Knuckledragger

Welcome (back) to the world of photgraphy, Reks. Sorry about your ...well, you know.

Paid $65 for the privilege of my own "Geraldo" moment. No, not being thwacked in the face with a chair by a Nazi Skinhead. There's been a safe in the back of a closet in the MV cottage for longer than I've been alive. For as long as I've been in charge of the house, the safe has been open and empty. It has an interior compartment which was secured with a peculiar 19th century "flat steel" lock. The locksmith removed it in about 10 minutes, talked my ear off for another 20, and then gave me a bill. Of course the compartment was empty.

Shh. I forgot to post it yesterday.

ThinkGeek :: iCade - iPad Arcade Cabinet Now if they can just get it to run MAME...

Nice. Welcome to the 12L Club. Personally, I put a few carefully cut piece of scotch tape over the LEDs.

Rented a storage container that will in theory hold most of the contents of the current MV house. Met one of the locals, who has apparently been putting fish traps in the pond at the edge of my property. Pretty cool guy, actually. Took full advantage of the sun coming out, and moved a large pile of bricks from the center of the property to the edge. After that I went down town, saw a late-1990s BMW M5 (*drool* absomotherfuckinglutely *DROOL* 400HP and a 6-speed manual, Chris Bangle can SUCK IT), and took a bunch of pictures around the harbor.

Goddammit, now we'll never be rid of you! ...and by that I mean congratulations, this country needs more obsessive bike nerds.

I don't know much about the D3K, but the reviews have been tepid at best. It's got worse noise at a given ISO setting, by a full stop, than the models it replaced. That's a big issue. It's harder to quantify, but the D3000 also has worse handling and user interface as well. What makes low-end Nikon DLSRs superior to Canons is equal-or-better image quality and vastly improved handling. Take those away, and the argument becomes moot. The reason I linked to the D40 and D60 is that they produce better real-world results than the newer Nikons and most Canon DSLRs (until one pays 2-3x as much.)

Photo not mine. I didn't exactly buy it, but I got a new camera today. It's an Olympus "Trip XB AF 44" film point & shoot. The local second hand store has a stack of old film cameras in at the moment. They had three point & shoots with slooow zoom lenses (crap and more crap), the Olympus (which has a fixed 27mm wide angle lens, rock!) as well as a Minolta XG-M manual film SLR. The Olympus was the one that interested me the most, but had two corroded batteries in it. I pointed this out and the lady said "you can have it if you want." I took it home and extracted the batteries with a pair of channel locks. I spent the last hour cleaning out the battery compartment and scraping the corroded terminal as best I could. I fed it a fresh pair of batteries, and it came to life. There was an unexposed roll of Fuji print film in it, so I don't have to feed it. I'm psyched about this camera. I brought my film SLR and a roll of Fuji Velvia 50, but the weather conditions and my own mental state have not been up to working with ISO 50 slide film that costs $3 per shot when all is said and done. Some nice low-pressure print film in a goofy point and shoot is exactly what the doctor (or in this case, muse) ordered. Of course, I might be making another post like this tomorrow where I talk about the neat Minolta film SLR I just bought, because I am nucking futs an obsessive camera nerd.