Crimson Crux

Finally, a significant upgrade from my Olympus FE-100 cheapo point-and-shoot.

I am the proud new owner of a Nikon D80, lens included (Zoom-Nikkor 18-70mm). Price: Php 28,000 (or around $580).

That’s a sizeable discount from the price at Wikipedia: “Its current price is $600 for the body only or $800 with the Zoom-Nikkor AF-S DX 18-135 mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED kit lens.”

I bought this baby in October or late September from a writer-photographer friend of mine. It’s second-hand but almost new at just four months.

Disclaimer: I never dreamt of being a photographer, much more a professional one. The visual arts were never my forte. (Literary arts are an entirely different matter.) However, I wasn’t able to resist the allure of the camera’s selling price, and there’s nothing to lose but everything to gain if I tried my hand at photography.

The camera also arrives at an opportune time — I’ve been attending/holding lit events like crazy these past months, and I sure need something to document them and document them well.

The following are my first shots since buying the Nikon D80. Pardon the evident lack of skill — these are beginner’s shots after all, hehe. I haven’t had much time to practice and read the manual due to the onslaught of lit/art events.

In front of our apartment along Cordillera Street, Galas, Quezon City.

The view from Dampa, Diosdado Macapagal Avenue, Manila Bay.

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I’ve just repaired the mySQL database for Crimson Crux’s WordPress comments. For around two months, this blog wasn’t displaying its comments pages, which meant I couldn’t respond to any of my (few) readers’ feedback.

The problem lay with the overhead of my wp-comments table. Fortunately, all it took to fix the problem was the “Repair” option in my cPanel’s phpMyAdmin. (Note to self: Check your tables’ overhead once in a while.)

If you’re experiencing the same problem, here’s a helpful video on how to fix WP mySQL crashed tables.

Due to lack of time, I forgot to update this blog just before I left for Subic, Zambales. I again served as the Coordinator for the Sining ng Tugma at Sukat (STS, Art of Rhyme and Meter) event of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) and my literary org, LIRA.

It was the third and last time I handled an STS leg (the first two were in Pangasinan and Quezon). You can click the above image for the full programme.

STS Subic was held on October 25 in the Subic Central School. But prior to that, we had a swell time doing the one thing I never thought I would do in my whole life — scuba diving! (For some pics of our Subic adventures, visit my Multiply blog.)

The experience proved surreal for us, including our speaker, the award-winning poet Vim Nadera. Prof. Nadera even wrote about the trip on his Manila Bulletin column…including a photo of our group posing in the middle of the sun-caked street, in full diving gear! (What infamy! Hahaha.)

So that makes it three ‘working vacations’ in just over a month — and every ounce of stress was worth it.