Who remembers “Jackie O.”? I’m reading a book of the same name. Jackie Onassis/Kennedy/Bouvier, who I never thought was really all that good-looking. I’m just at the first chapter, but I can already tell they are making a huge play on the fact that she was not as rich as everyone thought. Her father’s net worth in 1934 had “sunk to $106,444.94”. How ever did they manage?The book, published in 1994, has that very annoying style where they assume the reader knows all the people mentioned. Senator who? What committee? So far, I can only recognize Marilyn Monroe, and I don’t find her good-looking either. She looks too 1950s, too soft. Was it John F. Kennedy’s father who said, “Win by a margin, I can’t afford a landslide.” Anyway, be ready for some barbed comments, few things irk me as much as poor little rich kids whining the blues.
One of my clients [Howard] has a Panasonic digital camera, which we stepped through and figured out how to use. The manual, typical of overseas product, only makes sense if you already know all the acronyms and can guess what they call things. (Example, the lowest resolution is called the user-friendly term “0.3M”.) You like that, do you? The camera has a dozen features unlikely ever to be used, but one unforgivable lack – a viewfinder. People, never by a camera without a viewfinder. I’m surprised an otherwise reputable outfit like Panasonic would do such a thing.
The major problem, outside of draining your batteries, is that you must look at the LCD to frame your picture. There is always a momentary delay [you will miss shots] and worse, the viewscreen will wash out in bright light. Digital cameras are not self-contained, people. You must, repeat, must have a computer or compatible device to download the pictures. These require two separate steps. If you want to send the pictures on email, or burn them to a disk, that is two more separate steps. If you are not prepared to read all the instructions yourself, I only charge $35 per hour to show you.
Howard purchased the add-on memory S card. It is nice, but want to hear something funny? When we stepped down the resolution to match the average computer screen (640 x 480 4:3), the S card displayed the capability of storing somewhat more than the “200 pictures” he had in mind. More like a whopping 4,634. Plus the internal memory. Most people do not even have a filing system that will handle that many photos.The Panasonic camera defaulted to the highest resolution and took huge pictures, gigabyte size. Here is the newest picture taken with my $18 Argus. Yellow flowers, from a tree that blooms in the Spring. This particular jpeg is 96 kilobytes. This is unrelated to the honey article of y’day, but there was a post on the Internet to the effect that ¼ to 1/3 of all honeybees in the US had died in the last short while. I don’t know who counted them, but did I not read many moons ago that bees are an indicator species? Or could it be a conspiracy by Sue Bee to raise the price of honey sky high?
I decided to do some serious drinking tonight, so I went out and bought 5 cases of Chek soda. It is quite possible to carry those sixty cans on my bicycle, but I did not get a picture since I ran into the first real rainstorm of the year. This doozie came down for 40 minutes and caught me outside. I took pictures with the Argus, which is another of its selling points – most people would not take an expensive camera into severe weather, where I have the Argus hanging around my neck. What? You want to see pictures of a rainstorm. Okay. You may have to look closely, but those are not shiny paving stones. It is a torrent of water almost a quarter inch deep flowing down the driveway. I took this shot because I could not see the highrise apartments on the horizon, meaning visibility was down to a quarter mile due to rain. Still, I’d rather have a downpour than that constant Seattle drizzle that never quits all winter. Well, I miss it, but not that much.
Hampton Farms Premier Jumbo Peanuts Salted and Roasted. Don’t bother, they taste like moldy circus peanuts. Almost as bad as health food. Stick with Planters, they cost too much but they have flavor. I’m afraid this is about as exciting as Friday is going to get until I find a club I can play in.
Last, Howard and I got to systematically figuring out why there was no sound on his Skype. What? Okay, Skype is an Internet video phone system. You must have a high speed connection and in basic mode you can only speak to other Skype phones. My biggest dislike is not that the Skype does not work without being set up, but that the phones are designed in the first place with a mode that does not work. These articles are 100% artificial and should be self-configuring, so configurations that don’t work are just as difficult to build as ones that do. The solution, which took at least a half-hour of valuable time, was software. Boo, Skype.
