Steven&co - Estonian tales

Seen snow already, early morning yesterday; this morning started with a chilly -0,2 degrees... Trying to observe the breathclouds walking on the sidewalk out of the windows of a cold trolleybus, slightly changing course to hear the first crack of the first thin layer of ice on the puddles, pondering wether or not to get out that cap already (wherever I put that thing away for the summer). Good thing that I am not in Belgium, where it is now an unhealthy 20 degrees :-)

Luckily, one of the nice things of being your own boss is that you can work from home quite often. Nice and warm with the baby in the background - bring on that winter!

On October 20th

• 72,5 cm
• 8,010 kg
• 44 cm around the head

I had to do a month without one, but I finally managed to buy a new one digital camera - as from today, I can terrorize the family again with a brand new Canon Powershot A510.

It must be said that Canon has the best optics in this price range, and enough reputation to convince me of sufficient quality. Anyway, the choice for this A510 with "only" 3.2 megapixels was not made lightly; I spent evenings on the internet and roaming the shops to find the best deal for sale in Tallinn - the A510 was a logical choice. Not the most sexy camera available (for some serious drooling, check out the Olympus Stylus 600), but a decent little thing with two undeniable advantages: it uses ordinary AA batteries (rechargeable, courtesy to mother nature) and has an optical viewfinder instead of only an lcd screen. Call me old-fashioned... This camera will take me some getting used to though, the flowery taste of autumn has to do as a first try (it is cropped from 2048x1536 to 640x480 - so don't draw any conclusions as to quality yet).

Now how much did all this cost? 178,85 € for the camera, a nice Case Logic pouch for 6,09 €, a superfast memorycard SanDisk Secure Digital Ultra II 1 gigabyte 101,92 € (which, plugged into my laptop, doubles as emergency external memory for documents), and a bit of extra power provided by the new 2500 mAh rechargeables from GP for 18,91 €. 305,77 € in all - slightly surpassing my set budget of 300 €. I don't need any extra's any more now though.

A review of this camera can be found on http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/canon/powershot_a510_a520-review/, where you can also find images of the camera itself.