Yo, shot!

I’m really bored, so I guess I’ll write about last Thursday’s purchase.

I decided I needed a tiny little point & shoot digital camera to take with me on the bike, and especially for next month’s Pan-Mass Challenge. And, of course, it would also be handy to carry around, to catch the shots I see when I leave the 70-pound dSLR at home.

My criteria were (1) size, (2) image stabilization, (3) cost, and (4) maybe some sort of movie mode. I wound up picking up a Nikon Coolpix S200.

I played with it a little bit last weekend, and am mostly pleased with the results. Size-wise, it’s smaller than an Altoids tin. Cost-wise, it was tolerable, although I could have gotten it cheaper had I bought online rather than at Bromfield Camera. Movie mode far exceeded my vague desire: it can do 640x480 at 30 fps, plus it has stop-motion and time-lapse modes that I may try playing with.

You can see a couple shots I took up in Maine this weekend here.

The only minor disappointment is the image stabilization, which I thought was optical, but is actually digital, which is not as desirable. Still, it’s got to be a huge improvement over my near-worthless cameraphone, even if it is another device to carry.

I’ve gone out and done some on-bike tests, both to see how it performs and to get familiar with operating it while piloting a moving vehicle. I think it went well, so you can expect to see more and better pictures of this year’s PMC ride, and maybe a video or two of the more interesting bits!

Your inner kitten..

Sorry, but I think this one’s just too good to keep to myself. Sometimes I really amuse myself, if no one else.

So one of my friends has resolved to lose weight. Although she’d be happy well short of this goal, she exclaimed that she could lose a hundred pounds and still be healthy.

A bit later, we were talking about the difficulties she has doing things like exercise, step aerobics, running, and so forth. In order to put it in perspective for her, I came up with the following image…

Of course it’s going to be hard! An extra hundred pounds is a lot to carry. That’s the equivalent of nine or ten adult cats… Imagine trying to climb a set of stairs with ten cats strapped to your body! Or twenty kittens, for that matter…