01 Jul 2005
High definition? Huge disaster? Horrible disappointment? Heinously difficult?
I went to buy a three-pack of 24 exposure 35mm film for my SP 500 today, and, because it was on special (probably because the film expires next month), treated myself to Kodak’s over-marketed offering that I’ve always been a little dubious about. Disclaimer at this point – I don’t think there’s anything technically wrong with the film by any stretch of the imagination. I’m sure it’ll produce great shots. But the branding and marketing of this doesn’t exactly assist the photographer (I so nearly wrote “end user” there – must get out more.) in capturing great shots, at least not in terms of exposure.
To explain: this film is billed as being multi-purpose. It does everything. Apparently. It also does it well. Apparently.
Okay, nothing wrong with that. You could use good quality ISO100 stock to do “everything”, albeit with a little bit of pain. By the same token, this film stock does “everything”. It’d just help if I’d known what I was using before I got home and had time to look up the specs online.
The bottom line is this: on the exterior packaging there is absolutely no mention of the speed of the film enclosed, aside from fleeting comparisons to other Kodak products, saying “look, this is better, it does more stuff” – never mind that if you inspect closely it’s actually slightly different stuff. Deceptive marketing certainly plays a part in the problem.
So, I couldn’t find information about that anywhere on the packaging. I loaded it into my camera and ran off a roll of it, with the ISO speed set to 400 (that’s something I’d personally consider fairly useful, if not overly versatile – certainly something I’d consider probable if they’re marketing a consumer brand high-quality stock), trying not to worry too much about it.
Yeah, a recipe for disaster.
I got home, checked Kodak’s specs, and it turns out the film was ISO/ASA/DIN/whatever you want to call it 200 speed film. Nothing I can do about it now, of course, apart from hope that post-processing will be able to clean up the underexposed mess. I went and had a closer look at the cartridge after I’d thought about it for a bit, and it does say the speed on the side of it – but of course, I didn’t think to check this until I’d already wound the film on, so even had I thought of it at the time it wasn’t the best option.
Why can’t film manufacturers label their products more thoroughly and cut down on overhyped marketing that fails to actually inform the consumer of what their product is?
01 Jul 2005
The map data is still incomplete, but it’s doing better than it used to be – and my house is showing up at maximum zoom! Yay for globalisation and stuff… it means we don’t have to wait for companies over here to copy ideas from overseas innovate!
Technology is yum.
30 Jun 2005
Last night for about two hours, with under twenty minutes notice, four people communicated aurally and simultaneously(ish) watched and could interact with the same screen.
VoIP (using Skype on Linux) wasn’t playing nice, so we wound up using a PSTN, with the phone at the remote end (remote to me, anyway) hooked into a sound console with three microphones patched in (as well as computer audio, but that doesn’t bear mentioning!) for each participant. Using VNC (I’d have preferred to use MS RDC, but that doesn’t allow multiple simultaneous users on one session), we collaboratively worked on a website design in Photoshop simultaneously from opposite ends of Sydney.
Sure, it helps that one end was a sound studio, and that both ends were using real — as opposed to 256 or 512k “broadband” — broadband… but that just goes to prove even more firmly how much technology rocks!
30 Jun 2005
A few things to post about that I haven’t, or that I’ve started typing and had a system crash halfway through.
I saw (most of) War of the Worlds with Tori yesterday at Chatswood Hoyts. I got annoyed with the “You wouldn’t steal a car […] Piracy is theft.” promotion at the beginning more out of habit than anything specific to the occasion (more on that some other time), but later there was a bit more of a reason to be agitated. Aliens walk around, zap people, act like mosquitos, cover earth in blood as fertiliser–and then the sound cuts out. There was probably about 15 minutes of the film to go, and I’m sure it wasn’t really that great, and they did give full refunds: but that wouldn’t have happened if we’d downloaded the film and watched it at home! Yeah, okay, things go wrong – but the system clearly had been showing some signs of problems for a while — even the ads before the feature had sound cutting in and out. Cinema advertisers take note: Cinema may be “Australia’s Fastest Growing National Advertising Medium” (with too many capitalised words), but it’s growing, ahem, rather silently. Anti-anti-piracy rant here.- WordPress 1.5.1.3 has been released, and mere mortals should not try to upgrade using SVN: you’ll migrate to 1.6alpha. I know this because I did it yesterday, then, thanks to a recentish backup, successfully rolled back without any client-side downtime to speak of.
I could put in a massive anti-anti-piracy rant here (notably not a pro-piracy rant – and yes, there is a distinction) but I don’t think anyone ever actually reads those!
27 Jun 2005
I’m just posting so that the RSS mob realises something has indeed changed. ;) Yeah, that was a joke. Kind of. Not a discussion for now, anyway. The theme is built around my film SLR camera, a Pentax Asahi SP 500. Vaguely inspired by Dale’s somewhat-cynical comment a few days back, although more out of a knowledge that I really should stop being lazy and build my own theme, and a general re-design itch, I whipped this up over the course of today.
I shot a range of photos of the SLR camera to use as a design base, and eventually wound up chosing one as the main design element, cropping off part of another to integrate within that after some editing (that’s the “SC 500″ and serial number you see burnt onto the front of the lens bevel), and scaling one down to use as a background for the search area.
The search area, incidentally, is inspired by a post of Matthom’s a few months back entitled “Attractive, accessible web forms.” The image I’ve used is one of the length of the lense – the theory behind this being that the purpose of a search function, as with the lense on a camera, is to focus and zoom – one being images, and the other, information.
I’m thinking the typography doesn’t feel terribly inspired, but I can deal with that given its clarity. The colours of the post header type, by the way, have nothing to do with Flickr – the link and link hover colours used to be more pink and more light blue before I noticed how similar it looked to Flickr’s branding! I’ve shifted it down a bit, but I thought I’d clarify now that any resemblence is purely incidental, before someone else said anything.
I haven’t decided if the header is cool or annoying yet. I wanted it to be apparently complex, ideally without needing to use images, but I don’t know if this is taking things a little too far – hover back and forwards too quickly and it is a confusing experience. The interface can be simplified easily, but I thought I’d ask for feedback on the weird/trippy version first.
Changes in summary
- IMO cleaner markup than Placid (the previously used theme by Chris Lin)
- Also lighter (bandwidth wise). This theme is a 58KB template, Placid was 130KB. Partially code/markup, but largely images. Reduced use of images in this template will also reduce hits and thus improve loading times.
- Optimised for wider screens: fluid layout, works best from 1024 upwards. Motivated at least in part by my own acquisition of more screen real estate recently
- Built for WordPress 1.5 from the ground up – the first theme I’ve developed myself for this website that’s had that advantage
- Inclusion of a “Recent Comments” section
- 3 column layout using absolute positioning
- “Bright” design, because I’ve been accused of always coming up with darker colour schemes, etc.