Seems to me like 2004 has been the year of going digital for me. I retired my faithful filofax after around 11 years of service, having at one point believed I would never manage without it. This perception was wrong, of course – I wouldn’t manage without a system of writing down addresses, dates, notes, lists, etc etc, but it turns out that Palm devices hit the bill perfectly! Ebuyer are still doing the Palm IIIxe for around 30 quid, and it’s a fantastic little device, it does exactly what I want, AND I can play chess against it on the train.
Course, an equally seismic shift is to trade in my 35mm SLR for a digital one. The digital photography revolution has come upon me while I wasn’t looking.. we got a 3MP point and shoot a couple of years ago, and (more or less) since then I haven’t used my SLR. It gets dragged out for ‘proper’ photography, but then I just get frustrated when the pictures eventually come back from the printers, and half of them go straight into the bin! My strategy for picture taking is always to take loads, and expect around 10-30% ‘keeps’, but having lived with this in the digital era it’s too frustrating. So, Canon D300 is the one – 6.3Mp is easily enough to rival 35mm at A4, probably at A3 too. I’ll pontificate about this camera some more when I get my mitts on one (December 25th being a significant date in this case).
Final digital switch is in song-recording. I haven’t written many songs, and haven’t recorded any of them in a way I’m happy with, but I had built up a collection of gear (4-track, compressors, reverbs, minidisc, …) to this end. Actually said equipment involved a significant amount of space and wiring… so that’s all gone on eBay, and instead it’s a Boss BR-864 digital 8-track porta-studio thing. Ok, it has limitations (can only record 2 tracks simultaneously, for example), but the quality is fab, it has built in effects, including drum machine, and is pretty much perfect for the level of tinkering I do in a musical type way.
So, year of the digital revolution. Paper, film, and tape has been replaced by LCD and Compact Flash!