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• Best Buy wouldn't match a Circuit City price on an item that is $149 (with free shipping). Best Buy wanted $169 and considers the fact that you have to buy it online from CC to be the discrediting factor. It's also $149 from Amazon.com with free shipping. I could have it delivered to the CC store - does that change anything? Nope. What gives, Best Buy? You think I don't mind waiting two or three days to save $20?
• Taco Bell has re-jiggered their menu. Tacos are now $0.89 (which is still too much), but man, the Cheesy Double Beef Burrito is a steal at the same price. Thing weighs half a pound: soft wrap burrito, beef, cheese, rice. Mmmmmmm. I'd given up on Taco Bell, but I've had about five of those in the past week now.
• I'd like to get two projects off the ground this fall/winter, but I have a hunch I' going to have to dedicate myself to only one or the other.
• JDD's on a roll: here's a good article on the problems with focus-and-recompose.
• Kiddo has a contest in which she can write a poem, take a photograph, paint or draw, etc. and win prizes. I'd love for her to be able to take a photograph to enter the contest, but the theme is completely insipid: "Wow." What the heck kind of theme is that? I'm tempted to tell her to take a picture of her mom and submit it upside down. 🙂
• My Lensbaby 3G has apparently been renamed the Control Freak, and I might just need to pick up a Composer, even if I never swap lenses.

JDD talks about the autofocus found in the Canon 5D Mark II, and in talking with him, I told him that I agreed the 5D's focal points are pretty worthless. "Focus and recompose" doesn't work at paper-thin depth of fields, yet you're either forced to do that with the 5D or you're forced to zoom out, use the center AF point, and plan to crop later to obey the rule-of-thirds and get a focused image ((That's not to say you must always obey the rule of thirds, of course, but the majority of the time you probably want to heed the "rule.")).

I also told JDD that my ideal viewfinder and AF layout would consist of only five points.

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I made several changes today to my photoblog:

• Added histogram to the right side.
• Resized box and comments area to accommodate histogram.
• Added the category and tags to the left-side "Image Info" area.
• Re-enabled the "Paged Archive" add-on.
• Added photoblog to three photoblog site(s).

I'd really like to get my site into wider circulation, so if you have a moment, subscribe to the feed, visit daily, and tell your friends.

Pretty please? 🙂

Oh, and the "Desktops" section of this site got a small update recently, too.

Yippee!

WP-Super-Cache is considered by many to be one of the "must-have" plugins for WordPress.

Yet if my recent experience says anything, it's that WP-Super-Cache causes nothing but trouble: it bizarrely interferes with the rendering of pages and it sucks up obscene amounts of CPU time and RAM.

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Rivet, Cynical Peak's software for sharing movies, music, and photos from your Mac to your Xbox 360, has been updated to version 1.3. This is a bug fix and feature addition release:

• Added the ability to only display unplayed podcasts.
• The "Share checked songs only" option no longer requires the iTunes database to be reparsed.
• Better handling of disconnecting and reconnecting to the network when sleeping.
• The menu bar icon will no long flicker while viewing a video.
• The device description is now in memory and does not use a temp file.
• Fixed an issue with allocating a new port when the previous one is in use.

This update is free for all registered users and is of course available as a demo. Rivet costs $18.95.

JDD brings up some good points in his post on the Canon 5D Mark II: most lenses can't resolve enough detail to take advantage of a 21 megapixel sensor.

I must say I've been relatively disappointed with the performance of my 24-70L and even, to a smaller extent, the 70-200 2.8L IS. The 300/2.8 is incredible, however, and the 50 and 85mm lenses I own (f1.4 and f1.8 respectively) I don't expect much from to begin with.

JDD's point is that a 16MP camera (or even a 12MP camera) with incredible high-ISO performance would have been much, much more useful than a 21 MP camera, and I agree. Though the 5D is a great camera, particularly at high-ISO, there's a lot of room to improve there, and blowing past the resolution capability of even the premium lenses just doesn't make much sense.

JDD raises a few other points, and I recommend you read the post too.

Despite all of the objections and rationale, I still plan to find a way to grab a 50D and a 5DMII… perhaps not this year, but sometime. And yes, my 5D is still for sale.

P.S. Only loosely related, but interesting.

Can someone explain to me exactly why it's in my best interests to support the bailout of Wall Street? Even theoretically?

Because until someone can, I'm thinking this is quite appropriate.

Coming from WordPress, the PixelPost developer community seems bizarrely tiny. There are a fair number of themes out there ((And despite the smaller number of developers, I think there may actually be MORE good-quality templates for PixelPost than for WordPress.)), but the add-ons and modifications are relatively few and far between.

An example of this "few and far between" is the Aperture plugin. It doesn't even save your choices - blog URL, username, password, and export choice between exports. You have to manually type it all in. I've posted a comment on the author's photoblog asking that he respond and offering to help him improve his plugin, but I've not yet gotten a response.

And earlier today, I wrote a plugin that stops PixelPost from publishing "Next" and "Previous" links when you hit either end. No such plugin to change this behavior existed - only one plugin of this type existed, and it simply looped the photos back around to the other side.

Of course, I could be totally wrong about this - after all, these impressions are based on about two days of experience ((Though when I was looking to do the Photo Battle Blog, and was looking for a plugin that allowed a user to vote for one image or another, I similarly came up dry.)).

As I said a few days ago, I closed the Photo Battle Blog.

Today I had a little time on my hands, so I've created a photoblog just for me: http://photos.nslog.com/.

Subscribe (here's the link), visit, and most rate the photos. I hope to post daily, but those times when I don't have any particularly stunning images, I won't. I'll be using my back catalog for quite awhile, though, so hopefully I can stay ahead of the curve.

Apple needs to fix this crap:

The only way to reliably install applications is to:

1. Delete the application from the iPhone (which deletes all the data)
2. Delete the updated app from iTunes
3. Sync
4. Re-Add (by drag and drop) the .ipa (iPhone App) back into iTunes
5. Sync again

Lame.

Just two HDR images quickly made with the SD550 (hence the less than superb quality)… The first is the opening hole at Whispering Woods near sunset. The second, the 13th hole at mid-day.

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The subdomain "pic.nslog.com" that I was running prior to today has been shuttered. It didn't accomplish what I had hoped it would accomplish - to drive me to create interesting photographs every day for a year.

That's due to a number of reasons. The competition wasn't very stiff at all. Too many people voted, en masse, for their favorite person, regardless of the images available. Vote totals failed to surpass ten per day on weekends. And too many days the question wasn't "which image do you prefer" but rather "which image sucks less?"

So, for that reason and a few others, it's closed.

I may re-open it at some later point, perhaps with a new "competitor" or a four-way weekly competition, or I may just start up an actual photoblog of my own. We'll see.

Ever since updating to Mac OS X 10.5.5 (I believe), several buttons have been missing from the toolbar in my Screen Sharing application. The only three buttons in my toolbar now are "fit to window" and the two clipboard ones. I know there used to be one for full screen, one for locking the screen, and a few others.

So where'd they go? I'll re-download the 10.5.5 update and apply it. Run Disk Utility… Or am I missing that this was an intended change?

Update: Never mind. Screw you, Apple. I've recovered Screen Sharing 1.0, removed 1.0.1, and recovered the prefs file too. Thanks, Time Machine.

For Sale (make me an offer, including shipping in the U.S.): Canon 5D body, in great shape, battery charger, and two spare batteries. Also includes USB cable (do you really need another one?), 128 MB CompactFlash card, and possibly the remote control. Make me an offer. I'd prefer to avoid eBay, after all.

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