Monday Musings

(Lost my last post. Let's try this again.)

• I'm really glad that my kids got to participate in our church's Vacation Bible School, but I'm still worn out. We didn't get done each night until 8:30, so by the time we got the other kids home, picked up a bite of dinner for the kids, and then did the nightly chores, it was 11:30 or midnight before we could start to relax. We are just starting to relax and catch up on some rest tonight.

• Can anyone recommend a $100-$150 digital camera? I'm not expecting SLR quality, but I would like something that can push out a decent 4x6 picture, and it needs to be both Mac-friendly and work with XP (I know, I shouldn't be supporting The Evil Empire, but I do have a family....). We don't take enough pictures because of the cost of developing film. I'll be more than content to burn several CD copies and then just spread them among the family members. If we lose our house, we don't lose our pictures.

  While I'm at it, can someone su ggest a cheap scanner than can do APS film, or a service that would scan APS film directly into pictures? We had the dog ruin some prints, so I don't have them to scan directly.

• The Burger King "King" is really disturbing.

• Jeff H of Think Sink has reached 10000 readers. I'm jealous.

• As a former Democrat and a former liberal, the Gitmo == Gulag and US Soldiers == Nazi thing is really disturbing me. The Republicans need a strong, sane opposition party, and right now the national Democratic party isn't it.

• I haven't missed not seeing Fox News, CNN, or MSNBC cover the Michael Jackson case one bit. BBC World had one or two stories on it on PBS, and then moved right on. Those were too many as it was.

• In Reason, Jacob Sullom talks about how half of us are crazy at one time or another, or at least according to current psychiatric standards. Milady and I both have a touch of Seasonal Affective Disorder in the winters, and she was proscribed Effexor to help her past a rough 5 years. That'd make us both have mental illnesses, I suppose, but neither of us would think so. Milady just had 3 deaths and 2 kids in 5 years, and little non-emergency babysitting help available from either side of our families through it. She wasn't crazy, just exhausted. :)

• Apple will make Pentium Macs. I sense a great disturbance in the force, like a million geek crying out in anguish... Yes, I am late to this party, but I'm not surprised at this. IBM and Freescale/Motorola just couldn't make chips fast enough or cool enough for Jobs, and AMD can't make the volume he'd need. Intel makes the coolest laptop CPUs, and that's where Apple rules.

• Kodak isn't going to make black and white paper any more. I worked for a count y newspaper in high school, and one of my tasks was to print black and white pictures for the paper. I really loved doing B&W pictures, but I've never had a darkroom since. Now, digital photography, especially the high-end SLRs, are ending all but niche markets for consumer film. At least there are other vendors who still make good B&W paper.