Forget carpet. Wood or laminate. Carpet is SO last millennium.

Epic.

I'm running one in a few weeks. Excited! Hope to learn as much myself :)

The big Canadian you're after is this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Werbeniuk Also dead.

"which camera"?!! Surely *any* camera with you would have been better than nothing. I always have the Canon S90 with me which takes a second to fire up and is usually good enough to get something from a moment.

Fiction? The "Girl who..." trilogy was pretty good. I'm sure you've got photography books covered :)

If you're going with the black t-shirt, don't forget the commando paint on the face too.

Two things I think are happening here: 1. The camera is applying some noise reduction when rendering to JPEG. Ah, yes, there's on-camera noise reduction. 2. The JPEG algorithm itself is reducing aberrant pixels. It is after all, a curve approximation for the changes of colour in an area. Hence "jaggies" on sharp edges. I wager with the right combination of noise reduction and JPEG you can achieve the same results.

Just a point of note: crop lenses work perfectly well on the D700, just at crop resolution. I'm at the D300 stage, still finding interesting things in the menus, most recently a pretty usable b/w mode: http://www.davehodgkinson.com/blog/2010/05/final-call-for-shi-da-night-market/ Got an itch for new lenses, mine have taken a beating in concerts. I foresee at 24mm and 85mm in my future.