About this time last year, I took the plunge and bought my first-ever DSLR. Having just come back from a tropical-island holiday (where I was thinking about photography) and spent the prior two months researching cameras (and thinking about photography) I was all fired up and went out to photograph things all the time. I’d heard of a thing called “ ( Read more... )

I haven’t blogged in a very long time; the top item of my To Do list is “post a review of The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks” but although I wrote myself a great little rambling Rogerian intro to that post, I hit a mental block the size of an office building when the time came to talk about, you know, the actual game ( Read more... )

Years ago, I used a Toshiba laptop for a week or two that had a TrackPoint (commonly known as a “nipple mouse”). My first impression was that it was incredibly annoying, but I kept using it and when I gave the laptop back I was amazed to discover that switching back was even more frustrating: half a second of feeling around the desk hunting for ( Read more... )

So, 22:15 and I just got home. I left work about 19:30 or so (got to work late, gotta do my hours) and on a whim, instead of taking the most direct route to the train station, I just started walking south. Pretty soon, I caught a glimpse of the Sydney skyline in the distance, neon blaring, and decided I needed to check it out, so I kept walking ( Read more... )

I have two computers; one is plugged into my nice monitor and keyboard, and runs my games and web-browsing and general mucking about, the other is headless and sits quietly in a corner, looking after my long-running communication needs: email, IRC, long-running downloads, etc. The idea is that I can mess around with my main PC as much as I like, ( Read more... )

I haven’t been uploading photos to Flickr for the past few days, mostly because I’ve been away from the computer but also because my Flickr account ran out of upload quota AGAIN. I’ve bought myself a Flickr Pro account as a belated Christmas gift, so I’ll start up again soon. This also means that every photo I’ve ever uploaded to Flickr is ( Read more... )

I’ve been quiet lately - for a while I’ve been keeping to my schedule of posting a new photo to Flickr every day (although I’ve enough backlog that I haven’t been taking photos every day), but that discipline hit a snag this evening:
You have a free Flickr account and have used 101% of your upload capacity for this calendar month
I guess normal ( Read more... )

In Februrary, during one of my occasional photography-sprees, I exhausted all possible routes from my office to North Sydney Station and felt the hunger for more subject matter. I hatched a crazy plan to walk all the way to Waverton (the next stop homeward) before boarding the train and continuing home: It was unexplored territory, it was raw ( Read more... )

On Saturday, I decided I’d deliberated long enough, and trekked across the city to buy a Nikon D5000. Unfortunately, it seems I managed to get one of the ones subject to the recall, so I’ll be ringing them up this week to find out what the procedure is ( Read more... )

After a couple of weeks reviewing specs and review sites, I’d pretty much decided I wanted to buy the Nikon D3000, mostly for its superior kit lens and the broader range of cheap lenses. The only problem was that being a very new camera, nobody had actually reviewed it yet, so I sat down to wait for some reviews - just to be sure.

Well, the first ( Read more... )