Before I left for the U.S., I failed to find the time to get a classic movie on DVD in Japan: It’s a Wonderful Life. I wanted to get it in Japan for three reasons: first, it only costs ¥500 there (about $4.50) because copyright has lapsed in Japan for films made before 1952. But the more important reason was that a copy purchased in japan would have Japanese subtitles, and so Sachi, my parents, and I could all sit down to watch it together. Finally, as the Japanese version was beyond copyright, it would be region-free, and so viewable on a DVD player at my folks’ house.

Because I failed to get it, I asked Sachi to in my stead. Failing that, I asked her to pick up Miracle on 34th Street. Well, she didn’t find Wonderful Life–but she did find Miracle–however, she got the 1994 version, on sale for ¥980. Alas, it was not region-free. And I figured that the remake wouldn’t be so good, as remakes usually aren’t. We didn’t watch it with my folks (I knew my dad would see the IMDB rating and balk–or worse, watch it out of obligation, and not enjoy it so much), but Sachi and I did watch it together a few nights ago.

The first surprise was the cast–they did a surprisingly good job casting the film (probably they got the people they did from the reputation of the story alone). The movie is brimming to overflowing with actors you’ll recognize–almost every role was filled with a name actor, including some bit roles. Richard Attenborough was the best possible choice for Santa Claus, and perhaps the major saving grace of the film. While he could not be expected to live up to the definitive performance given by Edmund Gwenn in the 1947 original, he did as well as anyone could have hoped to do. Mara Wilson (Mrs. Doubtfire, Mathilda) similarly could not compete with Natalie Woods’ performace, but she also did pretty well. Elizabeth Perkins (Weeds, Big) and Dylan McDermott (The Practice)were serviceable as the unbelieving mother and the faithful attorney-cum-father figure.

Other cast members stood out for their performances as well as for their name recognition. J.T. Walsh played the prosecutor trying to put Kris Kringle away; Robert Prosky (Mrs. Doubtfire, Veronica’s Closet) played the judge; William Windom (Star Trek, Murder She Wrote) played the affable owner of the good department store, while Joss Ackland (Lethal Weapon 2, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey) was way over-cast as the villainous head of the competing department store (which may be why he went uncredited in the film, despite his being instantly recognizable). James Remar (Dexter, 48 Hours) and Jane Leeves (Frasier) played the agents of the competing store. Even Allison Janney (The West Wing) made a cameo appearance as the shopper who is swayed by Kringle to be a loyal customer.

The film itself was surprisingly well made, and not too disappointing. While it pales in comparison with the original (the original had much better dialog, for one), for a remake it fared decently–but only where it stayed faithful to the original. Where it tried to go original, it failed rather notably, and unfortunately, the film did so in two of the most important side stories.

The first was the mechanism which got Kris committed to a mental institution: in the original, it was the young Santa impersonator that Kris took a shining to because of his good heart; Kris got violent because the store’s psychologist fed the young man bad and hurtful advice. In the remake, that storyline was erased, and in its place, we got an expanded role for the drunken Santa that Kris replaced at the beginning of the film, who is hired by the bad guys to intentionally provoke Kris into violence.

However, the worst substitution was, both figuratively and literally, the deus ex machina for the film’s climax. In the original, we saw workers at the post office mischievously decide to unload all their unsendable Santa letters to Kris, inadvertently granting him the recognition of the government that gives the judge the excuse to also “recognize” Kris as the real Santa Claus. That ending had both a humorous and natural flow that worked perfectly in the story, and was not at all preachy or intrusive.

In the remake, however, this was replaced with a literal deus ex machina, culminating from an overarching religious preaching that pervaded the film. Where the original was enjoyably secular, the remake suffered from a theme of religious superiority that was annoying enough all through the film, but stood out painfully at the climax. Throughout the film, there were presentations of religion and faith, mostly delivered by Dylan McDermott’s character, that rather irked me. Instead of the attorney/boyfriend disapproving of the mechanistic mother’s depriving her child of a merry childhood fantasy, the remake’s attorney clearly disliked the mother’s religious non-belief, demonstrated by an early scene where he insists on saying grace where the mother is clearly uncomfortable with it. Later, the attorney excuses the mother’s disapproval of her child visiting the department store Santa to Kris by muttering the word “unbeliever” to him. As it had religious overtones, it lost it’s playful innocence and sounded almost like a damning or a name-calling–the word “heathen” would not have been too dissimilar in the same context. It all smacked of the same cluelessness some religious people have when they preach to people of different beliefs, and then can’t even detect that those people are annoyed and insulted–born from living too cloistered among other believers to understand other points of view. This is not even a “let Christians be Christians” situation, but instead a smarmy put-down of non-Christians that all too many Christians are tone-deaf to.

But the deus ex machina comes in the climax when the little girl interrupts the judge’s decision, and gives the judge a Christmas card with a dollar bill enclosed–with the words, “In God We Trust” circled in red felt marker. Bolstered by a bizarre million-person flash-mob in the streets, where New York comes to a standstill so that everyone can stand silent until they all cheer at high noon, this clumsy interjection leads to a flimsy argument by the judge that if the government can recognize god, then by golly, he can recognize Santa Claus. This solution lacked the humor and frivolity of the original, replacing it with a preachy and unsatisfying injection of religion.

Had they simply kept the young Santa impersonator, the incompetent store psychologist, and the letters-to-Santa elements of the original, this could have been a much more enjoyable film. Done as it was, it was still enjoyable for the most part, but was more or less spoiled by the in-your-face religious message splashed into the story. While the original may have had some of the same elements, it was far less proselytizing–one could see it as being about imagination and magic, rather than religion and god. No wonder that the remake is commonly included in “Christian Cinema” lists.

Note: We did find It’s a Wonderful Life, by the way–on Google Video, of all places, complete with subtitles (which, for us, transitioned into Spanish halfway through…).

Here we are, caught between the years. It’s not quite 2008 yet here in Menlo Park, but it’s already well into the afternoon of January 1st in Japan now.

Either way… Happy New Year!

InfoWorld has published a “top ten underreported stories of the year” story, and weighing in at #3 is the old canard, “Hackers Take Aim at OS X.” This story is worse than many of the others, partly because it’s touted as a huge story that nobody seems to be paying attention to, and partly because it focuses purely on “vulnerabilities”–potential chinks in an OS’s security fence–and not actual hacking attempts. They give zero support to the idea that hackers are actually targeting Mac users more.

So far, the only even semi-serious threat to the Mac has been a single trojan–trojans revealing weaknesses more in users than in the OS–and there is no evidence that this one trojan had any success in duping more than just a handful of users, if even any at all. After a thorough search of the web, I could find no figures whatsoever on how many Mac users fell for the trojan–which requires a user to (a) be surfing for porn, (b) fall for the scam which says you need a codec to view a porn movie, and (c) requires the user to type in the admin password upon installation, despite a warning that a video codec needs access to change your operating system.

It should be that the whole “Hordes of Hackers are Overwhelming Macs with Attacks” diatribe is wearing thin, after being one of the most over-reported “news” stories of the year, a result of the security software peddlers relentlessly pushing this scare tactic on tech publications so they can sell as-yet unneeded products.

Some things really are just more expensive in Japan. I have noted before that electronics made in Japan will cost up to 70% more in Japan than they do when exported to the U.S. And while vitamins cost more in Japan than they do in the U.S., the difference was even more pronounced twenty years ago, when vitamins were not as easily found in Japan as they are today. But Sachi and I found that herbs are much more expensive in Japan–sometimes ridiculously more so.

In Japan, Chamomile herbs, at their cheapest, cost ¥313 per 30g package. The same herbs, from this store we visited in San Francisco, cost $4.90 for a 1-pound bag. That translates to ¥550 for a 454g package–or ¥36 for 30 grams, or just 12% of the cheap price in Japan.

An even more extreme example is Yellow Dock Root–in Japan costs ¥19,950 ($177.49), while a one-pound (454 grams) package in the US costs just 4.55 (¥511). The Japanese price is 35 times more expensive.

No wonder Sachi wanted to shop for herbs here in the U.S.!! Our only worry is that Japanese customs might not like all those herbs in our suitcases. If there are no restrictions, it would be a nifty way to pay for the trip–one suitcase full of herbs could net a profit of $2500 or so, if you could sell everything. Not that we’re planning to–we’ll just be happy if we can get the stuff in for our own personal use.

This is somewhat of a weird idea, almost disturbing–kind of like saying that rich people are more hard-working, or Asian people are naturally better at math. But there have been some stories floating around the web recently that would have you believe that the title statement is true. Note: I don’t believe a bit of it–just wanted to let you know that before you formed an opinion of this Mac fanboy’s leanings on this issue, which you may have done already just from the title. Anyway:

  This ZDNet article suggests that Mac users are more honest, though their data is a bit one-sided and weak: it is based on the fact that nearly a third of all Leopard sales were in the form of the Family Pack–a purchase that would be unnecessary for anyone wishing to install Leopard on multiple computers, should they wish to do so by buying the cheaper single-install disc, which is not copy-protected (it does not even require a serial number to be input). The only data on the Windows users’ side is paper-thin: no reports of relative software piracy, just a note that Microsoft goes to extreme lengths to copy-protect their software, which in itself suggests that Microsoft doesn’t trust its user base like Apple does.

This whole idea here does have some rather notable holes; Apple makes its money with hardware more than software, so it does not have the imperative that Microsoft does to protect its software as much (Apple does copy protect its more expensive software). Also, buying a Family Pack does not mean that you are being completely honest–it may just be a way for five people who do not live in the same household to pay $40 per person for Leopard instead of $120. Not as bad as stealing it outright, but not exactly angelic either. Not to mention that the article makes no measure whatsoever of actual piracy levels on the Windows side, so it is useless as an actual comparison of OS piracy amongst the two user groups.

  Harder data comes from this study, which found that “consumers who own Apple Mac computers are much more likely than PC users to pay to download music.” It reported that while about half of all Mac users paid for their music downloads, only about one-sixth of all PC users paid for theirs. It also reported slightly higher CD purchases among Mac owners.

While these numbers are a bit harder to dismiss outright, there are several chinks in the armor. For instance, the numbers may be based upon inaccurately low estimates on the number of Mac users, or perhaps that PC users simply consume less music overall. But the difference shown in the survey is a bit high to be completely explained away by just these two potential flaws.

It could be that Mac users are simply hand-led to a more legal avenue–with iTunes pre-installed, it is simply easier to buy legally on the Mac, while on the PC there is much more software available to download music illegally. Perhaps the average income of Mac users is somewhat higher, leading to a higher “what’s my threshold for dishonest behavior” effect. But again, these are somewhat weak. Nevertheless, it is kind of hard to suggest that Mac users as a group are somehow more intrinsically honest than PC users, even by a slim margin. Perhaps all of the above circumstances combine toward a greater data-altering effect.

  Finally, there’s this rather non-scientific survey which found that Mac users at Starbucks were bigger tippers than PC users–twice as big, in fact. Again, it might be more about the median income of Mac users, but then again, PC users are supposed to be businesspeople, and going to Starbucks is not exactly slumming, either. In the end, this “evidence” is more easily dismissed as apocryphal, isolated, and ultimately non-scientific to the extreme.

Now, despite what you might think about me being a rabid Mac fanboy (which I am), I seriously don’t buy into the “Mac users are better people” idea. Something skews data & perceptions about this, and much of the data, as I’ve shown, is rather weak. Mac users are no better than PC users, I have no doubt about that.

Nevertheless, despite not taking it seriously, it does <evil grin=”on”>rather tickle me</evil> to see stories like this floating around the web.

The Bush administration has been bashing Democrats for holding up military spending, even for small periods of time, or when the military has more than enough money to operate for longer periods of time. Republicans have loaded bills with all manner of unacceptable political poison pills, and then railed at Democrats for not “supporting the troops.” Bush and the GOP have repeatedly and shamelessly held the troops hostage for their low political purposes… and then we get this:

Friday, with no warning, a vacationing Bush announced he will veto a sweeping military policy bill because of an obscure provision that could expose Iraq’s new government to billions of dollars in legal claims dating to Saddam Hussein’s rule.

Regardless of how dishonest or slimy the Republican tactics concerning war spending bills have been, they have made their standards clear. By attacking Democrats for doing this sort of thing, they have made clear that they consider such actions unacceptable. By their standards, what Bush just did is as bad as you can get, no excuses tolerated. By their measure, Bush just attacked the troops and held up the war efforts. By their past claims, Bush has just betrayed the country and helped the terrorists.

What makes it worse is that this veto by Bush will actually hurt soldiers, now. In the past, Republicans claimed that Democratic holdups hurt the military because they denied it funding, saying that troops would stop getting paid or the military couldn’t buy troops armor or equipment–claims that were always clearly false. But this veto by Bush actually will hurt the troops in the near-term: at least one of the measures of the bill was a pay raise for soldiers that would have taken effect January 1st, but will now be delayed by at least two weeks. The bill also provided for veterans’ health care, job protection for family members of wounded soldiers, and provisions to prevent fraud and waste by military contractors.

And for what? To prevent Iraqis who suffered under Saddam Hussein to find recompense. Um, wasn’t the Bush administration supposed to be fighting for those exact people, and for the purpose of making right what happened under Hussein?

Even if conservatives see this reason for vetoing the bill as somehow “necessary,” they can’t have it both ways: either both the Democrats and Bush held up military bills for reasons they saw as being necessary, or both of them attacked the troops and the military and hurt the country.

Not that this will register with the right wing; for Bush and the GOP, there are always excuses, ones which somehow never apply to the Democratic equivalents. Outside of conservative circles, this is known as “hypocrisy.” Within conservatives circles, there is a blindness for that term when applied to conservatives.

By this time, it was pretty much inevitable that I’d pop the question to Sachi. We’ve both been waiting for it for a while; I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity, and Sachi has been waiting for me to get around to it.

Actually, I have been planning this for a little while now, trying to get things set up–getting the ring selection lined up and doing my research in that area, getting the timing right so the event would be special, that kind of thing. I wanted to do it at Christmas, but Sachi’s work kept her from joining us for Christmas by a day, and because she would be too jet-lagged the first night, we arranged for a special family Christmas dinner on the 27th.

Certain coincidences have been happening lately as well. When Sachi’s flight was an hour from taking off from Narita, I wondered if maybe she had her cell phone with her, and decided to call her. When I started looking for for her cell number on my computer, just at that moment an email came in from her via her cell–she was asking what my family’s address in the U.S. was, as she had to put it on some form for the flight. The timing was within seconds.

When her plane arrived, I picked her up at the airport. Doing this is always a difficult affair–since parking both costs money but more importantly, represents a long walk with luggage, my family always tries to time the pickup at the arrivals lobby. But the timing is difficult–you never know how long immigration, baggage unloading, and customs checks will take. The person picking up always gets there x number of minutes early or late, and somebody has to wait. Usually we do it so the arriving person calls the driver from a public phone; if the person picking up gets there early, they loop around the airport until the call comes.

So I monitored her flight (three hours late! Poor Sachi!), and just after it arrived, I took off for the airport. Just as I pulled up to the arrivals lobby door, my cell phone rang–it was Sachi, and she had just come out to the lobby that moment. Again, spooky timing.

Then, the day I planned to propose to her, we were up in San Francisco doing some shopping. We visited several herbal shops (Sachi is into herbs now, and we got a ton for good prices here), and at one that had a new-age theme, Sachi found some tarot-like decks. One was called “Messages from Your Angels,” and Sachi shuffled the deck and pulled one card out at random. It read: “Daniel: I am the angel of Marriage, and I am assisting you right now.” She showed it to me, in our usual, “Hey, when are you gonna pop the question?” joshing manner. I thought, “Dangit, Daniel, you’re spoiling the surprise!” Of course, it didn’t spoil anything, but wrapped up a rather interesting string of timing coincidences.

So we came back from the city and picked up the presents we’d collected, went to the place where we’re staying (a family friend who very kindly allows us to stay in her home while she visits family for the holidays) and wrapped the presents, then returned to my folks’ home for Sachi’s Christmas dinner (goose with stuffing and various fixings–really good). After that, we exchanged gifts (I got Sachi a MacBook, natch), and then things settled down so it was just Sachi and I and my parents. I made an excuse via noting the songs I should put on Sachi’s new computer to start playing our favorite song (When You Taught Me How to Dance, from the Miss Potter soundtrack), and then I took the ring in its case out of hiding, and proposed.

When I asked Sachi if she would marry me, her response was priceless: as she cried and reached out to hug me, she said, “Why not?” We all loved that line—to me, it sounded like a line from a movie–but it was not exactly what she meant to say. She wanted to say, “Why would I not want to marry you?” as she later explained.

The ring I gave her, however, was not the actual engagement ring, as I explained as I gave it to her. In order to both have the ring be a surprise and to allow her to pick out her own, my sister kindly lent us her own engagement ring to use as a stand-in. Before Sachi came, I did some research with the help of a family friend who is also a gemologist to pick out a number of possible ring mountings and diamonds to go with it. We then went through the assortment, and Sachi chose the one that she liked best. We probably won’t be able to have it finished before we leave–New Year’s coming and all–but we’ll get it soon enough after we get back.

Many people thought upon seeing the Apple TV, “Huh??” All it did was make it possible for a Mac in another room to stream video to the TV–essentially the same thing as hooking up your Mac to a TV by cables, except without the cables. So why spend $300+ on the wireless equivalent? At the last MacWorld Expo, almost a year ago, Apple’s stock dropped when the Apple TV was mentioned, only to shoot up again upon news of the iPhone. The Apple TV was a non-starter.

Well, the answer, of course, was that Apple TV was incomplete. What the device was really built for was something more than just wireless TV: it was made as a rental movie box. I speculated on this as far back as last December, after discussions with my family on the topic, and six months ago, rumors of talks between Apple and the studios for online rentals flew around the net.

This potential makes the Apple TV look a lot more attractive. The product could act as a “DRM box,” a way to express movies to your TV over the Internet with the least risk of copying and distributing them. Not that such a thing is actually going to stem piracy–all they need is one copy, and ripping a rental DVD is simple enough. But it might be enough to get the studios to get over their piracy jitters enough to agree to it, and one more revenue stream could even entice them enough to sell their wares through Apple (though don’t hold your breath for Universal).

Which brings us to today’s story:

In an effort to jump-start the market for online movies, News Corp.’s Twentieth Century Fox and Apple Inc. are preparing to announce a deal in which Fox movies would be available for rent digitally through Apple’s iTunes Store, according to people familiar with the matter.

That will certainly help. You can probably bet that Disney and their affiliates will be on board, and maybe even Paramount (they sell older movie titles over the iTunes Store). Interestingly, the article only mentions the Apple TV in terms of its poor sales, and not in its potential as a part of the rental movie deal. But the article does mention this:

In a related move, Fox also plans to release DVDs that use Apple’s digital rights management system, a move that would allow consumers to make legal copies of the disc that could be played on an iPod or other device, such as a computer.

Now, that’s an unexpected move–unless somehow they make it so that you are allowed to do this for an additional fee, which would fit much more into the studios’ “pay as often as possible” paradigm. But if it can be done at the same cost as usual DVDs, then that would be a nice added bonus.

An additional boost to the legitimacy of the claim: the report comes from the Wall Street Journal, a newly-acquired property of NewsCorp (play Darth Vader’s theme here), which also owns 20th Century Fox. That doesn’t make it a lock, but it certainly enhances the possibility that the report is true.

Unsurprisingly, Apple Stock surged over 200 again, and may stay there this time.

If you want full disclosure, I bought a largish chunk of Apple stock back when it was at $90. So, nyah.

I’ve been having a wee bit of trouble making some third-party purchases via Amazon this holiday season. The worst was in attempting to buy some SterlingTek batteries for the Rebel XTi. The low-priced ($10 vs. Canon’s $40) batteries come highly recommended by Canon users in a variety of forums, and I have noticed no enthusiasm for any other specific brand or seller.

So I decided to buy some, and instead of going through SterlingTek themselves, I tried to save a few bucks and instead go through the online store at the top of Amazon’s list, probably because of the low price. What happened was that I was most likely the victim of a little scam, else I was the victim of very poor services.

What I did not know at the time was that “SterlingTek” is not a brand name of battery per se, but rather a company that sells batteries of a certain quality. How other dealers sell “SterlingTek” batteries is somewhat of a mystery to me still–they’re probably just trying to feed off the name recognition.

But the seller Amazon had at the top of their list was a place run out of Oregon, called “TheMemStore.” I ordered the batteries and paid extra for “expedited” shipping, supposedly 1-3 days. The order was placed on December 17, the order processed December 18. The batteries were delivered on the 22nd. Not very expedited, if you ask me.

But that’s not the worst part. The order was for SterlingTek batteries. They sent me some other brand I’d never heard of, a brand which I could barely find on the Internet, and when I did, got poor reviews. (The brand is “MaximalPower,” and the SterlingTek guy said that that’s not a brand they use.) So, they sent me the wrong product, despite both my order and the packing list that came with the batteries clearly indicating “SterlingTek” products.

Worse, the store is closed weekends, so I was unable to get ahold of them until Monday. Then it all seemed fixed, when the sweet-talking operator kindly sympathized, apologized, and told me that she’d make sure the product I ordered would be sent off right away, with a package that I could send the wrong items back with. I emphasized that time was of the essence as I was leaving for Japan soon, and any delay could cause a delivery to arrive after I’d departed.

Today, two days later, instead of getting what I originally ordered, I got an email from TheMemStore, informing me that they did not have any of the item I originally ordered (it took them two days to check if an item was in stock?), and while I could return the batteries they sent me, everybody is happy with the other brand… making me think that probably they didn’t have it at all when I first ordered, and instead of postponing or canceling the order, they hoped I would just accept whatever they sent me. I have to wonder, how many people do that? Probably enough so they would do this kind of thing.

Apparently, if you resist or protest in any way to allow Christianity to be dominant over any or all aspects of public life, then you are an “Atheistic Fundamentalist.” We are supposed to accept that if one tries to treat everyone equally, including all and excluding no one, then we are some zany terrorist types running around trying to destroy religion.

Said the archbishop to the actress.

After stories came out showing that Romney’s father, former Michigan Governor George Romney, never marched with MLK as Mitt has claimed several times, people stepped forward to “verify” that George Romney indeed marched with MLK, “hand in hand” down the street. Then, to top it off, Romney posted these clippings which very much give the impression that it did happen.

It was enough to fool TPM (temporarily–they posted updates), as they initially posted that “it’s looking like” it all really happened. However, a closer look at the evidence suggests that Romney is simply playing with the truth more than ever. Look at the press sources Romney uses; Romney lists a press account from the Detroit Free Press alongside with a citation from Stephen Hess and David Broder claiming that Romney’s father marched “with” MLK. It certainly makes it seem like they were side by side.

Except they weren’t. Look at the Detroit Free Press citation and every other citation on the page, and you’ll see that aside from the Hess & Broder quote, none say that Romney marched with MLK. In fact, one of them says outright that Romney’s father was at the rally with “Hosea Williams, a top aide to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” which makes it pretty evident that MLK wasn’t there. But by featuring the Broder quote prominently, Romney obviously wants people to believe that the claims of his father marching “with” King were true, when they were not. And none of this addresses Romney’s past claim that he himself marched with his father and King. Not to mention that the only writers that put Romney & King together–Hess and Broder–cannot recall their source for that claim, which probably was simply them taking Romney at his word and printing it as if it were fact.

Romney claimed:

“My dad marched with Martin Luther King.” — Meet the Press, 12/16/2007

“I saw my father march with Martin Luther King.” — Romney’s “Faith In America” speech, GHW Bush Presidential Library, 12/06/2007

“My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit.” — interview with the Boston Herald, 1978

Here are the facts:

On Sunday, June 23, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. marched in Detroit, MI. Gov. George Romney did not attend, citing a policy to do nothing but attend church on Sundays. Romney sent representatives to read a proclamation, and they were “lustily booed” by the crowd. Source

On Saturday, June 29, 1963, George Romney spoke at a rally in Grosse Pointe, MI, where an aide to MLK was in attendance. However, none of the news stories covering the event mention King attending, which they absolutely would have done had King been there. Furthermore, Grosse Pointe and MLK historians have stated point-blank that King never marched in Grosse Pointe, MI. Source

On Sunday, June 30, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the closing session of the annual New Jersey AFL-CIO labor institute at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, making it unlikely that he was also in Michigan on the 29th. Source

So: Mitt Romney never marched with King, as he once claimed. Nor did he ever see his father march with King. This is because George Romney never marched with King.

This is not to say that Romney’s father was not a supporter of the civil rights movement; Romney’s campaign seems to try to spin it that way, to make it seem like people are denigrating his father instead of pointing out Romney’s own penchant for exaggerating.

But that’s not the point. The point is that Romney is just making stuff up (other examples: that he passed bills that didn’t pass, or that he was a “lifelong hunter” and NRA fan) in ways that make Al Gore in 2000 look like the very picture of accuracy. Nor does his “definition of the word ‘saw’” remark make him less of a parser than Clinton was. Not to mention, of course, that Romney’s propensity to flip-flop (on abortion, gun rights, the environment, stem-cell research, immigration, gay rights–a host of issues) makes John Kerry look like the very picture of stubborn obstinacy.

How do Romney and his campaign explain his inaccuracies and flip-flops? They are all due to “hyperscrutiny” and “fine-tuning.”

Romney, in short, has all three qualities that conservatives viciously attacked in the last three Democratic candidates for office, and he has those qualities in far greater depth than did the Democrats. So far, I haven’t seen conservatives taking Romney to task for those qualities very much.

But, of course, it’s not as if raging hypocrisy has never been observed before on the conservative side of things.

Really? Good, because I have a list.

Oh, he didn’t actually mean it? Hrm.

Is this the new version of the press release? You may not even be aware of the print version, in fact: many “news” stories are simply word-for-word reprints of text press releases, essentially ads put out by organizations in the form of a news story. Usually they announce some new product, an event, or an organization’s position on a news-related story–something that resembles news more than it does an ordinary ad. But it’s still an ad. A lot of people read them and don’t know that they come directly from an interested party, some business or other organization that has a stake in influencing people’s views.

And that’s the problem: people usually accept news reports as being unbiased, as coming from an uninterested source, giving an objective view. Press releases are the exact opposite of that. That some news organizations reprint this word for word, especially when they do it without any disclosure about the source of the “story,” is contrary to the idea of objective journalistic practice.

A new version of this seems to be the “video press release”–a short insert for TV programs or even web sites, disguised as a news report. Done in the same format (or close to it), it can be dropped into any TV show or web site and appear to be a regular news story. It may have preceded the Bush administration, but Bush certainly made extended use of it–especially the type that tries to hide its biased source and fool people into thinking that it’s a real reporter. This is even worse than the text press release, because people are less familiar with the fact that these even exist, and they are less likely to have some disclosure about where they came from.

Well, not surprisingly, now the RIAA has jumped onto the wagon, and has their own fake news “video press release” out--which, of course, does not identify itself as coming from the RIAA. It has all the usual RIAA claims, like the canard that piracy costs the industry billions, but it goes further, trashing pirated copies as having “atrocious” quality, and then quietly segues into full-commercial mode, suggesting “cool, innovative ways to get your favorite music,” such as buying Christmas-themed ringtones.

Ah, yes–nothing says “I got the perfect gift for you” like paying two and a half bucks for a shortened version of a song you already paid a dollar for, especially when it’s a song that is only usable on a cell phone for one month out of the year–and most people would find “atrocious” even in that case.

One of the things I wanted to know before buying the 10.1-megapixel XTi was, how did its 300mm zoom compare with the 10x zoom on my older 3.2-megapixel PowerShot S1-IS? Would the new, much more expensive camera deliver any better magnification?

The numbers were not translatable, apparently; no one that I could find had a direct x-to-mm chart showing equivalencies. But there had to be some way to compare the two. As I went ahead and bought the XTi anyway, I was able to simply shoot comparable photos and see what the differences were.

I should note that I was not taking any care to match the f-stop, exposure times, white-balance or metering, so the image colors and other qualities may seem different between the two cameras; this is simply due to my lack of attention to certain details, rather than any actual differences in the cameras.

If you inspect a camera’s image in Photoshop (or another image editing program), you can get information on what settings the camera was set to when the photo was taken–what shutter speed, aperture, and focal length, for example. This is called “EXIF” data. With the digital SLR, the focal length (effectively, the “zoom”) is directly proportional to the “mm” rating for the magnification. For example, my short lens is 28mm ~ 105mm, and my long lens is 70mm to 300mm. That’s exactly how the focal length reads in the EXIF data. 50mm is considered a standard focal length for normal photos.

With the point-and-shoot S1-IS, however, the focal length is reported as ranging from 5.8mm to 58mm, 5.8mm being the standard wide-angle “non-zoom” setting, and 58mm being the “10x” zoom. Even when using the same “mm” measuring system, the numbers are obviously not equivalent to what the DSLR’s use. So instead, let’s see what the photos look like side-by-side. Since there is not enough room on your screen, let alone my blog frame, to show entire photos, these images have been reduced, but in ways to show equivalency.

First, here are two images, showing the S1-IS at 5.8mm (max zoom-out) and my 28 ~ 105mm lens on the XTi at 28mm:

S1-IS

XTi

As you can see, the XTi’s 28mm was a bit more “zoomed in” than the S1-IS’s 5.8mm. Of course, the XTi has far more megapixels; the S1-IS image is 2048 pixels wide, while the XTi’s is 3888. If we reduce the S1-IS’s image to be proportionate to the XTi’s in pixels, it would look like this:

S1-IS

Compare that to the image just above it, and you can see how much more information the XTi captures.

Okay, now for the maximum zoom. On the S1-IS, max zoom is “10x,” or “58mm.” For the lens I bought for the XTi, the max zoom is 300mm. I took photos with both cameras of some birds just below the far shoreline. Here are the whole images superimposed.

This one is a bit confusing to sort out. The XTi’s image looks smaller, but that just means that it is zoomed in more. I had to reduce the XTi’s image that much to match the area in the S1-IS image. The XTi’s image is still 90% wider than the S1-IS’s, so clearly it contains a great deal more detail.

For a slightly better idea, this time I’ll show a small portion of the above images–a 450-pixel-wide cropped part of each image, showing what the exact pixels caught for each camera:

S1-IS

XTi

You’ll notice that the XTi’s image is much more “zoomed in”; this is a combination of the slightly greater actual zoom (about 20% more), and the increased detail from having more resolution.

You might also think that the S1-IS has better sharpness. However, there are two factors playing into this: first, I believe that the XTi was dealing with a smaller depth of field, and my inexpert focusing caused a different part of the image to be in focus; and second, as the birds and other objects in the S1-IS’s picture seem smaller, they also seem sharper. However, they are not. If we enlarge the S1-IS’s image so it shows the birds approximately at the same size at the XTi’s image, we get this:

S1-IS

XTi

This makes it quite clear that we’re getting a lot more detail with the XTi. Since I had to blow up the S1-IS image about 250% to get it to match the size of the XTi’s, I would guess that the 300mm zoom on the XTi is approximately worth a “25x” zoom for a point-and-shoot.

Now, I do have a telephoto converter for my S1-IS, though I forgot to bring it with me on this trip. However, the telephoto lens only adds 60%, for a total 16x zoom–not to mention that the quality is not all that great. With the 1.6x telephoto converter on the S1-IS, at full zoom, there is a lot of purple fringing and other artifacts that I have yet to see on the XTi at full zoom.

So, in the end, the XTi with a 300mm lens has more than twice the magnification power of my old S1-IS–if you include the extra boost given by the extra megapixels.

I’ll have to try another test on another day to see if I can work out the possible problems with focusing and other image settings, to give an even closer comparison. However, this will do for now.

I went to a few good birding spots along the S.F. Bay Area wetlands, specifically at the Marsh Road and Embarcadero Boulevard termini, where tons of birds are known to gather. And I wasn’t disappointed. One of the strangest-looking birds I caught was a Northern Harrier:

In addition, I got this Red-Tailed Hawk as it flew away; apparently, it had been hiding in a bush not more than ten feet away from me. I knew it was a predator taking off mostly because all the other birds scattered when he took off.

With both the above birds, I saw them in flight suddenly, and only had seconds to react. With my S1-IS, I would have completely missed both these birds unless my camera was on and ready to shoot, but only if (a) I could track and zoom on the bird successfully–hard enough just to do that–and (b) successfully focused on the bird, something almost impossible to do. With the XTi, I just raise the camera zoomed out to 70mm, center on the bird, and zoom in all in one swift motion, and then snap-snap-snap-snap-snap. The focus usually gets it right the first time, and one setting on the camera has constant tracking on the focus, great for birds flying toward and away from the camera. The max zoom on the XTi is a bit better than the S1-IS, but the megapixels catch the extra details that would have left the S1-IS image lacking.

In short, none of the above shots would have been more than a brown smudge with the S1-IS, if I was lucky enough to get anything at all.

Here is the American Avocet, a common but lovely bird, and a signature bird with some birding organizations. The first image has a larger version; the last two are tracking shots of an Avocet in flight and making a landing.

There were also the closely-related Black-necked Stilts (very similar to Japanese Black-winged Stilts):

There were also a number of different birds in the related sandpiper family–but frankly, I have such a hard time differentiating them (they are often even harder to tell apart than gulls), I didn’t want to take the time and trouble cataloging them.

There were also two Great Blue Herons (similar to the Japanese Grey Heron) in attendance:

There was also a Great Egret, but I didn’t get a good photo of it (too distant, and over-exposed somehow).

To my surprise, there were four or more rather large Black-crowned Night Herons in attendance, including one rather scraggly, mangy-looking one (both have larger versions on click).

There were also, of course, a good number of ducks. Northern Shovelers, Green-winged Teals, Northern Pintails, Canvasbacks, Mallards, and more. At the Duck Pond at the end of Embarcadero Boulevard, a lot of these birds were easy to approach, including Mallards:

Canvasbacks at Marsh Road were somewhat more skittish:

Two slightly more unusual birds were the female Bufflehead (too distant for a decent shot), and two Common Goldeneyes, one male and the other female:

Doesn’t that last shot make it look like the duck has glowing yellow eyes?

Now this duck in the center is tricky:

I swear, it looks like a black duck with a gold-leaf streak on its front. In actuality, it’s a Green-winged Teal, a light-colored duck–but this one is in the shade. The gold-leaf coloring is where the sun comes through between the rock and the breast of the duck in front of it. But the contrast is misleading–from the surrounding shadow, it doesn’t look like the duck should get that dark. The giveaway for the bird’s ID is the vertical stripe on its side–unique to this particular Teal.

There were also a gaggle of geese nearby–a mixed group of Chinese Geese and Greylay Geese:

And, of course, a lot of Canada Geese, these ones flying in flocks overhead:

And speaking of getting close up…

Those are non-reduced images, the full-pixel images, cropped. Here are reduced images that give a better view of the American Coot and the Ring-billed Gull:

This is probably also a Ring-billed Gull, just younger–between 1st summer and 2nd winter:

This is probably a Double-crested Cormorant–unfortunately, a rather uninteresting-looking juvenile, and not the more flamboyant adult with breeding plumes.

There were other birds as well; White-crowned Sparrows as well as several other sparrows, but one that stood out a little was the Golden-crowned Sparrow:

You can just make out the yellow on top of its head. There was also the usual Black Phoebe:

And there were several other birds as well–but that’s certainly enough for tonight. I’ll finish with an interesting moon shot; as a bonus, there’s a much larger version that could be applied to your Desktop if you want:

Based on a true story!

AL GORE: During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

RIGHT WINGER #1: You say that you INVENTED the Internet all by YOURSELF???

AL GORE: No, I said I took the initiative….

RIGHT WINGER #2: He “invented” the Internet! Haw Haw! Yeah, and I “invented” my dog!

ROBERT KAHN AND VINCENT CERF, CREATORS OF THE INTERNET: No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than Al Gore.

RIGHT-WINGER #1: Gore said he “invented” the Internet! Haw! What a lying jackass! Haw haw!

MITT ROMNEY: I saw my father march with Martin Luther King. You can see what I believed and what my family believed by looking at, at our lives. My dad marched with Martin Luther King. In fact, my father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit!

RIGHT-WINGER #1: Impressive!

REPORTER #1: Umm, that never happened.

REPORTER #2: Yeah, the story doesn’t check out at all.

MITT ROMNEY: Well, I was speaking figuratively, not literally.

RIGHT-WINGER #2: Well, that’s absolutely reasonable.

RIGHT-WINGER #1: Yeah, I can totally see that.

Hat tip to C&L.

Second day using the camera, and everything is going well. The focusing issue seems to be a matter of self-training, recognizing where the camera is focusing on and compensating. For example, when I am shooting birds on the ground and there are prominent depth-of-field issues, I notice that the camera will not focus on the center of the frame, but rather just below center. So, if I want to focus on a bird on the ground, I have to position it just below the center of the screen.

I also have yet to produce RAW images. Are they sharper than the JPEGs? I’ll have to experiment and find out.

I have also noticed more a feature I mentioned last time: if you are focusing on an area with several objects at different distances, the camera may focus on the wrong one. If you release the shutter and hold it halfway again to re-focus, the AF will usually offer a different object to focus on, as if to say, “Oh, that’s not your subject? OK, then how about this? No? What about this?” It can all be done pretty quickly, too.

Anyway, a lot of the same birds were there, but I did spot this Northern Flicker unexpectedly (click for larger image):

As usual, hummingbirds virtually swarmed around this giant tree near the bike bridge. Got one of them pretty well as it perched in a nearby tree. The first image can be clicked for a larger version:

There were also the prerequisite White-crowned Sparrows:

As well as the usual Stellar’s Jays and Acorn Woodpeckers, as well as a Black Phoebe that seems to have laid claim to the meadow:

There was also a flock of Chestnut-backed Chickadees. One I got real close; here’s a cropped-but-not-reduced shot:

Here’s a reduced shot, with a larger unreduced version after a click:

This one’s kind of cute, like the bird is hiding behind the flower…

And a squirrel; larger image on click:

So, what is Bush’s take on the CIA destroying the torture tapes?

BUSH: You know, you’re trying to get me to prejudge the outcome of this inquiry, and let’s wait and see what happens. Let’s wait and see what the facts are.

This should come as no surprise. He’s done it countless times before. Remember how he couldn’t comment on various ongoing investigations, but wanted everyone to just wait and see how the investigations turned out? Like the Valerie Plame investigation, for example? He just delayed and blocked and evaded until few enough people cared strongly enough, then swept it under the rug. Bush’s quote here demonstrates his intent to do exactly the same thing here.

Easy prediction: Congress will ask for documents, the White House will refuse, an investigation will begin, it will be stonewalled by the administration… and after we “wait,” as Bush urges, we will “see” nothing–but most of the public will have forgotten about this scandal, or else consider it “resolved” or not relevant because it’s old news. And/or, there will be three new scandals in the headlines in a month, and this one will get lost on the background noise like dozens of other scandals, any one of which would have caused serious damage to any other administration.

For the time being, however, the Bush administration knows a proven strategy when they see one: delay until people forget or just don’t care. And mention national security and 9/11 and terrorism a lot. That always works.

‘Nuff said.

It was just a short trip, down to the creek and across the bike bridge. Lots of birds down there. Saw two kinds of jays, some woodpeckers, a load of hummingbirds, Black Phoebes, Dark-eyed Juncos, a Plain Titmouse, American Robins, a Mourning Dove, plus a couple of less usual birds–an American Goldfinch, for one, and what looked like some sort of Meadowlark. Here are some of the images. As my 28-105mm lens only came this afternoon, I was just using the 70-300mm zoom.

First impressions: Wow, what a difference! With the S1-IS, the zoom was good and all, but startup, zooming, and focusing took so long in comparison. It could range from 6 to 10 seconds, from pressing the “on” button to taking an image at full zoom. The XTi turns on instantly, you can zoom manually at high speed, and autofocus works in a flash; if I don’t have to fuss with the lens cap, I can go from a cold start to a full-zoom auto-focused shot in less than 3 seconds. If I don’t have to turn the camera on, then less than that. And that makes a huge difference in bird photography; the birds will hop or flit out of frame so fast, I wound up losing most of my shots on the S1-IS to having to wait for the camera to be ready. Today, I caught probably twice as many birds as I would have otherwise. The camera felt like it was always ready.

First of all, was an easy test of good depth-of-field effects; it’s easier to get the blurred background with a zoom lens, taken at a bit of a distance.

Here’s another example with some nice flowers; an 800 x 600 version available on click.

This shot was partly luck, and partly the lens. A Black Phoebe sat up on a pole about 20 feet away from me. Still, the camera zoom and 10.1 MP helped a lot to make this bird appear large in the images. Click for an 800 x 600 zoom shot. Here’s another view of the bird, works better:

Here’s a photo of two hummingbirds perched in a tree at a fair distance. Alas, the images using the full zoom are not as sharp as I’d like; see below for a view of one of the hummingbirds at 100% size–the actual pixels from the original shot, just cropped. It doesn’t really get very sharp. But the extra megapixels allow for reduction and sharpening to make it look that way.

There were a few Stellar’s Jays–pretty birds, crested and deep blue and black.

The second one has an 800 x 600 blow-up.

Then there were some basic “brown birds,” or common birds of an uninteresting brown color; in Japan, that would be the Brown-eared Bulbul; here, I believe they are Brown Towhees here.

Still common but much prettier is the Dark-eyed Junco.

Also an interesting bonus with this camera: being able to catch between-the-frames shots like this Junco taking off:

That wasn’t usually possible on my S1-IS for a few reasons: first, even if I was fast enough to take the shot, and even if the camera was on and ready, it would still take a second or two for the camera to respond and snap the shot, by which time the bird was long gone. Second, the S1-IS takes almost a full second between shots, even without the flash (with the flash, well, forget about it).

With the XTi, the camera responds immediately, taking several shots in quick succession (if it’s in Continuous Shooting mode), allowing for the capture of flyaway moments like the Junco above.

It also allowed me to snap this image, a bird that flitted by for a split second and then disappeared. I think it’s a Meadowlark or something.

Finally, I got the American Goldfinch below. Several of them had flown into a tree, but this one stayed for a while, on a branch more visible than the rest.

For fun, I took some moon shots as well; the 300mm lens does a good job of capturing it.

Notes on the XTi: the focus is trickier than it seemed. I thought I was getting very good focus most of the time, but when I reviewed the shots on my computer, so many were just off. It was the usual problem with autofocusing on birds: anything in the foreground or background still has a tendency to rob the subject of focus. However, there may be a fix: the XTi normally focuses using nine different focus sensors, but you can limit it to just the center focus sensor. Hopefully, that would focus directly on whatever was in the middle of the frame. Hopefully; I will try that out soon.

Alternately, I could use the manual focus; it would take a little longer, but could yield better results. Or maybe not: if I couldn’t tell the focus well enough when taking the images, how good would manual focus be?

Still, the autofocus is much better than on regular point-and-shoots, and the responsiveness of the camera is just great. So far, I am very pleased with this camera.

One other point: I was looking for an thumbnail viewing program to use with the new camera’s images. Since they are so big (2~4 MB for each photo), I must weed out the bad images much more assiduously. But this presents problems. I never really thought iPhoto was great for this–iPhoto ’08 is acceptable in some ways, but was still slow going from one image to the next, and had some annoying foibles–like not actually deleting photos I removed, and after removing one from the list, iPhoto would jump back to the beginning of the list instead of looking at the photo after the deleted one. Other thumbnail image-viewing programs were only worse. (Though I must admit, I haven’t tried Canon’s program on the install CD–I should do that.) I was about to give up when I realized that I had the perfect image viewer: Mac OS X. Just open up the folder with the images, click on the first one, then hit the space bar to get Quick Look. It was a lot faster to view images, and if I didn’t like one, a Command-Delete would zap it to the trash. Arrow keys can change the view to the next photo in the list. Very handy!