Every photo posted here from The Lazy Kings til now has been taken with that camera… yeah, I was using it before my birthday, bad me :P

I maintain that the other Pentax (SP 500 film SLR) takes better pictures, especially at night, but it’s just so much more expensive to use all the time! Having said that, I’m not going to let it sink into a cupboard and disappear: It’ll be on hand whenever i’m planning to take (good) photos, whilst the new Pentax will be for general happy snaps and the like.

Qualms with the camera thus far? It didn’t come with a rechargable battery. $90 later, and I’ve got a Samsung charger with killer battery life, so that’s no longer a problem — but it’s an expense that should be noted prior to purchase. Other than that, I haven’t figured out how to manually adjust exposure, so if you’re taking photos at night without a flash (scenic shots, etc.) then it’s not a great idea. Having said that, the massssssssiiiiveee exposure in “Night” mode does do some cool blurry things to photos…

The exposure time (according to the EXIF data) on the Harbour Bridge image is 4 seconds, and 1 second on the first shot (Coogee) — but it felt like lots more, because it was really windy standing on the head. (No, not standing on my head… that would be talent!)

It’d mean I could walk between buildings and blog as I go, not in a crappy wi-fi enabled kind of way (although, admittedly, if SACS coverage extended to the vicinity surrounding the school, I’d probably have bought a wireless card by now and had a hack at making it work), but in a fluent, hands-free, talk-into-phone-and-content-appears-online kind of way.

How cool would that be?!  Never again would there be a complaint of “you haven’t updated your blog since last time I checked a few hours ago!”, because not an hour would pass without a phonecall and a voice-enabled update of the website!!

Well, okay.  An hour would pass.  In fact, many hours would pass.  But it’s a cool idea, don’t you think?  Still, several phone calls a day (let’s throw three in the air as a ballpark figure, not counting at-home updates) would add up.  Let’s do the maths, shall we?  Okay.  So, let’s say an Orange phone serverside, so I get free five minute phone calls from my baby Samsung.  Let’s make it prepaid — not as though we’re making calls from it.

A chargeable call must be made within a 12 month period, or the service will get narfed.  Okay.  That’s cool, I can setup an SMS gateway online and use that occasionally.  Bonus.  Cost?  Assuming I keep the calls under 5mins, nothing to connect — there’s a limit on the amount of free Orange-to-Orange time I can have a month, but it’s pretty ridiculously high, so I’d not worry about that too much — and the cost for the prepaid?  Well, between $33 and $90, depending on the expiry length required.  So if I go for $90, that gives me a year to use the credit.

At what rate?  $0.18/message sent, and of course, recieving calls is free.

So let’s say about $50 a year, plus initial handset cost.  Let’s face it, I’m not really one for bothering to login to a web interface to send messages most of the time — I’d use it, but not incredibly often.

All this is of course ignoring the technical feasibility of using telephony as a voice-recognition medium — not only do current systems struggle with microphones already, this is also without the other conditions imposed on mobile lines!  The software side of things (i.e. interfacing with web panel/directly with MySQL) also presents a little bit of a challenge, although not prohibitive — it’d be a bit of fun, to say the least.

This’d make me blog more, though.  A lot more.  That said, I blog more when procrastinating, or when holidays are on — the simple solution?  Give me more holidays (or assessments:|)!!!

Overcomplication of a simple problem rocks.

See, unlike certain people (no offense to anyone ;), I only keep *one* diary and calendar (admittedly, they are separate physical objects, but I make a habit of checking BOTH before scheduling anything), with the theoretical goal of not having to be in two places at once too often.  And then there were parents.  Well, specifically, a mother, with her OWN calendar, and her OWN agenda when it came to scheduling meetings with certain dental workers.  Insert a pun about going “mental” here… haha.  Or not.

My mobile is another source of angst.  Apologies to everyone who’s sent me an SMS recently and hasn’t got a reply — this is a case of PEBPAWIBM (Problem Exists Between Phone And Whatever Is Behind Me) in conjunction with an ingenious feature that will cancel any message left too long half-written.  No, really, thanks Samsung.  Geez, it’s so useful returning me to the main menu of the phone — if I were to leave a phone in my pocket with a message half typed, that is far more dangerous than an unlocked phone at a dial screen, of course.  And it would be, of course, completely irrational to dump me from my message, forget it, and then *actually lock the phone so something doesn’t happen by accident* — no, I was using the phone, you couldn’t possibly lock it.  Dumping me to a menu is greatly appreciated, though.

Samsung deserve an award for usability.  I propose the award be supplied in an un-openable box, as an example of how accessible products should be in recognition of their most excellent achievements in this field.

On a completely unrelated note to any of the above, thanks Ben for lending me your 40GB harddrive… I now have room to breathe in my home directory again (although I have somehow managed to ALREADY fill 20GB of that 40… go figure), at least for the next few months.

It’s kind of funny, that.  Six months ago, I would have said that at my current rate of consumption, it’d probably take me about three years to fill 40GB.  Nowdays, I go through about 1GB a week (much of which is simply deleted or burnt to CD, but still) of storage space on various mediums… admittedly, this is largely due to my storage of the raw audio captures from Platform Seven for streaming and archival purposes, but a lot of it is from other stuff as well… Platform Seven accounts for less than half of that 1GB/week usage.

So yes, I now have my music back!!  Yep, I had it before, but my CD’s are in the next room — technically, we’re not allowed to convert copyrighted material between mediums here in Australia, but MP3’s (and, in the near future, OGG files) are just so much more convenient for me that I am past caring.  I’ve never heard a complaint from anyone about this usage, anyway, even from various record associations — of course, the issue of “fair use” has never been a prominent one, since everyone ASSUMES that Australia has identical copyright laws to the US.  Just for the record (haha, get it?), this is not so, and if you’re in a position to do something about getting our laws changed, or know what to do about it, let me know/do something.