Some choices:

"That two-timing jerk! He said he loved me!"

"I hope he doesn't use that 'this is my body, broken for you' line. That one's got whiskers on it."

"Don't order bread or fish or you'll never get out of the restaurant."

I'll be here all week! Try the veal!

Asian crunchy snacks are great. Calbee Shrimp Chips. Calbee Green Pea Crisps. (They're not the same as the ones at Trader Joes; the ones in Asian groceries have powdered fish in them and taste much better.) Fried rice crackers.

Pretty much any snack by Calbee is worth trying. The BBQ corn snacks don't taste like any kind of BBQ I've ever had, but have a nice savory soy-sauce and corn flavor unlike any American snack.

I basically use Cook's Illustrated's method, and it seems to work quite well.

- Use a high-sided non-stick skillet with a lid, and fill it almost full of water (at least 1.5 inches of water). If you have no lid, improvise with a big plate or go buy a generic lid.

- Add about a tablespoon of vinegar (to help set the white) and a teaspoon or so of salt (for flavor)

- Bring water to a full rolling boil. Meanwhile, crack the eggs into teacups or shallow bowls, one egg per cup. This technique won't work for more than about 4 eggs in a 10-12 inch skillet.

- Once the water is fully boiling, turn the heat OFF. Wait about 10-20 seconds for the water to go to a bare simmer. Quickly slide the eggs into the water, two at a time (one bowl/cup in each hand). I actually put the cups in the water and turn them to let the egg float out.

- Cover the pan and wait 4-5 minutes. In four minutes, you'll have a runny poached egg. In five, it'll be soft-set but still a bit runny. Start the toaster now (if you're having toast).

- Use a slotted spoon to remove the eggs from the pan.

Keep in mind that some of the egg white will form billowy shreds like egg drop soup no matter what you do, but the bulk of the egg will form a nice tight oval sitting on the bottom of the pan. Don't worry about the shreds of egg white floating in the water; use the slotted spoon to gently slide under the main oval and pull it out.

If you like your eggs firmer, then instead of turning the heat all the way off, you should turn it to low. If you're using an electric stove, then turn another burner to low and move the pan to the new burner. The old one will remain hot too long and will stay boiling.

That's it! The silicone egg poacher sounds like a workable idea, but not really necessary.

Make a pilgrimage to the Lobster Shack in Cape Elizabeth (which is a suburb of Portland). It's at Two Lights, which is a great place to visit just for the scenery. Two lighthouses right on the rocky shore. Even on cloudy cold days it's a beautiful spot.

Recommended items: the lobster roll, the fried shrimp boat. But it's all very very good.

It closes for the season at the end of October, so I hope you'll be going earlier than that.

http://lobstershacktwolights.com/

In general, AVI files can be moved via flash drives, but one issue is that by default flash drives are formatted with FAT32, which has a maximum file size of 4GB. So if you have any AVIs larger than 4GB, they won't work with an off-the-shelf flash drive or memory card.

To get around this, you can reformat the flash drive with one of the file systems that support huge files. My recommendation is exFAT, which is supported by Windows 7 natively and Vista and XP as of the latest service packs. It's compact, fast, and designed for flash memory.

If you want something with better interoperability with Macs and Linux, right now NTFS is easier to read on those systems. But I expect that to change soon, and NTFS is very heavyweight in terms of space and performance.

That's a seriously tall order for a compact digital camera. Fundamentally compact digital cameras are not as good with low-light and motion because their sensors are much less light sensitive than the ones on DSLRs.

Some of this is just physics. The sensor on, say, a Canon Rebel XS (a DSLR) is about 22x14mm, and has 10 million pixels. The sensor on a Canon A480 (a compact) is 6x4.5mm and has the same 10 million pixels. Sensitivity of each pixel site is a function of the area. Do the math and you find that the area of the pixel sites on the XS is 12 times as large as the A480, which makes it roughly 12 times as sensitive to light. For the photographers out there, that's a 3.5 stop difference in fundamental sensitivity.

There are other factors, obviously; CCDs have different noise performance than CMOS sensors, there have been continuous improvements in sensors over the years, etc. But as a first rule of thumb, pixel area tells you a lot about quality.

To compensate, compact digital cameras do a few things: they crank up the gain on the sensor, they use much more aggressive noise filtering, and they try to use the low ISO ratings as much as possible. So in auto mode, it'll still be trying to use 100 or 200 ISO, because 400 and 800 will be noise-ridden messes. It'll try to use the flash, and if you force the flash off, it'll use a long shutter speed. The result is blur and dark and/or noisy pictures.

To really do well in a darker environment with motion, you have to use really high ISO ratings and good image stabilization (and you still might not get clear pictures; if it's super dark and there's a lot of motion no camera will do very well). Unfortunately, those are both characteristics primarily of DLSRs.

So after all that, if being able to slip the camera in your pocket is the most important factor, you still have some options to improve your odds of getting a decent picture.

- The current leaders for cameras with reasonable image quality at high-ish ISO ratings are the Canon G10 and the Panasonic Lumix LX3. Both are expensive; you could buy a DSLR for the same money. And they both use the tiny sensors that all compact cameras use (though slightly larger than the A480 mentioned above). But they do the best job of maximizing the image quality at high ISO, and if you're taking fast-motion or indoor pictures without a flash, you'll need high ISO.

- You may want to invest in a good noise-removal program. The one I like best is Noise Ninja, which allows you to profile the noise characteristics of your specific camera and apply just the minimum filtering necessary in each frequency band. It does a nice job, though it's not magic.

- Cover the noise with more noise. The noise produced by an over-amplified camera sensor isn't very aesthetically pleasing; it's more like TV static than like film grain. Get a plugin to add grain to the image, and it might help make the noise into an effect.

You could also just try to get the smallest DSLR you can find, with the smallest lens you think will be usable. The Panasonic G1 is a Micro Four-Thirds camera and is smaller than most DSLRs. The kit lens is still fairly large compared with the lenses on most compacts. It's only pocket-sized if you have a pretty large pocket. But you can fit it in a belt pouch easily enough.

It depends on the specific disc. Some films are an amazing leap forward in clarity. Others are basically a DVD-resolution master scaled up to Blu-ray resolution. The latter is fairly rare from the big movie companies. Usually they spring for a new transfer of the film at HD resolution.

It also depends on your display. If your display is capable of showing a higher resolution than regular DVD, you'll notice the difference with the best discs.

Here's a good comparison on A Bug's Life on DVD and Blu-ray. To make the comparison fair, they scale the DVD up to Blu-ray resolution so you're comparing images of comparable size.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1152976

Scroll down to the second post and hit the "spoiler" button to show the comparison images. I think you'll see a difference.