Castles made of sand…

My list of frequently visited web comics has grown from one to two:

1. xkcd
2. Abstruse Goose

Summary of last week:
Monday - Fay begins dumping rain on southern Florida, but I don’t see any all day. I get Tuesday off.
Tuesday - Fay makes land fall in southern Florida. It starts raining early morning Tuesday. Fay moves towards east central Florida. I get Wednesday off.
Wednesday - Fay sits off the coast of east central Florida. More rain pretty much all day. Flooding. During part of the day, the center of circulation was close enough that it wasn’t raining for part of the morning. I get Thursday off.
Thursday - Fay starts moving slowly. More rain. More flooding.
Friday - Back to work. No real major flooding in my area, but other people in the county weren’t so lucky.

Fay’s track went from hitting the other side of the state to going almost right over me. Boo. It did give me a day off of work. Hopefully it won’t cause any damage.

That was painful. Migrated site to new web host. Apparently WordPress did not like this. But that may just have been that I failed to have a local copy of the theme I was using. I think everything is back to normal.

In other news. I bought a new camera, a FujiFilm S700. You can see the quality of the new camera as the picture of the old camera, which looks better, was taken with the new camera.

The Kodak has seen more than 3,500 photos. Rest in peace(s).

Someone had better words than I did. Happy birthday, good friend.

I went to the beach. It was nice… and like 74 outside. I told you that. But I forgot some awesome details. I went for a walk on the beach, looking for shells. In the water I saw a stingray swimming around… good thing I wasn’t it in. The water was like freezing anyways. And then I saw a sand dollar washed up… but it was still alive. So I threw it back. And in the parking lot I saw an armadillo. And I was going to get a picture with my camera, but he ran off. What an exciting trip to the beach.

Until I move to Florida. Time is flying by.

Three exams are between me and graduation. I’m excited.

The weekend was my brother’s wedding which took up all my Saturday. Sunday was dinner at someone’s house followed by seeing Bourne Ultimatum. Good movie by the way. Then I drove back down to Florida on Monday. 8 hour drive, yawn. Tuesday, work. Wednesday, half day at work, then went to the Causeway later to watch the shuttle launch. Vroom. Thursday, Friday more work.

My camera (Kodak C300) broke… I turned it on this morning and it wouldn’t turn off. You might think thats not an issue, but it has an auto off feature which turns the camera off after a few minutes. To turn it back on you have to turn it off and turn it on. That didn’t work.

Warranty? None… it only had a one year warranty from date of purchase and I’ve had it for a year and 4 months. I’m not one to be defeated by technology. Since I wasn’t going to loose anything by breaking it further (if such a thing occurred), I decided for surgery! Yep, took my camera apart. And let me tell you, you never want to drop your digital camera (EVER)! Various internal components are small and plastic, so it should in theory be very easy to break your camera internally such that not even the manufacturer could fix it; it would be cheaper to buy a new one cause you would spend more on labor trying to fix it if the part was replaceable.

I discovered the issue was a toggle switch that controls the mode of the camera (Night, Auto, Off, Video). The switch is a neat concept (thumbs up), but horrible design (thumbs down). The toggle lever was getting stuck in the on position, thus it wouldn’t shut off or change modes. The lever is about as small as the thickness of a penny. Very hard to work with… not to mention fix.

So this tiny piece of plastic is virtually unrepairable if it breaks. It didn’t break, but was just getting stuck. I made the mistake of taking the toggle lever out, and that cost me like 30 minutes to put it back. It took lots of patience and a little ingenuity. I believe I put it in backwards, so now it doesn’t get stuck ON.

And after putting it all back together. The video mode doesn’t work. No big loss there, I still have picture mode, and thereby a working camera. Yay, go me, I win.

Here’s what I recovered off the memory card… 6:38 AM this morning: