Blog entries from August, 2022

That new camera I bought a month ago? Today I sent it back.

However that is only “back” in a geographical sense. I bought the camera online and it was shipped to me from Sydney, while I have posted it to a Sydney address, that destination is the Canon Service Centre because the camera has a fault. While I could have sent it back to the retailer, all they were going to do was forward it on to Canon, so I cut out the middleman.

It is a bit annoying that I have to pay for the postage, it is cutting into the saving I made by buying the camera online. That is a sense of security you get from a physical store, you can walk back into the store and under Australian consumer law it is on them to get it fixed.

I do miss the time when Canon had a decent service centre in Melbourne, especially since it was just around the corner from where I worked at Monash Uni. When my EF-S 17-85mm broke the first time I was able to drop it off and then pick it up once repaired. It was even more convenient when the driver board in my 7D failed because I had to take it back after the initial fix because they didn’t reconnect the display inside the viewfinder. If I had had to post it each time, that is extra cost on my part.

I know there is the Canon store in South Melbourne, even though they say they only accept drop offs for DSLR and EF/EF-S lenses, I suspect that if someone walked in with an R body or lens that they would be crazy to refuse it, even though they would just send it on to Sydney. I decided that time cost to try that approach would be higher than the monetary cost of posting it.

So what was wrong with the camera? The worst type of fault, an intermittent error in the form of Err 70, though nothing like Scott Kelby experienced.

The first few times I used the camera I had no issues, but then on the Saturday morning of Open House Melbourne I got the error a couple of times, but then not the remainder of the day or at all on the following day. I used the camera at home a couple of times, got the error once. Then again when on an outing with the camera club.

I did what the error says, turn the camera off and remove the battery. This worked and I could take photos again, but the photo when the error occurred would either not be stored or would be corrupted. As I left it a bit to see how often I would get the error I was able to confirm that it happened with different SD cards, with different batteries and with different lenses.

Hopefully it gets fixed and returned soon, but it will definitely be too late for the workshop I have booked in for this weekend.

When I am working at home from my desk I have the venetian blinds opened enough so that I can look out over my front garden and over the road. My experience is that I need to frequently rest my eyes by looking away from my monitors, and this type of break is often recommended as part of office ergonomics.

This also means that activity outside often catches my eye, not everything but a few days ago I saw a man at the front door of the house across the road. Nobody answered the door and I saw him ring the bell a few times and wait like he expected someone to be home. It was unusual that he walked out the street, looked in the window of the car parked there (which belongs to one of the people in the house) and then went back and rang the bell again. He walked off to the right which was out of my view.

About 20-30 minutes later I heard a car door slam, I looked outside and saw something very strange. There was a car parked on the footpath across the road, not on the side of the road, but right up on the footpath. How did they get there? Did they lose control and crash?

As I was trying to work out what I was seeing I saw the man from before walk around from the far (passenger) side of the car, get in and drive off. Not back onto the road, but along the footpath and out of my view. This was very weird, what did I just see? How was there enough space for a car between a letterbox and a large tree on the nature strip? It was thoroughly confusing.

Because it was so strange I made a quick note and then had to join a work meeting, forgetting about this until the next day when that neighbour came over to say they had been burgled and were asking if I had seen anything. Well yes I had, now what I saw wasn’t just weird, but also suspicious.

Unfortunately I didn’t see much, just that it was an older male person and a general description of the car, no license plate or any specific detail.

It made me think about one of the projects deep in my backlog which is to put up some cameras. But even if I had cameras my plan is to cover my own driveway and front door to get alerts if someone is approaching or to know if a parcel has been delivered, they would not capture anything across the road.