Rusty and I usually don’t see eye-to-eye on style. But when he sent me a link to this shirt, I knew he was onto something.
Granted, it’s not out yet. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to be ordering one. Not only is it “geek chic,” but it’s functional, too: I often wonder if there’s a good WiFi signal in various locations.
As an aside, tell me that this doesn’t fill a need in your life. And seriously, I’m buying this. Which makes me wonder… Bluetooth is 2.4 GHz, too… Will it false-alarm my shirt?
This is really bizarre, but it still really cracks me up because it was so bizarre.
Some friends and I went to Margarita’s this weekend for dinner. It fills up fast, but I was able to get a reservation so we didn’t wait more than a couple minutes. But as we were waiting, this group got seated. They’d been waiting for a while, since they all had margaritas in hand. They left the waiting area to go to their table, but then one woman came back. There was a sort of display case with various Mexican art and handiwork in the wall. She rammed her margarita glass into it–I’m not sure how it didn’t break. And then she just left nonchalantly with margarita in hand.
We’re fairly certain that’s not what she was intending to do, but none of us can figure out what she was trying to do. I confess to not being up on all the issues surrounding drinking, since I don’t really drink, but I’m fairly certain that forcefully banging your margarita into windows isn’t a custom.
Canon and Nikon are like the Coke and Pepsi of the photography world. And if you have a Canon camera, the lenses for it won’t work with a Nikon camera, and vice versa, so you’re effectively locked into one or the other. I’m a Canon guy, so I don’t really follow what Nikon’s doing much. But it turns out that Canon and Nikon have both just recently come out with amazing cameras.
Nikon just released the Nikon D3, which as some awesome features:
It’s got an orientation sensor that shows you how ‘level’ the camera is.
Dual CompactFlash cards, and you can use them several ways: double your storage, mirror them (I should note that CF card failures are probably far rarer than hard drive failures, so this is insane reliability), or store RAW images on one and JPGs on the other.
HDMI output.
ISO6400 as a standard feature.
ISO is how sensitive the camera is to light. A higher sensitivity lets you get pictures in darker settings, but raises the amount of noise (grain, essentially “static”) on the image. Most consumer cameras go ISO100-400. I can shoot up to ISO1600 without much noise, which lets me get a lot of shots I otherwise wouldn’t. I also have “ISO Expansion” unlocked, letting me bump up to ISO3200 when necessary, but at the expensive of pretty grainy images.
ISO6400 is the highest before you unlocked expanded ISO!
It goes up to ISO25600. Please excuse me while I drool. Unsurprisingly, ISO25600 is extremely noisy, but at the point, no other camera on the planet would even be able to take the picture, so some noise is an acceptable compromise. What interests me, though, is that, short of ISO25600, it’s really not that noisy. Look at the gallery of this site. Those first two pictures are ISO3200, which I find really hard to believe: they look flawless! ISO6400 is perfectly acceptable, and really, ISO12800 isn’t bad. I wouldn’t use ISO25600 if I could help it, but you’d probably only be using it when all the other photographers put their cameras away because it was too dark to get shots.
Of course, a camera like that is meant more at the sports market, where speed is essential. Canon just announced something for the other ultra-high-end market: studio photographers.
The Canon 1Ds Mark III was just recently announced. What’s remarkable here?
It’s 21 megapixels, and it’s 21 megapixels on a full-frame sensor. Digital photography actually surpassed the ‘resolution’ of film long ago: if you were to take pictures on the best film and blow it up as much as possible, you’d get more detail if you used a high-end digital camera. But at 21 megapixels, Canon is closing in on medium-format cameras. Seriously, 21 megapixels.
Two neat ways to manage sensor dust (the sensor builds up a charge that causes dust to stick to it, which ends up showing up on pictures):
“Dust mapping,” where you can use software on your computer to map out the dust.
A high-speed (ultrasonic?) vibration of the sensor, which keeps dust from sticking. A few other Canon cameras offer this, too, but it’s still very new.
A fairly big image buffer, something I wouldn’t expect on a 21 megapixel camera… And 5 frames per second, which beats my 10D.
An optional wireless add-on.
As an aside, check out the photos page and check out how obscenely wide the 85mm f/1.2 lens is.
And now imagine… 85mm f/1.2 lens… On the Nikon camera… ISO25600… You could probably see in the dark?
I can’t for the life of me find the quote, but I think it was Thomas Jefferson, or maybe Lincoln, who said in his inaugural address that, “We are all Democrats, all Republicans…”
I think that is exceptionally important these days. Last night, on campus, we had a debate with the Republicans. We bashed Bush, and they bashed Hillary. In the Senate, Democrats seem to oppose whatever the Republicans do, and the Republicans oppose whatever the Democrats do.
In theory, the parties are really important: much like the three branches of government, they keep each other in check. The country probably won’t go socialist, because the Republicans will oppose it. And we won’t become a fascist dictatorship because the Democrats won’t allow it. (Of course, some would call the current Administration a fascist dictatorship, and at last night’s meeting someone went on about how the Massachusetts government is now truly run by socialists; realistically, though, we’re not even close to either.)
In practice, people are too devoted to their parties. I don’t agree with everything the Democrats do: every now and then, I have to go with the Republicans on something. And I have a lot of respect for some Republicans who have taken the side of the Democrats. (Which is happening increasingly often when Bush is involved?)
So nothing gets done. Bush just vetoed a bill that would have given healthcare to children who can’t afford it. Did we ever renew the assault weapons ban? Michigan’s government almost shut down.
What did we debate last night? Whether or not Hillary could lead the country, and whether she could stare down world leaders. (My question, “Why do we want a president who intimidates world leaders?” got lost in the fray.) What else might we have talked about if we’d had more time? Whether or not we’re ready for a black President? Whether or not Rudy is inappropriately using 9/11 for his gain? The MoveOn ad?
It seems like not many people care about what’s right anymore, as much as whether their side wins. What do I think of the MoveOn ad? I don’t know, I never saw it. I don’t give a crap, really, just like I don’t give a crap about whether Hillary can look intimidating, or whether Rudy’s unceasing talk about 9/11 is inappropriate. I give a crap about children in poor families dying for want of health care. I give a crap about our soldiers dying in a pointless war. I give a crap about us not having an assault weapons ban. I give a crap about the fact that when I was a little kid, America was, without a doubt, the best nation in the world, and now most of the world hates us. I give a crap that our economy is going down while the rest of the world watches their economies soar. I give a crap that the government has such a deficit that we’re borrowing money just to pay off our debt. I give a crap that the big investors are moving all their money into foreign economies. I give a crap that schools aren’t getting the funding they need to keep America competitive. I give a crap that the military is losing talented people because of their sexual orientation. I give a crap that college keeps getting more and more expensive and we’re cutting loans. I give a crap that we’re not giving benefits to soldiers who came back from the war.
Please, politicians, get it. I’m a Democrat. I don’t want the Democrats to “win” in Congress: I want America to win. And we’re not.
The poor Zune has so much going against it. For one thing, they decided to make it brown; the most delicate way I’ve seen this put was something to the effect of, “The Zune team decided that brown was the hot new color. No other marketing team has reached this conclusion.”
I don’t like DRM, not even on my iPod, but the thing the iPod has going for it is that it’ll play that DRMed music. A lot of people complained that the Zune didn’t play half the formats of music they had.
And then there was the “orgasm screen,” a really bizarre screen during the installer that’s probably Not Safe for Work. Also probably NSFW is their logo upside-down, although that can be considered more bad luck than poor planning.
But I still gave them credit for trying. They have a terrible market share, but they tried.
Well! They just released the “Zune 2.0,” and, well, see for yourself. They did ditch the brown, although they also introduced “diarrhea green.” But I think this is even worse: the old one made me think, “Good for Microsoft, designing their own MP3 player.” Now I think, “Wow, it’s a bad clone of the iPod.” The looks are just too similar. They added some features, such as more video codecs, which is great. WiFi syncing to a computer? Awesome idea.
There is one thing that I think they got right, though. They failed the design, they failed the color choices (again), they failed having safe-for-work backgrounds in the installer screen, but they have a DRM-free music store now. I didn’t think Apple could lose its edge, but now Microsoft and Amazon are both offering DRM-free songs. And you know what? I don’t think I’m going to get my songs through iTunes anymore. Now that Linux is my primary OS, all the songs I bought from iTunes don’t play due to DRM. Apple’s got to do something, or it’s going to start losing, at least on music sales.
It’s amazing what the Internet has unleashed. Today I stumbled across a mention of the Vosges Bacon Chocolate Bar. It was an amusing typo, I thought: it almost sounds like a chocolate bar with bacon in it. My roommates have long joked about my love for bacon. (A local pizza place offers a dish known as the “heart attack,” which is a calzone stuffed with mozzarella sticks and bacon–its name is well-deserved. But ohhhh is it good.)
But it turns out that I hadn’t misunderstood anything. It is a chocolate bar with bacon in it. Sitting on a hot tip like this, though, I knew I had to act fast, so I sent the link to the Snack Maniac. Barring the Maniac’s ghostwritten entry, the Internet had gone a whole month without any snack updates, so I’m proud to take credit for leading to the first update in a month. So proud, in fact, that I may have to take todays “Hero of the Day” designation away from [deep breath] the man suing to keep his amputated leg that he stored in a barbecue smoker in a storage shed but was inadvertently sold when he missed his rent payments and is now used by the guy who bought the smoker at an auction as some sort of bizarre exhibit in his backyard[deep breath], and instead give it to myself… (The Hero of the Day designation, not the amputated leg stored in a barbecue smoker in a self-rental shed.)
Having recently resolved that I need to focus on eating healthy, I was thrilled to learn that the Snack Maniac was sending me a bacon-chocolate bar of my own. And while I confess that I don’t have the experienced palate of the Snack Maniac, I’ll be sure to post an update on how it tastes.
If the piques your interest… It’s not the strangest part of the story. You see, the man lost his leg years ago in a plane crash, and stored his leg in a barbecue smoker in a storage shed, but failed to make his rental payments, so they sold the smoker with the leg inside. The new owner charges people to see the leg inside the smoker, and refuses to give it back to the man from whence it came.
Today’s Hero of the Day secures a solid spot in my list of daily heroes.
I’m eating some nuts right now. They’re unsalted, unroasted, so they’re really not even that good.
Which got me wondering… How did people discover nuts? Were they accustomed to ripping things off trees and eating them? Did they try acorns? All the trees with inedible berries?
But here are some other things I’ve always wondered about the discoveries of:
Smoking. I think I posted about this before, actually. I think that, even if I lived all by myself in the woods with nothing to do and nothing to eat and no basis for what was normal, I’d never think, “Let’s rip this leaf up, dry it, set it on fire, and inhale the smoke.” And why tobacco leaves? Did they try oak leaves? Grass? Cabbage? Corn? Poison Ivy?
Sex. No, really. What else did they try before their breakthrough discovery? I think a fair amount of what we hold as “intuitive” is really societal. Was it clear initially that it should be a male and a female, and what went where, or were there lots of other variations?
Beer. Who thought, “Let’s take these unappetizing ingredients, let them rot for months, and then drink it!”? Intuitively, wouldn’t you think, “This has been rotting for months, I don’t dare drink it?” What else did they let ferment before ingesting?
Cheese. Kind of the same concept. Spoiled milk is disgusting. But getting it to cheese? I don’t think I could ever even eat cheese if I really thought about its manufacture. And for the first, say, century after cheese was discovered, I’m fairly certain that there weren’t supermarkets that sold pre-packaged cheese.
Milk. Really thinking about where it comes from, what led us to drink that? Did we try drinking bodily fluids from other animals? Do I even want to know?
Meat. Seriously, who thought, “Let’s kill that cow, cut it up, and eat it?” Was cooking devised right away? I love my burgers, but I’d rather starve to death than go up and start gnawing on a cow. And cutting up a cow and then gnawing away sounds even more disgusting.
Contact lenses. I’m glad I got them long after the technology was perfected. I’m fairly certain that if someone came up to me and said, “I’m working on a revolutionary new technology that lets you stick ‘glasses’ directly to your eyeball,” I just would have laughed… Or run screaming. Depending on whether or not they wanted to try them on me.
John Kerry gave a speech at Faneuil Hall today, focusing on economics. Between being interested, having been a Kerry ’04 supporter, wanting to try my hand at photographing the event, and having no classes during the day, I decided to attend. What follows is a write-up of the event, a combination of photography stuff and politics.
I was worried when I found out it was inside. I have a fairly “slow” lens (f/5.6 when zoomed in, which I knew is where I’d be shooting), so I wasn’t sure how they’d come out. It ended up being fairly bright inside, but shooting zoomed to 200mm still requires a fairly fast exposure. I left the lens wide open (which has the added benefit of helping to throw the background out of focus) the whole time, and bumped the camera up to ISO800. (I spent a little time at ISO1600 to try to get some “safety shots,” figuring a little grain was better than motion blur, but I can’t even tell without looking at the metadata which was which.)
This is not John Kerry, but I’ve still got a few photos uploading so I’ll start with those that are already online. This guy was marching around Harvard Square ranting about his dislike for Jews. I kind of wanted to get into his head: momentarily pretending that hating Jews isn’t crazy in and of itself, I have to wonder what possesses someone to dress up in a ridiculous costume and try to convince a ton of other people that they should hate Jews, too. Does this guy have a job? Is he sane in other settings, or is he always like this? Does he go to the grocery store to buy eggs and ham and rant to the cashier about Jews? Does he have a wife? What’s going on with the couple beyond him to the left?
Upon seeing this guy, someone near me wondered aloud, “Can you say that in public?!” This guy must not have gone to our school, because just a few weeks ago, we handed out about 1,000 copies of the Constitution. He wouldn’t have had to read far, even: we put that part right up front for him.
I had lunch in Quincy Market. Since I was by myself and didn’t feel like looking for a seat, I ate at one of those bizarre troffs tables. I took this shot with my 18-50mm lens, at 18mm. Even with the camera’s crop, 18mm (effectively 29mm) is really wide! This picture should also go in textbooks that talk about barrel distortion.
What are the odds that everyone here would be in orange? (It was pure coincidence.) I really like seeing that it’s not just young college students calling for Bush’s ouster.
The room was really impressive, and was a great place to hold something like this. Of course, there was no shortage of flags. The inscription on the bottom of the pictures behind Senator Kerry reads, “Liberty and Union Now and Forever.”
This breaks one of the cardinal rules of photography. You want the subject looking “in.” It’d have been great had he been facing the right (his left), but he wasn’t. Also, at least for me, the object that my eye jumps to is the woman in green, who was just some random audience member.
The enormous picture behind him wasn’t level. Another “cardinal rule” I’m big on is keeping straight lines. I’m more prone to noticing than most people, but when the horizon is slanting, it really detracts from the picture. I realized early on that my pictures were coming out pretty crooked, so I started being careful to try to keep the bottom of the frame nice and level. But on more zoomed-out shots like this, the stage was pretty slanted. I’d love to fix the alignment of the painting, but when I try aligning pictures on walls, they tend to fall off. I think I’d be in pretty deep trouble if I knocked that painting down.
Here’s the room. It’s on the upper floor of Faneuil Hall, and is incredibly nice. (This was a little before we started; the guy on the right is an usher.)
Any idea who this lady is? She was right near the front and a lot of people were coming up saying hello. I’m assuming she’s either a former politician or wife of a politician, but I didn’t recognize her.
See what I mean? Here I aligned the image so the stage was perfectly level. Look at that sloping painting! Isn’t it distracting?
Kerry talked a lot about health care, and the utter disaster that is our status quo. He actually slipped in what I thought was a hilarious joke… Discussing Romney’s move for universal health care in Massachusetts, he mentioned how he’s now downplaying it. “It’s almost as if he’s saying he was for universal health care before he voted against it.”
He also discussed tax cuts and the preposterous situation of giving the richest Americans huge tax rebates. “Teresa and I didn’t ask for a tax break. We didn’t need one, especially not when 43 million [?] Americans can’t afford basic health care.”
I’m not sure I did such a great job going over what happened, but it was great. My one critique is that he seemed a little too quick to bash Republicans: it’s something most all Democrats are quick to do, but unless we start working together, the schism is going to get wider. We need to work with the Republicans, not against them.
