Speaking of gear, I did replace my aging Canon Digital Rebel (300D) with a brand spanking new Canon Digital Rebel XSi.  I'm pretty satisfied with it -- it has double the megapixels, a nicer screen for doing quick shot reviews, and more features in general.  I particularly like that it shows the current shooting settings on the LCD screen; I wear glasses so it's nice not having to squint into the viewfinder to see that info.

I've also decided that I'm no longer going to host my own gallery -- it's just too much of a hassle.  As a result, I set up an account over at smugmug and I'm quite happy with it.

I took a trip to Cincinnati recently, which had two nice results:

Unfortunately, the panorama still needs a bit of work -- I don't think all of the colors are matched up quite right, and I think I'm going to have to spend some time in Photoshop getting that all matched up -- I screwed up when I took the photos and used aperture priority instead of full manual, so they all metered a bit differently... live and learn, I guess.