Project 365: 100 days

#1. Evolution (36 / 365)	#2. Moonlight (35 / 365)
#3. Video Game Violence (55 / 365)	#4. No Photos Allowed (20 / 365)
#5. Assimilation (57 / 365)	#6. The Globe (78 / 365)
#7. Will I Ever Make Explore? (75 / 365)	#8. Sylvan Stream (74 / 365)
#9. Night Settles on LP Field (10 / 365)	#10. Fillin’ Station (60 / 365)

I’m jumping the gun a bit since I’ve not posted or taken my 100th Project 365 picture. That will happen sometime today. But I was curious to look at my progress, so there.

Having gotten used to Aperture and its features, I coughed up the dough to Apple so I can continue using it. I still haven’t really spent time getting to know all of its features, but I can find my way around well enough to crop, straighten, adjust exposure, levels, etc. The less I do to a pic the happier I am, but occasionally I spend a bit more time trying to get a photo just right.

Looking over my 99 pics, one thing that makes me particularly happy is that I try not to focus on a particular theme. While I do tend to take a whole lot of pics around the house because I still have a hard time making time for my hobby, there is still a good bit of variety. Mostly still life around the house, but several of flowers and naturey bits thrown in, as well as sports, architecture, and even a portrait or two. This is a good thing I think.

Taking a look at my Top 10

1. Evolution is still #1 and my only Explored pic. I still don’t get what’s so special about it.
2. Moonlight makes a well deserved move from #3 to #2. It’s still one of my favorites despite a smattering of hot pixels (not newly discovered red stars).
3. Video Game Violence moves from #4 to #3. I really had a lot of fun making this one. And so did my son. He regularly presents ideas for my picture of the day that include assorted toys meeting an untimely demise. Perhaps I should worry. I need more stuff like this. Not necessarily blood and violence, but like this and No Way Out (43 / 365) that require a little thought and creativity.
4. No Photos Allowed falls from #2 to #4. I took this for the perspective, but its popularity is also party attributed to the security guard, standing to the left in this photo, who came and told me that photography wasn’t allowed in the mall. The admin for the Photography is not a crime group stumbled across this pic and invited me to add it to the group whereupon it received many views. It actually has more views than any of my other Project 365 pics.
5. Assimilation jumped from #8 to #5. Still shocked that I was able to capture this on the first try without any sort of assistance.
6. The Globe is one of my favorite little bits of serendipity since I started this project. I knew I wanted to take a picture of this glass globe but wasn’t quite sure how to pose it. I laid it on a magazine and found the words were magnified nicely. Even better when I found words like “depression”, “uncertain”, “the globe” and “I don’t know” and managed to magnify them within the globe.
7. Will I Ever Make Explore? is another new one and a bit of a joke. Flickr’s Explore contains some fantastic photography. And while I don’t expect to see my pics on there everyday, I’ll admit I have uploaded more than one image thinking this might be the one. Sadly, Scout remains silent.
8. Sylvan Stream. Speaking of stuff I thought had a shot at Explore. In any case I enjoyed my little drive out to Burgess Falls where this photo was taken.
9. Night Settles on LP Field drops from #6 to #9 which is just as well since it is a painful reminder of the Titans loss to the Ravens in the playoffs.
10. Fillin’ Station drops from #7 to #10. While I like it, it also demonstrates the quirkiness of flickr’s interestingness calculations. Within moments of posting it, it had 1 view and 1 favorite and was therefore, somehow, immediately among my most interesting pics. Right now it has 46 views and 1 favorite and is my 24th most interesting pic overall. While Uppercut (59 / 365) taken the day before has 86 views and 1 favorite, but is my 30th most interesting. Strange.

That’s it for this time around. I am having a harder and harder time trying to find things to point my camera at, but so far so good. Just two hundred and sixty-five more to go. Thanks again to everyone for your encouragement and feedback.

The Great Music Wars

Several months back I saw the light and switched all my music purchases from the iTunes Store to Amazon. Not only does Amazon tend to be a little cheaper, but all Amazon tracks are DRM free which means they can be played on pretty much any device without all that messy authorization nonsense that comes with iTunes purchases. Between me, my wife and my daughter we own several computers and iPods and many times haven’t been able to share tracks between them because of this. With Amazon music that problem goes away. If I buy music, or my wife buys music, it gets copied to the Drobo and everyone in the house can easily get to it if they like. The deal gets even sweeter with Amazon’s daily specials which regularly discount entire albums to anywhere from $0.99 to $4.99. Anyway, I’m a big Amazon fan when it comes to buying music.

So yesterday iTunes dropped all DRM from their music. This is good. In addition, they added a variable pricing scheme where some of the really popular tracks would be $1.29, but never fear (says Apple), this will be offset by many tracks which will be $0.69. This is bad. The majority of tracks should remain $0.99. I read this news with little interest since there was nothing in that news to sway me from Amazon back to iTunes.

Until this morning. Today I came across an article claiming that Amazon and Wal-Mart have followed suit and will charge a premium on their more popular tracks as well. Amazon will be charging $1.29 for premium tracks while Wal-Mart will be charging $1.24. I was a bit distraught. If Amazon prices their music the same as iTunes then they lose whatever advantage they may have over them. I’m certainly not using Amazon for the elegant user interface.

So, I did a little research. I looked at the top 20 selling tracks on iTunes and compared them to the prices on Amazon. Here are the top 20 most popular tracks on iTunes and the prices on both iTMS and Amazon:

Amazon has indeed increased their prices. But they are not anywhere near the changes that Apple has made. In fact it looks like the difference in price between Amazon and Apple has just gotten that much wider. Amazon beats or matches Apple’s prices on all but one track. While I can’t say I’m happy with the price increase, Amazon’s average price has only jumped a few pennies a track on average. While Apple’s prices have jumped almost $0.20 per track in this sample. I looked at a larger sample comparing Apple and Amazon’s top 100 tracks and found that in Apple’s case they are charging $1.29 for 41 tracks and $0.99 for the other 59. This brings the average down to around $1.11. An increase of around twelve cents per track on average. Amazon’s top 100 tracks had the following breakdown: 8 tracks at $1.29, 87 tracks at $0.99, 1 track at $0.89, 6 tracks at $0.79 and 2 free tracks for an average of $1.02 per track.

Now it may be, since Amazon has only recently adopted this price increase, that all of the changes have not yet taken affect in which case I may need to reconsider. But as things stand now, Amazon is in little danger of losing me as a music customer. I’ll be watching with interest though.

McNabb Mines

Company Store	Hotel
Two Story Structure	Coke Ovens
Rectangular Stone Building	Incline

Last week I finally bought a new GPS receiver in anticipation of some exploring I planned to do Saturday. I was going to be in Kimball, Tennessee having lunch with some of my cousins, and so I decided to add some nearby waypoints from the National Register of Historical Places. While looking through these places I came across one called McNabb Mines. The Register is a bit sparse as far as details go, but I was intrigued. Google came to the rescue with a link to this article from the Chattanooga Times Free Press. The McNabb Mines was apparently a small mining town built in the early 1880s and abandoned around 1910. This place was supposedly just sitting right there next to a lonely stretch of road along the banks of the Tennessee River and only maybe 20 minutes or so from where I was supposed to eat lunch.

Lunch was nice. Three of my cousins showed up. We ate, and talked, and enjoyed ourselves, then went our separate ways. My GPS guided me along the Tennessee River towards the location that I guessed the most likely location of the mining town. The Times article described its location quite well, but they weren’t handing out latitude and longitude, so my coordinates were a guess. I was a bit worried I wouldn’t be able to find it, but I needn’t have worried. As I rounded a curve at the top of a hill, there right next to the road were the remnants of the old hotel. I drove a bit further looking for someplace to pull off the road and passed the ruins of the old company store. I found a place to pull off the road just a little further down the road.

I explored the old hotel and company store, but it wasn’t clear from the article just how much of the original structures were intact. The Historic Register application I found said that there were 76 documented features, but again it wasn’t clear to me how many would turn out to be nothing more than a crumbled ring of stones. Although I was satisfied having explored the hotel and store I walked up the hill towards the general direction of the mines. I found a bit of crumbled foundation and while it wasn’t all that spectacular, I came all this way, may as well take a picture. I climbed a little higher up the hill so I could get a better picture when I noticed some very large walls amongst the trees a bit further up. These walls were much taller than those of the hotel and company store below. So further up the hill I went. I really need to get in better shape.

The Two Story Structure looked as if it were being attacked by trees. There were several lying across it as opposed to growing inside it like the buildings below. This one still had chimneys on two walls and also a tiny bit of plaster on one of the walls.

I wanted to walk further up, but I didn’t have a whole lot of time so I decided to make my way back down. On the way down I found another foundation and another. I didn’t take any pictures of these. A bit further down the road in the opposite direction were the coke ovens and the incline leading to the old mines. The remnants of another stone building were visible from the base of the incline and so I explored it a bit, but the day was getting late and I needed to start heading home.

When I got home and started getting some pictures ready to post on flickr, I reread the PDF and realized I missed at least two other buildings that would have been a lot of fun to explore. There is a church / school building that apparently includes an archway that was still intact as of 2008. Also probably 200 feet away from the “Two Story Structure” was what the archaeologists supposed was the company owners house. Much of it is also supposed to be intact, including 3 fireplaces. And of course, further up the mountain are the mines themselves.

It was a really serene place. I think in the hour or two I was there, three maybe four cars went by. I’ll have to go back sometime and see what else I can find.

Nashville / Griffin Video

OK so a buddy here at work was recently tasked with creating a video for a PR event that Griffin is hosting in Soho. The last couple weeks J has been roaming around the office and Nashville getting all this footage and no one was quite sure what it was. Or at least I wasn’t. There were mysterious tweets and filming of people in the cubes all around me (I can only assume he didn’t film me, because the goal is to help the brand, not hurt it). Over the last week J has been editing all these bits together into a video highlighting Griffin and some of the sights around Nashville, Tennessee. But wait! There’s more. Our warehouse manager, Tom Yarbrough, who will see his album released on iTunes in April, provides the musical accompaniment and the end result is fantastic. Great job Tom, J and everyone else that was involved. This place is really filled with a bunch of bright, creative, talented folks.

If you have any interest in Nashville, or an inside look at Griffin take a look at this video, it really is well done. Also, I highly recommend the HD version to avoid the stutters and audio sync problems. And, lastly, while you’re watching, keep an eye out for some Griffin / Nashville area Twitterers.

Twitter credits:
created by: @blatherskyte
music by: @tomyarbrough
cameos: @davedelaney / @griffintech, @keydesign, @rvalosik, @webslog, @jmrowland, @bradleyspitzer, @camerondaigle, and probably some others I missed.
sir not appearing in this film: @somegeekintn

Update: It looks like the video has been made private for some reason. I’ll update this if it is made public again.

Good Blizzard / Bad Blizzard

If you are even remotely familiar with video games, and even if you’re not, you’ve probably heard of World of Warcraft (WoW) and the company that created it: Blizzard Entertainment. World of Warcraft is a legitimate phenomenon with as many as 11.5 million monthly subscribers playing the popular massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG). WoW follows the Diablo, Warcraft, and Starcraft series and each was very well received. The reasons for this are many, but not least of these is Blizzard’s commitment to not releasing a game until they feel it is ready and meets their high standards. Whether of not this continues with after the merger with Activision remains to be seen, but that’s not really why I’m writing this post.

As good as Blizzard’s games are, their online account management leaves something to be desired. Like pretty much every online game, WoW requires a username and password to log into the game. This username and password are vulnerable to keylogging software which can be installed without your knowledge through your web browser. This software runs on your computer and relays back information to the bad guys, who can log into your account and clean out your bank and everything of value. If you don’t play the game, this may not seem like a big deal. It’s just polygons and pixels, right? Sure, polygons and pixels that can be sold for as much as $1000 or more. One thousand actual United States dollars. Have a look and see what a geared level 80 toon is going for these days. People have invested weeks or months of time in their World of Warcraft characters and you would hope that this account information could be made secure, but this keylogger vulnerability is apparently fairly common.

I know this because recently a friend’s account was stolen. Someone gained his account information, changed his password, transferred his character to another server, sold all his stuff, and took all his gold. Cleaned him out. Adding insult to injury, Blizzard charges $25 to transfer your character to another server. And since they have your payment info for the monthly fee, they will conveniently charge that $25 to your account so you don’t have to reenter any messy payment info. They took his fake money and some real money to boot. I’ve heard that several others in my current and former guild have had their account stolen as well over the years so this isn’t uncommon.

Blizzard does offer a device to combat this vulnerability, but that device will cost you an extra $6. Instead what Blizzard could do, without much effort at all, is to confirm a password change, account transfer, etc., by simply emailing a confirmation link to the email address associated with the account. Or alternatively, requiring the answer to a security question. Easy. Lots of other sites do this or something similar. This only prevents part of the problem, but it’s an easy fix and with 11.5 million people paying $15 a month to play, Blizzard can surely afford to spend a little to make a more secure system.

The next step would be a bit more trouble, but not any more than the work required to for the little USB device that they’ve created. Basically they just need to add an optional signed key solution. Login to the web site, generate a signed key which is stored on your computer and only allow a computer with a valid key file to login to the game. Keys, can only be activated through an email confirmation link. Problem solved. Instead, Blizzard is spending time and money chasing down these stolen accounts and trying to put everything back together for their customers. They’re spending untold amounts of time on a solution that is making no one happy, except possible the thieves.