I had a dream…
I had a strange dream last night. It was a bad combination of Half-Life 2, X-Men, Anarchy Online and the pub up the road from my home. Blargh.
Weird dreams aside, I just saw this on Boing Boing. That shit is kinda scary, as they say.
My lenses to be…
This is more a glorified post-it note so that I can find them when I reach America, but these are the two lenses that I plan to buy in the US:
28-105mm F3.8-5.6 UC-III ASPHERICAL IF
And the…
28mm F1.8 EX DG ASPHERICAL MACRO
The first one I want as while my 18-55mm isn’t as sharp or powerful as I want, the 90-300mm I picked up is horrible overkill. And the second is just awesome for what I want. Landscapes or macros, this can handle them both competently. And they both come with lens hoods in the box!
I’m going with Sigma as I just wasn’t happy with the Canon lenses I’ve tried.
Galway by Night
Its an extraordinarily still night here, so I grabbed my camera and headed down to the docks to snap a few photos. I walked away with a few good shots, one a stitched panorama. Out of them all, I definately prefer the first one:
I’m a retail whore
I purchased a new lens that I’m not even sure I’ll have much use for. As with anything new, it will take a while before I get to grips properly with the lens, but I can say to start with that I don’t like it. The lens is the EF 90-300mm f/4.5-5.6. Uppers and Downers:
Uppers:
For a lens of its power, it was relatively cheap (250 euros).
Its sharper than my kit lens (the 18-55mm).
Downers:
It has horrible colour distortion that is really vexing me.
Its field of view is horrible, but then again its a zoom lens and not a “normal” one. I’m very much looking forward to getting this when I’m in Las Vegas. I think I might just pick up a smaller Sigma lens in addition, cash permitting!
I don’t have that much need for such a big lens as I mostly photograph buildings, forests, hills, etc., as opposed to people or animals from a distance.
The auto-focus is muck. Its excellent for tracking something that’s moving, but if I have to make a larger change it takes forever (upward of 20 seconds) to lock on.
Its unwieldly and big.
It didn’t come with a lens hood. This is a only a small thing, but its annoyed me insanely. I spend 250 euro on a lens and I expect a lens hood, which is a bit of plastic.
On the whole, I figure I’m going to return the lens on Tuesday coming. Until then, here are some photos:
So you’ve bought a computer!
Congratulations new owner! You travelled down to your local superstore and handed over your hard-earned cash for that computer you’ve had your eye one with the kick! Ass! Nvidia! Graphics! Card! You’ve sat down with the sales person and he told you about the various accessories pacakges, so you picked a printer, a scanner and a digital camera. He threw in a bale of paper for free – what a nice guy! Possibly you’ve purchased the extended warranty as well, as you know the sorts of virus’ and hackers that might break into your machine in the dead of night and swap wires around. Better be safe, eh? Then you proudly drove home and pulled all of the new-smelling components from their packaging. After a little fiddling with cables and plugs, you have it all set up on your desk ready and waiting to be used. Filled with trembling anticipation you hit the power button…
…and in an anti-climatic moment it all works! Awesome! You go through the setup screens, add yourself as a user and then get dropped into your Windows desktop for the first time. You play around with it for a little bit and check out all the applications: The office software, the games, the photo suites and maybe you’ll go online to check your email. And you sit back satisfied…
…and do something wholly and inexplicably stupid like reinstalling Windows on it. You pop in the Windows XP Professional CD you got from a friend of a friend, as you’ve heard its better than “normal” Windows, go through the setup process, once again go through the tasks of adding users (why? Didn’t you just do that?) and as you get dropped to your desktop for the second time, you notice that something is wrong! There’s no friendly chime when you log in – there’s no sound at all for that matter! – the colours look all weird and windows are choppy, the icons for Office and Photoshop have vanished and when you try to go online you discover that your broadband doesn’t work.
What in blazes? Thinking quickly, you assume something has broken and you take the machine back into the store, only for the scruffy-looking geek to tell you that as you’ve broken the PC, the store is under no obligation to fix it for you. Then you get angry…
–
I run into this kind of scenario a few times a month: People buy a PC and then install a different version of Windows for whatever reason. Some have better reasons than others, such as immigrants who will install their native language version which is completely understandable and some people just seem to do it for shits and giggles. I recall one person wiping off XP Home from their machines, only to install XP Home. Why?
“Oh, I didn’t like the theme and wanted to make it the blue one..”
The problem I have is not that they want to change their OS: I regularly use Gentoo, XP and OS X at home. The problem is that they haven’t a fucking clue what they are at and then get angry when I try to explain that while we can’t fix the problem in-store, nor provide drivers, I can point them to where they can get them.
“I need software for my computer! I can’t find it anywhere on the net!”
“Did you check the manufacturers website?”
“Yes, there was nothing there at all!”
“Okay, look here…”
I then go to the website, enter the machine’s serial number and find a page with a download of every single driver for the machine that you care to think of.
“It wasn’t there earlier!”
I never expect people to have the sort of geek know-how that I’ve picked up, but its reasonable to expect that they know something about computers. After all, would you buy a brand new car and then sit in it on the dealer’s driveway for five minutes before you got out and somewhat embarassedly ask them to show you how to drive it? No!
Friday’s Photos
Only two interesting ones from today from a total of 132, one of Killer and one of the sunset:
Taking the piss..
How low will the media companies stoop? You have groups like the MPAA, RIAA (if you’re American) and the IRMA (if you’re Irish) sueing end users because they download works that they own. In America, they brought in the much-hated DMCA which criminalizes activities such as bypassing copy protection on that new CD you purcashed, so you can copy the tracks to your PC. A similar act was passed in Europe, the EUCD, but its thankfully impotent in comparison, due to the difficulties of bringing it into law in different consituencies.
And with Captain Copyright they encourage activities that at best can be called tasteless:
Classroom Activities for Grades 3-6
Activity 5
Letter to the Editor
After reviewing examples of letters to the editor supporting copyright as a class, students will write a letter to the editor in support of copyright for the school paper or a classroom newsletter.
Activity 11
Giving Permission
Class discussion about why and how people may want to use copyrighted material will lead to the design of a permissions form for use of students’ materials.
And so on!
I find it personally offensive as it strives to create within children a mindset that their works must be controlled draconically, which is utterly contradictory to creativity. Oh for sure, its obstensibly to stop piracy, but in truth its aimed at controlling and maniplulating children from an early age.
For better or worse, my completely amateur interest in photography makes me an artist and so I’ve had to deal with copyright matters myself. I very much a leftie hippy and every single photo I put online is released under the Creative Commons” lisence, specifically the Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 one. In short, you’re free to do whatever you like with each of my photos, so long as you attribute the original to me and aren’t using the photo for commercial purposes (money-making, in short). And I will continue to do so for as long as I have a camera in my hands. A world where locking art and and creativity away for the sake of money is the norm isn’t one for me.
June Desktop
Past time I put it online:
I was editing my current desktop wallpaper – this is Openbox with the Gimp, Conky, Docker, mocp and Gaim 2.0, before I went to work this morning.
All of it in Gentoo Linux of course.
Flowers are pretty..
…but if you want truly interesting photos, you need to seek out people. With that in mind, I stepped out of the house to discover one of our fine local respresentatives causing a scene.
Heading into town after that, I finally bought a lens hood for my camera. Having worked in electrical retail for what’s heading towards seven years I could pretty much work out how much profit they made on that crappy little bit of plastic (50-80% margin), which made buying it all the more painful. Ah well, its already gone to good use on my camera. I took a lovely photo of the boats at the Waterside at an angle to the sun that would normally be all blown out:
Today’s crud to good ratio was 93:6, including the photo of Killer this morning. Here’s the rest:
I hate builders, and I hate summer
The bastards had me out of bed at 6am as they were digging up the road outside the house, but I’d no choice but to open the window as my room was stiffling. Nggh. Ah well, Killer at least has a love-hate relationship with them, she gets to take over my bed earlier than usual today.
She doesn’t like the builders, either
And at the price of God’s Own Migraine, I cancelled my hotel reservation for Paris and booked a hotel for London. I’ll be staying about a kilometre down the road from Heathrow, which suits me perfectly fine.