I will deal with this in the only way that makes sense. Events in chronological order.
Ok, Christmas, not a huge amount to report. I have to admit, it’s starting to loose some of it’s magic now. No more do I run downstairs in the morning to hunt for presents, nor do I spend the entire day with a cheesy grin plastered to my face (thank god for that).
Presents are listed in no particular order:
- Advanced drivers course and skid pan practice
- Selection of books such as “Crazy laws and lawsuits”
- Personal organiser (subtle hint me thinks)
- Socks typical isn’t it
- WHSmiths voucher
- Very large road atlas
- Coldplay CD (X&Y)
There were more, but many studies have shown that people’s attention span has been decreasing at a frankly alarming rate. Still here? Good.
Moving on.
As is the case with most years, that time between Christmas and new year becomes a bit of a void. There is nothing in particular meant for it, it’s just there. I’m not 100% on what I filled mine with, but I know a good part of it was spent working on my site (testing version). I have been refining the logging on and off, adding the tags and associated searching (much like LJ). Work on the full text search has also begun, where I encountered the delights of things such as stopwords which you just can’t search for, well not using built in functions and having boolean support.
New Year passed, as it normally does. I’m not a great one for celebrating new year, never have been. I certainly don’t subscribe to the idea of it as a reason to walk out of the house one year and crawl back the following. I don’t consider passing out as a “fresh start”.
Ah yes, I just remember what I did before new year, I went shopping, sales and all that. I even have two note-worthy events. First off, I bought a suit (in prep for Merrill Lynch). Second, I found (and bought) a decent shirt that doesn’t make me look like I work in IT.
Anyway, where was I. After new year I have just been working on my site, seeing friends and that’s about it.
Now we come to Yesterday (Wednesday (04/01/2006)) where I managed what I have been meaning to for some while. I bought a proper digital camera! Well, prosumer.
I met up with in town at about 12:50 from where we made haste to the nearest decent camera shop (Jessops) to browse and pick-up a catalogue, then had a quick look in the window of a crappy camera shop (which is closing down (trust me, if deserves it)) before wandering off to find lunch and mull over the choices.
The two choices we narrowed it down to were:
The Konica Minolta Dimage Z5
And the Fuji FinePix S5600 Zoom
The problem was the choice was not a simple on, both had their up’s and down’s. For every good point of one, the other had a different way of dealing with it. This made for a hard choice. Now I managed to have a go with Z5 in Jessops, so I had a feel for that, but they didn’t have the S5600 in store, so I had a go with a model up. Problem was, the model up was quite different (size, specs etc) so it turned out to be no-good as a comparison. So we left and preceded to wander round town looking for one to try. First place we tried was the crappy camera shop, as we had noticed they had one in their window. Walked in, made my situation clear so they knew I was interested in buying (bear in mind this could have been £300 easy sell for them) and was told that I couldn’t have a go with it because they were selling it at “internet prices” so they can’t offer additional services. So basically two fat blokes sit in a shitty little shop all day on the off-chance that someone who knows exactly what they want comes in and buys it for a price that they can better online. WTF! And the icing on the cake; there was an article about the shop closure in the local paper this week, in which they stated the reason for the closure was the lack of good parking for the town. BOLOCKS! They are closing because they offer a shit service and have no customer communication skills whatsoever (this is not an isolated event, trust me, they deserve to close).
Anyway, I did in the end find an S5600 to have a go with (from a shop with customer service) and eventually (just as it was getting dark) decided to get the Z5. I have little doubt that the question of if I choose the right one will recurs in my mind for many weeks to come, wondering what might have been….
*snaps out of*
Today myself and went back to our old school to visit the IT department. We had a little tour and chatted to staff around the school (the traditional “what you up to then?” stuff).
Then back to my house where insisted that it was a good idea for me to upgrade the firmware on my mp3 player. I wasn’t so keen on the idea, but gave in, in then end.
Below is a picture of trying to work out what has gone wrong with the firmware upgrade.
And a picture of the error (it flashed up so fast we took a picture to read it).
Suffice to say, all is well with it fortunately, but there was a grey panic area of about 5 minutes where we thought it had died for good and was a bit sheepish.
On a plus side, it has reinstated his distrust in manufactures to get firmware upgrades right, so a good deed was indeed done this day, the world is as it should be, well, bar the heathens at the top of the road who don’t understand the “12 days of Christmas” (although it does mean the thing is gone).
