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Things I wouldn't mind getting for my birthday this year include:

• Think Tank AirPort International rolling case
• Canon BG-E4 Vertical Grip/Battery Holder for Canon 5D ($220)
• Another BP-511A Li-ION Battery (for same, $50!)
• Really Right Stuff BGE4-L L-Plate (for same, $183)
• Some lens bag for the 300/2.8 L IS (more research needed, ~$40)
• World Peace
• Anything else on my Wish List

Things from the above list I'll actually get: 0.

Update (2008-03-03): Added the Think Tank, though I might just pick one up for myself soon.

If you're well beyond the "beginner" phase in photography, have a little free time to work on a project that could be fairly successful¹, and the interest in combining those two things, get ahold of me².

I've recently re-thought a lot of the UDSLR project I've had on a back burner for a few years and have come up with some changes that I think are more exciting and simply "better" than the ideas I had a year ago. I can't say much publicly, but if you're interested in helping out, I'll be happy to share more details.

The project has been several years in the making, but I'm fairly happy with the latest shift and I think I'll be moving forward with the project soon.

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Later this week I expect a Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS USM lens to arrive at my house. It should come with a 1.4x teleconverter and a drop-in circular polarizing filter¹.

The 300/2.8 is perhaps one of the finest lenses Canon makes. Its average overall rating is a perfect 10 at FredMiranda, and many say the lens suffers almost no image quality degradation with the teleconverter.

I'm going to be trying the lens out for a few months before deciding whether I'll want to add it to my personal inventory, and I'm sure I'll post my thoughts here after I get it. At this point, though, Thursday or Friday can't arrive quickly enough.

I agree with most of what Matt Ball has to say in this article. The people of whom he speaks seem to develop software because they feel they can make money from it, not because they personally need the software. Building software you yourself would and do use is one of the keys to long-term software success.

At Cynical Peak, we've built all of our software for our use. Not because we think it's going to make a quick buck, but because we'll always have at least two customers who will care about updates.

The Photo Battle Blog keeps a simple table that contains the IP address, the vote choice ("1" or "2"), and the post_id.

I'd like to add a feature to the plugin that drives the entire process that allows me to get some statistics. I've already written up the code to generate the easy statistic: total votes for "1" vs. total votes for "2."

But I'd also like to show the "win" totals, where a single post_id is the "battle." If I win one day 40-7 but Steve wins the next day 33-32, our "win" totals would be 1-1.

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This is simply an experiment, but one I'd call relatively successful. I took three exposures of the local Outback near my house. The scene has a wide range of light and dark tones, and thus was suitable for an HDR technique. The three images (+/- 2 stops) are included along the top row.

I picked up a copy of Photomatix earlier today, and it was used to create the image. I tweaked it in Photomatix's Tone Mapping but didn't spend any time in Photoshop as recommended by the well-known and well-linked HDR Tutorial at Stuck in Customs.

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Sometimes Aperture 2.0's hue selector yields some surprising results. Moving around within this bright sun, I can grab just about every color: blues, yellows, greens, reds, oranges, purples…

That makes sense, and should serve as a warning: don't try to select hues in super-bright or super-dark areas, or you'll get similarly surprising results.

You can also be tricked in other ways. In some other sunset images, I tried to grab what I thought were streaks of blue in the sky, but the actual pixels were red. The sky only appeared to be blue in that region because, compared to the rest of the true red/orange sky, that region had a little bit more blue… but not enough to make blue the dominant color and thus what the hue chooser would display and select.

I haven't used a mousepad since… my first laser optical mouse in… 1999? 2000?

John Gruber attributes this quote to Emerson

We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent was a youthful effervescence which we have now lost.

From his recent interview.

Aperture 2.0 arrived today. The upgrade process went smoothly until Aperture began updating previews. I would rather it have given a progress bar and insisted it do that work modally rather than as a background task. The app was unusable during that time anyway.

FlickrExport fortunately works with 2.0 out of the box, and I've uploaded a few photos I took this afternoon with it. FlashAlbumExporter works as well.

Shortly after upgrading to 2.0 (and on about the eighth launch), my vault encountered errors. I had to delete it and re-create it, a lengthy process. On the up side, it eliminates the wonder I had whether I should create a clean, fresh vault.

And yeah, Aperture 2.0 speed >>> Aperture 1.0 speed. I might be able to leave most of my applications running (on a Mac Pro!) with 2.0.

P.S. Remember to vote!

A few days ago, my Time Machine drive filled up.

I back up a 500 GB drive nightly to another 500 GB drive. My main drive (and the exact, full, bootable backup) have 130 GB free.

Since I began backing up my Time Machine drive shortly after Leopard's release back in October, I'm fairly impressed that it took so long to "fill up."

Occasionally, syncing contacts on my iPhone takes minutes. Like 5-10. Other times, it takes 30 seconds.

I sync with .Mac and Entourage (just the contacts), but I don't think those matter. The .Mac syncing is always on, and disabling the Entourage syncing doesn't magically speed things up.

FWIW, I have only 54 contacts in my "iPhone" group in Address Book, and those are the only contacts that I sync with the iPhone. A few (three or four) have pictures. One has a custom ringtone.

I just ran three syncs back to back. The first took four minutes. The second took five minutes. The third took less than 20 seconds.

Since updating to Mac OS X 10.5.2, my computer will randomly and semi-frequently drop its AirPort connection. This has never been a problem before.

I'll usually notice because Safari will complain that it's not connected to the Internet. I look at the signal strength in the menu bar, notice it's gone completely dim, and click it. I reselect my network (WPA) and it works again for a day or an hour or so.

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From gamesindustry.biz: "SquareTrade, a firm that specialises in electronics warranties, has found that of a sample of 1000 Xbox 360 consoles, the failure rate was 16.4 per cent."

Normally consumer electronics try to shoot for failure rates of 2-3% or less, if I remember correctly. I have a hunch that 16.4% is even a little bit low. My Xbox 360 has been fine so far (knock on wood), but since announcing Rivet beta testing starting tomorrow, no less than two of the 15 testers we have lined up have informed me that their Xbox has gone belly-up in the past two weeks.

This seems appropriate:

And don't get me started on the DRM hell a busted Xbox 360 gets ya.