On Monday signed a contract together with v2iketibu (deviant) for renting an apartment a few kilometres from the city centre. An apartment I have been long dreaming about, an apartment with 2 rooms, 2 clean an beautiful rooms. No furniture yet, but it will come as the time passes - bit by bit we'll gather everything we need. Already transported my other PC away from my current home, tomorrow will also have a 512 kbps Internet cable and cable TV connected to wherever they need to be connected to. Tomorrow will also have a fridge moved in, as well as a table for a PC bought. Maybe, if the time allows. And that's probably pretty much everything for the current month as financially it'll be very very tight month.

HAPPY!
A.

Hello dear visitor,

Had a possible HDD crash at work today (July 15th 2003). "Possible" as I haven't got any feedback about it yet. The system boots up, but hangs during WinXP startup (or just restarts) and sometimes throws the "Non-system disk or disk error" during the bootup. For a couple of times out of ten I even managed to log in into my workstation, but then it crashed anyway (being a clear sign about a final time for a disk backup).

I hope the IT-Services dept. can make an image of it and save as much data as possible. Nearly everything (programming source codes, documents, programming projects, build scripts etc.) are located in a server, but the development programs (and before that the entire OS) need to be reinstalled anyway. I am already getting used to losing the mail as well (not everything is stored in an Exchange server).

Otherwise had a very sunny weather today, on the top floors of 9 floor buildings some people told seeing temperatures even as high as 40 C.
No clouds in the sky yet, but the Sun isn't visible either, so that when looking out of my office window the weather seems kinda cold and windy (nothing like the weather during the day)

A.

After getting a digital camera, in my case Nikon Coolpix 3100, a complete switch has occurred in the style of my deviations. Totally keen about shooting, one more beautiful for the eye than the other.

About the camera:

Construction - plastic, but still feels very comfty and light in hand. Have found no problems yet, even the screen has remained unscratched (I move a lot, a ready-to-shoot camera mostly in my hand not in a protecting bag, it has been with me in a beach sandstorm, in waterfall fog, in a deconstruction of a building, and still works. Of course it does - it's Nikon )

Features - Good, most of the time I keep it on "auto", so it has more features than I need. If I could construct the camera then I would leave all the dings away, and for the same value would add a better sensor, a better case as well as increase the zooming and flashing capabilities.

Image quality - almost excellent. Almost - well, Canon A70 performs better in dark (and at night). Nikon also seems to have some white scattering with macros, but don't worry - it's almost invisible (meaning that if you look very very closely then you might see it. It's more like that you know it being there but don't see it and as you don't see it, it doesn't matter).

My CP3100 is very easy to use (as told, I mostly keep it on auto and the images come out brilliant).

Value for money - hundred percent (100%), I also bought a 256 MB compact flash card (enough for more than 300 high resolution images and even the 16MB card that comes along, holds 20 high or 60+ average resoulution images).

the batteries - well, before buying I also read that it eats them, but now after having it for about a month I could say that this is a bit overrated. I can shoot about 80 averate res. pics with one charge. It was me last weekend during a graduation of my girlfriend where I shot lots of pictures and the batteries lasted for the whole time. They became exchausted meanwhile, but then I turned the camera off, waited for about 30 mins, turned it back on, and shot another 20 pics.

The LCD was on most of the time and as it was a new toy for me, I also played around in the menus, zoomed, deleted images etc, and the batteries still lasted.

Now after owning it for about one and a half months no problems have still occurred. Had an interesting case with batteries: the regular rechargeable ones got exhausted, so I bought a couple of the non-rechargeable (the regular) ones (Energizer). Shot about 15 pics and they got exhausted. I usually have some noname 2000 mAh ones and these last for about 100 images, approximately, the LCD of course always on, zooming, deleting, reviewing gallery, switching settings etc. And about half of these images get taken with flash, so .. no bad words about the battery consumption as long as you remember using the rechargeable ones.

Currently studying tricks about digital photography (still considering myself as a beginner) from the web as well as getting hands dirty on shooting with different lenses for more artistic and interesting effects.

Any recommendations concering lenses more than welcome!

Yours truly,
A.

Guess who's soooo happy about his most darling graduated from a college on saturday (June 6'th). Also bought myself Nikon CP 3100, running around the city and driving outside to find places and things to shoot. Shooting myself and others (I know it sounds violent, but I like the wording of it )


Yours truly,
A.