It’s one week ’til John’s stag day and my preparations are generally on track.

Today’s item ticked off the list is getting a more suitable camera to take on such an event.

My Fuji Finepix S602Zoom is rather a big camera and far too delicate to be trundled around town and above all, won’t fit in the pocket. Hence, today I went out looking to buy the best compact digital camera I could for the lowest prices I could find. Initially I’d thought of the Nikon Coolpix 2100. This is a 2 megapixel camera, takes CF media (which I already have), uses standard batteries and costs about £150. However, after seeing it in the flesh I thought it FAR too big to lug around.

My thoughts then turned to the obvious, high quality compact camera range, the Canon IXUS series. The IXUS 400, costing about £350-400 was out of the price range but the IXUS II at £250 was at the very top of the price range I was looking at.

I’ve always thought that the Canon IXUS cameras were idea for taking out on the town, being built from strong matterials and having seemingly armoured lens covers. After buying the camera I wasn’t disappointed in this respect.

The camera uses Secure Digital media and comes with a small 16MB card which won’t actually hold a lot of pictures. However, I do have a 32MB card in my Treo. This means that I can use the Treo’s card in the camera and the camera card in the Treo until I get around to buying a bigger card. It means that I can still take about 66 3 megapixel pictures in “normal” quality mode which is all I’ll need for next Saturday.

As for the quality of the pictures, well, for a camera with such a small lens it’s pretty good. The images are slightly noisier than my Fuji but the camera is half the price!

As for the other item on today’s list, unfortunately I couldn’t find one. So, what was it I was trying to find?

Well, it was a set of flashing, red devil horns. (Tacky, eh?) They weren’t my idea, they were John’s twin’s (along with wearing black and dark sunglasses and John being dressed in the most inappropriate women’s clothes he can find and being made up badly. John doesn’t yet know about this part.)

And so, the day comes to an end.