My Thoughts !

No matter about what season it is, sunsets are always beautiful. This one was taken with Ravi's Powershot. It was sometime in last September, during my company's anniversary. When the function was going on, we were walking in the near by beach and I was experimenting with Ravi's camera. The sunset created a wonderful backdrop for the hatchery and I clicked it. The color combination has come out perfectly  

Why didn't I blog for the past three months about the camera I bought? Something seriously wrong with my memory :-( Wondering why I thought of it suddenly? I'll come to that later. First the selection of my camera.

Right from the beginning, I was looking for a Digital SLR. With its wonderful performance & great reviews of the DIGIC processor, Canon was obviously my choice over Nikon. My eyes were on Digital Rebel.

But somehow I thought they are going to release a better version than that and I'll wait. At $1000 its not cheap. I was satisfied with the features, but thought it is not worth for that price. Canon answered my patience with D20.

Obviously it had all the features I was looking for, but alas, the price was not less - it was too high - $1700. Certainly its not the camera I was waiting for. Still searched for a better good deal on D20, as its 8.2 Mega pixels & DIGIC II processor really attracted me. But in Chennai, its not available at all. And I couldn't simply accept Digital Rebel Then some strange thing happened. I decided to go a film camera. The obvious choice should be Nikon, but hoping one day I'll definitely buy a D-SLR from Canon, it is wise to go for a Canon film camera, as I can always reuse the lenses and other accessories. My first choice was T2, but again, its not available in Chennai. So finally got settled with a K2. After enquiring in Camera City, many Canon dealers, professional photo stores, I went to Burma Bazaar. Luckily there were two camera shops. One guy said that he is not having a K2 stock here, but in his another store in Spencers. Wow! One shop in Burma Bazaar and other in Spencers ! I got a good deal with his brother in Spencers and bought it immediately. I took it with the 28-90 lens.





After 3 rolls, I'm quite happy with its performance. I'm still exploring it. With digital, we can experiment like anything. Although the camera is costly, it virtually doesn't have a running cost. You can immediately see the results of the shots and adjust your settings and keep on reshooting till you get what you want. With a film camera in your hand, the story is quite different. The running cost is not cheap. Rs. 220 per roll for developing, printing and scanning it to CD - excluding the cost of the roll Rs. 100. So it works out somewhere near Rs 9 per shot. I don't know why, the K2 is not allowing me to take more than 36 shots per roll :-( So I've to think thrice before experimenting anything. There is no way of seeing the results immediately. I have to wait till the roll is over. When the roll is over, I'll be rushing to the photoshop to develop it. When I get the photos in my hand, will be excited to see pictures turn out quite well and of course there will be "few" snaps that won't come as I expect. No problem, I'll try it again :-)

Meanwhile coming to the question in the beginning of the blog, Why did I all of a sudden remember about blogging about my camera? Simple. Today got to see the news that Canon is about to come out with the next version of Digital Rebel the 350 D.




Its 8 Mega pixels and yes, its powered with DIGIC II. Reviews say its faster, and cheaper than the 300D. Ah ! This was the camera I was looking for!!! Anyways I've a K2 with me, so no need to go for another one (Well, honestly I don't have a enough bank balance). I will wait till Digital Rebel 450/500 and then surely upgrade it :-) Meanwhile, keep looking for the photos I shoot. Now that I've net @ home, once in a week, I'll be uploading a photo to my blog with Hello.

Think of Mark Jen. He left Microsoft to join Google two months back. Highly enthustiastic, he created this blog for his life inside Google. He was writing about his life there and suddenly this happened. Yes, he was fired ! His blog was the reason for it. Another poor lady was also fired for writing something about the appraisals in her company. The big companies & their policies. Hell with them. I was looking at my blogs. Hopefully I've written nothing about my company and guess I'm safe :-/

I still remember those bleeding experience I had 3 yrs ago to install Linux in my box.I'll give one sample. After installing everying, X came up and asked for a userid. I typed the userid and pressed Enter - nothing happened. After few tries, I thought I've messed up some options in the installation and reinstalled again. Same Login page; Same error :-( Ok. I thought this time, I install only the minimal stuff and try. So left out all the devel packages, entertainment, games, etc and installed it. Same Login page; Same error. :-( Didn't know what went wrong, I asked one of my juns to look at it. He came typed the userid and pressed Enter - voila! It asked for the password. Then I realized what was wrong - I was using the Enter in the numeric keypad!!! Guess the code has been written based on the scan codes rather than the Ascii values. For this, I've repeated the installation twice. Then I understood the value of free software. We have to use it at our risk. I was thinking of the amount of testing that would have gone in Microsoft's dev centers for the same login page in Windows. You can not only use the numeric keypad, you can use the mouse to click on the Login button or just but tab to the button and press space to make it work.

Finally everything is over, I've to bleed to make it co-exist with Windows ME. I had bought the latest (at that time) 40 GB harddisk and LILO didn't recognised only 32 GB for some reason. So dual booting was another trouble. Not to mention about the drivers for the devices I had. If installing itself was really a painful experience and working in Linux was more than that. Finally I decided. OK. Enough! And uninstalled Linux and happily went back to my Windows ME and started playing Age of Empires.

I've been told that the story now is different. Fedora is far better than what those earlier Redhat distributions used to be. Thought of giving it a try. Got installation CDs and started to install. I had the same old 40 GB hard disk. 3 yrs is a long time and I thought it should recognize the entire space. Yes, it did. Partitioned it with Disk Druid and started installing. First two notable differences:

(*) Fonts - Even a hard core linux enthusiastic will say that Linux sucks when fonts are compared to windows. The result is always an ugly looking GUI. Now the fonts are pretty neat and so is the design of the GUI. It was very neat.
(*) i18n - Internationalisation support was good in those days itself, but for creating a Tamil UI, I've to install few things. After all, even Windows 2000 doesn't support Tamil by default (XP does!). Fedora i a surprise. Not just the OS, but the installer itself supports tamil and so you can install just with Tamil itself.

The installation was pretty smooth. Its packaged with firefox :-) It automatically found my network card, graphics card, sound card, mouse & installed the drivers for it. After inserting the installation CD, all it needed was few mouse clicks & about an hour time. Boom - the installation was complete !!! I was told that things have changed, but didn't think its changed to this extend!! Another surprise was sify had a client for Linux too :-) So connecting to net was not a problem.

Not everything is smooth, first big surprise was xmms doesn't support MP3!!! Redhat has removed mp3 support due to some legal issues, but still its really bad. How good is an audio player without mp3 support? Another issue is that NTFS is not supported by the kernel by default, so I can't mount my windows drives :-( Thats bad. I've all my MP3s & data there. May be should find a module or recompile the kernel with NTFS support. Let me see.

Taken with Ravi's Powershot. As usual one weekend we went to one of the ECR beaches and I was shooting the waves and Ravi. When I turned to look at what Gow and Kicha are doing, I found the sun and the silhouette creating an amazing effect. They have been seriously discussing about something. Without their knowledge I shot them.