I have just finished my library run for the holidays and as you can see my stack of material to read is pretty formidable. I have done a quick count and found I have a little over 5,000 pages of academic text to read in less than a month (not counting any of the papers I have downloaded that I may want to read).

Somewhere before mid-January I will also have to produce 10 to 15 pages on how Bourdieu’s ideas of symbolic capital – particularly notions of field and habitus – relate to the production of personal home pages and weblogs, mark six essays and prepare to teach an undergrad course at the London College of Printing.

Of course, I am somewhat exaggerating the travails of this holiday season – I have already dipped into several of the books and some of the others I signed out on the off chance they might be useful and will probably not get around to reading. Above all, several of the books are collections of essentially separate chapters, so I won’t need to read them all (and anyway I like reading – if I didn’t, would I do a “PhD”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm?)

FWIW the books I have taken home to read are hidden below:
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Having read Popular Photography’s “buyer’s guide”:http://www.popphoto.com/article.asp?section_id=2&article_id=780 I am now more confused than ever. It “singles out”:http://www.popphoto.com/assets/download/12182003163311.pdf the camera I wanted saying, ‘The Minolta DiMAGE Xt is a wonderful little 3.2MP camera, full of fun features. But for just about the same money these days, you can get Minolta’s DiMAGE S414, a standard compact with all the Xt’s features and more—as well as a full 4MP of resolving power.’ It’s true that the S414 – “reviewed here”:http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/cameraDetail.php?cam=460 – is about the same price with an extra MP of resolution (and seems cheaper than competing 4MP cameras) but is it cheaper for a reason? Having looked at dozens of reviews for different cameras I don’t know what to think any more…

And practical though it might be, it lacks the ‘coo what a neat little camera’ factor as well.

I’ve been wanting a proper digital camera for a while now (I have a camcorder that can capture 1MP digital images but the results aren’t that great). For a while I was tempted by the “NISIS DV4”:http://www.nisis.com/Products/DigitalCameras/DV4.asp since it can act as a webcam and a storage device and even an MP3 player and is reasonably cheap (£109 from Amazon) but I knew it was what the Brits call a ‘mug’s eyeful’ – lots of features but nothing likely to work terribly well. It only has a 2MP resolution for example which is hardly state of the art these days.

Then I heard about the “Minolta Dimage XT”:http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/minolta/dimage_xt-review/index.shtml via the message boards on “dpreview”:http://www.dpreview.com/ (available in the UK for a little over £200).

It is a 3MP camera small enough to take with you anywhere, has a 3x zoom (surprisingly omitted from some of the low-end digital cameras I have looked at), and works as a webcam (though admittedly a separate webcam would only cost around £25).

A few questions arise, though –
1) Is the Minolta the best small digital camera in this price range or is there another that would be significantly better (without costing significantly more?) Does anyone know if Minolta plans to upgrade it again within a month or two or if some wonderful new cameras are due shortly? The Minolta has been out since the middle of the year.
2) I already have a nice little Canon Elph APS film camera (the original Elph). My wife says it’s a perfectly serviceable camera and a new digital camera wouldn’t give any better images (might in fact be worse) and that we don’t need any more gadgets anyway. Is she right? Should I just get a DV4 to muck about with and wait another year? What other persuasive arguments can I use to justify the purchase of this desireable piece of kit (or its equivalent)? You’ve got to help me out here, guys!

P.S. If you’re looking for a last-minute stocking stuffer, may I recommend the very fine slim volume I wrote earlier this year pictured in the column on the right – “Dealing with E-mail”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0789495392/blogorg-20 – a bargain at £6 or $7?

P.P.S. So far I have received exactly nothing in the way of recompense from the thousands of people who read my site weekly. I don’t do this for any financial reward but if one of you did feel inclined to give me something for Christmas it would certainly encourage me to continue and fill me with the Christmas spirit. The cheapest items on my Amazon wish list start at less than £10 – they wouldn’t arrive by Christmas at this point but I’m not fussy!

Today I graduated from my “Masters”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/mScInNewMediaInformationAndSociety.htm here at the “London School of Economics and Political Science”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/aboutLSE/information.htm but I am already hard at work on my “PhD”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm – being supervised by “Robin Mansell”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/whosWho/robinMansell.htm (at L) and “Nick Couldry”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/whosWho/nickCouldry.htm (at R). Wish me luck!

P.S. On the morning of graduation day I received the first line or so of a spam email on my mobile phone. It read, ‘Want more respect? Get a PhD’ – I found that obscurely encouraging…

Two recent stories about attempts by doctors and MPs to make us all a little healthier (this sort of stuff sticks in my mind because my wife is doing a degree in public health). Doctors recently urged a public smoking ban – something I have supported on this weblog more than once – in “2003”:https://blog.org/archives/000920.html and “2002”:https://blog.org/archives/000474.html. Not only does passive smoking kill 1,000 people a year in the UK but it’s extremely anti-social. And today a select committee “suggested”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3242674.stm an easy-to-interpret code to be put on all food that would tell people how much exercise it would take to burn off the calories contained in it.

It appears I am truly a Master of Science – I just got the results back from my recent “MSc in New Media, Information and Society”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/mScInNewMediaInformationAndSociety.htm at the “London School of Economics & Political Science”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/aboutLSE/information.htm and I discovered I have achieved a distinction (an A for my North American readers).

“Then let the throng our joy advance / With laughing song and merry dance…”:http://math.boisestate.edu/gas/mikado/webopera/song24.html

Come on – sing along!

Back in June, the Onion wrote about “social capital”:https://blog.org/archives/000799.html – now it is examining the social consequences of weblogging.

An article by “Dr Adam Swift”:http://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/about/stafflist.asp?action=show&person=92 in the “Telegraph”:http://www.dailytelegraph.co.uk/education/main.jhtml?xml=/education/2003/11/12/tefswift12.xml&sSheet=/education/2003/11/12/ixtetop.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=181438 (registration required) suggesting private schooling in the UK should be banned has inspired an interesting debate on the always-interesting “Crooked Timber”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/ weblog. As so often is the case it seems clear to me that the left and right wings of the case arguing in the comments to the original posting will never agree because they have fundamentally different ethical premises. For me, Spock (and most of the left-wing commentators) ‘the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one’. For the right wingers, parents have an absolute right to do what they can to better the lives of their children, whatever the harmful effects might be for society at large.
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The “London Health Commission”:http://www.londonshealth.gov.uk/ has launched a website survey on where people should be allowed to smoke in London. It seems someone has started a “campaign about this”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ican/Club146 over at the BBC’s new iCan site. Personally I would be delighted if smoking could be banned in pubs, though doubtless it would annoy many of my fellow Londoners.

Many is the time I have wanted to go out with friends but I have cried off when it emerges they want to go to a pub. If I do go I end up returning home with my clothes reeking of smoke and I dread to think of what it does to my lungs. Moreover sometimes I need to eat in pubs and having to eat with people smoking around me is just diabolical.

Here’s a recent magazine profile of my local area (I have helped to encourage some of the changes in my role as press officer of the “Newington Green Action Group”:http://ngag.org/). Just today a pizzeria is opening around the corner from us and when a nearby street is closed at one end (part of the council’s urban regeneration plans) patrons will be able to sit out in the sun (when there is some).

Also in the same magazine, a profile of local heroine “Mary Wollstonecraft”:http://www.n16mag.com/issue19/p18i19.htm and news of “plans for a multiplex cinema”:http://www.n16mag.com/issue19/p11i19.htm in Dalston, close enough for us to walk to.