Thursday, April 17, 2008

Journey begins....

Today is a Red-Letter day in my admissions calendar as I embark on the journey to the school of my dreams by working on the very first draft of my 'Why MBA?' essay :)

I have been wondering about the right way to go about it for a long time now - should I read sample essays first, form an idea and then begin with my own? or should I first just list out the main points I want to cover for each essay? or should I pick a school, pick an essay of that school and target it and nothing else? - and then I realised that I had again fallen into the traps of my age-old vice of procrastination so I said to myself - NO MORE!

And here I am... its 12:50 am on a chilly Wednesday night in April and I am trying to get my thoughts down on paper... well, computer screen actually! First thing I realized that I have waaaay too many thought-streams and no logical flow in what I am putting down but since this is my first draft, I have decided to just let it flow and will then get down to structuring it later....

Thats all for now! gotta get back to the other window now where my essay waits....

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Oh Camera! where art thou?

21st February?!! Wow, has it really been that long since my last post! I need to get back to this blog more frequently but truth be told, there hasn't been much to write about anyways this past month... I took an unscheduled break from the whole MBA-researching, career-planning and future-worrying thingie for the month of March but now I am back!!

As April came, it brought with it the 'keeda' of buying a new digital camera and what began as a simple task of ordering a heavily discounted SONY model (DSC-H9, to be precise) at a employee sale soon turned into something infinitely more time-consuming and confusing when I thought... DSLR, why not? Thus began the saga of long hours spent staring at the computer screen trying to make sense of ISO, sensitivity, 35 mm equivalent, noise, stabilization, EVF, telephoto lens etc etc, checking out one model after another from Nikon, Canon, Sony and Olympus - Nikon D40, Canon EOS 400D, Nikon D400, Olympus E-510, Canon 30D, Sony A100... the list was endless! There were so many options and so little to differentiate between...

But now after spending a lot of time and learning a lot about how a DSLR works and what its advantages/disadvantages are I think I would be better served by going back to my previous decision of getting a compact high-zoom (if I can find one, that is!).

The one reason why I had first thought of getting a DSLR was because I was looking for a super-zoom camera (zoom in the range of 10+) . The cameras got very SLR-like as the zoom range increased so much so that they almost felt like one (size and weight wise) and I thought if I am going to be carrying such a big camera with me, why not go the whole distance and get a DSLR instead? But now I know that for a amateur photographer like me, a DSLR would be an overkill especially because all that I am truly looking for is a super-zoom stable camera that produces great pics and is easy to carry around.

So now that I have sorted that out, there still is a long way to go till I finally decide on the model I will buy but the following criteria are an absolute must (in order of priority) -
1. super zoom
2. sleek design, no SLR look-alike for me
3. not too pricey
4. not older than early 2007
5. does not have outright negative reviews
6. video feature

So the hunt for the perfect camera continues....