In a local supermarket they have an Asus EeePC 1000HE for the equivalent of £250 - £50 cheaper than in the UK as far as I can tell.

It has an international warranty too, so no dramas there. The only drawbacks are that it comes preinstalled with WinXP Arabic (I’d be nuking whatever OS it came with regardless to put on Ubuntu and WinXP, so I don’t really see this is a problem) and it has some arabic markings on the keys. I don’t look at the keyboard anyway, and all the keys are in the same places (and the english markings are most prominent).

I just hate spending money. On the otherhand, I did a fair bit of overtime last month, more than enough to pay for it and it would come in pretty handy in Japan and so on later this year.

Thinking about buying this has led me to a realisation about my purchasing behaviour - I think I dislike spending money on things like this generally - I don’t like to impulse buy technology. I’ll research and research it, but deep down I think I know I’m going to buy it almost immediately - it just depends on if I can stall myself long enough for external events to stop me.

Fate has till the end of the week…

Jim

Hello.

I’ve spent the week training in sunny Slough. I’ve enjoyed it so far, the course is interesting and I’ve found it surprising how rewarding it is to put what I know already into practice on the example evidence files (which are carefully engineered and are pretty rewarding to dig into). It’s made me a bit more enthusiastic about learning the EnScripting language, I think as my experience grows I could write some pretty handy modules if I had the time.

I can’t say much about the next few weeks, but suffice it to say I think they’ll be very interesting. Either way I’m not going to be around to write boring blog entries on here, which will probably be noticed by about 2 people.

Which also means I’m not going to be around for my birthday on wednesday, which kind of sucks.

Jim

My new pride and joy.

So I bought a new pack-film Polaroid the other day off ebay for unconscionable amounts of money. I came across the auction by accident but it appealed to me as it’s one of the first guaranteed working examples I’ve seen and came with the #581 Portrait Kit, the #583 Close-Up Kit and (supposedly) the #268 flashgun.

Annoyingly I ended up having to pay duty on it (it was shipped from the US) but that frustration was quickly forgotten by the time I took the first few pictures with it on saturday afternoon:

Some flowers in my back garden, with the close-up lens attachment.

A pint in The Washington, with the portrait lens attachment.

Some stencil grafitti near Rare & Racy on Devonshire St.

Laura in the Devonshire Cat, with the portrait lens.

An engraving on Barkers Pool which I’d never noticed before. I didn’t really get why only some letters were accentuated with red, like it was some sort of code or something. ‘TSGGWBBCSLS’. No idea. Portrait Lens.

Really pleased with how they turned out, the action of the camera is very smooth and everything seems to be in pretty good order. The electronic eye seems a little lazy but thats pretty easy to compensate for with a slight nudge on the darken/lighten wheel. The construction of the camera is much better than the Auto 103 I have, with the body being metal construction (and so even heavier than the 103…) and seemingly more sturdily built (or perhaps just in better repair) than the 103.

For the first pack I’ve put through it I’ve just used Fuji FP-100c Silk (Silk = Matte finish) which is all I have to hand, I’m planning on buying some regular 100c and maybe some 3000b (black and white, ISO 3000). Ultimately I want to try some image transfers which looks like it could be a bit of a rollercoaster - first I need some good quality un-sized paper like Arches 88 (about £3.50 a sheet) and then get hold of some Polaroid 690 film (could be a nightmare and pretty pricey). Fuji transfers are possible it seems, so I might try that first.

Now I’m just hoping for some good weather (jinx!) to get some nice high contrast pictures for it!

Jim

FINALLY got the net in my flat, now I just need to find time for all the updates I’ve missed. In the meantime, savour this gem of old I’ve rediscovered on an old backup HDD:

Need I say more?

This saturday Tomorrow I’ll be jetting off to the US for a week of training at one of our facilities in Westport, Connecticut. Which is a bit surreal. I’m looking forward to the trip, but I’ve been so busy that I’m not fully sure that it’s sunk in that a week today at this time tomorrow I’ll be on a different continent.

I started this post like a week ago and only just got back to it at half-11 the night before I leave. Jeez.

I’m going to take my SX-70 and DSLR for some photo goodness, hopefully I can make it down to NYC on the weekend and see the city - everyone I’ve spoken to has gushed about the place, I’d like to see for myself what the big draw is! The weathers meant to be a bit ropey, so I’m not sure if it’ll be possible yet, but fingers crossed.

Exciting! See you guys in a week.

- Jim

I thought I’d plug my friend Sam’s newly formed blog, ‘Baked Beans & ….’, which is a journal of his experiences subsisting entirely on beans for a month. Him and Tom are going on a month long road trip across the US in may, and poor old Sam is embarking on this experiment to a) see if he can actually survive, and b) save enough money to live for that month (presumably not on beans). Frankly, I already admire his stamina having lasted 6 days so far. Good luck Sam, and you should probably open a window!

http://beansforamonth.blogspot.com/

- Jim

Just some scans of polaroids I’ve taken lately. I’ve not had much time to go and only take some photos so I’ve had to make do with carrying my SX-70 (which up till now has been a bit underutilised since I got back from Oz!). I’ve added them to the ever growing flickr pile.

I took one on my wander through the park the other day on my Automatic 103. It was very cold and the sun was going down, so getting a sharp exposure was impossible (but I tried anyway):

Not perfect, but the cow didn’t seem to mind at the time and I thought it was a pretty fun picture when it had developed. Just a shame that the matte finish is a nightmare to scan! When this film pack is done I’m going to work on the rollers a bit more, in darker photo’s you can see some banding. I’m wondering if this is because the springy joint that pushes the rollers together is a bit corroded and isn’t putting even pressure on the rollers.

Lastly, not the best polaroid in the world (it was indoors and far too dark to expect a decent exposure - artificial lights + gloom = shaky gloomy polaroid) but I really liked what it was of, so I took a picture. It was part of an art installation in the Graves gallery which consisted of a number of passages written as though by the characters of famous folk stories and fairytales, asking for advice in their lives. There were a load of pegs underneath and a stack of card for people to write replies and peg them up underneath.

I can’t remember precisely what the parent passage said, but it was from a young woman who wasn’t finding any satisfaction or happiness in her needlework which she was particularly talented in, and was asking for ways to find some joy in her life.

The card I photographed reads: “your new hobby should be writing or running or going out every day to playing on the beach - Sophie“, which I think is some great advice for everyone.

- Jim

I’m so ridiculously behind I’m not even going to try and catch up completely. Between work, commuting and sleep, I’ve not had much time to post here or do much else! The upshot of which is that you needn’t worry about many more-boring-than-normal catch up posts.

So yeah, it’s been really cold lately and the snow made the commute a complete nightmare. Amazingly the trains mostly ran ok, but the roads and buses were a complete joke. The moors looked pretty great out of the window at sunrise with the blanket of snow, though. On the monday that it was worst, I ended up having to walk back from Heeley Retail Park, which was a complete ordeal as my shoes have literally no grip whatsoever so I had to make my way up to my sisters flat and borrow some of Michaels trainers (size 9…I’m size 11) to trudge home up Derbyshire Lane.

The weathers taken it’s toll on me really, it made an already rather draining commute that much worse - I’ve been getting in and just having zero energy to do anything. Shouldn’t be too long before I’ve sorted a flat with Ben though, he’s already told his landlord he won’t be staying past the end of the month, so we’re on a bit of a timer now!

I met up with Laura for a wander around town and that last weekend. We ended up going to the Wig and Pen for lunch and met Mike (a schoolfriend) who is a chef there. I had the Wig and Pen steak and blue cheese sandwich, which was really nice. Laura had the wild boar sausages and mash which looked pretty great too. I got off the bus a few stops early so I could walk back through the park and take some photos:

- Jim

P.S the title is from a Slow Club song.

A couple of weekends ago I had a wander around the woods of my youth, Oaks Park with my DSLR because I was bored. The woods used to be a prime location for youths to come and drink, shoot cans with air-rifles, make frighteningly good tree-houses/log cabins, and on occasion dump a joy ridden car and then torch it (just to clarify, I didn’t do any of those things or associate with anyone who did, other than drink). These days the woods seemed a bit bare and knackered, probably on account of most surface shrubs and that being burned in bonfires and the fact that it’s winter.

Anyways, I took some pictures for as long as I could stand not having my gloves on:

Makes a change to the endless white snowscapes I’ve seen lately!

- Jim

So I started my new job in Leeds on the 5th, and so far it’s been pretty good. Given the nature of the job, discretion is the name of the game, so I’m not really going to go into detail about my work on here.

I’ve been commuting while me and Ben can get a flat or something sorted soon - I’ve been looking at some promising places in the city and in the slightly further out Chapel Allerton and Headingly areas. The commute isn’t that bad, about an hour on the train either way, with no major hiccups so far (fingers crossed!). Works out as just enough time to read the Metro cover to cover - I love how many of the news items are really obviously googled. It almost annoys me how much media essentially gets it’s content from free web sources, eg. shows like E4’s Rudetube (just videos off YouTube). It’s such a cheap way to produce anything, the metro always has a load of articles which are just ‘check this video out on youtube’. Having said that, I imagine newspapers need all the help they can poach off the net, seeing as its free and widely available high-quality content will have hurt newspaper’s business badly, I’d have thought.

Sorry, diverged a bit there. So yeah, predictably I’ve been doing the donkey work in the office - decent working experience of the processes of the office and job coupled with training and qualifications in forensics is essential for me before stepping into my full responsibilities. The office is a great change of pace from my last job, the atmosphere in the office is much more my speed and there’s none of the grey and melancholy of good old Adastral Park (in my opinion). I’m really excited about what lays ahead in the coming weeks and months.

The payslip I got yesterday morning was a nice surprise too, I was expecting to work a month in hand. My days as a scrounging student are officially over…

- Jim