That's dead goat arse. With strike.

 
I just wanted to mentioned again that changedetect.com sucks goat arse, in case you forgot.



This is a very deadly magyar insult. You thought the Evil Eye was the worst thing the Roma could throw at you?

 
I need this for Windows XP. Email me if you have a solution, SVP.

 
A couple gear reviews.

Not gear reviews, but reviews on gear. The reviews themselves suck.

Camera: Canon Powershot S230 Digital Elph

I bought this camera for digital snapshots in Budapest, and later Prague. Because I was foolish and waited too long, and because I thought some tosser could get a good discount on the S400 through a particular ecommerce site he just launched (lies!), I had to buy at a brick & mortar. This wasn't actually bad, because the guy dropped the price $50 because I look good in a turban, and I was out the door.

First things first: It's still too heavy. It's lighter than the S400, but the Optio S was lighter, cooler looking, and if it didn't use xd media AND have a crappy lens, I would have bought it instead. The S230 also takes too long to focus. If you're strolling along and try to take a subtle picture of some hottie, you'd better have continuous shot mode on, or you're going to miss 2/3 of the shots.



Other than that, the lens is good, and the pictures are nice if you have time to stop and frame them. And, to its credit, it does focus and lock on much, much faster than my old A50.

Earphones: Sony MDR-NC11 noise-cancelling earphones

Bad: the computational unit is bulky, large enough to hold the 1xAAA battery that powers things. The earphones, because they fit snugly in the ear, transmit a lot of ambient resonance to your eardrum, so you hear yourself walking, sniffing, breathing, chewing, etc. And it's loud. There's also a lot of noise -- it's almost as if the "noise cancellation" is just white noise that masks the low-frequency noise instead of blocking it. The sound quality of the earphones is not as clear as it might be, especially if you're used to something like the Etymotics or even a good pair of open-air headphones. I listen to my Grados a lot (SR-80s at work and SR-125s at home), and they've accultured me to very "bright" music, so everything else sounds more subdued.

On the good side, the noise cancellation does work well on the train or on the plane. Because there's a fairly good seal between the rubber plugs and your ear canal, it also blocks a fair bit of outside noise on this basis alone. They look cool, and once you get them fitted to your ear canal, are actually amazingly comfortable, and I'm speaking as a person who can't stand most earphones for more than a few minutes.

 

I can't fault the Magyars their fixation on bacon.
I made it back into the states today. Fortunately, I was not the person who died on the plane.

I have a few trite observations to make about Budapest. I'm tired and cranky (so, in other words, feeling normal), so this will be short, in the form of bullet items.

• "Budapest has the most beautiful women in the world."
  Perhaps at one time, they did. But the Madison Avenue model machine morlocks have apparently sucked them all away, like so many Eloi appetisers. There are a lot of "pretty" girls with fantastic bodies -- the sort who think they can make it in Hollywood and become movie stars, and do, but in porn. There are also a lot of "cute" girls working in places far beneath what would be their stations here in the states -- mall kiosk girls that could easily be regional catalog models, etc.
  
• Very dirty, run-down buildings
  Budapest is about ten years behind Prague in cleaning up their city after throwing off the industrial yoke of the Soviet collectivisation regime. This stands to reason -- half of Budapest was destroyed in the second World War, and replaced with godawful Sovbloc concrete cubes of residential misery. Who'd want to clean that up? It'd just be polishing a turd.
  
• Porn capital of Europe
  It may be the porn capital of Europe, but it's almost all for export. Even in the tourist areas (where lots of porn is typically sold), the best you could do is a handful of truly scary looking magazines with emaciated, drugged out girls on the covers. After I worked my way through those, there wasn't anything else.
  
• Food & Hotel are absurdly inexpensive for European city standards. The five star hotel we stayed in (Kempinski) was about half the cost of similar lodging in Prague, and about a third to a fourth the cost in Nice, Paris, or the states. And food -- eating at McDonald's is about 1/2 the cost of a gourmet meal at one of Budapest's new "elite" scenester restaurants (Tom-George). However, the bill of fare at these restaurants lead me to believe the menu was composed by a guy who came to the west coast once, and made up a list of dishes that sounded to him as if they'd be served in SF or LA. Lots of bacon, though. Bacon chips, bacon noodles, bacon nigiri. You think I'm making that last one up. Anyway, we had a very satisfying meal for about 10kft, or about USD40. The huge numbers would throw me off after eating, too. I'd think,"Oh, jesus, 5000ft to take a cab from the airport!" and have to calm myself by telling myself it was about USD20. That backfired, though, when I checked out of the hotel and settled the minibar tab. I signed away 36kft without thinking or questioning how perhaps ten bottles of Coke, Fanta, and water could come to $144.
  
• Lots of fat americans in BP
  It's american vacation season, true. It's Hungarian travel season, too, lowering their numbers. But everywhere I went, I heard loud american-accented english. Everywhere. However, on the bright side, I didn't hear any of the "ugly american"-isms that embarrass us overseas. Perhaps Budapest, being slightly inaccessible (good god, you'll never learn the language), is on the other side of that Rubicon, impregnible to the people who roll through the Netherlands and call everything 'quaint'.
  
• Grocery stores close absurdly early
  OK, this last one sucks, but so do grocery stores that close at 4pm on Saturday, and 2pm on Sunday, if they're open at all.
  

Kat asked if I'd go back, because she's keen on living there. Not because it's her favorite place, as I think we're both partial to Prague in that region, but because there's actually work for her there. Lots of work in the human rights/international law field, and she could get a job that would pay for law school in only 250 years.

Let's just say,"no." I might consider it if I were single, just to debauch for a year or two, but not old and married. It's too dirty, it's too backward in terms of technological facilities available, and the language is just too damned hard. I can't emphasise the language barrier enough. Sure, everyone speaks english, but I don't want to be one of those gits who lives in a foreign country for a year, and still can't hold a conversation about the weather.