Author: Pearl L

… belated.

so jer and i got all excited about staying home and handing out halloween candy to all the trick-or-treaters this year, but such a reality would not come to pass.

it rained like a mofo friday night. and it was freeezing cold to boot. we received a grand total of zero trick or treaters.

so now we have all this halloween candy left! it’s pretty good stuff too — we’d gone to costco and picked up two huge bags of candy (reeses peanut butter cups, snickers bars, kit kats, milky way dark, and all sorts of good stuff), but now the only people eating it are me and jer. it’s really not good to have this stuff laying around because eventually you’re just going to grab some and eat it, to the detriment of your health and of your waistline. i should know. i went through one quarter senior year where i would go through a huge sack of snickers minis something like every couple weeks or so. oh! life was good then! but it’s not a good eating habit to have at all.

anyway, i digress. our halloween was slow, but pretty fun. we watched some dvds (dvd 1 of the season 3 simpsons set and “This is Spinal Tap”), made some snacks, and got some gaming in. season 3 simpsons is really when matt groening and the gang start to pick things up and find their stride: lisa’s birthday, bart the murderer, when flanders failed, mr. lisa goes to washington, homer at bat, brother can you spare a dime, flaming moe’s… oh! there are so many and they are all so good!! i can’t wait till season 4 comes out!

and on that note, here’s the rest of that “can’t wait” list.

– matrix revolutions
– kill bill vol. 2
– lotr return of the king
– lotr two towers special edition

I would say “I can’t wait for fall to actually be here” but i think it got here friday. =P to be fair, the cold wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t 80-90 degrees for weeks before. it’s just the 30 degree contrast that makes it a bit of a shock.

but the rain!! oh, the rain is a welcome thing!! i love the sound of it, i love the feel of it, and i love the crisp feeling the air has as the sky clears away. and it was certainly good for the fires! it looks like its progress is finally being slowed.

so yes… i think i can say we had a pretty good halloween this year, trick or treaters or no. :)

for those of you who are counting, jer and i have switched to cingular. we changed carriers at the end of last month because we really really needed to get away from tmobile. if you don’t have my new number by now (c’mon!!, it’s been almost a month!), do let me know and i will give it to you. unless you’re one of them crazies. Then i’ll just give you a bewildered look.

so i’m really digging on my new phone!! it’s the siemens s56. it’s small, sleek, sexy, has a color screen, decent battery life, can sync with Outlook/functions as a PDA, and has polyphonic ringtones! i finally got some new midi tunes for it last week, cuz the original ones on the phone were awful. actually, there are a lot of really terrible midi songs out there, and i sifted through many many songs before finding ones that were exceptional, or even just good.

the good:
– peanuts theme
– weezer – in the garage
– seaquest dsv theme (WOOHOO~!!!!!!!!! SUCH A GOOD SHOW.. in the first season.)
– shanice – i love your smile (remember that song?! oh, back in the day! too bad the intro is too quiet to be a really good ringtone…)
– blind melon – no rain (oh shannon hoon, how we’ve missed ye)
– futurama theme (sounds terrific as a ringtone! and plus it’s a great show.)

the bad:
– a lot of poppy techno/electronica midis are okay, because they often use synth instruments as it is. but boy some of those songs are reproduced in MIDI to sound really soulless and repetitive. garbage’s ‘cherry lips’ is one such song, and although i can hear shirley manson’s girlish purr in my mind, it’s not really there, and the song sounds pretty sad without her.

the ugly:
– too many. you’d have to hear it to believe it. and i wouldn’t wish a fate like that on anyone. color me badd’s all for love is super repetitive and irritating without (and some would say with) the vocals. 911’s ‘the day that we find love’ is probably the ultimate in boy band cheesy goodness, very difficult to say no to, except in MIDI form. elastica’s ‘connection’ is a another fun song, but reproducing the fun dissonance of justine frischmann’s voice with MIDI instruments is a task that should have been left undone. i also found a few versions of the really pretty travis song ‘driftwood,’ and all of them were so bad that they almost made me cry.

but you know, it’s free, so what can you expect, right? i kinda wish there were some way to pay these folks for their time… like an ‘insert a dime or quarter or dollar’ to this person’s fund for taking the time to arrange a thing like a MIDI. I tell ya, electronic music is HARD WORK. anyone who tells you that good music has to be instrumental and acoustic has clearly not dealt with the difficulties in composing and producing music electronically. it’s just a different instrument to be played, and electronic music producers deserve respect too, dammit.

anyway, my new ringtone as of today is the peanuts theme. i guess it’s additionally appropriate seeing as it’s the week of Halloween, and networks will be airing “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” soon.

in case you need to hear the peanuts theme rightthismoment, you can click here.

so the other day i was at the library and i overheard one of the staffers mention that they hate it when they buy something then find it cheaper elsewhere. and being the nosy brat i am, i chuckled, told him i related, and asked him what he got. he said, a nikon coolpix 2100.

a nikon coolpix 2100!! i exclaimed. that’s a cool camera! [michael and sharon have one of those!] i mentioned that i was also kind of peeking at the 3100, which has similar features, but is a 3.1 megapixel camera rather than just 2.1. while i love my canon elph s200 and the features it offers, the versatility of its manual mode is limited by having to sift through many menus to get the settings you want. and i’ve found that pictures usually turn out better when you set it up for the proper exposure, shutter length, shutter speed, flash, etc than when you just let the camera take them in automatic mode. pictures in automatic mode aren’t bad, but tweaking some settings is often worth the effort.

for instance, my favorite feature in the s200 is long shutter with delayed flash to photograph a subject in a nighttime situation where there are lights in the background. a regular flash results in a photograph with the subject illuminated but the background being completely dark. the long shutter/delayed flash feature keeps the shutter open for a little longer so as to let the background light in and then activate the flash to illuminate the foreground subject as well. this equals a successful picture.

but using this feature requires a whole slew of steps: first shifting the camera into manual mode, then going to a settings menu to turn on slow shutter, then going to a menu within the manual mode settings menu to select how long you want to keep the shutter open for, and THEN you finally snap the picture.

the nikon coolpix cameras also have this feature, but they work it like this: instead of having to navigate a whole lot of menus to set the proper settings for different scenes each time, there’s an icon menu of popular photo shooting situations: sunset/sunrise scenes, party scenes, portraits, night mode, and few other ones i can’t think of off the top of my head. so instead of navigating 4 menus, you just navigate one.

granted, you might not be able to customize the settings *as* much (and this i’m really not sure of, so if anyone knows, do correct me) but most people don’t really need to for the most part anyway. and if you really do need that kind of flexibility and versatility, then you’re probably getting an SLR anyway. but as far as a compact camera goes, i’ve found that it really has to be a quick-shoot type of affair, and that spending too much time fiddling with the settings means you’ve already lost the moment =(.

so yes. i think the nikon coolpix would be a pretty sweet camera, both the 2100 and the 3100 models. the design fits nicely in the palm of your hand, the construction is better than, say, a number of the fuji finepix digicams that came out earlier last year (want to add anything brian? was it the 3250?), buttons and dials are placed in easy to understand positions, and the features are readily and easily accessible, making some intermediate photo techniques accessible to the photography newbie. i wouldn’t mind a 2100 or a 3100 for xmas. ;-)

although i have to admit.. i really do have a thing for canon digital cameras. i can’t resist the sleek design and steel construction. plus i’m interested in playing with the DIGIC technology that shipped in all the canon cameras that came out after mine (shakes fist!), which would improve on the color issues i’ve had with my elph. SD100….. *drool*….. S400…. *drool*

so staffer-working-in-the-library… i may have had to tell you what features your new camera has, but i hope it helps you enjoy your camera to the full extent it deserves to be enjoyed. it’s capable of a lot. =) use it well~!!