Technologically Savvy

My Birthday is next week, and my first (and probably only) gift arrived yesterday from my mom. A digital camera, a gadget i've been jonesing for for along time now, and am quite frankly pretty stoked on. Tog et it here, my mom passed it along to a friend who lives in rio who happened to be in the states, who gave it to her daughter who was visitng but lives in rio, and i went to her house to pick it up. I never even got to meet ehr to say thanks in person, she had her housekeeper send it down in a chocolate shop bag. It was raining at the time, so i decided to hang out at the building and learn to use it a little.

I felt really 'mission impossible' flipping through the manual of a gadget i recieved in deceptive packaging from a contact i didn't know and never meant at an apartment building where i felt kind of unwelcome.

Afterwards I hung out with my friend georgiana who lived nearby, and ended up crashing at her pad. I'll post pictures soon, but this damn computer is too old!

But yeah, back tot he point, camera = awesome. it's a Pentax Optio M40. about the size of a credit card, it's really light and has tons of features (although it doesn't have manual control of the apperture or shutter speed...it does have ISO sensitivity though, which i guess osrta controls the shutter speed...). It has optical zoom, and records at a maximum resolution of 8mb. Also, my mom got a 128mb sd card, which suits me fine. From poking around online i think it cost my mom under $200, which is perfect.

it is exactly the camera i wanted. it's small. it's light. It has optical zoom and records at a decent quality. it's cheap enough that i won't feel too bad if it gets jacked.

the last bit is important because next month i plan to hit the road and backpack north through to march or so (fuck, i still need to change my ticket and extend my leave at the firestation!). the whole purpose of this trip was to see brazil, and although i've gone on about one serious sidetrip a month, i haven't seen nearly as much as i wanted to. So as far as traveling is concerned, i'm happy not to have a professional camera on me.

Along with clothes, i plan to take this camera and my Archos (Media player). I had originally intended not to take the archos with me on my travels, but ARCHOS + CAMERA = LETHAL COMBINATION. here's why: the archos isn't just an mp3 player and movie viewer, it's 40GB hard drive the size of my hand. and it's pretty light too. I'm going to look into the cost of a bigger SD card for the camera, but i feel like taking the archos along will probably give me more versatility.

I will be much more bummed if my archos gets jacked than my camera. But at least I can back up my music collection on my old 80gig external before i leave (the uneven power currents here have been wreaking havoc on it though, it's been glitching alot lately and some folders are becoming corrupted).