I haven’t been run­ning much lately, because… I’m lazy. And there are exams on. And I’d much rather pro­cras­ti­nate pas­sively. Or some­thing. I don’t know, I don’t really have any good excuses.

There is, how­ever, some­thing that would prob­a­bly make me want to run more. This ridicu­lously cool GPS train­ing device! It’s like… hey… you’re a geek. And you want to run. With gim­micks that are arguably use­ful. Buy me, buy me!

Some­how, though, at $US330ish plus ship­ping, I don’t think it’s going to hap­pen. The solu­tion? Start jog­ging with a back­pack and take a car GPS unit (already have one)!

Yeah, not ter­ri­bly likely, either. Ah well. Hope­fully The Trip to New Zealand com­ing up (have I men­tioned that online yet? Geez… maybe not… how bad) will serve to kinda rem­edy the whole lack-of-exercise sit­u­a­tion and cre­ate a habit for when I get back. If I haven’t men­tioned that on this site before (I don’t remem­ber doing that, I don’t think I have), then… con­sider this notice. I’m going to NZ from Sat­ur­day the 12^th of Novem­ber until Mon­day the 5^th of Decem­ber. Tori leaves to go to Eng­land on Novem­ber 10, so that’ll be dis­trac­tion enough after fin­ish­ing the exams and just before pack­ing… and hope­fully NZ will be enough of a dis­trac­tion for me to not realise she’s on the other side of the planet for a while (and vice versa, I imagine…)

I’m plan­ning on tak­ing lots of pho­tos, but haven’t decided which cam­era to take yet. Or, more accu­rately, how many I will take. I’m def­i­nitely plan­ning on tak­ing my Pen­tax SP500 w/ 28-70mm lens, but don’t know whether my lit­tle Pen­tax qual­i­fies. I can see it either get­ting bro­ken or full very quickly. Con­tem­plat­ing get­ting a harddrive-based reader thingo (some­thing like this HD-DM40 from Any­ware, about $215 from a retailer), but quite uncer­tain. It’s just more stuff to carry in a back­pack that’s already going to be sub­stan­tially full.

Plus, as I’ve told some peo­ple before, I like film grain. It looks nice. Far nicer than dig­i­tal com­pres­sion arti­facts or the sen­sor crap­ping out in low light con­di­tions. One of Hayley’s pho­tos on year12.joahua.com demon­strates this nicely, because it’s not a good photo, but it’s very nice and char­ac­ter­ful… mostly, I think, because it was shot on film not digital.

So, I can live with my own inabil­ity to use a cam­era per­fectly mean­ing I get a hand­ful of blurry shots, and it cost­ing a lit­tle more to get pho­tos developed/make mis­takes. The ques­tion is, should I have a sec­ondary cam­era for quick pho­tos that I can check the qual­ity of imme­di­ately, just in case? I could prob­a­bly drop my SP500 in water and it’d sur­vive after a [prob­a­bly quite expen­sive] ser­vice… I can’t say the same thing for the dig­i­tal. Fun­nily enough, the tiny dig­i­tal would ulti­mately take up nearly as much space as the chunky SLR, because it would mean I’d be car­ry­ing a charger for its bat­ter­ies, a hard drive, and a charger for the hard drive, as well as the cam­era itself. I could just not use the hard drive and try to find a net cafe, but that’s some­thing I’d rather not rely on. I could also buy another SD card or two before we leave… which is a dis­tinct pos­si­bil­ity, given how cheap those things are get­ting (I saw a 256MB card for under $30 yes­ter­day, and wasn’t even look­ing. 512MB cards can be had for under $50). Prob­lem­at­i­cally, they’re absolutely tiny and I can just see myself los­ing one.

Sug­ges­tions, anyone?

Tags: GPS, New Zealand, SP500, United Kingdom