July 7, 2008
Bear Stearns is old news, but that is usually when things starts to get interesting. Only after an event fades from the evening news (or cable news shows as it may be these days) can the real light illuminate a story.
Vanity Fair has a very interesting story about how Bear Stearns fell. It is a very long piece but I found it very interesting.
I get very annoyed at how the media and political talking heads distill major events like this down to talking points. The failure of Bear Stearns was obviously a very complicated event with many contributing factors. Reading the initial comments and articles about it, it is clear that very few people understood what happened. I understand that it is impossible to get real analysis of something like this immediately, but I think this difficulty is very telling.
The world is complicated, and our financial markets are certainly a poster child for complexity. The mortgage crisis was essentially caused because enough complexity was introduced into the system that the ties between profit and risk were severed. While we fool ourselves into believing we understand how things work, we are reminded time and time again that those at the controls often do not fully understand the complexities they manage.
It will be interesting to see if anything comes into the alleged S.E.C investigation into the Bear Stearns collapse. I’m not one to believe in conspiracy theories, but in a situation like this the conspiracy could be small and the actions very limited.
June 28, 2008
As I’ve posted in the past, I recently picked up photography as a hobby. Thanks to some great suggestions I started reading the Strobist website and this weekend I was inspired to have some fun with my flash (a Nikon SB-800).
These pictures were taken mid-day. There was a bright sun, but I reduced the ambient light by speeding up the shutter and closing down the aperture. Then I added a flash to highlight Nora’s face. In some of the later pictures I also convinced my wife to hold a makeshift reflector to serve as a fill light. Since I am shooting with a Nikon D40 I have to use the SU-4 remote mode on the SB-800 to trigger it remotely. In this mode the flash triggers whenever is ‘sees’ another flash fire. So I set the D40 to manual, setup my shutter and aperture, and turned the flash on manual to its lowest setting (1/32 power). This allows the camera to trigger the SB-800 without imacting the exposure too much. It took a while to tweak all the settings manually but I’m pretty happy with what I ended up with. The whole point of this exercise is to get the flash ‘off camera’ without exensive cameras or adapters.
You can check out all the pictures here (SmugMug).
I’m also working to utilize post processing (I shoot RAW) to improve my photographs. For this one I explored shifting to grayscale. You can see the original color in the above link.
June 14, 2008
Tim Russert died today of a heart attack at age 58. Sunday mornings will never be the same.
Meet the Press has been part of my weekly routine for the entire time I’ve followed politics, and Tim Russert was at the helm for that entire period. There was no one I enjoyed watching more. He will be missed.
June 10, 2008
I recently migrated my email over to Google Apps, and after a few weeks everything is still running smoothly. The only issue I had was accessing the Google Apps Gmail account from my Treo.
For the rest of the world, you simply need to go to http://m.google.com/a and install it. However, it is not supported on the Palm OS. However, if you do have a JVM installed, you can install the app using the following URL:
http://tinyurl.com/yns3f7
Or the long version:
http://m.google.com/a/v1.5.0.1187/L1/MailByGoogle.jar
Thanks to GoogleSystem for the info.
The application works on my Treo 755p but isn’t perfect. The font seems too big for the background layout. I’m not sure it is really much better than the pure web version though.
June 2, 2008
Erik van Oosten wrote a post on Open Source and money: “Do Not Offer Money”. He quotes my post about experience with JES 2.0 and the JBoss Email server. It is an interesting topic and he provides a nice anecdote about Christmas dinner.
The point is well made though. There are different ‘modes’ and expectations when you are doing it for ‘fun (insert any non-financial motivation)’ versus for pay.
I also want to be careful to not overstate the switch. I’ve continued some work on JES as well as other projects since then (iTunesExport). But the immediate impact on THAT project (JES 2) was significant.
June 1, 2008
My domain is registered at GoDaddy, but instead of using their email application or a fat client, I have it setup to forward all my emails to my gmail account. This gives me ‘anywhere access’, a significant amount of storage, and great UI for free. So what’s the problem? Well, for one, it still enforced the GoDaddy SPAM filters, which I’m not really sure how to control, or get reports from. Since I’ve had several people (not just you Ted) have issues with their emails to me getting bounced, I got fed up and decided to migrate.
So I signed up for a Google Apps account for ericdaugherty.com, verified my domain ownership, and added the appropriate email accounts.
Before I changed the MX entry to make it live, I imported all the mail from my original gmail account. Since I only signed up for the basic (free) version I had to import using POP. While I read elsewhere that Google wouldn’t let you do a POP import from gmail, I had no issue with that. Just went to the Account tab in Settings and added an account to download from. It had a few errors along the way, but seemed to self heal and import the emails. However, I realized that this would not bring over the Labels, which I do use, so…
Since Google offered a free 30 day upgrade to the Premiere version, I upgraded to that and did an IMAP migration. This is actually done through the Admin screen instead of the gmail interface, and seemed to work pretty well. Not real fast, but it brought over all the emails. At first I thought that it wasn’t brining all the labels for each email, but then I realized it was downloading them by label (folder in IMAP) and was assigning the labels as it found the emails in different folders.
I then went ahead and moved the MX entries over and fired off a test email. Worked like a charm.
I have several other google applications tied to my gmail account. For now, I guess I’ll keep them all as is. I see no real value in migrating those over yet.
Overall, it wasn’t too painful. In the next week we’ll see what other issues I forgot…
May 27, 2008
I’m tired of being sick. This Spring has been a disaster heath wise. I have seasonal allergies, so every spring and fall I’m always a bit ‘off’, but this spring I’ve added:
Several colds, the flu, a stomach virus, and Strep Throat. Oh, and I finally had my heel diagnosed as Achilles Tendonitis. It is caused by calcification of bone in my heal (a bone spur is stabbing my Achilles when I play soccer). So now I need to work on stretching out my Achilles (or have surgery whey they disconnect it, sand down my heel, and staple it back on my heel.)
As we cross Memorial Day weekend, hopefully I can put this mess behind me and stay healthy for the summer.
May 26, 2008
As an amateur photographer sometimes you have to work with what you’ve got. In this case, I needed my model to double as a Photography Assistant. Unfortunately, she wasn’t up to holding a reflector or anything else ‘complex’. So I figured I would try using a SB-800 at low power to provide the fill light. Unfortunately, that didn’t work either. She was a little to focused on the light:
April 27, 2008
As an attempt at redemption for my previous post…
Also at Tabblo
April 27, 2008
“Can we watch Simpsons? It’s my favorite” - My Son. He is 3.
