ionosphere

Archive for April, 2010

Got an excellent bit of news by email on Saturday afternoon

My digital camera that died/fried several years back is coming home.  It went to California and a week later here it comes. Very reasonable price and a fast turnaround. The power circuit and the card writing circuitry were blown. The fellow who did the work was in Monrovia, California and I’d guess that I’ll have the camera back later this week. I’m surely thrilled by this turn of events and I’ll post links to the guy’s business as soon as I have the device in my hands and see it working again for myself.  I didn’t think that it was going to be good news when I saw that note — but I was very pleas­antly surprised.

I’ll let you know how it goes and graph­i­cally demon­strate the results. Been without an SLR since Cape May and I miss it. Which also reminds me that I should post a gallery of Cape May Victorians so that the “replacement” camera can have death with dignity.

I am a subscriber to a Desktop Publishing Newsletter at About​.Com that is written by Jacci Howard Bear. Today’s article discussed a recent article by Smashing Magazine about Instant Gratification literally killing Good Design. That shouldn’t be a big surprise.

While I don’t think that anything will change, there are some inter­esting thoughts for us graphics people and it was worth going to the link at Smashing Magazine. I’d also suggest that the Desktop Publishing Newsletter has some very solid ideas — so sign up. 

If you have time that is…

Yes. The Olympus E-20N that I bought back years ago in New Jersey has been sent for resurrection.

It stopped working several years ago — just as I upgraded to bigger and better Compact Flash Memory cards. There I was already to go shooting with absolutely no worry of  running out of storage space while shooting and damn if the camera didn’t just go to sleep on me. Matters were made worse when I wrote to Olympus USA on Long Island and didn’t even get a response as to where I could take my now out of warranty camera for service. So I went searching and found a company in California that I will certainly talk up a lot if they can just get my original digital working again.

The shot above was one of the last sessions with the Olympus prior to it freezing up.

In the interim period I purchased a used and rather beat up E-20N from a well known online retailer. It was sold as being in “mint” condition. It was functional but somehow the rubber padding on the camera that covered the body where you held it — had been ripped away and replaced with a black rubber or asphalt-like material that I’d swear was “coaxseal” — something that I used to keep moisture out of my connectors and junctions in coaxial cable commu­ni­ca­tions settings. Each time that I went shooting — the gunk would come off on my hands and small pieces of it would fall onto my shirts and mark them. Others using the camera also noticed the same thing as when they used it they would also have to wipe their hands clean afterward. Apparently the vendor’s idea of mint condition meant covered with gum?

When Sue and I were down in Cape May, NJ earlier this month I shot dawn coming through the window and the beautiful golden light went immedi­ately to black on my second shot that morning. It was the click of death for that shutter and you could no longer even look through the viewfinder. It was just black. So — since that was the second camera with such intense body coating trouble… I decided to see if there was anyone out there who felt that they could take on the challenge of repairing a digital camera that Olympus themselves no longer support in any way. It arrived in California last Friday morning and the fellow doing the work notified me by email that he’d received it and would let me know when the repair was complete.

I hope that Olympus America knows that they are building ill will by not even giving a repeat buyer so much as a simple answer about repair. I was thrilled back when I bought this camera and it’s acces­sories and just so sad when it ceased to exist. I took very good care of the equipment and never intro­duced it to a hard shock of any sort — extreme temper­a­tures of hot or cold… and I never got it wet. Failure of the camera was purely an internal wear issue and quite likely electrical in nature rather than a mechanical problem. When it comes back I’ll let you all know what it cost, who did the work, and just what the problem seemed to be.

I can’t wait for it’s return. Many images to make. Reference to gather. Time exposures to make… ya know?

We started at Talbots and widened the search area to yesterday’s score at the King of Prussia Mall. Moving around the area near the Oxford Valley Mall and then in the Oxford Valley Mall itself we looked at just about all the dresses and such that are available. Sue just wasn’t going for what she saw.

The stuff that we found in the local stores was the result of a process of deciding what had the least wrong with it rather than what we liked about it. That’s just not the right way to go about shopping. Sue spent hours looking through the stores online to see whether or not they had something that she truly liked.

All of that changed once we were shopping at the King of Prussia Mall. Quality stores and pleasant sales people make all the difference in the world. The King of Prussia Mall reminded me very much of a Mall that I’d grown up near… The Mall at Short Hills in NJ. That was a nice Mall. The woman who helped Sue was great and it was an easy choice. Neiman Marcus got the sale.

I really don’t under­stand the big deal that people make when going shopping with their female companion. It’s not difficult and the opinion is generally helpful. I had a very good time overall and all those dresses and shoes… My mind was drifting a few times thinking about Sue in some of the stiletto heels that were in the stores. Heels are an “inter­esting” design. Absolutely imprac­tical. Right up there with neckties for men. I can’t imagine standing on an angle like that. Got to say though… Nothing could possibly terminate a beautiful leg more grace­fully than a good pair of heels. At home — Rudy kept his attention on home security while we were out. Growling and gnashing at a whole bunch of nothing.

Change is inevitable — so I’m changing this page layout

Just set up a new fixed width blog with what I hope will be easier to read text. All of my widgets and images in the main column will be out of whack for a while but it all will be lots better once I get it organized.  I used the latest version of Artisteer to mess with the theme and it worked out pretty well.

I had this blog design finished last month but Sue and I spent a long weekend down in Cape May and Passover then Easter came into play as well. Really nice here again today with temper­a­tures in the 80s but we are cooling off tonight and expect a line of strong thunder­storms before that happens. It has just been one extreme after another all winter long right into early Spring. I wrote a couple of long entries here about specific storms we’d had and sure enough the next week another would come along that was bigger and badder than the one that preceded it. All photog­raphy is currently offline. I took a shot at sunrise looking over the ocean from our deck and it was a fatal digital click that was heard in Cape May. I was fortunate enough to have captured a number of spectacular Victorians the day before though.

Is everyone aware that Cape May surely seems to be haunted? We were taking some shots at one of the old Hotels when a piece of siding hit the sidewalk a couple of feet away. With so many Nor’easters coming through over the past couple months — slightly hard to imagine that on this gust free, almost totally still day that a piece of siding just happened to coinci­den­tally float by…  Some pictures to follow later on.

Sue and I drew pictures of Cape May Lighthouse from various angles. Unfortunately the museum and light­house itself was closed due to the off-season. Tree damage around the parking area there showed that they had the same nasty winds that we’d had recently. Never seen so many broken limbs in my life.

B