Category: Uncategorized

It’s 8:35pm PT as I start this post, where I will chronicle the process of buying a new digital camera via CNET.com. That’s not an uncommon task on the Internet, nor an uncommon starting location. Still, I’m going to willfully avoid other options as long as possible and see if I can come away with a new digital camera by the end of the evening.

The current (old) camera

The camera I’m replacing is a Canon PowerShot S400 Digital Elph, purchased in the summer of 2003. Why do I need a new camera? Occasionally, the images are coming out skewed in strange ways, and won’t even transfer to the computer via iPhoto. I wondered if it was the memory card, but wandering by a camera store (they still exist!) in Fanueil Hall, in Boston, I was told that the CMOS chip is probably shot. I’m willing to believe that diagnosis, in part because the slow shutter speed of this camera irks me, and has for almost as long as I’ve had the camera. The size and megapixels and controls are all pretty sharp…but taking pictures of moving children is well nigh impossible.

The requirements

My requirements are simple enough, I hope:

• small enough to fit in the pocket
• at least 4 megapixels (but I don’t need more)
• shutter speed that can catch up with the under-10 crowd.

I’m not terribly picky about zoom levels, etc., and I’ll pay a reasonable price, though I won’t pass up a deal.

The selection process, in laborious detail

Start at CNET.com.

Search for “fast shutter speed”

Looking at the tiny thumbnails in the search results, the first few cameras don’t look small enough (they have ergonomic handles, which means they won’t fit in the pocket). So, I tried the second one which looked small, the Sony Cyber Shot DSC-T9.

Note: the first camera which looked small, the Olympus Stylus 710 has a disappointing summary.

Despite the attraction of a weather-resistant body, the Olympus Stylus 710 falls short with disappointing performance and overprocessed images.

I went on to read the full review of the T9. The “nut graph” is buried a bit:

Though the Sony Cyber Shot DSC-T9 is far from perfect, it’s darn good for an ultracompact snapshot camera.

Right below that sentence is a chart, which I had to read carefully to understand, but shows that the DSC-T9 has a shutter speed of 0.3 seconds.

I noticed that the user ratings is 8.7, even higher than the CNET Editors’ rating of 7.6. Since user ratings are often lower than CNET Editors’ ratings (in my anecdotal experience, anyway), that’s a good sign.

I flipped over to the Compare tab, to see which other cameras are similar. The chart was fairly useful, although putting the weight in both lbs and oz (pounds and ounces) forced me to think a bit much. 16 ounces to a pound, right? (Google confirms yes.) Weight isn’t really my key decision point, but I am curious.

I decided to remove two cameras from the list, the Canon PowerShot S2 IS and the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT with 18mm-to-55mm lens (silver).

Clicked over to the Casio Exilim EX-Z750

The “bad” concerned me:

Sluggish burst mode; can’t charge battery or off-load photos without using the dock.

but I still clicked to the full review. There was only a paragraph or so on this page, so I went to the printer-friendly version, hoping to get it all on one page. I did. The dock requirement for charging or transferring photos does stick in my mind, so I’m not done yet.

I went back three pages, and went over to the Canon PowerShot SD600.

Almost immediately, went to full review. The initial page really doesn’t have enough information to make a decision. The full review showed me that time to first picture is 0.7 seconds, much slower than the Sony.

Decided to watch the in-page video review. Quite a loud Best Buy ad first, although only 10 seconds. Mildly helpful.

Went back two pages, to the comparison page once more, so I could watch the videos for the Sony and the Casio (links are five or six rows down in the grid). Watching the Casio video reinforced that I care not at all about manual features — if the camera can’t figure it out, I’m certainly not going to. (Also, the repeat of the Best Buy ad at the end was… unwelcome. Ad volume is much higher than the video volume; not a good part about TV to emulate.

Since the review date of the Casio was “Review date: 5/11/05” (should be May instead of 5, but oh well), I decided to click on the link for “See all products in the Casio Exilim Z series” in the hope that maybe there was a new model which didn’t require the dock. Nope… the 750 is the newest.

At this point, I’m uncertain, so since I know there are editorial features which try and group like cameras available, I click on the Camera link in the header.

Scrolled down the page, and noticed a review for the Casio Exilim EX Z1000.

Once again, had to click through to the full review, where I saw that the camera has 10 (!) megapixels, but seems to come up a bit short in some other areas. Mostly, I wasn’t sure it was fast enough, although the shutter lag is cited at 0.3 seconds. From the review:

Despite a very responsive shutter, the Casio Exilim EX-Z1000 takes just a bit too long between shots. After a quick 1.8 seconds from power-on to first shot, the camera took 3.5 seconds between every additional shot–even though shutter lag in bright light was a minimal 0.3 second and only 0.5 second in dim light. With the onboard flash enabled, that sluggish rate ballooned to 5.1 seconds between shots.

Early in the review, there was a link to the Casio Exilim EX-Z850 — I guess that Z series page I looked at was historical in nature, which is frustrating. I wanted to know about these newer models in the same line. Glad I found them via another route!

Watched the video on that page, which shows a dock (ugh) in the screengrab, and that’s the one negative mentioned in the video, although not in the “bad” — wonder why?

I did continue on to the full review, and was annoyed once again by the limited info on the page, so I went to the printer-friendly version almost immediately. I think the dock is a deal-breaker, although I didn’t know it when I started this process.

Back to the Camera index page. Two of the three cameras I was looking at initially are in the Most Popular section (which is driven, I believe, by how many people clicked to buy the camera), and the third (the Sony) is in the Editors’ Top Products section. Scanning those two groups of five. The Z850 was in the latter group (Top Products), too. So, I’m probably in the right ballpark. How to decide?

I decided to look at the Canon PowerShot S80 from the Top Products list, since it also looked to be a pocket camera. It is. It’s an Editors’ Choice, which is good. A bit pricier than the other ones I was looking at, and only available from three stores. I watched the video…made me think it was slightly bigger than I want. But I went to the full review anyway, and quickly (the norm, now) over to the printer-friendly version. Yup… it’s not small enough:

The S80 isn’t as small as the ultrathin models out there, but it will easily fit in a jacket or a loose pants pocket.

Back to the full review, where I click in the left-hand navigation menu for “Editors’ top cameras” and then on Ultracompact cameras, last updated June 2, about six weeks ago. Four of the first five cameras on the page are ones I’ve looked at already. That’s good. I feel like I’m in the right place to make my final decision, especially since I can now compare price ranges on all of these, too. I don’t have to pick the cheapest one, but I want to know how much more I’m going to pay for each model.

I have to check out the Sony Cyber Shot DSC-T30, since it’s the only one I haven’t looked at in the top five. Over to the full review, one one page (yes!). I watched the video, longing for a different advertisement. (They are short.)

The T-30 is the first one where I went to check prices. Seeing the tax-adjusted price (with my zip code entered) was very welcome… adds $40 to the price of this camera, sending it over $500 at some of the merchants.

Hmmm… I did sort by price, and saw that the T-30 is available from J&R Music and Computer World for ~$440. I’ll admit that my reaction to this merchant is colored by the Science Tuesday section of the print New York Times, where J&R was always (still is, probably) one of the prominent advertisers. I don’t look forward to spending money with the NY camera merchants. So, I have two options for $10 more, and I’m going to go with PC Connection over Crutchfield, probably because it’s higher in the list (not very scientific). I may have ordered from them before.

The purchase

I clicked over from CNET to PC Connection at 10:10pm (damn, writing this up simultaneously has stretched the process out). (Here’s the page I arrived at, with the CNET attribution in the URL.) When I arrive, I realize that this is a Sony (duh), which means their damn memory sticks. Oof. Trying to decide whether I should bail, going back to the Canon PowerShot SD600, since I don’t want to deal with the Casio’s dock (too bad… great cameras otherwise). My current camera has CompactFlash cards, so I guess those won’t be in use either way. Oh well. My 1GB card would be nice to keep using. I’m disappointed the CNET editors didn’t remind me about the proprietary Memory Stick format, but maybe they assume that everyone knows about that tradeoff. I knew, but didn’t remember, obviously, as I considered other factors.

(It’s late, and I want to finish this off. If I wasn’t blogging it, I might just call it a night and sleep on it.)

Opened a new browser window, and went over to check prices for the Canon SD600. Much cheaper camera. Sorting by price shows me a few merchants I’ve never heard of pricing the camera just under $200! I’ve ordered from BuyDig before, though, so I think I’ll go with them instead, even at $80 more.

Except, before I click, I scroll up and read what I’ve noted here about each of the cameras, and I see that the Canon is about the slowest of all the ones I’ve been looking at. So, cheaper and slower and more common memory card (the Canon) or more expensive and faster and proprietary memory card (the Sony)? Since I have to buy new memory cards either way, and I’ve been griping about the slow shutter speed for years, I’m going to go with my initial instinct on the purchase, gritting my teeth about the Memory Stick all the way.

Before I checkout, though, I have to figure out which Memory Stick (a) comes with the camera and (b) is compatible, as there are now a Duo and Pro and a Pro Duo (huh?). So I go look at the specs again, and see that the Duo or Pro Duo are compatible… but I don’t know the difference, beyond expecting that the PRO option is more expensive. I scroll up to the Digital camera memory card selector in the left-hand nav, and on to the Memory Stick page.

Armed with the knowledge that I want a 1GB Memory Stick Pro Duo, I go back to PCConnection and decide on the cheapest one I can find ($47.95, a SanDisk).

The actual checkout process is speedy, and I have my confirmation email at 10:42pm.

Two hours of my life… gone. I hope (a) the camera is great and (b) my former colleagues at CNET find this blow-by-blow useful.

Many thanks to Phil, Mark, and the team at Creative Good for an outstanding weekend in San Diego. Great mix of people, mostly new to me, and the Team Wahine surfing clinic was a great way to start a very hot Sunday.

Although our red envelopes do tend to gather a bit of dust, we watched The Royal Tenenbaums on Friday. Ummm… funny and strange. Lots of talent, in a skewed comedy. But easier to watch than Mystic River, which is “dusty” right now — doesn’t look like an “escape” movie, so it waits.

I left CNET Networks on May 10th, about nine weeks ago. I’ve hinted at my departure a few times here, but I haven’t said much. When I noted the launch of OpenDNS, it reminded me of my silence on the topic of CNET.

I am proud of my five and a half years at CNET. I worked with smart people and contributed to two redesigns of CNET News.com, and helped start the reshaping of CNET. Working with Jai Singh is a highlight of the time, and there are many, many others whom I look forward to crossing paths with over the years. And I cheer for their continued growth, across all brands and sites, with a special nod for the “Red Ball.” (I’m startled and surprised by the stock option issues. CNET Networks always felt like a company that was painfully correct about HR issues.)

Why did I leave?

First, I feared not recognizing when I needed to try something new. Read Seth Godin from a month ago: “Time to quit?” I was promoted in January (up, not sideways), and I was still growing, but I was also somewhat comfortable. I’m usually a fan of that word, but I started to believe that I needed to change to stretch myself.

Second, David got me energized about the opportunity in DNS, and the chance to be a big part of making something small into something very big. It’s a chance, not a right or a guarantee. It was time for me to put my shoulder into something where I could feel the organization move every time. I met the team, and I liked both the people and the ratio: six engineers or web developers to one wanna-be geek (me).

For me, it’s been the right choice. But I still skim all of CNET News.com via RSS every day. I’m looking to buy a new digital camera this week, to replace my Canon PowerShot S400 with something no bigger, physically, with at least the same 4 megapixels, but with a faster shutter speed. I’ll blog the process as a focus group of one for my former colleagues.

Thanks, CNET.

State of Fear, Michael Crichton’s latest, wraps a thriller around two related themes: global warming and the use of fear to maintain power.

Crichton paints global warming as a bogeyman, throwing statistics, charts and citations in the midst of his storytelling as if he were Al Gore’s evil twin. Crichton’s most compelling point about global warming is that we still do not know about weather trends, and what they mean. Since Crichton has achieved global success with films and movies, not just books, maybe we’ll see a visual counterpoint to An Inconvenient Truth in the future.

The second theme connects some large dots. Government needs to maintain a state of fear for the status quo in power relations to continue. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, a character in the book says, the environment has become the cudgel with which politicians and policy-makers keep both the developed world and the rising development around the world under control. I think it’s a bit of a stretch to consider it so planned. Still, I do think that keeping everyone on edge all over the world, even while (by most measures) life improves for most people, becomes easier when we fear the future, and each other. If you fear the future (it’s unknown, after all), then you’ll listen willingly to efforts to “protect” what you have…even if it’s not so grand.

I haven’t focused much on the story. Neither does Crichton, really. It’s an excuse to make his points in a more palatable fashion. I suppose a spoonful of honey makes the medicine go down, after all.

The race is to stop an environmental group gone amok, preventing them from precipitating (sometimes literally) weather-related crises to coincide with media coverage. Our gun-toting, Nature-citating hero drags along the Los Angeles lawyer who has previous represented a large donor to environmental causes. They jet about from Antarctica to New Mexico to the Solomon Islands, and several other distributed points.

Oh, never mind. If you can get past the preaching, it’s an airplane book. I whipped through it this weekend and left it sitting in Logan Airport to save someone the expense of picking it up themselves. Not going on our overflowing shelves.

Travelling cross-country and back without children for a three-day weekend gave me more than a chance to catch up on my reading. I also brought along my current Netflix choice, Ghost in the Shell , or, in the original Japanese, “Kôkaku kidôtai.” This anime version (apparently there is a live-action one) was entirely dubbed in English, fortunately, and quite short (maybe 80 minutes). I suppose I can understand this purist’s quote, from the first review at the IMDB link above:

I find it terribly unfortunate that the only American viewers familiar with Ghost in the Shell are anime fans, many of whom overlook the film’s complexity and see only its nudity and violence.

It was violent, and the movie’s cyborgs do spend a lot of time naked. This feels like entertaining pulp sci-fi, despite the grander claims made for the film. Maybe, as the same individual says, it’s better in the original Japanese…I’ll never know. A small airport diversion, but I won’t rush to see the sequel.

Andy Kessler has a blog, fortunately. I haven’t read it before, but I’ll take a peek now, after reading Wall Street Meat: My Narrow Escape from the Stock Market Grinder, courtesy of David.

As promised, the paperback was a gulp on the airplane this weekend. Juicy, breezy, broken up even across a two-page spread into digestible moments… this tell-all of stock analysts in the late 1980s and into the Internet-fueled 1990s is irresistible. Despite some wrap-up comments at the end attempting to bring his gossip up to a higher level, Meat really amuses because (a) Kessler doesn’t hold much back, even burning some bridges (surely) and (b) this 2003 book seems so obvious in hindsight. But few were talking while the bubble was burning (to mix at least two metaphors). Must have helped book sales to be able to namedrop about Grubman, Meeker, Blodget and Quattrone. As a current hedge-fund manager and investor, Kessler probably doesn’t need the money from book sales, but he’s clearly still having fun. I wonder if those who work with him currently are more or less cautious now? In an age of blogs like ValleyWag, I suppose fearing a book author’s influence is hardly top of mind anymore.

Only bad news about Kessler’s blog? Doesn’t seem to be updated very often.

Oscar Lewis’s popular history of the Comstock Lode foursome, Silver Kings: The Lives and Times of Mackay, Fair, Flood and O’Brien, Lords of the Nevada Comstock Lode was published in 1947, and then republished in 1986 by the University of Nevada Press. All of which is to say… I couldn’t find a great place to link to.

Living in San Francisco, where much of the money plucked from the east side of the Sierra Nevada mountains was spent, you can still see the legacy of this foursome. Silver Kings points out some of the obvious landmarks (Pacific Union Club, Fairmont Hotel), but it’s not an urban history of San Francisco. Rather, this book dwells on Mackay and Fair, breezes through O’Brien, and doesn’t show much love for Flood. The telling part is how little was known about the early lives of these men, and how much yellow journalism colored the tales of even their very public lives during the late 1860s and onwards, as their wealth influenced most of the West Coast. This was mostly an enjoyable read… by popular history, I meant that Lewis never misses a chance for an anecdote, even when he admits it’s probably mythical. There is a short bibliography, but I’ll look elsewhere for a more complete tale of the history of San Francisco between Gold Rush and 1906 quake. That’s an era which I’d like to know more about, so suggestions welcome.

(I’m making the connection in the headline, even if no one else would.)

The blog measurement service Measure Map craaawwwwllllssss. I know… I’ve been using it for months, even before Google acquired the project from Adaptive Path.

Today, I read that FeedBurner bought BlogBeat, expressly to beef up their analytics. And I say to myself… Measure Map is going to have to change radically to pull a rabbit out of this hat.

Jeff Veen is one savvy guy, but he and any other folks working at Google on Measure Map have been well-nigh invisible for a long time. The acquisition was in mid-February, 2006, five months ago. Since then… zip.

I’ve been pondering a blog post about Measure Map’s performance issues for weeks, and on June 22, I decided to complain in the forums, first, before I blogged about how disappointed I’ve been. Veen replied five days later with

Yeah, we’ve certainly been experiencing some performance issues lately as part of some migration work we’re doing. There are fixes coming relatively soon, and we’ll post updates when they happen.

I’d hope for more from someone who gets it like Veen. (He helped build the original Hotwired, for crying out loud.) But Veen’s “lately” translates to “forever” for me. Truly, since the first day I started using Measure Map, it’s been slow, and it’s gotten worse. Also, Veen promised “relatively soon” for fixes and updates, but we’re coming up on one month from my original post. Look at the ghost-town that is the only public feedback forum those of us currently using the service are encouraged to use, a Google Group. And, as others have pointed, where’s the blog?

Why have I put up with this pokiness for so long?

First, the visual architecture engaged me. Measure Map was developed with blogs in mind. Over time, I’ve come to miss some of the more traditional ideas, like pageviews, but from first glimpse (at a TechCrunch party last year, when I asked nicely for an invite), I’ve appreciated the simplicity and focus brought to the task.

Second, my blog is not my job. It’s a hobby, which alternately consumes and frustrates me. I know quite a bit about how to make websites better, and my blog feels to me like the shoemaker’s children: painfully un-shod. So, I care about the numbers and the audience, but not enough to spend time trying every service out there (yes, Scott, my to-do list include MyBlogLog as an alternative).

I’ve mused at length before into web sites already, so why not merge analytics across the platforms?

Note: in writing this blog post, I tried to load my Measure Map statistics, but got the all-too-familiar warning

Sorry, I’m having issues. Please try again later or contact [email protected].

That’s… (deep breath) …unfortunate.

I’m not going to pull Measure Map from clock yet, but I am going to add another service in the near future. BlogBeat doesn’t appear to be an option at this time, during assimilation, so we’ll see what’s available when I get around to it.

Saw this last week, but still worth sharing, especially since the Wall Street Journal print edition even felt it amusing to tell its audience about the plethora of Zidane animations. Here’s Anil Dash’s Zidane World Cup Headbutt Animation Festival, a best (?) of compilation. Never let it be said that editors are dead.