Is that what the whine is? I’ve always wondered what was making the noise.
I have a very bright little xenon strobe, which fires every four or five seconds, which makes that lovely sound, but not loud enough to hear if you don’t put your ear against it. timing depends on the state of battery charge.
I had a camera that used these. Inherited from my grandpa though. There were like 8 pictures on a roll of film. I still have a few of the pictures somewhere around here. Help, I am old. Almost a crone. My colleague I am working with was born in 1990. And next week a new colleague starts who is even younger. 1998 if I caught it right. Waaah. Those kids are allowed to drive…
And Gute Besserung @GeeBizzle, @pillbox, @Acacia and families, and especially the kids. Hope those immune system updates go as smoothly as possible and you all get well fast.
Maybe I wasn’t allowed around them, the cameras I had when I was a kid had a flash, and my father had plenty of photographic equipment due to his work (underwater ship repairs) but I don’t remember those being around much (if at all) in the early 80s… Don’t discard that being a kid and not being able to recognize them they weren’t around, but everything was starting to be fancy Japanese stuff back then, at least that I can remember…
The vivitar 283 was introduced in 1970. this was the first usable compact flash that used regular batteries, and which was not outrageously expensive. They sold a couple million of them in the first couple of years they were made, and many more over the thirty years they were in production. That was the end of flash bulbs in serious amateur use, and all but super specialized professional use. But for casual snapshot use, they hung on for quite some time. Film was expensive (and you have to develop it…), so most people didn’t take lots of pictures, and the cost of a box of flash cubes or flip flash sticks was more bearable than a expensive flash. I doubt many new cameras were sold that used the flashes after about 1980 or so, but there were millions of them around, and grandmas buying flash sticks for them.
A new academic manifesto! (waves to @Shimmin ) In this thread because, well, yeah, that’s the way I feel today.
What a sad ending.
I haven’t been to the (equivalent of) a pub since pre-pandemic…
Can’t wait to finally move (renovations still haven’t started. We’ll get there) and become a regular at this one place… not that my conversation will ever be quite as lofty as the comic indicates. I will probably gripe about how everyone works too much, and isn’t treated well enough and I don’t have enough time for games and stuff like that and then order another beer and start a debate about which password manager is the best (or if they are all security risks).
I shouldn’t have read that before breakfast, oof! Right to the solar plexus.
Now wistfully envisioning the lovely warm crackling of the former. You could bring jacket potatoes.
I wish pubs are more interesting. I always overhear the dumbest shit in pubs. I don’t mean “is sushi a rice sandwich?”. I mean, absolute dumb shit.
Oof. That hurt. Half the reason I went back to university for an English degree (“the most useless of all degrees”) was for those conversations. And to meet people who were… I dunno… driven. Who wanted a better world.
Instead I got video classes, exhausted students, exhausted professors, and about $15K tossed into a pit. If I get anything out of these last 4-5 years from my studies it will be a miracle.
Oh, that triggered another memory. Yes, this multiflash camera I had was my grandfather’s. So alive in the 80s but not born in the 80s.
Just an aside: the Canadian government has informed me today that I owe them $2,000 for CERB that I received back in 2020. I am pretty confident that I have already repaid the amount they are asking for… but I mention it only because usually news like this would’ve arrived yesterday, which is historically the worst day of the year for me, every year.
The fact that this news arrived today instead of yesterday is a little surprising. I blame Canada Post for delivering it a day late.
Shouldn’t you at least get a sheet of paper?
At some point I might… I don’t think I have the last useless piece of paper I got back in 2003 (or if I do, I have no idea where… I’ve certainly never needed or used it, and I take no pride in having it).
Upon further accounting, it appears I do indeed owe the government that $2,000. “But I’m already extremely poor” is not the financial argument I thought it was.
Additional conclusion: the worst day of the year every year is now spreading to the following day. Two worst days of the year is a new record, I think… sigh
No more whining from me for a while. Exams are done, handing in the last tomorrow and then, in celebration, I am going to… I dunno. Sleep. Cry. Assume the fetal position and moan softly for at least two hours.
Sorry to hear that. Is it possible that you can contact them and ask to pay back in instalments?
The SAT is complete for this year, which is the unofficial beginning of the end for the school year. In the classroom, we’ll have a rash of absences from students and teachers for the next couple weeks, and then it’s just intervention teaching for the students that haven’t met their proficiencies yet.
For my district admin work it remains kind of a nightmare, as a crew of very tired teachers re-invent the wheel in response to some curriculum changes way above their heads.
On the bright side, I added a new rug and curtain to the area behind my desk in the classroom, and it is bringing me an unexpected amount of joy.
The national passenger rail service has new equipment. I assumed I would see it go by the house eventually. I just saw the top of it go by over the back fence. In a chat window I told my friend who lives on the same line but on the other side of town. We are both pleased. Somewhere, in the later rounds of a game of 1867: The Railways of Canada, there has been some ‘rusting’.
You know that feeling?
When you’re kneeling on the kitchen floor in your pyjamas and dressing gown with a plastic container in your hands, which you were hoping to use to capture/rescue the mouse that your cat brought inside to play with this morning. That feeling you get after the mouse has darted to safety by escaping directly under you because you were too slow, causing you to sigh and realise it could now be literally anywhere in the clutter behind you, and maybe you’re going to need to set your cat after it again just to figure out where it is; and you stand up to look around for it, but unsurprisingly can’t see any movement anywhere.
That feeling you get then… the one you try to dismiss, except it happens again… that you know exactly where the mouse escaped to… because it tickles a bit whenever it moves against your skin, inside your pyjamas.
That feeling?
That’s not my favourite feeling, it turns out.
(Although on the plus side, it does make it much easier to get the mouse outdoors.)
I wish someone would tell mice about “quiet as a mouse”. They rustle and they skitter and they practice rugby in the attic. I once met one coming down a flight of stairs with a THUMP, THUMP, THUMP.
Perhaps it was supposed to be “quiet as a moose” but somebody misheard.
Sounds like an auto-correct typo crept into the evolution trait-assignment algorithm.