06 January 2003

(Very) Recent Photos. Snow Life with Weimaraner [Textism] Dean Allen has posted some wondeful shots of Oliver. Bless! 10:46:18 PM    comment()

Photography musings - latest I'm finding the whole equipment question really confusing, not least because of the vast range of high quality cameras available at the moment. I have a whole load of conficting priorities. I want high lens quality, large enough film format to make reasonable enlargements, easy portability, complete control and the ability to point and shoot if I want to. I don't want to break the bank, I don't want to worry about keeping the camera pristine, I don't want to have a big "hey, steal this!" hunk of technology hanging around my neck, and I don't want to intimidate people with a pro looking camera. Of course, digital throws another loop into the whole question. Chris is dead-on about the convenience factor with digital. I bought my first digital camera a couple of months ago (a tiny Kyocera S4). Making all but cost-free images with no waiting for processing/printing has already spoiled me. The main issue I have with the Kyocera is the ultimate lack of quality of the images, and the limited and somewhat hidden manual controls. If I was a totally rational person, I would probably stick with my current cameras. I was recently given my Dad's old Nikon EM, which is small and light but very well put together and satisfying to use, even though you have to do things like fiddle with the film speed dial to get more manual control. The main problem is reliability - it's getting old, and the metering sometimes takes some coaxing. As I'm an almost totally irrational person, I'm at the point of buying a mint condition second-hand Contax G2 that a certain camera shop is holding for me. My forebrain is telling me I would be much better off buying a better digital camera, if I buy one at all, but my brain stem is pining after the sound of film-through-sprockets. The price of the G2 is very good, so I don't feel too bad about spending the cash. I still have time to come to my senses. Tomorrow is the day when I buy it or it goes back on the market. I'll blog the outcome here. 10:40:23 PM    comment()

Work update: Things went very, very well. Today we spent the day catching the inevitable bugettes that only show up when real users get their hands on a system, but there was nothing too serious. What was hard to cope with was the sheer deluge of e-mails pouring in through the day - user comments and questions, congratulatory messages to the team, requests for fixes and progress reports on fixes, etc. etc. I'm hoping things will calm down a bit over the next few days. I'll be sleeping a lot better tonight than I did in the week before the go-live. One good thing - the framework I built for the original Intranet, which is soon to be superseded, proved to be both flexible and robust, and actually faster in its new guise. We have about 100 independently managed sub-sites on our Intranet, with several tens of thousands of files in total, and not a single if statement. I'll blog about it before it is replaced later this year. 10:01:47 PM    comment()