Tax Return Camera

I was saving for a new camera. The nikon Coolpix 960 was just not cutting it. I had promised myself a new camera as a reward for not loosing my mind in grad school. That had been put off for quite a while do to the expenses of moving and wedding planning.

You have your priorities. Work before pleasure.

If you want to make art, have your camera fight you every step of the way will inspire you to not make art. You want the image, not weird colors that no one understands (except nikon engineers). The 960 was definitely falling down on the job. It wouldn't turn on. It couldn't focus. It ate batteries. It was really slow. It worked surprisingly well for a 13 (14?) year old camera. But it felt like a relic when compared to everything else I had used, except of course, the Apple Quicktake.

Fortunately, I screwed up my tax return for the 3rd year in a row, and that somehow translated in the IRS giving me more money than I figured they owed me. I find this to be a prime example of the need for our tax-code to be re-written. It is so dense that the IRS has to tell us about the forms that we should have filled out, had we known they were there.

So, I left a pile of money at Adorama and purchased a Canon s95.


Holy Cow.

This camera wants to take pictures. Especially technically amazing pictures. It wants it very, very, very badly. I have never used a point and shoot that made camera control so quick and easy. It can handle low light decently. The controls are easy to get at, plentiful, and mostly self explanitory. The color rendition really nice. The (relatively!) large sensor gives some since of depth of field.... it's hard to find an excuse not to like this camera. It does feel a little cramped for shooting a lot of pictures (it's smaller than my wallet). But, I think it would save you from lugging an SLR on a hike where your goal was hiking, not photography.


I really like this one.

Time to go make art.

Not that kind of Doctor....

Nature Magazine recently published a special section examining one of the current crises facing the scientific community: the over-abundance of doctorate holding researchers. I think this is one of the more involved surveys of the issues available, although one can find little bits here and there in the literature and online. There is some dissent on the scale of the probleme, there are other people saying that physical scientists are more or less at the same level of demand as they always have been (http://cenblog.org/). There are some pretty profound arguments that research scientists are doing fine and well.


My experience lands somewhere between golden tickets and the poorhouse. I did get a Ph.D. in a physical science, and ultimately landed a job there. But, I did have to mostly abandon the field where I did my dissertation research and move to a location that has little to offer beyond its simple being. Most of my colleagues have not had the same success either, so I have a nagging feeling of being lucky. The forces that be certainly seemed to be against me in my job search.

My current opinion of the degree distills to a profound determination that it is over-rated. People who deeply love the material, will not be deterred. However, I think someone should make a decent attempt to try. From my own experience, I had no clue that it was going to be hard to land work until I was nearly done. I harbor a theory that a large number of them are their simply because they were in school to start with, and the graduate office was the path of least resistance.

Those seeking job stability and a degree of independence should consider other routes first. A smart, driven individual will likely encounter opportunities to establish their goals, and greater freedom working outside the acadame. This view is represented by the vast number of people who appear to successfully live their lives without a higher degree.

Lotus Notes is the tar in the gears of progress.

The annoying thing about the flies in my office is that they are surprisingly noisy when mating.

The Other Rust Belt

I found a map on wikipedia that depicted New England as part of the Rust Belt. It had a special blue color to denote it was recovered rust belt. Old money has a way of making anything quaint, I suppose. The old mills and warehouses are becoming apartments, offices, shops, and light industrial. The humidity and the salty ocean air make anything iron bleed accross the landscape. I get it.

For a while, I spent a lot of time with The Dog wandering abandoned areas of the old Pease Air Force base. Maybe just dis-used. Commercial flights have always been touch and go there. The last airline to provide regular service, Skybus, left when the economy collapsed. Since then, the parking lots have been barricaded. The terminal is locked. The area is littered with old military footings and the hulks of failed enterprises.

What wasn't growing was rusting.

Ew.

Ramming Speed: n. The velocity attained when slidding across a freshly mopped floor, just before slamming into the urinal. alt. The event that occurs when the janitors do not put yellow cones up in the bathroom after mopping.

Squirrel attack staved off using whole wheat and almonds.