There were a combination of factors leading to me not posting anything new yesterday. The first was yet another silly little video game, which I may go into in some more detail at a later date. The second was a telephone conversation with my mother, which at least helped to ease a bit of family tension. The third was that I was looking to buy a new digital camera so that I could show off my handsome/pretty dogs, Warlock and Zelda respectively.
The first digital camera that I ever bought was an “Argus DC2000”, I bought that little sucker for 79 bucks a few years ago. You know, back when any digital camera started at a couple of hundred. That camera is just totally fucking useless, but don’t take my word for it, here are the reviews that it got on Epinions.com. Hardly glowing recommendations, to say the least.
I wanted to ensure that my next digital camera purchase would not just, well, piss me off, so I spent a bit of time reading reviews over at Epionions.com, as well as reviews for more recent cameras from sites like amazon.com. I read through the reviews on epinions, compared them to what I saw available on ebay at the time, and bit the bullet. The camera that I bought is a Kodak, which is a name that I am certainly more familiar with than the previous “Argus” camera that I had. The particular camera that I purchased has tons of reviews over there, the average is 4.5 out of 5 stars, yet there are a couple that just give it a 1 star rating. I think that might just be based on their inability to use it, but it could also be a piece of defective equipment. Only time will tell.
At any rate, I have not yet gotten that camera so I can’t yet voice an opinion. I am sure that it will be better than what I already have, but not sure if it will be the ultimate bliss that I am hoping for. I figure it will hit somewhere halfway between the two. If it is simply usable for taking still shots, it will be a hundred times better than my last digital camera purchase.
One humorous side-note to the whole thing. The number one ‘con’ to buying this camera was that it eats batteries, while the number one ‘pro’ was that it only takes two, while most cameras take four. Do the people that call it a pro that it takes less batteries, yet a con that it goes through them faster eat sugar-frosted lead flakes for breakfast or what? Of course it is going to go through batteries a lot faster when you are only using two, as opposed to four, the energy in the batteries is used as needed and, to my knowledge, can not be divined by simply praying over them. The camera runs on 3 volts, that means that it will operate on two AA batteries, the cameras that require 4 AA batteries last twice as long, but was there actually any savings to you?
I am sure that it is written somewhere in the fine print that the use of only 2 batteries is for the purpose of reducing the weight of the camera. I could be wrong, but it would seem too silly to think that you could get the same performance from a camera that had half the power. That is just my take on it, your opinion may vary.
• Country Thunder is descending on us like cancer. You can see signs of it all over the place, most notably the big-ass sign that they put up on the tiny little road leading into town. My wife often laughs when I say that I did not get the mail because there was too much ‘traffic’ in town. When I say that what I mean is that the drive-up-and-grab-your-mail slots outside the office are full. Once Country Thunder hits, it will be an adventure to simply make it home alive.
I said in my last blog that it is like Ozzfest, and it is in many ways, especially the drinking. People getting up at nine in the morning so that they can make the first show, taking time out only long enough to go get more beer. I have heard that they have better security and the such this year, but just imagaine trying to drive through a tiny town like ours at noon, when half of the driver’s are already drunk. I am pretty sure that I don’t want to have to be in the middle of that.
• Even as I pen (type) these lines, I may be looking at the last living moments of our older dog, ‘Warlock’. He is in perfect health, has had all of his shots, he is a good dog by the definition of dogs, but he may have to be killed. The little bastard kept myself and my wife awake all last night by first scratching on our bedroom door. She (my wife) let him go out, in case he needed to pee. He came back into the room and started sniffing at everything (you wouldn’t think that was loud, but you haven’t heard it). Then he scratched on the door wanting out, it took me about twenty minutes of laying there listening to him before I let him, and Zelda (who is the good dog at this point) onto the porch.
Dogs have nails like the talons of death, or so it would seem. After an hour of not being able to sleep because of the sound of the dog scrathing at the door, I let him back in. If the dog was intelligent, he would have noted that it gets better when he quits scratching, unfortunately, the dog is an idiot. Within ten minutes they were back on the porch. And the second he got there he was scratching at the door.
Long story short, if he does that again tonight, my wife and I will have a very beautiful stuffed dog.
I should also mention that I just got a call from my employers that will make it so that I will be able to make a post tomorrow, but not on Thursday. So Wednesday and Thursday are switching places, hopefully just for this week.