technology

 If you have read this blog before you would likely notice that I tend to be interested in photography a good deal even if I'm not a very good photographer yet.  Art Wolfe recommended an e-book by a photographer friend, William Neill, and I have to say that I'm impressed, not just with Mr. Neill's photography, but with his e-book publishing style. Not only do you get a cleanly formatted PDF of his photographs, but each photography is a high-resolution file that can be "zoomed in on" for further detail review of the photographs he made.  This is what e-books should be, not merely regurgitations of the print versions with all of their limitations of size, print quality, and weight.  Hopefully McGraw-Hill and other textbook publishers will catch the cluetrain soon and awake to the possibilities of the Internet.  Stop protecting your dwindling print revenue streams traditional publishers!

Throughout a story today from the NYTimes, officials from Ohio are quoted as blaming voting problems on both government employee typos and "computer errors." I find this funny, because computers generally don't have ANY "errors", rather they have programming errors which ties back directly to the person, people, or companies that programmed the computer. Given that our great state of Ohio has chosen to use horrendously designed and programmed Diebold voting machines and tabulation databases, I don't think it would be a stretch to blame these supposed "computer errors" on further poor government decision-making and expertise of those building the databases which our voter registrations are being checked against.