GPS Running and a trip to New Zealand

26 Oct 2005

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?