I have always been a fan of footnotes. No, not the dry, academic, here-is-the-obscure-journal-where-I-got-this-from kind, but the David Foster Wallace let’s-go-on-a-tangent variety. Bill Simmons is from the latter school as well, and footnotes figure predominantly in the articles on his site, Grantland</a>.

From what I can tell poking around, javascript is used to measure the vertical position of the footnote in the text and the footnote itself is relatively positioned the same amount from the top. Nicely done.

News Corps is going to sell MySpace to Specific Media for $35 million, which is about $545 million less than they paid for it six years ago.

Cliff Notes Version, Not Without Biased Commentary: A shitty social website that is exponentially lamer now then when it started is going to “revitalize and transform” itself, care of an online ad company and…wait for it…Justin Timberlake. I’m not making this up:

Timberlake will have an office at MySpace’s Beverly Hills headquarters and a staff of about a half dozen people working for him “around the clock” developing his ideas for the site, said Specific Media CEO Tim Vanderhook.

I can’t wait. The interesting part is at the end:

At $35 million, Specific Media gets an Internet property for a price that Altimeter’s Li called “ridiculously low” and values each monthly U.S. visitor at about $1 each. Its new owners should be able to recoup their investment if the company gets each user to click on about 20 ads over their lifetime, she said.

Nothing earth-shattering about making money off of ads, but if getting ad clicks is really what it is all about, I wouldn’t have a lot of faith in the “revitalize and transform” part. And using anyone’s lifetime has a measure of ROI, especially for something like a social media site, is probably not very wise.

I’ll go out on a limb and predict that MySpace will continue to suck.

Here is what’s in my camera bag:

• Nikon D40 - now four years old and showing its teeth. My biggest gripe is only three autofocus points.
• Nikon 55-200mm VR - first lens I purchased to go with the kit 18-55mm.
• Sigma 30mm/1.4 - hefty lens that is great for low light, but can be difficult (at least for this rank amateur) to shoot wide open.
• Nikon SB-700 Flash - pop-up flashes are for losers.

Note: I rarely use the iPhone camera (either my current iPhone 4 or on my old 3GS), either because the photo quality isn’t that great, especially indoors, and I honestly sometimes I forget that my phone even has a camera.

Here’s the software I use:

• Adobe Lightroom 3 - my primary tool for organization and editing of photos. My library has almost 9000 photos and a rough yearly average is 1500 photos. I’m not too aggressive about only holding onto true keepers, but I’m not afraid to delete stuff either.
• Apple Aperture - I keep Aperture around strictly for its tight integration with the rest of my Apple gear. I export my top pictures (about 220, mostly all of my kids) to Aperture for syncing with my Apple TV and iPhone and the easy availability of the Aperture library to other apps like iMovie and the new Final Cut Pro X. I wrote previously about keeping these keepers synched between Lightroom and Aperture. I also like Aperture’s Faces and Places capability. The latter I have to add manually since my D40 obviously does not include GPS metadata. As a side note, I don’t think I’ve opened iPhoto since I purchased my current machine (15 inch MacNook Pro) last year.
• Nik Software Complete Collection - I have the Lightroom/Aperture versions of these great filters such as Viveza and Silver Efex, although I haven’t used them too much. On the to-do list…
• Adobe Photoshop CS4 I freely admit that I’m a complete Photoshop noob and when I do use it, it is usually to use actions from Totally Rad and Pioneer Woman.

And here is my wishlist:

• Nikon D7000 - I thought the D90 was going to be my replacement, and then this came along. Need to save some lunch money first.
• Sigma 17-50mm/2.8 - A better low-light mid-range zoom, and significantly cheaper than its Nikon equivalent.
• Nikon 70-300mm VR - Need a bit more reach.
• Nikon 16-85mm VR - Not a fixed focal length, but a highly regarded all-around zoom.