After some email and telephones back and forth, it appears that my ability to scope out a flat is pretty weak. I can't remember which photos relate to which rooms, the plan I thought I'd carefully made doesn't specify all the furniture and I'm unable to answer some questions about layout. This is a flat I saw yesterday. My spacial awareness and visual memory are pretty weak, but I thought I'd taken enough notes to fix things in my mind, clearly not.
Of course, the fact that I was only able to take half a dozen photos doesn't help. Since I got my digital camera, an Olympus Camedia C-310, I've pretty much loathed the thing. The fact that it came with a tiny 16Mb card, storing 8 photos at default resolution, and a battery that lasted an hour was the biggest problem... the received wisdom was that you should a) switch the camera monitor off and use the viewfinder instead, and b) change the resolution of pictures (or buy a bigger memory card I guess). However the camera would idiotically forget these settings and every time you switched it on would come back with 2Mb photos and monitor blazing.
Today, I finally decided to buy a 512Mb card, which would at least store a couple of hundred pictures even if I couldn't be bothered to change the settings every time. Then I decided that it wasn't possible that the machine was this fucking retarded and checked the menus. Though there's no option for "Save Settings", I found a menu item "Reset All" which I'd thought was a command but is actually a setting. It was set to "On". I am now taking pleasingly low quality images no monitor, hurray! My (standard duracell) batteries lasted the whole day and 80 pictures, and even managed to resist while I downloaded the pics to my laptop (which Ubuntu handled incredibly smoothly).
Of course, without the monitor, there's no feedback about when the photo's been taken, unless the flash fires.. I noticed that I was taking a lot of pictures of my feet, having moved the camera shortly after pressing the button. The solution appears to be to stand like an idiot for a couple of seconds longer until you *guess* it must have taken. That, or press the quick display button every time to check the picture took, either way, it sucks. On a quieter street, I noticed that there is a very slight "click", but not really good enough. Of course, the fact that a proportion of photos just didn't take is a problem too, I don't have a solution to that yet beyond checking in replay mode after every important batch.
Some internet cafes charge you on departure rather than on arrival. I think this is a good thing. You don't spend the whole time worrying about whether you'll get locked out while still signed into your webmail, and you get discounts for the longer period if you overrun. It's good for the cafe' too, as you probably end up spending longer there too. No internet cafe' seems to have ICQ/Gaim, most have Yahoo messenger. Gf has now installed Adium and got a Yahoo account. Internet costs in one of the phone centres which seem to be frequented more by immigrants than tourists seem to be lower, and the machines aren't necessarily crappier.
