Month: December 2003

Consumer’s blues

Buying a digital camera is not easy.

There are too much specs, which soon left me caring mostly for mega-pixels and optical zoom and, to a lesser degree, for the type of batteries and storage. Viewfinder, manual aperture, bla-bla-bla, i don’t have the attention, i give up.

There is a good helper site, dpreview, but as i said, there are too much specs to choose from and it’s not so clear where do the prices listed there come from. It is definite, however, that the prices in Israel are droven up wildly. Only a complete sucker will buy a camera in a retail store here; online stores and duty-free seem better, but:

  • The duty-free is a mystery, as their website is too terse and doesn’t seem to be up-to-date and they don’t give any “marketing information” (?!) on the phone, so there’s no way to know if they have the brands i want.
  • Online stores seem to be rather cheap, but they ship after 21 days and i’m flying next Monday.

I will buy a camera eventually…

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London definitely waits for me

El’ad went all the way to Eilat to get his passport. After being strung around by the govt. for a week — will it or will not come in the mail? — it finally came, so we are flying and it is final.

In the duty-free i’m planning to buy a digital camera — Canon A80 or maybe G3… I’m accesorising myself — minidisc, discman, colour cellphone, Ray-Ban, Hohner, Latin Dictionary, good stuffs. In London i’m not planning to buy nothing but beer, beer, beer, beer, beer, beer, beer, beer, whiskey and some very silly souvenir for Avital O. (he specifically asked for something very silly).

now playing:
When you have it, you suffer,
And when you don’t, you suffer,
Her name is Pussy Hell.
(T. Albert 1994)

Telit ist L33t

Hello. I have a new cellphone. It’s my fourth since 1997. It is made by a company that i have never heard of before — Telit; i got it because its ability to store 1500 phone numbers captured my attention. It also has an SMS quick-speller and a color display! Ya mama. I have a strange feeling that for the first time i got a cellphone a little before that model became completely obsolete.

The website says that the company is Italian, but the user’s manual says that it’s Korean. Whatever’s the truth, it felt great when i saw that their download section was written in Italian and could read it. That’s how bugs can sometimes make people happy.

Light Bor

My lovely government builds a bunker for itself in Jerusalem. Apparently it is very big with miles and miles of tunnels with a center in the Government campus in Givat-Ram. The tunnels were shown on TV — and if they were just a few inches wider, they could be used for a metropolitan underground. Above the ground a light rail is being built, because a committee found that building an underground would be too expensive. The solution — build them both! The government of Israel, i love you so much.

Baby Musorgsky?

I swear i thought about it myself. Here is my theory about the “Baby Mozart”-tape industry: there is no copyright on classical music! It costs nothing to pay a very cheap orchestra to play it, put it on CD, publish a mocked-up “scientific study” that claims that babies that listen to Mozart grow up smarter — kazoom, the guy‘s a millionaire. I have an absolutely disgusting feeling that he is Jewish. Why Mozart? — because he’s the most famous classical composer and has the most pronouncable name. Imagine “Baby Musorgsky”, “Baby Rimsky-Korsakov”, “Baby Rakhmaninov” or “Baby Händel” — it wouldn’t sell. I should check if there other people who think like me.