suboptimal information

My camera kit

Since my flickr page links here, I figure this is as good a place as any to document my camera kit.

First, my camera (body only, I skipped the kit lens):
Canon Digital Rebel XT

and the lens I got with it right off the bat, my general lens:
Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM Standard Zoom Lens

the vertical battery grip, which I use just for the extra grip surface and control buttons, but also provides more battery capacity:
Canon BG-E3 Battery Grip

a macro lens, for pet photography:
Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM Lens

The classic “standard” 50mm self instruction lens:
Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Lens

A wide angle lens, to deal with the sub-frame sensor cropping factor:
Canon EF 20-35mm f/3.5-4.5 USM Ultra Wide Angle Zoom Lens

and the flash:
Canon Speedlite 430EX Flash

How crazy do you have to be to go on Food Network

With all these award winning cooks getting challenged on Throwdown with Bobby Flay, how crazy do they have to be when they get approached for their “Food Network Profile”.  Just once I’d like to see Flay show up at a victim’s faux profile and have the victim immediately blurt out “You’re ON FLAY!  You’re GOIN DOWN!” or something.

Should it be legal to discriminate against honor killer families?

Honor killings are often carried out against family members perceived or suspected of having brought shame onto the family, usually by a sibling or previous generation relative.

While most certainly illegal, it should be fair in a big picture point of view to discriminate against the same class of shamed people if they or their kin carry out an honor killing. I may not care that some dude’s sister married a person of a lesser caste, but if his mother and brothers killed her over it, maybe I don’t want to risk giving him a job or renting him an apartmenet. Who knows what the risks are - I could be out a large investment in training if he’s later arrested for conspiracy in the original honor killing or involvement in some other honor killing of some other family member.

Continue reading Should it be legal to discriminate against honor killer families?…

The absurdity of an over-abundance of caution

Allen Lee is told to write anything, without consideration of appropriate or even inappropriate censorship, as part of a creative writing assignment. For his troubles he’s arrested for two counts of disturbing the peace, effectively expelled (the action taken isn’t expulsion, but the result is the same - he’s no longer going to that school, it’s a disciplinary action, and against his will), and has been released from his chosen future - the United States Marine Corps.

What would people - parents of students - do if the teacher had given them an assignment under the pretext of writing in a thought crime society where every possible thought crime contrary to the interests of the the greater good is prosecuted. What would they have done if the teacher instructed the students to write a paper under this premise and insisted that they not identify themselves, gave every student a copy of every essay, and then told them all that they would get a failing grade on the assignment unless they found a plausible neo-conservative, ultra fundamentalist, or otherwise extremist reason for prosecuting the writer of every essay.

Continue reading The absurdity of an over-abundance of caution…

I may have to try this on my busted Roomba

My roomba lost a fight with a protest my cat made in the corner. The roomba now only goes backwards. I may have to try this fix for the roomba circle dance.

Don Imus

Someone attempting to spur an ethics debate about ethnic slurs and the measure of reasonable versus unreasonable response to their use - accepted or not - by participating audience and third parties after the fact seemed to me to have missed a key factor.  Firing someone in Don Imus’ position is completely unrelated to how offensive a particular comment was, the audience that was or was not offended by it, the outside parties that heard about it and took offense, or even cultural ambiguities that may surround a given slur that might make it inoffensive language when used in context between cooperating social groups.  Firing is a business decision. Continue reading Don Imus…

I think I want to build an RC car

I want to build a radio controlled car, or rather a truck, for an interesting robotics experiment. Self contained digital video recorders and wireless video cameras have progressed to the point that individually, their use on RC cars is relatively common as evidenced by a robust collection of bumper-view, hood-view, and zip-tied-to-the-roof view videos of RC cars tooling around in houses, parking lots, race tracks, dirt tracks, and populated streets complete with real vehicle traffic.

The questions this presents:

Continue reading I think I want to build an RC car…

And today, March 30th 2007, Macs….

Macs…

Continue reading And today, March 30th 2007, Macs…….

Hosting multiple wordpress instances

I set up three wordpress blogs (including this one) in the course of about twelve hours last weekend. It started out as an interest in setting up some sort of photoblog for my guinea pigs on their website (on whose webhosting this blog is vhosted on). A buddy suggested wordpress so I gave it a spin. One concern I had was to have a single software install if at all possible both to reduce disk usage (while not at all a significant cost factor on my hosting account, just on princple why waste disk space) and to eliminate having to cascade changes. So I set forth at trying to share a wordpress install on my hosting account.

Continue reading Hosting multiple wordpress instances…

TMI about Tony Snow

I really didn’t need to know that much about Tony Snow’s personal health.  While I wish him the best recovery science and nature can provide, the media could have stopped at “cancer returns”.