I was a bit extravagant on Friday. After much umming and aahing, I treated myself to a new flashgun, and have been playing with it ever since. I have a whole list of justifications for this purchase, which I could only just afford, but nevertheless feel a little guilty about it. Things are still a little up in the air part-time-job-wise, but I’m hoping to have that sorted soon.

Obviously I’m going to experiment and learn how to use it well, but after such an expense I think it’s doubly a duty to know it inside out. I’m keen to get an understanding of its Manual mode, but as it can interface with the camera’s exposure system I’d obviously like to figure that out too - fast-moving events and I’m not going to have time to manually set the power and zoom level. I know what the camera and flash can theoretically do together, but needed specifics.

Unfortunately, the instruction manual is dreadful. It tells me what all the buttons do, but has little information on how the flash deals with the various priority modes on the camera. It’s basic message is: “we’ll handle all the exposure stuff, don’t worry about it”. Which is no good. It continually refers to ‘foreground’ and ‘background’ without giving any indication of how the camera decides which is which. ‘Fill-in flash’ is mentioned as a possibility (and one of the features I most want to use), but how do I ensure the camera is in this mode? What happens when the camera is in aperture priority? This made me realise that I never really understood the small built-in flash as well as I should have, which in turn made me even more determined to make proper use of one that can bounce / swivel / zoom etc.. In search of help, I googled for a site I vaguely remembered.

The Photonotes.org three-part Canon EOS Flash guide turned out to be fantastic. It’s a comprehensive explanation of the various exposure systems, and has answered my every question. For example, the ‘foreground’ is the area around the active focus point, and the background everything else. Perfect.

The only remaining thing is to get it off the camera as I want to work through the Strobist lighting course, which requires an off-camera flash. I’d assumed a hotshoe extension cable would be cheap and easy to find, but I should have researched that more. Options are:

• Cable - Canon’s TTL sync cord. Means I can still use the camera’s exposure system. But £45. For a 60cm cable. So: rubbish.
• Cable - Jessops TTL sync cord. Again I can still get easy exposures. £35, and 1.2m long. Maybe.
• Cable - make your own PC connection. No exposure data so I’d have to do everything on manual, but that’d be good fun. I’d need two hotshoe adapters at £10 each but could then use any length PC cable I want. 5m would do it. Probably come to about £30. Definite possibility.
• Wireless - Canon’s wireless-TTL setup. Transfers exposure data. Needs a £90 trigger and, I think, line of sight. Can’t justify that.
• Wireless - “Pocket Wizards” - beloved of professional photographers, radio rather than optical, apparently 100% reliable, and £300. No exposure data. No chance.
• Wireless - eBay radio triggers memorably described as ‘modified garage door openers’. Not completely reliable, but the new ‘V2’s are apparently Not Bad. No exposure data. But about £20. Possible.

I think I’ll go with the make-your-own connection. I’d want a good few metres, and there’s no way to do that including exposure data, which I can easily live without. The eBay triggers I may upgrade to at some point, once I’ve got some understanding of how off-camera flash works.

As it happened, some extra work unexpectedly turned up and took the edge off the expense. Still going to work hard, though. On the right is one of the first shots I took, of (my sister) Jane, (not actually being tortured) Meg and (due in 4 weeks but apparently already in position) vaguely-baby Guybrush/Bellatrix.

Via Pootergeek, Stephen King on visceral enjoyment:

It’s easy — maybe too easy — to get caught up in serious discussions of good and bad, or to grade entertainment the way teachers grade school papers (as EW does, in case you missed it). Those discussions have their place, even though we know in our hearts that all such judgments — even of the humble art produced by the pop culture — are purely subjective. And as a veteran grade-grind in my youth, I have no problem with awarding A’s, B’s, and the occasional F to movies, books, and CDs (which is not to say I don’t also have reservations about such drive-by critiques). But artsy/intellectual discussions have little to do with how I felt when I saw Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects. This movie made virtually no one’s top 10 list except mine, but I’ll never forget some exuberant (and possibly drunk) moviegoer in the front row shouting: ”This movie KICKS ASS!” I felt the same way. Because it did.

and:

I’m not talking about guilty pleasures here. Guilty pleasures aren’t even overrated; the idea is meaningless, an elitist concept invented by smarmy intellectuals with nothing better to do. I’m talking about the pure happiness that strikes like a lightning bolt out of George Strait’s blue clear sky (another sacred occasion of joy for me).

It may not come as a complete surprise to hear I agree entirely
‘This kicks ass’ is a surprisingly apt way of describing the moment the ideal song starts playing on the radio, or I realise from an expression alone that a plot is going to abruptly shift, and I never saw it coming. It’s like he says: a feeling of pure happiness. For my brain chemistry, Heroes has it. Byron. The West Wing. ‘Blue Picadilly’ by The Feeling. Neal Stephenson. George Lange’s photographs. Serenity. ‘Addicted to Love’ by Robert Palmer. Carl Sagan. Scrubs. Not that I’m a romantic or anything.

But there can be no more subjective a reaction, and I suppose that’s why critics ignore it - you can’t say whether any individual is going to react in such a way¹ so it becomes irrelevant to a broad discussion. But as a result I think this kind of emotional response gets looked down upon, as if it’s somehow less worthy than an intellectual examination. Which isn’t to say that such discussions mean nothing, although I agree with SK that it’s all subjective in the end, just that they have no business suggesting such feelings of happiness are something to feel proud of/guilty about.

1. it’s vaguely-related that Stumbling on Happiness apparently claims research results showing that others, no matter how much they differ from you, are far more effective at judging whether something will make you happy. I must read that book [↩]

I’d agreed to drive to Liverpool this morning, on an errand to pick up some hard-to-find tiles for a friend. Driving distances doesn’t bother me much - I just plug in Hettie the TomTom, stick on some podcasts and I’m away. Usually.

I was up at 0645, and in the car half an hour later. I haven’t replaced Hettie’s stolen holder yet, so I had a wodge of blu-tak to hold her down. Once attached to the dashboard she wouldn’t boot up. I figured I must have left the power on - satnavs by their nature don’t have auto power-offs - so I reached for the charger, couldn’t find it, and realised after five seconds that it was probably stolen too. Don’t know why it took me so long to realise. Hmmm. Problem.

Contrary to popular opinion, satnav users are perfectly capable of navigating by other means. My map-reading skills have always been ok - it’s remembering the instructions while driving that I struggle with. I can remember maybe three steps, but place / road names simply fall out of my head after that. Thankfully, hurried consultation with the ever-so-clever Google Maps (you can drag the planned route around, and it’ll re-calculate timings!) revealed the entire drive to Liverpool consisted of “M6 J21a. M62 to end. Right, second major left, look for shop.” So for the first time in three years I drove somewhere without a little voice telling me the way. Admittedly I lost confidence on the second major left and pulled over to check. But still, I’m chuffed that I managed it without getting lost at all.

I arrived home around 1400, which wasn’t too bad. By this afternoon I’d forgotten that I even went…By this afternoon I’d forgotten that I’d been…I’d forgotten, by this afternoon, that… I apparently can’t do tenses/elegance tonight.

Earlier this week we learnt that blue eyes are the sole indicator of intelligence. Enough of that frivolity. There’s much more serious news in Tuesday’s telegraph. I have deleted the appropriate word for sarcastic effect:

But another, sadder thought occurs to me. This attack on basic liberty, which was allowed through without any significant protest, might mark the end not merely of [removed], but of literature.

Oh crap. What have we missed? Did the government ban adverbs? No, literature could survive, melancholily, without adverbs. Verbs, then? Punctuation marks? Serifs? Line breaks?

The true answer is, of course, smoking. The ban on smoking in public places might mark the end of literature.

Well, that’s certainly a bold claim. Let us examine the evidence behind it:

I have been racking my brains to find a single non-smoker among the great English poets or novelists of the 17th, 18th, 19th or 20th centuries. Possibly, Keats had to lay off the pipe tobacco a bit after he developed tuberculosis.

Don’t think Jane Austen smoked. Not sure Ian McEwan does. Just saying. Otherwise, convincing case. The standard of newspaper columns has certainly already fallen.

I’d take the one on the left for my car. I’d probably have to add the apostrophe, though.

On July 1st Abi and I started selling second-hand books via Amazon Marketplace. Is fun. Abi handles the grading and classification, while I deal with the distribution.

Today we sold our 100th book! Yays!

I used to work in a record label’s distribution office, and figured setting up my own system would be entertaining. The initial setup and teething problems were hard work for a few weeks, as was finding room for all the books in my small flat, but it now only takes half an hour to process the day’s sales and head down to the local postbox. Abi has all the really hard work, which I feel a little guilty about.

It started because Abi had a large collection of old books she wanted to clear out. We picked up other stock from various friends, house clearances and local wholesalers. Our aim is to reach 1000 books online, both because it’s an arbitrarily good number and it’s about the limit of space in my flat. We’re at ~400 atm, and hoping to top 1000 before Christmas.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of booksellers on Amazon, and as with any online store reputation is key. Approx. 30% of people leave feedback, and I think our numbers are just now getting high enough to look trustworthy. I’ve tried a couple of methods to make us more visible. Most sellers post second-class in 3-4 days, but my theory is that people are always impatient to receive goods - I usually am - so we’ve advertised each book as aiming to be posted within 24h in the week, and always first-class. We’d make more money posting second-class, but hopefully this gives us a slight edge.

There are, incidentally, no temporal sales patterns. A few weeks ago we sold eight on the Monday, and nothing else until Thursday. The only trend I’d suggest is that we sell more in the evening, but I wouldn’t swear to it. Genre-wise, the 3-for-2 style paperbacks are without doubt the first to sell, but otherwise it’s fairly random.

We use Google Docs and Spreadsheets so we can both work on the data simultaneously, and I’ve been very impressed with the depth of the software. For example, I was quickly able to set up a system where Abi enters the weight of a book and it automatically calculates the likely postage cost¹ so she can set an appropriate total price (Amazon pay you a fixed amount of postage per book, regardless of weight). I’m not much of an Excel guru and am sure this is very easy offline, but I was still chuffed to find it’s possible with GS. It’s much less daunting than Excel, too. Once I learnt the tricks - e.g., always right-click and ‘copy’ rather than CTRL-C, as the former uses clever coding that preserves cell formatting - it’s handled almost everything I’ve needed. Given that Gmail controls our email too, I feel genuinely bad that Google are getting nothing out of it. I’d happily pay a monthly subscription.

Initial expenses were enough that we haven’t quite recouped them yet. We have a big red number that’s slowly increasing towards profit…That’ll be a good day too

1. via a lookup table rather than any clever Royal Mail web services [↩]

Google today released an update to Google Earth which adds the night sky, complete with images of galaxies and nebulae, as well as planetary motion, wikipedia links and constellations. A cheezeball video on the GE website introduces the basics (update: much much much better video here). This sounded most exciting, so I downloaded the update.

It is, initially, underwhelming.

The positions of the objects base themselves around your location in Google Earth, so I set it to my address and hit the ’sky’ button. I saw black, with lines and coloured dots. Not as beautiful as I was hoping. There is no artificial horizon, so you start essentially floating in the middle of a black sphere. A myriad of constellation lines and names takes up much of the screen. I guess some people are interested in arbitrary groups of stars; I’m not. Thankfully, they can be easily turned off in a Layer panel similar to Google Earth’s.

Slightly disappointed, I played around with the layers. ‘Planets in Motion’ adds a slider, which when dragged shows the movement of the planets over the next three months. This was kinda fun. My search for Saturn failed, so I scrolled around manually until I spotted it, and zoomed in.

At which point: wow.

Once you start to zoom, GS downloads higher-resolution images in the same way as GE. And what images! Starry Night and other astronomy programs can map the stars, but don’t use real photographs, and it makes a hell of a difference. I haven’t tested it fully, but they seem to cover most, if not all, of the sky. The milky-way is a patchwork of glowing dust. The ring around Polaris is a bit weird, but everything else seems to be very high-quality. Hubble images are correctly located - check out the orion and horsehead nebulae (searching for stars / other objects seems to work better than planets). And you can keep zooming and zooming and zooming.

There is nothing like looking at images of billions and billions of stars. It’s astonishing.

The red and blue dots represent interesting sights: the Messier objects are included, all with associated information, along with the 12000-object New General Catalog and Yale Bright Star catalog. Between them these pick out the most interesting items in the sky, and each click brings fresh wonder.

The only obvious omission is the artificial horizon. Perhaps they’re concerned about competing with commercial products such as Starry Night. But Picasa is free and possibly the best image-manager out there, regardless of price, so this seems unlikely. Hopefully they’ll add one later - being able to view an easy-to-understand map of the sky above your head would be wonderful.

Google’s massive database means there’s huge potential here. I want to zoom in on Mars and see the Spirit and Odyssey photos. I want to see moon craters, comets and the real-time position of the international space station. I want to be able to switch to infra-red.

Don’t let the initial impressions put you off. Search for ‘ultra deep field’, and you’ll see objects which were exposed at the rate of one photon per minute. This is light from over 13 billion years ago, when the universe had barely begun. This is an amazing thing to release for free, and worth spending time with.

Update: From the discussion forum:

We had the horizon in during beta testing and the testers recommended
removing it because it was very confusing. Instead, you go somewhere
on Earth and then click SKY and see what is overhead.

We could consider bringing the horizon back, but it was confusing.

We really want Sky and Earth integrated….someday

The ecliptic could be added. We will think about it!

That’s a shame…Hopefully enough people are complaining about it that it’ll be back. The same post pointed out that CTRL-L will display the sphere’s grid, which makes the view a little more comprehensible, but is unfortunately bright red…

McDonald’s made a bad business decision last week. Really bad. As I’m sure is familiar to most, the way the drive-thru usually goes down is:

• I drive up to menu board and decide what I want.
• I pull up to the main window, realising too late that I’m much too far away and if I drop the coins it’ll be terribly embarrassing.
• A grumpy looking 16-year-old grunts something which I assume to be ‘what is your order?’
• I supply the required information, and following another grunt, hand over some money.
• I receive change that may or may not be accurate - I don’t have time to check - then drive on to the next window.

This is the comforting McDonald’s. We know what to expect. It’s been this way for years. Except this time.

• I drove up to the menu board and decided what I wanted.
• I pulled up to the main window and realised too late that I was much too far away, and if I dropped the coins it’d be terribly embarrassing.
• I looked up, and there was a very pretty girl leaning out of the window on her elbows, long dark hair falling around her shoulders. She gave me a beaming smile and said ‘Hi! What would you like to order?’.
• I didn’t know. The information was gone.
• After somewhere between 3 and 5 seconds of ‘umm’ing - an eternity, in other words - I finally remembered.

I bet they’re wondering why throughput was way down that evening.

This story has elicited two reactions so far: “that’s completely understandable” and “men are pathetic”. Both are possibly true. It’s a problem. This morning I had something similar, but opposite:

I needed to ask for something vaguely embarrassing at the Boots pharmacy counter¹. I was a little nervous while walking to the shop, but told myself not to be so silly - they’re trained professionals, and I’m grown-up enough not to worry about the thoughts of other people in the queue. I headed inside determined to comport myself in a mature manner.

This lasted as long as it took to realise the sole customer at the pharmacy desk was my next-door neighbour. I diverted into Shampoo and Tampons. Another minute of dithering and the desk was clear. Ok. I stepped forward.

See, this is how I think it must work in the mind of a typical Boots assistant:

There is a young man waiting at the desk. He is looking a little nervous. Perhaps he has to ask about something awkward. Thankfully, we have many kindly, motherly-types working here who can put him at ease. Except, we’re not really his generation, are we? Maybe he’d prefer someone his own age. I’ll send in The Bombshell.

This time I had no trouble with forgetting. I knew exactly what I needed to ask for. Sigh.

My ex used to get cross that pretty women make me nervous. Abi, thankfully, just rolls her eyes.

1. I’ll spare you the details this time [↩]

The below video demonstrates a method of resizing images that leaves the important areas intact. The software analyses an image for the least important curved lines of pixels, based on a gradient magnitude¹, then adds or removes them as necessary. This results in apparently seamless (at youtube resolution, anyway) real-time contraction or expansion of the image area. Easier to see than to explain:

I’m sure they’re using images that suit the process, but it’s impressive nevertheless. They’re surely talking to Adobe about licensing…Found via Waxy.

1. I’m not entirely certain what this is, but I’d guess it’s related to the average brightness/colour difference between neighbouring pixels? [↩]

If, like me, you feel like plunging forks into your brain after the previous post - despair not. For this is one of the finest pieces of graphical storytelling I have seen in a long time. Ten minutes of brilliance. Via dy link blog, which also links to a photograph of hair-dye in Iran that may well depress you all over again.

I believe some people get their science news from the Daily Mail:

The colour of your eyes could determine your achievements in life, say scientists.

They claim those with blue eyes are more likely to sparkle academically than those with brown.

They are more intelligent and gain more qualifications because they study more effectively and perform better in exams.

The ’scientists’ are a study by the University of Louisville. Little more information is forthcoming on their website. The Guardian thinks it’s probably a bogus conclusion. I suspect they’re right. But the DM forges on, boldly going where no brain has gone before:

The discovery might help explain the success of such disparate individuals as Stephen Hawking, Alexander Fleming, Marie Curie, Stephen Fry and Lily Cole.

Yes. Scientists have for years been in need of ‘help’ to explain this phenomenon. These people don’t look anything like each other - what could possibly explain their shared success? It must be their blue eyes - it’s so obvious!

My university information arrived late last week. I’d heard nothing since May and was half-expecting a phone call saying “sorry, we thought you were the guy with the pictures of the stairwells; obviously we can’t offer you a place”, so it was a relief. Included was a reading list, with two particular books listed as recommended reading before the start of term. This was great: there are approximately a million books on photography, and it’s hard to know where to start without some guidance. I ordered them from Amazon, whose super-saver delivery only took a couple of days.

Photography books are great. They’re large, colourful and printed on high-quality paper. If I had a coffee table, that’s where they’d be. The two I ordered are no exception; one is a reference for the technical side, and the other an introduction to critical theory.

I opened the latter and had a flick through. One of the first sentences I read declared that a key component of critical theory is psychoanalysis. Oh god.

Obviously, I am not a psychologist. But I’ve read something on the topic, and was under the impression that psychoanalysis forms no part of modern theory. It’s not that studies have shown Freud was completely wrong about everything, it’s that…actually, yes, Freud was wrong about everything. I looked up the reference just now, and it says the other key component of this type of photographic theory is post-structuralism. Oh good.

But, like I said, I’m not actually a psychologist and can’t claim to really know what I’m talking about. I’m trying to be appropriately skeptical about this. I really am. I shall read the whole book and, you know, take the course and stuff, then see what I think. They’d better have some evidence to back this stuff up, though. Otherwise I shall, um, complain about them on my blog.

I can’t move for hearing about the new xbox/PC game ‘Bioshock’, and was going to download the demo just now. Unfortunately, it’s almost 2gb. That’s a serious chunk of my 12gb monthly limit, which I usually skirt anyway, so I’m thinking twice.

I’m sure this problem won’t exist for much longer. It can’t: transfer limits are increasingly out-of-sync with average need. It’s been all about speed for a few years, but transfer limits must surely be the next battleground.

Most broadband customers have 2gb monthly limits. 2gb/month is only 67mb/day, which on my connection takes about ten minutes to download. Surely there must be a lot of people already getting charged more / cut off? Even if you’re not BitTorrent-ing (and a lot of people are), chances are you’re watching movie trailers, emailing photos and downloading music. And with high-quality video streamers like the BBC iPlayer just around the corner, 67mb a day is quickly going to look pitiful.

I don’t know how cynical to be about the responses of BT etc.. Chances are there’ll be a period where they just charge everybody more, then somebody will take the ‘revolutionary’ stand of offering higher transfer limits and everybody else will quickly catch up. The worry is they’ll use the issue as a chance to demand money from websites, as they’re currently threatening in the US.

Not content with already getting paid by everybody, telecommunications companies want to instigate a tiered-system by which Google etc. will have to pay more for their data to be transferred at higher speeds. It’s not a big step from there¹ to demanding money for basic accessibility, which completely breaks the democratic nature of the web. Currently, the smallest startup can compete with Google: if they’re successful enough, they’ll be able to find investors to help with bandwidth costs. But having to pay for basic accessibility would prevent them getting off the ground. There’s no reason for telecommunications companies to care, so it’s up to governments to regulate.

The counter-reaction of the “Net Neutrality” movement is vocal, but it’s not hard to make a convincing-sounding case for the other side using words like ‘government interference’, ‘freedom’ and ‘free market’². I don’t think it’s yet clear which way governments will go on this issue.

1. yeah, I know slippery slopes are logical fallacies, but remember that BT tried to demand money after claiming they owned copyright on the hyperlink - I don’t think this is beyond their capitalist brief [↩]
2. I wonder how libertarians deal with this particular issue. Democratic internet = yay, but regulation = bad. Probably the latter - hatred of government tends to trump all other considerations, in my experience [↩]

Skype had a major outage at the weekend. Their explanation is:

On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.

I’ve no real reason to doubt their statement, except to wonder that, given their fifty million users, don’t a significant percentage shut down their computers overnight? Windows Updates don’t arrive instantly, either - mine take up to 48hrs to filter through…just thinking out loud.

Despite possible skepticism, I think people wondering ‘if Skype was planning to refund them for all the calls they had to re-direct to other, usually more expensive, phone numbers during the period of disruption’ should get a grip. Firstly, Skype charges per call. If you can’t call, you can’t get charged. But maybe they’re talking about Skype’s incoming phone numbers, which do cost. Maybe the problem is with incoming callers having to use a more expensive number? Is there any phone company in the world who would even attempt such an open-to-abuse “refund”? I’m sure Skype are well covered by service agreements anyway. I can think of hypothetically costly examples, but doubt they actually happened. I can see how someone might be aggrieved at losing the ability to conference call, or something, but the extra pennies involved? Really?

While working at PC World I once had somebody ask whether we were going to pay for the petrol incurred in his coming back to swap a box of floppy disks. Sometimes the world screws you out of pocket change; that’s just how it is.

One of my favourite people on one of my favourite podcasts died last night. Perry of the Skeptics’ Guide had been in hospital for a couple of weeks, but was expected to be back shortly. I was just listening to him early this morning…I didn’t know him, but have been listening to his thoughts and observations weekly for 18 months and can’t help but feel a passing acquaintance. It’s awful he died so young, and I feel for the rest of the team.