Promise of a new day
I've made no bones about the shortcomings of the digital camera I've been using in recent months. Not only does the resolution suck, not only does it fail dismally at handling contrasts between bright and dark, but it has an alarming tendency to blot all the pictures I've taken from memory by the time I get it home.Time was, I had a better camera. Still a cheap point-and-clicker, for which I paid much too much at Cyberrebate on the eve of its bankruptcy, but it took pictures that were orders of magnitude more beautiful than I've been able to manage of late.
But my old camera began shutting down the laptop every time I plugged it into the USB port. One of the programmers at work suggested the problem was a corrupted driver, but I never tried working around it. I just stopped taking new pictures. After Crosswinds' repeated trashing of my pages, it was the major factor behind my loss of motivation to keep this journal going.
That is why I took a chance on a $10-after-rebate camera at Office Max, even though I knew in my heart that at those prices the results were bound to be dismal. Still, just as with the Bush presidency, I had no idea just how horrible and frustrating things would acually be.
This morning, in the It's About Time department, I decided to dust off my old camera and plug it into the same USB cable I've been using for my cheap piece of crap. And it worked like a charm.
"And all that's best of dark and bright"It reveals true colors. It handles contrast sufficiently well that the snow-capped peaks in direct sunlight aren't entirely a white washed-out blob. And Windows XP speaks its language. It recognized the camera and installed it as soon as I plugged it in, and now whenever I plug it in again it automatically launches the Windows Scanning/Camera wizard, which is much easier to use than the proprietary software that came with my cheap piece of crap.
Ah, the happiness of simple things.
