As I Xi It v2.3

I’m staring at my jazzed up Moleskine diary. It’s looks pretty neat. I’m still bummed about paying £10 for the diary iself. I jumped on the ‘net and had a look at what other diaries for a tenner there were which I could’ve got.

One of the alternatives of note were the diaries by Ciak. Soft cover, Italian bonded leather and with a horizontal elastic band rather than a verticle one. I remember handling one in Paperchase the other day, quite nice, oozes quality and looks like its worth way more than a tenner. I think I’ll get that one next year. It’s nicer than this Moleskine, oh well.

For my upcoming trip to South Africa, I might get a Ciak notebook and use it as my travel journal.

To see what the fuss was about and to celebrate my PhD application, I thought I’d splurge and get myself a Moleskine diary for next year. I’m looking at it and to me, it seems a lot to be paying £10-15 for it. It’s quite nice, but not that nice. I find the pages a bit on the thin side.

To protect my overpriced diary, I made it a little jacket out of felt. I stitched on a pen holder and a little pocket to hold a USB stick. I even added a fat ribbon bookmark! It works and looks rather sweet. I’m just trying to decide on what kind of fastening I want to add.

Here’s a couple of macros with my A590 IS. Not bad for £66 delivered.

I guess this is to kerb paedophilia. Taken at Northwick Par car park.

After an interview this morning, I strolled on over to Tottenham Court Road and popped into Paperchase to have a browse. They had some nice diaries, I quite liked the Moleskine and National Geographics ones. One of the other things I saw was a Travel Accessories kit. I looked at it and instantly thought “ooh, that looks ideal for collecting specimens!” There’s two dropper bottles which could hold C₂H₅OH and H₂O₂ for specimen preservation in the field and lichen ID; two round, flat containers to hold specimens or samples; a spray bottle for some other liquid (distilled H₂O) as well as a pipette and a spatula! It’s all held in a nice transparent zip bag so you can easily find things and there’s space for a x10 handlens too.

In search of a more capable point & shoot to complement my big 40D and very small Ixus i5, I picked up the A590. It’s kinda chunky, but quite nice to hold. The pics it takes aren’t bad either. I’ve managed to get CHDK to run on it, but haven’t had time to really fiddle around with it all that much.

This is one time that I wished I had the Canon MP-E65.

I had a look in the glass vial I have where I keep the stick insect eggs and noticed one died while in the process of emerging and another was still moving mostly, but its legs were trapped in in the egg still. So, I made a little time-lapse but it just never managed to get out.

You know what? I never realised that there was a Crumpler store in London till yesterday. It’s on New Oxford Street.

Inspired by this on the Howies blog, I came up with this -