Life and stuff

Here’s a set of pics from Rex’s Saturday outing at the Getty Villa. Kind of a bummer it rained in the afternoon, but it made me so much more glad my camera is weatherproof.

20070127 Getty Villa

Looks like the Apple Inc. of the camera business strikes again. I was beginning to write off the Olympus consumer cameras as “me-too” kinds of things until I saw the specs for the Olympus SP-550UZ:

• 28-504mm equivalent lens
• CCD-shift anti-shake

I haven’t been excited by non-SLRs in quite a while, and this is just enough for me to say “Wow!” The wide 28mm starting point for the lens makes it especially useful. It’d come close to being the ultimate walk around camera. (Most cameras in this class such as the Panasonic FZ-30 or the Canon S3-IS aren’t nearly so wide at 35mm+ as a starting point.) The lens quality is an unknown right now, but if it matches the quality of the 38-380mm ED lens that they used in the C-750UZ, it could be pretty competitive with lower-end DSLR kit lenses. The CCD-shift anti-shake technology from Olympus is a dark horse as well, but the fact it now exists is more promising than that “digital image stabilization” crap that the their marketeers tried to fool people with.

If the SP-550UZ is even half as good as my inflated expectations want it to be, then I’m practically sold. A new pro DSLR from Olympus with CCD anti-shake would be nice too, but I’m still learning the ropes with the E-1, so my wallet is safe from that for now.

Bush has called up 21,500 more bodies to go to Iraq, and one of the flight test engineers in my group is one of them. I hope he and all the rest of them come back alive — the current death toll is around 3,059 and not likely to stay in that area.

Dutch brewers launch dogs’ beer (news.bbc.co.uk) Its also fit for human consumption, in case you REALLY need your fix. Though the non-alcoholic part would bum the hard-core alkies.

A professor at the University of Calgary has published a meta-analysis on the nature of procrastination. (press release at ScienceDaily.) The findings are interesting:

• Most people’s New Year’s resolutions are doomed to failure

Definitely saw that one coming.

• Most self-help books have it completely wrong when they say perfectionism is at the root of procrastination

I’m glad I don’t read any self-help books. Because I’m very very far from being a perfectionist. Too much of the “good enough for govt work” idea instilled from on-the-job cynicism.

• Procrastination can be explained by a single mathematical equation

.. which looks something like Utility = E x V / GD

or:

Utility = (Expectancy of Success) * (Value of Completing the Task) / ((Immediacy or Availability) * (Person’s Sensitivity To Delay))

None of which I really care about, and looks a bit too simplistic, but it probably applies to someone out there (or can be tweaked accordingly)