Old grape juice is wine.
Old wine is cognac.
vinegar is soured wine.
as human beings, only our attitudes and outlook on life, diferentiate the cognacs from the vinegars.
Neutral density filters are like sunglasses for lens.
they allow you to use wider apertures with slower shutterspeeds in any given light.
graduated nd filters are no smarter than the highschool dropouts. they just let you control contrast in the scene where part of the image area is beyond the exposure lattitude of the film/sensor.

JR is right, as long as the debris isn't affecting image quality or moving around (ie at risk of winding up in image sensor, leave it be).

Reminds me of a joke.
Guy goes to his doctor. He terrified.
"Doc I'm in really bad shape...I think I'm dying...It hurts when I poke myself here, and here and there, and also there...It hurts everywhere!..."

Doctor replies "Quit poking yourself all over....you've got a broken finger. That's all."

Mattmatic saidMatttMatic please consider this: From the moment you press the release button to remove the lens you risk adding more dust for the sensor grab. You are as usual right about the ccd it will atract dust like a magnet.
so I suggest not giving it more to grab while trying to clean it.
Therfore gravity can help. The process should involve:
A)blowing the dust off before removing the lens.
B) Cleaning the lensmount, then the viewfinder screen, then the mirror, then the mirror box, then finally the ccd.
Doing this whole process upside down will reduce the chance of you adding more dust/particles/dandruff(???) to the area for the ccd to grab while increasing the chance that any particles you dislodge will fall out and down as opposed to just getting moved around.

learn to chang lenses , and do all cleaning with your camera facing down. let gravity help you out.

Actually, the new intel processors should be easy to switch over to.
OSX is based on unix, and unix runs on both platforms, just like linux.
The switch from os9 to osx was made with ease for us, the hardware (epson was slow to get updated drivers for our scanner, but it still worked in classic mode for us) worked and so did the software. But we all know that ALL computers have a shorter shelf life than milk....

I used to be poor.
For many years I had only gr 8.
When I learned photography, I started with a used pentax k100.

I have learning disabilites and am self taught. It was hard.
When I started being asked to do weddings and promotional stuff for some small businesses, in my small hometown, I found myself able to afford a "Pro" camera. I compared all the top models, from all the top brands, It was all the menus and custom functions and newest features that actually put me off buying them. I wanted to get a camera and go to work, without having to re-learn everything.

Pentax released the mz-5.

Everything Worked the way it should've and I could keep my old work habits, while learning the pluses and limmits of the new features, and eventually adapted to new ways of creating images.

I saw digital on the horizon and just knew...

I got a laptop with windoze ME and started to learn computers. I made a mistake.
I went back and got a Mac, then loaded a photo of Bill Gates onto my laptop and punched a hole through his face...felt good. I learned computers on my Mac, everthing worked the way it seemed like it should.

Then came the digital cameras.

Thank you Pentax for never once making me go back and start all over from the very begining. Thank you for never making me scrap my old stuff and forcing me to buy a whole new system.

I thanked Pentax with my checkbook, because if Pentax hadn't done things that way way, I probably would've been forced to give up what is now a way of life.

Depth of field can be controlled with photoshop. you can Bracket your focus on a macro shot and composite the sharp areas together in photoshop to create an otherwise impossibly sharp macroshot.

You'd've been better off handholding. A mono pod/tripod/beanbag, or any support for that matter is only as stable as the foundation you set it on.
Handholding still too hard? film not fast enough? No room for a steadycam rig? Think gyro!
creamy sauce, olives, feta cheese, pork roasted to perfection, warm flatbread....wait, I meant gyroscope....

By the way-in case my previous post freaked anybody out, I said "mischief" please think more along the lines of a bunch of highschool students cutting shop class to wreck a derilect in my friends backyard- do not think along the lines of "Osama Bin-Hidin' ".

I don't know about an acetelyne generator, but I rember a trick involving a tomato juice can, some caulking, a spark plug and some aceteline, that landed a carhood on a garage roof, one time....What is the statute of limmitations in Canada for mischief anyways?