I went to high school with a kid just like Comcast. He was a big kid, with big, giant, black hair. He’d spouted some story about how his long ago distant cousin was related to Russian royalty, a tzar or Rumplestiltskin or some such.

One day, this great oak of a boy shows up in a shiny new car. He says his divorcee mom has agreed to buy liquor for his high school parties because, he says, “she says that if she buys the booze and my friends come to my house, that will keep us all out of trouble.”

Of course, so will prison, largely.

After yesterday’s tome of a post, I had a few questions hit my inbox looking for details on my own shooting equipment, specifically on which lenses I use most often.

I love my D300 and was wondering what glass you shoot with most often? For people it looks like maybe an 85 1.4? Great depth of field. Do you use any tilt-shift lenses?

Thought I’d answer this one as a continuation of yesterdays discussion on picking out your first DSLR.

It wasn’t long ago that I set up my fancy Google Profile. If you haven’t set up your own, it’s a privacy advocate’s nightmare. This is a system whereby you willingly inject Google with your personal information to “improve search results” when people search for you. I didn’t give them the Full Monty, but you can find own everywhere I’ve lived, which may or may not be useful for … whatever.

The point is, last night, for the first time, I received an email through my Google profile from a friend. A friend who didn’t know my email address, and found me through Google. Profile. Man, this system is rock solid. He wanted to know if I had any thoughts on picking up his first digital-SLR camera. Well, I’ll let him tell you.

I want to get a DSLR camera for Christmas, but I do not know much about them. I was hoping that you could shed some light on what would be a good first DSLR camera for a first time user. I am interested in Nikon or Canon, but that is only because of name brand recognition. I am looking to keep the cost around $500.00 for body and lens. Any thoughts?

Do I have some thoughts? Sure I do. This one’s for you, Dave.

(more…)

The first photowalk of the holiday season. We ended up on Mississippi Avenue at The Rebuilding Center, one of the coolest, most eclectic home remodeling stores I’ve ever seen.

I’d called Chris at the Rebuilding Center the day before — I know they’re sensitive about class-type things going on in the place, and wanted to make sure there were no hard feelings about shooting on a crowded Saturday. No problem. Downright appreciative that I’d called first, in fact.

We were focusing specifically on camera function this time. With so many people carrying professionally capable DSLRs around their necks, sporting inequitable skill in using them, I thought it a good opportunity to look at the top 3-4 things to do with your camera that can improve your photos and your confidence when working quickly and taking advantage of natural light.

So many wonderful trinkets and bobbles and textures make for a great photographic playground. If you’ve never been, take the time to stop into this treasure of other peoples’ trash and soak it in. I’ve posted the full gallery here and, as always, comments are appreciated!

From diveintomark.org this morning:

And you can trace that all the way back, 17 years, through the Great Browser Wars, all the way back to February 25, 1993, when Marc Andreessen offhandedly remarked, “MIME, someday, maybe,” and then shipped his code anyway. The ones that win are the ones that ship.

It’s fascinating. Go read the whole piece if you’re into HTML nerdery: Why do we have an IMG element? [dive into mark]

Here are a few horrifying stats from bookstatistics.com:

• 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
• 42% of college graduates never read another book.
• 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
• 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

To be fair, I don’t go to bookstores often anymore, but I’m a Kindle guy. The rest of this stuff? So much for respondents inflating their answers to look smart…

I’ve been in sunny California the last week and missed some good stories. Trying to catch up with a hat trick to my man Dane at strike10media.com who notes this piece on the Intuit acquisition of web 2.0 darling Mint.com. I’ve already lamented the acquisition, since I think Intuit is at best confused right now.

Mint.com’s chief marketing officer, stunned a room full of digital marketing pros by noting that she really didn’t have much of a marketing budget. Mint.com has gone from zero to 1.5 million users in two years with no ad campaign, save a mid-five-figures sum spent on search engine terms. Rather than purchase traffic, it has pursued the same type of strategy that food trucks and online magazines do: Using free social media and piggybacking on popular new communications technology. Mint.com has more than 36,000 Facebook fans and 19,000 Twitter followers, a well-traffickedblog, and a popular iPhone application.

Great article. Worth checking out in more detail.

I absolutely love this video. It’s crazy in every way that Steve Balmer isn’t.

This day for me is like an Oreo cookie — if you aren’t really crazy about the creamy center, but you are a hooligan for crisp chocolate cookiness. Best presentation of the day for me goes to the day’s closer, Tyler Sticka. Presentation slides below:

This from Aaron Patzer today:

As outlined in today’s press release and my blog post, after the acquisition closes, the Mint.com team will contribute to improving the financial lives of tens of millions of consumers and small businesses. I’ll personally be taking on the role of GM of Intuit’s Personal Finance group responsible for online, desktop and mobile consumer personal finance offerings. Joining Intuit enables us to bring our vision of helping consumers understand and do more with their money to millions of Intuit customers. This is a compelling combination of our innovative product, technology, and industry leading user interface design with one of the most trusted brands in software.

This is good news for Intuit — not sure they can get any more disorganized than they are now. It’s probably good news for Mint, though they’re hitching their wagon to a brand that needs desperate help, putting themselves in the position of floating quality for both brands.

I left Quicken this year after being a user for over a decade. The software is less stable than it was when I joined the Intuit bandwagon and there is little evidence of evolution or rigorous development over time. In fact, several of the features I used regularly in those early versions have been taken out of the software today. I’ve moved to MoneyWell and have been able to make a remarkably easy transition to the package.

Just to follow up the Pre article from earlier this morning, if I were walking in to a Sprint store for a phone, which is unlikely for me, but if I were going to do it, I’d be waiting for the HTC Hero.

Widely praised by reviewers as well as users who can already buy it in Europe, the Hero could give Sprint a much-needed boost. This will mark the second recent attempt—following the sale of the Palm Pre—by Sprint to use an exclusive deal for an anticipated phone in hopes of stemming a long stretch of losses.

via Sprint to sell Android phone in October.

I’ve now actually touched a Palm Pre. I was walking through Best Buy and, for the first time, they had a functioning model on the floor — not the plastic brick placeholder they usually have around. I stood there poking around at it for about 20 minutes and walked away with a few quick impressions.

1. You never quite know where you are.
There’s no doubt that the interface is quite slick. It feels peppy and rich and — believe it or not — it’s more gooey than the iPhone interface. Maybe that’s just me not being used to it, but I really did want to lick this thing; it’s that much like candy. That said, even after 20 minutes, you never quite know where you are on the thing. Was I in an app? Was I cycling through processes? Where did the calendar go? It seems like there was just so much going on at any one time, that I was never able to focus on where I was, what I was trying to do. In this respect, this is a de-evolution from the Palm OS that I had grown to love with my first Palm III.

2. Cheap.
The thing squeeked in my hand. Every time I slid the keyboard out, I got that cringe-inducing plastic squelch. Maybe it’s designed for smaller, more delicate paws, but I couldn’t help feeling like it was going to fall apart on me. I imagine this is the feeling with many of these sliding-keyboard jobs, and I don’t have experience with many, but this one just felt cheap.

3. Fixed Keyboards.
The last two+ years with my iPhone have broken me from the physical keyboard thing. It took some time, and I don’t think I ever really took note of it before the Pre, but it turns out that I hate tiny phone keyboards now. They don’t change when my needs change. They don’t get all wide and wonderful when I turn the phone into landscape orientation. They don’t pop-up little markers telling me which key I just typed. There are just so many don’ts that I suddenly find it hard to believe they included a hard keyboard at all. The keys were just too small to get any work done, and too inflexible for the needs of the applications on the device itself.

4. Polish.
There is an entry video on the Pre that follows this shiny ball of light floating about a landscape, introducing you to all things Pre-wonderful. The video is presented in portrait mode, or “tallscreen”, so it looks normal as you’re looking at the phone for the first time. When you touch the screen, the video controls fade in, allowing you to scrub through the video and control volume and such. The controls appear on the left side of the screen, sideways, as if you were holding the phone in landscape orientation. I was blown away. It’s one of the simplest bits of polish that I’d never really appreciated on the iPhone — when you turn a video from landscape to portrait, the controls change too — that when I found it missing on the Pre, I was stunned.

It’s a beautiful device on the whole, that shows what you can do with a smaller screen and alternative input methods, but as a consumer, there are so many little paper-cut issues that hit me in just 20 minutes, I have to worry that in three hours, or three days, I’d have plum bled out.

This is why it breaks my heart to read this piece from Eric Savitz over at Barrons finding that it looks like others are in the same boat — not buying the Pre. Competition is good. Product evolution is better. But the clock is ticking, and aside from Best Buy, I have still never seen a Palm Pre in use in the wild.

Eller adds that “with the Palm’s fade,” takeover talk is also likely to evaporate. As the world realizes that the WebOS is “good but not mature enough for developers,” he adds, “Palm’s strategic value to potential acquirers diminishes.”

link: Palm: Pre Sales To Whiff Targets? – Tech Trader Daily – Barrons.com

From NPD this morning:

According to NPD MusicWatch, when it comes to the unit-sales volume of music sold at retail – including paid digital music downloads and CDs – Apple iTunes leads in the U.S. with 25 percent of music units sold, which is up from 21 percent in 2008 and 14 percent in 2007. Walmart (including Walmart, Walmart.com, Walmart Music Downloads) remains in second position with 14 percent of music volume sold at their stores and Web sites with Best Buy ranked third.

via Digital Music Increases Share of Overall Music Sales Volume in the U.S. .

This is where we are starting to see the trouble of Apple’s dominance in the market. Competition is important. Competition drives innovation. Apple, of all companies needs competitors. But the dominance in the market of iTunes and the iPod/iPhone is killing it. I want the Palm Pre to succeed on the merits. I want Amazon to be a killer digital music store (it’s on the way). I believe Apple’s products and store ecosystem are best-of-breed right now. But they can be beat. What is scaring me most about the current state of the digital music market is that before long, the most creative among us may just stop trying.

I haven’t seen the Hero, and likely won’t get my hands on it for some time now. But judging by the videos in Joshua Topolsky’s review that hit today, I’m not in a hurry. And neither, as it would appear, is Flash:

So Flash is kind of a big deal on new smartphones. The iPhone doesn’t have it, the Pre doesn’t have it, BlackBerry devices don’t have it… but the Hero does. Unfortunately, in our testing, we found the inclusion actually hurts operation of the phone more than it helps. When browsing to a site heavy on Flash (there are many), the browser loading times were abysmal. Furthermore, trying to view videos in-window produced choppy, nearly unwatchable results. You may have a better experience with lighter kinds of content, but in our opinion the main reason to introduce Flash into a mobile environment is to allow for broader media viewing options, and in the current state of this Flash player, you’re not really going to get much mileage out of it.

Watch the video and see for yourself. Loading the Flash movie is an atrocious, fist-pounding experience, and while I thought Topolsky nailed the rest of the review, on this point he was far too gracious. Two things I take out of it:

1) If your customers are clamoring for a feature in a product which you know will deliver a maddening experience for them, don’t deliver the feature. There’s a reason the iPhone doesn’t have Flash. There’s a reason the Blackberry doesn’t have Flash. There’s a reason the Pre doesn’t have Flash. It’s because the experience is abysmal for users.

2) This is more of a damning review for Adobe than it is for HTC. It’s clearly tough to scale Flash down to mobile devices, but it’s been years now and the natives are moving passed “restless” and into resignation that they’ll never get Flash at all. Politics aside, maybe HTML5 is a better bet?