#computer
Been feeling like a zombie since Sunday, though I have to put on the record I love those pre-made beef tamales. Very good breakfast option last week. Had a turkey, egg, and arugula sandwich for breakfast. Watched an episode of Seinfeld — The Stock Tip. Took grandma to Hashi grocery store around 4 — tried looking for a filter with a wire handle and got some pompano fish, I wound up ordering the filter online. Played Angry Birds Space on the iPhone 4s. Napped from 6:30 to 8pm. Had dinner soon after; grandma panfried the fish with mixed bell pepper, tomato, zucchini veggies in a sweet-and-sour sauce and I had some leftover sweet-and-sour Vietnamese style soup from last night.
The major "highlight" recently has been my compact camera shopping hell week, from about July 29th to August 4th. It turns out the Lumix LX3 I had been waiting on for 2 weeks (shipping from China) arrived with haze in the lens and a stuck aperture at f/8, causing major diffraction and softening in the photos. I intuitively knew something was off but lied to myself for a whole day that I wasn't using it right. Ugh. Don't doubt your intuitions if you have the knowledge. If I didn't look closely at the lens on the 2nd day (I think the 28th) who knows how long it would've taken me to initiate the return. The return process itself was also weird. My seller didn't know how to convert their USPS label to a hazmat compliant one for shipping the lithium-ion battery. I held up for days and days because I didn't want to get fined by USPS. Eventually we agreed I could return it without the battery and I got a full refund. During the return process, I hunted down digicams on eBay, ran back and forth between Claude and ChatGPT, and became more frustrated each day that the compact camera market had gotten so hostile since late 2024 (I was also looking for an LX3 that time). I couldn't believe the rampant price scalping and god-awful shipping prices from USA and Japanese sellers. Only 2 years ago, these would be highly trusted, and very affordable places to shop from. Today it was bullshit. Plain and simple. I ran through candidates of a Sigma DP1/2 Classic, Olympus XZ-1, even a Coolpix A (the latter was listed on Ali's OMTC garage sale) and edited a bajillion sample RAW files (which I was, at least, good post-processing practice). Major dealbreakers on all of them. I was getting genuinely depressed, so it was a goddamn miracle I found an Olympus XZ-2 for a very good price. The XZ-2 builds on the already-strong XZ-1 by adding a tilting screen, dual-function front ring, and a backside-illuminated(?!) CMOS sensor. The rendering is a bit more modern but still has that 1/1.7" sensor "grit".