On the music side, I was recently pleasantly surprised by both Red Sparowes with their album The Fear Is Excruciating, But Therein Lies The Answer (which is not that heavy/loud), “Russian Circles” with Geneva (heavier/louder), Keelhaul with Keelhaul’s Triumphant Return to Obscurity and Animals as Leaders. It feels like there’s a trend here…

I used this occasion to test some new toys.

The GPS was handy, and I can extract most informations to use them on a computer (well, truth be told, I haven’t used yet the track informations and I may well lose time related informations, and that sucks). But there aren’t that many libraries to edit (not just parse) EXIF information, and in the end I had to use the nice Image::ExifTool Perl library to do what I wanted to do. There’s gpsPhoto that does almost exactly what I wanted, but it seems to be based on a tracklog instead of waypoints, as I planned.

On the camera side, the 24mm is hard to use and get good results, while the 105mm is still quite wonderful. However, I didn’t find that many interesting subjects to explore (even though in my opinion, it seems that cats are always a good subject). Anyway, all published photos are now up.

Maybe I shouldn’t trust Google spreadsheet about any kind of financial number handling.

1988—2008

The paint is still fresh, but there are also a few things left: the flickr badge is a bit loose — I probably need to either fix things (not smart) or add some javascript to make it smooth (smart), and some pages may still have a weird “borrowed” look. However, the “design” is still table-free (yay!) and even almost compatible with Internet Explorer (almost double-yay!).

So I settled on the Sennheiser PX200. My conclusions:

• Don’t expect much if you have to endure a lot of wind when using them;
• Don’t expect much if you try to say, run or some kind of sport. That’s not what they are for;
• Don’t expect your head to blow out with the bass sound. Well, even though for many people, this was the main problem for them, I didn’t expect that, so that’s ok;
• They’re not as pocket-friendly as earbuds;
• There’s a good but not full isolation. I can hear the cars around me (and this way, I expect to live for a few more years without an accident when crossing the street), maybe some people talking, but I don’t have to raise the volume to hear my music;

• The sound is really good: during the past week, I have discovered sounds I hadn’t heard before on some songs. Even “bad” music feels better.

Overall, I’m satisfied. I can listen to my music and enjoy it with a pretty good quality, while not disturbing people or getting my ears sore.

At first I had a bad feeling, since I had to use my lens extended to its maximum I thought most would be blurry (well, many are indeed blurry), but since the weather was almost fine (sunny with a few clouds) I was able to use a fast shutter speed. But maybe I shouldn’t have used it so much, since some photos are a bit darker than they should have been. And when I see pictures taken by others at almost the same time of the same planes, I wonder what I missed. I don’t think that at this point, the equipment matters that much.

Sigh, so much work yet to do…