I just came across the article Bribing Bloggers on Joel Spolsky's blog. Joel heads his own software company and has been blogging since 2000, and although I'd never heard of him, he's apparently an extremely popular blogger (having 4,500 times more subscribers on Bloglines than I!).
In the article, he writes about how Microsoft is offering bloggers free laptops and other gifts in the hopes of garnering positive exposure. (Unfortunately, Microsoft must have lost my email address, because I have a blog but was not offered a free laptop.) Joel discusses whether it's ethical to accept such gifts, even if disclosed, and in the end decides that it's probably not. He goes on to say...
| “ | These gifts reduce the public trust in blogs... This is the most frustrating thing about the practice of giving bloggers free stuff: it pisses in the well, reducing the credibility of all blogs. I'm upset that people trust me less because of the behavior of other bloggers.” |
His logic about “bloggers” and “public trust in blogs” seems outlandishly silly to me. A blog doesn't have credibility, a person does. A blog is merely a medium, and has nothing to do with one's credibility.
I don't understand this whole notion that “blogging” somehow transcends other forms of publication, such that the form is more important than the content. You see the same type of thing every time someone “gets fired for blogging,” such as the engineer fired for speculating about his companies financials on his blog, or the flight attendant fired for posting suggestive pictures of herself in her uniform.
The thing is, no one has ever been fired for “blogging” — they're fired for doing something their employer considered wrong (such as for revealing confidential information, or not meeting your company's standards of appropriate behavior). That this “something wrong” was done on a blog is simply not relevant, and they would certainly have met the same fate had they presented what they did in a different but equally visible way.
I've written books, but you don't hear me complaining that the farfetched plot lines in trashy romance novels “reduce the credibility of all books.” That would be a silly thing to claim. Considering newspapers, The Wall Street Journal enjoys a high level of credibility despite the existence of trash like The National Enquirer.
Perhaps Joel laments the low barrier to entry in choosing blogging as a form of communication. A low barrier to entry means that most anyone can have a blog, and as such, many will simply be rubbish, so how can a skilled and interesting writer with integrity possibly be recognized amid the overwhelming chaff of writers lacking one or more of those qualities?
Well, I'll answer that: by being a skilled and interesting writer with integrity.
(As for myself, hey, I've got “writer” covered, so one out of four isn't too bad, is it? 🙂 )
Joel has a level of credibility in his readers' eyes that is independent of the medium, and also independent of other blogs, books, TV shows, plays, radio programs, CDs, Movies, and other forms of communication. He is what he is.
I've only just become acquainted with Joel's writing, and so am in the process of forming my own opinion. He gets points for declining gifts clearly meant to curry positive exposure, but in my own eyes, he'd get the same points merely for disclosing it.
On the other hand, he loses points for the way he hawks his own books, with a page entitled “Buy the books!” I think that kind of in-your-face approach is just not classy, and so he loses points in my eyes.
Nikon D200 + 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200mm — 1/350 sec, f/2.8, ISO 400 — full exif
Autofocus Doesn't Get Much Better Than This
The up/down range of what's in focus is indeed centered on the focus point
As I mentioned the other day, my camera was in the shop to repair poor autofocus. It's back now, and my first quick tests show that its autofocus is now excellent.
I'd first run into problems with the Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 that I got in November. I posted about it on the Nikon SLR Lens forum on Phil Askey's Digital Photography Review (this thread) and was told that the problem could well be my fault for not understanding what I should expect from the autofocus system. In hindsight, considering the test photos I sent, those comments were fair. So, I went about testing with a focus test chart that I designed myself, and confirmed that indeed the equipment was having issues. So, I brought it to Nikon, and after inspecting it out for three hours, they accepted it for repair.
That Nikon accepted it for repair made me feel a bit vindicated, because there are those that reflexively accuse “it's your poor technique” whenever someone suspects a focus issue, never allowing that someone might indeed have faulty equipment. In particular, one loud mouth active in these forums, Leonard Shepherd, was incessant in his accusations of ineptness to everyone (including me), even in the face of clear evidence that the person he's accusing understands the issues well.
The feeling of vindication was short-lived, because unfortunately, the situation was worse when I got the equipment back from Nikon.
I think I pretty much understood the problem early on: the 70-200 zoom needed to be calibrated. What Nikon did was adjust my D200 body to match the miscalibration of the 70-200 zoom, rendering the body miscalibrated for any other lens. Sigh. Was I being unreasonable for wanting good autofocus?
I do expect equipment at this level to work, so I had to send it in again, this time with more explicit instructions. That I have to explain camera repair to Nikon is well beyond my understanding, but it seems to have done the trick.
So, I got it back yesterday, and today did a few quick test shots with my pro glass, the 70-200/2.8 and the 17-55/2.8, and found autofocus to be excellent.
So, what did Nikon do this time? Here are the reports....
For the D200 body:
| “ |
Due to defective autofocus, replaced the autofocus unit.
Replaced the deformed lens mount. Inspected the operation of all components. ” |
For the 70-200 f/2.8 zoom lens:
| “ |
Report on the autofocus inspection: confirmed front focus, so recalibrated the autofocus unit.
Inspected for the resolving-power issue you pointed out, but could find no issue with lens accuracy. Inspected the operation of all components. ” |
I'm not sure what they're talking about in the second line, since I never mentioned anything about the “resolving power,” and indeed there's nothing about it in the “customer's complaint” part of the form (the whole thing of which you can see if you click on the snippet shown here.) In any case, I'm glad things are fine with it.
For the 17-55 f/2.8 zoom lens:
| “ |
Report on the autofocus inspection: could find no issue with the focus point. Everything was within specs, but we recalibrated it anyway.
We inspected for your complaint, but could find no flaw at this time. ” |
Which is what I expected: the problem was with the 70-200, and, after Nikon's first “fix,” with the body as well. (For those keeping score, the report for the 18-200/VR was similar to the 17-55/2.8)
In Summary
In summary, I was right all along: the 70-200 was miscalibrated, and it took Nikon two tries to get it right. I didn't realize that there was anything initially wrong with the D200 body, but perhaps that's because my only lens before, the 18-200 f/3.5, is too slow to reveal the problem.
In any case, I'll take everything out for some real-world tests the first chance I get, but at this point I'm pleased that things finally seem to be fixed.
In case you haven't noticed a cute little feature I added to my blog last month, click on one of the “Index of Photos” links in the right-hand nav bar of the main page, such as “Appearing in 2006.”
These indices show a small, square thumbnail for every photo that appeared on my blog during the year in question. Clicking on one brings you to the corresponding post, so it's a quick way to find a post when you can remember only the photo. (I'm probably the only one who would find this useful, but it's a pretty display nevertheless.)
( If you're not familiar with MySQL, this post will be of no interest. )
I like that MySQL has its replace command, which acts like an insert except that if the newly-inserted data would cause a conflict with one or more unique keys, one or more pre-existing rows are automatically deleteed to make way for the new data.
However, it seems that most times that I want to use replace, I really want semantics along the lines of “update if already there; insert if not.” The only difference is in the value given to unmentioned fields: in normal replace semantics, unmentioned fields get the default value for the field (the one created, explicitly or implicitly, at the time of table creation). What I want is that fields that I don't give a value for on the replace line to get the value that had been there before (if the record was already there, and if not, then fall back to the default for that field).
This seems a totally natural (and useful!) extension, so it's beyond me why it's not there. I looked around the docs, but couldn't find it.
As for the syntax, I can imagine either an in place option to replace, or an or insert option to update.
What do you think, Monty?
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 44mm — 1/100 sec, f/8, ISO 320 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Forsaken
Kyoto is a photogenic town, but it's not all shrines and cherry blossoms. Not far from where I live, somewhat hidden from the civilized world, is the saddest, most dilapidated, most forsaken place I have ever been in my life: Kyoto University's Kumano Dorm (熊野寮).
Last fall, on the same day I took the vine & bamboo photos in yesterday's post, as well as the photos that went into the awesome (if I do say so myself) fall-foliage desktop, I made a visit to Kumano Dorm to get a picture of a scene that I'd seen from the street while passing by: fall-foliage yellow leaves that had covered some abandoned cars like a fresh snowfall.
I ended up walking around the grounds, and had an experience like I'd never had before. The only word I can think that even comes close to describing this place is “forsaken.” It was eerie — I've been in poor third-world countries and in communist Eastern-European countries, but I never felt farther from humanity than at this little spot in the middle of Kyoto.
I'll show more pictures from that trip when I get around to processing them (UPDATE: they're here), but having run across them when processing yesterday's vine & bamboo pictures, I thought I'd post at least one of them today.