The Canon SD700 IS is a great little camera. It shoots incredibly clean images and has a really low-noise low light mode which, along with built in image stabilization, makes it a winner for anyone who hates flash-infested shots at cocktail parties. I had this little gem for about 6 months until it met its untimely demise and the hands of my little 4 year old Ansel Adams today.

Read on to see how, and more importantly, why software engineers should stick to software...

I've had good luck in the past turning Alex (who is 4) loose with my camera and then throwing away 95% of the material and keeping the 5% that turns out to be interesting. This afternoon on the way back from the park, I figured I would try this at Starbucks (truth be told, I was trying to shut him up but I justified it by thinking he would make some good hay out of this "It's red again" theme that Starbucks has going).

Here are some of the shots he managed to get...

These two represent the end of the SD700s life. While getting a particularly Taratinoesque photo of the contents of the refrigerator, he lost his grip on the camera and sent it skipping like a flat stone on the calm sea across the concrete floor.

The Canons are built tough— but not this tough. Below you can see what happens when you "tower of pisa" the image-stabilized lens through sudden impact.

Now here is the part you do NOT want to repeat at home. Since my father is an electrical engineer who can take anything apart and put it back together, I figured I would teach Alex a little self-reliance by making an object lesson out of fixing the camera. I thought I had maybe a 30% chance of fixing anything but given that the camera sounded like a maraca when shaken, I was pretty convinced that the odds were low that the geniuses at Canon were going to fix it for anything less than it would cost to buy a new one.

My dad did manage to teach me some things— so I pulled the high capacity battery out and started looking for screws...

Apparently these little suckers carry some pretty slow discharge capacitors (for the flash?) because while trying to get the lens mount off, I got the best electric shock I've gotten in 10 years...

Back in Venezuela when I was about 9 years old, my father taught me what a relay did by taking them out of broken consumer electronics gadgets. One day, I thought I would make the lights in my room work by relay by pulling a little DC one out of a remote control car and running it into a patched light switch on the wall. This was my own first contribution to material worthy of the Darwin awards and my first big electric shock. It was not the biggest (that would come years later in California when I was holding a stripped phone wire in my mouth [I was on a roof] right when someone called) but it did leave the biggest impression. This little experiment in object lessons definitely resulted in a top-5 electric shock.

The funniest part of it though was that the jolt sent the camera six feet up in the air only to land on its crooked lens. The result was an amount of curvature that makes me amazed at the tensile strength of this lens mount (see below).

People, pay attention to all of those warnings that say "CAUTION: May cause electic shock." Just cause it's not plugged in doesn't mean it can't smart.

From this day forward, I will not be able to look at those cute little cameras in quite the same way...

Happy Holidays from all of us at Tabblo who hope to stay firmly employed in software and far far far away from hardware.