Another cunning method of dealing with trolls (pioneered on JoelOnSoftware's discussion board, and carried over to CrazyOnTap) is to make deleted comments invisible to everyone but the troll -- when a post is removed, the original poster can still see it so as far as they're concerned they've been left unmolested but no-one else has to deal with their drivel.

I used to live across the road from Ray Burt-Frost, the publisher of OctaMED. No interesting story attached, sadly.

I have fond memories of cranking out tunes on my trusty A1200, and I even used OctaMED as a drum machine and sample player for a few live performances. Those were the days!

I would imagine there are circumstances where photography shouldn't take place in public places - for safety of course. There must be such times, no?

I can imagine "standing in the middle of the M25 in rush-hour taking pictures" may be frowned upon for safety reasons, but the photography is pretty much incidental -- it's the standing on the M25 that's dangerous, not the photography.

When taking "safety reasons" in to account, the only activities I can think of that may be unsafe to do whilst operating a camera are things like driving, cycling, flying a plane, performing brain surgery, etc. However, you also shouldn't do those whilst using a mobile phone, playing with a yo-yo, making a cup of tea, or restoring an antique chest of drawers; in other words there's still no reason to single out photography as forbidden for reasons of safety. (Unless it was meant in a menacing sense, like "that's a lovely camera you've got there, and it would be a real shame if something... happened to it...")

Holy crap. I think I'll just carry my camera around with me wherever I go and take pictures of the sort of things that are liable to provoke suspicion, just for the sheer civil disobedience of it...

Up until a couple of days ago I'd never visited the Genius Bar, but whilst I'll agree that the name is in itself somewhat fatuous I found the "genius" to be nothing but helpful; the battery on my MBP had crapped out (about 80 cycles, but held less than 50% of its original charge) and he replaced it with no quibbles. Whilst we waited for it to be brought up from the stock room he chided me gently for smoking whilst using the machine, gave it a clean for me, and the whole experience was both swift and pleasant.

Whist I was there the other geniuses seemed to be equally pleasant and helpful to the other customers, and in terms of dealing with tech support it was at least nine gajillion times better than any other company that I've had to deal with -- they didn't try and fob me off, they solved my problem, and they obviously enjoyed their jobs. Not sure why you have such a problem with them, John, other than perhaps being an inverted snob or some kind of reactionary asshat yourself?

Indeed. Shades of Epimenides?

I'd just like to add the time honoured phrase, "no, your *other* left"...

Is it a xenon bulb? I've no idea whether they use xenon or something less exotic in domestic projectors. Anyway, if that's the case then xenon itself is pretty scarce, and due to the high temperatures involved the envelope will likely be made of quartz rather than glass. Both raw materials serve to push the price up even before you factor in the additional complications in manufacturing a bulb out of them. Even if it's not xenon, I suspect that a bulb that's designed to pump out high-intensity near-white light for several thousand hours will be slightly better engineered than the mundane 60W jobs you use to light your house, plus will have a lower manufacturing density pushing unit costs up.

All that said, though, the cost of replacement bulbs is the only thing that's put me off buying a projector; here's hoping white LEDs can rescue us!

Oh, and to save you the time and effort of running it yourself (it takes an age as it's quite a complex image, and it needed some fudging with the settings to get a reasonable result) you can find a vectorised version here:

http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/vctr/vctr_flex?g=1103980&k=Y52X2G0e6OxmlnCs&p=g

It would probably benefit from some pre-processing in Photoshop/GIMP/whatever to remove the noise, increase the contrast, etc., but it's come out pretty well. The text at the top is completely broken, but without a higher resolution source there's not a lot that can be done about that...

Vector Magic FTW!

"I wonder if the camera has a night vision mode, too?"

FTFA:
"Record up to 60 Minutes of crystal clear covert Night Vision surveillance (video and audio)."

Don't worry, you'll get the hang of this blogging thing eventually. :)