Three Things

(Click to enlarge as always)
From the left, we have my new(ish) cellphone.
It's an LG VX8300 and I feel safe recommending this model, especially over those fad phones like Chocolate™. It's got a solid feel and has more features than I'll ever use.
Because the LG is a speakerphone the ringer is loud enough to be heard in a bar.
In fact there's a speaker on each side of the pivot point that are actually stereo.
Mainly I got it for the 1.3 megapixel camera that has pretty much every feature you would find on a point and shoot digital camera 5 years ago except for optical zoom.
Who else makes a phone-camera with white balance choices and 1280x960 resolution?
Comes in handy more than I thought it would, providing plenty of content for one of my other photoblogs.

In the middle we have the new flashlight.
3 LEDs, 3 AAA batteries, tons of lumens.
Still haven't used it at work so the jury's still out, but it's my go-to flashlight right now.
It's a little too fat to slip into my back pocket the way a MiniMag™ does so on Saturday the testing begins.

On the right we have Sylvia's new SanDisk Sansa™ e250 2GB mp3 player which supports photos and videos.
This is the best alternative to iPods and especially the fatally-flawed Zune, or so I have read.
Here comes the fun part, where I get to tell how we discovered a half-hour after leaving the store that the minimum system requirements for a Sansa are Windows XP and Windows Media Player 10.

I still run Win98se.
My media player is probably version negative 2.
Not good.

After Googling for hours and hours and hours and finding exactly one useful thread hiding in an anti-iPod message board inhabited by an "expert" and a guinea pig who got his Sansa to work with Win98se, the fun began.
Short story is that after two system crashes and 4 days of running the nightmare through my head, I got it to work with a badly out of date operating system.
No pictures or video can be transferred this way, but getting mp3s onto it was the main focus and I won that battle. Not unlike the story of David and Goliath except with Keith vs Bill Gates, which is oh so much goofier.
The first song converted to mp3 and transferred to the Sansa was from my Physical Graffiti(sic) CDs.
Kashmir by Led Zeppelin.

Under the three things is a cigar box that I bought for $2(empty) knowing it might come in handy as a prop someday. I plan to put a print inside the top lid and use it as a flip-up picture frame with storage space.

The scene was lit using a diffused 85w Natural bulb for highlights and the FVL-F1000 flash I was recently given bounced off the wall just over my setup's black backdrop.
Photoshopping was much, much less than most of my pictures get.

Data was recorded on a new Sony 512MB Memory Stick Pro™ card that is faster at both recording and formatting compared to the non-Pro sticks I have been using. This new addition quadruples the number of images I can record before changing to another, and nearly triples my total memory space.

After review I suppose the title of this post should be 'Six Things'.


Here's the exact setup for the photo above, minus the phone which was used to take this snapshot.