Category: General

Rob Pegoraro’s column in this weekends Washington Post was a general buyer’s guide to digital cameras and I liked the the no-nonsense advice he gave out until I read this:

That, in turn, undercuts one of the primary advantages of digital cameras — the ability to take one to as many places as possible. That’s also why I don’t recommend D-SLRs — “digital single-lens reflex” models that, like their film equivalents, let you frame a shot through the same lens used by the image sensor. They take extremely sharp pictures and do so extremely quickly, but they also cost far more and are hardly smaller than film SLRs. Hold off on any D-SLR shopping until you find you’re making photography a serious hobby.

I disagree here. The benefit of the extremely fast photo taking seriously outweighs the “downsides” of extra disk space. You don’t need to have photography as a serious hobby to get big benefits from a digital SLR. Fast photo taking is one of those things that’s hard to understand the benefit of until you actually have it. And I’m generally a photo geek and a technology geek so you might discount my opinion here, but my wife who is neither LOVES our Canon EOS digital, she absolutely swears by it. With a young baby (they never sit still!) or kids that play sports or perform in school plays or WHATEVER, the quick response time from a camera fundamentally changes the quality of the shots that you get — not in terms of pixel quality, but in terms of capturing what you intended to capture and not an image 1-2 seconds later.

Yes, the bulkiness is a disadvantage but it’s outweighed (no pun intended) by the shift in the results you get from digital SLRs.

Now if only the makers of smaller digital cameras (the stuff that Rob exclusively advocates) could put the storage buffers and whatever else gives digital SLRs a quicker response time on digital SLRs into the next generation of Digital Elphs, we’d have the best of both worlds.

Back in 1997, while I was still in college, I took a class on the history of the Palestinians and I was part of a subset of the class that went on a 2 week study tour to the Palestinian territories in Israel. Most of us stayed near Jerusalem and during our stay, we traveled to Ramallah, Bethlehem, the Gaza strip, Tel Aviv, and Haifa. Organized by student Allison Fine, the trip included private meetings between our group and key Palestinian leaders and intellectuals like Sari Nuseibeh and Haider Abdul Shafi.

I shot about 30 rolls of 36-exposure black and white film on the trip, probably the most significant photography project that I have ever undertaken. I got back to school and processed all of the film myself and put together quite an exhibit of phtoographs. I’ve always meant to put the photographs online because I’m really proud of the photographs I took on that trip but never got around to it until now. I hope to put up more of my photographs here along with captions and more information, but for now, I’ve uploaded a selection of photographs from the Palestinian Study Tour. All of the B&W’s were taken by me. Color photographs were taken by Adam Reiser. Adam, where are you these days?

In Chicago right now for a friend’s wedding and I went to buy them a gift from TheHoneymoon and I was surprised to find out that the site didn’t work properly in Firefox. All of the checkout pages had the action buttons “confirm order” and “place order” covered up by the footer of the page. TheHoneymoon.com, fix your website dudes!

This is a simple rule, but I think it’s a valuable one in several if not all spheres of life — business and family for sure. I think it will make me a better parent.

I realized tonight that I have way too many ties.

I’ve had this mostly broken tie rotator in my closet for the past year or so (it used to work before that). When I’ve wanted to find a tie to wear, I’ve had to manually rotate the belt to circulate the ties. I decided to take action and remove this broken piece of technology today. So I ripped it off the hanger rod in my closet and that’s when I realized just how many ties I have.

How many? I’d say the count is easily above 50, maybe approaching 75. I’m not sure where these things came from, but somewhere along the way I picked up a bunch of ties. Yes, it is ridiculous. Want a tie?

Sometimes you have a problem that only gets solved with some very old, very non-flashy technology. We have a Panasonic multi-line, multi-handset telephone system in the main house with probably 5-6 handsets. We also have a room that’s designated as the library and has the main computer (the same one that I recently bought a new dell widescreen LCD for). Problem was this: very often, when someone was working on that computer, they would want to make or answer a phone call (examples: look up restaurant review and phone number, call to make a reservation; look up store hours, call to confirm availability of some product; working at the desk and the phone rings). So as you might guess, cordless phones are useless in this scenario — you’ve got to go hunt around for one and when you have as many people at home as we have, forget about it. No amount of training or exhortation will EVER get anyone to put anything where it belongs, much less the cordless telephones. That’s why they are cordless!!! So that they can be taken into far corners of the house and hidden so no one else can find them or use them!!!

So I always thought it would be a good idea to get a two-line corded phone for that desk but never got around to it until last weekend. (As a side note, amazon and most other online stores don’t make it at all easy to find corded telephones. Consumerreports.com hardly has any reviews of them. Likewise for other product review sites. So I was a gadget-purchaser-fish out of water. Not much to help me buy the right phone.) Last weekend I bought two single line, compact corded telephones with caller id from Target:

I’m getting high praise around the house as EVERYONE has been using these phones. Sometimes, the solution to a problem, even for the earliest of early adopters, is old technology.

I’m on the phone with Ticketmaster right now. What a terrible company. Ugh.

So here’s the story, quickly: Shonali bought 4 tickets to an upcoming showing of the musical “Wicked” for a friend (b/c the tickets were being pre-sold to Amex gold card holders and Shonali has one and her friend doesn’t). But after buying the tickets Shonali realized her friend had mixed up the dates and actually needed tickets for the following week. Shonali asked me to take care of it. I called Ticketmaster. I waited for a long time, frustrating in this day and age for any sort of customer service. I spoke to someone who said, “Your tickets have been mailed and you need them in-hand before I can help you.” OK, fine, it’s like a paper ticket. I get it, I’ll wait.

So I got the tickets earlier this week and I called back today. Again, I have to wait a long time before I’m connected to someone. The gal on the phone is flippant, unsympathetic, and unhelpful. From her, after going around and around a few times (I could have sworn she was chewing bubble gum, filing her nails and rolling her eyes while I talked to her), I find out that there is no such thing as an exchange and that I need to mail the tickets back for a refund and buy completely new tickets if I want to.

Why didn’t someone tell me that 6 days ago when I first called when I could have gotten better tickets for the following week?

I have to say that I’ve always disliked Ticketmaster, their service fees are outrageously high and they’ve never seemed worth it (in this case, their service fees accounted for about 15% of what I paid — $10 per ticket!). They don’t serve much of a function, at least not to me as a consumer. And to then see them do what very little they do (acting as a middleman for ticket sales) so poorly, well, it’s really frustrating. I don’t know anything about their business or their stranglehold over their customers, but I do know that there are countless companies today that could do what they do better than them — how long before Ticketmaster gets toppled?

I pretty consistently have some technology product/service that I think is cool that I evangelize and show off to anyone and everyone that I meet. A couple of weeks ago, it was Google Earth. Five years ago (give or take) it was my home WiFi network, back in 1996 when I was living in Washington D.C. and working for American Management Systems it was my Palm III organizer (back in the US Robotics days, before 3com and everything else that has followed). For a while recently it was Lookout (and Google Desktop and X1, but mostly Lookout since it’s what I use the most).

The thing I’ve been show-and-telling most recently is Google SMS. I use SMS a fair bit, the most when I’m out of the country or when Shonali is out of the country — so I’m pretty good with text entry using T9 and I love everything about the user interface on my Nokia cell phone (including how it learns proper nouns in my ‘vocabulary’ that weren’t built into its dictionary — I should write about my love of my Nokia 6610 another time). So I’ve known about Google SMS for a while, but I only recently started using it. It’s great. No more 411 and it does a whole lot more. I was in San Jose on Wednesday of this week and on my way to a meeting, I decided I needed some coffee — I punched in the zipcode for where I was (I had it because I had just checked into my hotel and it was on the receipt) and ‘starbucks’ and I instantly got a list of all the nearby locations. I was parked at a Starbucks within about 2 minutes. Likewise, I’ve used it to get restaurant numbers, movie showtimes, and more. It just works. Now it certainly has it’s limitations. There’s no interactivity and the response time between input and output isn’t that great (again, not Google’s fault — it’s just about the way SMS works). This just means I have to know exactly what I’m looking for. Text entry can also be difficult for some people, so those people will continue to use 411’s voice-based technology. Also, for someone whose not done any serious sms’ing, I’d imagine the menus might seem esoteric for a query response sequence.

I’ve also briefly tried Google’s richer XHTML based portal for mobile devices (mobile.google.com, I think) and it improves on a lot. Again, like their SMS product, the results of this product are extremely well suited to the target device (which translates to “it just works!” in terms of user reaction). You can iterate more with your queries on this device, though the Cingular Edge Treo 650 that I tried it on was still laggier than I had hoped. I could search Google Local for a restaurant or a restaurant category and not only get a phone number and address, but I got a map (that I could zoom in and out of) and the ability to get driving directions. Similarly, I could look up movie times and more. I didn’t have enough time to use it in real life, but I could tell that there was quite a bit of promise behind the concept.

Google SMS is great, if you can get the hang of using SMS, I predict it will be invaluable to you.

I have had about 200MB and 45,000 e-mail messages marked as SPAM sitting up on our company mail servers from the past couple of months. While most of them are actually SPAM, some could be actual messages that never made it through so I’m sitting down today to go through the painstaking process of filtering out the good messages and deleting the rest. Luckily, our SPAM filters are relatively good and I’m mostly deleting messages. I just hit ‘e’ and boy do a lot of spammers masquerade their SPAM messages as ebay emails!