This is why testing is good.

Thanks to whoever it was with a Shaw Cable account in downtown Vancouver this morning at 9:30 a.m. that chose to bounce a test of my Domino-based GeoIP lookup off a proxy server in Taiwan. You've got me thinking now about how I might want to handle people hiding behind foreign proxies vs. corporate proxies that may not necessarily be in the same country.

What Fits in to Russia?

Since I bought the stereo camera I've been in need of a lightmeter since the camera itself doesn't have one. My attempts at guessing daylight exposures were abysmal (I used to be much better at it before I was spoiled by technology and my only camera was my equally ancient and light-meterless Pentax SLR). So off to eBay to look around where I found this lovely item:

The "Ленинград-4" (Leningrad-4) Soviet-made lightmeter of roughly equal vintage as the stereo camera.

It will do the job and I get all the glorious kitsch-factor that comes with it for roughly 1/10th the price of a brand new lightmeter bloated with features I neither need nor want. Plus I get to exercise my brain converting Soviet ГОСТ (GOST) film ratings to ASA.

In other semi-sane recent photographic purchases, yesterday I received a PC-TTL cable I ordered that allows me to use my electronic flashes with my old Pentax and I have a conversion ring coming in the post so I can use my old M42 screw-mount lenses on my digital SLR. I also acquired the appropriate cable to use my flash-that-cost-more-than-the-camera with my old digital that I converted to infra-red.