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Deal or no deal?
I talked a little about Groupon, and why I think the model in general is ultimately challenged, in an earlier post after using up my Photobook Canada Groupons. I haven’t gotten to see the photobooks yet, so I’m still looking forward to seeing how that turned out. I’m also hopeful that Lightroom 4 support for creating PDF photobooks will help to push adoption of a standard that isn’t tied to a particular tool, since right now I have no option of reprinting the books I made with a company here in the U.S. We’ll see how that goes!
My reservations about Groupon has absolutely no effect on Valerie, though. Last weekend, when we were heading out, we had three of these group buying coupons to use on a single excursion! One from Groupon for entrance to the Seattle Aquarium, another from Livingsocial for lunch at Henry’s Taiwan, and a third from Google Offers for a Chinese bakery. And no, none of the barcodes in the above image are still valid, in case you had any bright ideas :).
There’s a cost to the consumer to going deal-crazy, though. We had to go to particular locales in Seattle for each of the above; understandable for the aquarium, but the other two places were not ones that we’d normally trek to and when you factor in time and the cost of gas, the deal is a little less sweet. And while Valerie is at least a little cautious on ensuring that the rating of places she buys deals at warrant an actual visit, perhaps due in part to past complaining on my part, it remains true especially for food that most good restaurants are busy at mealtimes anyways, and don’t need to give away 50% of their revenue to be even more full. For instance, we like Din Tai Fung in Bellevue Square – but every time we’ve been there, it’s been packed with a wait of a decent length to sit down; I don’t think they’ll be doing a group deal anytime soon!
I have no complaints about the aquarium Groupon; it was already on our list of places to take the kids at least once, and the Groupon made it half price for one of us – though the aquarium might have gotten as little as $5 (vs. $20 usually) on entrance fees. Looking for value is great too; indeed, last weekend, shopping for clothes, I managed to stack a 30% off coupon, a $5 credit, and a donate-$5-get-$10 offer with an outlet store’s usual “50% off and then an extra 20 off!” prices to pick up some ridiculously cheap stuff, from a brand I bought before I ever knew they had an outlet place. But generally, I’m still not a big fan of the group deal model!
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Ice Cream!
On account of good behavior, Olivia and Leo got to share an ice cream (okay, frozen yogurt that seems to have far too few calories to possibly be tasty) after dinner. Olivia took delight in being the arbiter of the ice cream, controlling exactly how much her little brother received – but to her credit, she was reasonably fair with the occasional reminder that the treat wasn’t hers alone.
(Courtesy break here to save your RSS reader from too many photos)
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Lightroom 4
One of the very early things I posted here were thoughts on processing, part of a few pages I created to share my thoughts from a non-photographers perspective – that is, someone more oriented towards getting nice shots of their kids than hanging their work in a gallery someday. That page essentially argued that processing your photos after taking them is of great value to non-photographers, in particular for fixing mistakes that a professional would never have made or would have caught before it was too late. I ran through the various tools I had tried, before expressing my tremendous satisfaction with Adobe Lightroom 3.
Well, Adobe Lightroom 4 became available yesterday, and while it’s box shot is mildly perplexing – I’m not sure it’s really representative of what most are likely to turn to Lightroom to create; in fact, you can’t really create images like that in Lightroom unless you stick feathers into people’s eyes for real – it’s phenomenal and well worth the purchase.
How can I be so sure just a day after release? No, it’s not because I used the beta extensively or anything to that effect. It’s that I thought it was fantastic before – and Lightroom 4 takes nothing away, while dropping the price by half to $149 (for a full copy). Even if nothing was new (and a lot is), it supports the old process version and tools, so at an absolute minimum, it’s a half-price version of Lightroom 3. I understood that $300 for software might be a lot to ask if you spent a total of $300 on your compact camera, but at $150, it’s cheaper than almost any lens or accessory you could buy for even an entry-level SLR – yet the capabilities it provides are profound. Especially if like me, you don’t do everything (or anything) perfectly in-camera when shooting.
There’s a good review up at dpreview.com that’s well worth reading, especially if you want to see what’s different between LR3 and LR4. Though if you have LR3 (or any prior version), it’s hard to imagine that it’s not worth the $79 upgrade price, because LR4 adds a large number of very significant features:
- Reworked basic controls. I struggled to see and figure out when to use Exposure vs. Brightness; people made entire videos on that topic. The new panel makes a lot more sense, and for black levels, also seems to provide a lot more control. It’s definitely easier on new users!
- Books! I haven’t tried this yet, and it sounds like a v1.0 attempt, but I’ll bet it’s a ton better than my recent experience with the software Photobook Canada provides – and it creates books that are publisher independent. It takes many hours to put together a book, and while some publishers supported PDF for a while, many didn’t and your books were locked into their service. Want a reprint in 10 years and they’re out of business? Too bad. I hope Adobe really iterates and makes this feature top-class.
- Geotagging! I stopped Geotagging when a bug in Picasa destroyed EXIF data on a whole batch of my JPEGs in an irreversible way (though all I really lost was the detailed information about what lenses I used, etc). Lightroom had no effective way to support this before. It’ll add some overhead to manually geotag my photos since I don’t carry one of those position logging devices, but at least now I can.
- Automatic Chromatic Abberation (CA) removal. I tried some photos where I struggled to control CA using LR3’s manual CA controls – and LR4 did a fantastically better job, instantly. This is really pretty huge if you’ve ever had photos that were marred by red/blue fringing (the kind that I think corrects easily).
- Video. I always wished there were some basic Lightroom-style adjustments like white balance that I could easily apply to a video without creating a new video editing project, and it looks like LR4 provides this. I haven’t tried this yet to know how well it works, but I intend to give it a shot, and it’s a worthwhile addition especially now that most current cameras do competent video.
- More local adjustments, including noise reduction & white balance. I’ve never wanted to do local noise reduction. But when you light a face with flash against a background with natural light, it did make you wish for this sometimes.
- Reduced Clarity halos. You had to be really careful in LR3 about pushing up Clarity because of the halos it would create on high contrast edges. Reviews don’t seem to make a big deal of this, but if it bothered you like it bothered me, you’ll really like this.
I think Lightroom was well worth what Adobe used to charge for it. At it’s new price, it’s a steal. That it comes with quite a few great new capabilities is just icing on the cake!
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Well, that didn’t take long
A few posts ago, I talked about 7.1 surround – and about how though it was mostly unnecessary for movies, I stuck with a 7.1 configuration for our room in the basement when replacing floorstanding surround speakers with wall-mounted versions to make some more space for little things like… actually being able to walk by without bumping into a speaker. The plan was just to replace the surrounds, and to stick with the Infinity Delta speakers I’d long been using as the left/center/right speakers. I knew I’d be tempted to go for consistency – but I didn’t think I’d cave in less than a month!
I had actually decided against making any changes – because getting matching Mirage speakers big enough to handle the relatively large space they’d be in was going to be a pretty expensive undertaking. We don’t get to watch movies or play games like we used to, so getting the “cost per hour” of the system down to a reasonable level would be hard – whereas the prior system had delivered somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 hours of service at a price of less than $0.50 per hour (with some of that equipment remaining in service despite the speaker updates – for now!).
What defeated these rational thoughts? Listening, unfortunately. Prior to buying the Mirage OMD-Rs, thoughts posted online fairly uniformly said that while matching the left/center/right speakers with the surrounds was desirable, it was really not that important. But after listening to some material with the new surrounds, there was a clear and noticeable difference in the sound from the rears. An audiophile – which I’m not – would have been able to characterize this precisely; to me, it just felt like there was more clarity and a different timbre. That, and the illusion of an expiring 10% discount from my first purchase with Vanns (the only authorized Mirage dealer), pushed me into placing the order. I got a pair of OMD-28 for the left and right channels, and an OMD-C2 for the center channel. The center arrived last Friday, with the main speakers showing up today.
The Mirage OMD line was designed and initially priced for the high end of the market, where prices start to get fairly crazy for barely perceptible differences. Fortunately (for me, I guess not for Mirage), that didn’t work out – and what I paid was about 1/3rd of what the speakers launched at, an amount that still seemed like a lot to spend on speakers. Mirage has been known over the years for an “omnidirectional” design that produces more diffuse sound; the manifestation of this in the OMD-28s and OMD-C2 is probably the strangest driver you’ve seen:
Being designed for a high price point left a few other interesting marks on the product…
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Mommy Cake, Daddy Cake
Leo turned two just a few days after the family came back from Asia. With Valerie and the kids jet lagged, and to make getting up for work tougher for me, we were out buying an orange at 10pm, and Valerie was just starting to work with the kids on making a cake at 11pm. Not electing to put my culinary skills to the test, I took a few pictures of them instead:
This post is relatively light on words, but heavy on images, so I’ll put a break here for any RSS users…
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Groupon and Photobook Canada
By most measures, Valerie is much more active when it comes to finding a “deal” than I am, though we seem to sometimes fit the stereotype that women like deals on things they don’t need, with men paying any price for things they think they do (whether that’s actually the case). I’m not above taking a good deal – hence that bulk purchase of way more used photo equipment than any non-professional needs – but I don’t buy things just because they are cheap. So unsurprisingly, she’s used group buying services like Groupon, Living Social, and Google Offers a decent number of times; by contrast, I just finally used my first Groupon.
Note that I didn’t say that I just bought my first Groupon. That actually happened back in 2010 sometime, when Greg in the office said there was a deal on printing a photo book from Photobook Canada. For some reason, I bought four coupons – I don’t even remember for how much – each of which provided $115 of credit to be applied to a future order. It took a surprising amount of time to actually do this – even though I created just one book for photos from 2008, one for 2009, and made two copies of each. But I really didn’t have a choice, as I’d gotten a half-dozen nag E-mails reminding me that my Groupons were going to expire at the end of February (which I’m sure is part of the overall business model). I had inquired about cancelling for a refund – especially since I now live in the U.S., and Photobook Canada doesn’t even ship to the U.S. – but no dice on that. Fortunately, they do offer local pickup, so we’re going to ask our family back in Toronto to get the books once they’re ready.
I have two sets of comments; one on Groupon as a model, the other on Photobook Canada specifically (prior to having seen the books they produce, which will greatly affect my impression of them in one direction or another). First, on Groupon – and as always, these are just my personal thoughts:
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Is 7.1 surround useful?
How many A/V receivers do you think Best Buy (.com) carries that support 5.1 surround – 5 speakers plus a subwoofer? 14. How many that support 7.1 channels or more? 44, with models that start at under $200. Don’t ask me how it’s possible to make a box that amplifies 7 discrete channels and does surround sound decoding and various other A/V receiver duties for that price! But in all seriousness, you look at what’s being sold out there, and you’d start to assume that you need to have 7 speakers plus a subwoofer if you want the “true” surround sound experience.
What about content? DVD is limited to 5.1 surround (via Dolby Digital or DTS), and not a single streaming service I’m aware of supports better than 5.1 on any title. If you even the possibility of 7.1 surround, you have to get your content on Blu-ray (which delivers the best overall quality anyways). So of the roughly 40 titles that I have on Blu-ray (counting series of things as a single title), how many have a 7.1 soundtrack? One. And the 7.1 title in question – Transformers: Dark of the Moon – is not really a title that I’d recommend owning; even for someone like me who grew up with Transformers and collected the toys, I found the movie pretty bad.
But let’s not judge by my collection! There’s a handy site – www.blu-raystats.com – that has a searchable database of almost all known Blu-ray content, with handy filters to narrow down the selection. Out of the 5,669 titles it reports with no filters, 295 are listed as having 7.1 soundtracks. Unfortunately, even this is deceptive. Even a cursory glance through the actual list quickly reveals that almost all of the movies are older titles that were definitely not recorded or mastered in 7.1 originally – so what you’ll hear out of the extra two speakers is just some the result of some DSP algorithm trying to create a more enveloping sound field. It doesn’t have positional information to know what sounds should really come from behind you.
So basically, 7.1 surround is nearly completely useless over 5.1 surround when it comes to most movie material. In spite of this, I’ve had a 7.1 setup for some time anyways, as a result of over-buying equipment a dozen years ago. Room geometry here in our new home meant it was time to change some of the speakers in a system that’s worked very well. Was it worth sticking with 7.1, or did my understanding of the above send me down a different path? And what speakers did I go from and to?
One of the new speakers; that’s actually a picture of it hanging on my wall!
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My D800 Preorder
(Image is Nikon’s, and links to their D800 page). In an earlier post on the announcement of the D4, I decided that the D4 was too big and too expensive to reasonably consider – and that the D800 was looking like it wasn’t the camera for me. Almost three weeks ago, on February 7th, Nikon announced the D800 (and D800E) full frame cameras. And in spite of what I had said earlier, I pre-ordered a D800 the day of the announcement. Did something change my mind – why did I preorder?
Well, pre-ordering alone doesn’t take much guts – you get to pore over all the samples, analysis, and early user feedback in the month or so that follows until the camera actually starts shipping, and if you don’t like what you see, you can cancel at no cost. And if Nikon’s past launches have been indicative, there won’t be enough D800s anyways, so it’d probably be trivial to sell it perhaps even at a profit if it didn’t meet expectations. I intensely dislike secondary markets that offer new goods at inflated prices (because it results in lots of non-customers buying solely to make a profit, making it more difficult and expensive for legitimate fans to actually get the products in question, without providing any value back to the product creator – see the first year of the Nintendo Wii for examples), but it does take any risk out of pre-ordering.
However, as I’ll explain below, I went a step further and actually committed to this for real. Given that the D800 isn’t intended to address my primary need – good enough high ISO performance to shoot the kids in ambient indoor light at shutter speeds that accommodate their constant state of motion – why did I commit anyways?
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Final Fantasy XIII-2
To say that I’m a long time fan of the Final Fantasy series would be putting it mildly; I’ve played every non-MMO iteration in the main series except for Final Fantasy 2 and 3 (though I did not play 1 or 5 through to completion when I did finally play them a decade after their initial releases). I’ve bought many of the original soundtracks, piano sheet music I can’t really play, and various figures, stuffed toys, and other collectibles. When the first North American performance of music from the series was scheduled – for a single performance – Valerie and I went to Los Angeles to see it. Nobuo Uematsu and Hironobu Sakaguchi were there in person! The music of the series has always been the high point for me by far, but still, it’s safe to say that I’m a fan.
Final Fantasy 13 wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It was incredibly linear, even for an FF game, and it wasn’t till you were about 3/4 through the game that you actually had the opportunity to experience the full extent of the gameplay that it offered. Others were put off by some fairly questionable character design elements (leading some to hope that that ‘-2’ meant ‘minus two’ of the characters they found annoying). While these concerns were legitimate, I still enjoyed it overall. Though character development options were somewhat fixed/limited, many fights that seemed impossible were actually surmountable not with grinding but with a highly tailored strategy in which you’d set up exactly the paradigms and equipment that you needed to survive that particular battle. You didn’t have to do these things, or you could just power up and come back, but it was very rewarding to get beaten 10 times, and then finally – with exactly the same party and equipment – find the strategy that allows you to prevail.
This is my first post in a month in part because I’ve been working through the sequel, FF13-2. I’ll get the good out of the way first, because what follows is mostly my astonishment and disappointment at the things I felt they did wrong. I still think it’s a decent game, and don’t regret having played it – but it had far too many moments where I just couldn’t believe what seemed like ineptitude in game design.
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Broom vs. Snow
I’m not sure how many people here in Washington would figure out that I was a Canadian if I didn’t tell them. No boots, no jacket, no gloves or hat, a car that’s useless in snow and has no chains – I probably seem more like someone from the tropics than a veteran of colder weather. Fortunately, the very mild and pleasant winter we’d been having returned today, with a daytime temperature of somewhere around 7 Celsius (45F). Since it had already become mild by yesterday, much of the accumulation of snow had already melted off naturally.
Still, our steep driveway doesn’t get as much direct sunlight as other areas, so there was still quite a bit of snow/ice/slush. It was clear that my car wasn’t going to make it (it’s rear wheel drive with low profile tires), but I wasn’t sure about the minivan – it looked like it might be close! Unfortunately, by a large margin, it didn’t have enough traction – in part because there was a layer of ice beneath some areas of snow. So shoveling the driveway was going to be necessary. Unfortunately, there was one more thing most Canadians have that I don’t – a snow shovel.
As I had a dinner appointment, waiting another day for the snow to melt wasn’t an option, so I looked around the garage for alternatives. Leaf blower? Maybe on the super light snow from last week, definitely not on what was there now. Pouring fuel on the snow and setting it ablaze did appeal to my lazier side, but probably wouldn’t earn many points with the neighbors. Nope, the closest thing to a snow removal tool was a large broom:
With the ice underneath, with a standard broom I’d just have been polishing the ice as if I were curling. Fortunately, this broom had a hard rubber scraper on the reverse side, which was actually quite effective in breaking up the icy bits underneath (this is not solid ice in -5C weather):
Unfortunately, with most of the snow cleared, a bigger challenge emerged – further up the driveway, at our neighbors, there was still a big pile of snow blocking half the driveway. Our neighbor – a student around 20 – came out to help. I had thought the snow pile was because the people who went sledding down our driveway made a small jump or something. He explained that he and his friends built a 6-foot high wall, which later fell down – this was just the remnants of that wall. He still seemed quite proud and impressed of their accomplishment, and a little disappointed I hadn’t seen it standing it all its glory! This also explained why he came out to help as soon as he realized I was clearing the driveway. Since they packed snow into blocks to make the wall, igloo-style, it was a bit tougher than regular snowfall. Since he had an actual shovel, it wasn’t too hard to clear, but unfortunately, the trusty broom was a casualty of this process:
I guess use as an ice pick just wasn’t something the manufacturers of the broom had in mind!
