Tag Archives: news

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Condensed knowledge for 2007-05-03

This post picks up where my previous one left off. Here’s the good stuff:

  • Do you like old printing presses, or the quality print jobs in old, rare books? Then you’ll love this video of a small press that still uses the old methods to create some amazing results. (You’ll need Quicktime to view it.)
  • John Dvorak is a Mac troll. And I bet he’s drooling for an iPhone as well.
  • Check out the Google Maps directions from NYC to Dublin.
  • Did you know raw milk is illegal in many states in the US? Neither did I, until now, but I think it’s a very silly thing. Check out the stance of the public official quoted in the article. You’d think the guy was talking about terrorists, not some stuff we find in the supermarket. Remember the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld? See any similarities?
  • This article made serious waves when it came out a few weeks ago. The Washington Post arranged for one of the world’s best known violinists, Joshua Bell, to sit in a DC metro station and play on his violin — a Stradivarius. The music was classical, but extremely moving. Would people stop and listen? Would they realize what they were hearing was amazing? Check out what happened.
  • Back in April, Johnny Hart, the cartoonist who created B.C. and Wizard of Id, died. Rest in peace, Mr. Hart!
  • Look At This has a series of “Monkey-ed Movies” on their blog. They’re parodies of movies and television programs done entirely with chimps. Funny stuff!
  • Keith Washington was, or may still be, Prince George county’s deputy homeland security director. He is also trigger happy to the extreme, and can pull his gun on you at any time. He’s shot up two furniture delivery men in his home, and also pulled his gun on a real estate appraiser as the man took photos of his home. Someone tell me how this guy got the job. Or is the Homeland Defense department purposely looking for these sorts of people?
  • IKEA makes prefab houses, and they’ve begun to make them available in England.
  • This is a great video of the real estate house prices from 1890 to the present, adjusted for inflation, and plotted as a roller coaster ride.
  • A drunk guy fell under a passing train in Cologne, Germany. After the train went over him, he got right up and kept on going. That’s one lucky dude.
  • Beware the bot fly and its larva. This is NOT something you want to experience. There’s also a video to go along with that.
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Lists

Condensed knowledge for 2007-05-02

I can’t resist sending interesting links through email to my close contacts, or publishing them to my Twitter page. But I thought it’d be a good idea to collect them every once in a while and publish them on my blog as well. Hope you find them as interesting as I do!

  • Have you been unable to get a mortgage or to rent a place lately? You may be on one of the government’s many terrorist lists. The Treasury Department has started to release names of suspected people to private businesses. They’re supposed to check against these lists when doing business with normal folks like you and me. The sad part is, the lists are inaccurate and there are many false matches. It’s also a serious invasion of our privacy. See “Ordinary Customers Flagged as Terrorists“, in the Washington Post.
  • If you use FeedBurner, you’ll be glad to know they’ve released a Twitter Feed Flare that will let your site visitors automatically submit a link to your blog posts on their Twitter pages.
  • Have you been getting hassled about your photography in public places? You’ll get a laugh out of this What The Duck comic.
  • The Japanese are doing some pretty cool things to save energy in their country, and in many ways, are on the leading edge of energy efficiency and conservation.
  • The FBI abuses its right to use gag orders when they investigate suspected crimes.
  • Got money to burn, no common sense, and a desire to possibly pee in your pants while eating dinner? Great, then have dinner in the sky.
  • Hey look, here’s a really cheesy Bollywood movie featuring a dancing Superman and Wonder Woman…
  • The last WWI combat veteran, Ret. Army Cpl. Howard V. Ramsey, has died. Rest in peace, brave soldier!
  • Russia has formed a super agency that will control what the media says and does. Gee, what does this remind me of? Oh, I know, communism…
  • Just what is Supermarket 2.0? Watch it and see.
  • I always thought the Art Lebedev Studio made products that bordered on useless, but this is just not right. Although, given the date when it was released, I have a feeling it’s an April Fool’s joke.
  • A very cool dog saved its owner’s life by jumping on her chest as she choked on a bit of apple. It worked! There’s a video as well.
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Thoughts

More good things

Didn’t get a chance to post the review of the S9100 yet, but the 30D review unit arrived today and I got to play with it tonight. And, most importantly, I sold my first photo today. It was a direct sale. Someone liked one of my photos and wanted to use it. I don’t know if that makes me a semi-pro or pro photographer, or neither, but I do know that I feel pretty good!

Meanwhile, I’m thoroughly impressed with the EOS 30D, even though I’ve only used it for only an hour or so. The photos are amazingly clear, even with the kit lens, and at 1600 ISO, remarkably free of noise. My gosh, I’m really going to enjoy using this camera for the next month! I have to ask, if the 30D is this good, how much better is the 5D, with its full frame sensor? I’m wowed already. Stay tuned for that review sometime within the next month.

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Thoughts

Keeping up with the news

It’s so easy to spread yourself thin these modern times… You’ve got news up the wazoo, 24×7, from a gazillion sources. On top of that, you’ve got blogs, with experts expounding on the virtues of this and that, and why it should matter to you, and you’ve got feeds of all sorts you can subscribe to, and podcasts you can listen to, and videos you can watch on these humongous video sites like YouTube and Google Video and Revver and plenty more. If that’s not enough, you can watch tens, if not hundreds, of TV channels, and the programming variety just boggles the mind.

Trouble is, most of this is garbage, and you can’t keep up with all of it. As addictive as it is to read a ridiculous amount of news, and be at the top of the game on many subjects, it’s wearisome, stressful and exhausting. It’s not seldom that I found myself bleary-eyed and listless after catching up on the news these past several years. And yet, I still didn’t learn my lesson, and wanted more, more, more. Well, you can’t have it all. It’s humanly impossible to stay plugged into many sources at once, and expect to get anything else done. You end up becoming part of the pipe, unable to contribute, overwhelmed by the information, receptive but useless, a consumer, not a producer.

I suppose if that’s all you want to be, that’s fine, but I’d rather make content, not consume it. I want to leave a mark, not go through life eating, sleeping and watching TV or reading the news. More than that, and I suppose on a more basic level as well, I want to get some work done, not waste my day away. So, for the umpteenth time, I’ve come to the realization that I need to cut down on my news addiction. It’s good to stay informed, but it’s better to stay alert. And it’s even better to get my plans accomplished. Which for me includes work, consulting, photography and blogging on weekdays. On weekends, more consulting, photography and blogging, reviews and sometimes, podcasts. And somewhere in there, I’ve got to squeeze in downtime with my lovely wife and a movie then and now. Not to mention that I’ve got other projects waiting on the back burner.

The thing is, reading the news in itself doesn’t take that much time. At most, it takes one to one and half hours per day. I don’t think that’s a lot of time. But, it IS a lot of information. And information processing wears you down, particularly when it comes from many sources. If you don’t believe me, try picking up a few tens of books, and rapid-read a few pages from each. See how you feel at the end of that little power session! When we read the news, it’s the same thing. We don’t notice it these days because it’s so easy to subscribe to a ridiculous number of various sources in news or feed readers. They aggregate all of that content for us in one place, and we just browse through and read. But it’s all written by different people, on different subjects, in different styles, with differing levels of emotion. Our brain has to adapt to each style of writing and process all of that information in a short amount of time.

Add to that the emotion we spend if we get worked up about an article. I’m guilty of that a lot. If I read someone’s getting abused somewhere, I’ll get mad at that injustice. Some days that anger will affect me for more than half a days, and truth be told, there isn’t a darned thing I can do to help that person or people other than share that article with my friends or on my blog. The amount of help that provides is questionable and depends on the situations. Some are helped by more media attention, and some aren’t. So what’s the good of getting worked up over them? I don’t know. I do know I can’t help it, so the only way for me to stay focused on what I need to do is to avoid those articles. Otherwise, I end up shooting myself in the foot and I can’t meet my goals.

So while it’s not about the time, although it’s nice to gain an extra hour here and there, it’s about the effect of the news on you or me. That’s why I’ve already started to pare down on the amount of news sources I read. I’ve cut a few out today, and will continue to cut them down till I arrive at a good balance between quality of information and time spent reading it. And I encourage you to do the same. Don’t think I hold myself immune from this. If you find that I don’t add value to your day, then unsubscribe. Far be it from me to waste your time and keep you from doing something useful.

Here’s to a productive use of our time here on earth, brief as it is!

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Thoughts

Here's to a few milestones

This weekend, I (or rather my photos) reached an important milestone. I/they crossed over 100,000 views. That’s amazing as far as I’m concerned. In the relatively short span of four months, I got to the point where I’m getting more than 1,000 views per day, and have now reached 100,000 views. It was just back in October that I passed 10,000 views, and here I am today.

I’m really happy with the progress I’m making, and even more than that, I’m happier that my photographic skills are visibly improving. I’ve learned so much in these past four months, and have benefited so much from interacting with fellow photographers, that my success is doubly sweet.

This next “milestone” is somewhat dubious, but it’s worth mentioning. A few days ago, I reached over 30,000 spam comments, right here on my blog. Yeah, it’s disgusting. But, none of them made it to the live site. All of them got caught by Akismet, my WordPress spam prevention plugin. I featured Akismet in this post I wrote at the start of January, and I meant every word I said about it. The only improvement I could make to it is a CAPTCHA. I find that more and more spam comments make it to the Moderation Queue instead of the Spam folder these days. Spammers are either using fresh batches of IP addresses or finding ways to sneak past Akismet’s spam filters. Still, NONE of them make it to the blog.

While I’m on the subject, I’d like to reiterate my very ardent wish that ALL spammers (in particular sploggers, spam commenters and feed scrapers) be flogged publicly. I would gladly volunteer to perform this duty myself. I think they all deserve it for poisoning search engine results, making blogs uglier, decreasing my content’s rank, and littering the Internet. I don’t know how likely this is to happen, but a fellow can dream, can’t he?

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