I have an Olympus C-750 digital camera, which my family bought for me for my birthday. It’s basically what I asked for in a camera…big zoom lens, powerful flash. But I’ve used it very little in this last year, and I think a lot of the reason for that is that:

• It’s fairly big and bulky compared to other digital cameras
• It doesn’t do very well at low light levels
• Auto focus is pretty slow
• Camera takes too long to “warm up”

Mostly I take very quick pics of people, surroundings, and action. The C-750 is much better at shots where you have some time to set up and focus and properly light. I don’t really do that.

So I guess the question is, if I get rid of this camera, will I be able to find something tiny, light, with a good zoom, that takes good pictures in the dark, focuses very quickly, and can go from “off” to “shoot” in a second or less? Does such a beast exist? Am I going to have to go and start reading lots of reviews? *groan*

Two days ago I had a craving for a chili burger (or “chili size”, whatever). Yesterday I had the same craving, so I went on down to Johnny Rocket’s and ate one. And today I have the craving again! What’s up with that? I thought I was getting pretty happy with salads and sandwiches and such, and doing well without burgers and french fries. Apparently not…

Late to rise, late to work. Did some odds-n-ends work before the weekend. Doing lots of OpenACS research (i.e. skimming docs and reading bboards) to look at the viability of using it for content management. Dinner at Johnny Rocket’s with Aaron Braver, who just got back to campus. And then more ACS research. 🙂

Woke up late and went to work. Met with John Cummings about the gameroom and had a short check-in with Josh Simmons about the facebook viewbook. In the process of trying to get Josh’s check, stumbled upon Michael LaFarr’s going away party and talked to Maggie, who would be happy to take our old pool tables off our hands. Hung out with Nat, Ian, and Igor at Uno’s and then with Nat and Ian in Nat’s room in Grad, which he just moved into. Then home for sleep at a reasonable hour, or at least more reasonable then of late.

I had fun walking to Moody street the other day, and tonight when I got home I found that my traditional parking space of the last week was occupied and so was everything else around, I ended up having to part about three blocks away because there is no parking around the school. I didn’t mind the walk to the apartment, except that it was a little cold and I was sans coat, but I did feel I could probably be doing better with a bicycle. I’m all about taking things slow, but for some reason walking any distance just makes me very impatient. I think it’d take about an hour to walk to work every day, but more like 15-20 minutes on bike (I wouldn’t do well on the hills).

If I were to get a bike, though, I’d have to contend with the scary roads (no bike lanes) and figure out what to do with it when summer ends.

Went grocery shopping, ate lunch at Panera Bread, searched the web for pictures of gamerooms, IMed, emailed, coded. Talked to dad, talked to mom. Went to bed terribly late for the second day in a row. How terribly late? Well , it’s 5am, and I’m going to bed now.

Two blogs I read are MegNut and Kottke, written by two people who reference each other and who one can logically infer over a period of time are together. Recently Jason Kottke posted an entry about how his blog is six years old, and how he has never stuck with anything for that long. This caused me to wonder about how he met Meg, and whether there were references to their relationship’s beginnings in his blog. Them both very web-focused people, this seemed probable, and interesting. How did people talk about relationships on blogs back when blogs were first beginning?

Continue reading “Meg, Meet Jason”

I subscribed to one or two magazines in the past that are considered “left” or “liberal” and ended up on a lot of junk mail lists, which pissed me off. I also once gave money to, I think, KPCC (or was it KCRW?) and started getting a lot of crap from them as well. I wondered whether my money was going to anything useful for just going to more mailings.

But the ACLU has brought a case challenging a provision of the USA PATRIOT Act that I find particularily revolting, and I’ve decided it’s high time I finally join an organization that has become increasingly more important every day since Sept. 11. I unchecked the box that said “share my name with other organizations” and gave ’em 20 bucks, and I can finally call myself a card–carrying member of the ACLU.

You should do it too.

Looking back, 2004 was a terrible year for me in pictures. It looks like all I have is stuff from the village and a few snaps taken on the last day. I don’t know how I missed everything, hopefully I’ll be able to collect some images from friends and post them in my gallery :cry:. Anyway, without further ado, here is Welcome to the Village, which shows images from moving-in and then moving-out. A year-spanning gallery with nothing in the middle!

Walked around the neighborhood, snapped some photos, lunched at Bombay Mahal (buffet!), then stopped into Compleat Gamester to get some info for the gameroom. First draft of a floor plan (PDF). Followed this with several hours of AgBlog v5 coding and tweaking. Went to bed really late for no readily apparent reason.

Three years ago yesterday I started this blog by talking about ducks and pools. Time continues to pass. I feel like I’m an old hat at blogging, but many people have been going a lot longer. Still, happy anniversary, me!

There seems to have been a big controvery about the character of Enoch Root and his miraculous coming-back-to-life bit. Example. I don’t really see what the problem is or why this is such a big deal. I mean, admittedly, very little if any of Cryptonomicon is science fiction, so this could be coming out of the blue, or, if I may, gold.
Continue reading “Enoch Root Lives”

…is stupid. I dunno if WordPress 1.2 does anything to fix it. One suggestion that was made is simply reject comments with lowercase names, and real people can learn to capitalize. 🙂 For now I’ve set it so that all comments have to be moderated. Generally these spambots target older entries, so ideally I’d like to set it up when I upgrade so that all entries older then n, where n is a amount of time, are moderated comments, and all new entries are open comments. I think this strikes a better balance then disabling comments on all old entries (sorry Meg!), since sometimes people pop along and have interesting things to say.

I was about to post a quick entry about how Wendy’s didn’t give me ranch dressing for my salad and so I had to eat frozen pizza for dinner when I realized — if I’m not careful, over the summer my blog might turn into a LiveJournal! AHHHH!!! Must…avoid…pointless…daily…updates.

When I was in second grade a parent who was a nurse came to school to teach my class about some health concepts. We spent a lot of time on proper hand-washing and germs. One of the things she had us do was rub our palms together so that the dirt and such became visible as little black spots. She said, “look at all those germs and microorganisms!”

I came home and repeated this experiment for my father, who then asked me, “if they are microorganisms, why can we see them?” I puzzled over this question for a long time, trying to determine the amazing procedure by which microscopic specks can grow large enough to be visible to the human eye.

Eventually I realized that the nurse had lied to me, and I found this highly disturbing.

I finished my Cyberlaw paper and it ended up at 24 pages, which, if pasted into MS Word at standard settings (double spaced, 12pt Times, 1.25″ margins) would end up at something like 40 pages. So yeah, that’s exciting.

In celebration I went with Kevin, Marli, Amy, and Dave to Jillians for some bowling and pool. Wish Adam Batkin could have come, but it was still fun. This is what I’ve missed over the last semester, just going out and hanging with people, having fun. I want to do more of it.

Looks like I have housing from the 24th to the 1st, so I don’t have to find some overpriced hotel! Woo-hoo!

Clearly, the gods are conspiring against me. I set an internal deadline of 5:00pm for my cyberlaw paper, and, even though this deadline does not correspond to anything in the real world, fate has conspired to ensure that I miss it. The supermarket checkout lane that I choose is the slowest of all. The car in front of me on Bear Hill Road insists on going 20 when everyone else goes 35. I miss every single light. And children are crossing the street at various crosswalks.

It’s 3:11, I have another 10 pages to write before 5:00. Heh. Well, here goes.

I’ve wondered for quite a long time why MA doesn’t have those nice reflectors in the road that allow cars to see lane markings at night. Apparently they are called “road studs” and the reason why we don’t have them is pretty simple…snow plows.

A shame, cause it can get awfully foggy, rainy, and dangerous around here, and those things would save many many lives. An answer?

I’ve added a new sidebox called “Currently” which says what I’m up to (generally, no good). I’m going to upgrade to WordPress 1.2 soon (as soon as it is released) and make the changes I’ve been meaning to make so that remaindered links work better and can be commented upon, and if I like this “currently” bit I’ll turn that into a blog category as well, and add a link to “previous activity”.

Oh, hopefully the upgrade will fix the problems with links in comments and some strangeness with the mini calendar. Anything else I should fix/update/change? I really do need to get the “Writings” section back online…