My view of the world

I upgraded my camera the other day. I went from a Nikon D70 that’s 6 years old or so, to a Nikon D300.

I was going to go with the D200 because it will do anything I’m likely to need, but the price difference for a new unit was minimal and I’d have had to order it online.

The D300 was being offered as a special with an 18-200 vr lens and an instant rebate of $300 applied to the lens.
Since I already own a 24-120 VR and a 70-300 I let the salesman talk me into forgoing the special and buying a Sigma 12-24.
I also own an SB-800 flash unit. — All this makes for a fairly heavy camera bag.

My intention is to get my overfed ass out from behind my computer and outside. — You know, that place with sunshine.

For outdoor work I’ll probably leave the flash unit home, but I may purchase a macro flash. I will definitely need to include a bipod and water bottle.

Because of the weight, this combination may have to change, but for now I’ll just try a vest or backpack.
I’m certain that what I carry a few months from now will be much different from all the stuff I currently think I might need.

Here are two shots taken from the roof of Pioneerloan and one from the inside that demonstrates the problem of being close to your subject with a wide angle lens.
(Clicking on either of the wide images should take you to a much larger image.)
12mm

24mm

12mm
I focused on the bottom shelf of the case directly in front of me intending to include the walls in the shot as well.
I had not expected the “special effects” to be quite so noticeable.

For my next trick I’m going to read the owners manual. The bloody camera will sing, dance and make coffee. But only if you know where to look in the menus and what dial to spin.

I used to shoot film with my Nikon F2as or my TLR.

Those cameras would take beautiful pictures, but it was mostly because I had studied and practiced until I didn’t have to think about what I was doing.
Now I not only need to learn how to use a camera that is smarter than I am, I need to buckle down and spend some serious study time with Photoshop.

Remember those disgustingly cute Cabbage Patch dolls? Well some of them weren’t as harmless as they appeared.

Back in 1997 Mattel had to recall approximately 500,000 Snacktime Kids dolls at $40.00 each.

It seems that these cute little critters were supposed to munch on plastic veggies. However, being kids they didn’t want to eat their vegetables. They wanted to eat other things, like hair and fingers.

Yeppers, the little blighters would just munch out on some kid’s hair and refuse to let go.
– Just like a real child who has something in their mouth that they like.

I guess they made them a little too life like.

Here’s the story in the NYT archives.

Mattel got lucky. The engineers I’ve known would have given them teeth.

I ran across an old bookmark that led to this from the Timesonline.com:
A 28-year-old South Korean man collapsed and died of exhaustion after playing a computer game almost non-stop for 50 hours.

The man, identified only by his family name Lee, sat down to play the online battle simulation game Starcraft at an internet cafe in the southern city of Taegu last Wednesday morning and stayed there for the next three days, stopping only for brief naps or toilet breaks.

And they say there’s no harm in playing video games.

If you have a blog or small website the odds are you use a shared server. Which is to say, your’s isn’t the only site on the machine. In fact there are anywhere from several hundred to several thousand other websites using this same machine.

Now there’s an easy way to find out who some of the other site are that on the “your” machine.
Myipneighbors.com will show you who else shares your ip. Keeping in mind that there can be, and usually is, more than one ip assigned to each server. This information will not tell you how over-sold the machine is, but it provides an interesting list of domains to explore.

This information was returned for Rcnevada.com:

rcnevada.com has the IP address: 67.18.141.194
487 found with the IP 67.18.141.194

487 is the number of sites sharing that ip, presented as a list of domain names, each with a clickable link.

In the case of this machine which is located in the US, I found websites in Russian, an Australian web design company and a UK based escort service.

Another site, also in the US, led to latviantours.com, losemanboobs.com. and sugarshanemosley.com.

And a personal favorite: Tiny Feet Mousery
“We are a small mousery in Wichita, Ks. We pride ourselves on having beautiful, tame and loving mice. We breed for better looking and longer lasting pets. We are not against feeders, however, we do not sell or breed our mice for feeding. All of our mice are loved pets. If you are interested in adopting one of our mice please check out our current available mice on our Adoption page.”
They also mentioned just getting back from the Midwest Mouse Club 2007 Fall Show.

Midwest Mouse Club 2007 Fall Show???? — Something else I knew nothing about.

I’m the admin for several sites, so I run Google Analytics on them. This morning I noticed that 5 of them had large spikes in the number of visitors Saturday and a severe fall off yesterday.
It turned out to be the Digg effect. something got dug and then people followed the links on that blog to the other sites.

The blog in question was titled “Underwater Cockroach” and contained a couple of pictures with a link to the Wikipedia article.
My guess is the digg got buried as a dupe. I saw a digg not to long ago with a bunch of pictures of weird sea creatures and the giant isopod was among them.
I have no idea where Old Dude found his material, but for a brief period his server slowed down, and now it’s back to normal.

My point is that social bookmarking makes a difference.
It can drive traffic to you sites, but this traffic tends to come in bursts, so unless you promote your site regularly diggers and others like them are going to visit once and are not likely to come back.

The slowest site I babysit normally gets 5 or 6 visitors a day. It suddenly got 50+, that’s a 10 fold increase in traffic.

If you have something to sell this approach can work as long as you don’t get reported as spam.
On the other hand, if you are editorializing or reporting, this is great. You get your message out to more readers and you get increased traffic, which in turn helps sell ads.

In closing. Here is the picture everyone liked so well.

Sure looks like a cockroach to me.

This is a story about raising bear cubs in Russia from English-Russia:It’s a shame they grow up.
Click on the picture to see more. The page is slow to load because of the number of pictures.

When I bought this new lens I was looking for a 12-24 Tokina. I decided I didn’t want to spend the money on a Nikkor, and after reading the reviews on Ken Rockwell it seemed the best choice.
I was unable to find the Tokina, however a salesman at Wolfe Camera out in Henderson sold me on the Sigma 12-24.
So far it seems to be a very good lens. I read one reviewer saying that the focus was too soft for them, but I haven’t found this to be a problem. (yet)

For testing I used my Nikon D70 and a D300 both in JPEG mode.
(The D300 weighs quite a bit more, but is 100 times the camera.)

Then in order to maintain the most rigorous standards I stepped out back with the cameras on auto, and fired. The only editing was cropping and resizing.

This shot was taken with the lens at 12mm to see if straight lines stayed straight. —They do.
I took several others with both cameras with the same results.

Then I hand held the D300 with everything running auto and the lens at 24mm from about a foot and a half or maybe two feet away to take this shot.


It will never match my Nikkor 60mm Macro, but for a lens that’s not designed for close-up work it’s not half bad.

All in all I’m pleased with the lens. What will happen after I’ve lived with it a while I can’t say.

As a side note:
There is a special on the purchase of a D300 and the 18-200 VRII lens. If you buy them as a pair before May 11, 08 there’s an instant $300 rebate on the lens. Bringing the cost down to about $2300+tax. I don’t know if all stores are participating but Ritz/Wolfe is and so is B&H in NY.

Digg exemplifies the extent to which we will go to satisfy our need to socialize, to be part of a group.

It also exemplifies what is wrong with Web 2.0…. it’s a time killer. I can easily kill an hour or two on Digg and never notice I’ve done it.

On Digg most of my “friends” seem to be posting from work, I see far fewer shouts or submissions on the weekends. Perhaps one day it will displace solitaire as the number one workplace time waster.

Of course the Grave Diggers seem to work 24/7
— Grave Diggers are how I refer to those folks who seem to be in charge of burying anything they disagree with.

From the Digg FAQ:
The promotion and burying of stories is managed by an algorithm developed by Digg. There is no hard number of Diggs/buries to promote or remove a story. It’s based on a sliding scale that takes several factors into consideration, such as number of Diggs, reports, time of day, topic submitted to, Digging/burying diversity, etc.

Yesserie Bob. We now have a whole new definition for the word “Nebulous.”

I find it hard to believe that as Digg says:
“Bury.
If you find stories with bad links, off-topic content, or duplicate entries, click “Bury.” That’s how we get the spam out of the system and let the good stuff rise to the top.
The system only works when users actively participate on a large scale, so make sure to do your part and Digg and Bury content that matters to you!” — Large scale??

How many buries does it take to kill an article? Digg won’t say….
I still believe that certain folks carry a lot more weight than Digg implies by their statements.

Other social networks have arbitrary ranking, so that you know who does what. While Digg insists on being secretive in their methods.

Kinda makes you wonder what they’re keeping from us, don’t it?

This did not start out as a whine about Digg, but rather an observation on how Web 2..0 can be incredible time waster.
Oh well. Such is life.

Western Digital has announced the release of a new 300 gig 10k rpm hd they call the VelociRaptor.
The company claims this new drive with it’s 16meg buffer is 35% faster than the old Raptors.

The drive is a 2.5 inch form with an SATA 3g/sec interface and integral heatsink bringing the outter dimensions to a standard 3.5″. —So no you can’t put one in your laptop —Yet.

Alienware is reportedly shipping with the new drives, but to buy just a drive from a retailer you need to wait until mid-May.

Not that that matters. Nobody should buy version 1 of any hardware or software.

I would hold off on this beast for at least a couple of months. By then the supply will have stabilized and any issues will be known.

My current plan is to wait about 6 months or so, then buy 4, put them in a machine running a very fast Intel chip, a pair of fast Nvidia cards, and run the drives in raid 5.

If you’re going to do something that is completely frivolous you might as well take it to the extreme.

Did you know that the Defense Intelligence Agency writes it’s own video games?

In the wake of the intelligence bungles that propelled the United States into the Iraq war, it’s no secret that the nation’s spies have been working to improve the quality of their analysis. Now the top U.S. military intelligence agency has come up with a new tool for teaching recruits critical thinking skills: videogames.
The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency has just taken delivery of three PC-based games, developed by simulation studio Visual Purple under a $2.6 million contract between the DIA and defense contractor Concurrent Technologies. The goal is to quickly train the next generation of spies to analyze complex issues like Islamic fundamentalism.
There are three games and none are for sale to the general public. As a general rule they are not about run and gun, but rather more on the lines of the eight points of analysis and proper interrogation techniques.

The DIA isn’t alone in turning to videogames for training. The U.S. Army Intelligence Center is using a custom game to train interrogators, or “human collectors,” as they are euphemistically known. Known by the staggering title of Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Tactical Proficiency Trainer Human Intelligence Control Cell, the simulation was designed by General Dynamics from the shooter Far Cry.

The game does not teach coercive interrogation techniques, like waterboarding. But it may eventually be modified to show how offensive or abusive questioning will cause detainees to become less cooperative, says Dennis Mitchell, chief of the intelligence center’s training devices branch. “One of the persons who helped us out on it was an instructor who trained people on what the current [interrogation] manual is, and what the rules of war are, and how you treat prisoners of war acceptably.”

Former DIA analyst A.J.Rossmiller says videogames won’t fix what he sees as systemic flaws in American intelligence, where conclusions by analysts are distorted as they work their way up the chain of command. “A lot of problems are stated as analytical when they’re management problems.”

If you think these games will work I suggest you read any number of books on the intelligence blunders past and present. — Any schooling is only as good as the premise behind it.