Rain! Walked out the door this morning and saw clear blue sky, so I wasn’t convinced… but RAIN! (We seriously need it.)
*sigh* Google maps informs me that my usual route home is solid red. Rush hour + OMGWTF water from sky! Surface streets it is.
Always a Newer Model
*sigh* I’m mostly happy with my G1, but I just read about the upcoming Samsung Memoir, which is the first phone I’ve seen that really takes the approach I’ve been looking for in terms of photo capability: instead of a phone that’s also a camera, it’s a camera that’s also a phone. Even the press release describes it as “designed to look and feel like a customer’s current point-and-shoot digital camera.”
Key specs:
- 8 Megapixel camera
- Flash
- 16x Digital Zoom
- Touch screen
- 5 shooting modes
- 3G connection
- Connects to Flickr and other photo sharing sites
- GPS navigation
It quotes Samsung’s Bill Ogle as saying, “This is the camera phone that will make people want to leave their digital camera at home” — which is exactly what I want from a camera phone. It’s what I’ve wanted in a camera phone for years, and now that I finally bought a new phone, now someone’s actually selling one.
On top of that, it’s being offered by T-Mobile, so I’d be able to get it at an upgrade price — or could have if I hadn’t just upgraded to a G1 three months ago!
Of course, the press release leaves out a couple of critical items:
- No mention of optical zoom
- No mention of mobile web browsing capabilities
- No mention of extensibility
- No specs on how much memory it has, or what kind of card it takes (probably the usual micro-SD)
- No Wifi
I’ve come to really appreciate the G1’s fully-capable web browser and the Android market for third-party apps, and I’d be reluctant to give that up. If the Memoir is a camera first and a phone second, the G1 is a handheld computer first. As for zoom, I have yet to see a digital zoom that was any better than just cropping an image in Photoshop. And even with a 3G network, I’ve found it does take time to upload the G1’s 2-megapixel images. For 8 megapixels, I’d really want wi-fi.
Ah, well. With phones, as with many things, you have to take the plunge sometime, or you’ll keep waiting for the next model, and the next, and the next, never actually make any change at all.
Mixed a Day?
Having one of those weeks where I keep thinking it’s a day later than it is.
Buggy Recipe
Found this ad for Coraline in this morning’s newspaper:
It’s kind of hard to read, between the pixel size and the printing, but the funniest bit is the blue sidebar on “Finding the Tastiest Beetles:”
Beetles are delicious creatures that live close to home. If you use beetles from your backyard or basement, check them for shiny and fully developed thoraxes (beetles still in larval stage will be chewy and bland). The most mouth-watering kind, with translucent shells and large veins, can be found in the forests of Zanzibar.
It’s so perfectly Martha Stewart for the Macabre.
Wicked Spammers
Spam subject: Wicked in the Sack. Come on, spammers, leave Elphaba out of this!
CentOS List Hijack
- Pissed off because some a-hole with a centos.org address posted multiple copies of a racist antisemitic diatribe to the CentOS announcement list.
- CentOS sent an apology to lists. Said spammers forged the sender’s address to get past moderation. Look back, name doesn’t match address.
Rewatching Star Wars: A New Hope
We watched Star Wars last night, the DVD version. It’s been about four years since I last saw it. When Revenge of the Sith came out, we came home and immediately re-watched A New Hope, then caught the next two films over the following week or so.
It’s been long enough that memories have blurred, and some (but not all) of the revisions to the film don’t seem jarring anymore. (I had the same experience last month with the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, especially with the first two films.) Most of the scenes where they just wanted to do more dynamic shots, like the Millennium Falcon blasting its way out of Mos Eisley, not only blend in just fine, but really are improvements. As for Mos Eisley itself, I’m of two minds: On one hand, I liked the stark barrenness of the tiny frontier town presented in the original version. But at the same time, it does make more sense for a spaceport to be a bustling metropolis.
All the scenes with Obi-Wan, Luke, and the droids on Tattooine take on added significance after having seen just how Ben, Anakin, and Padme were connected to each other and to the droids a generation earlier.
As for additional scenes: I still think the Jabba the Hutt scene adds absolutely nothing to the film, and that if they really wanted to add it, they should have rewritten Jabba’s dialogue (an easy task) and/or edited it into something that wouldn’t simply re-hash the conversation with Greedo. The brief moment with Luke meeting Biggs, however, adds quite a bit.
At one point early in the film, I turned to Katie and said something to the effect of, “The next time they re-release this in theaters, I am absolutely going.” But the more I think about it, I’m not sure I’d want to, at least not immediately. The 1997 re-releases were great, and I saw each movie several times, but the audiences — especially the opening night audiences — were full of the hardcore fans who cheered whenever a character first appeared on screen. They were reacting to things outside the movie itself, actually distracting from it rather than enhancing the shared experience. Maybe waiting a week would cut down on that sort of thing.