I am the proud owner of a FujiFilm F401 digital camera which takes good pictures, is small and handy to carry around and gave me a lot of joy in the last 3 years.

I had to send it in Christmas 2004, as the main chip got buggered and got it replaced on warranty. so that was fine.

Now all the buttons on the back seem to have shifted in functionality – the zoom in button is now turn on Macro, and there is no way to choose the different flash modes.

I googled a bit about the issue and it seems that the internals are scrambled by a leaking battery. I contacted Fuji and will see tomorrow how much it’ll cost me to fix this £150 camera.

I also wanted to plan for the worst case scenario and checked what I can replace the camera with – and re-use all the SmartMedia cards I bought over the years, and realised that it seems impossible to find a camera that does support SmartMedia any longer…

What is this? Do we have to buy accessories for every item we buy these days anew? Is there no chance to re-use what you already have?
It seems that when you buy products now they are already worthless when you get them – as the reselling prices are that low that it is not worth the effort of postage and packaging.

I spend a lot of money on products – if I get quality, but I really cannot be bothered to buy things just for the sake of following a new trend and not see any support for older products…

My watch is a Mondaine which was designed in 1943 and not changed since, my vacuum cleaner is a Henry which proved to be indestructable in many an UK office in the last 50 years, why does all the digital stuff you buy these days have to be flimsy and break in a year?

Now here is my question:

• Is there a newer camera at an affordable price that still supports SmartMedia cards or will I have to ditch the lot when Fuji tells me it is going to be £££ to fix it?

I have spent yesterday and will spend today and tomorrow in a Microsoft Partner Training on the new parts of Visual Studio. It is quite an impressive IDE, and can now also deal with XML and schemas quite nicely. Maybe if it also supported DTDs properly, the HTML output of .NET wouldn’t make us weep any longer.

I really liked the idea of introducing snippets of code as an anazingly new feature. :-)

We all knew that the success of the million dollar homepage will spin off lots of imitations and plagiates. One of the more funnier ones is Buy it off where you can buy parts of a female body to be revealed and link to your site. Visitors can also solve puzzles in these parts of the body and win money – which means that there will be more people visiting that site.

Now, good marketing and an almost unique idea, but the technical implementation is really bad, you’ll need MSIE to see the lady undress – if that many people can be bothered, as last time I heard there are naked ladies somewhere on the web for free, should you be interested.

Older and more honest seems to be TinaTina, a German student who tries to finance her studies by revealing more and more in photo series of superb quality and taste. “Better naked than daft” is the motto.

Personally I think I will spare you a dress-off Chris to finance this site, but I might keep it in mind it as a last resort…

I just got greeted by this happy chap at the tube station:

He collected donations for a male cancer research charity and I must say he has balls doing so dressed like this.

Can you imagine the interview? “You want me to go dressed as WHAT?”

Only in England, I love this place!

I am currently writing up my follow up article for my digital web article 10 reasons why clients don’t care about accessibility aptly named “Seven habits of projects who fail to deliver accessibility”.

In it I’ll be listing mistakes I have encountered and done which caused the final product to become less accessible than it could have been. Examples are taking all the accessibility responsibility away from the client and believing the product description of a CMS without really testing if it delivers what it promises.

What are the snags that you kept encountering in your products?

One I just had to suffer again is a company trying to cut down the amount of incoming emails by looping requests through an FAQ system that fails to help:

Dear Christian,
The following may help in answering your question:
No matches were found.
If this response did not answer your question, you can submit it now

No, it didn’t help me, and a clever system would not even bother showing this message.