The fatal combination of an Internet connection and a Switch card.

Just bought a Canon PowerShot A200 (and charger). I've been contemplating such a device for a while (prompted by ladylilith), and went for this model on the advice of rbarclay and recalling that this was the model solipsistnation brought with him in August that I was so impressed with.

Here's to it arriving before the tree comes down on January 6th. Will likely lead to a revival of the photo page. I might even get around to developing and scanning the films from the last ten months ...

I'll be getting a USB CompactFlash reader for it - what brands and models are known to work with FreeBSD? (No, not Linux.) And the best prices I've seen on CompactFlash are at Crucial.

Update: Bollocks! It does not in fact have optical zoom. Will be calling first thing tomorrow morning to change the order to the A40. Which is another fifty quid, so I expect they'll be very happy with the change ...

Update: Changed, no problem. A40 should be arriving early next week. Phew!

Fun with spam!

Just saw ladylilith off on the plane. (Heathrow Terminal 4 has a Wetherspoon's.) Now life becomes a flurry of paperwork to bring her back.

To pass the long, dark hours until her return, I've been committing small evil with Nigerian 419 scam email. What you do is post their address to Usenet newsgroups alt.test and misc.test, with an 'ignore' (so that the test post itself is not replied to - let's not give the game away).The reason this is fun is that the *.test newsgroups are regularly scraped by other spammers for addresses. So I've been doing lots of things like:

( worked example )

It's profoundly childish. But endlessly amusing.

(Don't try this at home unless you're quite sure your Usenet provider will still love you in the morning.)