I made a web page to keep track of various cameras I have experience with.
I lost my camera tonight. :(
This sucks, but I was intending to upgrade soon anyway, and I did shoot about 10,000 photos with this camera, so I'm pretty sure I got my money's worth. And it was starting to get difficult to use due to wear and tear from all the abuse I put it through while I owned it.
Resumed working on my photo metadata management software, and made a page to keep track of photo metadata software/notes.
Bought a PCMCIA/smartmedia adapter in Hong Kong for only $85 HKD (~$11 USD)!
After getting a bit more experience with photo storage formats, I don't think photopc is quite the marvel I originally thought it was: it doesn't do anything special to deal with photo metadata on its own, it just reads photo files from cameras and writes them to disk as-is. (they happen to have photo metadata already embedded inside.)
gphoto inexplicably removes this metadata from image files before writing them to disk (at least the version I tried does.)
So to sum up: photopc isn't way better than gphoto, gphoto is just a lot worse than photopc.
(This is not meant to knock photopc: it is excellent at what it does.)
Started writing some software to manage photo metadata.
I ordered a couple 32M Sandisk smartmedia cards for $64 each, so I can go nuts taking pictures on my vacation in Europe this summer. This will bring my total storage capacity to 88 megs, enough for about 1320 photos on the camera's lowest resolution (640x480), or 352 photos on the higher resolution (1280x960).
After owning the camera for a few months, I'm still very happy with it -- I had no trouble at all getting it to work with various software on my Linux box, the picture quality is very good, and the price I paid still seems to be a very good price (in fact, I haven't seen it priced that low since I bought it.)
Finally ordered a replacement battery charger from Thomas Distributing for $28.90. I think I've gone through about 40 disposable batteries in the meantime.
I had lots of fun with my camera this weekend in New York -- I tried to fill up all its memory (24M), but failed.
Bought a 16M Sandisk smartmedia card from Future Shop in Edmonton,
for $80 CAD ($50 USD), so I would have enough space for tonight's parties. 
Unfortunately, the LCD screen on the back of my camera got broken last night (see photo); I put it on top of a fridge for safekeeping, and someone knocked it off. It still works fine though.
photopc is indeed exactly what I was looking for, thanks to Eugene for writing it!
Cool, it sounds like photopc groks metadata! I haven't tried it yet though.
Here's info on the protocol. And here's a photo gallery run by the guy that reverse-engineered the protocol, with lotsa cool metadata associated with each photo. Excellent.
gphoto lists the D-450Z as "supported", and I got it working without much trouble.
I first tried using the latest "stable" version of gphoto (0.4.0), but that didn't quite work so I downloaded the current development code from CVS, compiled and ran that. I then found that the problem was I didn't have access to my serial device as a regular user (this might have been the problem with 0.4.0 as well.) Yep, permission checking was only added recently -- less than a day before I downloaded it! Open source software rules!
So within 20-30 minutes of receiving the camera I was able to download images from it and put them online.
Unfortunately I haven't found or written software yet to extract metadata along with the photos (date/time, exposure info.) I hope this is possible somehow (i.e., that the camera exports this data) -- I'm pretty sure it is, but didn't research this ahead of time.
