While visiting the Sony Building in Ginza yesterday, I had a chance to see the newly announced Sony Qualia 016 2-megapixel digital still camera, part of their high-end Qualia product line developed only for the Japanese market. This tiny compact camera, clearly designed to appeal to the James Bond wannabe, retails for 380,000 yen (approx. US$3200), and ships with a number of detachable components: a lens hood, viewer, tele conversion lens, wide conversion lens, remote timer, flash unit and a video output unit, together in an exquisitely presented black leather case.

The first of some of my new Mirror Project submissions are now online. This shot was taken in Thailand from the back of a tuk tuk while trying not to suffocate from all the noxious traffic fumes from the millions of cars that swarm the streets of Bangkok everyday.

Reporters Without Borders gave a number of disposable cameras to international celebrities, including Jodie Foster and French actor Vincent Cassel, asking them to capture glimpses of their daily lives, such visiting the Cannes Film Festival, their behind the scenes of a film set, or their friends. They will auction off the unopened cameras at a charity event tomorrow.

Finally, apologies for the intermittent downtime over the last 48 hours. My flakey and unreliable host was upgrading its network, and took everything offline for most of the weekend!!! No mail, no web hosting, no tech support! I'm jumping ship next month so hopefully most of the hosting problems I've experienced over the past six months will be solved once I move over to a Unix box (currently I'm hosted on an NT server).