19-VII-2007.
The new Fujitsu camera (which I'd later call Fujica) arrived. She made pizza so the first batch of shots was of me, eating the repeats. The camera is the top of amateur, prosumer-like category, which means the images are quite hi-res (8,7 MPix), 10x zoom, ordinary batteries, has raw format, can do video.
This is my third digital camera, and finally one which can approach the film in quality. Soon, of course, I learned its limitations - its autofocus is not so fast, can fail in low light (well, they all can) or when zooming all the way, the video is VGA (though not bad at that, sound is great and the sound of autofocus is far below what Conica did). For batteries I bought two packs (threw away the old ones, three years is pretty much the life of them) but it was unnecessary - by the time I need to switch, the other pack discharges just sitting in the drawer. Also, the software for processing the raws was too unwieldy and it frequently created white pixels here and there, unusable. And I didn't even think that some other software maker would have something for Fuji's format, so I gave up. But it was promising while I was playing with it, specially one sunset I stiched three days later.
Also got yet another scanner, a Canon this time, can do slices of film too. And it's good at that, but veeery slow. Scanned one. Got this one at a discount, courtesy of NewEgg, because I got hosed by HP on the rebate for that nezavisni. It's installed in Lena's room, attached to her box. There are figures made from colored paper on her desk, and the old Conica (which she did use a bit, but not as much as I thought). She will be buying a TI-81 (the last digit not visible on the picture) for school. Does graphs! It's gone a long way since 1977 when we played with TI-57 or 59, but OTOH it hasn't. The language is still very specific to the machine and the syntax (yup, has one now) doesn't make much sense to me. But does to her, she turned out to be a master of it. And somehow after a while she had two of these.
The little pillow with the (machine) embroidered bird was on the floor in the front room, as usual. I'd take my 10-minute naps on the carpet almost every workday, or read sometihing in the evening. This was the year I started buying books again. One of those clip-on lights (with a CFL bulb) would be attached to anything handy, usually the folding bed the guys used, or one of the slats in the future shelf/wall that's just half-made at this point.
Behind it is Chu's (the remaining guinea pig) pen, with the cedar bedding, some grass, two carrots, a roll which held toilet paper, and some of her special food in a dish (with fish skeleton drawn on the inside, probably intended for cats). Bext to it is the bag with beach stuff - towels mostly.
The sugar on the kitchen counter is still in the dark-blue coffee jar(... 9 words...). All the way in the corner, behind the coffee machine (which we rarely used, sticking to instant coffee, until recently, we got bored with instant so there's a couple of galon cans from Kroger, Folgers or Maxwell), because almost nobody uses sugar for anything.
On the faucet on the sink there's a filter, which did give a somewhat nicer water. Back home the water was yellowish, from extra minerals (iron, some arsenic - not enough to have any cases ever), and it's pumped from 125m of depth. Here, the water is from artificial lakes, so whatever seeps through the soil and falls from the sky. It's more reddish in the places where it drips. Filter helps.
The stylish flatware rack (holding sets of, american style, four spoons, knives, forks) looks too good to be from Big Lots, but it is.
The clock on the oven (flat glass, we ditched the old one last year or so) shows 4:55 even though the shot was made at 16:55. Americans.
On the job, Norman was complaining about a bug I caused. Because the Feds is so entangled, the changes to db (dbfs AND sql) have no mechanism of propagating, it all has to be done manually, no source control is in use... aaaah. And he's acting the insulted primadonna, as usual, trying to sound impersonal and yet place blame at the nearest target at the same time. I'm just lucky he's not doing the same things I do and we don't intersect often. And at least we use proper FogBugz (by Joel Spolsky) for almost six weeks now. Customer relations still goes through Sugar, which is an unsung piece of shit, but the old team is used to it and they somehow manage. Drives me nuts at times.
Mentions: Chu, Feds, Fujica, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), nezavisni, Norman Shen, in serbian