Pricing a Hasselblad 503CX on KEH

 

Why would I want to get a medium format Hasselblad when a camera like D300 offers better quality, greater convenience and flexibility at a lower use cost? Because it has a much superior viewfinder! I still much prefer the FM3a to a D200, and especially to the D100 because of its much better viewfinder. And I think that I take better pictures on the FM3a because of it. I also think that a waist level viewfinder works so much better for taking discreet candids of people on the street. Most people don’t even suspect that they are being photographed.

 

On Branding

Recently I came across an incredible interview with Paula Scher from Pentagram. Paula Scher thinks that the “image issues” that the U.S. is facing can be solved with a little bit of re-branding! To paraphrase the Daily Show on this subject, “these are not our detention centers, these are our happy clown camps.” Branding people are fascinating in that they often seem to think that the brand can be entirely disconnected from the actual product. Although the audience for this campaign is not specifically mentioned, I wonder if it includes civilians in the combat zones.

Thinking of this interview and some recent New York Times and WSJ editorials, I came to the realization that news is run like branding campaigns. Essentially, it is a collection of slogans repeated ad nauseum with little or no supporting evidence. As few ever have time or interest to investigate beyond the slogans, this remains terrifyingly effective.

Paula Scher on Brand America

 

Crappy eBook Readers

So it turns out that Kindle not only does not support Unicode, it seems that it can’t event handle Roman alphabet diacritics!

see the discussion on Amazon

There are mainly two reasons why I wanted to get an eBook reader.

1) To read comfortably the enormous amount of content that Russian sites like http://lib.ru/ have. Oh well…

I just cannot believe that Amazon and Sony can invest so much money developing this hardware, while repeating all the errors of the pre-Unicode computer age…

2) I would love to replace several bookshelves of hideous computer books that I have with a small portable device. This doesn’t seem that promising either…none of O’Reilly books are yet available on Amazon as Kindle books. I would think that people working with computers would be among the first adapters and Amazon would have a strong incentive to make sure that they can get the books that they buy…maybe not…

As for Sony, things look even more dreadful. This screenshot below was taken today while browsing the “Sony Connect” bookstore:

 

Dari and Pashto Quagmires

I’m writing this in the hope that there are some poor souls out there who are doing the same thing and who can relate to these problems.

I am presently working at a place that develops on-line language courses for fairly exotic languages. The two languages that we are currently working on are: Dari and Pashto. The courses are being developed using Flash which supports the Arabic script haphazardly. For example, certain letters completely mess-up the order of words in a sentence. For Dari, the solution was to create an XML-based look-up table and using a couple of classes rewrite morphing characters using presentational forms. Pashto turned out to be tougher, as several glyphs didn’t have presentational forms, and only morphing forms. Our current solution was to create a custom font that mapped the missing presentational forms, and making the user install the custom font. Anyway, if anyone is facing similar problems or has better solutions and is interested in sharing their experiences please send me an e-mail to kirill at kirillmazin dot com. I can send you the AS classes that we are using to deal with these problems, and/or the custom font that we are using.

This weekend at Samovar

Just prior this picture was taken with an iPhone, Alan was making fun of some guy with crazy hair and a PowerBook/MacBook Pro at Samovar for being part of Apple’s perfect demographic. Btw, dropping the “PowerBook” brand name and replacing it with the inept “MacBook Pro” was dumb.

FF Meta Serif Introduced!

Exciting stuff…

Tsubo’s Website — Eponia

I wish some companies did a better job photographing their products and designing their web sites. How about showing a top view of the shoe? Also, who is responsible for designing a site that doesn’t accommodate multiple product views, but has corny animations in the navigation that play every time one clicks on any of the links?! The new shoe looks intriguing though…

Tsubo Eponia

According to Marquis Robert de Goulaine…

…drinking Muscadet with a dash of crème de cassis is a wonderful way of welcoming friends.