Yearly Archives: 2007

Thoughts

How I handle contacts at Flickr

When you add me as a contact on Flickr, you may notice that I may not add you back. Please don’t think I’m ignoring you. It’s just that I handle contacts differently at Flickr.

I like to go through all of my contacts’ photographs. I try to view every photo they’re posting. I know that’s a rarity, but I consider it my responsibility. I’m not going to be a false contact that jumps on someone’s photo stream once in a while and comments on a couple of photos, then you don’t hear from them again for 6-12 months, if ever.

Since my time is limited, and I do try to go through every photo that my contacts post, I can only have a limited number of contacts. I’ve found out that I can handle about 100 or so contacts.

I also look for photographs that inspire me. I look for a high concentration of artistic or creative photographs in someone’s photo stream.

I also encourage my contacts to do the same with me. If you’re not inspired by my photos, take me off your contact list. There’s no reason for you to be frustrated with the photos I post. Life’s too short to be frustrated with things you can change.

Does that mean I forget about the people who’ve added me as a contact? No. I go through my Recent Activity regularly, and when I see that people who aren’t on my contact list have taken the time to interact with my photos, I return the favor.

I hope this explains my stance, and I also hope that those of you who’ve added me as a contact don’t feel offended. Feel free to contact me at any time through whatever means I’ve provided to you (phone, email, blog).

If you’d like to get to know me, a good place to start would be this blog, which is where I spend most of my time. Read my work, comment on it, start a dialogue, etc. Life is one big et caetera. It’s not limited to a contact list on one social networking site.

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Reviews

Song of the Thin Man (1947)

“Song of the Thin Man” (1947) is the sixth and final installment in the Thin Man series, starring Bill Powell and Myrna Loy. The series started in 1934 with “The Thin Man”. In the midst of the depression, that first movie struck a chord with people and was instantly popular. More movies followed, in 1936, 1939 and 1941. One was even made during WWII, in 1944.

This final movie made in 1947, at the end of WWII, was a turning point. From that point on, movies changed. Americans who came home from abroad, from war and travel, had a different perspective in life. Social hierarchy changed. American prosperity came into its own and people’s expectations changed (not necessarily for the better). You’ll see hints of all those things in this movie.

I may be wrong on this, but it’s possible that Bill Powell was made to wear a wig for this movie. He had a receding hair line as early as 1931, and it was visible in his other Thin Man movies. In this one, however, you’ll see a clear, determined hair line, much closer to his forehead than in earlier movies. It bothered me a bit. I wanted to see the Bill Powell I knew, with his own hair.

The plotline for this movie is similar to the others in the series. Someone gets murdered, there are lots of suspects and motives, the likely suspects turn out to be false, and the criminal is someone close to the action but an unlikely choice. Although we know how things are going to unroll, it’s the action, the dialogue, and above all, the actors that keep us interested in this movie, and in the others as well.

Bill Powell and Myrna Loy are two of my favorite actors, and they’re amazing when they’re together on screen. It’s a delight to watch them. Every time I see a movie that stars only one of them, I miss the other. They’re just not the same if they’re not together.

More information:

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Lists

Condensed knowledge for 2007-09-19

A bit of a health theme to this edition of condensed knowledge:

  • A new CPR technique was discovered. It’s called OAC-CPR (Only rhythmic Abdominal Compression). As its name implies, you only press on the abdomen, eliminating the risk of broken ribs, mouth-to-mouth, and fatigue from pushing so hard. Definitely worth looking into this!
  • Prozac found in the drinking water in the UK. Apparently so many people are on the anti-depressant in England, that it can now be found, diluted, in the water supply, after having passed through their bodies, into the sewers, through the water treatment plants, etc. Although the “experts” are saying there’s no risk, I doubt it. I mean, this is a drug, found active, in the water supply!
  • WD40 turns out to be a great help for bad joints. Despite the precautions written on the cans, rubbing it into the skin was of tremendous help to a man suffering from joint pain. Not sure that I’d recommend this.
  • Aspartame is the behind the spike in suicides for teen and pre-teen girls. Apparently, it’s a powerful mood-changer — it causes depression. Something to think about the next time you buy your children something with Nutrasweet or Aspartame as the sweetener.
  • Exercising in traffic is bad for your heart. Now that’s something I’ve known was wrong for some time. It just didn’t make sense to me when I saw people running on the sidewalk, next to heavy traffic, breathing in all those noxious fumes. When I run, I want to breathe fresh, healthy air, not someone’s nasty car exhaust. I just couldn’t get why they’d put themselves through something that unhealthy. It turns out the particulates from vehicle emissions decrease our blood’s ability to clot, and restrict the amount of blood that reaches the heart immediately upon exposure.
  • Mobile phones are as dangerous as smoking. So reads a recent headline… People have gone back and forth on the safety of mobile phones for years. Now the EU has finally decided to pick a side and take action. The article’s in Romanian, but what it says is that governments are starting to take mitigating action, first by warning people of the risks, and then by looking at ways to minimize exposure to WiFi radiation. They’re recommending that people go back to using wired Internet connections instead of wireless ones.

Now for some funny stuff:

And some economic discussion:

  • Greenspan on Iraq war, oil link. He confirms what I’ve thought and said for some time. In his talk with Matt Lauer, he touches on the housing bubble and the fiscal irresponsibility of the current administration, but he has no compliments for the Democrats, either. Last, but no least, he says the dollar may be replaced by the euro as the reserve currency of choice.
  • Transparent Investing: what your broker doesn’t want you to know. Here’s a site that offers a purportedly frank discussion of index investing. Definitely worth a look.
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Thoughts

Moved my ideas to ComeAcross

Until now, I housed the various ideas I published online at my personal site. I decided to move them here to my blog, and I did just that today. I could not have done it without the Import/Export functionality in WordPress, and even more importantly, without the Redirection plugin from Urban Giraffe. That plugin is one amazing piece of work! I just love it.

I imported my posts, assigned them to a new user so I could easily find them, and then I simply entered the corresponding URLs on each site into the Redirection plugin settings page, as seen below. Then I deleted the original posts at RaoulPop.com. Now every time someone tries to access the page for an idea at RaoulPop.com, they’ll get a 301 redirection to that same page here at ComeAcross. It couldn’t have been easier!

The Redirection plugin for WordPress

I got a chance to look at my ideas once more, and it was interesting to see that some of them have already come true. I’ll let you have a look at them as well. Can you tell which ones are already out there?

The thing to keep in mind as you go through these ideas is that I tried to match the publish time of each one with the exact time (to the minute, anyway), when I got the idea. So you’ll see publish times going back to 2005 or so for most of them. The gravitational propulsion-levitation idea doesn’t have an exact time. I do know that I started thinking about it back in 1997, and although it seems outlandish, I’m pretty confident that it can be done. We just don’t have all of the pieces of the that jigsaw puzzle yet.

This page will give you the background information on why I decided to publish my ideas on the web. I call it my great experiment in ethics. We’ll see how it turns out.

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Reviews

Camera preview: Nikon D3 and D300 DSLRs

On August 23, 2007, Nikon introduced two new DSLRs to the market: the full frame D3, and the D300, an upgrade to the D200. I’m late with this bit of news — I meant to publish the post sooner, but I was out of the country and I had less access to the internet that I’d hoped. Still, since I went to the trouble of getting nice studio pics for the two cameras, I thought I’d write about it anyway, late or not.

First, a few photos. There’s the D3 below, and the D300 is right after it.

These two cameras have gotten plenty of coverage already. What else is there to be said? Well, remember the big CCD vs. CMOS arguments that went on and on for years? Hmm, let’s see, who was it that argued for CCD? Why, it was Nikon, of course. What have they just done? They’ve switched to CMOS entirely for their new DSLRs.

There was another argument thrown around, also by Nikon and its supporters. Um, yes, I remember now, it had something to do with full-frame vs. cropped sensors. I’m paraphrasing here, but Nikon people were saying something along the lines of “full-frame isn’t needed for digital, it’s useless — we can accomplish everything we want with a cropped sensor.” So, what just happened? Nikon put out a full-frame DSLR.

Short of holding my brother’s D70s in my hand, changing the lens, cleaning its sensor and taking a few photos, I don’t have a lot of hands-on experience with Nikon cameras. I considered buying the D200 this past spring, but opted for the Canon 5D instead. I can tell you what my brother says about his D70s — and believe me, it’s not flattering… It turns out there was a ridiculously high rate of factory defects with that camera, particularly when it came to autofocus. His camera can’t autofocus to save its life. He’s had to use manual focus ever since he bought the camera. He’s finally going to pay to repair it, after more than one and a half years of use. He’d have sent it to Nikon for repair while the warranty was still good, but there are no official Nikon reps in Romania, which is where he lives and works.

We sat there comparing on-screen menus between his D70s and my Canon 5D. He couldn’t believe how easy it was to navigate the menus on my 5D, and to get the settings that he wanted, the first time, right away. He kept mumbling under his breath about how pathetic the D70s was, and how he could never find stuff when he was pressed for time. Heck, I tried to help him find the sensor cleaning mode and gave up after several minutes. We just couldn’t find it. We ended up putting the camera in mirror lock-up mode, pressing the shutter and cleaning the sensor that way. That’s pretty pathetic from a UI (User Interface) point of view.

On the other hand, I’ve heard some people praise Nikon’s controls. I don’t get it. Perhaps if you’ve been a Nikon guy for years, the stuff is just easier to find, but they sure don’t make it easy for someone who picks up the camera and wants to use it. Canon does make it easy, and that’s one of the reasons I like them.

There’s another thing I can say for Nikon in general. Their PR people gave me the run-around when I tried to get a D200 for review. On the other hand, Olympus and Canon were responsive and willing to send me review units. I’ve also heard of really bad customer support experiences from Nikon users.

Take these experiences for what they’re worth. They may have been isolated incidents — or not. I’m certainly willing to forget my bad experience with Nikon PR if they are interested in sending me a D300 or D3 for review. I’ll do what I usually do, which is to use it as my primary camera for one month, then write an honest, detailed review of the experience.

From a design point of view, these two new cameras look really nice. I can’t tell you how they feel in my hand, since I haven’t had the chance to hold them (yet).

I do want to point out that Nikon has more high-res photos for its cameras than Canon. That’s nice. It gives people a chance to get a closer look at them, and it’s an added convenience. You can see the rest of the photos below.

Here’s that troublesome CMOS that Nikon people used to badmouth in the past. It’s the sensor that does what a CCD cannot, which is to enable Nikon to go all the way to 6400 ISO natively on the D3 and 3200 ISO on the D300 (and even all the way up to 12,800 and 25,600 ISO in expanded mode on the D3).

Yes, ISO-wise, Nikon one-upped Canon, but they haven’t managed to get the same amount of resolution from the full-frame sensor that Canon can get. My 5D has roughly the same resolution as the D3 (12.8 vs. 12.1), while the Canon 1Ds Mark III has 21.1 megapixels — but only goes up to 1600 ISO natively. So there’s a certain give and take here that has to do with the physical limitations (at least to date) of the medium.

If you squeeze more pixels out of the same surface area, the pixel pitch decreases and you end up more prone to noise. If you keep the pixel pitch large, you can get more low-light sensitivity, but you don’t have the resolution. Nikon chose to go for low-light sensitivity with their two newest cameras, which I think is an interesting choice. Perhaps they did it to silence the Nikon critics who kept harping on their noise-prone CCD sensors. Whatever the reason, I’d love to see just how one of these two cameras does in low light with a nice fast lens like a 50mm f/1.4 or f/1.2.

Till then, I’ll leave you with more information:

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