It was kind of a crummy day at work for various reasons, most of which don't bear going into, but it mostly had to do with the fact that the office is getting close to shutting down, there are people walking in the halls carrying computer equipment and boxes, and talking about dismantling furniture and whether or not people have gotten files they need off their computers, and I'm still in the middle of a big project and finding it very difficult to concentrate and do what I need to do in the midst of chaos.

Nothing to be done about it, though. As Dave said the other day in response to something else (I was doing a banner ad for someone and wanted to be sure that I'd done everything I could do to get the file size down): "It is what it is."

A couple of months ago I ran across Lomo.com, a site that is mostly devoted to the Lomo camera, a funny little camera with four lenses that takes four photographs simultaneously on the same frame of film, but they also process "normal" film, i.e., film from non-Lomo cameras.

If you sign up for photo processing with them, they'll send you a free package containing a roll of film and a pre-paid mailer so that you can test their service.

The only problem is, they're in Switzerland. So I sent off for the package, not really thinking I'd ever get anything, but I did. A free roll of film, a prepaid mailer, and a bunch of stickers and sample photographs. It's been a long time since I took anything other than digital photographs, but I put the film in my camera, and since both the film and the processing were free, I just snapped away, not worrying whether I was taking good photographs or not.

Most of them were pretty bad, actually, but I had fun with it. Then I sent them off in the mailer to Switzerland, wondering, really, whether the U.S. postal service would take it, but they apparently did, because I got an email this morning that my pictures were ready--ready to look at on the web, and on their way to me in the mail.

It's just a really cool, funky service, with lots of fun features, including the Lomo Wall, an animated collage of your photographs:

Click on the collage to go to the site, and if you press the little red "play" button, you can see the animation, and if you click on any of the photographs, you can see it full size.

Pretty fun.

I took the camera with me when we went to Springfield two weeks ago, and took it in to Bass Pro Outdoor World, where I became a pure tourist and asked Bob to take my picture with the bear.