R.I.P. display

About two weeks ago i dropped my camera. Accidentally out of my pants
when picking them up in the morning. Fell about half a meter, maybe.
But fucked up the display, as it seems. Now it only displays some
psychodelic colours. They move a bit but mostly stay the same.
I have this camera - my first digital one - since March 2005. And just
took over 20000 - in words: twenty thousand - pictures. I haven't
counted, but the camera has an internal counter that resets to zero
after ten thousand pics. Anyways. 20000, now no more display.

This is kinda insteresting for me because it brings me back to where
i've been before: Lomography. I took thousands of pics when i was
seventeen (and after that) on good old analogue films. Still miss the
colour produced by that chemical process. And by the lense of the LOMO
camera. If you don't know what i'm talking about,
nevermind(www.lomography.com might help). Basically some Viennese
students discovered this ~1980 camera in the nineties and started
talking pictures in a new way. It's surprisingly different to what
people used to do with cameras. And it's one of the reasons i took
even more pics, thousands of pics, always finding cheap ways to
develop them. Back then, pre-digital, that was costly. 39 to 42 pics
per roll of film. And me being a teenager without fixed income.
Anyways, it also disturbed some people how one can take pics without
looking through that tiny little hole in the camera to see, as they
presumed, "what will be on the picture". As if that little hole would
tell you so much about it... it just blocks most of your view of the
beautiful world around you.
And now i'm back to taking pictures without "seeing what i shoot"
first, hehe. No more display. Kinda annoying that i have no way of
seeing when the camera memory is full. But since the display is fucked
i might as well empty my memory card each time i connect to the
computer. That was more visible in the good old LOMO, turning the roll
of film (or not if you want double exposures) manually after each
shot. Anyways. Fun, fun, fun. As soon as i get more things to shoot in
front of my camera.

Other than that not much news to write about from my side. I'm
offshore since December 9th. Meaning that i am writing this from a
platform somewhere in South China Sea. Got my helicopter ride. Taking
off the first time was fun. Other than that it was like expected -
loud and boring. Being offshore the first time has its fascinating
aspects - when you walk on those fence-like things and have the water
thirty to fourty meters below you. On the first day i saw some fish
down there. Must've been about one and a half meters long, judging
from the height. Other than that i was doing night shifts most of the
times. Getting up when it was already dark. And in the mornings it was
misty almost all the times. When i told a colleague that i only saw
the sun after more than a week he was surprized. Then i realized that
ususally the clouds open up a bit during the day and the sun comes
through. Just that i was asleep at those times, mostly.
I'll most probably be here until sometime in January, so "Guten
Rutsch"=happy new year to everyone. 2008 should bring some interesting
changes, hmmm.

And by the way, a friend of mine wrote me "I hope that you live only
from love and air over there" and this link (in German, sorry)
http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/0,1518,522693,00.html
I feel like i would prefer to eat nothing at all as long as i'm in
this country. But one has to survive. Food as such is not bad here,
offshore. Just what's in the food, apparently all over China,...
disgusting. So much for that. Back in good old Europe i had the
feeling that even if i bought cheap food products they had to follow
at least a certain standard, given all the food laws and standards.
But of course i can't count on European standards around here, i'm a
bit far off...

--
Cheers
CGA