And I refuse to believe that your coffee is so good that you can drink it at room temperature.

That’s sort of beside the point, I think. There’s a range between room temperature and the temperature at which heat masks the flavor of what you’re drinking. In fact, I’d hazard a guess that peak flavor for most things happens between those two points. I’m only saying that my coffee is good enough to not require a temperature that masks the taste. Contrast that with Miller, Coors, etc. who are always begging us to “enjoy” their products “ice cold”. “Please”, they say, “neither of us wants to know how you feel about the actual flavor of our beer, so let’s not even go there.”

On the camera, cool – please do! I picked up the $300 version of Canon’s fixed 50mm lens (not the plastic $100 version, and not the $holyshit “L” version), and find that I forget that the camera even has a flash built in.

Some of us just try to drink better coffee and whiskey.

I actually tend to only buy single malt and drink it at room temperature. And I refuse to believe that your coffee is so good that you can drink it at room temperature.

a lot — a LOT — of light was required

I took these with just the default autofocus flash settings on. I’m looking forward to learning more about how well my 40D does when I start tweaking the shutter settings. I’ll report any findings.

Our filter has this little peg that traverses an arc…

Wow! That’s way more sophisticated than ours. Ours comes with a little LCD gadget in the pitcher lid that will dutifully count down a period of 3 weeks. It sounds like your filter might actually be measuring the amount of water that goes through. If that’s the case, then it might not be a complete scam like mine is. Or maybe your guests are secretly on the Brita payroll…

I love photographing splashes, but I usually am not thrilled with the result. (With the D350, a lot — a LOT — of light was required, but I find that I have a lot more flexibility with the D40.)

Our filter has this little peg that traverses an arc from point “new filter!” to point “OMG WTF change me already!” I’m fairly curious about how that works. There are gears involved. It usually takes us a couple of months to run all the way through the arc, but goes faster when we have guests.

And in conclusion – dumb like a fox!

I normally drink all my water chilled, too. And Marga prefers her water slightly warmer than room temperature, which is about as disgusting a way to drink water as there is, in my opinion.

I read a humorous blog once suggesting that, if you were a bioterrorist and really wanted to poison the water supply, you should break into a Brita factory and poison the filters. That wouldn’t work in the US, of course, because the Americans are so dumb that we prefer our tap water sold to us in bottles.