Yearly Archives: 2007

Places

A night at the Legg Mason Tennis Classic

I received an exciting invitation from Olympus PR last week. Would I be able to attend the Legg Mason Tennis Classic on August 1st, here in DC? I’d get a box seat and the chance to try out the new E-510 DSLR. Absolutely, I said!

What do you think I did this afternoon? I was center court, sure enough, sitting together with five other folks from reputable news organizations, geeking out on Olympus DLSR stuff and comparing cameras and features. The E-410 was also available to try out. It’s the smallest and lightest DSLR on the market. You’ll remember the E-330 held that title before, but it didn’t have a prism. The E-410 has the prism. It, along with the E-510, now also has Live View, which lets you compose photos on screen.

If you know your cameras, then you know Live View is a pretty innovative feature, which is really hard to accomplish on a DSLR. In the E-330, Olympus used two sensors and a complicated mirror system to accomplish it. With the E-410 and E-510, they’ve simplified things. Now they have only one CMOS that does it all. I’m planning to write a detailed review of the E-510 after I’ve used it thoroughly for a month, and I’ll explain how the Live View works in the review.

Back to the Legg Mason Classic. The weather was filthy hot today, but thankfully the humidity was fairly low for our area, and the sun’s oven-hot rays tapered off around 7 pm. I slathered on plenty of sunscreen, but still got sunburn. Such is life when you’re a pale-face.

The first match, at 4 pm, was P. Goldstein (USA) vs. R. Stepanek (CZE). By the way, you can check the schedule over here. I didn’t know who to root for. Goldstein put up a serious fight and I thought he’d win. Stepanek looked like he was losing, but somehow he kept on top and won the match. Goldstein was the crowd favorite — apparently he grew up in the DC area. Stepanek got booed a few times, but I have a feeling he didn’t really care. He kept at it and brought home the bacon, so to speak — home for him being Monte Carlo, which is not a bad place to call home if I might say so.

The second match was A. Clement (FRA) vs. T. Johansson (SWE). Johansson had some amazingly fast serves. He clocked in at 132 mph once, if I remember correctly. He also had great returns. Clement kept pouting and giving the crowd angry looks if they’d as much as get up from their seats. In the end Clement went home to sulk over a baguette and Brie and Johansson advanced to the next round.

The third (and final match for me) featured the annoying Bryan twins (USA) vs. P. Goldstein and T. Phillips (USA). Yes, you read correctly. That’s the same Goldstein from the first match at center court. How he managed to recover from that exhausting match with Stepanek in the course of a couple of hours, I don’t know, but there he was, ready to put up another good fight. I instantly had to root for him. You have to respect a guy that plays two tournament matches in one night. That’s real dedication and perseverance. Unfortunately, all he and Phillips could do against the (yes, I’ll say it again) annoying Bryan twins was to put up a good fight.

The dynamically annoying duo towered over the shorter Goldstein and Phillips and smiled gleefully as they mercilessly tore away at their opponents. I’m sorry, I don’t care if they’re top seeded and girls find them cute, I found myself calling them names and hoping Goldstein and Phillips would beat the pants off them. I didn’t end up staying for the whole match, and after I got home, I found out that the annoying Bryan twins lived up to their ill-begotten reputation and won it. I so wanted them brought down a notch… They desperately need it.

All in all, I had a LOT of fun, and I’m really glad I got to meet people from the National Geographic Traveler, Internet News and The Washington Post. But all of this would not have been possible without Michael Bourne (yes, that’s his real name) from Mullen, who organized the entire get-together and provided us with some great new DLSRs to test and review. Michael, Mullen, Olympus, thank you! I look forward to processing the photos I got last night, and reviewing the E-510! 🙂

Updated 8/6/07: The photos are available right here.

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Thoughts

The Simpsons me

I read a post over at Dawn Armfield’s blog today that resonated with me. It’s about one’s online identity, and whether you’re comfortable enough to be yourself even when you can be someone else. If you read my blog regularly, I think you pretty much know where I stand on that. I write in first person, my photo’s everywhere, I’m not shy about expressing my opinions, etc. I would ask where you stand on that, but it might be a moot point. I get the feeling that the people uncomfortable revealing their identity online, for whatever reason, won’t reply. I’ll only get comments from the ones like me.

Something fun did come out of it though, and I wanted to share that with you as well. Dawn built a Simpsons avatar for herself (you can see hers in her blog post) and inspired me to do the same. I headed over to the Simpsons Movie site, which is where you can partake in this fun little experience, and built one for myself. It was a bit difficult to find the bits and pieces that would make the character look like me, but in the end, I arrived at a reasonable facsimile. Have a look below. Ligia got a kick out of it. She said she liked it, and that it was really funny.

I don’t think I’ll be using this as my online avatar, but it’s fun to look at it. For example, I had no idea that I would like a hippie if I wore certain clothes. What do you think? And by all means, if you want to chime in on how you identify yourself online, please do so as well.

The Simpsons Me
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Reviews

James and the Giant Peach (1996)

James and the Giant Peach (1996)Last night was the first time Ligia and I saw this delightful movie (IMDB). I regret not seeing it earlier. I remember the ads on TV back when it came out. I hadn’t read the book by Roald Dahl, nor did I know the story was written by him until I watched the featurette included in the special features on the DVD. I might have known it though.

All his stories weave scary elements into whimsical storytelling with wonderful plotlines and happy endings that remain with you. It makes for such vivid characters and happenings! I still treasure “The BFG” (1989, IMDB), more than 15 years after seeing it. I taped it when it ran on TV, and I still have the tape somewhere — although it’s probably so demagnetized by now that I wouldn’t be able to watch it.

Boy, those aunts of James’ were sure scary! If I were still a child, I might have had nightmares about them. The sets were great. You could tell right away they were sets, but that didn’t detract from their atmosphere at all — in fact, it added to it. I wondered why, and then I saw Tim Burton’s name as Co-Producer. I might have known that as well. The sets had the same feel as “Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993, IMDB) and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (2005, IMDB).

Parents have already picked up on what makes the movie wonderful for children, so I’m only going to mention it in passing: it’s the uplifting message it carries, of course, picked up from the book. James, a child mistreated by his aunts to the point of abuse, hangs on to his imagination and the kindness that his parents instill in him, and proves to be a hero loved by the insects he saves, and by his adopted city, New York. It’s the sort of story that you’ll want to read to your children over and over, and the sort of story they’ll want to listen to over and over and over.

I thought the movie was very well done and highly watchable. I always have a healthy amount of respect for the people that work on these stop-motion animation movies. It takes years to get them done. It took three years for this movie. There are 24 frames per second, which means that each scene had to be rearranged for each frame, 24 times per second and 1,440 times for a full minute of action. That’s a herculean effort, and one has to respect that. When you add in the fact that the finished product looks great, it’s really a wonderful achievement.

Loved it!

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Lists

Cool science videos

The Japanese have come up with a swimming snake robot:

Ronald Mallett is a university professor and a physicist. He believes time travel is possible, has a theory about how it can be done, and is working on a time machine:

The first dynamically-balanced robot, Dexter, learns to walk:

Here’s another robot, called Murata Boy, that can ride bicycles:

A home-made anti-gravity kit. Could be a hoax, but then again, I haven’t tried it out for myself, so I don’t know:

A demonstration of the principle of atomic halving through noodle-making. Awesome!

The FLIP is a research vessel that can literally flip to a vertical position while in water. It’s designed so its stern submerges deep underwater. It becomes incredibly stable that way, and this allows scientists to perform very precise measurements at sea.

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How To

Making it to the first page of Google search results

As I checked my traffic stats over the past few days, I noticed a steady stream of traffic to my reviews of the WD My Book World and Pro Edition II hard drives. I was pleasantly surprised, but couldn’t figure out why. Other than publishing the reviews on my blog, I hadn’t done any sort of promotion. No one had linked to them so far (from what I could tell), yet the traffic was there. It wasn’t an outrageous amount of traffic, but nice, steady and regular. That sort of traffic usually only comes from one source: search engines.

I checked, and sure enough, my two reviews had made it to the first page of Google search results — the dream of any content creator. Here’s a search for WD My Book Pro Edition II, and for WD My Book World Edition II. Not sure how long they’ll stay there, but it’s really nice to see blog content make it to the front page of Google search, and even better, it’s a treat to see my own content make it there. 🙂

I thought I’d check on some other popular content and see how it ranks in Google’s search results. I logged into my FeedBurner account and looked at the most popular pages for the past 30 days. Here are the top ten pages at ComeAcross, in descending order:

In truth, I’m not sure just what it takes to get to the front page at Google. Let’s just say that it involves a fair amount of chance along with the the hard work. I steer clear of dirty SEO tricks like keyword seeding and other such nasty stuff. Also, I haven’t really spent a lot of time optimizing ComeAcross with honest SEO techniques. Other than using WordPress, which has certain built-in SEO advantages, and trying to write good content, I don’t do much to ensure that my posts get good ranks in the search engines. That’s why I find it refreshing to see that content is still king, and as long as one’s design isn’t egregiously awful, you’ll still get indexed just fine and bubble toward the top as more people find your information interesting.

Don’t assume though that I do nothing to promote my work. Remember, I just finished writing about how I promote it using Twitter and Jaiku or other microblogging services yesterday. Here’s part one and part two of that discussion. I also have other tools that I use, though I don’t use them often. I depend on my readers to do that — or rather, I prefer to let my content grow in popularity organically, without “cheating the system”. It’s probably a good idea that I discuss this in more detail in a future post — perhaps next week.

I should also say that I’m not dismissing SEO. It has its value, and if done right, can help push content right to the top. Some people swear by it, and have seen their traffic double. I should probably look into it in more detail at some point in the future. And good web design is crucial. Design may not necessarily matter to search engines (to some extent) but it sure matters to people. If your site’s design is ugly or hard to use, don’t expect many people to read through your content or return to it. By the same token, good web design alone won’t draw the traffic. Good content will do it. Keep that in mind, and thrive.

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