I got to Sunset Park just in time for the first annual Duck vs Coot race.

Obviously the little guy was at a disadvantage. In the excitement it seems he forgot he was allowed to fly.

And Duck wins easily.

Our proud winner swims out to greet his fans.

(Click on any of the images to view a much larger version.)

After months of experimenting with long-form video, YouTube said on Friday it would start offering full-length episodes of some television shows on its sprawling Web site.

“This is what the users want,” said Jordan Hoffner, the director of content partnerships for YouTube.

With the addition of TV series like “Dexter,” “Beverly Hills, 90210” and “Star Trek” through a deal with CBS, YouTube is catching up to other Web sites that have promoted long-form video for some time.

Most important for YouTube’s owner, Google, the longer videos will include advertising before, during and after each episode. Google is under pressure to raise more revenue from the nearly four-year-old video sharing site.

And there you have it: If YouTube can get exclusive rights to the TV shows or at least get them earlier than they appear elsewhere the advertising scheme just might work.

A 15 second commercial interupting a 1 or 2 minute video is too much. But several 15 second commercials attached to the beginning, middle and end of an hour long video won’t be as offensive.

It seems that some of the laptop recovery DVDs from ASUS contain not only the OS and drivers, but extra bonus material.

This material includes, among other things:

If you have a fairly recently acquired ASUS laptop you might want to explore your recovery disk. —It could be more interesting than it seems at first glance.

To me it sounds like someone burned a personal copy of the recovery disk and added the tools and data they felt they might need and it somehow got loose.

Either that or someone got pissed and gave the company a computer geek’s one finger salute.

Because there exists so much previous art their claim to be the inventors won’t stand up in court. But just in case you think this is a waste of time consider their obvious reasoning. With the size of Microsoft’s legal department(s) and their aggressive anti-competitor approach no one but the major competitors have deep enough pockets to stand against them.

M$ has something approaching 10,000 patents most of which are a pathetic as this one. But each of them gives M$ ammunition for a legal attack that can be used to bankrupt a smaller company.
===========================

What? You really believe M$ invented something? —Fool, even their base os was purchased for about $60k. It was QDOS -Quick and Dirty Operating System. They just renamed it DOS and leased it to IBM.

When IBM first approach M$ about an operating system the company said they didn’t do operating systems, only ports of programming languages.

IBM then went to the inventor of CPM who immediately went off to play tennis or some such, leaving his wife to negotiate. She refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement so IBM went back to Dear ole uncle Bill and company, who by then had figured out an angle.

—And that boys and girls is how desktop computing was lost to the Dark Side.

If you think this looks like a cool toy, just picture those flashing lights every time you check you GPS. And won’t the cops wonder what you’ve got on your dash when they see those?

Now picture listening to that overly authoritative voice all day every day.

This is a gimmick designed with impulse buyers in mind. It’s also great for those people who have everything. At last there’s something you can get that car nut in your life that they won’t already own.

Other problems are that it slower than glaciers and the text to speech isn’t built in. This needs to be loaded from a cd. Why you ask.. As near as I can determine Mio intends this to be a multinational unit.

They probably have figured out that the novelty will wear off soon and by making the device language and country independent they can delay the time before it becomes “as seen on TV.”

Last night we had wind and rain. Today the sky is clear and the mountains look close enough to touch.
The air is still and temperature is in the high sixties. The birds are noisy and flitting from wire to branch and back.

I know it’s beautiful up in the mountains, everything will stand out in sharp detail. The wildlife will be out and active.

If ever there was a day for that one great photograph, it’s today.

And I had to come to work.

This is my best effort so far.

Click on the image for a larger version. (1500×997)
The original size is 3008×2000 and when I pull it up on the monitor it’s so fuzzy it hurts my eyes.
–I processed this shot by using the clone tool in Photoshop remove the worst of the dust from the frame and then ran auto levels to clean up up the colors and contrast.

So far the problems I have run into with a digital pinhole are dust, dust, and more dust. A pinhole lens on a digital camera can find dust in a laboratory clean room. I even glued a uv filter over then cap when I was done and it still sucked in the dust.

Determining the pinhole size and shape is an ongoing experiment. And while I can buy pre-made pinhole caps or a set of 12 pinholes in various sizes, they are all micro-drilled and I’m not certain that will give me the image I want.
(The rule as I understand it is the smaller the hole the sharper the focus. But each hole diameter represents a give distance from lens to film(or ccd) running anywhere from 3.5mm to several inches.)

The Nikon body caps I have seen for sale seem to have a hole diameter of .0102 which should work out to about the same coverage as a 50mm lens on a full frame camera. This means that for a dx camera I should need a hole about .008+/-.
I think I may even buy some pre-drilled pinholes to play with but I intend to continue to experiment with my needle and hammer approach.

My first pinhole camera was an old Quaker Oats box with a home grown film holder for 120 film cut into 4 or 5 inch lengths and it worked well for what it was, but with my nifty neat and wonderful digital pinhole camera I can test my exposure without wasting a lot of film or even needing to know my f/stop.

If you go to Pinhole Resource they have quite a bit of information. They also have cameras, body caps and pinholes for sale.

It appeared on Wayne Martin Belger’s site Boy of Blue Industries.

For more incredibly strange cameras start with his camera archive.

I doubt that I could afford one even if he was willing to sell. But I want the one called Wood.

The Wood Camera is made from Wood, Aluminum, Copper, Steel, Acrylic, and Insects. Most of the camera parts were found in Death Valley, CA. The camera has an interchangeable front plate used to float objects in front of the pinhole. With pinhole photography the focus is infinite. Objects which are a quarter-inch in front of the pinhole are just as in focus as objects 20 miles away.

At first the official line from the LSE was, “We will be investigating this and will do everything we can to make sure this doesn’t reoccur.” Now they say “It was software-related, a coincidence, due to two processes we couldn’t have foreseen,” and not caused by high-volume.

These people handle huge volumes of trade and deal in trillions of dollars. The fate of many a company could hinge on the next failure. Which is why I find the “coincidence” - “couldn’t have foreseen” statement scary.

The problem is simple: Their 100+ servers are running Windows Server 2003 with custom C# and .Net programs connecting to a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 back end.

This is the world’s third largest stock exchange and someone got suckered into running M$ crap. That it ran without crashing for as long as it did is simply amazing.

I just have to wonder what M$ had to pay to get them to use their products or was it some anonymous middle management incompetent who believed the hype and the pretty pictures?

When asked for my opinion about handling large volumes of constantly changing data I automatically suggest Oracle as the primary database. It may be expensive to own and operate, but it’s reliable under load. Put it on high-end Sun or IBM servers with massive raid arrays, institute redundant means of communication and you might not be bulletproof, but you’ll be damn close.

But they’re just dealing with a business that requires nearly instant communication and gambling with the financial lives of a few million individuals so I guess going with the “low bid” vendor is ok.

BTW: The New York Stock Exchange is starting to run Linux on its servers.

The recipe from Stuff Magazine:

BACON, CHEESE AND BEER DOG

Ingredients:
1 hot dog
1 slice of thick-cut bacon
1 can of spray cheese
1 can beer (It doesn’t matter what kind, but we recommend something dark. Corona probably isn’t a good idea)
1 cup flour
Oil for frying

Instructions:
This one is a little work-intensive, so be ready to buckle down. First take the center out of the hot dog with an apple corer, if you have access to one. If not, just cut out the middle with a knife. Fill the cavity with the spray cheese and use the hot dog you removed from the middle as a cap to keep the cheese in. Wrap the bacon around the hot dog and deep-fry for two to four minutes or until bacon is cooked. Dab them dry with a paper towel (so the batter will stick). Mix the beer with the flour until it reaches a thick, but lump-free consistency. Dip the dogs in the batter, coating the dog completely, and deep-fry on high heat for two to three minutes or until brown and deadly.
NOTE: Don’t fry them too long or all of the cheese will explode out into the oil. That’s very bad.
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The article also had a link to a Corndog casserole recipe.

Yes I’ve tried both recipes:
The dogs aren’t too bad, but you need a cold beer to wash them down.
The casserole is good enough for me to tweak the recipe a bit and make it again. –More cheese.

No, I’m not skinny. Why do you ask?