The Thrifty One

You know how Dale is.  He has trouble spending money.  If he has to spend money it eats at him.  He will even place his health on hold for the sake of pinching a penny.

Recently, Bzzz has been after Bernie to buy a camera for the shop.  Because there is no longer a "shop camera" (meaning the oft-used Bruce L personal camera) there is no way for Bzzz to take pictures of press setups and things.  Bernie does have a little point and shoot in his office, but there is no interface cable that fits it (it's not a standard mini-USB), and therefore no way to get the pictures off the camera without cable or card reader.  Bernie said he would be fine with buying a camera, but he has no idea what to buy.  I can't say I blame him--there are too many to choose from.

Today, Dale came strolling in and put this camera on Bzzz's desk.  I got quite a kick out of it.  It was basically brand new, but it was a toy--almost literally.  It felt as if it was an empty plastic shell--virtually no weight to it.  It uses one AAA battery, had no internal storage, no flash, and basically no features of any kind.  This website calls it a "perfect camera for kids..."  I did a lot of digging around the web after I got home and could find hardly anything on it.  I guess it's something he "had laying around" for a while or something.

The USB cable did connect to the computer and the computer would recognize there was something connected to it, but it had no idea what it was.  Without a CD (which was not to be found) would not recognize it.  And really--would you want to install some sort of weird software so your computer could talk to your toy camera?  I wouldn't.

Here are a few shots to chuckle over:



Good ol' Dale.  However limited his actual results are, his intentions are pure gold.  Gotta love him.

Bzzz needs to figure out what he wants for a shop camera and have Bernie BUY one.