Severe Jam Damage

I’ve changed it.
No, I don’t know if I like it.

Blogsome now has a ’stats’ tab in the admin section of the blog. The info is a lot easier to interpret than that awful ‘google analytics’ thing which makes my head ache everytime I look at it.
Anyway here’s a few of the search terms that people have used (and that amused me) to find SJD:

-vomit smell in house
-sexy jason barry (this is just wrong, wrong, wrong.)
-sluts fucking in basques (*speechless!*)
-jennifer connolys tits (ooo-kay)
-in and out went the prick of steel (dude, I dont’ even wanna know)
-raclette night (thats cheese right?)
-pouches for holding order books in restaurants (I’m sure you could have improved this search to return somewhere more relevant than this blog.)

Have noticed that bloglines is not picking up new entries from this blog. Wonder is the feed from blogsome down?

Oh Lord, I’m due to come into a bit of money next week. Not a lot, but my pay cheque is going to be a bit bigger than normal. Given the fact that access in work is so badly restricted and monitored and I can’t work on any of my own projects I’ve decided to spend this (small) windfall on a new laptop. I’ve spent the last three weeks looking at specs for various machines and at this stage my head is completely cabbaged. All I want is something that I can get online with, has a decent size hard drive, decent speed and won’t be obsolete within the next 2 months.

Who’da thunk it would be so hard to spend money?

So for those of you who haven’t heard the company I work for has been sold and I may or may not have a job when I land back on T’Eire Firma.

It sucks hearing about it on holiday but at least I have a heads up this time so can arrive in prepared on Monday morning, as opposed to the last time this happened and I turned on my phone in the Dublin arrivals hall to a flurry of increasingly panicked messages.

According to my source everything is going to be done and dusted in 2 weeks time. Our office will shut down and those who are the ‘chosen’ ones will be moving out to the new owners premises.

I feel surprisingly calm. Although I am utterly fed up with this industry. At the age of thirty mumble I would expect to have a career that didn’t involve bouncing from company to company and wondering how long it’s going to last. Saying that I know a girl who was made redundant from SEVEN jobs in a row. Miranda, where are you now?

IT is a pipe dream, in Dublin anyway. They told us we’d be millionaires, that stock options would actually be WORTH something. Do you know how many companies I’ve worked for where my options have lapsed into negative numbers? Don’t answer, it’s rhetorical. But apparently this decade’s big thing is the Pharmaceutical industry. All the kids are studying in that field and coming out making a fortune in the companies that have invested in Dublin. They’ll get about 7 or 8 years out of it before the companies pull out and move to India or somewhere similar.

Sorry this entry is a bit muddled. I meant to write something a bit more legible but my head isn’t really in it. Must go, gotta fly!

I may have mentioned to a few of you, but for those who don’t know I’ve bought myself a new camera. Yep, another one. Those of you who have seen some of my kit are probably wondering WHY I bought another camera. After all at this point I actually own more camera’s than I have workable limbs. So what on earth possessed me to buy yet another one? Well, this one is different.
The last couple of years I’ve been working mostly with 35mm SLR’s, and while I like the results I’ve been getting I just needed something more. Sometimes I worry that I’m some sort of techno-junkie geek grrl hybrid. So I started looking around to see what was out there and found the lomo. But a lomo is still a 35mm camera and it is damn expensive too, out of my price range at the moment. The lomo would have been nice but I resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to afford a new camera right now until that is I found a link to the Holga. The Holga is a medium format camera that is so cheap it’s laughable.
It’s from the 80’s, built by the Chinese and it’s er, plastic. That pic looks pretty cool yeah? You look at it and think it’s a relative of a Leica Rangefinder, big and sturdy, with a good lens. Well, you’re wrong. It weighs 200g and the lens is plastic. As is the case, the flash and all the buttons. Plastic.
Ok, saying all the buttons is wrong too, as there are pretty much exactly eh, no controls on it. Remember that fisher-price camera you had as a kid? Well technologically that’s probably a step up from a Holga. There are two main ‘features’ on the Holga 120GCFN. The first is a button to change the aperture from f11 to f8 (marked with a sun or a cloud) and on the lens ring are painted some vague shapes resembling people to gauge your focus. (One person equals close, group of people equals far away, mountain equals infinity.) Of course as this isn’t an SLR when you look through the viewfinder it’s hard to tell exactly what the camera lens is seeing, and until you process the film it’s impossible to tell the lens quality. Which, added to the known problems with the camera regarding light leaks, variation in shutter speed, lack of sharpness etc means that it’s a total crapshoot as to whether anything comes out at all.
Despite all this, or perhaps in spite of all this I bought the camera which arrived, boxed and plastic wrapped last week. The next day I went down to Gunns and bought a few rolls of film to get me started. Since then I have been snapping away as the mood takes me. One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that people are much more natural around the Holga and it’s easier to take their picture. Because the camera looks and feels like a toy, they don’t feel half as self conscious as when I’m pointing a Nikon with 200mm telezoom in their face. Another bonus is that because the camera is made of plastic I don’t have to worry about it getting knocked about in the bottom of my bag, so now it comes pretty much everywhere with me.
It’s cheap, it’s fun and I’m looking forward to seeing what I’ve captured on film.

Holga goodness on flickr.

So it’s now illegal to be a troll in the states. Although the word ‘annoy’ is used very loosely. If I had my way I’d lock up the entire world for annoying me.

From fuckedcompany.com:

Rumour has it that a company in Brooklyn NY left a voice mail on a customer’s phone threatening to break his neck if he cancelled his order… and I thought America was the country where the customer is always right.

Just a quick one. For anyone following the Sony rootkit debacle, El Reg has this to say about beating the system.

Saw a link to this on P45. It is almost terrifying in it’s accuracy. Except for the glasses bit - I don’t bother to wear mine which gives me a rather distinctive squint.

Also here’s something for any WriMo’s looking for ways NOT to write the novel. For everyone else it’s a good way to lose your mind.

And because it’s Tuesday afternoon, here’s a top choon for you.