digital cameras

By emile 06 Jun 2001

i’m shopshopshopping for digital cameras in the 3 megapixel range. my front runners are the kodak dc4800 (which i had to buy to try out, bestbuy sucks…), the nikon coolpix 880, and the olympus c3040. im also considering the canon powershot g1 and s20 but theyre a bit expensive. anyone have any advice? i’m about to return the dc4800 as its nearing the end of my 10 day ‘trial’. considerations: the dc4800 has sub par indoor performance and red channel noise, and higher than average chromatic abberations. the coolpix 880 is 150-200$ more than the dc4800 and gets bad reviews on cnet, about being too complicated. the c3040 is a nice one, but is the most expensive of the class. i’ve been poking around www.dpreview.com but i can’t make a definative comparison. any input?

Your existence is meaningless without ice cream

By quiet 03 Jun 2001

If you haven’t seen Invader Zim yet, check it out. Nickelodean, Friday, 9 eastern. It’s Johnen Vasquez’s new cartoon. Vasquez is the guy who does Johnny the Homicidal Maniac if you’ve heard of that. Both Zim and Johnny are hilarious.

what do you do? "oh, i'm on vacation..."

By anders pearson 25 May 2001

i haven’t been posting much lately because i’ve been rather busy. had finals week, then my Columbia graduation and moving my stuff to my new apartment (with omar).

from there, tuck, jp, and i went down to deleware for shu and liz’s wedding. it rocked. the three of us were “thugs”; our job was to stand around in suits and dark sunglasses and intimidate people (plus handle any bodies that may need to be disposed of). nice ceremony on the beach. the weather cooperated. no fatalities. jp showed tuck and i how to eat crab.

now i’m hanging out at bates with kamden, lani, and assorted other miscreants that i haven’t seen in a while waiting to graduate from here too. got kam and lani to watch eraserhead with me the other night for their first time. mwahaha..

saw Shrek the other day. it was funny. saw Pearl Harbor today. it sucked. i was going to give it one star for killing ben affleck, but then it turned out he wasn’t dead so i can only give it half a star. sorry if i just ruined the surprise for anyone. you weren’t missing anything.

i’ll be back in nyc on june 6th to start my “new” job.

until then i have some serious slacking off to do.

idiocy

By quiet 25 May 2001

So I’m driving home from a job interview on Thursday (http://www.discoverymachine.com) and sure enough, I see the orange cones and rode signs that predict driving 5 miles an hour on the highway. Creeping along at automatic coasting speed, not touching the gas peddle at all, all of the cars are of course herded into single lane driving. A few crazy drivers are driving on the rumble strip at the far left of the road because they can’t relax and slow down, almost causing a couple of accidents. After 20 mins. of this, ahead I can see what appears to be the major bottlenect of the “construction” that’s slowing everyone down. Instead of broken concrete, I see 2 guys in orange vests handing people in cars little slips of paper. I grabbed mine and sped off, slowing a little to look at it. A fucking survey assesing highway safety in Pennsylvania. They were doing NO WORK on the road at all. Does it really make sense to create a major traffic hazard in order to asses highway safety? I hate idiots. (not the guys passing out the survey, they were just doing their jobs)

evil

By anders pearson 13 May 2001

cool. apparently there’s a professor at columbia who studies evil:

… Dr. Michael Stone of Columbia University also showed slides of nearly three dozen killers and others whom he considers evil.

A woman who burned one of her three daughters alive and starved another to death was ``at the extreme edge of evil … one of the most clearly evil persons’‘ of more than 400 whose biographies he has read, Stone said. …

natural flavor?

By emile 08 May 2001

so i read this story the other day, and found out that mcdonalds french fries contain beef product. i mean, what kind of sense does, that make? how is it to be deduced? mcdonald’s defence? they never claimed the fries didn’t contain beef fat. nice one… they never claimed the cheesburger didn’t contain human remains either, and i can’t wait till someone catches them on that one. they claim that the ingredients are clearly available to concerned vegetarians. are they? see for yourself. they sure are. but where is this beef fat? you probably guessed it, “natural flavor”, the mystery ingredient in every processed food we eat. i’d assumed the guidelines were a bit more strict, like “natural” referring to the product, and beef isn’t a natural thing in potatoes. so i look up “natural flavor” on the food and drug administration’s home page, its insection 101.22 (3). natural flavoring, they say? in other terms, just about all organic matter. great. everything at the grocery store may contain dead animal without telling the consumer. wonderful. i think that with the growing popularity of vegetarianism, that regulation might just have to be radified.

say it ain't so

By anders pearson 06 May 2001

actor Robert Blake appears to be under investigation for the murder of his wife.

normally i’d give him the benefit of the doubt. but anyone who’s seen Lost Highway knows that Blake is the creepiest human being in the world. is this the face of an innocent man?