Oh my … we should all be very frightened …

Remember my comments about the idiocracy? Take a look …

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/07/bobby_jindal_possible_vice_presidential_pick_but_has_a_creationism_problem_.html

If this fellow ends up being the Veep in coming years, the west is in for a bigger world of intellectual hurt than we already enjoy from the religious right’s choke hold on US politics …

Rogers – the run around mark II – from the ridiculous to the …

Warning: Language. I am tired, having been on the phone with Rogers for a long time and three people. I am irritated, having had no success. AGAIN. So if you don’t like rough language, then skip this post. Thanks so much.

… more ridiculous. That’s the end of the title.

I am stunned. I got an email from Rogers today that suggested that they could call me and help me upgrade my plan so I could get the new phone. Um … no kidding. I could help me upgrade too if all I wanted to do was piss away more cash. Good grief, the problem is that I was to find a reasonable solution to these costs while still getting decent features and service. All anyone wants to do at Rogers is spend my money …

I got a second email from the fellow that the first fellow said was going to call me. He told me to email back if I was interested. Hmmm … why not just call in myself, I thought?

So I called this evening. Having spent last night on a half dozen spread sheets with alternatives, I had settled on a plan that would chop more than $100 from my overall bill and retain all the things we valued, while jettisoning the things we do not value.

Today I called only about wireless, but let me first cover the other services.

Internet

This will stay at $99.99 Ultimate service. 250GB cap, 75Mbps down, 2Mbps up. Very nice service overall, performance is good except in the evening, when things bog down badly. Typical of cable systems where so many people share a segment.

I will not do anything that could get me under contract because I plan to check every quarter to see if we can get Fibe 50/50 service here. Same cap. Slightly lower download rates, vastly higher upload rates. Opens the possibility of doing cloud backups etc. And it is 20 bucks cheaper.

Home Phone

Bye bye. I almost never use it, and the only people who call us are telemarketers, notably the evil air duct cleaning companies. If it were 20 bucks, I’d keep it in a heart beat. But Rogers insists on charging me 50 bucks a month for some unfathomable reason.

TV

I want to reduce this. But as I documented in my last rant, I want to avoid losing HBO, Sportsnet One, and TSN2HD. We watch sports now and again and I really like HBO. See the last rant for reasons why Rogers has arranged these channels to pull many other packages and force people up to 100 bucks. It’s a rip off, but what isn’t in the Canadian media services market?

Besides … I am waiting for Fibe TV to come to my neighborhood. That service looks awesome.

Wireless

And now … on with today’s show.

The first person I chat with seems to want to argue every point with me. Really annoying. But eventually I get her to understand that I want the $45 voice and data plan in order to modernize my plans and thus allow me to upgrade to the latest generation of phones. Turns out that $45 is not enough because it contains only a 100MB data plan. This is apparently not enough revenue for Rogers to subsidize the modern phones, even though they allowed me to get the first iPhone with no data plan at all.

But, as with all things, corporate entities must grow and the way to do that is to force customers to reach for a higher bar. Nowadays they want you spending 30 bucks on data alone if they can get you there.

Eventually she realizes that all my wireless numbers have corporate codes on them as I got them when I joined my current company back in 2003. Thus, she cannot touch them anyway. Sheesh.

Person 2 – The Business Unit

This was a very personable young woman who really knows her stuff. We went through the whole thing again, with me alternating between telling her what I want and me ranting. She took that very well and had no problem agreeing with many of my points, since they are all perfectly true.

At one point she mentions that my monthly commitment to Rogers is higher than her car payment. No surprise … since it is almost double mine as well (and my Mazda 3 is only a year old.)

So … we spend a long time laying out the goals I want to achieve and she says she fully understands. She decides that she will call customer relations and explain everything to them, thus saving me the pain of explaining it all a third time. She feels confident that a long time customer (1987) like me with a commitment this huge should be able to upgrade his phone for a reasonable plan cost.

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I had been listening to silence while she was talking to customer relations, and suddenly I hear a burst of background music for a second, then a ringback. A fellow answers and asks for my name. I give it and he asks “how can I help you?”

Oh oh … this is not what was supposed to happen.

So I ask “are you customer relations?”

“Yes”

I say “I was just speaking with several people and the last one said she would call customer relations and discuss my situation and then transfer me.”

“She transferred you cold.”

I say “It’s been at least 10 minutes … did she speak with you at all?”

“No. How can I help you?”

I’m thinking … “you could go fuck yourself, for starters.”

But instead I say something like “I’ve been on the phone with Rogers for a long time and am too tired to go through this all over again. I‘ll have to call back.”

So … mark II ends as did mark I. Fuck!

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So … it will cost me $200 to cancel my youngest’s phone. It will probably cost me something to drop the TV service, but not much since my commitment ends in September.

I’ll bet I can get the cancellation fees back pretty quickly with Bell, at least in free stuff like the free PVR they are offering.

So now what? Do I have to keep taking this shit?

Windows continues to command a huge lead with my readership …

IPower sends me stats on my site periodically showing clicks etc. Turns out that I am up over 100,000 pages views a month because I get almost 40,000 visits per month, each of which obviously clicks on several pictures per visit. And I serve up my images from my gallery on iPower. Highly recommended, by the way.

So anyway … you can see that Windows continues to maintain about 70% of the market, which is well down from the 96% hegemony they enjoyed a decade ago. But still very dominant. As we are entering the post-Jobs era, and as Linux never really made much noise as a desktop OS, I think these numbers have the potential to hold for a while yet.

But then the news on Windows 8 is not all that good. An awkward relationship between trhe desktop and Metro has the potential to finally destroy Microsoft’s hegemony in the desktop OS market. If Windows 8 is another Vista, and the timing is correct for that to be true, then Apple might enjoy a freebee …

Manfrotto 334B Monopod and Smith Victor BH2 Ball Head

I decided to start working on my shooting technique again. Stabilization has turned me a bit lazy and my keeper rate has dropped somewhat. That irks me. I like to be choosing from all sharp images, not trying to find the “sharpest” image of the bunch. That’s just annoying.

But I’ve had a monopod before and I did not like it at all. I had made the mistake of buying a super high quality Giottos, which really was a thing of beauty. But it weighed a ton and was very slow to adjust. This made it so awkward to use that I ended up shelving it after a couple of sessions. And I later sold it.

I have been eyeing the Manfrotto Neotec 685B, which is a single trigger adjustable monopod that is about as easy to use as it gets. Step on the little stand thingy, squeeze the trigger, and pull it up. But it is $200 for just the monopod and you still need the head. At the time the 334B did not exist, but this time I went looking and there it was.

The 334B is the little brother to 685b and is a simpler design. Which I prefer, by the way. There is the familiar squeeze trigger at the top and it allows the top half of the monopod to be adjusted up and down. The bottom section can be twisted a half turn and pulled open to the desired length, then locked at that length while shooting. Since the trigger-adjusted section is about 2 feet long, it is an easy matter to get the bottom half just long enough to be useful at all required heights with the trigger only. In other words, this is just about as convenient and it has fewer parts to break and is cheaper. A win in my book. I paid $92 at BHPhoto and my preliminary tests say that this thing works really well. I can get very sharp images at very low speeds on unstabilized lenses.

Of course, one must mount some form os attachment mechanism on the top. You could, of course, just screw your camera body directly to the top, but I don’t find it very common that I hold the monopod perfectly level, so to me this is not a useful option. The same reasoning says that mounting a quick release clamp directly to the monopod won’t cut it either.

So that leaves a ball head or a tilt head, which is monopod specific. I have tried the tilt head and do not like it. I like the full freedom of movement that you get from the ball head. So that’s what I went looking for. Holy cow, are ball heads ever expensive! I didn’t want a micro, because I want to apply leverage to the pod and the head in order to lick in a super steady shot most of the time. That requires some strength. I looked on all the sites and prices for a decent low end ball head were quite high. So it was with some glee that I stumbled across the Smith-Victor BH2 ball head. I saw it as an arca compatible, medium duty ballhead that should be a perfect fit for this monopod. And I was almost right.

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Immediately upon mounting it onto the monopod (very easy, as their 3/8” mounting parts were a perfect match) I noticed that I could not top load any of my Arca plates. Oops. Turns out that this is Arca-like, not Arca-compatible. Grrr!

So my first inspiration was to install a spare Kirk clamp in place of the original SM clamp. This required removing the old clamp, which is held on by a sunken large headed screw. A screw should turn, right?

I took one of my many standard-sized hex keys and tried to loosen it. Not a great fit and no budging. Hmmm …

So I clamped the clamp itself into my workmate and gave it a try. I then tried it with a heavy duty drill and a matching attachment. The drill twisted in my arm. Eventually, the screw head basically stripped, rounding the internals. Very frustrating.

You can see the chewed up edges and the fragments of the screw that were torn out. No idea what they used to install that screw, but it is more than loctite.

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So I gave up on that approach and decided to see what could be done about the original clamp.

There was one review where the comment was made “I had to remove the safety stop in order to use my other plates with this head. It is inconvenient, since it still won’t open wide enough to drop in from the top, but it works.

Good, I thought. So I too removed the pin.

But my Wimberley universal ball head still would no Ifit. It stuck about third of the way in. So I decided to go with Plan B.

I had already had the thumb screw’s little cover plate fall off, so I knew that there was a big screw head inside, to which I applied my heavy duty cordless drill from Ryobi. There was resistance; after all, the screw head only opens 1/4” and then stops. But it was unable to resist the power of this amazing drill and out it came. All the piece parts fell off as well.

It went back together very easily, and suddenly I had what I wanted

But not for long. I was going to take the Tamron 500 with the Kenko 2x out for a walk in the woods to see what a telescope can do with nature, and as I tightened the thumb screw, I noticed it turning longer than it should. Of course, I realized right away that the soft metal had stripped. *sigh*

Is it just me, or is this thing the spitting image of Johnny 5

Anyway, you can see from my image that there is much dust and softness to the threads that I created when I undid the screw in the first place. This sucker is done for.

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Having now destroyed the clamp, the only thing for it is to again turn my attention to removing the clamp. Since the screw is rounded inside, My only hope was to clamp the ball as tightly as possible and then clamp the remaining chunk of clamp tightly into my workmate and twist with both hands.

And that’s the name of that tune. The incredibly cheap plastic bushing that holds the ball into the head (as opposed to doing some decent machining) has been broken loose and now follows the ball head with any twist, which means that even if I could get it fixed, it has no convenience left and the stability is now completely compromised.

So I paid $44usd for an Arca-like quick release plate that has a non-standard (flat head) mounting screw. Whoopee …

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So what should I have really done?

That one is simple … what I should have done from the get go was to attach the spare Kirk clamp to the quick release plate of the Smith Victor and then just used attached the SM QR plate permanently. Now I have an Arca compatible moinopod with a very nice ball head.

Of course, with all the soft metal and plastic in that ball head, it would have failed pretty quickly anyway. This ball head is for extremely light usage for people who don’t mind locking into a completely non-standard plate system. Most enthusiasts will want to give it a wide berth.

And what will my next ball head be for this experiment?

The Joby BH2-01EN ball head. We’ll see how that works out. It is supposed to be Arca-compatible, which makes far more sense than the Smith Victor approach.

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Update: Well, that was a bust. The Joby was cheap … too cheap. All I received was an extra plate. Sheesh. Henrys took it back no problem (although the store would not cover the shipping, which was perfectly fair.)

So … plan C. I asked at Henrys if they had any decent but cheap ball heads. No. But they had the Manfrotto 234 monopod head that tilts in one direction. So I caved and bought it … which is probably what I should have done in the first place.

I find it cumbersome in two ways: The adjuster is actually a wing nut with only two prongs, so is often awkward for a quick adjustment. Second, I have to hold the monopod perfectly vertical to get a straight horizon. This is much more cumbersome than you might imagine.

So … the grand experiment fizzles. It works, but not smoothly enough for me to be in love with it. Great monopod, crappy head. *sigh* …

Laksa

Another trip around the sun for me and my boys and I enjoy a bowl of Laksa.

Fuji f550exr  800iso  f/3.5  1/5  4.4mm  (24mm EFL)

My favorite soup, over Pho and the Mennonite chicken soup.

Update in 2017: The Singapore Restaurant closed late last year or earlier this year as the owners wanted to retire and the son did not choose to continue running it. This is a tragedy, as no one else has a soup quite like this. And I do not have the recipe. Sigh ....

A little perspective … will there be a global extinction event within the next 20 to 40 years?

Sounds like science fiction, fantasy, or a wing-nut conspiracy theory, right?

Well, perhaps … but read this paper and you tell me whether these guys are just wing-nuts. Doesn’t read like that to me.

Thanks go to Peter Croft, my friend from Perth Australia, for pointing out the article on his blog. Fascinating reading. I can’t find myself getting terribly worried about it because it will target everyone if it really happens, and no one gets to plan for that or duck out of it.

http://arctic-news.blogspot.co.nz/p/global-extinction-within-one-human.html

The warning about extinction is stark. It is remarkable that global scientists had not anticipated a giant buildup of  methane in the atmosphere when it had been so clearly predicted 10 to 20 years ago and has been shown to be critically linked to extinction events in the geological record (Kennett et al. 2003). Furthermore all the experiments should have already been done to determine which geoengineering methods were the most effective in oxidising/destroying the methane in the atmosphere in case it should ever build up to a concentration where it posed a threat to humanity. Those methods need to be applied immediately if there is any faint hope of  reducing the catastrophic heating effects of the fast building atmospheric methane concentration.