Teeeeejirrrrr

Republic of Korea's King Sejong the Great

The battleship is dead!

No navy has built a new one since the close of World War II, well over 60 years ago. The concept of an all-gun surface warship is basically a relic from a time past. Imagine if the term “carriage” was used in a car review for something modern like a Lamborghini Gallardo. It would be out of place, and makes the writer sound less intelligent than they may be.

For example in this recent article by Paul Alexander of the API, he uses the word ‘battleship’:

…Japan has deployed battleships and Patriot missile interceptors off its northern coast to shoot down any rocket debris that the North has said might fall over the area…

Sure you could argue this is just petty semantics but unfortunately makes the writer look ill-informed about the basics of contemporary naval military technology. I’m sure that Paul is not a stupid fellow though- but it is a mistake that he is helping to perpetuate. Unfortunately for him what is normally a goof that only happens in conversation bit him with a published article on the web.

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Here are some photos I stumbled upon on Flickr, which I felt were quite good… subjectively valued by their framing, artistic merit, emotional content, and the vaguest of them all, sheer beauty:

Happy Birthday by redrocker_9@flickr

Feliz cumple.... by Espace vitto

Pattern by d's 2nd@flickr

Down the road, by humanwarmth@flickr

Pogled sa zvjezdarnice by *shana@flickr

Trio, by La Señorita Pil

To go to heaven, by ~ Araien ~@flickr

Dargın mıyız ? by Derya Hacalaki@flickr

Now for the fun part. These pictures come from two of the WORST digital cameras ever manufactured. Again- the pictures are absolutely beautiful and nothing bad can really be said about them… but the hardware is almost universally derided.

The first four photos were taken with a Polaroid i-Zone 550, a camera regarded as a toy. Its own user base tends to not really like it all that much. Not only a camera, it also comes with a built-in MP3 player, and unfortunately is good at neither task. Advertised as a 5.1 megapixel camera, it was shown to be a 3MP CCD that was upsampled to meet the specification- yet look at the nice shots that came out of the camera in this particular case.

The next four shots were taken with a Pentax Optio E-10, a camera known for its technical crappiness and generally hate-filled user reviews, and for its CCD imager chip randomly dying or batteries mysteriously being drained in abnormally short times.

Again, this is proof that the camera really does not make you a better photographer. Good tools help, but that’s all they are- tools. Many pixel-peepers today simply fail to grasp that.

No spoilers will be printed or shown here 🙂

Last night was the conclusion of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series. I have to say I was not disappointed. Ron Moore, David Eick, all production and actors have managed to blow away my wildest expectations about this show and where it has taken us. I remember seeing the original Battlestar Galactica miniseries reruns when I was only 6, and being completely spellbound by it.

This was one of the few remakes that really bats one out of the park. The bar for a science fiction series has been raised. Big ships with hyper-realistic special effects is simply not enough. Having compelling characters is not enough.  Technobabble and stirring of emotions is not enough. The whole science fiction aspect was thrown into the backdrop and the raw power of the cast became the forefront. This show was magic.

In an unlikely note, Richard Hatch gets special credit to me. I remember in the 1990s when he lobbied so hard to get a remake of Battlestar Galactica done- whether it was shooting short films financed by his own money, writing spin-off books, or relentless self-promotion on his website in the naescent days of the web… I give a lot of credit to Richard for never giving up. Admittedly I found myself at a crossroads of sorts when seeing his relentless push for a Galactica remake.

At first I laughed at him. Then I really laughed at him. But he never gave up. The months went by and the memories of his short films went by the wayside. But Richard never gave up. I’m not saying he brought this series back singlehandedly, but Mr. Hatch really deserves a lot of credit. His lobbying as Apollo kept the smouldering embers of hope alive for many who always thought Battlestar Galactica of 1978 could have been something much, much better. His role as Tom Zarek in the new series helped make that possible.

Well, everyone has pulled it off. It’s exceeded my wildest expectations. Thank you all for four frakking excellent seasons.

I can think of much better ways to spend $300

$300USD and up for a pair of Prada branded flip-flops?

Who… I mean who really buys this sort of crap?

Oh. This girl did apparently (article in Chinese).

Bonus points- she spent $80,000HDK (roughly $11500USD) on a shopping spree. Included in the tally was $1900HKD for a pair of Prada flip-flops.

Okay, so I blow a ton of money on camera gear and machine tools… but those things can be used to make other things. Plus both things hold their resell value pretty well in case I change my mind and say to myself “gee, that was stupid”. Flip-flops, belts, and Vertu mobile phones don’t really do too well in that department.

I am sooooo in the wrong line of work. Maybe I should put my machine tools to work making ridiculously expensive, exclusive thingies. Then I should take pictures of underfed models wearing them. Profit!

Something I had not noticed before until the other morning, when I took a different subway going to work. Hidden in a fenced-off garden just feet away from the street. Shot was hastily taken as the lighting was perfect, with the Cosina-Voigtlander Ultron 40mm f/2 manual focus lens.

Dragon's Blood Tree, by dianadrz@flickr

Socotra is an archipelago of islands in the Indian Ocean off the Horn of Africa that hosts some of the more interesting plant and animal species in the world.

Its separation from the African mainland occurred sometime in the Miocene geologic era, a period roughly 5 to 23 million years ago, and this isolation is one of the primary causes for the continued survival of its indiginous species.

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I have to say I am hooked on pancake lenses. What are they? Well, they’re very flat compared to other lenses, hence the name. Other than their compact size, they don’t offer distortion effects like fisheye lenses, or tilt-shift lenses. The name just implies their diminuitive footprint and possible roots in the Zeiss Tessar lens package design. Now I’m motivated to start a little project that provides some centralized information about them.

UPDATE

I’ve got the first four lenses added into my “Index of Pancake Lenses“, a little database-driven side project that I just launched. I hope to add more in there as I get collect information and develop better understanding of lenses as a whole. Any hints/corrections/additional info are greatly appreciated!

Yesterday, Canon issued a recall on one of their flagship DSLR cameras, the EOS 1D Mark III. One of the problems is related to autofocus issues when not using the center focus point – which I don’t experience because I almost exclusively use the center point. There are a total of 45 autofocus points on the camera viewfinder, with 19 of them being selectable. The remainder are “assist” points.

The autofocus has had knocks on it because under certain conditions it totally freaks out – high temperature heat/haze in the backgrounds, and under low contrast conditions (such as a dancer wearing black against a black background). The EOS 1D Mark IIn, its predecessor, apparently did not have these kinds of issues.

The other problem which is potentially more serious and troubling are ‘ERR99’ messages that occasionally pop up and without real regularity. These cause the camera to become unusable until powered off.

Canon’s biggest problem though is that they are perceived as covering things up.

It’s a lot like when a Windows desktop would crash- you had no idea what happened, and like voodoo in the Microsoft way- with the reboot of the computer, and the waving of a dead chicken, everything would come back just fine. Some users have had to leave their cameras powered off for extended periods of time, while others just remove the battery to reset it, and everything is okay again. I have personally never experienced this problem, so I can’t comment on it.

Canon’s biggest problem though is that they are perceived as covering things up. Having some camera bodies out there that work, and some that can’t focus, and now finally acknowledging some that randomly crash makes this problem worse. In some ways, I wished that ALL of the cameras had failures so that it would be easier to clear the mess away and start over. Then they could issue a credit on current 1D Mark III owners towards the newer model. But I can’t

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Taken by Misha Kalyustin (Михаил Капустин)

Quick! You’re going to build one of the tallest hotels ever, and where would you possibly put it on the world? Could it be London? New York? Dubai? Las Vegas?

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