2005-08-16 15:46 UTC Off the Grid
I spent two weeks in Switzerland (staying with friends and family), and it was great. I strangely didn't miss the Internet at all. Now I have to catch up on what I missed while I was away. My e-mail. The news. Four hours of Stargate and two hours of Top Gear. Fifteen days of Web comics. Work.
My e-mail alone is going to take weeks to catch up with. I had 3956 new e-mails when I checked my inbox after 358 hours off-line (not counting any of my Opera work e-mail). 61% of that is bugmail (from the bug systems of Mozilla, Webkit, W3C, Apache, and other projects), from which we can determine that on average I get one bugmail every 8.8 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
I won't be reading most of that bugmail. If you asked me to comment on a bug in the last two weeks, please ask me again on IRC, or ask me again in the bug in about 10 days (by which time I might be caught up and reading bugmail again).
I just worked out that at the current rate of replying to mail, it'll take me 11 months to deal with all my new messages, by which time I'll have received another 82,000. Joy.
My mum recently got a semi-professional digital camera, so I played with it for a while when I was visiting my parents in the mountains.
My first picture was a low-aperature-value close-up of a screw:
The hardware-store kind:
To give you an idea of how large the original picture was, here is just the screw, at the original resolution, taken from the same original JPEG image:
Eight million pixels!
I later played around with capturing the local wildlife:
A fly:
A grasshopper:
A ladybird:
I might put some of my other photos up at some point.
In general I don't like cameras; I find people use them to "keep a memory of" events to the point of not actually experiencing the event they are trying to keep a memory of in the first place. I'd rather just experience the event, and if one day I want to remember what it is like... do it again.
However, doing photography for the purpose of doing photography, i.e. as an art form rather than an exercise in archiving memories, seems to be quite fun. Although quite time-consuming, as far as hobbies go. Nor particularly cheap ($1200 for a macro lens?!).