Mrs Ball's Original and Steers BBQ Sauce

Mrs Ball's Original and Steers BBQ Sauce
Originally uploaded by Ian Wilson.

All is good in the world when you can get your favourite home grown South African brands at your local Sainsbury's.

Well you can at my local one anyway.

Schnappy schnapps

I finally, after fighting it for about a year, gave in to my urge to splurge on new gadgets.

1) Tomtom 510
2) Canon EOS 400d Digital Rebel XTi (which sounds more like a car than a camera)

The Tomtom was a replacement for my old navigation system, which after months of threatening, finally gave up the will to function properly. Well it still works fine as a device but it refuses to charge through the car unit, which pretty much makes it useless. The Tomtom is fantastic, does everything bigger, faster, and better than it's predecessor and is loaded with a bunch of fantastically useful features (like hands-free bluetooth phone calls via your mobile and real time traffic updates and rerouting).

The Canon, and I completely admit to this, is a far better camera than I am a photographer. But having said that I've been using my old S85 for about 4 years and it was time to upgrade. Already the trial photo's I've taken have illustrated exactly how much better this camera is. Auto focus, with the supplied EF-S lens, is almost immediate and start up time is down from the 4 seconds that I'm used to, to about 0.2 seconds. Read and write is like lightning, largely thanks to the Scandisk 1GB Extreme III card I bought to go with it.

On that note, with regard to the previously mentioned offer from Jessops to price match any UK online price: they usually retail the 1GB Extreme III's for £64.99 but price matched this site and sold it to me for £23.90.

I don't know what prices are like in South Africa, but as I'm heading there in February if anyone wants me to bring over a few bits just drop me a line and I'll see what I can do.

Lastly. GOD DAMN IT WAS GOOD TO FINALLY BEAT ENGLAND AT TWICKENHAM AGAIN! Viva la Springbok return to form... almost.

Doppelganger

In my quest to find the cheapest EOS 400D on the market (well actually I already know where it's cheapest) I stumbled across this weirdness...

Jessops.co.uk - Well known UK camera store

Tecno.co.uk - Who?

Can you spot the similarities?

I'm not sure if it's just a complete rip off or, as Natalie suggests, Jessops are just trying to own the online camera market. Who knows.

PS. If you, like me, are looking for a EOS 400D then Amazon have them going at the special Christmas price of just £479.96. I would suggest printing that out, taking it to Jessops and getting them to price match it, and then getting yourself the silver model (which is exclusive to Jessops). That's what I intend to do.

P.S.S I was hoping to go a whole month without blogging but just couldn't pass up the opportunity to post about the duplicate sites.