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Just so you know, sactraffic.org isn’t dead. I missed writing up a huge number of updates I did back in October, which is a shame because they included a lot of really cool speed tweaks and other updates that are just too numerous to list here now.

Anyway, I just finished another set of updates, though this time around the changes are more subtle. Outwardly I added support for geotagging the incident location in the Twitter updates so if you use a Twitter client that supports geotagging, the location of the incidents will appear with the tweet.

Behind the scenes I put in two additional changes. First I converted to Twitter’s OAuth mechanism for authentication, which should provide some more security under the hood and second, I switched to Google’s Closure compiler which provides better javascript compression than YUI Compressor which I adopted back in October.

Last, but not remotely least — and this was something I did back in October — the sactraffic.org code is publicly available via github under an OpenBSD-style BSD license. You can check out the code there and suggest changes.

Though now, with the days filled California’s characteristic sunshine, it’s hard to believe that only a few weeks ago we had snow…

and yes, this post also serves as a fine test of the Flickr slideshow embed code…

On my desk at work, back in the ever present dust, behind the gargantuan 30″ monitor I inherited from someone who found themselves suddenly unemployed, is a kaleidoscope.

The lettering on it reads:

There were once 7 of those at The Sacramento Bee but today there is just one: and it is mine.

All this brouhaha about newspaper’s “original sin” (see: Alan Mutter, Steve Buttry, Howard Owens, Steve Yelvington and lets not forget Jeff Jarvis for starters) got me thinking about those pre-historic online newspaper days. In looking back, I don’t see any singular “original sin” per se. If anything a Gomorrah-like den of iniquity perhaps, but no single point of failure.

Everything was new and we were pulling the whole thing our of our collective asses as we went (perhaps that was sin #1).

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The perfect is the enemy of the good. — Voltaire

Man I’ve heard that quote a lot recently, especially in the online news arena. It sounds all impressive and high falutin’, you know, being a quote from Voltaire and all. The problem is the above quote is almost always uttered as an excuse for something less than perfect or good… mediocrity.

Now, some would say that this is an outgrowth of the traditional newspaper mindset where existing in a virtual monopoly state — where “good enough” was in fact all that was needed for 30% profit margins — for so long has dulled that mindset to the realities of actual competition.

I don’t know that I’d go quite that far (tho it is fun to theorize on occasion) but I do bristle at the quote. Online operations are exceedingly competitive — and are becoming more so almost daily with the advent of local news blogs and the like — so if there are people running around thinking we can aim low and still be successful, well…

Since getting a 105mm Micro lens (its real name is AF-S VR Micro-NIKKOR 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED but yeesh…) I’ve been experimenting a lot with macro photography or in other words shooting reeally, reeally small things up close. Since, I’ve never owned a macro lens before, it’s been kindof a learning experience.

The first thing you figure out when working up real close is that as far as focus goes, there’s little room for slop. Tilt your head a little bit and the image is out of focus. No, not “a little soft” but blown-out blurry.

Of course there’s auto-focus, but when shooting macro it’s not always a big help. Generally auto-focus works pretty poorly up close, it simply pushes the limits of the technology. You can hear the motor frantically trying to move the lens back and forth that 1/16th of an inch you need to get that bug or whatever in focus (usually while you’re holding your breath and trying not to wiggle the camera, which when you do throws the auto-focus off even more).

Now if it’s dark, or you’re sporting an astigmatism in your shooting eye like me, we’ll then sometimes you might have to punt and just use AF. But be warned, if you use auto-focus for macro work it has to be dead on accurate. I used the wicked cool “AF Fine Tune” feature of my D300 to kick the focus of my 105mm macro lens back just a bit (+8 if you care). It’s not that the lens isn’t sharp, it’s just that “a wee bit” is the difference between a bug’s eye being tack sharp and nothin’ but blur.

My favorite subject at the moment is bugs and other creepy-crawlies, probably because they look so creepy up close and given the semi-rural area where I live, there’s a healthy pool to choose from.

Bugs however tend to move around a lot, and often times pretty dang quickly, so they offer additional challenges. I try to use small apertures to squeeze out the most depth-of-field that I can, in case the little buggers move. f/22 gives a little bit of leeway but the downside is that sometimes a little bokeh is worth having. f/5.6 on the other hand is pushing it. That wide and you can have a spider’s eye sharp but the rest of it too blurred to be recognizable.

I’ve found having a strobe handy is a huge help. Even a small strobe can easily throw enough light for f/22 at close range and have enough left to cycle quickly. I tend to pop my SB-800 on the camera, sometimes with the diffuser, and let the iTTL mode do the right thing, usually matching whatever f-stop I choose. Other times I just use it for fill.

It’s a lot of fun, and along the way I’m picking up a lot about the various critters we share this part of the world with. Did you know there are tarantulas in California?

Of course you don’t need a marco lens for those.

Early in my photojournalism career a Sacramento Union photographer once gave me some simple advice: get a hold of all the film you can and shoot it up. But as I’ve gotten back into photography, even when shooting digital which isn’t constrained by the limits of a 36 exposure roll of film, I’ve found it’s just sometimes easier to say to yourself: nah, I’ll shoot it next time…

You don’t make good pictures that way.

Tonight as the midwest-grade thunder cracked and lightning lit the sky up, I finally remembered those words and decided, no, it was going to be this time and I headed out into the rain.

I’m thinking that’s how you make good pictures.

While I hesitate to pick up on anything with Media News stink on it, if you haven’t seen the memo posted to Romenesko about Media News’ new online “direction” it’s worth a read.

I won’t repost the whole thing here but I will pull out the interesting bits…

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So I got a Kindle 2 for my birthday this year and now that I’ve taken some time to get a feel for it, I thought I’d share my thoughts a bit.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, the Kindle is the latest “e-book reader” from our friends at Amazon.

The attraction of the Kindle is that one can carry a huge number of books around in a package roughly the size of a DVD case with even more books on demand wirelessly from the online Kindle store. This alone is awesome! Add to it bookmarks, highlights, searching and on-the-fly definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary and you’ve got a powerful tool. Throw in syncing across multiple readers (like the new iPhone app) and it becomes almost insanely great.

But not quite…

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It’s no secret these days that newspapers are hurting (well, to be more accurate most newspaper companies are hurting, the newspapers they hold are generally still profitable enterprises) and a lot of people have been wondering what it will be like when the newspapers are all gone.

Well hopefully not like this.

Recently when the Sacramento Bee Newspaper Guild entered into concession negotiations with Bee Management, the local TV stations and “alternative media” jumped all over it and gave us all a glimpse into some ugly dystopian universe where the media eschews accuracy for what, speed? pretty pictures? I’m not sure.

First up was local TV station KXTV News10 with their atrocious handling of the whole story. From their end-of-the-world headline, Sacramento Bee Fights for Survival to their cartoonish editing online:

Advertising assistance Cindi Taylor has worked for the paper for ten years. “It’s pretty grim. It’s hard to watch people lose accounts,” Bee advertising assistance Cindi Taylor, who has worked at the Bee for 10 years.

They got so much wrong in their stories that it was laughable especially when a simple look at the Newspaper Guild blog provided far more information and contradicted a lot of what was being reported on TV.

But the negotiation teams weren’t laughing. The garbage stories (one media outlet at one point suggested the Bee was going to lay off over 500 people in the mistaken belief that the California WARN act was triggered at 500 people and not 50) were causing serious problems with advertisers who suddenly believed the Bee was right on the heels of the Rocky Mountain News which published its last edition last week when clearly it is not.

If TV outlets and other news sources can’t even get a media story right, how can they be expected to get anything else right? Yes the Bee gets things wrong on occasion and of course people think the Bee is as incompetent as the next media outlet, but I know these guys — the reporters and editors — and they really take this stuff seriously. They at least try.

If they don’t, who will?

So this year the wife and I decided to go to San Diego for this year’s family “vacation”. I say “vacation” in quotes because as any parent knows, there’s not a whole lot of vacationing that goes on during family vacations. There’s running after kids, who’s got the snacks, honey where are my socks, STOP HITTING ME, turn left here… NO NOT HERE, where’s your boarding pass, I’M HUNGRY!… eh, you get the picture.

We’d originally planned to just hit Sea World and then spend a few days at Legoland when the idea of checking out the USS Midway Museum came up. Since my father-in-law was stationed on it during Vietnam it seemed like a cool idea. Then since Ryan just did a report on it, we tacked on a trip to the Mission Basilica San Diego de Alcala. For any readers not in the 4th grade, that would be the Mission in San Diego (and for non California readers, the Missions are a California thing… look ‘em up).

Anyway, here are some notes on each:

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