My Quiet Life

Actually, this post has me thinking: what typically kills a DSLR? That is, beyond dropping it from 4 feet (which will kill a DSLR. trust me on this one. RIP D30), what are the things that will typically break in a DSLR first that will make it prohibitively expensive to repair versus the cost of a new replacement? It's sortof like a car. As long as the engine and a few other critical components don't die, you can keep repairing it, barring a money pit situation. So, what is the "engine" of a DSLR?

The shutter?

I think I'm okay here. I have shot around 15,000 frames, and before that I'd guess the previous owner did a third of that, but I don't know. This thread indicates an average lifetime of 50k frames with a typical consumer EOS body shutter. So not a problem. And even if it did break, apparently it's not a difficult repair to send in and have done -- a few hundred bucks. (Though, with the plummetting cost of DSLRs, a "few hundred" quickly gets into viable replacement territory, depending on how many "few" we're talking.)

The sensor

I am curious about this, and I have my suspicions that this will actually begin to be the thing that causes me to replace it. I don't think that it will ever just completely die, but I already have a scary number of dead pixels (as I learned when I started doing lightning photography with long-exposure noise reduction turned off). There's also a weird pock-mark I can visibly see on the sensor, which yields a little circle sometimes that I have to clone out. I have a feeling the sensor might eventually get beatup enough that it's unusable?

CF card slot

I don't know what the possibility of this dying is, but I've read about people having problems. And I don't know a lot about embedded electronics, but I'm guessing the CF reader is incorporated into the main board itself, and this is likely prohibitively expensive to replace/repair. I really have no idea though.

What else? What will kill a DSLR?

Yes, Another Picture Of the Damn Skyline. What can I say, I like it up there. I saw my homeless buddy Jackie and he didn't ask me for money this time so hopefully we're past the awkward "money? no. money now? no. money this time? NO." phase and can just chat from now on. It was really nice up there tonight, though there was a very nasty slick of oil on the river that you can see in this picture.

I think my camera is dying. Although this is promising. I am going to try that this weekend. At this point I have shot around 15,000 frames with my Canon 20D, and I bought it used, at that, so who knows how many exposures are on that shutter, but I've heard most consumer EOS bodies are good for 50k exposures. Maybe it'll last me a while after all. I dread the day that it dies, though.

There's this website stuffwhitepeoplelike.com. I don't like it.

...

Sorry, what? Oh, fine, I'll explain. Before, in a similar vein, there was Black People Love Us, which is basically hilarious, because it plays on some very real race dynamics. And it was a brief, succinct, and effective parody.

Sally's always saying: "You go girl!" while "raising the roof" to mainstream hip-hop tracks at cheesy bars. That's fun! I relate to that.

I mean, come on. That's hilarious. And it's funny because it's a parody of genuine interactions between black and white people that we've all experienced to some degree. "Stuff white people like", on the other hand, is stupid, and you should stop liking it. "Ha ha, man, us white people are so lame!! GET IT?? Oh man, white people sure love facebook." What? I think it's endemic of some creeping sense of self-loathing tied to race. It's like if you took white liberal guilt, applied it specifically to race, and cranked the volume to 11. Don't get me wrong, there's some funny stuff up there. Like this article about people studying abroad:

If you need to make up your own study abroad experience, they all pretty much work the same way. You arrived in Australia not knowing anybody, you went out to the bar the first night and made a lot of friends, you had a short relationship with someone from a foreign country, you didn’t learn anything, and you acquired a taste for something (local food, beer, fruit). This latter point is important because you will need to be able to tell everyone how it is unavailable in your current country.

This is pretty funny. And we all know these people. But what the hell does this have to do with being white? I know black people that wouldn't shut the fuck up about their trip to Africa for a week and how they really connected with their heritage, and I'm like "dude, you grew up in Long Island."

That's all I got.

Mixed nuts in order of tastiness:
(An authoritative, painstakingly-researched list that is full of facts)

• Pecans -- unique for their inability to be consumed by themselves. Too overpowering. They have to be in mixed nuts to maximize relative deliciousness.
• Cashews
• Brazil Nuts -- these are delicious and full of selenium, which is good for your prostate. But they are knocked down a few notches, because they used to be called "nigger toes", and that's just so weird and wrong. Also, Brazil is on the same continent as Venezeuela, which is run by a crazed brutal dictator (mental note: fact-check this), and we shouldn't support terrorisms.
• Almonds
• Peanuts -- although perhaps my favorite nut, they share the opposite property of pecans, wherein the combination with other nuts obliterates their tastiness.
• Filberts/Hazelnuts (You should throw these away, or at people you don't like) *

* Filberts are not actually a nut at all. They are actually the testicles of a lower-level shit demon, and they taste about how that sounds. God made a bet with the devil when the devil claimed that humans would eat anything. God lost, obviously, but we've been eating them ever since.

I am beginning to think that I need to read more (okay, any) of the beat generation authors. For the same reasons that I've always felt the need to read Marx, the Bible, and Ayn Rand: to understand Certain Types of People.

UPDATE: Appropos of very little, courtesy of rev: "In my mind objectivists are kind of like scientologists with a higher chance of recovery. Libertarianism: YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG"

Looks like they're doing another zombie walk. Last one I went to was okay. Lots of good humor, and of course, photo opportunities. This year it looks like they're trying to break some world record. Or provide a plausible premise for hundreds of thousands of zombies appearing worldwide, so that we let our guard down.

Things that I share. with you. because you're just that special to me.

I put it in the sidebar, but I don't know if anyone notices that stuff. You should subscribe to this feed if you want to see stuff that I find notable but not bloggable..

So, I've been sick all weekend, and pretty much slept it all way, but by tonight I felt like I needed some fresh air, so I went out for a nightly constitutional. A cop stopped me on the way back. Actual exchange:

Cop: Hey, where are you going with that camera? What are you going to take pictures of?
Me: Well, actually I'm just goin h--
Cop: Well you should really be walking on 2nd avenue on your way.. If you go down 1st avenue, the homeless down there, they'll take any opportunity, you know.
Me: Well actually I live on 1st.. but thanks!

Teehee. Silly cop.

Okay, I was just gonna let sleeping dogs lie with this whole Tyson food/refugees/immigrants/etc thing, but this is just too hilarious to let pass. Just read this. In short, Brian Mosely is a reporter with the Times-Gazette in Shelbyville, following the uh "Somalian Question", I guess, in Shelbyville. Brian seems like an astute guy, and a decent reporter, and I even mostly agree with a lot of what he has to say about our refugee/immigration policy. A lot of the situations these people find themselves in do indeed resemble indentured servitude -- but in a metaphorical sense, at best. These days, the manacles are economic and structural, but more on that later. The part where he goes off the rails is towards the end:

I also have to say that I do not feel that I am "obsessed" or "fixated" with the topic of Somalis living here, as one blogger believes. The refugees have lived in Shelbyville for the past four years, and no one has even addressed the issue until the T-G published the series in December of last year.

I would also have to suggest that the blogger's opinion is quite possibly influenced by the fact that she makes her living by working with the Nashville refugee community, as she states on one of her other websites.

Aside from the fact that the second link was a link to Christy's myspace page (which strikes me as a somewhat unexpected, unprofessional and vindictive swipe at her personal life -- especially given the, uh, "eccentricity" of the commenters focusing on this issue), let's focus on what he's actually implying here: that Christy has a vested interest in refugees coming to this country because she works in social work. Let that sink in for a minute. Are you done laughing hysterically yet? I'll wait. Come on, collect yourself. Okay, now read these comments:

So, you are basically stating that Christy works for the Refugee program in Nashville and profits from their plight? Heh, no wonder she defends it.

-- Posted by Evil Monkey on Sun, Aug 3, 2008, at 4:01 PM
...

"Only in it for the rain."

I think she means MONEY!
-- Posted by Disgusted on Sun, Aug 3, 2008, at 4:26 PM

You can't make this shit up. Social work: where all the scum and villainy of this earth goes to make a quick buck. I mean seriously. I have a lot of friends that are working with immigrants and refugees in particular. It's insanely hard work with shit pay. I'd be offended on their behalf if it wasn't more hysterical than it is offensive. The idea that anyone take a job like that for the money is so laughably idiotic that it borders on sheer insanity.

The Times-Gazette is doing a fine job of reporting on this issue, but I'd advise Mr. Mosley to lay off the personal redirection and speculation. I get the impression he's imagining he's on the cusp of some pulitzer-winning expose of a grand conspiracy of charities to bring refugees into this country. Or something. He's either doing so out of ignorance to the economic complexity and sheer magnitude of the situation or he's being willfully naive in order to, as Christy suggested, stir up controversy with the local yokels (which he certainly has).

Stick to calling for reform, avoid insinuating vested interest and conspiracy on behalf of the organizations trying to help these people. Someone might mistake you for an insane person.