KirstenMortensen.com

I have just bought a new digital camera. Needed because I wanted something compact to take with me on my trip to London next month.

I debated which brand to go with; after reading a number of praise-filled reviews like this one, I decided on a Canon SD600.

Image quality was the overriding factor, a priority I learned with my last digital camera. The one before it was a Kodak LS443, which I loved. Its replacement, however, burdened me with a couple of irritants. It has a detachable lens cap, instead of a lens cover that opens and closes when you turn the camera on and off. If you forget to remove the cap, it’s catapulted onto the ground when you turn on the camera (by the telescoping of the lens). (The cap has a strap but nothing to attach it to — it’s too short to comfortably reach the hook for the camera’s wrist strap.) Not to mention I’m continually putting it down and then having to remember where I left it.

More damning was the image quality, particularly a color distortion that crops up all too frequently in constrasty images.

Compare that to this, taken with my old LS443:

When I zoom no this one I can see some very slight fringe where my sister’s teeshirt sleeve is juxtaposed against the lilypads; even at this size you can see a little purplish cast on the shirt itself, but it’s not nearly as pronounced.

I didn’t know this was called purple fringe until I started researching my next camera purchase. Turns out it’s not that uncommon. And while it’s partly due to the properties of light (a messy substance if there ever was one!) “Most of the problems seem to be as a result of individual camera designs.”

So. Here’s a shot out my back door with my old camera this morning:

I didn’t get a pronounced fringe but you can see the purplish cast. Here’s the same view, with my new Canon:

Needless to say, I’m thrilled.

Next step: a digital SLR. But that can wait :-)

Technorati Tags: digital cameras, purple fringe

Now that they’ve decided corporate agriculture is cleaner?

I suppose this was inevitable. First, the incidence of infections from food-borne pathogens is decreasing. For example in the U.S., between 1996 and 2004, E. coli O157:H7 infections are down 42 per cent (betcha didn’t know that, did you!!!) (What? We’re not dropping like flies??? Shocking.)

2. This can possibly be attributed to a systematic approach to establishing food handling standards dubbed “Hazardous Analysis and Critical Control Point” (HACCP).

Okay, fine. But

3. Here’s how the above-linked article (from CBC News) concludes:

The HACCP approach would never work if you had 10 million farms, 50,000 small feed mills, and 10,000 small processors. What allows HACCP to succeed is the much-demonized size and reach of modern agriculture. A big, mechanized operation like Natural Selection Foods can invest in record keeping, sanitation, delivery vans in a way that smaller ones would find worse than onerous.

Alrighty then. That’s quite a statement. “Worse than onerous.”

Would they really?

Personally, I’d like to hear what some actual small farm operators have to say on that topic. Until then, Strauss comes across, to me, like someone who found something provocative to write and liked it so well he didn’t worry much about whether it could be backed by facts.

(P.S. While tinkering with this post, I found a website of vintage audio where you can listen to a 1918 recording of “How Ya Gonna . . .” sung by Harry Fay.)

Technorati Tags: E. coli, spinach, farming, agriculture

Damn Interesting has a . . . damn interesting . . . article up about the efforts being made to devise warning signs for our radioactive waste dumps.

We need to erect a warning that could be understood by people tens of thousands of years in the future. To keep these future people from, you know. Digging that crap up and poisoning the entire planet with it.

It’s like a perverse twist on “we can send a man to the moon, but . . .”

We can’t even guarantee that the CD we buy today will be readable in 15 years, but . . .

Phew.

Technorati Tags: nuclear waste

A Dutch bricks & mortar bookseller has implemented Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology in two of its stores to help it manage inventory — and to help customers shop for books.

I find both applications interesting, but it’s the latter that truly rocks, and here’s why: once you’ve used Amazon’s search capabilities, hunting for a book in a traditional shop seems awfully combersome.

So to my way of thinking, any retailer that’s maintaining bricks & mortar outlets should be looking at ways to implement the customer-friendly aspects of online shopping in its physical locations. Being able to search for a product on an in-store kiosk is a prime example. Combine that with the capability to pinpoint exactly where that product is in the store and you’ve mimicked one of the major conveniences of an online store.

I mean, how many times have you stood in line at a customer service desk in a bookstore, you finally get a clerk to help you, the clerk looks up a title on a computer, leads you to the shelf, and then you stand there while the clerk spends another five minutes hunting for the book?

That’s pretty much the brick & mortar book-shopping experience.

Whereas with Amazon, you run a search on a title, click on “add to shopping cart” and you’re done. Don’t even have to enter your credit card info if you’ve set up an account.

The disadvantages of online shopping are that you can’t actually touch an item before you buy, and you usually have to pay shipping. Brick & mortars win hands down on those two counts. Bricks & mortars also have human beings to give you face time should the technology fail you, which is a huge plus when you need it.

So why not build on those strengths, but at the same time become more like an online store?

Another example: why shouldn’t I be able to shop at Gap.com from within a conventional Gap store?

No reason, except that Gap execs haven’t considered the possibility — or grasped what it would mean to its customers . . .

(RFID story found via Publisher’s Lunch.)

Technorati Tags: books, bookstores, online shipping, retailing