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Archive for November, 2006
I love emusic, and so should you.
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Suckered in as usual by an attractive price point, and because I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a new digital camera for ages, I’ve bought meself a Kodak Easyshare Z740. Pretty much the whole reason for the purchase is the 10x zoom, and even though a lack of image stabilisation is going to make it a heck of a job getting the most out of that zoom, this is my first step along a road that should lead me towards an SLR and much fanciness thereafter. And all for just over one hundred quid, which is not bad for the camera plus a case, and a memory card (512MB), although I seem to be lacking some things from the original box, but what the hey, I’m sure I can get by.
So what does 5 megapixels and a longish zoom get you these days? It gets you crisp photos of swans, that’s what. In fact, here’s one now:
Very crisp and detailed, I hope you’ll agree.
It also gets you pictures of pumpkins (depending on the time of year, naturally).
And pub signs
Sometimes the pub seems further away, though: mostly when you don’t use the zoom:
It also gets you a very helpful range of pre-set configurations for taking photos on the beach, indoor photos, landscape photos, portraits, and even fireworks, although it will probably now be a while before I use that setting. Here’s a photo taken using the backlight setting, which is supposed to help you out if for some reason you’ve decided to put the subject between you and something very bright. Like an autumn afternoon’s sun, for instance:
Apart from some slowness when the camera writes to the memory card, and the lack of stabilisation, there’s not much I’d change based on my experience so far. It does seem to suck battery juice pretty rapidly, but then I am operating from cheapo rechargeable Ni-mh and Ni-Cd batteries, so I don’t expect them to last a lifetime. Being able to carry spare batteries is definitely an improvement on my canon Ixus, which would leave me powerless after about 100 pictures.
dpreview also liked the camera, and since they’ve already done a perfectly good job of reviewing it, I’d rather link to their review, than write my own, just yet:
Last time I checked out my blog’s worth, according to the Technorati-using tool at www.business-opportunities.biz, this site was so worthless I might even have been plunged nominally into more debt.
Not so any more! Here’s some tasty proof-pudding.
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How much is your blog worth?
As I was driving into work, my musical enjoyment was interrupted, as it occasionally is, by a completely irrelevant travel report. Now, as we all now, travel reports, when they bother with them, are either about a 20-mile jam on the motorway you’ve just joined, or a problem that has now cleared on a motorway 100 miles away from where you are at the time. Or both. But that’s by-the-by.
The real point of interest in this report was that it was apparently all for me. Apparently, my progress was going to be easier, because my slip road off the motorway had cleared. As you can imagine, this was a blessed relief to me, even though I wasn’t planning on using my slip road today, because, well, I don’t need to go into it, surely, do I? I mean there’s nothing worse than having your slip road and then seeing other people use it, is there. I mean really.
I don’t know where this deep personalisation of reporting has come from, or when the shift from telling me that “the slip road is now clear” to the reporter saying “your slip road is now clear” began, but I can’t be the only one who finds it at best irritating, and at worst confounding: train announcements now talk about “your next station stop”, as if it somehow belongs to all the passengers. Quite apart from the fact that as a passenger I only really care about stops at stations (I don’t recall ever hearing an announcement about my next “signal stop” or next “random unscheduled stop 100 yards outside the station”), in what sense is it mine? It only comes close to being correct when the station in question is where I will be leaving the train, in which case it’s still nonsense for all the passengers who will be left on the train as it departs. Unless “your next station stop is the final destination” of course, but let’s not get started on that one just yet, shall we?
I can vaguely remember not noticing this phenomenon until a few years ago, when I was watching QVC. There seemed to be then, and still is, a style guideline for that channel that tells presenters to always use the word “your” whenever possible. I imagine the theory behind it is to personalise the broadcast. If, as a presenter, you can reach out into someone’s home by referring to them directly, perhaps they’ll like you more, and vicariously like whatever tat you’re flogging at the time. And then perhaps they’ll buy more of it.
Perhaps it’s just as well that I don’t watch a lot of QVC these days (not that I ever did, mind) because it really, really, really annoys me. “You’ve got your on/off switch here, your battery compartment here, and of course you’ve got your memory card in here”. No, no, no, I don’t have any of those things. I just don’t. On my camera, yes, I have those things, all of them, and I suppose they’re mine as a property they inherit from being a part of the camera, a larger object that I do own, but I don’t have the ones on the camera you’re holding, any more than you own the corresponding parts of my camera. They’re just not mine. They’re not even yours! “I’ve got my on/off switch here, my battery compartment here”… you wouldn’t dream of selling it like that. Or how about “my dog’s got his on/off switch here, his battery compartment here”… No. That just won’t do either.
On the other hand, if I do have my on/off switch there and so on, does that mean I can phone QVC sometime and ask for my camera back?
Via Grammar Puss, I discovered Literally, a web log. And seeing that the widespread abuse of the word ‘literally’ is something I find particularly galling (you might say it literally gets on my wick, but then I’d have to hate you if you did), pretty damn happy I am to have happened upon it. Together, we might not be able to eradicate painful instances of literally, but at least we can point at the silly people and have a jolly good laugh.