If you have a cash surplus...

Utopian Pessimist Calls on Radical Tech to Save Economy, article/interview.
Peter Thiel: "People take it for granted that their retirement funds can earn 8.5 percent a year. That’s what their financial planners tell them. And sure, you look back over the past 100 years, the stock market has generally gone up 6 to 8 percent a year. But in a larger historical perspective, that kind of growth is exceptional."

Thanks, Peter! I've said something similar in my money article. Given risk, inflation, etc, you can't expect the near-ten-percent growth that everybody likes to talk about as a god-given right. In fact I think that if you are risk-averse, you should be happy with any significant growth at all after inflation.
And I do think that the past couple of years have proven that it's prudent to be risk-aversive! Even great banks can fail spectacularly. So if you have capital, spread it over at least three banks, and put a bit in cash in your home, and quite a bit in gold bullion (not paper gold, actual coins like Krugerands) in a safe place.

Smiling models

I just learned today from one of my photographers that it's no accident that my bigger competitors in the nudie-girly-site market have so few smiles in their photo sets... apparently they prefer it like that, and instruct the photographers to have few smiles in the shoots, and (I guess), more "sexy" expressions.

I really don't get that. For me, smiles are so important. A set without smiles is almost useless to me.


I wonder if a big section of the broad audience really need help by a "sexy" expression to find (upcoming Domai model) Laura here sexy? I sure don't.

Miserere said...
Not everyone considers the same look sexy. Most of Domai's viewership probably think smiling girls are sexy, and those girls are on Domai because Big E. thinks smiling girls are sexy. It's a selection effect, me thinks.

eolake said...
Doubtlessly there's something to that.
Though I would point out that I don't select smiles because that's what I find sexy. I select smiles because I find them pleasant and wonderful.
It's a spiritual/human attraction. The sexual attraction is pretty automatic, you don't have to work on it, is what I'm saying.

Adobe Plays the Porn Card in Flash Campaign Against iPad

[Thanks TTL]

Adobe Plays the Porn Card in Flash Campaign Against iPad, Wired article.
Adobe does not like the iPad not supporting Flash.

-----
By the way, does anybody know if Twitter has a no-nudity policy on pictures? I've just gleefully been posting some via my Domai account without thinking about it, and so far so good, except now one of them is gone.
I'd like to know if they are likely to cancel my account if I keep doing it, because I could host the images myself, just be a little more work.

Phone card query

Phone card query, post by Neil Gaiman. His young daughter unknowing ran up a $600 phone bill.
"T-mobile now charges $16 a meg for data when you're out of the US.
... had Maddy not set off alarm bells, I could, I have no doubt, have come home to a $5,000 phone bill without even trying."

Sixteen dollars per megabyte! That's criminal. That's like hotel phone prices (which are also criminal, to my mind). One megabyte is three decent-sized photos, not even one youtube video.

Sunshine pics

I went for a walk, and it was very, very contrasty sunlight (winter sun and not a cloud in the sky), so I took the opportunity to test the contrast capability of the Pentax K-x and the 35mm Macro lens. They did really well.

I like these two pictures which came out of it.


... And the lens is damn sharp, as Mike Johnston said. (He called it a "paragon".) I admit that sharpness is pretty incidental to artistic expression, but, well, I simply get a kick out of it. If I get a bigger home some day, I'll get a really big printer, just to enjoy the quality of images modern cameras can produce. Lord knows, back in the day I'd have killed for this quality.
Sorry, TTL, I did it again, I blogged again about the progress of technology. I can't help it, I write about things which make me feel stuff, and tech progress gives me joy.

Burned-foil art

[Thanks to Japan Exposures.]

A new entry in the ongoing "art or sport?" category, this guy makes photo-realistic pictures by burning foil with incense sticks!

Teens arrested in sexting case

Two Lacey teens arrested in sexting case, article.

What worries me is that it seems that in areas with much emotional turmoil, people in general loose their intellectual faculties to a degree which allows the definitions of common terms to simply shift with hardly anybody noticing. It is clear that these days, "engaged in sexually explicit conduct" has been redefined to mean "nude". This is a big problem for many reasons.

It's also worrying that playful behavior by young teens is being lumped in with serious predatory behavior by adults. It's a very bad example of the lack of ability to differentiate.

This mental confusion also means that if a 16- year-old girl has a photo of her 16-year-old boyfriend nude, she is apparently now in "possession of child pornography" and may go to jail and be in a sex-offenders register for the rest of her life. It's really not a sane state of affairs.

Calibre for ebooks

Update: Cool!!
... One of the few disappointments I had with calibre was that there were no Danish news sources amongst the many, many international sources in the list. So I went to the MobileRead forum, the calibre room, asked, got referred to the "custom recipe" thread, asked there, and user kiklop74 created a "recipe" for me to load the three Danish newspapers I'd mentioned offhandedly. I followed his instructions to load them into calibre, and now I can read Danish news on my Kindle! So kool!

(I should mention that I generally prefer magazines to newspapers. What they call "news" is 97% stuff which depress you, and you don't need, and of dubious truthfulness.)

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Calibre is a nice cross-platform application for managing a wide variety of types of ebooks. It can also create ebooks, for example in the EPUB format, from other formats. (EPUB is used on iPad and other devices, and unlike PDF it allows for the reader changing font size, and the device will re-flow the text.) It seems EPUB is a variety of XML, which I understand to be a sort of hyper-HTML language for text formatting.

A cool feature of calibre (the author spells it with a lower-case c) is that it can be set to check with various news services and magazines on the web, and download them automatically and format them for a good ebook format for whatever ebook reader device you happen to use. Very neat.
... In fact there's a huge wealth of news and magazine type resources. Calibre will convert them to a format your preferred ebook reader (including phones etc) can handle.)
Calibre can also automatically send the articles (books) to you via email. I guess to your Kindle's email address, for example.

Hey, I have Dilbert on my Kindle! And when I get an iPad, it'll be in color too.
... I also have Wired Magazine, The Guardian, The Onion, The New Yorker, Mac World, Discover Magazine, Digital Arts Magazine, and these are just a few I'm trying out to see how it works. Everything seems to be perfectly formatted, and eminently readable, although I do look forward to the bigger and more contrasty screen of the iPad.

I hope the iPad will read aloud to me. The Kindle does, it's very understandable, and I love that feature.

... Talking about the Kindle, I do like it, but even in version II, there are some odd choices. For example, I'd like the Home button on the right to be a "page back" button, I need that much more often. And the home button should be a different shape and sit higher, because if you hit it by mistake, in some documents it's quite a trek to find your way back.
And with a grey screen background, why on Earth did they select to make the Kindle white? If it were black, it would not only look kooler, but the screen would appear brighter by contrast. This would help both the public image of the device, and the reader's eyes.

Update:
Just in case the main Kindle engineer is reading this... separate buttons for "text larger" and "text smaller" would be very helpful.

iPad speakers

I hope the iPad speakers are really as good as they say. Because while I love my Airbook, the speakers (apparently located under the keyboard) are barely adequate. They just don't go as loud as I'd like, even when just watching videos. And of course they are far from hi-fi. If the iPad is to be really useful as a video device without using headphones, the speakers have to be two notches better than that.
It is just too clumsy to have to take headphones on and off every time you put down the device. After all, the great thing about the iPad is that you can pick it up, put it down, and twist it all around, anywhere and anywhen.

How To Get the iPhone Kindle App Outside the U.S.

How To Get the iPhone Kindle App Outside the U.S., article.
"Thanks to the iTunes Store option to choose “none” as a payment method, you can sign up for a US iTunes account with nothing more than an e-mail address (not the one you normally use), a real address and a cellphone number. Any free applications are then available to download, and best of all, when you hook up your iPhone or iPod Touch the application just syncs."

For years now, with the help of a kind and trusting US friend who let me use her address and credit card, I have been buying both from the US iTunes store and the UK one, is another matter.

iPad and graphic-rich books (updated twice)

Thinking still about the iPad (sorry) I am sorta wondering... on the one hand, it does not look like anything new, only an amalgam of things we've had for a decade. Buuuut... I am starting to get the feeling that maaaaaaybe this may actually be a new platform for media. Or perhaps rather the start of the actualization of the platform which people like me, Jakob Nielsen, and Scott McCloud has claimed that we have had, since the mid-nineties...

For example web comics have not really taken off. Why not? Well... a couple of years ago, I did several hours of work to find all the web comics I could, and made one mega-bookmark to load them all every day to read. And yet I have never done this!! The durn mega-bookmark still sits on top of Safari, untouched, but not deleted because of all the work I put into collecting them. (Probably half the links are dead.)

I did not use them because I simply am not comfortable enough to sit and read comic strips in my office chair. And also, most web comics are scaled for tiny screens on PCs from 1997, apparently. If somebody makes a web comic application which really utilizes the iPad's potential, I think we have a whole 'nother game.

And also, as a writer/artist I get the weird feeling in my gut that there's a potential market here, similar to the app market which did not exist before the iPhone put the platform there. I feel that graphics-rich books of various kinds, perhaps some with videos embedded, would become much more sellable. It's just a feeling.

TTL wrote to me:
It will be very interesting to see the effect the iPad will have on how people read stuff. Who knows, it might even be that it will take a little steam off from writing articles on the web, when people start to wonder whether they should publish that content for the iPad instead.
Are we going to see more longer format writing again? Just as people learned to output their thoughts in byte size chunks that can be quickly consumed from blogs while sitting on the office chair.
I predict the iPad will be a game changer in more ways than one.

I'm getting just the same feeling about long-format writing, it'll be quite interesting.

----------------

I just wrote to David Pogue:
Dear David,
Re this article: .... so now baby boomers are synonymous with oldsters intimidated by technology!!
When you and I were kids (David Pogue and I were both born on 9 March 1963), baby boomers were the young and the hip!
Then they were the big and powerful.
Now, revenge is ours.
I must speak now, in a few years it'll be too late...
Love, Eolake

Anonymous said...
Who is David Pogue? If you are going to drop names, please make them people I actually know.

ttl said...
He's some Irish singer. No need to make such a big fuzz about it.

eolake said...
Yes, of course I was referring to the great Irish singer David Pogue, cousin and arch-rival of Bonno (I am never sure of the spelling, sorry). Although as serious fans will be aware, he is technically Scottish, but his parents moved to Ireland when he was less than a year old, so obviously he was left no choice but to come with them.

Word is that David has been trying for the last couple of years to find a hot female pop singer to make a hit duet with, but he keeps being frustrated by the fact that just as they start the agent message-tag game, the female singer will invariably become involved in some drug-related scandal or such, and David will have to pull out, not to shame his deeply catholic parents.

Another frustration in his life is that when he's in NYC, he keeps getting stopped on the street by people who mistake him for another David Pogue, who apparently write about computers or something for the NY Times. He can only make them go away by pointing out that unlike the other David Pogue, his ears are anatomically correct and he can use in-ear earbuds without problems.

Update: ttl said...

So, Eo, are you planning to publish some ... er ... “graphic-rich” books for the iPad?

Eolake said...
Definitely.
Although to be honest, less than ten percent of such plans of mine tend to pan out. So we'll see.

My latest idea is to do a "powerpoint" type slideshow instead, so each page is a drawing, and the "text" is spoken word which I record. This will leave the art free of text, because I find that text almost always drag the art down, aesthetically.
For example the most beautiful pages I have found in comic books over the years have been pages entirely without any text on them. But it's hard to tell a story that way, so I figure spoken word would be a solution. (Each page could be a full drawing, or it could be several like a comic book page.)

If one is good enough (I don't know if I am), one can also put a lot more tone and emotion and so on into spoken word than in text.

And of course a huge number of people in the world just are not comfortable reading, either for psychological or eye-sight reasons.

Kahimi Karie - Elastic Girl

A couple ole faves.
(The songs, that is. I've never seen the videos before today, and like most music videos (and CD covers), they seem to be basically tacked-on.)