I’m on my second RAZR that does exactly what I want it to do (and even some things I don’t, like take pictures. How utterly lame) - make and receive phone calls. My job requires me to have a BlackBerry, which I initially scoffed, but has since proven its usefulness - checking email when not at my desk. It was nice to see if there was a giant shit sandwich stinking up my inbox while I was away this week. There wasn’t.

Will I eventually get an iPhone? Yes, but not until version 4.5 and they cost $79.

“If a female candidate, the first successful one in history, goes into the convention leading in the popular vote and it’s taken away from her, how do you think women are going to feel, heading into the November election?”

A few thoughts:

1. Ummm, not half as bad as the reaction if the first African-American candidate—with a lead in pledged delegates, is told to pound sand.
2. “Taken away from her”…the sense of entitlement exhibited by the Clinton camp from day 1 never ceases to amaze.
3. Clinton delegate wrangler Harold Ickes, to Reuters in January: “It’s useful to win states, but states don’t vote — delegates do”
4. Ickes today on Meet the Press: “the popular vote is a very, very strong measure and should be weighed heavily.”

Iceberg? What iceberg?

The change from 2000 to 2008 is simple to explain. Back then, the liberal establishment wanted Gore to beat Bush. Now, most of it wants Obama to finish off Hillary. The standards have changed accordingly.

Under no circumstances are Democrats, specifically Obama zealots, allowed to whine about the 2000 election. Not a word…

A few weeks ago, Tom Engelhardt wrote an article for The Nation about the employment of air power in the war on terrorism. I read it, got seriously pissed and then let it sit. I went back and read it again. Still bent. Engelhardt has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. To wit:

war from the air is, and will remain, a most imprecise and destructive form of battle.

Imprecise compared to what? How imprecise? As for destructive…that’s kind of the point, although Engelhardt has no idea the measures taken to mitigate collateral damage.

Third, in human terms, distance does not enhance accuracy. The farther away you are from a target, the more likely it is that you will have to guess who or what it is, based on spotty, difficult to interpret, or bad information, or even outright misinformation; whatever the theoretical accuracy of your weaponry, you are far more likely to miscalculate, make mistakes, mistarget, or target the misbegotten from the air.

Where to begin…? Lets start of with a fundamental misconception that permeates the above paragraph, as well as the rest of the article. Air missions in Iraq (and Afghanistan) are not executed in a vacuum. The vast majority are Close Air Support missions and it is painfully obvious that Engelhardt has no idea what that means: air power in direct support of the troops on the ground. Which means that the ground commander decides if, when and where bombs get dropped. Those warmongering pilots don’t drop bombs at will - they coordinate closely with the ground troops regarding what the target is, where it is and how to minimize collateral damage. There is no guessing and “distance”, at least in terms of how Engelhardt describes it, has nothing to do with it.

Fourth, if you are conducting war this way and you are doing so in heavily populated urban neighborhoods, as is now the case almost every day in Iraq, then civilians will predictably die “by mistake” almost every day[emphasis mine]

A completely unsupportable “prediction” with no factual basis whatsoever.

You can essentially no longer read an account of a skirmish or battle in one of Iraq’s cities in which air power is not called in. This means (see propositions 1-4) a war of constant “mistakes,”…

Wrong, wrong, wrong. “Proposition” does not equal “fact.” Air power is called for a reason: to protect and save the lives of our forces on the ground. And the targets of these strikes—“terrorist suspects”, “insurgents”, “militants” (always identified with “scare quotes” by Engelhardt)—did something to deserve it, like fire RPGs at freindly troops or plant (or detonate) an IED in front of their convoy. Contrary to the worldview of folks like Engelhardt, the Rules of Engagement do not allow the targeting of “militants” just because they looked at you funny. Are mistakes made? Yes, but not for any of the reasons put forth by Engelhardt.

According to Engelhardt, air power—in and of itself—is inherently bad. Nevermind the fact that is much easier, safer, and more accurate to drop a weapon into a house full of “insurgents” then send in a company of infantrymen when the entire house is rigged to explode the instant one of those troops kicks the door in.

Or in Engelhardt’s case, just ignore all the facts. It makes crap like this so much easier to write.

Important factual error-like thing in the post, Jason Zengerle notes that McCain has a son in the Marines and another in the naval academy. I didn’t know that McCain even had sons. That obviously puts the point about Meghan McCain in a very different context.

Didn’t know? The fact that McCain has a son in the Marines is mentioned in nearly every article about him that even briefly mentions the Iraq war.

I’m so friggin’ tired of the entire “chickenhawk” argument. If only the intellectually weak-minded that employ it would take it to its logical conclusion: you’re not qualified to lecture me about home foreclosures until you show me the notice…for your house. If you think NAFTA sucks, I don’t need to hear it from you unless I see the pink slip. Got a problem with the curriculums in your schools, but don’t have any school-age kids? Find something else to bitch about. And unless your phoning in your newest rant on agriculture subsidies from the family tractor, then don’t bother.

What lazy folks don’t do is bother to argue something on it’s merits. It is just easier to say that people that disagree with you are unqualified to do so.

“I pinpoint sexism for a living. You’d think I’d be able to find an example. And I hate to rely on this hokey notion that there’s some woman’s way of knowing, and that I just fucking know. But I do. I just know.”

Well, well. Of course you just know. That’s what do for a living. If you couldn’t find it, you wouldn’t eat. See also: self-licking ice cream cone.

Another gem:

“The whole ‘Hillary Clinton is a monster’ theme is so virulent.”

Really? Like a virus? No chance whatsoever that her complete lack of integrity has anything to do with it? Or this:

“They’re busy patting themselves on the back for supporting a black man: Aren’t we cool?”

Remember, and file this away because it will come up again if Hillary “wins” the nomination: They are talking about Democrats here.

Original link via Instapundit.

There is one problem with this: when posting with MarsEdit, the trigger doesn’t work. The documentation for Multiblog is not, ahem, the most helpful, but some digging around got me this tidbit from Multiblog creator David Rayners:

MultiBlog does not currently support rebuilding upon posting from an XML-RPC client.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I use MarsEdit because I could easily customize what exactly it puts in the Entry Body field. The javascript QuickPost bookmarklet created by Movable Type opened with the Entry Body field already filled in with <a title="Page Title" href="the.url">Page Title</a>. What I want is the Entry Body filled in with the URL only. Since MarsEdit won’t trigger my MultiBlog rebuilds, I had to go back a find a way to bend the MT bookmarklet to my will.

Some digging around the Movable Type forums showed that other people were interested in modifying the bookmarklet to suite their needs, but not the specific answer to my problem. And the info I did glean was based on an older version of MT. Eventually I found out that the file I needed to tweak was the CMS.pm file located in the /lib/MT/App folder of my MT installation. After some searching, I found what looked like what I needed at line 2256:

$param{text} = sprintf qq(<a title="%s" 
href="%s">%s</a>\n\n%s),
    $bm_link_title,
    $bm_link_href,
    $bm_link_title,
    $bm_text;

Dude, let me say I was about one step away from a duck watching a lap dance in terms of comprehending this. Pearl wizard I am not. Through some trial and error, I changed this snippet of code to the following:

$param{text} = sprintf qq(%s\n\n),
    $bm_link_href

And it appears to work. Now when I select the MT QuickPost Bookmarklet on a desired page to create an Elsewhere post, only the URL for the page is automatically generated in the Entry Body field. The Title and Extended Entry are blank for me to fill in. Again, the Title becomes the link text and the Extended Entry is my witty description. Now when I post an Elsewhere tidbit, Multiblog kicks in and rebuilds the main index page. My awesomeness astounds. Yes, there are probably about 22 easier ways to solve this entire problem, but this worked.

So now I use MarsEdit (and highly recommend it) for main entries such as this one and I click on the MT QuickPost doohicky for Elsewhere posts.

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chief strategist, Mark Penn, apologized Friday for “an error in judgment” after meeting with Colombia’s ambassador to the United States on Monday, when he reportedly discussed how to push for passage of a bilateral free trade agreement opposed by both Democratic candidates.

To top it off, Colombia turns around and fires him:

The Colombian government considers this a lack of respect to Colombians, and finds this response unacceptable.

What’s next, Penn sits next to Obama at church?

Update: What’s next is Clinton tells Penn to pound sand.

Within the last year, I have gotten more serious about digital photography. I would classify myself as a “somewhat serious hobbyist”. I bought a Nikon D40 about 18 months ago and followed that up with a 55-200mm VR lens. My big Christmas presents were a Sigma 30mm f1.4 and a Nikon SB-600 flash.

I mostly shoot portraits and action shots of my son - playing with trains, running around the park, etc. I don’t take pictures as much as I would like, but I still read about photography topics as much as I can. In the process of all this, I outgrew iPhoto and downloaded the 30-day trails of both Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 and Apple Aperture 1.5. I put them both through their respective paces and eventually decided on Lightroom for the following reasons:

• Overall, I preferred Lightroom’s interface
• Lightroom’s Develop controls were easier to use and more intuitive for my newbie brain
• While most folks give Aperture the edge in terms of straight photo organization, the ‘project’ concept didn’t quite meld with how I wanted to organize my pics. I’m not a professional photographer and Lightroom made it much easier to organize by date and then build Collections from there
• I like Lightroom’s ability to set flags and colors for individual shots as well as ratings
• Aperture was…wait for it…sloooow. The difference between the two on my Power Mac G5 2.0 with 2.5GB of RAM was noticable
• At the time Lightroom was cheaper

After about a year of using Lightroom, I have been happy with the results. It is fast, easy to use, and pretty much does what I need it to do. I have about 3000 pictures in my catalog, mostly family shots. I don’t print a lot of photos and I’m still in the process of evaluating different online options. That being said, here is a quick list of areas of slight annoyance/improvement, based on how I do things:

• Aperture’s Smart Album capability would be nice. I have a few “Best of” collections and every now and then I have to manually add new pictures to them. The ability to keyword or rate them appropriately and then have the software do the rest would be sweet. In Lightroom’s defense, the Metadata Browser is pretty sharp. You would have to build a ton of Aperture Smart Albums to replicate what Lightroom does automatically.
• The side panels in the Library and Develop Modules can get long and require scrolling to see the info you need. I would like to be able to customize their display a bit more. Right now I have the Navigator and Quick Develop panes permanently collapsed to make room for other stuff. Being able to turn them completely off would be a plus. Granted the panels as well as the filmstrip can toggled with various function keys, but usually there is something there that I need.
• Conversely, the left panel in the develop module is sort of a waste of space, for me anyways: I don’t use too many presets or take a lot of snapshots.
• I should be able to stack within a collection, as opposed to just within a folder
• Keyword management could get unruly if I I expand much further than the basic key words I use now: names, photo descriptors, etc.
• In order to get pictures to my iPod, I have to export JPEGs and then import into iPhoto in order for iTunes to see them. This is the only thing I use iPhoto for.

None of these things are deal breakers by any stretch and Lightroom has a lot of good things going for it: Targeted Adjustment Tool, better Metadata display in Grid view, fast preview generation. Also some common knocks against LR don’t apply to me: I don’t print from it, I own a single 20‪ Cinema Display - hence lack of dual monitor support is a non-issue. I also don’t have much of a dog in the “modal” debate since I rarely use the Slideshow or Web Modules. I spend most of my time in the Library organizing and when I need to make an adjustment, I just hit ‘D’ to go to the Develop Mode and ‘G’ returns me to Library Grid view when I’m finished.

Aperture 2.0

I promptly downloaded the Aperture 2.0 Trial to see what changes were made, and to see if any of the areas mentioned above were addressed.

The Good

1. The combined Projects/Metadata/Adjustments Inspector cleans up the overall interface nicely. I also like that Shift-I will move it to the right.
2. I had forgotten how useful a true Full Screen Mode is.
3. Access to the Aperture Library from iTunes (see above) and my AppleTV. Mucho easier.
4. Much more organizational capability with projects, folders, and albums (smart or static). While I like LR’s simplified organizational tools, after a year of use, they are somewhat limiting.
5. I don’t have much of a use yet for Light Tables, but they are kinda cool.
6. Adjustment settings are pretty intuitive and easy to use. I don’t see any major differences in RAW decoding between the two. My firmly entrenched status as a beginner could explain that as well.
7. Aperture now displays exposure information below the histogram, just like Lightroom.
8. Finally, speed. Just scrolling in Grid View in version 1.5 was almost unusable for me, with significant delays to just draw the preview. Version 2.0 is much faster, even without using Quick Preview Mode. However, piling on the Adjustments can slow down loading a full-size preview.

The Not-So-Good

1. I have really become tied to flags and color labels in Lightroom. In Aperture, I’m kind of lost without them.
2. Lightroom’s Remove Spots tool gives better results and is easier to use than Aperture’s Spot/Patch Tool
3. Aperture’s Loupe is nice, but sometimes I find it limiting - especially when doing Spot/Patch work. With the Loupe displayed, moving the Source circle for the Patch tool means I can’t see where I’m moving it to. While Lightroom’s zoom isn’t perfect, it works better in some circumstances
4. Using the Highlights and Shadows Adjustment pretty much kills my Loupe. Things grind to a halt.
5. I really like Lightroom’s interactive histogram. 75% of my image processing is sliding the specific tones around within the histogram itself. I have mistakenly attempted to do this more than a few times in Aperture.

Overall, I think that Aperture 2.0 is a solid program. It will be interesting to see how Lightroom reacts. Now I just have to spend more time taking pictures than writing about software for those pictures…

P.S. I should get some sort of award for not using the term ‘workflow’ anywhere in the above post.

Update: Should be fixed now. While poking around, I noticed that the RSS feed for my sideblog wasn’t behaving correctly. When using a feedreader, clicking on the title of the post led to a permalink for that post on this site versus the external link that was the subject of the entry. I hadn’t even modified that template from its Movable Type default because I don’t use it.

A quick Google search got me this post, but I couldn’t get it to work. I dug a bit deeper and it seems that the way I was creating the posts was the culprit. The Title field contained an a href that linked to the external site and displayed my title. The snippet of snarky commentary was contained in the Entry Body field. Although this seemed logical, I think the feedreaders (NetNewsWire, Google Reader, Bloglines) choked on the title (or more specifically, the <link> field) containing an a href.

I changed my input format to putting the plain-text entry title in the Title field, the desired URL in the Entry Body Field, and the commentary in the Entry Extended Field. I then changed the appropriate tags in the RSS template to match. The Movable Type quick post bookmarklet doesn’t conform to this, but fortunately the MarsEdit one can be customized. Mine automatically puts the URL in the Entry Body field, I then fill in the Title and Extended Entry.

Here are the applicable tags from the RSS 2.0 template file:

<title><$MTEntryTitle remove_html="1"$></title>
<description><$MTEntryMore encode_xml="1"$></description>
<link><$MTEntryBody encode_xml="1"$></link>
<guid><$MTEntryBody encode_xml="1"$></guid>

And here is the template code for displaying the Sideblog on the site, based on the new setup:

<dl class="sideblog">
<MTEntries lastn="15">
<dt><a href="<$MTEntryBody$>"><$MTEntryTitle></a></dt>
<dd><$MTEntryMore$></dd>
</MTEntries>
</dl>

Yes, I had to go back and change all my previous Elsewhere entries to match this, but that took less time than figuring out the solution to the problem. A situation that was helped by being lazy the past year and not posting much. I’m sure there was a better/easier way to fix this, but once I got it to work, I quit looking.

For a lot of D40 owners, this is probably a non-issue. They use the camera just fine with the kit 18-55 installed and are none the wiser. After browsing the forums at DP Review, it is obvious that a not insignificant group of D40 users is in the market for an all-around fast, prime lenses for their D40. I would count myself in this group.

In the 24-50mm range, there are really only three options:

• Nikon 50mm f1.4 ($290)
• Nikon 50mm f1.8 ($110)
• Sigma 30mm f1.4 ($400)

Neither of the Nikon lenses will autofocus on a D40 and Sigma has a reputation for less-than-stellar quality control. The online forums are full of stories from folks with Sigma 30mm’s that have back/front focus issues. I decided on the Sigma and I count myself lucky. Any issues I’ve seen are self-induced as this is a tricky lens to use wide open, at least for a beginner.

I have been tempted to grab the Nikon 50mm 1.8 since it is supposed to be a great lens, especially at a hundred bucks. I’m afraid though that having to manual focus would be a major detractor since the object of most of my photography is a two-year-old who isn’t down with things like “sit still while I focus”.

Well, recently Sigma has announced a 50mm 1.4 HSM that will autofocus on a D40. It will be interesting to see the reaction, from both Nikon and D40 users and the reviews of this lens once it is released. Is Nikon going to let a third party manufacturer fill this void? Do they even see it as a void? I think a lot of D40 owners want these lenses for the capability they provide, but are happy with their current camera and don’t want to trade up to fully use what used to be a “basic” lens. Are Sigma’s QC issues that plague the 30mm going to be present in this lens? What is it going to cost? Is the lens going to perform? Do I really need this lens now that I have the 30mm or should I just put that money towards a 70-300mm VR? Or should I just quit worry about it and take more pictures…

I have had a Flickr account for a while, but haven’t really used it for anything. While looking around for other alternatives to my current setup, I have narrowed my options down to the following:

• Flickr
• SmugMug - which I learned about from a WSJ article
• zenfolio - from poking around the DP Review Forums

All of three of these are hosted solutions - meaning the pictures don’t live on my server anymore, and I don’t really have a problem with that. Let someone else do the heavy lifting. There are existing Lightroom export/upload utilities for each of these as well - another bonus.

If you have any experience with any of these, please fire away. I’ll let you know what I finally decide.

As an aside, I have been playing around with the Aperture 2.0 trial, but more on that later.

Even when I had the time, the drive just wasn’t there. Upon further review, it came down to this: after re-designing this site from scratch a year ago, the thought of having to create something with even a hint of HTML made me run for the tall grass. I was just burned out on anything related to “creating” anything for the web.

However, I think that spell has passed. Time to bear down and get after it.

P.S. I still don’t give a crap about the iPhone.

My first introduction to WFB was Happy Days Were Again, which I bought when I was a sophomore in college. I had heard of National Review before then, but I would be lying if I said I was precocious 15-year-old reading his columns and signing up for Latin classes to be able to understand them. But that book was the start of it for me. As read more and more of him, I was in awe of the depth and breadth of his knowledge and in later years, I remember remarking to a friend, “I’m sure as hell glad is on our side.”

I did actually see him in person once. In the spring of 1995, during my junior year at Texas A&M, he moderated a debate between former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and former Secretary of Defense Les Aspin. As I was entering the auditorium, I walked right by him as he was exiting his car. He had a huge smile and seemed genuinely excited to shake the hands of those there to greet him. It was a profound regret of mine later on that I didn’t pay close enough attention during the debate.

Over the years, I anxiously awaited the release of his next tome. Just last week, I finished his most recent book, Cancel Your Own Goddamn Subscription. My personal favorite is Let Us Talk of Many Things, his collection of speeches, which contained a story of him pretending to drown so that then President Reagan could save him in order to earn the National Review Medal of Freedom.

The one piece of writing from Buckley that I always remember is a short reply to a letter reprinted in Buckley: The Right Word. In it, an Air Force Captain writes about a close friend, an admirer of Buckley, who was killed during Operation Desert Storm. He replied:

I am profoundly moved; and I extend you, his friend, our condolences, even as we share your pride in our friend. Gratefully, —WFB

To William F. Buckley, Jr, I am profoundly moved by your contributions to this country over the course of your very full life. And I would like to say thanks.

1. Actually, anything remotely related to the iPhone
2. Hacking the iPhone
3. David Beckham (although if you add his wife, he bumps up a spot)
4. Anything relating to any Presidential candidate before 2008
5. iPhone 2.0 Wishlists - it is only a matter of time, might as well start early