So I picked up a few more “toys” to take with me to Uganda tonight.  I bought a cordless laptop mouse that makes it much easier to navigate around.  I chose the particular model I did because the USB receiver is about the size of a dime, including the dongle!  So far I like it but I need to remap the buttons to make it more usable. <5 min later> Ahh, much better now.  I moved the forward and back controls from the awkwardly placed up and down buttons (now page up/page down) to the right and left clicks of the scroll wheel.  That actually gives me something I haven’t had since I used the much underrated Opera browser.  One of my favorite features of Opera was the ability to right click and drag to the left to go back or to the right to go forward.  I have missed it ever since!

Anyway, the other thing I picked up at Office Max was a digital voice recorder.  I plan on trying it out tonight.  I decided that it will give me the ability to record testimonies or music performances we hear over in Uganda that I want to bring back with me.  I had the opportunity to talk with Liz Cantu at Vintage yesterday and ask her about shooting in Africa and if she had any suggestions.  She asked if I was going to do any video while there and I said I wasn’t planning on it (in a pinch I can use my Sony point-and-shoot to capture video) but I decided it would be nice to be able to capture audio if we get a chance to hear a music performance or hear someone’s testimony.  It will be a nice thing to have going forward too if I want to move more into the journalism side of things.  I don’t plan on learning short hand any time soon.

I’m just about ready to head out but I still have some projects to finish at work and some things online that I would like to finalize.  I’m not sure if I will be able to post on this blog or to my flickr while I’m in Uganda but I’m hoping to find a way to make it possible.  I set up my flickr the other day to take photo submissions via email but I need to try that out before I leave.  Anyway, head over to flickr tonight and I’ll post up some shots of my new toys.

Filed under: life by Jonathan Assink