Rob Galbraith Saves Me $4500
Apparently the Canon EOS-1D Mark III’s got some autofocus trouble. Crap.
Fast forward three weeks and we’ve now shot multiple games of soccer and rugby plus track, indoor volleyball, moving cars, grip and grins, an executive portrait and personal stuff. It’s added up to over 15,000 frames across two production EOS-1D Mark IIIs, and the most obvious autofocus theme to emerge after poring over all these pictures is that when the lighting is full sunlight and it’s a nice day outside, the autofocus is unusably poor. The camera will still produce in-focus pictures (several are included in this article in fact), but the ratio of crisp to blurry frames is well below an acceptable level. Generally speaking, the camera tends to backfocus when it’s focusing incorrectly.
I really want to get my grubby mitts on this DSLR, and I know Canon reads this blog constantly (ahem), so please Canon, fix it! Quickly! Pretty please?
Technorati Tags: canon, eos-1d mark iii, photography
You Wishing You Were Me
…at Boston’s Logan, 6am, sitting next to this guy snoring on volume 11 and periodically couch humping. Sexy time.
Glacier
Finally home from Glacier-Waterton, was a blast despite Going-to-the-Sun only being open about 13 miles on each side. There were deer, elk, moose, grouse, ground squirrels, more deer, more ground squirrels, and bears, oh my! One day it snows, the next I’m in shorts. I learned US Customs closes at 6pm within the park, causing me to divert and see all those beautiful Canadian cattle in Alberta. And I learned that climbing 1000 feet per mile is a serious ass-kicker.
Pictures coming up…
Technorati Tags: glacier, glacier-waterton, glacier national park
Kenneth Eng Arrested
Kenneth Eng, the author of a controversial AsianWeek column that described reasons to “hate” black people, is being held in a New York jail without bail on assault and harassment charges.
[…]
Eng allegedly approached the mother and daughter as they stood in their driveway with their pet and said, “If your dog bites me, I will kill you and your family.” He then called the mother fat and lazy and swung a hammer at her and the dog, according to the Queens district attorney’s office.
Eng’s certifiably nuts. Check it out: 1, 2, 3, 4.
Here’s to hoping the arresting officer was as chocolate as they come.
Technorati Tags: kenneth eng, why I hate blacks
She does not dream at all about such…
Penis enlargement. I get a few hundred a day. Yawn. But this girl — check out the cheap Photoshop job on this girl’s eyes. Classic. I also enjoyed the pork loin trussed weenie diagram. Quality spam.
Team Geo X-Treme
If your ride is as embarrassing as a decade old 3-cylinder Geo Metro, it’s always good to have a sense of humor about it:
Remembering Falwell
I don’t take any particular joy in his death, but I do know if I’d met him yesterday, he’d of deemed me immoral and doomed me to hell. So, well, fuck him.
You can Google around as well as I can to find out what an awful human being he was, but here’s a few in memorandum.
“I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!” (you didn’t!)
“AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.”
“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians … the A.C.L.U., People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.'”
(in reference to 9-11) “God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.”
“Textbooks are Soviet propaganda.”
“The whole global warming thing is created to destroy America’s free enterprise system and our economic stability.”
“Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions.”
Oh, and let’s not forget his crusade against Tinky-Winky, the purple Teletubby turning your children teh gay.
[ UPDATE: Heh. There’s a postmortem protest at 18th & Castro tonight. Hey, boys — shouldn’t you be saving this for Phelps? ]
Technorati Tags: jerry falwell
Comcast Availability
I declared jihad on Comcast a few weeks ago, and decided that I should monitor (TOTDT has this idea too, thanks!)
I had full monitoring on by April 19th. So far:
- Monitor: 50 pings
- Monitoring interval: 10 minutes
- Total packets sent: 178,800
- Total packets lost: 1,965
- Total loss: 1.1%
That seems, well, okay. (Although as a software architect for web sites, I’d not accept anything less than 99.7%) They’re a large company, which in the US comes along with all the caveats: years of monopoly like buy-outs and crushing behavior to kill competition, low-paid employees, and an utter lack of customer attention until complaints get attention on national news. (Let’s not forget the Comcast employee who fell asleep on some dude’s couch waiting for his own company to answer the phone.) But it’s been an unusually good few weeks. I’ve not stopped the monitor, and it’s getting loaded into a database. It will get worse, unless the past does not repeat itself — and we know how that goes.
And if I start pairing down the stats to ‘prime-time’ hours, things get worse. I’m considering setting up some speed tests as well. I do get some amazing blasts of speed out of my cable modem, but I would really rather have 100% (or as close as you can get) reliable service. I also pay for their higher speed service, which promises 8Mbps downspeed. Of course, that rarely happens, a complaint hard to make given that you’re at the mercy of general internet traffic and the server from which you’re sucking down a file. Comcast’s “Power Boost” is an attempt to quell the masses, and it does an amazing job of seeding sites like DSLReports.com with bullshit stats. Fact is, the very nature of the technology yields less availability the more that utilize the service at a given time. And there’s the rub. I’ll try to develop some “real” availability tests over the next few weeks — speeds in addition to basic availability.
I’m expecting Comcast, at some point, to declare my various tests against my connection some sort of violation of their TOS. That’s great. Too bad I’m working on a package which every Comcast subscriber (or any other) can install to judge the true availability of their ISPs connection.
Power to the people. Or some such shit.
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