OK, my posting has been freaking non-existant light lately. There are a number of factors contributing to this:

-Laziness

-A nasty cold

-Nothing to write about

-Earning a living

-My new gadget

-An addictive video game (yes I know I'm a giant dork)

The gadget is a SiPix Blink Digital Mini Camera, as featured prominantly at ThinkGeek (although available at a cheaper price over on Amazon). It is not a very good digital camera. In fact, calling it a digital camera is somewhat misleading. It is a toy. It's limited to 640x480 images (stored as heavily compressed jpgs). It has no flash, it's doesn't work well indoors or at night, the edges of the image is always slightly blurry, it has a long exposure time (no action shots and a steady hand needed), and you can't take closeups. The picture downloading program makes all kinds of annoying sounds when you move images to your PC. Oh, and the memory is volatile, so if the battery (a single AAA) goes, so do all the pictures you've got stored in the camera.

Now, why, with all these drawbacks, am I still happy with my purchase? Well, price is one thing. At around $35 on Amazon, it's not exactly breaking my bank. Although the image quality is poor, it holds up to 100 pictures, and connects to my laptop's USB port for quick transfers. And the big neat feature: size. The camera is 2"x2" on the sides, and about 1/2 inch thick. It really is puny. That means it goes in my jacket pocket everywhere I go, just in case I see something cool I want to remember. A sample I took on my way to work this morning:

It's no replacement for a real, honest to god, 4 megapixel digital camera (which is probably next on my gadget list). It's a toy, but it's a pretty fun toy.

As for even more wastful uses of time, the video game Strategic Command has hooked me. The spiritual successor to the old dos game Clash Of Steel (voted all time best video game, ever, by me), SC is a hex based WWII game that lets you control the entire war from '39 to 46. As anyone who knows me is aware, I relish the oppportunity to kill Nazis more than anything else in the world, and killing them in mass is too much fun to resist. Thus blogging has suffered.

But fear not, dear readers, as my faithful abstract video game soldiers prepare to liberate Europe from Hitler's tyranny, I too feel a resurgent blogging élan building in my writing innards. Stay tuned...