January 10th, 2005
Roughing it
I finally got around to handling some long-term irritants I’ve been battling for quite a while. The first of which is that I bought new glasses, something I’ve been talking about for a year and a half. Retiring this week will be my emerald green Brooks Brothers that I got on my eighteenth birthday freshman year of college. Eight years of use on one pair of frames may not set any records (??), but I think the abuse I’ve subjected these glasses to does.
Currently, the acrylic tips on the sides of the frames are decaying and flaking apart. I attribute some of this to age, and some due to a close encounter with an intense heat source. The lenses in particular are badly damaged, as the antireflection and scratch-resistant coatings have long since worn off. Also at one point I cleaned them with some coarse fiber baby wipe which I mistook for a monitor cleaning cloth. Anyway, if you look at my glasses you probably wonder why I’m not blind. The fact I haven’t updated the prescription in four years is probably not good either.
The upshot is, I dropped about four hundred dollars on two new pair of glasses (one recreational, one professional) to appease both my geek-rock sense and my mother. I capped the lenses on the “professional” pair at one hundred-seventy dollars, which is required mostly because I’m so damn blind that standard lenses would be over half a centimeter thick (this is really quite revolting if you see it), and negate any chic’ I may receive from the lightweight metallic frames. So, an extra one hundred dollars got me from seven millimeters to three, which is a considerable gain, but still a little silly looking on rimless glasses, I think. The frames cost about one hundred-twenty bucks, and are manufactured under the Guess label. I have no doubt these are inferior to the quality of my beloved green specs, but my mother [read: father] was much more well off in 1997 than I am today. So, let’s hope the supplementary cheap ass birth control goggles and my maturing common sense offset the difference.
The root of this post lies in the big announcement (to me) that the PowerShot has gone into the shop (a mere two weeks before warranty expiration) to remove what has been classified as gomi [trash] on the CCD. This apparently is something that happens to digital cameras (disturbingly) quite often, and normally costs eighty dollars to have removed by Canon. The main point of entry for such anomalies appears to be the area around the lens that telescopes for zooming. I suppose I should either get a full hood for the camera or a cheap backup for trips to the beach and areas in high wind. At least it’s nothing terrible I did.
So, for the second January in a row, I am entering into a period of no camera for several weeks, and am already feeling quite handicapped and naked. It was a beautiful blue day, and I missed a couple shots of charming Tokyo architecture and a corpulent tabby. In the meantime I have acquired one of those recyclable idiot cameras. Remember the last time you used one of those? The market saturation of the filmless wonder has beaten the tar out of the once mighty twenty dollar point-and-shoot, and reduced it to a mere $3.98 with a five dollar discount on processing.
I was halfway to taking a picture of it for you until I realized the poignant irony of the situation. In its place I provide you an image from the Fuji Film website.
I take a negligible amount of solace from the candy-like packaging which boasts this is the “smallest in the world*”, though I didn’t bother to look for a note connected to the asterisk, and since there is no direct object associated with the statement I can only speculate as to what, exactly, it is (nonsensical marketing phrase?).
