I got up this morning and called over to LBC Model Trains in Buffalo to see what their hours were. LBC is the only store that looks like it might take modeling seriously that we were able to find in the entire area. I called over and got no response at all. No answer. No voicemail. No answering machine. And it is after 10:00 in the morning! I can only hypothesize that they are no longer in business. How annoying. Of course Kurt’s in Caledonia did the same thing and they are still around just not worth going to because they are a junk store. Either way it is not a good sign for LBC. So I guess we will be giving up on them. Their website doesn’t quite totally work and hasn’t been updated for two years so they probably closed shop and just left the website in place. That happens way too much. Someone needs to scavenge these things.
After several calls they apparently decided to turn on their answering machine and I got a message saying that the store was closed and that it would open again tomorrow. Oh sure, we finally get a chance to go there and they don’t even bother being open on a big shopping day!
I called M&R Automotive and they were able to get my car in today. So we had to get moving and get my car over there so that they would have the day to look at it. Dad was on his way to the Omega for breakfast when we took the car over so we decided to stop in there to meet him.
In a surprising move, Nikon has decided to cease the manufacturing of all analog cameras! And yes, that press release is directly from Nikon. This is very surprising as Nikon is considered to be the leader in analog SLR cameras (the kind most people associate with serious photographers.) Obviously, the sales of new analog cameras is only a fraction of what it was just a few years ago. Even though many people continue to use analogue cameras very few people go out and buy them. And of those buying them I would assume that a very large percentage of them are buying them used. I was not personally expecting this move to be made for several years yet. I thought that Nikon, Canon, Konica and Pentax would keep making analogue film SLRs until at least 2008 or later. Apparently I underestimated the speed of adoption of digital imaging. It is true that digital is just so much more convenient and so much less expensive. Perhaps the biggest factor in its use is the one that I have noticed for myself which is that I only even want to use photographs in digital form regardless of what medium they were originally taken with. I don’t look at prints. I don’t project slides. I look at photographs on my computer. I watch slideshows on my computer. I send pictures online to friends. I put pictures into web pages. Et cetera. Bottom line is I do nothing that makes use of the physical media. I have owned three “photo” printers and yet have never used any of them for the purpose of actually printing photographs.
John Battelle (of Google) makes fun of backwards New York Times today as they run a story about Google Ad-Sense years behind the times. Haven’t they used the web in the last year? What do they do all day? Did they just now notice the ads on the sides of so many websites? What did they think those little ads on the side of half the pages in the known universe were random? Dirt on their screens maybe? File this under “why traditional media is irrelevent.”
At 2:00 Jeremy and I went over to the Omega for lunch. I just got a cup of soup while he ate since I had eaten just a little bit before. Then I drove him back down to Leicester.
At 3:40 dad came by and picked up Dominica and I and we went over to the Geneseo Cinema to watch Glory Road which I didn’t know much about but ended up being a really good movie. Dad has been wanting to see it for a while but I don’t really keep up on movies that are coming out so I only kind of knew what it was. All of us really liked it. I am sure that dad will be buying it as soon as it is out.
It was dinner time when we got out of the theatre so we drove up to Denny’s for dinner. Min was getting a little tired of the Omega. The diet we are on is awfully limiting and it is starting to make all food just boring and blah. It is bothering her tons more than it is bothering me. Mostly it is making me not care about eating nearly as much as I used to but that is a good thing since that is why I eat so much 🙂
After dinner I did some work in the office and Dominica knit and watched some of the Gilmore Girls which I really do not like. I don’t even like listening to it. Then we watched more of Angel and I got to work getting out next model put together. Boy is there a lot of work involved in doing that.
Tony ended up not being able to work with me tomorrow. I wasn’t able to find anyone that was able to work so we ended up having to push off the project until Wednesday so that Jeremy is able to do it. That will work out really well for Jeremy. He is even managing to get out of school to be able to do the work. He is happy about that.