Broken camera

 technology  No Responses »
Dec 022007
 

In the past week, I noticed that the auto-focus on the camera was acting a bit chunkier and some of the images were a little soft. Sunday morning, I was out with Sharon taking photos of hairy crab before I left. I took my photos and then put the camera in my pocket. A few minutes later, I saw folks practicing tai chi. I grabbed my camera from my pocket, and the lens started to come out of the camera and then stopped. It now makes an interesting grinding noise whenever I try to use the camera. And the lens is stuck out.

The camera cost over $300 or $400 when I purchased it. Now, just a little over two years later, it’s no longer available. A much better camera is $260. It would cost around $120 to repair my camera and I wouldn’t have it for three weeks. I’m thinking of trying to repair it myself.

Anyone have any recommendations on a new camera? The Canon SD850 IS is $260 at Circuit City.

(In other news, I seem to be having a bad technology day. My receiver is now producing an odd hum on my speakers, even if all of the sound sources are unplugged. I may need to buy a new receiver. And my desktop machine had a failed hard drive–I think the power supply may be underpowered.)

 Posted by at 11:53 pm

Silicon Valley Start-Ups Awash in Dollars, Again – New York Times

 technology  No Responses »
Oct 172007
 

From the New York Times, Silicon Valley Start-Ups Awash in Dollars, Again:

Twitter, a company in San Francisco that lets users alert friends to what they are doing at any given moment over their mobile phones, recently raised an undisclosed amount of financing. Its co-founder and creative director, Biz Stone, says that the company was not currently focused on making money and that no one in the company was even working on how to do so.

“At the moment, we’re focused on growing our network and our user experience,” he said. “When you have a lot of traffic, there’s always a clear business model.”

Translation: we lose money on each customer, but we make it up on the volume.

 Posted by at 9:39 am

How I tie my shoes

 technology  No Responses »
May 092007
 

I switched how I tied my shoes last weekend. I got tired of having the laces slip apart, so I visited Ian’s Shoelace Site. It’s a very nice site, except for his habit of naming everything on his site after him. I am now using Ian’s Secure Shoelace knot to tie my shoes, and it seems to work much better than the old way I tied my shoes.

That being said, half of the reason why I am writing this post is that Clinky has a reason to mock me. I would feel bad if he had nothing to do.

 Posted by at 7:28 pm

Drives me crazy…

 technology  No Responses »
Apr 252007
 

I hate it when a columnist or talking head for a major news outlet complains how “big media” or “mainstream media” is ignoring an issue. For example, Lou Dobbs wrote a column for CNN, Dobbs: Big media hide truth about immigration, stating:

And the mainstream media are complicit in advancing this thinly veiled blanket amnesty.

Let’s take a quick look at some facts from Lou Dobbs’s entry on Wikipedia:

  • Has worked for CNN since its inception
  • Served on the board of the Society for Professional Journalists
  • Member of the Overseas Press Club and the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences

Let’s also consider CNN:

  • News website and 24-hour news network
  • Part of Time Warner, one of the largest media companies in the world

What drives me nuts is that Lou Dobbs is a representative of the mainstream media. By writing about a topic, he cannot in good faith say that mainstream media is ignoring a topic–he is mainstream media.

 Posted by at 5:16 pm

Fun with mail

 technology  1 Response »
Apr 062007
 

In March, I received 56,751 pieces of mail. This includes mail to me at samgreenfield.com and mail to the unhinged.org domain that I do not forward off. unhinged.org contains a catch-all. Of the 56,751 pieces of mail, I immediately discarded 25,808. These messages were obviously bogus for one reason or another and also include bounced messages that were forged from my domains.

27,058 pieces of mail were classified as spam by Spam Assasin and were filed into a Junk folder that I never check. I read most of the remaining 3,885 messages on gmail. Gmail does a pretty great job of filtering out spam, so I only skim through the messages in the Junk folder there. However, I do save a record of the messages, and in the end assesment I was left with around 531 messages that I would consider “legitimate.”

But it gets even better. Of the 531 messages that I consider real, 430 of them are what we would traditionally considered on the verge of junk mail. For example, I received 11 messages from Sears in the month of March. I’m not counting “real” email such as billing notifications in the 430 messages.

At the very end of the day, I’m left with 101 email messages that I consider worth reading. Or 0.18% of the mail I receive through my personal accounts.

 Posted by at 9:18 pm

Cool new Google maps feature

 technology  1 Response »
Feb 142007
 

Google Maps now displays buildings and subways in the map view! This is really cool. You can actually see an outline of my building if you search for 175 Adams Street; 11201. As you can see, I am very close to the “A” train. Unfortunately, what the map doesn’t show you is that the subway extends for two blocks in either direction; an entrance to the subway is right on my street, and you don’t have to cross the street to enter.

My brother works with Google Maps, so buy him a beer next time you see him.

Thanks to the DreamHost Blog for noticing this!

 Posted by at 6:40 pm

Blog for Choice day

 technology  No Responses »
Jan 232007
 

The Blog That Ate Manhattan is written by a doctor in Manhattan. Today, she blogged about becoming pro-choice on her post, Making Choices. I also appreciated her post last year, Doing the Work that Has To Be Done.

If you support reproductive rights, I suggest volunteering at or giving money to your local Planned Parenthood affiliate. In New York City, that would be Planned Parenthood of New York City.

 Posted by at 12:31 am

Firefox extensions

 technology  No Responses »
Oct 042006
 

I use Firefox as my web browser. It’s a pretty good web browser, and it works the same on Mac OS X and Windows. It’s pretty zippy. One feature of Firefox is the ability to add additional functionality through extensions. One main feature of extensions is that they can make your browsing experience slower. I guess that’s not a good feature, but there you go. Here are the extensions I use (extensions of special interest to geeks are noted with the phrase, “geeky”):

  • Forecastfox: shows you the current and predicted weather in your toolbar.
  • Html Validator: validates the source code of a web page (geeky)
  • Google Suggest: suggests search terms as you type in the Google search bar
  • View Source Chart: renders a the source a web page in color (geeky)
  • ColorZilla: implements an eyedropper color tool for web pages (geeky)
  • Web Developer: very useful set of tools for developing web pages (geeky)
  • Greasemonkey: allows arbitrary scripts to run on web pages (geeky)
  • del.icio.us: adds a full interface to the del.icio.us web site
  • FoxyTunes: control a media player from the browser
  • Image Zoom: allows zooming in on images
  • SessionSaver: remembers your last visited web pages when you quit
  • FireFTP: better FTP client
  • Download Statusbar: a better alternative to the file download window
  • User Agent Switcher: allows you to masquerade as a different web browser (geeky)
  • IE Tab: allows the use of IE embedded into FireFox (geeky, and more useful than you might think)

You could say that this entire post is geeky. And that would be okay by me.

 Posted by at 4:08 pm
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