Big Bikes

Feckless

I don't smell good. I smell really, really bad actually. There's something about sitting in a car for a few hours that does that to a man. It does it to me too. Did I fail to mention that I was going to Vermont for three days? I think I did. Yup, I'm pretty sure I did. Well that's where I am, up in Waitsfield. The plan is to ride around here tomorrow with the legendary Vermonster, Jeff Whittingham, and then head up to East Burke to ride the Kingdom trails for Friday and Saturday with the likes of Andy Sanidas and some other peoples.


You may have noticed that these are not my, typical as of late, Helmet Hero, wide angle-weirdness photos. I finally got a new point and shoot digital camera, an Olympus Stylus Tough 6000 in (greenish) yellow. I figured if it's good enough for Gewilli, Linnea Koons, and Jill Up in Alaska, then it's good enough for me. I did get the model several levels below the one Jill uses to take all those sick shots of the Alaskan landscape, but I'm just taking sickening shots of the environs of Somerville, MA, I think the 6000 model is up to the task. And besides, the claim is that this thing is "Thom P. proof" — it is shock-resistant to five feet and water-resistant to something like ten feet...something like that. I'm not going to try it, so it doesn't really matter. No scuba-diving or intentional dashing of this camera on the hard ground is going to happen any time soon. Although I might throw it at K-Sweet's head if provoked.



Ya, I don't read fine print when it comes to these things. And that is why I didn't know that Olympus uses a different memory card than a Canon (or just about anything else). And of course the camera doesn't come with the card, something that was clearly stated on the Amazon page I bought it from. So I had to run out to 'The Shack" before hitting the road to buy a card for the wee-greenish-yellow bugger, and I got absolutely reamed for a paltry 2GB card. But hey, what you gonna do? Stop being a dumb ass all the time? Nah, that'd take way too much effort.

When Jeff Whittingham's through making people cry on the bike, he goes home and tries to make his daughters...not cry. I'm sure there was a clever way of putting that, but I'm just too damn bleary-eyed to think of it right now.

Once I got the memory card in and started playing with the thing, I noticed some marked differences between this camera and my old (broken) series of Canon Digital Elphs. For one thing, it is HUGE compared to the Elphs. Not something you might notice in a photo. I'm not complaining, the Elphs are simply incredibly small, this guy is plenty small enough. Next thing I noticed was that it starts up much slower than the Elph and the functions are less intuitive and harder to scroll through. Turning off the flash or going to macro-mode is a slightly more clunky process. Again, not complaining, this isn't a real "shoot out," the cameras I'm comparing are completely different, the version of the Elph I had costs twice as much as the Stylus Tough 6000. It's like comparing factory-farmed apples to organic-local oranges. Or something.

Burgers the size of our heads for dinner

Where the Stylus Tough kicks (I just wrote "licks" instead of "kicks." That would have been a great typo.) the Elph's ass is in durability. My Elphs have only ever lasted about a year, and my last one only made it about six months before dying in the midst of one of the most photo-friendly events of the year — SSWCs in Durango. The horror. I am hoping the Olympus' claims of near-indestructibility hold true.

Time to crash, Whittingham has a four to five hour hilly-ass-beatdown planned for me tomorrow. If you don't see a post on Friday morning send out the search and rescue.

Get it?