The ‘Mute

I am selling my Mamiya 7II with two lenses and the Mamiya polarising filter. I’m pretty sad about it but I’m not using it and if someone can be using it to make wonderful images then I’ll be happy it’s gone to a good home.

All the kit is in perfect condition, I’m selling the following:

• Mamiya 7II body
• 80mm F4L lens + hood
• 150mm F4.5L lens + hood
• Mamiya ZE702 polarising filter (with mount adapter AN701)

I’m also including 40 or so rolls (400 frames) of film. Mostly dated 2007 but it’s been stored carefully and unless you are doing really colour critical work it’ll be perfectly fine. There are a few Black & White rolls but it’s mostly Fuji Velvia 50.

I’m asking £1400.

Get in touch if you have any questions. I’ve also got this posted on the Robert White noticeboard.

Thanks for looking - Robert.

…I’ve noticed more and more that advertising that I am aware of (and therefore I assume was intended to be noticed by people my age and all that) is using throwbacks to my childhood. I therefore assume that the people with responsibility for either requesting or actually creating this advertising are also from my era.

A stonking example is this: advert for bottled water called Drench.

It’s certainly made me aware of this Britvic brand but and the advert is fab, but I’m not likely to seek out the product, I’ll probably buy a bottle given a choice then next time I’m in a shop so brand wise they’ve sucked me in!

• http://www.lowmorale.co.uk/creep/flash/creep_FLASH.asp (is it cheesy to feel that the lyrics apply to me?)
• http://www.thewombats.co.uk/news.php (i asked father christmas for the album but he forgot, so i bought it myself)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_(James_album) (because it brings back many memories)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EeZRBStMNQ (my five year old asked about the “love cat” music so we looked it up together)

Rest in peace Jack. We will all miss you.

…bah humbug!

…handy on the surface, useless in practice!

We need to post a letter that needs to arrive by a specific date. Given the current situation with postal strikes, we don’t want to take a chance so decided to use Recorded Delivery so we know when it’s been signed for (it’s not valuable so Special Delivery isn’t necessary)… we have plenty of time for this letter to arrive.

Given that it’s a Sunday night and the post office isn’t open I thought I’d see if I could print a stamp using the Royal Mail online postage system. Having weighed the letter and established the size of the envelope I selected Recorded Delivery and was given a price of £1.04. So far so good…

I then proceeded to work my way through the 5 step purchasing process and ended up with my order onscreen… here is a screen grab (click to expand, then click again to shrink again):

This is a time limited stamp, it has to be posted before the end of the day tomorrow otherwise it’ll vanish and [I assume] the Royal Mail will have £1.04 of my money and I have a useless stamp.

Having made the purchase, printed the stamp and was cutting it out of the paper I happened to spot a “Please note” on the screen. Unlike the Royal Mail, I will highlight the entry:

You have purchased a tracked product that needs to be accepted into our network. To do this you must present it for posting at any Post Office®. Please do not post it into a Pillar Box.

Please do not post into a pillar box… what’s the fackin’ point in that? I’ve just been through an entire online process to spend a whopping £1.04 on a credit card to be told I’ve still got to queue up in the Post Office tomorrow anyway!

Royal Mail have a feedback page, doesn’t invite me to identify myself though so I’m assuming they redirect the feedback to /dev/null…

I think this is an example of a developer being asked to implement something with little or no thought to the user experience!

…but very good [if insanely childish] fun: http://www.misternicehands.com/

… and sit down. The bartender says, “So what’ll it be?”

The first string says, “I think I’ll have a beer quag fulk boorg jdk^CjfdLk jk3s d#f67howe%^U r89nvy~~owmc63^Dz x.xvcu”

“Please excuse my friend,” the second string says, “He isn’t null-terminated.”

…is the the computer equivalent of the everlastinggobstopper it just keeps on going! it’s a Dell PowerEdge 300 and has been running pretty must continually since February 2001…

dunno why but it crashed last night, so the ‘mute has been offline for almost a day… some messing around and i discovered that all i had was “GRUB GRUB GRUB” across the screen so i was braced for a new machine, i tried booting the installation CD and got an error message that was a bit depressing, a chat with a mate of mine identified the problem in seconds… having found that a Sabayon LiveCD would boot i had a shell to work from… all that was left was to search for the right commands and hey presto all back and running :)

i’m chuffed to bits, cheers ralphie :)