woggie

I've been wandering dA and looking at photography.

One of the most bothersome things about photography is that with popular point-and-shoot cameras, it always takes a long time between shots. This is to say, it often takes at least ten seconds. The problem with that is there are a lot of situations that can't be captured with just one or two shots, but they happen in only a few seconds. If you're really lucky, they'll take place over several minutes span, but exactly how are you going to capture the best shots, the shots you want to capture?

Okay, some would say to use the movie setting in those point-and-shoot cameras. That function is there for a reason, after all. The trouble there is that when you switch to the movie setting, the quality of your pictures tends to go way down. The shots become very grainy, or the darkness that wouldn't show up in a standard shot suddenly becomes oppressive. Your 5.5 Megapixel camera suddenly drops down to being a 2.5 Megapixel camera. Yes, I haven't bought a camera really recently. What a surprise, given my economic status.

Worse, how does one pick apart the movie output to find exactly the frames one wanted? VLC would probably do it, I suppose, provided the output file is in a format that can be read properly.

I had thought the solution to this problem would be to get hold of an SLR, because those things take a lot of pictures very fast. Since I'm not a pro with lots of money, and since I don't need pro-level detail, I figured I could find an ancient SLR that nobody in their right mind would want to use professionally, say, an ancient 5 Megapixel SLR camera.

Therein lies the problem. I can't find them, or they don't exist anymore. I read an article recently where a photographer was moping about the shutters on two of the three cameras he was carrying, and the shutter on the third and last camera he took this shot with was kinda wonky, and that's when it occurred to me that perhaps one of the reasons I can't find this mythical ancient 5.5 Megapixel SLR is because they simply wear out. Kaput. So perhaps one reason I'm having all this trouble finding an old SLR is because by the time a camera gets to be this old it's a paperweight. Or an intricate project involving lots of fine tools and small parts. And because this is digital cameras I'm talking about, circuit-boards might be another issue. I don't know nearly enough about how cameras break.

Of course, if I knew who to ask and how to contact them... wait! There's this thing called The Internet! I've heard of it... I could go find a magazine somewhere and simply ask some random person what happens to old cameras.

Or someone reading this might know who to ask or how to go about this quest.

I think I've figured out what initiative is.

Initiative is the purpose that you give yourself where you decide what you're thinking about is important enough that it needs to be done.

It might be done wrong, but it'll still be done.

That feeling of willingness to do stuff is initiative.

Huh. I guess Republican desires to "win" have achieved new depths. No longer interested in turning a blind eye to views they don't agree with, they've decided to take action, cutting support for Planned Parenthood, and now they're going after PBS and NPR.

I guess it's time to start looking for when and how the GOP is going to take this country from Republic to Theistic Dictatorship. It might take a few years, but if this attack on accurate information personally and in the news continues, it's going to be all that much faster and easier for them to do.

I'm disgusted.

Yes, Google Chrome is lightning fast. Yes, it is amazingly stable, fun, and has games and such it installs instantly. Still, I will not be using it except in very specific occasions.

Why? Well, it doesn't block ads yet. I thought this wasn't going to be such a big deal until I discovered, much to my horror and frustration, that there are still quite a few advertisers who think movement in adverts is the way to go. Meanwhile, I have ADD, and moving adverts tear my eyeballs away from whatever I was originally on the page to do. Repeatedly. So if I'm reading God's Own Instructions for how to save my life and be a responsible human, I can't read them because some fucking thing off to the side of the page keeps tearing my eyeballs away!

The amazing thing is that this attention to moving objects seems like it would be made for a traffic accident, except I can tear my attention away to the next thing that is moving just as quickly. I have no long-term concentration, as for things like reading articles longer than a paragraph or two, but I can keep track of where everything is without a problem.

So apparently, the lack of advert blocking is a deal-breaker. I wasn't really aware of that until now. I mean, I was sort of aware of that, and how nice it is to read things without having to deal with moving objects on the page, but I didn't know the problem was quite as bad as it is.

So, for all its bloat and inefficiency, I will be sticking with Firefox.

Tired. Sick. Runny nose, sore and scratchy throat, dizzy head (tho Sweetie would probably say this is normal). Living on NyQuil, C, Protein and Water. Sleeping a lot.

Yuck.

http://www.dontmakemesteal.com/

It's an interesting idea. I'm not quite ready to sign it because I'm not level-headed enough to know what I think about it right now, but it certainly would be an acceptable alternative on the face of it.

I won't have the money for parts until I get paid again, and then I'm tight financially until probably month-after-next, but I have a list of parts for her new machine.

BIOSTAR A770E3 Motherboard
AMD Athlon II X4 Processor
Kingston 2GB Dual Channel memory

I'm using the same case, hard drive, floppy drive and CD drive. The same video card, power supply, etc. All I'm changing is the motherboard, ram and processor. I had a cooling fan in the list, but in the time it took for us to figure out it wasn't coming out of this paycheck, the fan I chose went out of stock. I guess I'll have to choose another when the time comes.

Then it's three days until delivery, and I'm giving myself another couple of days to put all the parts together. Then I can start saving up for duplicates to build one for myself. If the motherboard is actually as good as it seems to be, I can put double the ram in that than I can in the one I have now, and three times what I had in the duplicate machine to Sweetie's that just died.

Sweetie's desktop machine didn't come up this morning. The power supply works, the rest of the thing operates, but the USB didn't, and the video card didn't. I suspect there's some sort of hinky OS-related thing that keeps the USB from working, and I also suspect the video card simply died.

( Technical Details and Sarcasm Follow... )

If all goes well, it'll be done tomorrow. If things don't go well, I may be working on this thing the rest of the month. Whee.

I discovered something interesting about Livejournal just now.

The S2 style of page formatting which is supported has no date on the Friends entries unless you have a paid account. If you go back to the S1 style of page formatting which is not supported, you get the date back, although admittedly you don't get the pretty colors and designs of the S2 page format.

Dreamwidth, meanwhile, doesn't care. You always get the date regardless of your paid or unpaid status.

Odd, that.