by last week you mean just over 26 hours ago (or at least the earliest news release that I read)

eh no you silly little git... just that with the release of the "black swan" book all the overblown hoopla from the media seeming to call every second even slightly less than normal thing a "black swan" incident.... yet for us black swan is a normal, almost every day, thing.. in fact right now as I type if I turn my head to the right I can see the very river named after these swans and as I walked in to my office an hour ago I walked past no less than 3 black swans... there probably were more but, meh, why count? they are ubiquitous, always there on the foreshore, watching the commuters, like oversized pigeons and I doubt many people who've lived their life in London or New York even notice pigeons
so yes we know other people in the deep dark past of european history were unable to think of the unthinkable occurrence of black swans but it just seems weird...

if I'm going out to take pictures its mostly film.
Apart from snapshots with the Digital p&s I use digital for a few things though, street parades, marches, demonstration that sort of thing where I'm in a fast moving/changing group of people the DSLR and a fast lens and a big CF seems more suitable, Fireworks I find a less hit and miss and less prone to lab development issues (though I sometimes do my own C41 colour film processing)
Not sure why I've gone back to film particularly as I quite professional photography in the early 90's out of frustration with the processing side, I guess I just like it, the whole process from loading the camera to hanging up the final print (though I do often scan and inkjet print images captured on film or go the other way and use a digital negative to print something from one of my digital cameras on to Silver Gelatine paper).

I usually pension my laptops off to legacy support duties ("oh your running MacOS 8? let me boot up my vintage wallstreet PowerBook to remind me what that looks like") Unfortunately some half-wit thief stole my near new (a few months old at the time) MacBook Black and my late 1990's (about 12 year old) WallStreet PowerBook (system 8) a 9'ish year old TiBook 500mhz (system 9) a 7'ish year old TiBook 1Ghz (System 10.2) and my 6'ish year old IBM Thinkpad (XP). weird thing is that they physically had to pick up and move to the side, off the top of the stack of legacy laptops a late model AlBook G4 and a early MacBook and a near new Asus Netbook to get to the vintage laptops they took with them then they stole the wrong power adaptors..... no one actually expects thieves to be smart but I did a lot of head shaking that day.

Digital: Canon G3, G4 and G9, Canon A70 and A80, Canon EOS D60, EOS 20D, EOS 40D DSLR's (and lenses) old compacts retained as they deprciated to low to be worth selling old SLR's retained as backups.
I DO NOT include the camera on my motorola Droid as it is pointless, useless and an embarrassingly bad. (lag time of 8 seconds? WTF? hell I can change a roll of film in less time than that and even my old original Diana F took better quality pictures)
next purchase will be a Fuji X100 or a Leica X1

So 8 digital cameras with one pending

if including film:
Voigtlander Bessa 2Ra 35mm rangefinder, Yahsica GSN 35mm range finder, 2x Pentex MG 35mm slr, 1x F3 Nikon SLR, Canon EOS 1v and EOS 33 SLR, Widelux pano camera, Yashica Electro 35 35mm viewfinder camera, Olympus trip 35mm viewfinder camera, 3 various medium format Zeiss Ikon folders 6x6 6x7 & 6x9 variants (the "newest" being over 50 years old), Pentacon six medium format SLR.
this year's film camera purchases are to be a 4x5 large format film camera, either a Chamonix 45-N2 or a used Toyo 45AII and a medium format rangefinder like the FujiFilm GSW.
so 14 film with 2 pending

so 22 in total with 3 pending

oh yeh and then web cams - iMac x 2, MBP and MB Air.... so 4 web cams
26 cameras with 3 pending ..
I guess I like cameras a bit, no?

wrong, tokyo survived a very very much lower than 9 quake, other parts of Japan between Sendai and Ofunato took much heavier hit. In those areas there was significant damage to many structures, only mitigated by design and codes. The death toll is already past 5000, but this may rise several times over as they get to villages that have not yet received much attention from the SDF and other agencies many of these smaller villages and towns almost the entire population is missing. If you have driven up the coast you will know that there are hundred and hundreds of these small towns and villages some no larger than 30 people but many having a population of a few hundred. as for Haiti being off the news radar after less than a week? seriously ... I mean _like seriously_ WTF? Only if you locked your self in your room and turned off the power to your little world... it was several months of coverage with headline status for a better part of 4 weeks. I would love to introduce you to some of my relatives who lived in this area, they may not have been dirt poor but they were very far from being rich, unfortunately I can't introduce you to them as they along with pretty much their entire village are missing.

you might want to look at a map - greater Tokyo area is big but not that big and just like the Tri States are not "The US" Tokyo is not Japan. about 15 minutes after the quake my nieces grandparents rang from their village south west of kamaishi to say that they were fine but that just about every building in their village had been damaged by the quake, some seriously and that there were people seriously injured and probably fatalities . (post Tsunami that village is now pretty much totally destroyed and almost its entire population is missing. One week after the event we are looking at about 30 people from our extended family still unaccounted for.) back on topic I'm impressed given the destruction that has occurred that the rector has held up as well as it has, I know the nearby daini reactors are newer but it would be interesting to the see just what the differences were that have kept the number 2 station mostly off the radar

...were's the "I'm already dead" option.

do you mean your deceased relatives? or the book by Evelyn Waugh? or is it the (disbanded) band? I think I'd take the book

to true I've got an old G5 tower still doing server duties under my desk... it's 37 outside (98 deg f) and I swear the G5 is helping it push it past 100 f inside..... time to turn on the old Mitsubishi air con....

recreation time after work... apparently, that's how it's pitched to us... funny I could see that working in Sydney, but not summer , rather for winter, as they live on the east side of their time time zone and they walk out of work in to the pitch black of night during standard time winter, but, Perth folk have, being on the west side of their time zone, a good hour of daylight to commute home in but in summer? meh I don't really get it

Our work clocks and many computers failed to remember that the western third of the country voted daylight saving/summer time down in to the trash heap of history and promptly told us we all were an hour late turning up for work this morning.... my guess is it will take them ... 4 months maybe?... to fix the clocks and the messed up online calendars.

I'm pretty sure if you check that's the diesel VW Polo model were as the Mazda has a petrol engine. Sadly even though here in Australia diesel cars are selling great guns and in Europe they already dominate most market segments for some reason north Americans don't like diesel cars. That said this sort of economy is not surprising, my daewoo matiz (sparks or something like that in the US) gets around 4.5 liters per 100 klm (a shade under 60Mpg) using rather primitive engine tech, compare that to the full size 4WD that at 18 liters per 100klm's gets taken out so rarely now that we have to wipe the cobwebs off it (true story). given the Daewoo range is no longer sold in my market and the local GM company (Holden) reneged on a commitment to sell it under their badge, my next car was going to be a diesel VW polo but if this Mazda 2 is released in Australia in 2011 or 2012 I'll give it serious consideration.

You wouldn't even need to be at a event like comic con - finding a thousand people in greater Tokyo area a minor affair - it's 0.0028% of the population and is like the queue for one train at one platform at one station one day of a normal working week... given that hard core fans will attend multiple gigs (or the whole tour) you could say that the number of unique attendants at each show of a tour would be, say, only 75% now your only talking 750 people. I've played gigs to bigger crowd on the small stage at a festival in Australia to punters who, perhaps, maybe, only 10% of had even heard of us let alone heard our music before but only came out of curiosity (and a crowd of 1000 people there worked out to being about 0.0588% of Brisbane's population) . Lets see Miku give a concert to 25,000+ people on main stage on the final night of Fuji Rock and THEN I'll say yeh we have a real .. um unreal... Rei Toei... (actually I'd want to see that, that would be a significant event in the history of music)... until then ? meh? it's fun it's cute but it's no threat to anything but a few peoples egos. my personal take on the whole thing is that it, (the Vocaloid program) is just another instrument, I've tried it, I've seen/heard some interesting stuff on the net but really it's just another part of one stream of musics evolvution... Peter Gabrial, Laurie Anderson et. al. all did a sort of vocal sampling thing to death with the, rather more difficult in comparison, fairlight in the late 80's and "fake" popstars are older than The Archies...