Da Feeesh is very much alive.  Just spending much more time in
his new life, circa Life #7 or #8.  :-)

But I jsut wanted to drop in and report an interesting route I
followed, which I blame ENTIRELY to Strike and Bjorn!  (With
the MX-10 being the accomplice).

Sue's new MX-10 died after one trip, and I told Sea&Sea to
smash it with the biggest sledgehammer they could find, and
stuff the smitherines where they belong, rather than paying
for the "repair" (used only a month or so since new) that cost
almost as much as the new camera.  Given the paragraph below,
I may have to start looking at e-bay for a good used one to
go with the new MX-10 YS-40 strobe we still have.

So, we "upgraded" Sue's UW camera to the ReefMaster 2000 digital.
The quality of the pics down-graded at least 99.8 percent because
she now specializes in shooting crows in the blackforest at
midnight,improved to twilight when we added a $200 extenal strobe
to it.

So, the only salvation (other than using the sledgehammer trick
again <G>) was to learn from Bjorn's article in e-nekton on how
to squeeze color out of crow-meat <aka cheat>.  :-)



This was when the interesting Photo-Shop <tm> shopping trip took
me through.

The first Box I saw in CompUSA was $149.  Hey, not bad.  The
prices must have dropped since I told Bjorn it was TOO COSTLY
at an educational discount of $299 years ago, and Bjorn said
it was a bargain!

Then I realized that the $149 was the price for UPGRADING an
older version (CompUSA couldn't tell me WHICH old version when
I figured I could get an obsolete oldie for practically nothing
and upgrade it :-)).

Then I saw a simpler versioni for $99 for ranking amateurs
that would have suited our purposes.  But THAT price was for
upgrade also.

Then I suddenly noticed CompUSA had a package "PHOTOPLAY 2"
on sale, for $2.88 (that's Two dollars and 88 cents), from
the original price of $9.99, listing features (on the box):

Cropping, Redeye Removal, Lighting Correction, Rotate and FLip,
Perfect Color, plus 16 other listed features, and "... and much more!"

That abruptly ended our shopping, to try it out of CURIOSITY, if
nothing else, until we found out that the package lacked one of
its requirements that's sold in the UK for about 100 Brit pounds. :-)

Okay.  $3 down the drain, and so I went back to my old "educational
discount" source (which I still hold the privilege, as a retarrred
professor emeritus).  It was then that I found that Adobe's PhotoShop
7 costs the same $699 as it was 6 or 7 years ago, and the same
educational discounted price of $299, with a new wrinkle.  For an
additional $100, I get three other Adobe packages that had a total
retail price of over $1100 for $399.88, which I have ordered.

So, I am just sharing this bit of wild-goose chase with others on
the list who might be thinking about buying and using the
e-nekton=Bjorn sanctioned Adobe PhotoShop 7.0.

BTW, the ReefMaster 2000 comes with its own photo-editing freebie
called "Photo Suite" but it's pretty much useless.  :-)


My new Life #7?  It unofficially started less than a month ago, and
I have already risen from an (inter)national ranking of below 200,000
to the neighhood of 16,000 (in spite of a 10-day interruption diving
in Coz <BG>)  and accomplished on very unusual feat (in a
competitive setting) of something equivalent to a hole-in-one
followed by a double-eagle in two holes of golf.  No, it's not
golf but I think it's impossible to have two hole-in-ones in two
consecutive holes.  Otherwise, it would've been equivalent to
that!   :-)))

For for $2 AUD or $4 Batt, what's that Life #7?

-- da new Feeesh Bob.