the art of writing is discovering what you believe
Interesting article on Kodak’s resurgence and how it found its market:
I can’t think of any other consumer products companies that eschew flash for functionality . . . . can you?
And Nikon not even mentioned in that article . . .
Now playing: This Night Has Opened My Eyes by The Smiths from the album “Louder Than Bombs” | Get it
As Apple keeps innovating, its challengers keep competing like engineers, thinking that advantages in storage capacity or battery life can make silk purses out of ugly, hard-to-use sows’ ears of machines. When people would rather spend more than $130 above list price on eBay for your product than buy someone else’s comparatively priced or cheaper product, you own the category.
These guys — at the WSJ, no less — think Apple may finally have shaken off the FUD: could they be coming into a long overdue renaissance?
This is a really nice camera: solid feeling, well laid-out, and bristling with features. I’m very intrigued by the amount of manual controls it has (and how you use them: how to check depth-of-field, for example?) and hope to explore them.
But.
If you understand that no one would ever buy a 16 Mb compact flash card, wonder no more about where they end up. They get shipped in new camera boxes, so you can thrill yourself with 9 pictures before offloading them to start again.
Of course, a 512 Mb card can be had for $45 or so, making it moot. I can even see upgrading the firmware to handle RAW images with that much space to work with.
Guardian | The King William’s College quiz:
The King William’s College quiz
It’s 100 years old and it’ll still outsmart you. The King William’s College quiz is devised for the intellectual torture of the school’s pupils, and this is your chance to suffer with them. Answers in the new year…
I’ll be taking this to a multi-family Christmas dinner tomorrow.
I got two on my initial scan. How did you do?
Kevin Kelly has collected a list of definitive text some of the world’s major faiths for his Cool Tools list:
Cool Bible translation
The Qur’an: A New Translation:
Best modern translation
The Zen of Islam
Pocket parables
A good idea for this time of year, to say nothing of where we are in history.
Load average of 300+ . . . . what the . . . ?
12:10PM up 7 days, 23:33, 3 users, load averages: 317.38, 314.25, 309.87
Perhaps I need to look at those monitoring scripts I just set up . . .
I finally managed to procure a film scanner to convert boxes of slide and negatives into something more useful, but of course on my budget, the complete kits were unattainable (you can find Nikon Coolscan LS-2000 kits, complete with original box for as little as $250: they were $2000 new), so I have just the scanner, no cables. You’d think an UltraSCSI cable would be fairly easy to locate, but I haven’t found one for less than $25 at a specialty website and one for $9 on eBay.
This unit lacks the multi-slide adapter (they’ll need to be fed in one at a time) or the negative carrier, so I’ll be pulling this together well into the new year.
And this doesn’t even get into drivers or scanner software . . . .
I have about 12 total messages in my GMail inbox: I haven’t used it very much at all. It’s fine, but I haven’t yet worked it into my dysfunctional work style.
Judge of my surprise and amazement when I found 81 spam messages in there today: since all the email I have sent and received was to trusted individuals, I have to assume the spammers are just taking usernames they find in the wild and just appending domains at random. They assume everyone has a GMail account, so just spam everyone@gmail.com.
This revelation (perhaps obvious to everyone else) suggests spammers, like the poor, will always be with us.
Current Watches, Warnings and Advisories for Washington Issued by the National Weather Service:
A PACIFIC FRONTAL SYSTEM COULD PRODUCE PERIODS OF HEAVY SNOW IN THE MOUNTAINS LATE FRIDAY NIGHT THROUGH SATURDAY EVENING…
…AREAS OF LIGHT SNOW ARE POSSIBLE IN THE WESTERN WASHINGTON LOWLANDS SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY…
SNOW WILL BEGIN FALLING IN THE CASCADES AND OLYMPICS FRIDAY NIGHT… AND THE MOUNTAINS COULD RECEIVE AROUND A FOOT OF NEW SNOW BY THE EVENING OF CHRISTMAS DAY. THE SNOW LEVEL IN THE MOUNTAINS WILL BE AROUND 3500 FEET FRIDAY NIGHT AS A COLD FRONT APPROACHES THE COAST.
THE SNOW LEVEL WILL FALL QUICKLY BEHIND THE COLD FRONT ON CHRISTMAS DAY…DROPPING BELOW 1000 FEET SATURDAY EVENING.
THE AIR MASS OVER WESTERN WASHINGTON WILL BE COLD ENOUGH TO PRODUCE SNOWFALL AT LOW ELEVATIONS SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY. AT THIS TIME WIDESPREAD SIGNIFICANT SNOWFALL OVER THE LOWLANDS LOOKS UNLIKELY…
BUT LOCAL ACCUMULATIONS OF 1 OR 2 INCHES OF SNOW ARE POSSIBLE.
Better get the sled waxed up . . . .
Now playing: End of the Line by Roxy Music from the album “Siren” | Get it