I’m home for the weekend, and stopped by the Turkey Hill Cemetery. Got some nice shots, perfect for Halloween. It’s funny how much of an effect the post-processing can have… Here’s a shot in black and white, with a little glow added:
And here’s a shot in color:
This marks the second time, by the way, that the 10D’s AE has gone wonky and I’ve had to switch over to full-manual mode.
I created two new sets on my Flickr account, Foliage and the Cemetery Trip.
Posting this in the hopes that it’ll be useful to someone else, because it certainly took me a long time and caused a lot of frustration.
There’s a bizarre bug that a few people, myself including, have run into when upgrading to Ubuntu’s Gutsy Gibbon release: the applications menu is blank.
Some recommended deleting ~/.config/menus/applications.menu, but, in my case, this didn’t recreate it.
Here’s a tip, though: there’s an /etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu. Copying it to ~/.config/menus/ fixed my problem. And now, I have an applications menu. Hurrah!
Going through the circulars, here are some more incredible deals:
Let the Democrats continue bashing each other in public, ensuring that, post-primaries, whoever wins from the Democrats already has egg on their face, thrown by another Democrat. The Republicans won’t even have to run attack ads.
And Republicans, don’t worry. It seems that we’re well on way with this plan. Just sit back and watch as we talk ourselves out of the White House.
In business, and really just life, it’s important to plan for the long-term. In a lot of publicly-traded companies, managers have incentives to manage for the short-term: if they boost the company’s numbers for the year, they get huge bonuses. The plan doesn’t account for the fact that they may well have gotten there by sabotaging the company’s future.
But the long term is different from the absurdly long term. I’m sitting here reading an article about how Merrimack needs to replace its manhole covers. There are two plans; one is very expensive but will last us 50 years. The other is significantly cheaper, but there’s a chance that, in a couple of decades, they might need to be replaced again.
I guess the right way to look at it is the total cost over time. But frankly, in 20-25 years, I’m going to be in my 40’s, and probably not living in Merrimack. I’m not going to think, “Man, I wish we’d spend more on manhole covers.” I won’t even remember that we replaced them 20 years ago.
One of my classes this semester is called Strategic Management. Some classmates presented their “strategic recommendations” for a golf company. One of their plans was aimed at growing the company’s market share over 100 years. I had to choke back my laughter when they said this.
It’s important to plan for the future. Doing something that you know will endanger your company in the future is a bad idea. You always want to be thinking of the future. But how can you know what the golf industry is going to be like in 50 years? How can you know what the economy will be like? For a five-year plan you can infer that it won’t change too much, besides a little technological advancement. But if anyone ever gives you a 100-year plan for their company, I encourage you to crack up laughing. I almost did, at least.
Kyle’s ending sentence reminded me of something I’ve noticed before: we at Bentley are not normal. Even those of us who aren’t obsessed with starting the next big company still have business on our minds all the times.
The other day one of my friends here remarked, “I want a Gap T-shirt.” Or at least, that’s how you’d have heard it. But what we heard, especially since a lot of my friends here are accounting majors, was, “I want a GAAP T-shirt,” which is actually what he meant. He just said it and we all cracked up laughing. I think I’m going to try to whip one up in Photoshop.
I came across this book on Amazon today. It’s called “Amtrak Privitization: The Route to Failure.” And my first thought was, “That’s not at all what I’m looking for,” (I was looking for a book about car maintenance by someone with a similar name), “but it sounds really interesting.”
The problem is, if you asked a sane person what their opinion of the book was, I think they’d tell you that it was the most boring topic they could imagine. And here’s another book that makes the opposite argument: the government should ditch Amtrak and let the private market “fix” it.
Of course, Railroad Law a Decade after Deregulation doesn’t grip me quite as much, especially at 50 cents a page.
As an aside, there’s one copy for $71.81 on half.com. The next is $101.98. In theory, you could buy it, read it (or use it as a doorstop), and then relist it around $95. It seems like it’s not a hot seller, but $71.81 is unnecessarily low on the part of that seller.
The one “problem” with my 10D is that you can’t possibly fit the thing in your pocket. I’m buying a “grip” for it from Andrew, which is going to make it even larger.
So I don’t feel as bad about tacking a huge lens onto it. Heck, the lenses I use are small compared to what the real pros shoot with.
But here’s what I need. Canon made a 1200mm lens. This thing is ridiculously large. At f/5.6, it’s as fast as my camera at 200mm. This is n amazing lens. This is the only lens where photos of the lens are routinely more interesting than photos taken with the lens. I knew for a long time that the lens was very expensive. But I wasn’t aware of the definition of “very” expensive, nor that Wikipedia had a page on it. It apparently cost just shy of $90,000, and was available only by special order.
So then I found this article about Nikon’s ‘version’ of that lens, a 1200-1700mm lens. Of course, being a Nikon, it’s black instead of white. Linked to from that page is this article on Reuters, written by one of their photographers in France who took the agency’s 1200-1700mm lens to an event this July to get some shorts of the new President of France. The situation is one in which most pro photographers would weep and give up, and the lens is barely long enough. (He jokes that next year he’ll put a 2x TC on it.)
I’ll gladly accept donations.
Numbers 1-10, sorted alphabetically:
This was oddly difficult, by the way. Kind of like that chart that has color names written in different colors, and you have to say what color the word is.
I haven’t paid all that much attention to the fires in California, especially after discovering that my family out there wasn’t anywhere near the blaze. But take a look at this. This family just got back from their honeymoon and their house was burned to the ground. Very literally. There’s a small pile of ash left.
AT&T is coming after them trying to collect $300 for the receiver that was damaged in the fire. The guy on the phone at AT&T had the audacity to suggest that they should have taken the rented satellite receiver with them when they evacuated.
Way to go, AT&T. Short of changing your logo to a swastika or making fun of 9/11 victims, I’m not sure you could possibly have made yourself look more foolish than this.
Would you buy perfume from a site called “I hate perfume?”
Check out chemist Christopher Brosius’ collection, including scents like “Ocean,” “Snow,” dirt, mushrooms, basil, carrot, hay, “Burnt Wood,” pipe smoke, leather, ice cream cones, “Celo Tape,” and rubber.
In another collection, he’s got gems like burning leaves, beach, and some that can’t be succinctly described like Mr. Hulot’s Holiday.
This one sounds like a winner.