To be or not to be

by William Shakespeare

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consumation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To Sleep? Perchance to dream! aye there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of such long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pang's of depised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

My dream camera

Although the camera I have now, is really really great, there is always room to improve, room to dream.

During the last 25 years, I had a number of camera's starting with a Canon A1 in 1978 to my first digital shooter a Nikon Coolpix 5000, till I fell in love with my current Nikon D100 in New York.

Dreaming of things which are too expensive to buy, or for which you don't have a real need professionally, is still fun. So here is my wish list. I think the latest Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II's or Nikon's D2X come very close, but there is still some room for improvement. I’ve also added "compatible with my current lenses", which, in my case, means another Nikon, but this very specific to my personal situation.

The wish list
• Digital SLR camera
• ≥ 10M pixel, allowing some digital zoom/cropping in photoshop
• ≥ 5fps for minimum 4 seconds, let's say minimum 20 images
• Decent LCD, ≥250.000 pixels, ≥2.5 inch
• compact flash card, allowing ≥1Gb microdrives
• Firewire connectivity
• GPS + timestamp built-in
• Lithium Ion battery
• Built-in flash, hot shoe, sync connector
• Playback zoom up to pixel level (10x to 20x)
• 100 to 1600 or more ISO rating
• Shutter 30 secs to 1/8000 sec
• Wireless 802.11 connectivity Remote control
• Connectable to an iPod
• No measurable shutter lag
• Auto/lock/manual focus
• Auto/lock/manual exposure
• User profiles including white balans, AF mode and image quality setting
• Sound memo per image
• Orientation sensor
• RAW, TIFF and JPEG formats.
• Compatible with my current lenses

Think Different

by Apple Computer

Here’s to the crazy ones.

The misfits.
 The rebels.
  The troublemakers.
   The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently.

They’re not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,
 disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.
Because they change things.

They invent. They imagine. They heal.
They explore. They create. They inspire.

They push the human race forward.

We make tools for these kinds of people.

While some see them as the crazy ones,
 we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think
 they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Think different.

Fun in Computing

by Alan J. Perlis, 1922-1990.

I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines.

I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them, setting them off in directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don’t feel as if you’re a Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.