Update: (5/2/05) Backpack has upped it's limits since I originally wrote this entry. Free accounts now get 5 pages (up from 3) and the $5/month account get 20 pages (up from 15). They also increased the storage for the $5/month account from 25MB to 40MB. In the entry below I've indicated some of these changes, but it seems silly to have little "(update: )" or strike notations everywhere, especially when these changes don't really change the way I feel about their pricing. The most important limit to me is "20 pages." How useful would a Wiki that could only store 20 pages be? How useful would a blog with 20 entries be? The feature I like about Backpack is that it makes it easy to create content. Their pricing stands in opposition to these potential uses and only makes sense if they are targetting this at business users that can afford the extra $$$ for higher limits -- but why target business users when you already have Basecamp?

original entry follows...

I've been playing a bit more with Backpack -- it combines much of the free-flow composition of Wiki with the ease-of-use and power of structured data (e.g. todo lists). When they release it to the public it might become a very useful 'application' for me and my friends to plan events together, but...

...we're not going to be able to plan that many events with it because the free account only gives you 3 pages total (update: 5), and the non-free plans are way too friggin' expensive. And by 'way', I mean WAY.

As a pricing reference point, I would compare it to Flickr, which I use constantly and have a two-year Pro account for.

* This pricing is based on Backpack's basic account (cheapest non-free account).

It's just not even in the same ballpark. Even when Flickr cost $40/year (pre-Yahoo), it was still a bargain compared to Backpack.

The 15-page limit is especially egregious. I can begin to understand the 25MB cap on file and photo upload, but limiting me to having 15 pages that hardly take up any space and are the central feature of the service is just plain assinine. IMHO, $60/year is a terrible price to pay for 15 Web pages, even if they are super-snazzy and editable. I could delete an old page to make more room, but why force me to do that? With the advent of Gmail and Flickr I thought we had gotten past that whole notion of having to delete old information.

Zeldman discusses several of the problems with tag clouds, but I thought I'd hit on a couple of more from a different viewpoint.

First, as a primer, a tag cloud (as seen on my Flickr account, but also seen on sites like del.icio.us (experimental) and 43things):

 700   animal   ape2005   architecture   armstrong   beach   bike   bird   blue   boulders   bridge   buddha   bunny   cacti   california   castro   cave   chaparral   child   christinethornburg   christmas   cliff   condor   contrail   cute   cycling   deyoung   ekimov   endangered   evil   flight   flower   football   gate   gehry   getty   goldengatepark   green   halloween   herzog   house   incredibles   iris   japanesemaple   japaneseteagarden   lamb   lancearmstrong   landscape   leaves   licenseplate   lights   lizard   losangeles   maple   metaldetector   meuron   momiji   moon   morganhill   mountain   nationalpark   nerd   orange   pagoda   paulmccartney   peligro   pinnacles   pipes   rabbit   race   railing   red   richardmeier   robonexus   rock   sanfrancisco   sanfransciscograndprix   santamonica   sfmoma   sidewalk   sign   silhouette   sonoma   spiderman   spire   spires   stonelantern   stones   sunset   tattoo   teagarden   tmobile   tonybennett   tree 

Tag clouds follow a very basic principle: the font size of the word is scales linearly with the number of times the tag has been used.

At first glance, there appear to be several things right with this sort of display. You can see, for example, that I have a ton of photos tagged "Richard Meier", and that I have a lot more "architecture" photos than "ape2005" photos. IMHO, however, this is all fluff -- it's has the appearance of being a statistical visualization but instead conveys information crudely and inaccurately. For example, for each of these pairs, answer the question, "Which do I have more photos tagged with?"

• japaneseteagarden or goldengatepark?
• richardmeier or architecture?
• sanfranciscograndprix or house?

With close examination you will probably get these right, but my point is that it takes a bit of thought (and you have the chance of getting it wrong). One of the fundamental problems is that the "tag cloud" display is using the size of the word to convey how many tags are associated with it. However, the size of the word is related to (a) the number of characters in the word (sanfranciscograndprix vs. house) and (b) the font size of the word, which grows in two-dimensions. Instead of trying to convey:

size of word ~= (# of tagged items)

we instead have the relation

size of word ~= (# of tagged items * length of word)²

So as a statistical display, it's bunk -- appearing to help you understand relative tag distribution, but not in an accurate manner.

Aesthetically, in order to try and convey this pseudo-statistical information, it completely throws the list out-of-whack: lines grow to arbitrary heights, one's ability to scan quickly across the entire list is lost, large words are constantly drawing your attention from smaller words, etc..., and, to borrow from Zeldman, navigation skews towards popularity rather than findability.

The fact that "richardmeier" is one of my most prominent tags entirely relates to the fact that (a) I took a ton of photos of the Getty one day, and (b) I was testing out my new Flickr Pro upload limits. They are not my "best" category of photos, I don't frequently take "richardmeier" photos, and they are not the photos I most want people to see. But the tag cloud design dictates that visitors will forever feel "richardmeier"'s gravitational force (that is, until I go crazy with another photo upload).

My own tag/category display could use some work, but I offer it here as a comparison (feel free to critique in the comments):

aka the story of the new 'lenstagged' tag on Flickr and why I hope it will spread across Flickr

There have been a couple discussions (at least) on how to tag your photos with the lens that you used to take the shot. For example, I've been using a Canon 70-200mm f/4L USM lens to take most of my photos nowadays, and, if I could come up with a good tag, people looking to buy that lens or wanting to compare photos could search for that tag and see various photos. I've started using canon70200f4, which you can browse at http://flickr.com/photos/tags/canon70200f4, but if you follow the link you'll see no one else is using it (yet) -- the stock rebel lens has a better following (canon1855f3556).

This discussion hits upon some classic ontology problems:

1. Is 'canon70200f4' the right tag, or should I use 'canon70200f4L', 'canon70200f4Lusm', or 'canonef70200f4Lusm' (or any combination inbetween)?

2. How do new users, unfamiliar with the fact that there have been various discussions, discover what the 'right' tag to use for their photos is?

3. How does the community maintain and evolve this 'standard', especially as new lenses are introduced that may conflict with the pre-existing ontology (i.e. if Canon introduces a new 70-200mm lens).

Brief aside: some of you have heard me rant about ontologies, about how I hate them, how I think they are an anathema to most software design and use... these are some of those reasons

I threw my hat into the ring with the following comment:

My assumption is that people probably won't standardize on these tags (hard for new users to know where to even find a proper list). Given this assumption, it might help if there were an additional tag, e.g. "lenstagged", that would be applied to any image that uses a lens tags. That way, in the future, the "Related Tags" feature of Flickr could help:

1) find the most popular usage (by going to flickr.com/photos/tags/lenstagged and looking at "Related Tags")

2) figure out that canon70200f4 and canon70200f4L and canon70200f4Lusm are probably all the same tag.

i.e. there's no freakin' way that people will ever standarize, but Flickr's Related Tag feature is a really great technological solution for searching and reconciling the misaligned ontologies.

The response to this proposal for this new tag was positive (11 practitioners so far), and one user even suggested that a group be started as a forum for hosting future lens tagging discussions.

So, I now present my first-ever Flickr group:

"Len Tagged"

Another user and I have started various discussions topics centering on a particular lens, posting which tag we are currently using to identify it. Other users can go to those entries to find out what tags other people are using and contribute their own usage. This provides a forum for us to argue/debate, but the best part is that we don't have to ever agree -- I can keep using my canon70200f4 tag even if everyone else thinks canonef70200f4Lusm is better, but if enough people following the discussion tag some photos with both, then Flickr's Related Tags feature should find both usages.

I hope that the lenstagged tag and group will grow in size and use, partly out of vain well-wishes for my "first group," but mostly because, as a convention (not a standard), I think that lens taggers will benefit from its use.

I've sold out to The Man and have started running Google AdSense ads on various entries on this site.

I debated this for a fairly long time, trying to solve the problem, "Can I place ads on this site without you (my friends) your myself ever having to see them?" Running this site costs money, so ads would be a good way of defraying those costs. I wasn't able to come up with a satisfactory solution for several months, but what finally tipped the balance was the data that was coming in from MyBlogLog.

The stats from MyBlogLog were interesting to me, not only because they provide a better measure of traffic than my Web server stat logs, which are polluted by spammers, but they also happen to tell me the most popular entries where people are clicking on links to leave my site. In other words, in examining these stats, I can find older entries people are using to find information not on my site. This, in many ways, is my target audience for ads: people whom I don't know, who are directed to my site by a search engine, and are interested in content not on my site.

Armed with this information, I have placed ads on about 50-60 entries on this site (about 5% of the total entries). There are various rules that I used to determine these entries, and while I may violate some for convenience, they are:

• entry no longer displayed on my front page
• higher traffic relative to other entries
• unlikely to be visited by me or my friends (i.e. not journal-like, not my photos, not my notes)
• keyword friendly (e.g. 'Google', 'Microsoft', 'Backpack', 'Gehry')

I hope that these rules will create enough extra effort in adding ads to entries that the number of entries with ads continues to stay very low. For now this is an experiment, and if it fails, either due to a lack of revenue or because it does not satisfy my original criteria ("only strangers see ads") I'll pull the ads as it won't be worth maintaining.

If you're curious, here are some example pages with ads: one two three four five

Update: I'm $0.03 richer! I can quit my day job!

K Rajan, NASA

Talk at SRI about the introduction of AI technologies into NASA technologies, and, more specifically, the used of the MAPGEN planner for the Mars Exploration Rovers.

Although the talk was not about work practice, it was amusing for me to hear Rajan speak as one of the converted. Despite being AI technologists, they had to learn importance of human factors/understanding how people will use their technology. If I understood him correctly, it sounds like this was his first experience with social scientists on a mission (and a succesful experience at that).

The extended notes focus on the planning technology and their challenges in getting it into the MER mission. They weren't seen as a critical technology, and it wasn't until they did a 'bakeoff' competition between their technology and the current practice that they finally made it in for good.

Steven Johnson gave a talk at Books Inc. in Mountain View in order to promote his new book, Everything Bad is Good for You. (a shortened version of his Apple Store Talk for those who saw that).

His stated purpose for the talk/book is that is an attempt to talk on conventional wisdom that things have gotten worse, that newer media (TV/video games) appeal to the lowest common denominator. It is a "contrarian but honest argument" that looks, not at the content, but at the cognitive complexity of these media (# of characters, plots, etc...)

I've transcribed my notes into the extended entry. Before the jump you can checked out kottke's review or Gladwell's review (the kottke review includes some links to other resources). Or, you go straight to the source, Steven Johnson's blog, where he's be reviewing the reviewers, posting his schedule, and whatnot.

Finally, you can read Watching TV Makes You Smarter, which Johnson wrote for the New York Times Magazine and pretty much summarizes the arguments in his talk/book.

The Edge is hosting transcript/audio/slides of a debate between Liz Spelke and Steven Pinker badly titled, "The Science of Gender and Science" (if you follow the link, you'll see the title misprinted as "The Gender of Gender and Science").

Pinker (predictably) argues that men innately have abilities that allow them to excel in science/math/engineering (nature), and Spelke argues that the data show that men and women have equal abilities, but are treated differently (nurture).

My friends who've taken classes taught by Pinker have described him as a pompous ass, and in the transcripts that clearly comes through, but even removing my negative reactions to his ass-itude, I still think Spelke does a much more convincing presentation -- of course, they are just throwing different statistical data sets back and forth that have irreconcilable conclusions, so I imagine this may be a case of reading for the data that best supports your given bias.

I'll include one point made by Spelke, which I have seen borne out by a different study involving orchestra auditions, as well as anecdotal stories by d regarding her better performance in getting job interviews due to her boy-ish name:

Spelke: The subjects ... were sent some vitas to evaluate as applicants for a tenure track position. Two different vitas were used in the study. One was a vita of a walk-on-water candidate, best candidate you've ever seen, you would die to have this person on your faculty. The other vita was a middling, average vita among successful candidates. For half the professors, the name on the vita was male, for the other half the name was female. People were asked a series of questions: What do you think about this candidate's research productivity? What do you think about his or her teaching experience? And finally, Would you hire this candidate at your university?

For the walk-on-water candidate, there was no effect of gender labeling on these judgments. I think this finding supports Steve's view that we're dealing with little overt discrimination at universities. It's not as if professors see a female name on a vita and think, I don't want her. When the vita's great, everybody says great, let's hire.

What about the average successful vita, though: that is to say, the kind of vita that professors most often must evaluate? In that case, there were differences. The male was rated as having higher research productivity. These psychologists, Steve's and my colleagues, looked at the same number of publications and thought, "good productivity" when the name was male, and "less good productivity" when the name was female. Same thing for teaching experience. The very same list of courses was seen as good teaching experience when the name was male, and less good teaching experience when the name was female. In answer to the question would they hire the candidate, 70% said yes for the male, 45% for the female. If the decision were made by majority rule, the male would get hired and the female would not.

Edge: THE SCIENCE OF GENDER AND SCIENCE

I love reading the Palo Alto Daily News. After growing up reading niche papers like the Washington Post that ramble on and on about our federal government, it's comforting to read a paper that focuses on real front-page news, like noisy leafblowers and vandalism in pedestrian tunnels.

My favorite ongoing saga is a $10,000, seven-foot tall egg made out of various computer parts, subtlety symbolizing the role of the Silicon Valley as the birthplace of the computer age (note: actually the second $10,000 egg as the first melted into a pile of glass in a fire -- this, of course, symbolized the dot-com bust). I might be misinterpreting here; they placed the egg in front of Pizza-My-Heart, so it could be representing the innovations that had their genesis over a slice of pizza and a beer.

This area in front of Pizza-My-Heart is a popular hangout for all the Paly kids, and when you stick a $10,000 giant green egg in front of a bunch of high schoolers, you end up with wonderful back-to-back news paragraphs like:

Gabe, a Palo Alto High School junior, was also displeased that the city's money was not direct toward education. "In my (chemistry) class we are using five different textbook editions, and we're supposed to be the rich school," he added.

Other teenagers in the group, who regularly hang out at the plaza, said "Digital DNA" lacks coordination and begs to be rolled down the street, rocked from its base, and subject to other thoughts/acts of violence typically inflicted on seven-foot tall egg sculptures.

Paragraphs like those, along with documentation of typical acts of violence inflicted on seven-foot tall egg sculptures (graffiti, ramming it with shopping carts, etc...), as well as quotes from the artist about how she fears her sculpture won't survive to its official unveiling make the Palo Alto Daily News a refreshing take on the issues confronting my community.

I came across an Ann Coulter quote while being entertained by Ze Frank's response to Dennis Prager. Prager took the example of a college student yelling anal sex references at Coulter as an example of the Left's Hitler Youth. More on that, but first, the Coulter quote:

"When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors."

parakkum pointed out this fits well with meta's On Bullshit post as it is about "shifting the focus of discussion in manipulative ways."

This is the second time I've run across Coulter's quote, but this is the first time I realized how that I reacted to it as Coulter intended (incorrectly). Coulter wants you to be so disgusted with her talk of liberals being traitors and her advocacy of killing liberals that you miss the central premise of her quote: John Walker is a liberal.

Yes, John Walker is an assault-weapon-totin', fundamentalist, anti-feminism liberal, and (getting back to Prager), the Hitler Youth were a bunch of anti-war, pro gay, free-speech hooligans.

Stormy tends to get more of the photo-love because of her Evil (Dead) Tendencies, but just to show you that the rest of the bunny troupe are all equally cute (even when they're not being evil cute):

more bunnies in the extended

I kept driving up Page Mill Road yesterday. I was intending to go to Russian Ridge, but the road was so much fun that I kept on driving and driving until we came across Portola Redwoods Forest. The park is only 15-20 minutes outside of Palo Alto and costs $6 to get in. We were extremely slow due to our picture-taking addiction and inability to find the trailhead, but there are some good 7 mile and 11 mile loops you can do there. It was also eery to listen to how much the super-tall redwood trees creak in the wind -- it's like hearing a door open.

On the way back we quickly stopped at Russian Ridge so I could get some shots of the foothills before they turn brown -- Palo Alto Foothills Park is already fully brown. The wildflowers were also in full force.

"What are the affordances of an egg?"

gus, coming from his HCI background, asked this question after I couldn't help bringing up the Seven-Foot Art Egg (note: this post won't make any sense unless you read my original Art Egg Post).

It's such a great way to frame the Giant Egg that I can't resist carrying out an analysis. After all, if it is going to be "subject to other thoughts/acts of violence typically inflicted on seven-foot tall egg sculptures," perhaps the psychology of industrial design can shed some light on what fate(s) await Egg II (Egg I died glass-bubbly in a warehouse fire).

A popular discussion of affordances is in Don Norman's book, The Design/Psychology of Everyday Things, which serves as a bible for companies like TiVo attempting to do consumer-oriented product design. As Don Norman defines it, affordance "refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used." For example, "plates are for pushing," and "knobs are for turning."

Drawing from Palo Alto Daily News quotes, Don Norman, and my own pompous assertions, here is my list of "The Affordances of a Seven-Foot Egg":

Cracking/breaking

The most common usage of an egg is, of course, cracking it open to access the contents inside. One of the acts of vandalism the PADN noted was teenagers ramming a shopping cart into the Egg, and I personally witnessed a passerby adjust his path through the plaza so that he could deliver a swift kick.

This leads us to the next affordance:

Containing (corollary to cracking/breaking)

Whether it be eggs we eat or the plastic easter eggs with their candy surprises, eggs contain stuff we want. This is a Giant Egg, so one must assume that the affordance of a Seven-Foot Tall Egg is that it contains something really good -- it's big enough to give birth to full-sized Shaq. Symbolically the Egg is supposed to contain Silicon Valley innovation, but the crowd quotes from the PADN were more mundane.

Grace, a registered nurse in San Jose, said "It's very ornate, like a time capsule -- somthing I want to open up and see if there's anything in there. It makes people think."

Another person quoted in the PADN noted the possible technological influence of the Egg on its contents:

"I like the shape, it's pretty cool," Geo said. "I wonder if there is a baby computer inside?"

$10,000 seems like quite a lot to hatch a computer -- I'm hoping for something more grandiose that still harnesses the technological potential, something representing the role of US government and Asian investment in the Silicon Valley, something like... MechaGodzilla.

The 1993 (from Heisei series) Super MechaGodzilla was designed by a joint American- Japanese project under the jurisdiction of the United Nations Godzilla CounterMeasures Center (UNGCC) to defend the world from Godzilla.

Rocking/Tipping/Rolling/Spinning

Admittedly, the role of eggs as food means that we don't too often play with it, but rolling as an affordance of eggs is strong enough to make it into an Easter tradition: Egg Rolls. An egg's oblong shape allows for other variations on rolling, including rocking, tipping, and spinning.

The PADN provides a supporting quote from the resident teenage contingent:

"[the Egg] begs to be rolled down the street" and "rocked from its base."

Even a administrative associate at Stanford Medical Center couldn't help mixing compliments and a test of its defenses:

[The administrative associate] caught sight of the egg after getting off work from Stanford Medical Center. "It's unique. It's very well put together," he said, while trying to rock the egg.

Writing

Norman, in discussing graffiti on British Rail platforms, notes that "Flat, porous, smooth surfaces are for writing on." While the archetypal egg is porous and smooth, it doesn't provide that much flat writing surface. However, a Seven-Foot Tall Egg is a whole new species of egg, and the artist has conveniently coated all the circuit boards with a nice, smooth sealant. The Egg also provides it own cues as to this affordance: the artist has already put various handwritten multilingual phrases across its surface.

Multiple PADN quotees noted this affordance:

Tom, from Los Altos said he'd be surprised if it survives in the plaza for a long time: "It practically says, 'Spray paint me," he said.

An employee of Pizza My Heart, Emilio, thought that it didn't fit in with the environment. "It's gonna become art with all the kids' graffiti," he said.

Approachable

This isn't an affordance of the egg itself -- it's more a lack of affordance by the choice of how it was installed. Many public sculptures are mounted on pseudo-pedestals, a slightly raised bit of concrete that sets it apart from the public walking area around it. These pedestals remove the affordance of walking in the area around the artwork, creating a virtual wall of the look-don't-touch museum experience.

The Art Egg is installed with no demarcations between it and the rest of the plaza, daring you to walk directly past it or approach it. It's there to be bumped into, shoved, rocked, or otherwise used within its affordances. Visit the Egg for a brief amount of time and you'll notice multiple people touching, bumping, shoving, and even kicking it as they walk past.

Hugging

It's slightly above average human height, it's round, and you can walk right up to it. After all it's been through and all the entertainment it provided me (via the PADN), I gave it a hug.

movabletypo folks: apologies for the rash of recent spam. Movabletypo and kwc.org had been doing so well recently that I had gotten complacent. Most of the damage was done by one computer, but I am noticing that more are making it through the filters. I've updated kwc.org to MovableType 3.16 so I can tryout SpamLookup, which is the latest tool in fighting comment spam. It is still in beta, so I want to test it out for a couple of days before I give it the green light for movabletypo. Hopefully all will go well and the nasty spam people will go away once more.

... Yoda and Obi-wan conspiring to kill all the Jedi and frame Anakin, who goes undercover as Vader so that he might one day undo all the damage done by R2-D2's death ray, which then gets stolen by the Emperor to put in the Death Star... it was just too much to handle. And that imagery of Ewok's riding Wookies into battle as if they were horses -- that ain't right, it just ain't right.

The black squirrels are invading!!! They're coming to eat our wiring!

I finally started having fun with Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey is a tool for Firefox that lets people write their own little programs on top of any Web site. There are various scripts to clean up site annoyances, such as scripts to remove CNN's ad columns or scripts to remove posts by Xeni on BoingBoing, but the type of scripts that have tipped me into using Greasemonkey are the time savers: autocomplete for Del.icio.us and a hack for This American Life that switches links to the downloadable (instead of streaming) audio.

I never looked at an actual Greasemonkey script until today when mfkenney posted a script to the Flickr Hacks group. His script modifies Flickr photo pages so that clicking on the photo title pulls up a menu that lets you click to the thumbnail/small/medium/large/original photo .jpg versions -- without this script you have to click through two or three pages to get the same result (link to script). mfkenney released it under GPL so I made a quick (1 minute) modification to the script that links to the "photo zoom" page instead (the photo zoom page provides HTML for posting the photo into a blog entry): Modified FlickrAllSizes script.

NOTE: To use either of these scripts you'll need Firefox, and you'll have to install Greasemonkey. You can then come back to this page, right click on the link, and select "Install User Script."

I've never posted about the Giro like I have the Tour de France or Vuelta a Espana. It usually isn't that much fun to watch Petacchi win stage after stage (nearly half the stages in 2004), but I paid the $5.95 for OLN's streaming Internet broadcast subscription and gave it a shot.

Half-way in, it's been well worth it. Nine different riders have worn the leader's jersey, the sprint finishes have been too difficult for Petacchi's team to control, and Di Luca and Bettini have been duking out a great mini-battle that ended finally with Stage 11's entrance into mighty Italian Dolomites.

Stage 11 was the first mountain stage of the Giro and had two major climbs at the end that set the tone for the battle. The Stage 8 time trial had shown that Ivan Basso and Paolo Savoldelli were in good form, but Stage 11 really set them apart.

Basso repeatedly attacked on the second-to-last climb, winnowing down the group from twenty down to down to four. Savoldelli then attacked on the descent and managed to get a 20 second lead heading into the last climb. Basso hit the bottom of the final climb and quickly cut that lead to nothing, and from there on it was just him and Savoldelli, with Simoni occassionally hanging on. Savoldelli got the stage win by hanging on for dear life and attacking at the very end, but Basso looks the better rider. Last year's winner, Damiano Cunego, was left over 6'02" back.

Basso's strength in the Giro will be interesting come Tour time, as it will either reinforce or hurt conventional wisdom. With Armstrong perenially focusing on just one Grand Tour, a good showing by Basso in both might alter other rider's ambitions.

On a side note: the whole Internet broadcast subscription is rather strange. You're getting a raw feed, essentially, with no commentary. The only real sounds are a helicopter when you're in an overhead shot and motorcycles for the on-road shots. It's a bit eery, though it's nice not to have the constant commentator rambling. However, to compensate for the lack of commentary and low-quality of the stream (can't read rider numbers), I have to pull up a cyclingnews live report to supplement the video.

Stage 11 Summary (cycling news)

A lot of the folks over in the Canon DSLR forum were recommending the Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens, so I finally picked one up. It's not an amazing lens, but the important part of the lens is it's price tag: $80. For $80 you get a lens that's small, light, and with a big 1.8 aperture. The autofocus sucks and the manual focus ring is a tad hard-to-use, but it was nice to my wallet and it can take some nice photos.

I also got some close-up lenses for my 70-200mm so that I can take zoomed-up photos of bugs and flowers. I haven't taken that for a spin yet.

I'm jumping on the Ajax bandwagon and redesigning my site a touch. A couple weeks ago I pared down the right-column a bit, and now, with the assistance of Ajax, I've modified the "Old: Monthly | Category" menu into its now current incarnation. I plan to add in an option to load my Flickr photos and del.icio.us bookmarks into this page, but that is on hold until I do some server upgrades.

My overall goal is to add more content to the front page while at the same time reducing clutter.

honeyfields, ln m, and I teamed up to beat Katamari Damacy (actually, it was honeyfields who did most of the work, we just came in near the end). Unlike Grand Theft Auto, Katamari is family friendly because it makes horrific death and destruction of animals, people, and towns cute.

honeyfields got us into a screening of Madagascar, Dreamwork's latest animated film. This is the first time I've seen a feature film where there was someone involved in the making (Rex Grignon, head of the character animation department) answering questions afterwards -- it was like having your own abridged post-commentary track there in the theater, without having to wait for the DVD.

Rex talked about how they wrote some new software for this film to try and make the CG rendering more cartoony -- i.e. unlike Shrek, where the characters had skeletons that followed natural laws, animators in this film were able to stretch, bend, and distort as needed in order to get more dynamic poses and motion. For example, if a character moved quickly, they could stretch out the hands/fingers and pop-out the eyes a bit to give a sense of faster motion.

Rex also mentioned some of the footage that ended up on the cutting room floor, a lot of which probably features Ali G's/Sascha Baron Cohen's improvs. Cohen's character Julian role was rewritten after the first recording session during which Cohen would turn a single line into an extended riff. One of these riffs, in which the Julian joyfully proclaims "spanking machines for everyone!" didn't make the cut; after a test screening with mothers and children: 1. The children found spanking machines frightening 2. The mothers didn't find hundreds of lemurs dancing to spanking machines entertaining either

As much as I enjoyed having this live commentary, though, Madagascar is not a good film. It seems that someone was aware that the story wasn't very good because nearly every shot has to have a gag; they are so afraid of people paying attention to the story that some gag has to be going on in the background, or some story-stopping movie reference has to be thrown in. Granted, many of these gags made me laugh and chuckle, but a good film has to know when not to tell a joke.

E-mails in my inbox remind me that Comic-Con approaches. Flights must be booked, fat reserves must be built up, plans of attack must be formulated. To help my fellow attendees, I have put together another list of Comic-Con suggestions that incorporate my two years of experience:

• Waking up: use Caffeinated soap to get that extra necessary hit of caffeine
• Breakfast: coffee for clarity, Guinness for strength, and an Irish Breakfast for a whole heaping of calories to let you skip lunch in favor of an extra session or two.
• Dress (for the ladies): last year the women of our group had problems with otaku stranger men invading the circle of privacy and conflating their Asian heritage with anime characters. This protective garb should allow you to stay Asian and/or dress as you please, but keep your protective circle. If you don't mind the proximity but want to warn off touching, there's this shocking alternative.
• Getting that sketch: if you try to catch someone popular like Jeff Smith or Jim Lee at an official signing, chances are you'll have to wait several hours in line. Some well-deployed animal ID transponders should allow you to catch your favorite artist/author in the hallway or bathroom (WARNING: always approach a cornered artist/author with care).
• Getting that sketch (2): a good sketchbook is important. Hardcover sketchbooks will resist 4 days of handsweat, but a sketchbook that allows you to tear out the pages is also nice because it makes it easier to frame the exceptionally good sketch.
• Getting the schwag: if you're in one of the big movie-related panels and they hand you a ticket, try to leave the talk early and locate the room with the schwag. If you're trying to get schwag on the Comic-Con floor, look for the discreet employee carrying the bag o' goodies or figure out under which table/in which box the goodies are being kept. Then get your accomplice to scream, "Oh My God It's Sarah Michelle Gellar!" In the ensuing pandemonium, Dodge Dip Duck Dive and Dodge your way to victory.
• The Creator: In case you run into Stan Lee, familiarizing yourself with Spiderman's greatest bible stories should allow you to converse with the Creator (while he gives you that "where did my security guard go?" look)
• Communication: SMS works really well. If all else fails, animal ID transponders should also work on your friends.

ASIAN POP: Superchomp / Korean-born Sonya Thomas is the No. 1 ranked female competitive eater in the USA.

There is an century-old prophecy within the competitive-eating community, dismissed by most, that foretells the rise of the One Eater, a woman who will electrify America's gurgitators and lead them to international victory once again. Like Joan of Arc before her, this eater will be slender of stature but mighty in strength. In recent months, the prophecy has been mentioned more and more frequently as the eaters have watched Sonya Thomas excel in nearly every contest she enters.

Just got my copy of the Google Earth Beta. I can't test it just yet because I purchased the cheaper NVIDIA-only license for Keyhole that will only run on Chunk (my home laptop) (update: added my own screenshots below).

Looking at the feature list, it looks like this will be a big upgrade: * GPS support * new primary database with imagery for Australia, South/Central America, Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, as well as hi-res support for all of Indiana, Missouri, New Jersey, and, Massachusetts. * 3D buildings in select cities (update: added a screenshot of an awfully pencil-like TransAmerica building in the extended entry) * integrated driving directions (don't care about this per se, but this is integrated with the flyover feature, which hopefully will be more useful than it's previous "flying morass of pixels" incarnation) * extension to their previous markup language, KML, which is now KMZ (KML zipped). From reading the descriptions, it looks like it will be easier to create photomaps (both in UI as well as with scripting tools). It's rather hard-to-tell, though, because Keyhole never released a public specification of KML, and I don't see any released for KMZ yet, either. In the past people have reversed-engineered the XML spec, but hopefully they will be nicer this time around. update: Google has posted the KML documentation and tutorial. (thanks Mickey)

The UI looks a lot cheesier, like some misguided homage to OS X (screenshot), but if the features live up the hype, this should be a nice upgrade from Keyhole NV.

Update: woohoo! There's a lot more imagery for Japan now, and they've unfogged my birthplace (military base). Here's a shot of Mt. Fuji close-up (checkout the extended entry if you want to see a screenshot of Fuji looming over Tokyo Bay):

The flyover driving directions are also sweet -- the map even spins as you go through a cloverleaf. It's mostly an eyecandy feature, though, as it takes about as long for it to fly between San Francisco and San Diego as it does to do the actual driving (even on the fastest flyover setting). Also, they went a little too crazy with the driving directions (in the spirit of Google Maps), which means that you'll find amusing popups like:

The is one of the best grand tour races I've seen in recent memory, up there with Roberto Heras winning the 2003 Vuelta on the penultimate mountain time trail stage and Armstrong surviving against Ullrich to win his fifth Tour. Unlike those other two US Postal/Discovery Channel team victories, Savoldelli won this one without the team's big guns. Either not believing that Savoldelli would have a shot at the overall win, or wanting to save their riders for the Tour de France tune up, Discovery didn't send any climbers other than Tom Danielson (who dropped out early with knee problems) to help out. This meant that on climb after climb Savoldelli was isolated, while Basso and Simoni were well-supported. Eventually Basso would crack, but the one-two punch of Cunego and Simoni and Lampre repeatedly damaged Savoldelli's lead on the final mountain stages.

This year's Giro was about flipped expectations: * The strongest rider, Ivan Basso, cracked with a stomach ailment, after putting in an impressive performance to get the leader's jersey. * Savoldelli, who didn't come into the Giro at the top of his form, got to up his expectations on a daily basis. * A great rider that no one expected to contend for the overall, Danilo Di Luca, continued to surprise by putting in a fight for a podium finish, winning multiple stages, and otherwise carrying his Pro Tour leader's jersey well. * Reversing their roles yet again, last year's Giro winner, Damian Cunego, was once again in the role of lieutenant to two-time Giro winner Simoni.

'twas a beautiful wedding and great time to celebrate your future together

There's something about a mystery, or any type of story perhaps, that I find gets heightened the more that you can become familiar with its elements. Recognizing the buildings and institutions; knowing the characters involved. New Zealand is experiencing this in the form of Lord of the Rings pilgrammages.

The 'Deep Throat'/Watergate mystery always had this extra bit of familiar cool. We studied it in high school in Northern Virginia, so the Washington Post was my 'local' newspaper, the buildings involved were ones I often saw or visited on my own or on field trips, and Nixon was certainly no stranger even if he was never my president.

The mystery nearly had another twist today, with Bernstein, Woodward, and Bradlee refusing to confirm or deny -- would we have to wait several more years to officially know? -- but by the end of today confirmation from all sides came. I'm sure Bernstein and Woodward are dusting off their revelation article that's been sitting under lock and key and adding an intro paragraph or two; I for one have a hankering for watching All the President's Men one more time.

• Vanity Fair article
• washingtonpost.com coverage

I love the look on this seal's face. The sleepy, annoyed look approximates many of my photos with human subjects.

Monterey/Asilomar was full of wildlife: seals, sea anenomes, hermit crabs, sea gulls, and gophers all within a small radius of each other. The shot of the gopher below surprised me when I finally saw it full-size; we had no idea when we saw it just how scary it's mouth was. The shot of the sea anenome below is obviously fake, though it took only a tiny bit of photomanipulation -- the color was all there, it just needed a bit of 'heightening' to achieve its trippy state.

More photos to bombard you with later, but that's all the photoshopping for today.