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To quote Donald Rumsfeld, there’s known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.

In the case of web development as with many things, some people who use web sites, think they know how easy/hard it is to build them. (Hint: they don’t)

Check out this person who needs to hire a programmer yet they already ‘know’ how ‘hard’ the task is and how long it will take.  link.

My goodness the internet is great. I was about to throw out a Sony surround sound receiver I’ve had for years because it would flash “PROTECTOR” on the display after being on for a few seconds, and I’d tried everything I could think of (cleaning, making sure no bits of wire in speaker posts, leaving off for hours or days, etc.).

I’d looked around the internet for solutions and most described things I’d already done, plus the usual “they all do that, throw it out” unhelpful comments.

Then finally, I found solution #2 at fixya.com’s page on this and figured I’d give it a try.

It basically said open it up, clean out the dust, and then disconnect and reconnect every connector you can get your hands on. I’d already vacuumed out the inside (which wasn’t really dusty anyway), but proceeded to disconnect and reconnect every connector in there, and there’s a BUNCH. Some are electronic type connectors with tiny wires, and others are definitely power type connectors.

Anyway, did all that, fired it up, AND IT WORKS! I’m now testing with loud playback connecting my blackberry storm to an input (what an amazing phone that is!).

Anyway, sounds awesome. State of Trance 2008, Mosaik’s music… ahhhh….

Enjoy the Masters golf tournament leaderboard!

Fred Couples, professional golfer, is someone I have admired for a couple of decades. His golf swing is unmatched in style, so fluid, so upright, elbows higher and more behind him than anyone it seems, and also seemingly effortless. He is has been a joy to watch, not only because of so many spectacular shots, but also because his quiet, seemingly relaxed, and stylish persona, have produced such an unusual set of results. Yes, in his prime, he won a coveted Masters green jacket, and a boatload of other less famous tournaments, but it seems like he should have won more majors, but he didn’t. However, in the ‘silly season’, which usually has been some time around October to the end of the year after all the serious tournaments, he has won a ton of times, and in the highly entertaining ‘Skins’ game, always with 4 different famous players playing for money on each hole which rolls over on a tie, he is unmatched. He has won a fortune just on the skins tournaments alone.

At this past week’s tournament however, where he played excellent golf but was just outdone by a bad shot on the last hole and a surging Phil Mickelson, I heard about Fred Couples the person, with real life challenges. His wife with whom he was long since separated and working toward a divorce, had died of cancer at the home they once shared in California. A tragedy indeed, but he has said he remains devoted to her children, his step-children.  Sounds noble. I decided to read up a bit on that history, and wait, there’s more. Much more.

This was his second marriage.  His first marriage ended in the 90s in what appears to have been an ugly and expensive divorce in Florida.  His first wife later committed suicide in 2001.

Fred Couples is also known for his really major back pain problems.  No doubt made worse by a game of unnatural contortions and a unique swing that probably puts more stress on him than other golfers with theirs.  This back pain limits the tournaments he can play.  It limits his practice.  It has basically hindered the last 15 years of his career in a major way.

At 49 though, he’s still out there, and in many ways he seems more determined than ever.  Maybe his shattered personal life and failing body increases his determination to overcome these major challenges.

Regardless, he is still a joy to watch, a class act on the golf course, and I for one want to say “thanks Freddie” for all the joy you’ve brought me over the years, and I hope only the best for you going forward.

And I won’t miss any coverage of you at the Masters in a few weeks.

References:

1993 NY Times

2003 Sunday Herald

2009 (this week) Golf Digest

A friend mentioned they were going to look at boats. This brought back memories.

When i was a kid in England, my Dad got a sail boat (or yacht as the English say for anything with a sail) – I think he was given it by a wealthier friend – we certainly couldn’t have afforded it. It was nothing huge, and it certainly wasn’t new. It was 22 ft with a small engine that was noisy and stinky, and a typical mast, jib and main sail. It had a raisable keel which my Dad thought was cool, but and it did mean we didn’t worry as much about running aground in the tidal waters around Portsmouth.

To GET to the ‘yacht’ we had to use this small fiberglass dinghy with an outboard motor. I’m talking 6 foot long boat with noisy stinky 50cc (maybe?) outboard (Yamaha?).

So my Dad would drive us to the dinghy place (maybe 60 miles which in England is a LONG drive) early in the morning, get in the stinky cramped dinghy and go at about 2mph I’d guess for about 1/2 mi. ? to where the boat was moored. With bags and crap in the dinghy it was about 3-4″ out of the water at the back and more at the front of course especially when moving, but it was creepy to me seeing the dark water so close. and of course it was often cold out, or rainy, or foggy, or all of those.

We’d get to the boat, clamber on, detatch from mooring bouy, attach dinghy to mooring bouy quickly before we drifted away, and then “head out” wherever into the harbor from the small waterway (solent?) where the boat was moored.

Then my dad would attempt to sail at some point, which was a pretty hit and miss thing. Too slow and we didn’t get anywhere. Too fast and it was pretty scary as the boat leaned, or rocked, or hit waves, just right was hit maybe twice for a minute or two in all the times I went on the boat.

My dad would criticize almost everything I did on the boat (too slow, too fast, not done right, too lazy, get out of the way) – oh it was so much fun.

One time, I was told to hold a rope by the mast which held the boom up (for those that don’t know that’s the horizontal piece connected to the mast and the main sail connects to both). Anyway, he had to duck under the boom to get to the other side I think and of course I somehow got distracted and let go of the rope and the boom fell on his head. He wasn’t injured and I can laugh now, but boy was he pissed off and was i scared. Nowhere to go, him ticked. Ah, good times.

On a more positive note, the wealthier friend of my Dad’s (well compared to us when i was growing up – the friend who gave my Dad that boat i think) – well he had a 36′ yacht and we went on that ONCE out into the English channel to fish. We fished for hours in roiling seas and caught a FEW mackerel, each probably 8-12″ long. I of course got sea sick for a while and the adults all laughed telling me it was good I was getting my “sea legs”. They cleaned and cooked the fish and we ate it on board, and in a massive group delusion we all claimed it was excellent. That was the BEST experience i ever had on a sailboat.

To say i loathe sailing would be an understatement.

This is an excellent, relevant, and at times humorous speech, by Bill Gates on two MAJOR problems facing the world and the U.S. and what he’s trying to do about them.

I watched all of your final press conference, your interview with Brit Hume, your interview with Sean Hannity, and while I didn’t agree with everything you did while President, particularly letting government spending spiral out of control and not vetoing any spending during your first term, overall I’m still glad you were our President during this time. I shudder to think what Al Gore or John Kerry would have done.

I’ve watched some of Vice President Dick Cheney’s interviews too, and I am completely convinced he was critical to this country’s effective (although not perfect) response to 9/11.

Despite critics, as you said, the Patriot Act, the military actions, and many other things done, despite huge opposition, meant the U.S. was not attacked again in the past 7 1/2 yrs.

The economic collapse will be a black eye, although there’s an enormous number of people who can legitimately be blamed not for just not avoiding it, but for actively causing a crisis to become a MAJOR disaster. Banks were told to write lousy loans, and they did, then banks and Wall St. bundled up all the lousy loans and sold them to suckers worldwide, with the government’s blessing, or ignorance.

The final Press Conference today was good, but it’s a shame most people won’t see all of it. You were forceful, direct, articulate, and in control, and handled the media’s ‘obvious’ questions well.

You handled the worst disaster since Pearl Harbor effectively, brought a fledgling democracy to Iraq, made this country safer, got the terrorists on defense and on the run, and the economy did ‘ok’ for the most part, despite man made and natural disasters, until the ticking economic time bomb went off.

You leave office unpopular, but as you have said, no one knows what will happen from here or how history will ultimately judge events and actions of the past 8 years.

I, for one, thank you.

As a web developer, one important task is testing web pages with multiple different browsers and even different versions of the same browser.  This could drive a person insane, but I’d like to share a couple of discoveries.

Trying to be a good developer I’m using ‘div’s more than tables these days, using CSS extensively, and trying to code to ‘strict’ page layout rather than ‘quirks’ mode or ‘transitional’.

If all the above paragraph makes no sense to you and you’re developing web pages, I can guarantee they won’t look the same across Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) or earlier (shudder), Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), and the about to be released IE8, FireFox (FF 1.x, 2.x, 3.x), Safari, Opera, endless mobile phones, oh and Google Chrome, etc.

First admission – I do not bother testing on all the above browsers.  That would be the first step toward insanity.  I look at browser statistics to see what the vast majority of people are using.  Anyone else?  Best of luck to you.  I refer to w3school’s excellent page on this.  As of writing, this shows IE6, IE7 and FireFox account for 91% of all browsers in use!  So that’s what I test.  I have an old computer I deliberately don’t upgrade to IE7 (it has IE6 SP1), I have IE7 and FireFox 3 on other computers including my main desktop.  IE6 is sliding down (thankfully) from 34% to 20% in one year but that doesn’t mean I can avoid the testing for a while yet.

<rant> The biggest headache by a long shot is IE6.  It has some BIZARRE behavior.  For one of the wealthiest and most successful companies on the planet to have its most widely used piece of software be so riddled with bugs and incompatibility with MASSIVELY documented web standards is inexcusible. </rant>  OK, I feel better now.

There are MANY web sites documenting IE flaws, but the biggest problems I’ve found are with IE6 and earlier, and specifically with its confusion and completely screwed up calculations relating to widths, margins, padding, borders, and even positioning.  Apart from that it’s great.

The page here demonstrates ‘default’ differences in browsers.  It looks different in IE6, IE7, FF.  Go ahead and look at the html/style tags – not much to it!  IE and FF have different default body margins, different default paragraph line heights, and a HORRIBLE bug in IE6 which DOUBLES the margin sizes of any divs that are FLOATED!  Ugh.

Fortunately, there are fixes that countless wasted hours have been spent discovering.

For the doubling (and worse) of margin sizes for floats by IE6, the fix is to add “display: inline;” to the style definition (or inline style value of the element) which since it’s a float should be ‘obvious’ and the default, and does seem to be for IE7 and FF, but IE6 needs this to get it right.  Thanks to this excellent web site for this solution!

For other problems, setting defaults are the main solutions.

The second page here has these fixes applied and looks pretty much identical in the 3 browsers.

I hope this helps.

Ever sit down to your computer which had some stuff running only to find you’re at the login screen (and not just the screensaver password prompt screen)?  Did you lose some work?  I have!

No easy option to change this, but it IS changeable.

Great blog post here about it:

http://softwarex-nz.blogspot.com/2008/01/stop-vistas-update-auto-reboot.html

Thank you!

So my predictions weren’t too bad.

Presidency: Obama by 188 electoral votes! (vs. 100)

Senate: Dems gain 5 or 6? (vs. 6)

House: Dems gain 18-25 (vs. 25)

Now let’s hope Obama truly leads and doesn’t cave to Reid and Pelosi’s agendas…

I voted.  And I’ve deliberately kept the TV off any channel likely to be analyzing the election or announing results.  It’s not been easy (I watched other, pre-recorded stuff, or did some work).  I will catch the result in the morning!

My predictions:

Presidency: Obama by 100 electoral votes.

Senate: Dems gain 6

House: Dems gain 25

Pretty much just guesses…

9/11/01 showed the world the worst and the best in humanity.

RIP to the victims and heroes who didn’t survive.

Thank you to everyone who has worked to heal the physical and mental scars, and to get those who share an ideology with those who committed the acts.

We didn’t capture Bin Laden ‘dead or alive’, but I still think he’s dead.  Good.

So this morning I was going to help my wife power wash her horse barn. She’d emptied the 3 stalls, and I showed her how to use the backpack blower to blow out the dust/hay first. So far so good. I brought the power washer over, started it up, put a spray tip in the wand (securely I thought) and hit the trigger and PHOOOM – the spray tip flew out into the grass!  Hmm… go get the tip, put it back in, make sure it’s in properly this time, then pull the trigger… sh—- whaa— water spraying everywhere, f-#, da–… turn it off.  Check spray tip, looks good, try again, same (soaking) deal. $#!+ After a few attempts to fix, I figure I broke the spray wand coupling somehow, and go back the house – somewhat unhappy!

I finished the mowing I had started earlier, showered, ate, had a swim, ate dinner, and the power washer was still on my mind.  I decided to look at the wand again to see if I could figure it out. I thought maybe a rubber seal ring had somehow become dislodged or something. I decided to look carefully at the area where the spray tip landed in the grass and voila, I found a rubber o-ring! Took me half an hour to figure out how to install it (goes completely inside the wand coupling) but I knew I had it. Put the tip back on (SECURELY!), fired it up —– YAAAAAAAAAY!!!!!!

Another maintenance mystery solved. I was so pleased I didn’t have to buy parts or deal with warranty or get someone to fix it that I power washed her horse’s stall.  Just another of life’s ups and downs on the farm.

I just saw the new Disney/Pixar movie WALL-E and I was blown away.  I think critics of this movie may have been expecting a comedy, perhaps a Toy Story with robots, but it’s nothing of the kind.  It certainly has humor, but it’s in a dark, tense, but ultimately uplifting (hey it’s Disney) backdrop.

To me it contains parts of many science fiction books and movies, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, all of Isaac Asimov’s amazing robot books, even Rendezvous With Rama, my favorite book by Arthur C. Clarke.

The movie’s web site is also amazing.  Here’s a free embed they provide:

I recently saw Bjorn Lomborg interviewed about ‘global warming’ and his views on what we should do seemed about the most practical and effective imaginable.  Instead of the shrill, slick, non-scientific, and dishonest ‘marketing’ by people like Al Gore, Lomborg looks at the effectiveness of solutions proposed by others.  For example, he says if all the goals of the Kyoto treaty were met (no chance, but ok), the world would still only delay the predicted effects of ‘global warming’ by a year or so!  So Al Gore and cohorts want to cripple the global economy to delay global warming by a year?  Ok Bjorn, now you’ve got my attention.

He goes on to say that efforts to save arctic ice will likely save 1 polar bear a year, a popular cause among environmentalists.  He said humans SHOOT 400 polar bears a year, so maybe stopping that would be more effective!

His new book “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming” will be available in August, and I’ve pre-ordered it.  Finally a cool head on a hot subject!

Despite all the great minds involved in the campaign such as James Carville, Terry McAuliffe, Harold Ickes, and both Clintons (see the rest here), their Achilles heel did them in. And what was that? Arrogance!

Their original plan appears to have been:

1. Raise a bunch of money from a few rich donors
2. Make speeches carefully worded to pander to voters without saying anything substantive that might be used against her
3. Put an organization in place to go after the big primaries, and ignore those annoying little caucus states for the most part
4. Be so far ahead after ‘Super Tuesday’ (Feb 5, 2008, a day that will live in infamy) that money will continue to roll in for the general election and coast to the nomination and crowning!

So what went wrong? Well everything really! Obama won the first ‘event’, a caucus, in Iowa. I’m sure the Clinton team thought “pfft, it’s a caucus, big deal, and we only just lost (well, ok, third), and we’ll be ahead shortly, stay the course”. She wins New Hampshire and they must feel like they’re back on track (remember ‘comeback kid’ in 1991?). February 5 comes along, and she doesn’t get the big lead. Money is POURING into the Obama campaign and the organizations are getting put together in EVERY state. Maybe they realized team Clinton had ignored the caucuses and went after those. Edwards doesn’t drop out which probably hurt Clinton further.

After a string of losses in caucuses and small state primaries, despite winning some HUGE STATES (CA, NY, PA, TX sorta, etc.), she still found herself behind, but the strategy had STILL NOT CHANGED except perhaps by highlighting her ‘experience’ over Obama’s message of ‘change’. ‘Experience’ came across as “more of the same” and “old”. Meanwhile Obama got a GIGANTIC push from Oprah Winfrey. “He is the one” she said, over and over. The crowd went nuts. Even I got goosebumps.

After it was already too late, her stump speeches began to get more specific, less boring, and less condescending and self-congratulatory. After agreeing that the results in Florida and Michigan, two HUGE and IMPORTANT states, wouldn’t count because they moved their primaries before Super Tuesday, team Clinton THEN decides they want to fight for them. Everyone saw through this as typical Clinton old school spin. But it was too late. Despite Obama scandals and distractions, he would not be denied. CNN, NBC, MSNBC, most bloggers, and idealistic twenty somethings had already fallen madly in love with him.

And then there’s Bill. The ex-President who is loved by so many as the creator of peace and prosperity in the 90′s. Well he quickly reminded people he has a temper and a mean streak too, and, like Hillary, is astoundingly arrogant. He did his wife NO FAVORS in this campaign, and without question cost her a ton of votes.

Other nails in the coffin were Hillary and Bill’s ‘flubs’, probably the most notable was her claiming to have landed in Bosnia under sniper fire when video showed she was greeted casually by smiling children with flowers! Unfairly or not, I think in people’s minds this might have subconsciously become linked to Bill’s “I did not have sex with that woman…” finger wagging bold faced lie. So she faced a credibility gap too.

And so today she finally conceded. Ms. “Inevitable” barely smiled. She wanted the speech to be historic, but it was still painful for her to deliver. She now clearly wants the VP spot, and I currently think it WOULD help Obama win the Presidency, BUT once he’d won it, then he’d have to put up with Hillary AND Bill for 4 or 8 years, a prospect he is no doubt thinking about.

It’s incredible that she and her oh so talented team blew this perfect opportunity. It just shows… you never know.

I have conflicted feelings about this. On the one hand I am glad she lost as I don’t like the calculating, cynical, manipulative, poll-driven way the Clintons operate. On the other hand, I’m sure this loss is very painful for Hillary Clinton and I feel bad for her. I do believe she was treated VERY poorly by the media.

With all this talk of oil and energy, I decided to look at the Department of Energy web site to see what it claims to be doing.

Loads of good sounding info, but I decided to go to the budget, as that’s where things usually reveal themselves (follow the money…).

I had no idea how much money the DoE spends, but for ’09 they’ve requested $25 BILLION. Now I’m sure govt lovers and Bush haters will come right out and say “that’s cheaper than Iraq in a week” or whatever, but ignoring that bogus comparison, how much is $25 BILLION?

Well if there’s 300 million men, women, and children in this country, that equates to about $83 EACH, a year.

So, are you happy, that you, your relatives, friends, children, everyone, is paying $83 a year for this fine organization?

Their budget “highlights” document is 113 pages. Yikes.

It says they need that money to “address the growing demand for affordable, clean and reliable energy; preserve our national security; and enable scientific breakthroughs that could have significant impacts on our quality of life and the health of the American people.” Yeah, right. But what do they actually DO?

This is their mission/strategy page: http://www.doe.gov/about/index.htm

On their strategic plan page it says:

By implementing DOE’s Strategic Plan, we are enhancing America’s energy security and sustaining our economic vitality.

EPIC FAIL! Oil is what, $139 today????

So I looked under achievements and awards to see what we might all be getting for $83 a year.

What’s this? Part of their funding went to the human genome project. What has that got to do with energy?

So then I find that their ‘researchers’ helped with research on Climate Change that lead to the IPCC winning the ’07 Nobel Peace Prize. And this is about energy and not weather HOW? This research was done at Oak Ridge National Labs in Tennessee which has 4200 people and is entirely funded by DoE. Facts about ORNL.

Your tax dollars at work folks.

OK – call me lazy. Tell me I’m not getting the full benefit of my Canon 40D digital SLR camera. Yes I know about RAW files, curves, unsharpening, HDR, etc. But sometimes, well, most of the time, I just want to take pictures and have them look great on screen and printable at anything less than a HUGE print without loads of, ok ANY, computer ‘post processing’.

Little point and shoot digital cameras in decent light situations (i.e., outdoors) take great pictures in most circumstances. But they’re still slow, cannot do shallow depth of field, often don’t have a very wide angle field of view, and to me at least, are generally irritating (except for their size)! Once you’ve seen the quality of pictures and enjoyed the flexibility and range of options and control with an SLR, it’s hard to go back. I know, I tried. Got tired of lugging the Canon 20D and lenses around, sold the lot. But less than a year later, I was ready to throw my Canon point and shoot camera in a fire pit. Read the rest of this entry »

Sooner or later I guess this topic was going to get mentioned here.

U.S. gas prices have doubled and more in the past couple of years.  It must be hurting millions of people directly (getting to and from work or school for example), and hurting many businesses too, which must deliver things and have things delivered to them and so they must raise prices on everything in turn to make up for it.  It seems the U.S. government has totally distorted how it reports inflation because gasoline and food prices alone are skyrocketing.  Maybe the drop in house prices is counteracting that some!

The politicians are arguing over causes and remedies, but while they do NOTHING, quietly, millions of people are driving a little less, maybe trading in the old clunker or big SUV for something much more efficient, sales of hybrids have skyrocketed, and the American people are being very sensible about all this.

We’ve all heard it’s ‘greedy oil companies’ that are the cause but that really isn’t the case – they process crude oil and refine it, etc., and pass along the costs they must pay.  Now global demand for oil and gasoline has been climbing and is projected to climb a great deal more as prosperity increases in China and India in particular, as they hold almost half the world’s population!  U.S. gasoline consumption has not increased significantly in decades.  Increasing overall demand puts upward pressure on prices if supply is not increased. Read the rest of this entry »

I no longer care whether Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or John McCain wins the November election.  I don’t think any of them is really inspiring or going to make much of a difference in this global economy.  And if more significant terrorism occurs, all the campaign promises will go out of the window anyway.

I’m still wading through “Dreams of my father” by Barack Obama, a dreary, depressing book so far.

Maybe it will get more interesting when the Obama/Clinton battle is officially over and the McCain vs. Dem. debates occur.

Professor Randy Pausch is dying and he knows it, of liver cancer.  But this inspiring wonderful man decided to inspire his students with his final lecture, telling them what’s really important in life.

You can see his last lecture here: google video or visit his web site at the above link for this and other videos and information.

I thought this article was very interesting and although my DSLR (40D) isn’t full frame, I still think I can apply some of what it shows… (in a nutshell, don’t use f/4 for landscapes!):

http://www.gdanmitchell.com/2007/04/12/sharpness-and-aperture-selection-on-full-frame-dslrs

I learned a few years ago the best way to get the house cleaned up is to invite people over.

So a friend came by this morning and I felt pretty good – I’d tidied my office (although some was cheating – took notes and papers spread across the desk and stacked them in one ‘neat’ pile) and the infamous ‘staging area’ kitchen table. Also felt good because I got the pool paver power washing and clean-up done a week or two ago (tedious and time-consuming job, but looks great!) and all the grass is cut!

A temporary victory in the race against entropy.

An old Logitech mouse I had broke recently so I began looking for a new mouse. Since I spend a LOT of time at this computer, I need something that’s comfortable, and very functional. I’ve come to rely on middle button click to open links in new tabs in the FireFox browser, rely on the forward/back buttons on the side, etc., so I can’t go back to something basic.

So recently I bought a Microsoft wireless mouse 5000 mouse from Newegg. BIG mistake. First off, it’s junk – very cheap and light. I should have known because in fairness, it is cheap, as in inexpensive. Second, I have big hands and found the positioning of the forward/back buttons on the side way too far back so I had to make a very awkward move to get to them. Finally the middle scroll wheel ‘click’ was way too hard to engage and definitely gave me hand ‘ache’ after hours of use.

So I’ve been on the prowl for a new mouse. I’ve been eyeing the Logitech MX Revolution mouse for a while, which they claim is the “world’s most advanced mouse.” Lofty stuff, so I broke down and got one. Figured I could return it if I really don’t like it. Well so far I’m AMAZED.

First thing that’s different is the shape. Instead of a regular ‘big egg’ shape, this one has a concave area for the thumb which is VERY comfortable.

I like a mouse that requires VERY LITTLE EFFORT to click, scroll, move, etc. This mouse is very light in use, although not light in overall weight so as to feel like a piece of junk. It’s very nicely made as are all Logitech products I’ve found.

It not only has the usual left/right buttons, scroll wheel, and side forward/back buttons, it also has a programmable button behind the scroll wheel (which they default to a configurable ‘search’ function, and they also have another ‘thumb wheel control’ on the side that can be used for a variety of things, but by default it’s used to flip through the running programs, and is GREAT. The thumb wheel is not a continuously turning wheel but it can be rolled forward or backward to an extent, a bit like a one direction joystick. I set it to do forward/backward scroll and oh man, it’s great! But wait, there’s more… Read the rest of this entry »

Canon’s ‘digital rebel’ line is about to evolve once more with the new Canon XSi (or 450D as it is known in some parts of the world).

Just as the XTi leapfrogged in some ways the semi-pro 20D/30D with automatic sensor cleaning and more megapixels, the XSi brings features from the 40D plus some more into a smaller, more affordable package.

Canon’s optional bundled standard “kit” lens has also improved recently from the pretty weak EF-S 18-55 to the new EF-S 18-55 IS (the ‘IS’ means it is ‘image stabilized’ so you don’t have the be quite so steady in holding the camera).

One feature new to Canon’s DSLR’s is Auto Optimization. It adjusts exposure/brightness/contrast curves automatically to make for more ‘appealing’ looking images right out of the camera. Images from digital SLRs often look ‘flat’ or ‘dark’. Basic controls have existed to adjust contrast or saturation of all images but they’re too simple. Auto optimization appears to do a MUCH better job and will be a big win for those (like me!) who don’t like to spend HOURS editing images on the computer!

I have a 40D, which is a GREAT camera, but I’m wondering if I might prefer the XSi, perhaps with its optional grip to make it feel a bit more substantial. One thing holding me off though is that the 40D is a MUCH faster camera for burst shooting, doing 6.5 frames per second vs., I believe, 3. I don’t need this every day but for shooting horses jumping over fences, faster is better!

The 40D also has a glass pentaprism vs. the cheaper pentamirror in the XSi so the 40D should have a brighter viewfinder although I’ve not compared them yet.

The XSi is 12.2 megapixels (vs. 10.1 for the 40D) which will impress the easily impressed, but this is likely to be at the expense of a bit more noise in images at higher ISO settings.

Anyway, hat tip to Canon for delivering another EXCELLENT camera!

We have a pool and I’ve put some landscaping lights around the outside of the screened enclosure, but some more ‘ambient’ light would be nice.

Came across a very interesting product recently called Starlite 7 from Starlite Lighting Systems. It consists of UV resistant translucent colored plastic pieces that fit into the aluminum pool enclosure beams and an optional fiber optic cable lighting system that provides lighting behind!

Looks great and comes in a bunch of different colors. Pretty neat!

Complain? You want to complain? It’s tax return time and the forms are SO annoying! The grass has started growing fast and that means I’m going to have to spend a lot more time cutting it than I want to. …

Complaining is expressing grief, pain, or discontent. It’s a complaint if you express how you feel something shouldn’t be the way it is, and usually you don’t offer a solution as to how it could be the way you want it.

We all complain, but does it do any good? No! Not only doesn’t it help, in fact it often just makes us feel worse about things and not just emotionally, but physically. We seem to think it will help ‘get it off our chest’ or maybe subconsciously we justify some perception of superiority by complaining about other things and people, but overall there’s NO benefit to it, to ANYONE, including the complainer.

Will Bowen, a reverend serving at a church in Kansas, talked about this in a sermon on finding prosperity, and this lead to him giving out little purple bracelets to his congregation and he told them to be ‘complaint free’ for 21 days, and if someone with a bracelet complained, to put the bracelet on the other arm to consciously remind them what they’ve done. Well, this has become HUGE. 5 millions bracelets and a book later, it’s still going.

Links:

• The bracelet web site and further information
• FAQ (frequently asked questions about how it got started, where the money goes, etc.)

Answering the question “how do we find happiness?” the Dalai Lama answered something like “stop doing all the things that make you unhappy.”

Complaining less is probably a good start.

Arthur C. Clarke, writer, visionary, and scientist, born 16 December 1917, passed away on Tuesday 18 March, 2008, at the age of 90. To quote the opening line from one of my favorite books by Clarke – Rendezvous with Rama – “Sooner or later it was bound to happen.”

Arthur C. Clarke wrote so eloquently, so clearly, and so creatively, that while he reached millions with his books and articles, it is a shame that more people haven’t read him, dismissing his works as just “science fiction”. But they’re really about so much more. They capture his hopes and dreams for future progress. His worries of potential catastrophes. He predicted many things that have come true. He conceptualized stationary satellites which provide so many great services today (television, phone, internet, GPS to name 4).

Clarke always kept busy, was always curious about so many things, and relentlessly searched for answers throughout his life. His writings in many ways are his speculations on answers to difficult questions about the future of humankind, whether and how we will venture into space to reach new frontiers, and the inevitable problems we will face.

One other work I must mentioned, is 2001: A Space Odyssey. He wrote this book and collaborated with famous and unique director Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay and movie of the same name. Both were milestones. The movie though made both very famous, and to this day still stands the test of time in its effects, painstakingly created, frame by frame, without the benefit of computer imagery. A story of our first contact with enigmatic alien intelligence and a computer named HAL on a huge spaceship that can’t allow the mission to be jeopardized by error-prone human astronauts.

Goodbye Arthur. You had a magnificent journey, and you will never be forgotten. Thank you.

Links:

• Wired magazine final interview with Arthur C. Clarke
• Final video message
• 1993 interview, also in Wired
• Obituary in The Times