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Mary Jo Foley is reporting that Bill Gates may soon start his own blog. Supposedly, it will be more of a personal blog than a corporate one. (The fake blog is fairly entertaining, but I imagine it won't be long before the real owner suffers a fate similar to that of Mike Rowe.)
I just heard today that one of my pictures from a rocket launch event in May might make the cover of Sport Rocketry magazine. Granted, it is a publication for a very specific audience and doesn't have a huge subscriber base (and I'm not even sure I am getting paid) but it would certainly be a nice addition to my photography r
Patrick Goldstein of the L.A. Times sums it up pretty well:
For me, the problem with Moore is that if you judge him as a documentary filmmaker, his work is undermined by too many shaded facts and slippery conclusions. But if you judge him as a political satirist, he's a supremely gifted bomb thrower.
You need to have a subcription to the L.A. Times to see the full article (titled "Truth teller or story stretcher?", June 22), but it is well worth the read (thanks to Alan Watkins for the pointer). The common theme around Michael Moore seems to be inaccuracy. If you ask him, Jay Leno and Bill O'Reilly have both banned him from their shows. If you ask them, there has never been a ban and he has, in fact, been invited several times to be on those shows. Makes you sort of wonder who needs the publicity more (sp?). :)
Notice anything different? Hopefully, you have. I put up a new banner last night. It was fun (and a lot of work) putting it together. Sunday night I drove down to Shelter Island to shoot precisely for this purpose. I found a spot with a good view of the skyline. I had to use my biggest lens for this, that was the only way I could get close enough to make the taller buildings fill the entire height. The image you see on the banner was made by combining 6 slides together. It took a lot of work in Photoshop to get the final result, with a little help from my friend Scott, my Photoshop guru. The pictures came out amazingly sharp. I plan to make a few prints for friends and such. At 300 dpi I can get 1' x 8' prints. You can't see much of the detail in the image here, but at 100% you can see folds on the sails of the Star of India ship. Just to give you an idea, here is one of the sails at 100%.
If you're interested in getting a print, let me know and I'll make one for you at cost, roughly $40-50 in paper and ink (maybe slightly more, I won't know exactly how much until I can get a good estimate on the amount of ink consumed).
*UPDATE*
Looks like about $30 in materials, if you're interested in one you can post in the comments area or send me an email.
Mary Jo Foley asks: "When Will MSN Up the Hotmail Ante?". Yahoo has called on Google's hefty bet. Meanwhile, I'm still stuck with a 2 MB limit and limited search capability. MS, your move.
Those commercials are hilarious.
From Scoble (Firefox doesn't have an RSS feed, sigh): Firefox 0.9 was released on Monday. This is my default browser these days, it is the most standards-compliant browser, runs very nicely, has a bunch of cool features, and is cross-platform. What's not to love? In case that isn't enough to convince you, you might want to read Daniel Miessler's article on Lockergnome. Incidentally, I found that link on Scoble's blog, also. His default browser is Firefox. It's got to be driving the IE team nuts that arguably the most-read MS blogger is not using their product. If for no other reason, you have to admire the guy for that.
...and I was just talking to a friend about earthquakes a couple days ago.
I am so sick of reading headlines that are misleading just to get me to read their stupid article. Bad reporting has run rampant the last few weeks...everything from the idiotic $50 iPod from Microsoft report by the Denver Post to the story about Microsoft patenting the double-click.
Looks like Reuters is joining in on the stupidity. Case in point...this article. The headline reads Nikon Boosts Digital Cameras, Eyes Exit from Film. Uh...not even close. What Nikon *really* said was that they "may next year start considering pulling out of the film compact camera business".
Well, no fucking shit. Who buys film compact cameras? People who have no intention of ever getting serious about photography and just want to take snapshots of family or friends. And guess what the market is for digital cameras? BINGO. These same people are all buying digital now, which makes perfect sense since all they were doing with their film photos was scanning them and emailing them to friends and family or posting them on a web site.
Professional SLR film cameras aren't going away for a long, long time, no matter what anybody tells you. Talk to some pros. Or read an article or two. Hell, I'm not a pro and I can describe it fairly easily.
The average digital camera is in the 3-5 megapixel range. Most publications want a resolution of 300 dpi for print. A 3-megapixel camera is roughly 2000 x 1500. Well, that'll get you a nice 5 x 7, but that won't even cover half a page of a magazine. A 5-megapixel camera will do about 2500 x 2000...a nice improvement, but at 300 dpi that still only gets you a nice 6 x 8. Not even close to a full-page ad, let alone a 2-page spread.
Now, consider film (we'll use slide film in this example). Slides are roughly 1" x 1.5" in size. Good film scanners (not drum scanners, those are beyond the reach of most people and usually only found in photo labs) can scan at 4000 dpi. So that means I can scan a slide and get an image that is approximately 6000 x 4000 pixels. That's 24 megapixels. Not to mention the scans are usually 14- or 16-bit, so a lot more information is being stored in the image file. A 4-megapixel digital camera, set to high quality jpeg, will produce an image file roughly 3 MB in size. Slide scans in 14-bit produce files in excess of 100 MB.
So, you might ask, who is using the high-end professional digital SLRs? Well, the obvious answer is the pros who need quick turnaround time and the best quality available...sports photographers and photojournalists, primarily. Which is exactly the market for cameras like the Nikon D2H. This is an excellent camera, by the way.
Anyway, sorry for the rant, but hopefully my handful of readers will be a little more well-informed than the average person on this subject. I've been reading way too many articles talking about the demise of film. Film isn't going anywhere for many, many years, not until we start seeing affordable digital cameras in the 20+ megapixel range AND magazines and other publications switch their workflow completely over to digital.
I got my Linux box built and loaded the UT2004 dedicated server on it. Right now it is set for Capture The Flag maps, although I will be tweaking the settings quite a bit over the next week or so until I get everything right. Most likely I will have it cycle through a series of different maps and game types. Also, I might be adding a mutator or two.
Feel free to try it out, the name is "Jorge's UT2004 Server" and it is visible from the master list. You might need to change your filter to CTF. Also, I have stats enabled, although I would consider removing that if it becomes a problem.
Suggestions on tweaks to improve gameplay are appreciated.
Details are not available, since the investigation is ongoing, but you can read about it here.
My favorite quote from the article:
"It was extraordinary to watch how quickly and how cleverly gamers were able to unravel what are traditionally unsolvable problems for law enforcement related to this kind of cyber crime," Valve Chief Executive Gabe Newell said in a statement.
Well, duh. That seems a bit na
I meant to post on this several times but never got around to it, but this event will be over soon so here goes.
Brood X cicadas, thought to be the largest brood, have emerged this year on their 17-year cycle, beginning in mid-May and through mid-June. Unfortunately, they only appear in the eastern United States. I was seriously considering flying out to see them, it must be quite a sight...and quite noisy. Apparently, they are not bad eating, although it is recommended that you not eat too many due to mercury levels.
Doc Searls says Brian Dear is the cover subject of this week's San Diego Reader. They paid him $0.25/word for 8000 words straight from his blog. Should be interesting to see what that's going to look like in traditional newsprint.
Read about it here and on the weblog of Jeffrey McManus, Senior Manager of Developer Relations at eBay. Right now there are only two feeds, one for eBay announcements and the other for system status messages, but I imagine they'll be adding more soon. This is exciting, I'm glad to see more and more companies adding RSS feeds for their products or services. This bit of news also shows the power of weblogging, I found out about it through Robert Scoble's blog, who in turn was told about it from one of his readers, who read it on the Internet News site, who in turn read about it on Jeffrey McManus' weblog. A lot of interesting news is being broken through blogs these days.
Don't ask me where I find this stuff. This Saturday, June 12th, is World Naked Bike Ride Day (nudity warning). I will definitely not be participating in this event. If that isn't your cup of tea, then perhaps you might be interested in participating in the *first* annual Go Skateboarding Day on June 21st. Go dig through your garage and pull out your old deck, get some new bearings and hit some local concrete. San Diego has some nice skate parks, now that they are legally built and maintained. Back when I was a kid, aside from having to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get to school, we used to skate in concrete ditches we'd find around town, then run like hell when we'd see a police car. I would have given my left nut to be able to skate legally in a park with nice smooth bowls, jumps, rails, etc. I remember practicing rail slides at the local Stater Brothers because they had these nice slick 4-inch thick concrete walls that were about 2 feet high, so you could ollie onto that and slide several feet and drop back down. Our other hobby was to steal wood from a local construction site and build quarter-pipes that we'd set up on our street. Now kids have professionally designed and built skate parks where they can practice their skills. Damn kids, they have it so easy these days. :)
As I mentioned several posts ago, some days when I get home from work I'll grab my camera and walk around my backyard looking for stuff to photograph. Every now and then I get lucky and find something interesting. Today I was walking around taking some pictures of flowers and spiders when I found this butterfly sleeping on one of the bushes in my back yard. I flipped my lens into macro mode and moved in. This was a somewhat technically difficult shot...I wanted to line up the barrel of the lens perpendicular to the wings of the butterfly. A tripod was out of the question, since it was going to be impossible to position it properly given the location of the butterfly. I was going to have to push my camera and face several inches into the bush to get the right angle. I also wanted to have limited depth of field so I had the aperture at f/4, one stop down from it's widest setting. I was working with my D100 and with an ISO setting of 200 I was getting a correct exposure reading of 1/80th of a second, safe enough for a handheld shot given the lens I was using, although I had to wait for the breeze to die down a bit.
There's the shot. And the butterfly is still sleeping. I would consider it a success from a naturalist's point of view, except that while leaning in to take the picture I destroyed half of a spider web, sigh.
Dave Winer says that the Online Journalism Review will announce today that the Wall Street Journal is publishing RSS feeds.