Tell me how long's the train been gone?

[reddragdiva]

Further Alf alarm clocks: NX9105 laptop motherboard (minus CPU, but I'm chasing one that is b0rken with intact CPU), Compaq PA-2 MP3 player (so hideously proprietary that nothing else can read the file system on the MMC cards — I'm about to try the horribly alpha Linux driver), two Compaq power bricks, the correct wifi adapter for this laptop and ... an Exilim EX-S500 for £126 total! (Going rate £175-200.) The camera of many of my dreams; tiny, 3× optical zoom, five megapixels. And about a zillion dollie things for redcountess and arkady. GIVE ME A JOB SO I'M NOT ON EBAY ALL DAY.

A visit today from _nicolai_ and mathilde. They had exhausted themselves at the London Transport Museum Depot, which counts as trainspotter extreme sports. And bought themselves a geographically accurate London Connections map, which Arkady, Liz and I decided we all desperately needed. Not on the website, but you can get them for ten quid each from the shop in Covent Garden. Nicolai wants to get two or three, cut them into A4 sections and laminate them and put them into a binder to pick up geek chicks impress his geek friends.

The house is clean, as in clean clean clean. (Spare room is still a pit.) Tomorrow we aim to strike Arkady's flat. TREPIDATION.

Note: I'm still basically not reading LJ, which means this is less of a journal and more of a blog of late. Please alert me directly to anything important, either here or by email to dgerard@gmail.com .

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

which means this is less of a journal and more of a blog of late.

That makes no sense. If anything it's the reverse; a journal is a private thing, and a "blog" is part of the "blogosphere", where the produced spunk is shared like a joint at a party.

[reddragdiva]

Essentially, all blogs/journals can be divided into LiveJournal and all the others put together. LJ is a sort of walled garden where the blogging software is mediocre at best, but the LJ-only network effect is the secret sauce. That is, on LJ the sharing features are the point, whereas the on the others you set up your own little world to blog on and the sharing features are sort of bolted on afterwards.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Well, there's also xanga and myspace and, um, whatever. But yeah.

[reddragdiva]

I mean in numbers of blogs/journals.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

Fecking LJ lost all my cookies and the user interface doesn't make it clear that's happened when you're reading http://user.livejournal.com/friends

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Well, to answer your anonymous question, myspace is overrun mostly with two types: teenagers and musicians. myspace makes it easy (or so i hear) for musicians to set up a page and throw up some audio samples. As for the teenagers... well, that was LiveJournal 5 years ago.

[reddragdiva]

Remember the good old days ... when teenagers didn't want anyone to read their diary.

[ashbet]

The only bit of news I have for you is that I'll be coming to London on June 22 (will probably be functional on the 23rd), and I hope to see you guys during that week . . . will keep you posted on dates (I'm also hoping to make it up to Manchester midweek) when I know more ^-^

*smooches!*

-- A :D

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

Are those Exilim things the ones with the atrocious noise problems, or am I thinking of another one?

PS. Get off ebay! You should join a support group with Annie-WINOLJ or something.

[reddragdiva]

I understand they are noisier than Ixuses, though not so noisy that I care — they're point-and-clicks whose big selling point is that they are thin and tiny.

The main problem in using them for pictures of drunk goths in nightclubs is that the CCD is not good in low light, which is one of my scripts does nothing but apply a 1.2 gamma to a folder of JPEGs.

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

Hmm - someone at work had one at the xmas party, and yeah, I'd say that the CCD *is* v.poor in low light - but adding gamma to it just makes the image even more noisy than it was before.. and it starts off pretty badly.

They're thin and tiny, but what's the point if the resulting images are useless? A slightly larger point-and-shoot still fits in your pocket.

but, obv., the fashion aspect of these things, like mobile phones, completely passes me by.

[reddragdiva]

You seem to be speaking in excessively apocalyptic terms picked up from a message board. If you want the results given by two kilos of glass around your neck, you should probably get that. The results are plenty good enough - see http://reddragdiva.fotopic.net/ April 2004-2005 - and many wouldn't have happened at all had I been using two kilos of glass.

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

I haven't read messageboards about this - just seen the results from a colleague.

Your next comment is a bit confusing - you seem to be implying that you took all the photos from April 2004 onwards on the Exilim, but I thought you just bought it?
Or are you instead merely suggesting that those photos wouldn't have been taken if you had two kilos of glass around your neck? (In which case, why not include the photos prior to April 2004 or after 2005?)

Also, note that I'm not suggesting you *do* carry two kilos of glass around your neck. I was just trying to suggest that as ultra-thin cameras go, the Exilim appears to have traded off too much quality for slimness. There are other "small" cameras which take much better photos.

meh. you've bought it anyway.

[reddragdiva]

No, I had an EX-S20 , one of the 2002 range (the EX-S500 is from the 2005 range) which I bought in April 2004 and lost in April 2005 - the perils of smallness. Most of the other thin cameras came about because the other manufacturers went "ooh bugger, we have some catching up to do."

I really wouldn't mind an Ixus, though, twice the thickness or not - in terms of robustness they double as sledgehammers (except the lens, where looking at it funny will cause the dreaded E18 "lens stuck" error), and the Casio CCD is a bit crappy. But not so apocalyptically crappy as you put it.

I do tend to reduce my images to 1200x900 for the web. This was a particularly good thing with the 5MP Premier (= thing I bought specifically because it was fifty quid), which only did unspeakably compressed JPEGs. I expect better results from this one, which should be relatively easy to put into service mode and get raw images out of.

[reddragdiva]

And I do recall one message board post pointing out something like "you don't realise how much you need a really thin camera until you have one." I did one Whitby with excy's Ixus v2, which is about the same size but twice as thick. That was good, but the thinness really does make a tremendous difference in convenience.