last week was spent...

..in Germany; mainly Berlin and Hamburg. The temperature in Berlin was -17 Celcius, experiencing which is a personal record for me. Well, this temperature is rather cold:-)
I had just four nights in Germany. I flew out from Lahore on the evening of Saturday 21st Jan, then waited a few hours at Karachi airport, then flew out to Dubai, the flight being an hour late, which meant I had to hurry up to check in to the flight to Düsseldorf, from where I reached Berlin on Sunday evening after spending a few more hours at the airport. I had to do some stuff at Berlin on Monday morning, and went to Hamburg the same day, reaching there by train in the afternoon. Tuesday the whole day was spent in Hamburg, and then Wednesday morning I took the train back to Berlin. Spent the rest of the day in Berlin, and flew out of Berlin Thursday morning to reach Munich first, then flew out to Dubai, then to Lahore, reaching Lahore on Friday early morning.
All in all, the trip was great. I'll be posting interesting tidbits in the days to come.

The most interesting...

...part of this news story is the last sentence :-)

As they say...

..., while avoiding profanity, STUFF HAPPENS. At least some stuff has happened to my Canon 17-40 mm L series lens. Some really nasty stuff. The lens has stopped autofocusing, just out of the blue. Its just that the lens was working one day, but not working the other. And in between these two days the lens was finely attached to the camera, and lying in the cupboard where I always put it.
The problem is this: the lens does not autofocus, which means something has happened to the lens motor. It is communicating with the camera, but just not autofocusing. This also means that this is a nasty thing.
Right now I am thinking how to deal with the situation. I bought the lens in Germany, but live in Pakistan. The lens has a European 1-year warranty, which still has about 2 weeks to go. Incidently I have to go to Germany for a few days within these 2 weeks. So one solution could be to bring the lens back to the shop in Hamburg where I bought it from, and then see what they tell me. In any case the situation is tricky.

I have been using...

...my Canon EOS 20D exclusively eversince I got in September of 2004. The older EOS 300V had been lying packed in its box. One drawback, though, of using digital is that your physical albums become scarce, since that involves selecting photos from your digital collection, and then getting them printed from a professional shop (home printing hasn't worked for me till yet, mainly because I am too lazy to try to understand the nuances of printing digital files). This bothers my wife a lot, since now we have quite a lot of printed photos of our elder son, but very few of our younger, since almost all of his pictures have been taken with the 20D, and very few have been printed on paper.
So we decided to put the EOS 300V into operation once again. Someone from our relatives was visiting Pakistan from the US, so I asked him to bring me a EF 50mm lens, which is cheap, good and lightweight. A few days ago we also bought a roll of film, and I snapped a few pics with the 300V. Vow!!! I could not have imagined how good that felt. The main reason behind this good feeling was how lightweight the camera fit into my hands. Let me explain. I use the 20D with a battery grip attached (the vertical shutter release button is indispensable, plus the battery grip holds two batteries). The lens I use is a 17-40mm L series, which is also not very light. For flash photography I attach a 420EX flash, which, though not the biggest of Canon flash units, is not the smallest either. Plus often I take care of the focusing by choosing different focus points, which makes taking a picture a bit more involved. Now when I used the 300V, it was in the simplest of configurations. EF 50mm lens, no battery grip (though I previously used the 300V with a battery grip), pop-up flash, the middle focus point selected. All that made the photo taking a breeze, and the way the camera felt (lightweight) and fitted (excellent match) in the hand made the experience a vow!! one.
Though of course for taking serious photos I still use the 20D. The 300V is meant to be used by my wife occasionally.
Related to this, some friends and colleagues have asked me why the photos I take aren't available on the web. The main reason for this is that my photography is limited to my family, and hence is a very private affair. That is why I haven't made my pictures publicly available.

Taking screenshots...

...from Windows Media Player can be a funny experience. Since I was not in a funny mood, I searched up on Google to find this site, after which it was easy to take a screenshot from a .wmv file.

Lahore is in...

...the grip of fog these days; at times, and at places, very heavy fog. Which makes driving quite difficult, and at times even more difficult, if a few others insist on driving as if it were a normal day! Plus there can by annoyances as well, as I discovered a few days ago. I had switched the headlights on in the fog, and as I parked the car at work, I forgot to switch them off; my car is the old-type, which does not beep if you switch off the engine with the headlights on. All this meant that at the end of the day, the battery of the car was fully drained, dead, zilch. Which can be pretty annoying, I assure you.
Luckily, my in-laws live not very far away from where I work, plus they have a car with someone who drives it full-time. So he came to my rescue, and the annoyance lasted not more than an hour.

Forgetting a...

...password can be pretty annoying. Plus browsers make you lazy in this respect, since these allow you to store passwords, which means you dont have to type them in often, which also makes it more likey for you to forget the passwords. As I wrote here, there are regular attempts to reset my Gmail password, and also occasionally my blogger.com password. So some days ago I changed my blogger.com password, and as I wanted to login today, I did not remember the changed password; neither had the browser stored it!! So I too had to reset the password, but since its my account, I was able to access the link sent by blogger.com to change my password:-)