(no subject)
Sep. 21st, 2007 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neadodsHome again, home again, jiggity-jig. Or more accurately "the third day in a row I've taken off work." Yesterday I thought I might have turned the corner, although I couldn't put in a full day. Today I realized in the parking lot that just getting to work had taken everything I had... I flailed for an hour and headed home again, where I went down like a clubbed seal. I'm just oozing back to an approximation of life right now.
I've sent regrets to the gamers I'm supposed to be with tomorrow. I don't have the energy; they don't want to have what I've got.
This is the last weekend before Italy and I don't have shoes, I don't have firm plans, and I don't have the ability to breathe or stay awake longer than about three hours in a row. If I was capable of feeling anything other than exhaustion, I'd be alarmed right now.
I have no idea how I'm going to handle the time change. I was going to try to shift my hours closer to their time like I did for the London trip (with exceptions for fall premieres and Yarn Harlot) but that went by the wayside as soon as I got sick; getting up at 3 in the morning would have done me no favors.
There is a certain sense of impending doom.
While I am awake, I'm pondering the continuing clearout. As in, if I'd been steadily clearing out the desk in my bedroom, I wouldn't have been reduced to pawing through detritus to see if I could find the charging cord for my camera (no, but I do have the battery charger).
And I'm pondering the camera itself. I know it looks like I charge into things, but before I lay a lot of money down, I do spend a certain amount of time assessing what I want, what I need, and what I can do with things. When I buy something big and expensive, I only want to buy *one.* The free second iPod was nice but the first one still is still my main one. The Palm Pilot I bought nigh onto a decade ago is still going. I'm going to use this computer and my car until they both die and then some... I've got a spare laptop upstairs that has a broken keyboard but I'm hanging onto Just In Case.
And yet, I recently bought a new alarm clock, and y'know what? It's much nicer and more powerful than the old one. It has features that didn't exist when I bought the old one. And it is rapidly proving worth its price because those features are so helpful.
The reason this is coming up is that when I went for a digital camera, I did it the "this is the one and only one I'll need" way. I have a very nice camera, two batteries for it (I don't like messing with chargers when I travel, especially overseas; I want to be able to pop in another battery and go), two spare memory chips, a reader for said chips, etc. Top of the line.
And yet... it was bought back when digital cameras were relatively new, which means that while it is a perfectly good camera, there are others on the market now that have features that didn't exist when I bought this one. Features that I rather think I'd like to have.
The practical "use it up/wear it out/make it do/or do without" mentality is clashing with the equally practical, "Look, technology becomes obsolete and it's no sin to acknowledge that what was once a prime piece of equipment is now a comparative kluge factory" mentality.
And why yes, I am looking at digital cameras under the membership rewards. Like the second iPod, it's not extravagant if I'm getting it for "free."
In the meantime, I may balance the wish to take pictures in Italy vs the fear of things being stolen and take the also nice, useful, and still functioning analog 35-mm camera...
I've sent regrets to the gamers I'm supposed to be with tomorrow. I don't have the energy; they don't want to have what I've got.
This is the last weekend before Italy and I don't have shoes, I don't have firm plans, and I don't have the ability to breathe or stay awake longer than about three hours in a row. If I was capable of feeling anything other than exhaustion, I'd be alarmed right now.
I have no idea how I'm going to handle the time change. I was going to try to shift my hours closer to their time like I did for the London trip (with exceptions for fall premieres and Yarn Harlot) but that went by the wayside as soon as I got sick; getting up at 3 in the morning would have done me no favors.
There is a certain sense of impending doom.
While I am awake, I'm pondering the continuing clearout. As in, if I'd been steadily clearing out the desk in my bedroom, I wouldn't have been reduced to pawing through detritus to see if I could find the charging cord for my camera (no, but I do have the battery charger).
And I'm pondering the camera itself. I know it looks like I charge into things, but before I lay a lot of money down, I do spend a certain amount of time assessing what I want, what I need, and what I can do with things. When I buy something big and expensive, I only want to buy *one.* The free second iPod was nice but the first one still is still my main one. The Palm Pilot I bought nigh onto a decade ago is still going. I'm going to use this computer and my car until they both die and then some... I've got a spare laptop upstairs that has a broken keyboard but I'm hanging onto Just In Case.
And yet, I recently bought a new alarm clock, and y'know what? It's much nicer and more powerful than the old one. It has features that didn't exist when I bought the old one. And it is rapidly proving worth its price because those features are so helpful.
The reason this is coming up is that when I went for a digital camera, I did it the "this is the one and only one I'll need" way. I have a very nice camera, two batteries for it (I don't like messing with chargers when I travel, especially overseas; I want to be able to pop in another battery and go), two spare memory chips, a reader for said chips, etc. Top of the line.
And yet... it was bought back when digital cameras were relatively new, which means that while it is a perfectly good camera, there are others on the market now that have features that didn't exist when I bought this one. Features that I rather think I'd like to have.
The practical "use it up/wear it out/make it do/or do without" mentality is clashing with the equally practical, "Look, technology becomes obsolete and it's no sin to acknowledge that what was once a prime piece of equipment is now a comparative kluge factory" mentality.
And why yes, I am looking at digital cameras under the membership rewards. Like the second iPod, it's not extravagant if I'm getting it for "free."
In the meantime, I may balance the wish to take pictures in Italy vs the fear of things being stolen and take the also nice, useful, and still functioning analog 35-mm camera...
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no subject
Date: 2007-09-22 03:29 am (UTC)Get one with double-AAs because you'll find them all over the world, and you don't have to have a cord. Get a 2 gig or more card for the camera because you want more room not less when you're in Italy. A camera's useless if your card takes 5 shots.
The one I'm using now has 2 memory cards built in it, a flash and a zoom lens. It's still a fixed length camera.
Make it smallish to carry around. Put in hand-carry luggage. Remember in Europe you have different power -- you may borrow my plug converter if we see each other before the trip.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-22 02:48 pm (UTC)To give you some idea of how old the digital is, I paid a great deal of money for the biggest memory chip they had for it - something like $40 for a whopping 256 MB.
Technology being what it is, I can buy a 1 Gb for $20 at Staples right this minute, and an AA-battery smaller one for one half to one third what I paid for the original.
It's the ability to use batteries and the much larger viewscreens in back that are the two main interests; I note that the ultra-slims *don't* take standard batteries.
And that battery part is very big. That's why I like the playaways when I travel too, because they run on AAAs and thus do not need chargers either, unlike the iPod.