DISQUS

I almost always shoot in Av mode. It gives you the aperture control, which I use to control depth of field (I think it's a finer control than Tv would offer). I have a couple of lenses that are f/1.8, which makes the blurry background real prevalent when you want it. You can bump the Aperture to around f/10 or f/11 to make the entire scene focused, but you sacrifice a lot of speed. When you get that height, you'll also see all the dust that's on the lens, so carry something that will blow it off periodically.

Just play around with it. Take some indoor photos at night with just the house lights on. You'll see how major the difference is in that light and outdoor. Screw with the ISO. Higher ISO makes it faster but adds junk to the shot. Knowing how much junk to expect makes you think about how willing you'll be to change that ISO from 100 (which I much much prefer) to 400, 800, or 1600.

Finally, I shoot almost exclusively RAW. I love the control and have become pretty proficient in Photoshop CS3 using the RAW editor. If you don't shoot RAW, the biggest challenge will be the white balance. I find that the camera doesn't accurately balance to sunlight, shade, clouds, etc., which is one of the biggest reasons I use RAW. I like to adjust the white balance to my eye for the shot. It's another thing to play with, for sure.

Good luck, and feel free to ask anything specific if you run into any issues. You know where to find me.

I saw these guys at conference and when I looked up the system I thought it would be redundant. I rarely deal with spam, though, so it wasn't a concern at the time. Keep us posted on how it works out.

Jesse,

Links were provided, as was contact information. We were certainly not trying to hide anything regarding that one post. And you're correct. The idea is a good one, and if executed properly, could have been great. It wasn't. That's the point of what we did-to show that there were major flaws. You can question my motivation, but I am here answering you and providing context. We don't have to agree, but it's important to see all that's out there and make your own decisions.

A couple of things here. First, everyone has a bias or two. We did not decide to look into the data until well after the announcement of the Vote Report and about midway through election day itself. Things happened that prompted us to look further. For instance, people were being excluded for what seemed like arbitrary reasons. That's fine. The Vote Report belonged to the people doing it, but you can't NOT follow your own rules then try to pass things off as legitimate. I posted the egg salad tweet to see if it would get through. It did. That's no different than the tweets posted by one of the volunteers for the Vote Report posting over one third of the tweets from our home state of Nevada. It actually proves our point - that the data is basically useless for any serious research.

Second, we focused solely on Nevada because we're local bloggers. As a blogger, I was emailed several times leading up to to Election Day and asked to help promote the project. I did on two different blogs. As the tweets started rolling in, I came to realize I had been duped. It was more an effort at marketing a few people's skills as "social media organizers" than a real report. Hence, looking at data.

The bottom line is that the voting system is more reliable than the project set up to identify problems. The assumed bias of simply starting this project hasn't even been brought up. Fortunately for democracy, election day was without major problems. The Twitter Vote Report, unfortunately, had a lot of them.

I love lambics. I once made one. It was fruitless, and wasn't nearly as good as the Lindeman's plain lambic. It was with bought yeast, though. The cherry is fantastic (called Kriek). I'm not as much of a raspberry fan. The best part about lambics is that they ferment them in centuries-old buildings and never replace the roofs. The yeast apparently lives in the roof and helps to ferment. Then they put them in barrels that are never cleaned. There are cobwebs all over the rooms and it's all totally natural. They're maybe the only style that hasn't completely changed in modern times. Great stuff.

I can add some thoughts, speaking as a true, authentic cubic zirconium. Colin mentioned the Internet and its inundation of our lives as possibly bogging us down. What if it's instead our own personal test? We take on more and more online and feel like it's wearing us down, but all it's doing is better preparing us for decisions and thoughts down the road, without our even knowing it.

This is about to be way more pop culture than I'm comfortable with, but having just finished both Blink and Everything Bad is Good for You, I might actually be making sense. Consider. In Everything the case is made that we're following more complex ideas with less trouble all the time. Those ideas, according to Blink serve to help us judge more quickly based on the knowledge we've gleaned, even if we don't realize it. That's a super simplified version of the thought process, but I think it makes sense.

And now, I can say that I've actually thought out new knowledge (at least for myself) and it's stored in a SQL database for eternity, or until the next time Kenzer's host explodes or he neglects to pay his bill. Also, pray the html tags work...

In SF they sell cotton candy with four layers. We bought The Girl one of those three years ago (she was four) in the fifth inning and gave her a new layer each inning. In the ninth, the Dodgers tied it and the game went 11. That hurt, but I still like the idea.