It's not about the money
The Perfecting Equilibrium Digest, March 19-25, 2024
It's not about the money, money, money
We don't need your money, money, money
We just wanna make the world dance
Forget about the price tag
Ain't about the, uh, cha-ching, cha-ching
Ain't about the, yeah, ba-bling, ba-bling
Wanna make the world dance
Forget about the price tag
Comment of the Week
Lynn W Gardner on Gold Days I’ll Always Treasure:
$47 vs $1,291, that is quite a price spread. I would take the $47 dollar one and use the left over cash for film 😁😁😁 (Lynn is referring to the current prices of the lenses used listed on Pentax Forums; both are long discontinued.)
It wasn’t quite that bad when I bought them; if I recall correctly I paid $135 for the SMC Pentax-M 135mm F3.5, while the legendary SMC Pentax-A* 135mm F1.8. set me back around $600. Which was a stretch for me; I was only making about $700 a month in those days at Pacific Stars & Stripes, which was already a squeeze in Tokyo. Though it wasn’t as bad as it sounds, since the Army also threw in a free apartment in downtown Roppongi. I love the idea of the A* 1.8, but I have to admit I’ve taken more good photos with the 3.5.
Perfecting Equilibrium Stories
Feola Elsewhere on the Internet
On Pentax Forums:
2024 Total Solar Eclipse Photo Contest
Announcing a special contest with a $100 1st prize!
By cjfeola in Giveaways and Events on Mar 23, 2024
We're pleased to announce a special edition of our monthly photo contest for the April 8 total eclipse of the sun. First prize is a $100 USD gift card to a photo/software retailer of your choice, such as B&H, Amazon, Adorama, Henrys, Adobe, Topaz, eBay, etc. The winner will then be featured in a Pentax Forums homepage article where they can explain how they got the shot! Click here to submit a photo for the contest. Second prize is a one-year forum account upgrade, and third prize is a box of photo paper from Red River.
Easter Eggs
My brain is a peculiar place; it likes to play word association, and then play back songs with those words. Here are the songs playing in my mind as I wrote these articles.
Next on Perfecting Equilibrium
Thursday March 28th - The PE Vlog: We’re starting a new series on building Large Language Models — AIs — for our own applications. Welcome to Virtual Grad Student! We’re going to set up a Large Language Model to run locally, feed it a clean set of data, then make it available to authors as a virtual writer’s assistant. For example, to pull together a few paragraphs of background on Roman aqueduct architecture. This week we’re diving into h2oGPT to see if it’s a good fit for our Virtual Grad Student.
Friday March 29th - Foto.Feola.Friday
Sunday March 31st — About that time I accidentally spent all my money on lenses. And tripods. And art. Every month for four years and fourth months... I was a typical soldier; always broke. But I was probably the only soldier ever broke because I’d spent every last dollar on Pentax lenses and woodblock prints…