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The tech world is abuzz with the news that Facebook bought WhatsApp, a phone messaging service with about 450 million users. The price tag? Nineteen billion-with-a-B dollars.

Seen on Twitter:

Sad because it’s true. Our priorities are pretty out of whack these days.

Randall Munroe, creator of the awesome web comic xkcd, has a knack for putting things in perspective. I really enjoyed one of his “What If” questions regarding supernovae.

Wow. Astrophysics is so cool.

One of my new favorite games is Small World.

What other game has Flying Trolls and Berzerk Elves? Sweet!

This is what happens when Zack gets a hold of my new camera.

It’s a miracle! Alex toasted a tortilla and the face of Jesus appeared!

It’s pretty obvious this is a message from the Lord. Or perhaps Che Guevera is channeling himself through Mexican food.

It’s always a little awkward when someone texts you and clearly knows who you are, but you have no idea who it is.

I don’t recognize the number (although these days, who memorizes phone numbers?) and since it’s not coming up in my contact list, it must be someone who I either don’t have a cell phone number for, or who I just didn’t add to my phone’s contact list.

In any case, I texted back a generic “Thanks!” and hoped for the best.

So if whoever texted that message is reading this, I’m sorry…

Today it was an unseasonable 60 degrees and sunny, so of course to celebrate my birthday I figured I should play some ultimate. The wind was gusting around 20+ mph which made for an interesting game, but I was pleased to see that even on the 17th anniversary of my 25th birthday, I can still run around with the fast kids.

Ahh, Windows, you’re so easy to mock.

I’m logged into a remote server that’s running Windows 7, and I just finished what I was doing so I clicked “log off”. Much to my surprise, I wasn’t able to log off because the system couldn’t play the log off sound. Yeah, really.

After waiting a moment for Windows to figure out how to play the sound, I finally clicked the dangerous-looking Force log off button. I was asked if I was sure, because it might cause system instability, and I took a big risk and proceeded. Heaven knows if the server is even running now.

My new toy came today: a Canon S110 camera. Per Thom’s suggestion, I decided to get a slightly more “serious” camera for my photography work. I always feel a little self-conscious when Thom and I are backpacking somewhere and he pulls out his massive Canon MegaShot SuperCam 2000X or whatever, and I whip out my little silver Canon ELPH point-and-shoot. Although I really like that camera and it’s certainly easy to use, it has a fairly limited feature set.

I chose the S110 for three reasons, really:

1) It’s compact– basically the same size as my old Canon, so it’s not ten pounds of high-tech magic to lug around.

2) It’s cheap– only $200 on eBay, compared with at least $400-600 for a serious DSLR sort of camera.

3) It shoots in RAW mode– Thom and others say that’s the only “true” way to take pictures because it allows for a great deal of post-processing.

After charging the battery, I took a few exploratory pictures. The quality is noticeably better than my old camera (as it should be, I suppose). Here’s an example of a quick point-and-shoot of Laralee’s Valentine’s rose:

Wow!

I completely understand that buying a fancier camera doesn’t mean I’m going to suddenly transform into a fantastic photographer. But it’s my hope that with some better tools at my disposal, I’ll at least be able to take my work up a notch.

Zack finally had a chance to use the Dairy Queen gift card from Aunt Kari today!