Returned.

04 Oct 2004

Yarrr. I’m back from my unannounced holiday, to a mass of email, an overflowing RSS reader, and a computer which is booting intermittently. I want to go back on holidays.

Yes, I did have Internet access where I was staying. I enjoy knowing I can blog from anywhere in the world, nearly as much as I enjoy knowing that I can choose not to. And so I didn’t — I realised that I hadn’t announced my departure a few days back, but decided it wasn’t worth writing home about. This was a holiday from blogging as much as anything else; not that blogging is something to be escaped, necessarily, but it is good to get away from on occasion.

And whilst I was escaping, I immersed myself in books, and cameras, amongst other things. Of books, more shall be said later, if at all. Of cameras, more details are coming, I promise — along with pictures, so I hope. “Other things” encompass more toys, including the pending arrival of some semi-vintage (read: old, but relatively intact and refurbished) speakers; for those who care, and/or are familiar with such things, I’ve got a pair of Acoustic Research AR14 2-way speakers in storage, which I’m hoping to put to good use once this damn house is sold, or at least taken off the market. They sound decidedly warm, although the HF is quite distinctive. Mid-range is a tad lacking, but certainly no worse that what I’m currently using.

So, I’m looking forwards to that. As I am looking forwards to playing with this camera (an SLR) over the next few days. I haven’t time to upload pictures of the camera itself right now, but it’s an old Pentax Asahi SP500 model — if you care that much, Google’s number one match for “Pentax Asahi” at the time of writing returns a website which brandishes a few decent pictures of the camera. As far as I can tell, the camera itself is about 30 years old, and is in pretty decent nick… I’ve got two lenses for it, details of which will be posted later, and a UV filter for one of those lenses.

It’s a 35mm camera, and was apparently last used in the early ’90s… Because I couldn’t bring myself just to waste the mostly-unused film which remained in the camera, I fear that some rather good shots have gone to waste on the aged film which I’ve used for the last two days. We shall see.

Aside from all of that, I’m back in Sydney. Exciting things are happening in the realm of web development, away from this website, which shall be unveiled in the weeks to come. Until later, I’m going to sleep…

EDIT: Looks as though someone was screwing with Google’s indexing system as I searched for “Pentax Asahi” — the aforementioned page disappeared into the void. For reference, the page was http://www.talboys.fsnet.co.uk/roderickt/pentaxcdfiles.htm.