Heater went kaput

It's cold in the house, and now we're receiving lots of bids for a new heater. Visions of heating efficiency, tax credit, Puget Sound Energy credit dance in my head.

We're not going to install air conditioning. We will have to rough it 5 days out of the year. Maybe sleep in our porch or downstairs with all of the windows open in late August or September when it actually gets that hot.

Taxes all done

I finished our taxes, using TaxACT Online. Cheap price, similar interface to TurboTax and H&R Block at Home. Now I just have to fill all of the paper work and drop it into the mail.

For those of you claiming the $8000 tax credit, you can't do e-filing. They want to see proof of home purchase.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad... a Fraud

Although I was one of the people initially caught up in the excitement that Robert Kiyosaki created in this book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad", over the years I have been extremely disappointed in Kiyosaki's subsequent books and terrible investment advice.

He took one good idea, one good story about contrasting investment philosophy, and is trying to turn it into a billion dollar business. He is making money, but is essentially a fraud and a late night television salesman now.

This is a link to story written in Wallet Pop, that tells us about an undercover investigative reporting by CBC's Marketwatch. The initial workshops (costing $500) are nothing than high pressure tactics to buy advanced workshops ($12,000 to $45,000).

Keep your money at home, folks. Investing that $12,000 to $45,000 in a slow, steady, unexciting blend of index funds will get you so much better returns for your money.

I am sorry that I have ever endorsed Robert Kiyosaki.

The return of the (sullen) suicidal medic

I really liked Battlefield 2142, in which you are a futuristic soldier fighting control of missile stations that can shoot down a hovering battle ship. You can drive tanks, helicopters, or troop transports. Since I am a terrible assault soldier (I keep on dying) I specialized in being a medic. I got quite good at it too. I was able to secure a location, revive my team mates, and generally plan an effective attack plan against the enemy.

The beta of next installment of the franchise is Battlefield: Bad Company 2. My Friday night gaming team has been playing it for several weeks now. Sadly, I'm going to have to give this game a thumbs down from what I have seen. The framerate is simple too jagged to make this a pleasant experience.

Many of the good things are still there. I can be that suicidal medic again, running into a hail of bullets to revive my teammate who lies critically wounded on the open road. You can pilot helicopters again, drive heavy tanks, or take up position on the heavy machine gun. Trees can get blown up, the buildings can get destroyed.

However, the game is simply not smooth. The slight delay between the command of my fingers to what I see on screen is disorienting. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 doesn't have the same problem.

I feel that DICE took on too much, and was too ambitious with this game. Even my powerful quad core computer with Comcast cable internet is having a hard time digesting so much information that this multiplayer demo is spewing out. There are also lots of little annoying things, like selecting a server to play games in the first place.

So I give it a thumbs down for the multiplayer experience. It remains to be seen if the single player mode is any good.

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Some of the feedback I regarding my post about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 said that you felt the second game wasn't as good as the first one. The storyline this time is completely over the top, and unbelievable. I still like the single player game though. How often will a game feature Washington D.C. being taken over, or house-by-house street fight in Virginia?

That said, I started playing special ops in cooperative mode. Wow! If you have not played that mode of the game with another good friend, try it. The special operations game play mode is thoroughly enjoyable and worth the money.

Local, Sustainable... Roses?

This weekend, virtually all roses given (and received) in the United States will have been grown in South America. The weather here is simply not conducive to roses in the middle of winter.

That led me to think some more about the local and sustainable movement. Stretched to the limit, no one on continental US will have access to guava, pineapples, papaya, or coffee (gasp!). (However, people in Hawaii and Guam will readily have a platter of their local fruits.) People in the California will not have blueberries (Northwest) and salmon (mostly Northwest). As for the people in Boston and New York, they will have puny choices when it comes to having anything of the green color.

As for Alaskans in February... I shudder to think.

If a neutron bomb detonated, and you were able to survive with the technology intact, California with its Mediterranean weather is probably the best place to be. Just saying.

Cherries are blooming!

The cherries trees around Seattle are blooming, signaling a very early arrival of spring this year. Photographers: come take some pictures!

In 2009, cherry blossoms came out in mid- to late-APRIL here in Seattle.
In 2007, cherry blossoms came out in March in *Portland*, which probably meant that they came out in late March or early April in Seattle.


This is a very unusual year.

Spring may be here

It's unusually warm this winter in the Northwest. No snow (see images for the Olympics to verify). I submit two more pieces of evidence that spring is starting: the cherry blossoms are beginning, and dandelions in my yard are growing.

It is but a Slice

At our small group last night, we talked about how community has changed with the advent of the Internet. This is a reminder to all of you readers that what you see on this blog is but a slice of who I am. If you want a fuller picture, give me a call. Better yet, come visit and have a meal!

Next Question on Photography

Does anybody have a comparison between Google's Picasa (a free tool) versus Adobe Lightroom for workflow processing?

Facebook photos vs. Flickr vs. Picasa vs. Smugmug

As some of you know, I have been pondering about the different ways of showcasing photographs. What are the differences between the different sites? Are the paid subscriptions worth it?

The different sites are built with different philosophies, and hence they have different strengths by design. So let me tell you the punchline right away.

You will get the largest audience for your pictures on Facebook. Google's Picasa Web is the best free site out there. Smugmug is the best paid site that I have found thus far.

Flickr is a great site too, but there are sufficient limitations with its free service that it should really be considered a paid site. Other free sites like Kodak Gallery (originally Ofoto) and Snapfish are poor.


Facebook photo (Free)
You will get the largest possible audience for your photographs on Facebook. With extensive name tagging, your friends will wander over just to see what new pictures you have of them. However, the picture quality is also extremely poor. The site is meant for sharing connections, not displaying photographs. For those of us who do not sell our photographs, or who cannot find a sufficiently large enough audience to sell the photographs, Facebook (sadly) remains an option.

The snippet from Lily's website show a recent birthday party. Image display quality is poor, organization is so-so, but each photo can have its tag. With a large community of friends, these photographs can propagate very far.



Flickr ($25 per year for Pro)

I see people using Flickr in two dominant ways. The first is a photo blog, a continually story on the lives of your family or yourself. Take a picture, post it up, write a little comment. It's like a stream of consciousness with images. The following is a screen snippet from my friends Don and Cheryl. They post beautiful pictures of their family.

Flickr is also a social network tool. It has name tagging, as well as labels, so that things are easily searchable. The main drawback of Flickr's social network compared with Facebook is its reach; Facebook simply has too many users on it, no matter how poor the pictures are. So Flickr suffers from having a smaller community to network to.


A second use of Flickr that is quite popular is showcasing the very best work by a particular person. This next snippet is from b|w, a fabulous photographer and friend. I don't know how many shots he takes on any given outing, but it looks like he displays the top 1 or top 2 out of the entire collection for that day of shoots. Flickr does a nice job of displaying the photographs in rich colors, and there is a photo stream preview typically on the right side.

Flickr is actually quite disorientating to me. It is structured like a stream of thought, rather than a collection of subjects. It is great if you are looking for single photos, or trying to figure out what has changed since the last time you were at this person's site. It is poor if you are a first time visitor trying to figure out how all of the photographs fit together. There are collections called sets that collect photographs together, but even then the place to display the sets are much smaller than Smugmug.

Picasa Web (Free)

I rate Google's Picasa Web as the best free option out there. Picasa, the desktop software editor and organizer, is a fabulous tool that I use all the time. Picasa Web is not as thrilling. This following snippet is from Jaume Cusido's public album. It shows a collection of shots that are logically associated. It's free, and if you click on each individual picture it shows the bigger version of the picture.

It is an excellent website for the cost. However, I feel that Smugmug still does a better job of displaying photos and making a wider array of tools available. The pictures on Picasa Web is not as crisp or as brilliant as Flickr or Smugmug.

Smugmug ($40 per year for basic, up to $150 for professional)

The most expensive photo display website of the bunch, it is also the prettiest. It does not require your visitors to get an account before seeing the pictures. Smugmug has lots of tools to organize the photographs into logical groups, has geographical tagging to put pictures on a map, can print on paper, mugs, books, T-shirts, and much more.

The following snippet is from GeoHsia, who is on assignment around the world at this moment. I like Smugmug's elegant black background, but there are plenty of other themes to choose from. The site does not charge based on the number of photographs uploaded, but rather on the volume of traffic your site generates. Let me pause and say that it is doubtful 95% of the users will ever hit that limit.

Smugmug also has lots of ways of showing different sizes of photos. It will also resize itself to fit the screen resolution you are using, so that the display looks right for a netbook, or an iPhone, or a 24" gigantor LCD screen. Slideshow is easy to activate.

Smugmug lacks social networking, however. The community base, though fanatical, is too small. It can link to Facebook and other sites easily enough, but such network is not native.


My use of the sites

Finally, here are the screen shots from my own sites.