So I zoom all over the world, blogging like crazy, and then I get home and go quiet. Why? No special reason; I’ve just found myself running around, dealing with lots of small matters since I returned.
- As I was packing up on Wednesday morning, I found that the latch on my 15 inch PowerBook wouldn’t catch. This used to be a perennial problem with PowerBooks and iBooks, but I thought Apple had solved it. I guess not…. On Thursday afternoon I took the machine to the Genius Bar at the Apple store near my home. The “genius” looked at it, and said, “Oh yes, routine fix, it’s under AppleCare, good, but it’s an offsite job, have you backed it up, and is there a
testaccount the technicians can use?” (Because, apparently, if they can’t log in as part of fixing things, they are liable to wipe the disk.) I raced home, backed up 32GB onto a handy FireWire drive, added a suitable account, and made it back to the store at 4:55 PM, just in time for the 5:00 PM pickup. Right now the system has been fixed and is on its way back from Texas(?!) to Massachusetts. Weather permitting (see below), I should get it on Monday. - I had a lot of fun photographing all sorts of stuff on my recent trip, but although quite a few shots came out quite well, I was also very frustrated. Take my attempts to photograph birds in Bangalore. The Nikon Coolpix 5600 that I was using is a perfectly good point-and-shoot camera, but with only 3x optical zoom I was never going to get really decent pictures of those herons and kites. So today, after studying the various online reviews of digital cameras, and stalking the aisles of Best Buy and Circuit City to check out how the various controls felt on different cameras, I bought myself a Kodak P850. Like my Nikon, it’s 5.1 megapixels; unlike the Nikon, it has a 12x optical zoom with image stabilization. If all goes well, you should expect to see the results in my Gallery in the near future.
- And in fact, the first pictures that I upload will probably be reminiscent of those I posted this time last year. We have another blizzard heading our way, and Sunday is likely to be meteorologically interesting…