Wired Cola

I have an imaginary evil twin, named Beau. Beau is a very wicked alter ego, and does all sorts of things I wouldn't contemplate: devilish advocacy, reading Ayn Rand novels, trying to get pregnant women to drink more.
Wait, I did that one? I'm sure I had a good reason....
Anyways, the other day I was talking to Beau about health care, and Beau seemed eager to engage me. I of course believe that medicine is great, but Beau, well, he reads a lot and then sometimes I think he says things just to annoy me.
This is Beau:

Why do you hate Cuba so much, anyway? Good health care, you know, world class. Okay, so what about Costa Rica, then? They spend about 1/16 what the US does on health care and they live just as long as average Americans.

Apropos of nothing at all, here's a list of consumer goods I don't need, but would enjoy tremendously.

Pentax 50mm f/1.4 lens (auto focus; i.e. F-series or later)

camera bag to hold one SLR, one other lens, and a big honking flash.

big honking flash (Metz 48 AF-1, Pentax AF540FGZ, or even some old non P-TTL flash)

Decent full-size tripod

Contour HD helmet cam.

Make magazine subscription

iPhone

Trip to Greece

Cadillac CTS-V Sportwagon

Kensington Expert "Mouse" trackball. Seriously, why is the best trackball ever made called a mouse?

Alcohol

Something nice for my Wii

I want to say, on several matters great and small, to the principals involved: You are trying to solve the wrong problem.

This photo was taken in 2004, using a Sony DSC-V1. It was a five-megapixel compact camera (introduced in 2003, MSRP US$700):

Pretty good, huh? That's a low-light situation, so the camera took this photo at 1/15 shutter speed. Of course, I also had ISO 100 set. I can't remember if that was because it was hard to change the ISO on that camera, or because high-ISO performance was not its forte.

For some time I've been mooting the creation of Classic Digital Photography, meant as a magazine-ish website documenting the early days of digicams.

"Don't take too long to think about it. Twenty books you've read that will always stick with you, not necessarily in any order. First twenty you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. I did this quickly and then went back to correct errors and clean it up. Tag friends, including me because I'm interested in seeing what you've enjoyed. Now, in no particular order..."

• The Princess Bride
• the camel book
• The Rider
• The Escape Artist
• Lance Armstrong's War
• Eat the Rich (P J O'Rourke)
• the Encyclopedia Brown stories
• something (anything, really) by Erma Bombeck
• Haynes Yamaha Vision (XV550) Repair Manual
• Longitude (not great, but a great story)
• Snow Crash
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

I believe what follows is one of the infamous ten percenter pamphlets, this one from the NDP. I don't remember a Liberal one off-hand, and it's hard for me to distinguish the Conservative ten percenters from the stuff they send me because I'm a known right-wing kook. On to exhibit A, which is most of the text from the pamphlet:

I'm biased, but "A hat trick for families" sounds like the kind of slogan you'd come up with if you had a vague understanding of hockey, and a vague understanding of Canada.

No, the doughty Pentax K100 D Super is not going anywhere, and I'm not giving up on the Canon SD1000 super-compact until I get a phone with a decent camera, but Olympus went and built the interchangeable-lens "rangefinder" I expressed a desire for in 2005.

Behold the Olympus Pen E-P1. That's the short Wired review. the long DP Review is longer. It's based around the micro-4/3s standard, and seems to be the first camera to really exploit the 4/3 system's benefits. On the down side, it sacrificed any built-in flash (it has a hot shoe) and a built-in optical rangefinder (there's a hot-shoe mounted one that's matched to the available 17 mm pancake lens (like 35 mm in OG full-frame focal lengths)).

This is an obituary I was not expecting to write for some time.
On Friday morning, Lady went in for a routine checkup, plus rabies and distemper shots. The doctor said she was in perfect health for a small 8-year-old dog. She was fine for most of the day. By late evening, she was a little groggy, and I made a note to see if she'd gotten worse by morning. I slept on the couch with her, and she was a little shivery but nothing scary.
She was worse in the morning. We had her in the vet's office at 11:20 Saturday morning. By 3pm she was dead. We don't know why, but blood work and a possible autopsy bring answers.
Instead of dwelling on the morose details of her sudden death, I want to remember this charming and photogenic dog, who brought much joy into our lives.

2009: Auto-Tune the News #1
2010: Brothers Gregory get a regular segment on TV
2011: MSNBC is the first channel to go to an all-autotune format.
2014: A web-only news broadcaster starts up. Key gimmick: the newsreaders sing in their natural voices.
A few weeks back I had a slight discussion on the fb with keith about the Guardian's experiment with crowdsourcing analysis of a data dump. I made the hubris-plagued claim that in the future, more news would be made that way than by traditional reportage.