Sunday before last, I stopped at the Walmart at exit 200 (north of Seattle) for my usual dazed stumble through the wonders of modern mass commerce. I was looking, among other things, for an architect's lamp -- the kind that clamp to the edge of a drafting table. This, I did not find, but I did find and buy two other interesting things:

1) A very expensive lightbulb. Philips-branded, 10-watt LED bulb, Cree-based, quad-emitter, claims 200 lumens, feels rather hefty in its (aluminum?) finned, long-necked glory. An otherwise identically specced / packaged / priced bulb with a shorter neck was also available, and perhaps I should have gone for that one instead. I chose the long-neck, thinking I would put it into a gooseneck lamp I have; turns out, this bulb is just a touch wide for its tapering shade, even with the long neck. $40 and tax for a lightbulb seems like rather a lot, I realize, but that's what I get to do for not taking up smoking or gambling many years ago. (This is my cigarette and gambling money!) Though it's billed as a floodlight, that's a generous description -- beam is fairly tight. Certainly wider than some LED bulbs, though. Warmish, "incandescent" cast -- really not bad. I like having a bulb that I can leave on without much worry about either the electricity consumed or the bulb's lifespan, and with IMO a much nicer color than typical CFLs. I'm aware that the economics are a bit silly, but so is saving money on a play to see a cheaper one you don't care for.

2) Unexpectedly, I also found a small articulated mains-powered LED desk lamp, the same sort of thing I mentioned being in search of a few weeks back. This is the sort of lamp that would have been equipped w/ a small (very hot!) halogen bulb not long ago, and cost considerably more. It took me a while to find a price, in fact, but eventually I found a store clerk who scanned the box for me, and pleasantly surprised me: $19-and-change. The lamp comes just-about fully assembled; just need to extract the body from the compact box, and secure it (captive thumbscrew) to the weighted base. Plug it in -- two-prong outlet, flip the switch, and don't have the lamp pointed at your eyes. The switch is conveniently on the cord, rather than the lamp base. Convenient for me, at least; ymmv. The beam color of this no-name lamp is a bit harsher / colder than the Philips bulb, but a) the whole thing is half the price and b) I don't find the blueish, cooler cast at all unpleasant. It uses a grid of 16 LEDs; the box is vague about rating. Happy overkill as an over-the-shoulder reading lamp, though. I'm using it next to my small, lofted bed, with the business end pointed at the ceiling, so the beam is slightly mellowed by the bounce.

They should be bright enough to see; use a light sensor, maybe? Default is OFF (you don't want a "Situation normal" LED on all the time when you're watching a movie on the laptop); ON is for caps lock / numlock / etc. IOW, situations where it being on would cause annoyance if you expected the default.

(On my netbook, the indicators are in the lower right of the keyboard half of the open case -- that is, right where the user's right wrist blocks seeing them. On my Toshiba Satellite, the caps-lock indicator is embedded on the Caps Lock key -- again, unreadable when typing, because blocked by hands -- but so dim as to be useless anyhow. Design idiocy :))

Ideally, I want a searchable index of everything I ever write online, and with at least one view of that being time-stamped chunks of plain text I can scroll through.

To that end, "Timestamp and mail logs?" would be a good standard option on all IM / chat programs. (Some programs -- Pidgin, say -- do a good job of this. Gmail does a good thing by treating gchat conversations as like gmail messages, making them searchable.) Facebook and many others do not, or do it badly. (iChat can keep logs, but they're in a hard-to-search format. I wonder how many iChat users ever make use of those logs.)

- Thursday past, walking up Pike St. toward 15th, well into the dark of evening, I saw a metallic-painted Prius going downhill with its lights off. I wonder if he was trying to go easy on the batteries. Penny-wise ...

- Not unrelated, I think a funny cartoon / satirical column about life here could be called "Silently Judging."

- For those who live in Capitol Hill: Video Connection, at 15th and Harrison (near Remedy Tea, and a Subway location) is going out of business. I bought two seasons of Penn & Teller's excellent Showtime series for $12 each, and the movie "Going Postal" (which looks funny to me, but is evidently *not* well regarded) for $1. No sales tax if you're paying cash. TV sets, $12. Most DVDs, $5. Some specialty selections, $7 (or more, as marked). No Dexter Season 1, which I'd hoped to find -- oh, well! A small selection is going for $1 apiece. The employee I talked to said that Saturday will probably have sort of a party atmosphere as they sell off from the dwindling stock, and that Sunday will most likely be too late.

- Also of CapHill interest: The Capitol Hill Seattle Blog. (I was just reminded of it while seeking out the name of the video place mentioned above.)

- Data point: From home on Capitol Hill to 5th & Pike, about 30 minutes at a brisk walk. 45-50 the other way, because it's harder to maintain a brisk walk uphill. Far pleasanter (lighter slope) to walk up Pike or Pine than one of the streets parallel and north. The ideal bus trip is about 20 minutes, but requires timing departure w/ hoped-for bus arrival. (Not that Seattle's buses are generally far off, but when a bus is two minutes early, it's hard to know, if the passenger is only *one* minute early.)

- Another data point: Though I didn't note when I *entered* the library, it took 20 minutes to walk from 5th and Pike to the Central Branch castle, check out the book I had on reserve, scan the feature-films shelf, and check out. At least some nights, I think my plan will be to close down the library, then Barnes & Noble, before heading back up the hill.

- This evening, Pad Se Ew at Ayutthaya Thai Cuisine (727 E Pike St  Seattle, Washington 98122). $12.60, modulo tip but incl.tax, for Pad Se Ew, a side of white rice (which was fine, but I wish I'd asked for brown), and delicious but lethal Thai lime tea. "Is that sweet?" I asked before ordering; the proprietor nearly winced as he nodded Yes. Fair enough! Reading through dinner, am now most of the way through "Dexter by Design." Sm. bag of leftovers, for a midnight snack. Very nice little place -- prices reasonable, pleasant service, decor neat and clean, portions decent if not overwhelming. It was very hard to get below half-full on my water, which was also mentioned in the review posted outside. Definitely will eat there again.

- Earlier, also finally got a veggie dog from Cyber Dog; about $5.60 for "just the dog and (green) onions" and a Snapple. The hotdog itself was fine, pleasant even, but literally about half the size I'd expected. More like the length of an index finger than anything I'd call a hotdog. Still, it was a novelty, and now I know. The free internet and quirky atmosphere blunts my indignation; I'm sure I'll stop there once in a while if I keep up the habit of working downtown.

I'm insomniac and impatient, sometimes at the same time. I find it helps me sleep to play some sort of audiobook or recorded lecture (often from EconTalk.org) in the background, or (similar to an audiobook) sometimes a movie that I know well -- like The Big Lebowski -- so I can hear the soundtrack and mentally picture each scene.

So, the glad tidings? Cross-platform media jackknife VLC has gotten much better than it was a few years ago about changing the playback speed of whatever it's playing, and since VLC plays so very many formats, that means I can (even when not trying to fall asleep) now watch downloaded YouTube videos at 130pct of their original speed, get through more of podcast or book in the same time, etc.

How to use it: Start whatever you'd like to make faster with VLC. Then, under VLC's Playback menu, select the option "Faster (fine)" (There's also plain old "Faster," "Slower," "Slower (fine)," and "Normal Speed.") Each time you select one of the (fine) choices, playback speed is affected by 10pct in the chosen direction.

Fairly obscure as a feature, I realize, but I like it. Listening to classical music (or even classic rock) probably isn't a good time for speeding up playback; listening to speakers with interesting things to say but slow voices seems like a victory. Likewise, a small percentage increase in the speed of movies doesn't seem to change my comprehension or enjoyment, but it does give me a few more minutes in which to do other things. It's amazing to me how watchable / normal Young Frankenstein looks at 150pct, but then, it's a movie I know well; at 130pct, it's not too bad, and at 110pct, I might even *prefer* the quicker version to the original.

With extreme speedup, quick-talking characters can get a bit quicker than you might like, but it's interesting how many dialog scenes seem just fine. Cars on a highway, people walking, and other action scenes become jarring much more quickly; the Bourne movies' fight scenes probably aren't well suited to even a nudge in the direction of faster. (Might be nice to have a per-movie Edit Decision List that does nothing but speed up the bits that can take it, and slow down the most interesting choreography.)

A few small gripes about this excellent feature:

- Not fine grained enough; the "fine" adjustment only goes by 10pct increments; I know it's picayune, but there are some things where I'd rather 13pct (say), because +13pct sounds fine while +20pct is too fast.

- It only works for the current thing playing (that is, the movie, or mp3, etc), rather than for the others in the playlist. I can see why that's the default, but a checkbox for "apply to rest of playlist" would please me.

Final note: I wish my car stereo ran VLC, so I could use this feature there as well.

Yesterday I upgraded from Ubuntu 9.10 to the latest build of 10.4 on my four-years-ancient Toshiba laptop (will turn five this year).

The upgrade took a while (I started the download the previous night), but was otherwise relatively painless, using the built-in update manager.

Bootup isn't 10, or 15, or 20 seconds for me -- I counted to 61 Mississippi, with a pause in counting to enter my password, until I had a working Gnome desktop. (Not sure what the startup was under 9.10; this seems snappier, though. Maybe expectation bias.) I look forward to trying it out w/ newer hardware, though!

I think the small, subtle envelope icon in the task bar is a nice touch -- it's got various communication options there (though I'd like to cull the Evolution one from it, since I don't use Evolution, but I don't know how to do that culling). Empathy finally works for me, too, which is good -- though I like Gajim, I'd like to have my IM stuff more consolidated.

So, this drive may go ahead and finish the dying that I thought had happened weeks ago (ha ha, I've backed up this time, you foolish drive), but maybe it'll keep alive for a while now. Will be a good preview of the real 10.4, too -- hopefully no major bug bites ...

Laptop's dying hard drive led me to CostCo for an external drive as a file-rescue device; now the laptop is again working, but probably on its last legs, so I'm not trusting it as a place to keep any new data.

But that doesn't matter right now.

What I'm happy about isn't finding that the first drive I bought (Western Digital Passport) didn't work with either my Toshiba (dying) laptop or my Asus (working) netbook and that I had to go return it. It's that while doing the usual dazed stroll through CostCo, and fruitlessly seeking a decent LED table lamp, I found that their current two-pack of LED flashlights (for a few years now, they've had at least one pair of LED flashlights on offer whenever I've looked) contains what look like pretty nice ones:

- textured reflector
- 3xAAA power (I'd prefer AA, but Hey)
- adjustable focus
- claimed output of 160 lumens

The pair is $20. That's awesome :)

Trying to get the data off the dying drive in my previously most-used laptop; am working mostly from my netbook in the meantime.

The Western Digital "My Passport" drive I bought yesterday at CostCo doesn't mount in Linux (Ubuntu 9.10): gParted doesn't show it, it doesn't show up on the desktop. I had assumed that I'd plug it in, immediately reformat w/ gParted to either ext3 or FAT32, and then plug it into the dying machine to slurp off the data, but no joy.

Googling finds that lots of people have had trouble w/ this line of drives under Linux (and some under OS X) as well.

A smaller complaint: this drive comes with a very small USB connector on the drive, and two cables: one of them is very short (maybe 16 inches), one of them is longer (a few feet) but the drive end is an ungainly docking station. I wish they'd have gone w/ a more conventional USB plug, so replacements would be easier to find, and I could choose a length I wanted from the always-growing stockpile of USB cables. (One day I need to count the total number of USB connector-type combinations I've got going ... I'm confident it's more than 10.)

Guess that 2d part doesn't much matter -- I'll be returning this drive today.

Preface: Yes, I complain a lot, but in this case like many others, I complain about things that I truly like quite a bit overall, but that I think could be much better than they are.

That said, here's my complaint about Synaptic, a mostly excellent graphical front-end to the Apt package manager: I can't figure out what "Quick Search" means, or why it's separate from "Search."

"Quick Search" is a nicely visible option when you run Synaptic; there's a text-entry field and a button for Quick Search. Since "Search" (just plain "Search") is available as a menu item next to Quick Search, I wonder what the point is. I'm sure there's something about this I don't get. Does Quick Search only search some subset of the available data? If so, how is it narrowed down? And why does Quick Search usually seem to get back exactly nothing, while the regular Search finds what I want?

Example: There's a set of four like-sized pictures I'd like to combine into one bigger picture. Sure, I could do this (somewhat laboriously) in The Gimp, but I know that ImageMagick already has a built-in function for doing this with a small dose of command line. Since I don't think this machine has ImageMagick installed, I fire up Synaptic and refresh the package information.

Then I type "magick" into the Quick Search box; results: nothing.

But if I select "search" instead, and do the same search, I get a nice list of results. Turns out, I already have ImageMagick installed (good).

As an experiment, I just ran the same search as before via Quick Search: *now* QuickSearch shows the same results as does the regular search. I wonder if this would have been true the other times I've been baffled by the blank results from Quick Search (that is, that the Quick Search would have succeeded, if I'd already run a regular search), but even if so, What's the difference?

Confusing, I say.

-------------------

Aside: Making a 2x2 grid from 4 identically sized rectangular images is not hard, but not especially intuitive, either, at least not to me. Here's a generalized version of the command that worked, based on the example at the ImageMagick site:
$ montage file01.jpg file02.jpg file03.jpg file04.jpg --geometry +2+2 outputfilename.jpg

My name it Tim, and I like flashlights.

Several weeks ago, I gave in to long-taunting temptation, and bought my most powerful flashlight yet, a Fenix TK-40.

It's nowhere near as bright as the 4000+ lumen light that ThinkGeek* sells (http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/lights/cd85/-- Yowza!), but it's pretty respectable -- 600+ lumens bright, and runs on AAs, my favorite batteries.

Right now, in fact, I'm using this flashlight, set on Medium (which is still pretty bright-- 93 lumens, supposedly, though it far outshines another flashlight I've got that's supposed to be putting out 120 lumens) to illuminate my small room. It's not bright compared to a typical conventional light-bulb, but even with it angled on a shelf and bouncing off the ceiling (not pointing toward me), it's bright enough to read by, and it means I can see my keyboard. Switching it to high for a bit, it provides a a lot more light than does the "60 watt equivalent" CFL I have in a small gooseneck fixture and would ordinarily be using.

All of which brings me to the question: if for around $130, it's profitable enough to bother selling a light this bright that's also packaged in a waterproof, portable package, why can't I find similarly bright LED desk-, stand-, or clamp-mounted lights made for mains power? I'm picturing something like this multi-headed beast (http://tinyurl.com/yettgqm), but with each head being a very bright LED module.

And Yes, I realize that the answer is simple enough, in one sense: I can't find this because no one, including me, has decided the gains to be had were so worthwhile on a [(returns)x(probability of success)-(overhead and opportunity cost)] basis. Thank you, Captains Obvious!

But I think (and am sugggesting!) that for someone already in the lamp-making business or seeking to enter it, using ultra-bright LEDs in a flexible mount of some kind would be a worthwhile business.

Even more blue-sky: I'd like to have a ceiling grid of power points on which I could snap / magnetically attach / velcro / etc. downward-facing (or even ceiling-bouncing) LED modules wherever I wanted. Put a bunch of dim (or dimmable) ones around the edges, for watching movies in the mostly-dark, or a cluster of brighter ones to point down at delicious food at the dining room table, or a few remote-controlled pointable medium spotlights for reading lamps.

How about ceiling robots with belly lights, that could hold to the ceiling with whatever gecko-foot technology manifests in the next few years? (Prepare for an awful pun: "Mr. Watss On, come here.") Sweep an area you want illuminated with your hand, and make it so.

But for now, Hey, I'd really be pleased just to have a night bright LED lamp that I don't need to feed batteries.

* If you care, ThinkGeek shares Slashdot's corporate umbrella, and Slashdot pays me, though that has nothing to do w/ my mentioning ThinkGeek here on Slashdot. Capice?

Three more complaints, all to do w/ my netbook, a 10" Asus Eee running Ubuntu (9.10 right now -- perhaps one or both fixed in the current versions of the upcoming 10.4, but haven't tried there yet, and that's not the point anyhow):

1) Suspend / Resume (and related stuff) still sucks. It works ... sometimes. Occasionally. Slightly more often than once in a blue moon. Have I filed a bug report? No; neither have I reported to the National Weather Service that it's occasionally overcast in Seattle.

- Regular "Suspend" (from the menu in the upper right on my quite conventional Gnome desktopo) doesn't work except once in a while. When it works, it works as I'd expect: screen blanks, HD spins down, power button blinks to signal that it's not actually *off.* Out of optimism, I often try using Suspend, but since waking up usually doesn't happen, I've taken to more and more often just fully shutting down.

- Sometimes, whether the machine is plugged in or not, my screen simply goes blank after a while; music playing in VLC continues to play, but nothing I can think of awakens the screen. (The three biggies I can think of: fingering the trackpad, hitting keys, pressing the power button, on the basis that the power button's the way to wake it up from suspend when it actually does suspend.) So, as annoying as this is, the only thing I know to do is force a shutdown by pressing the power button. I don't mind a screen blanking after a while when the machine is not used for a while, and in fact, I'd like it to be easier to trigger (as when it's just serving as a music player), but I don't like it happening at the expense of being able to actually use the machine.

- Sometimes my screen just freezes -- except the pointer. I can move the pointer around all I want when this happens; I just can't do anything else.

2) Firefox is my browser of choice; on this 600-pixel-high screen, though, I often want to run it full-screen; F11 should trigger (and escape from) full-screen mode, and sometimes it even does. Usually I have to go to the View menu and select Full Screen, though. This seems like a pretty basic thing. Not a life-ender, and I'll take a slightly broken full-screen selector over not having the option at all, but still. This is like having a passenger window in a car that only rolls down some of the time -- not the worst thing in the world, but doesn't make me happy.

3) And this one baffles me: When I start VLC (my favorite music player, generally) by clicking on an MP3 or Ogg file, it stutters for the first several seconds of whatever file I've clicked on. This is 2010, and this machine (upgraded to 2GB of RAM) was purchased in early 2009; MP3s would play acceptably on a 100 MHz 486, IIRC. At the very least, if playing MP3s is a strain, buffer them first rather than play the stuttering part. But how can it be a strain? Once it's playing, even subsequent tracks play fine.

- - - - - - - - - -

Don't get me wrong: I still like Ubuntu, and am glad that it mostly runs well and nicely.

Advice on fixing any of these things appreciated, as long as it's in short enough words and does not assume that I know much, because I don't. I remember that in Mac OS 8 (maybe 9, too, maybe OS X, and maybe in 7 and earlier, too -- not sure) it was easy to assign different amounts of RAM to different apps. Maybe there's a way to do that for VLC, and maybe it would help? Dunno. RAM starvation on a lightly loaded machine w/ 2GB seems unlikely ...

A few unsorted complaints:

- Bookshelves should have backs! Bookshelves without backs are weaker, and complicate placement -- they basically must be against a wall, unless you don't care that books (or whatever else gets placed on bookshelves) at least sometimes will fall out the back. (Best workaround: put a back on!)

- The sort of pens I like to write with (roller balls, usually) don't do well on airplanes. I'd like a pen that has good writing feel, but that I can use on a plane. Most of my pens become a danger during (or subsequent to) any flight, because of the pressure. (Best workaround, but one I don't like nearly as well -- pencil.)

- Computerish devices (incl. phones) with cameras should either let that camera rotate, or have one that faces the back of the device as well as the front. Who cares about front-facing cameras? If I'm on the phone with you, I probably either already know or don't care what you look like, and don't necessarily care for you looking at my face while we're talking. But I might want to show you the burning building I'm calling to report, or the house I'm inquiring about, etc. (Best workaround: hire better designers.)

For reasons of household network harmony, I am in the market for an Apple Airport Express.

Haven't bought it yet (a few Craigslist leads, though -- if none pan out, Amazon is slightly cheaper than Apple), but here are some thoughts based on what little I know:

- Would have been handy in Vegas, where in-room internet was very expensive. I forgot to bring along my tiny WiFlyer, which is too bad. MyFi coverage in Vegas during CES was very poor.

- I like the size -- for all it does, looks very packable even on plane trips :) But for that, I'd want to be confident that I could admin the thing without *needing* an OS X or Windows box around. (For just such things as sharing expensive in-room internet via cable.)

- If I can successfully follow the online guides to getting music to stream via Amarok or other Linux sofware, that would be cool.

- Smart to have the swappable plug-block, I really like that.

- I don't care all that much for or esp. about OS X (I sometimes use it, and like some aspects, dislike others); I am hopeful that the Linux-friendly admin software I've seen will work well for it.

- I wonder if the USB port has any use besides for printing. Not that wireless printing is a bad thing for it provide, but it I wish the A. Express could serve as a micro, instant server, by plugging in a USB stick, as is true of some linksys (perhaps I'm thinking of Netgear, or both) routers.

- Can it be used for wireless bridging? (Hmm. Yes, says the Apple site, but only for extending networks that are based on other Apple basestations ... so, I can't use it to create a zone of multi-device WiFi love at Motel 6 or Starbucks, too bad.)

- One nice thing (though not esp. compatible w my general unenthusiastic view of OS X*) is that the people who make Make magazine are enamored of Apple's wireless stuff, and often post about interesting hacks involving it.

- The user reviews on the Apple site and at Amazon are the usual polarized "Awesome!" vs. "Sucks!" ... given my relationship to computer documentation, I have my fingers crossed.

- I wish it had an antenna port for greater range. (Seems like an easy win, to me ... oh, well. I think the same about laptops with built-in Wifi.)

What else should I be thinking of and know about? It looks like a nifty device that will at least improve my network connectivity (tall house, and Yes, based on an Apple wireless infrastructure) at home, and I hope will be useful for me while traveling (with a Linux machine) as well.

timothy

* OS X is what it is, and I am not enough of a power user to complain except wrt my own purposes, prejudices, and preferences. If you like it, great, and enjoy!

Dream:

On a plane, flying to Seattle.

My friend C. Potocki, on the same plane, by coincidence.

Plane not too crowded; I was the only one in my triplet of seats, though most rows had 2 or 3.

Very low flight path, came close (on purpose) to some apt bldgs., which I was surprised by, though the flight was very controlled. (Note: in waking life, discussion the other day w/ housemate about Seattle's flight paths.)

Flash to air traffic control room; the ATC assigned to our flight was an obnoxious jerk but evidently competent; for some reason, he was nervous about our flight, was wondering whether to land a plane behind us in the queue first, to make sure it landed safely on the runway that we were to use, so if there was trouble, it wouldn't affect both planes.

Flash to a railway line on the way to the airport. The area with the tracks -- just two, one for each direction -- is slightly sunken, bounded by chicken wire fences for safety, low bridges cross it (for autos, parks, housing, etc, on the other side of the fence) -- as if the existing light rail went a longer path, and passed through slightly more rural / suburban area. A crowd on the tracks, tense but not actually a riot. Most of the crowd is there because they saw a smaller crowd and were curious. However, there is some tension, and finally one man (maybe more) splits from the crowd, just as it's clear to more people (incl. my anon. observer) that there are police among the people in this knot, and they've been trying to arrest / subdue at least the one who runs out. He gets out through a hole or gate in the fence, but there's a stand-off, crowd is tense and yelling, while cops yell for him to stop (which he does, at least for a bit) while they are still on the inside of the fence, but bearing down on him with guns.

That's all I recall.

I have come close a few times to giving in and getting a Pentax K2000; have seen it on Amazon (with a kit lens) for just over $500. The K-x, though, which is essentially Pentax's successor model to the K2000 (a few more megapixels, and available in several colors by default rather than as special thing), is available now for not much more, and (the big distinguishing factor, as far as I'm concerned) offers HD video recording. I am impressed by how good SLRs have gotten for video. I care more about still shots, but sometimes video is very worthwhile. (My niece bonking me on the head with her toy sofa, for instance, is best enjoyed as a moving picture.)

At the moment, this is the front-runner candidate for my next camera.

- Pentax mount -- lots of lens options; I am not an anti-kit-lens snob, but it would be nice to get a nice bright pancake lens on this body for everyday shooting, slowly seek out other options.
- I like the ergonomics, and the UI isn't bad (UIs are hard to get right). The K-x veers pretty far toward simplicity rather than feature completeness, but that's OK, IMO. Plenty of manual options are at least available, though I would prefer more of the controls were more immediately available as buttons, switches, toggles, etc.
- AA batteries, just the way I prefer. You may think that's crazy, as is your right.

Maybe I'll end up getting one of these later in 2010 -- would be good for family reunion, work-related gatherings, sister's wedding, travel generally ...

Pretty amazing; I believe I paid something over $200 for a used Pentax K1000 (film camera, one I really liked -- low-end, but respectable and treasured by many users for its robust construction and simplicity) and a f1.4 50mm lens in the early 90s -- 1992, I think.

According to this random site (http://www.measuringworth.com/ppowerus/result.php), $200 then had the purchasing power of about $306 now; think how crazy it would have been in 1992 to be able to trade a $150 premium over a cheap used 35mm outfit for what can be had for the equivalent money today. Impressive!

I wonder if there will be any AA-powered 4/3 mount cameras; that's one thing I wouldn't mind some leading into temptation for.