This past weekend there was snow, but the weekend before that, there was not.

I took a walk across the local cricket pitch and around the block, and shot some pics as I went. I was using my Olympus XA-3 with a roll of long-expired “Klick Max” film. It’s some store-brand that I’d never heard of, that I’d acquired at some point over the past year.

I found when developing it that the colours had an interesting shift to them. A bit more blue, a bit more red. (Or a bit less green?) Either way, the effects were unexpected but I rather like how some of them came out.

Until the past week or so, I had not been taking a lot of pictures (as evidenced by the lack of photo posts here). I’m trying to keep up with it, and I have a couple more rolls of film to process yet. I do expect to take more pictures, and hopefully as the weather gets better I will get out more with my cameras.

The other day when I took my Kodak Bantam out for a walk, I shot a few more pics than just the Ghostbusters car.

The walk took me past an old schoolhouse building, and its playground. The school was built over 100 years ago, and while it’s no longer used as a school, it is still busy there – though I don’t know what they do exactly.

The playground sees a lot of use in the summer as a cricket pitch.

p.s. Hey look! A photography post!

Oh wait, wrong movie. Who you gonna call?

I love that whoever owns this car sometimes parks it in my neighborhood.

(Pic taken with my 75+ year old Kodak Bantam camera.)

I just put together this simple fun kit from Sparkfun – it’s a great big chunky watch, with retro LED display!

The digits are much brighter and easier to read in person. I have not yet mastered the art of taking photographs of illuminated LEDs… either the LEDs are clear and everything else is dim, or the LEDs are dim and everything else is properly exposed.

I’ve been trying to write this post for a couple days now. Every time I try, I end up putting a few words down, then my mind fills with dark clouds and nothing else comes out. Then I get a lump in my throat and something in my eyes and just give up. So to heck with it, this time I’ll just bash out what comes and let it go at that.

These are the worst words ever. Words you never want to hear from anyone you care about. Words that cut deep and go on hurting when you think about them. I’m talking about works like:

• Recurred.
• Metastisized.
• Inoperable.
• Terminal.

They hurt, they suck, and I keep thinking that there must have been an error somewhere. Somebody forgot to carry the four or something, because this just isn’t possible.

Except of course it’s possible. These things happen all the time, they can happen to anyone… it’s just never been someone so close before.

Try and be optomistic and sure, there’s still hope, still a possibility. Sort of. Maybe some new drug will come along, some new discovery might be made. Maybe. And hey, what if the doctor’s wrong?

Like they said at xkcd, fuck cancer. But whatever, I have to go: there’s something in my eyes.

I took a few minutes this evening to geek out a wee bit. My Master Control Project has been sitting there working perfectly, staring me in the face, reminding me that I haven’t messed with it in a few weeks.

It didn’t take long to add a whole new layer of functionality to it, as this one is all software: I got it a Twitter account and programmed it to tweet status reports!

You can see the results first-hand by visiting the MCP’s twitter page.

At the moment it tweets a radiation reading at the bottom of each hour, and a temp / humidity message at the top of the hour. I’ll be adding some more tweet-content as things progress.