Hopped up on IncaKola, Anna and I survived the 30 hours of travel and managed to make it to LAX, San Jose (CR), Lima, and finally, Arequipa. It is a great city. We did the local thing today and checked out the Monasterio de Santa Catalina. The site is amazing, even more impressive is how they managed to lock themselves away from the public for almost 400 years.
Tomorrow we make our way out to the petroglyphs at Toro Muerto. A bit more local stuff Monday morning, then we take off for Cuzco.
This will be my last posting until I make one from Peru, or when I get back. I hope everyone has a nice holiday.
I should have started my Spanish weeks ago, but instead I started a day before I leave. Oh well. I rely on Anna too much for her Spanish I guess. I found in Costa Rica I could understand a great deal of it with my French background, I just couldn’t speak anything back. Baja is a different story. I understand very little Spanish there. It is way too fast and the words are run together.
I’ve been meaning to do the whole community college class for the past three years, but something always gets in my way. Software and tapes it is then. I started out on Rosetta Stone a month back, but gave it up fairly quickly. It seemed to just be teaching me how to say crap like, “the blue car ran over the red dog”. Over, and over again. Maybe that’s the way the brain learns the best (interactive repetition) but I seemed to get much more out of 30 minutes of Michel Thomas this morning. He goes right for the core of the language and focuses on that. It is definitely harder to keep up to speed with him than the Rosetta Stone or Pimsleur, but I seemed to get much more out of the time spent.
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Most of what I know of Lawrence is from the glossy movie. It seems his writing is getting another look these days: Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” tells how a 1917 Arab revolt against Ottoman rule – which he helped to organize – crippled Turkish supply lines in Arabia with guerrilla raids. It was No. 2 of 100 recommended books for US commanders in Iraq.
Dick gets some questions from U.S. soldiers: “Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?” Wilson asked. A big cheer arose from the approximately 2,300 soldiers in the cavernous hangar who assembled to see and hear the secretary of defense. Rumsfeld hesitated and asked Wilson to repeat his question.
It was suspected before, but looks like it is official: Ukraine’s Yushchenko victim of bio or chemical agent
Today I get to go get poked and prodded as an alien. No, I’m not talking about xfiles type stuff. I have to go through the “Medical Examination of Aliens Seeking Adjustment Status” to prove I am a healthy individual before the US lets me apply as a resident. Of course, I’ve been living here for almost 3 years, so I would have already spread my plague by now. I’m just starting on INS papers and am not looking forward to filling them out. It is like doing taxes, but with more fees.
Getting ready for Peru.. so much to do in four days.
I like my new camera so far. It has a good weight and fits naturally in the hand. The controls are all well laid out and very easy to understand without grabbing a manual. When it comes time to slip it in a pocket it feels pretty bulky for me – I am used to carrying one that is about 35% thinner and weighs half as much. It still fits in a pocket, which is the most important thing. I’ve only got the 16mb XD card that comes with the camera. I have 512mb in SD, but its useless, I need to go to Costco and load up on memory. Because of that I have been pretty limited (6mp pics are around 2.5mb each, 12mp is around 6mb) in the number of different shots before I have to download the card. The camera is USB2, so the download speed is very good.
It does quite well in low light situations compared with my old camera. I imagine it is gaining a lot from the AF light on the closer low light shots, but even outdoor shots at night seemed very good. I think it will be quite useable for night time shots with a tripod. The change I would have liked to see was a bigger shutter range – the max is 3seconds. From what I have seen they should have allowed more than that, as the CCD is very low noise, even at the higher ISO’s. Hell, even if there was a lot of bad pix in the picture you can clean that up in post processing.
The one thing that I found to be a bit strange was the flash. It is not automatic – you have to hit a button for the flash to pop up, and push it down for no flash. On most other cameras I have used the flash is determined automatically most of the time, and you have to manually suppress or turn it off by hitting a few buttons. After using the flash on this camera, I really like the implementation. My control freak side loves having a simple & manual flash. The flash shots that I tested by blinding the cat turned out quite well. Even in the big rooms and in hallways the range of the flash seemed quite good (10’+). Haven’t used it enough to know how much of a drain on the battery life it is.
Outdoor shots seem good as well. I tested a few this morning using very close range shots, playing with the focus on midrange stuff, and trying out the optical & digital zoom. Digital zoom is usually a completely retarded implementation on digital cameras, since you could do a better job in Photoshop afterwards. But when shooting in 6mp mode, the digital zoom on this camera shows a bit of promise. Since there are 2 sensors, they can interpol to 12mp – making the internal crop not as much of a butchery to the photo. Doubt I will ever use it though, will just shoot in 12mp and crop afterwards.
I’m not yet sure how much I will use one of the camera’s main selling points – widescreen mode. Since it is an internal crop, one could always do it as post processing. However, I did find myself playing with the 16:9 aspect, just to get an idea of how something would be framed. I wish they used the whole screen for other stuff when shooting in normal mode – it would be cool to see the picture and a histogram.
I will head down to the cove today at lunch to see how it does with more outdoor shots & water.