One reason for the urgency in getting the DV camera: we're finally taking Lisa's parents to Italy. Lisa was to take them back in the fall. In fact they were supposed to fly out September 13. Needless to say, the flight was cancelled and they had travel credits to spend. The credits were enough to add me to the flight plans, so the decision was made to postpone the trip until my spring break. Which, thank heaven, starts Wednesday. We fly out next Sunday. I'm looking forward to getting over there again. It's been too long.

Our itinerary: a day in Rome, then south to Campania. We'll spend two days in the family's ancestral home town of Calitri, then a few days in Positano and Amalfi, with a day trip to Capri, wrapping up with Easter weekend in Rome. Should be a lot of fun. Hopefully I won't gain too much weight from all the incredible food.

Lisa decided we needed a DV camcorder a while back--we'll be moving to the other side of the country from our families, and we could send back video greetings with it. Then her bonus came in...

Yesterday we brought home a new Sony DCR-PC9 DV camcorder. It's compact, lightweight, and takes both still photos and video. We tested the integration with the Mac this morning--it just works. Using iMovie, you can control the playback of the camera from the computer over its FireWire (aka IEEE 1394, aka iLink) interface. I didn't have much hard disk space free, so I was alarmed to notice that importing 5 minutes of video took up about 1.5 GB, but I was able to trim it down after importing it and free up some of the space again.

And when I connected the camera via USB, it started up iPhoto and downloaded the photos on the camera's Memory Stick automatically. I may get some photos on this site yet...