Zathras' Great Machine

Another marginally productive day

I want a cigarette! *grumble* Hmm, maybe I'll set up the hookah this evening instead.

I'm just about done with the fourth season of Babylon 5 on DVD... the fifth and final season comes out in about two months. I have a spot in my media cabinet reserved for it. Things to look forward to in life.

After spending a lot of time thinking things over, I decided to buy a Canon i960 printer on Saturday night. It got here just a little while ago, and so far, I'm very pleased. The set up was painless. As of right now, I've only printed one photo, but if the others turn out as good as this one did, I'll be more than satisfied. Unless you look very closely, you would swear this was from a photo lab.

I'm also going to experiment a bit with seeing what my current digital camera is capable of. The photo I just printed is 4x6 and looks like a regular print photo, but I don't think my current camera will be able to do 8x10 photos, which is where I really want to go. My camera is 2.1 megapixels, which is fine for most purposes but not for larger prints. I've looked at a variety of cameras, and if money were no object, I'd buy a Nikon D100. It's a fantastic camera, and it can do just about everything I want to experiment with, including infrared photography, which I think is really neat. (The only thing I'm not sure about is certain kinds of time lapse, such as making photos of star tracks.) The Nikon D100, unfortunately, is also tremendously expensive, so for the foreseeable future, buying one is just a pipe dream.

I'm getting a variety of projects taken care of around the house, and the place is starting to look pretty neat and organized. I'm also getting my hard drive in order. I've always been really bad about dropping files pretty much anywhere on my hard drive and not using naming conventions. Bad habit that I'm trying to break.

Rather amusing discovery I made about a week ago while working on the hard drive project: I found out that, due to the way iTunes imports MP3s into its library, I had almost an entire duplicate set of my MP3 collection on my hard drive. Getting rid of the duplicate folder saved me about a gig of space (yes, only a gig. I don't collect MP3s the way some people do... I have only about 250 of them).

Weekend project: I need to go thru this box of spare computer parts and stuff that's just sitting around and put it on eBay. I've also got this complete server setup sitting here that I never use, so I'm wondering about getting rid of it as well, although I have some reservations about doing that... it's my only spare computer, and if I hadn't had it the last time Denise was here, she'd have been in real trouble when her notebook died. (For that matter, if I get rid of the server, I could be in big trouble myself if my own notebook died, even though mine is still under warranty.)

David Gerrold reports that A Method for Madness is nearly complete. One more major section to write, then the interstitials, and it's done. I can't wait to find out what happens to "Parrish" in the book, but obviously I'm going to have to wait several more months at least.

And that's the evening report... back to taking care of some matters around the house.

Posted by Zathras at February 12, 2004 07:32 PM