Category Archives: Thoughts

Fixed one thing, broke another

Posted on 30 April 2007 | 1 comment

On Friday I blogged about the autofocus on my camera packing up. I fixed it last night and the autofocus now works perfectly again. Unfortunately there is another problem now; the LCD display on the back and in the viewfinder is not working. Everything else is functional but I can no longer see what settings I am using and don’t have any visible light meter. This may be due to the latch of the ribbon cable connector on the back breaking when I opened it, or it could be something else. Luckily I work with a bunch of electronic engineers so I’ll ask one of them to take a look at it. I’ll also keep hoping that somebody gives me a new camera body for my birthday, which is only three weeks off.

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Unfocused

Posted on 27 April 2007 | 1 comment

Well my camera is anyway. I was fiddling with it last night and discovered that it will no longer autofocus. The cause is a pin that raises and lowers the sub-mirror assembly that casts light on the autofocus sensors having broken. For some reason Canon made this small pin from plastic and its failure is a common fault on the Digital Rebel range. Fortunately it seems quite an easy repair to do. I have found a nicely documented series of photographs that lead you through the procedure. It will simply take time and patience for me to repair it myself.

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Afrigator Competition

Posted on 26 April 2007 | Leave a comment

Afrigator are holding a competition; invite your friends to join Afrigator and you could both win a video iPod. If I haven’t been too slow and lazy about posting this I might even snag myself an Afrigator t-shirt.

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Lost in the Kalahari

Posted on 26 April 2007 | 2 comments

I’ve noticed before that the folk at Kalahari.net seem to have problems with their search engine. I was just trying to find a book to link to for another post and the first hit from an author search for David Allen returned this.

How they made that match I’d love to know. I have sometimes seen where a title search doesn’t find something but an author or artist search reveals that they do in fact have the very title their search couldn’t find. Perhaps they should consider looking into this.

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This is Ridiculous

Posted on 23 April 2007 | 1 comment

SABC News reports that the lions that mauled park owner may be put down. This is crazy, people take predators out of their natural habitat, put them in a small enclosure and then blame the animals for following their instincts and helping someone put themself in line for a Darwin award?

Update: Perhaps I was a bit harsh with my Darwin Award reference. Latest speculation is that the cause of him getting out of his vehicle may have been an epileptic seizure. Whether that is the case or not, friends and family are saying he would not ordinarily have gotten out of the vehicle as he was very careful. I suppose it is pointless to speculate at this stage. Investigations will reveal what happened, or not.

Update: The final word, confirmed by results of the post-mortem examination, is that he was killed by a stroke; probably staggering out of the vehicle shortly before he died. The lions only mauled his body after his death had already occurred.

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Not So Wild Hogs

Posted on 23 April 2007 | Leave a comment

I watched Wild Hogs last night and was less than impressed. My son Christopher had seen it and said it was hilarious; as we have similar tastes I thought I would enjoy it. I should probably have taken a cue from the fact that Martin Lawrence was in it as I’ve yet to find one of his movies neither puerile nor simply lame. The humour in this movie is all visual and borders on slapstick. None of the main characters put in much of a performance, although William H. Macy is almost convincing as a clumsy, bungling programmer. I thought that the shining performance of this movie was John C. McGinley as a gay highway patrolman, but even this delivery was perhaps just a subtle variation of his portrayal of Dr. Cox in Scrubs.

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A Visitor’s View of Cape Town

Posted on 22 April 2007 | Leave a comment

Someone at Outdoor Photo pointed out Skip Hunt’s South African Photo Tour, a blog with well written stories and some excellent photographs, documenting a visit to South Africa, and Cape Town in particular. It’s well worth taking a look at.

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Sleep Patterns

Posted on 20 April 2007 | Leave a comment

I woke up at 3:35am yesterday, needing to go to the bathroom; it’s rare for me to wake up early, and I felt quite awake, so I figured it must be almost time for my alarm to go off. Checking the time on my phone and finding it was only 3:37 I went back to bed. Then when my alarm went off at 5am I went through my usual cycle of too tired to wake up, hit sleep on phone, snooze ten more minutes, repeat; for an hour before managing to drag myself into a vertical position.

So this morning when I woke up at 4:15, with both hands itching like mad from mosquito bytes, I decided that I would just get up and see if it works better than snoozing the extra hour and then not being able to wake up. So I’ve had a shower and now sit blogging at 04:50am. Once I save this post, I will get dressed, brush my teeth and head off to the office. Perhaps getting there two to three hours before everyone else will allow me to focus and get some work done. I should probably not open my browser and aggregator when I get there though, as catching up on the interwebs is much more compelling than the work I must complete.

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What’s up with Afrigator?

Posted on 15 April 2007 | 3 comments

I’ve just been taking a look at Afrigator to see what new entries there are. I’ve been through about five pages and while there is some variation, there is also a huge amount of repetition, with the same entries appearing over and over again. Either Afrigator is having a problem or some bloggers have figured out a way to get their entries reported numerous times.

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Creative Commons Photos

Posted on 15 April 2007 | Leave a comment

I used to post my favourite Flickr photo each day to my blog as a photo of the day but haven’t done so in some time. I decided that I would prefer to present only my own photographs here. However, I often come across beautiful photographs that I would like to showcase so I have started another blog, Creative Commons Photos, that I will use to post beautiful photographs, taken by others, that I find on Flickr and elsewhere around the web. As I am a supporter of publishing one’s works under open licences I will be restricting the images I post to ones that are published under a Creative Commons licence.

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