Jeremy Johnstone

A new geek term for the masses. Instead of calling the most kickass phone ever invented an “iPhone”, from now on it should be referred to as a “trouser mac”.

Last Friday a coworker brought around an Eye-Fi to show it off. After seeing how simple, elegant, and fast it was unfortunately the desire to have one overpowered me and I caved to the pressure. I mean heck, they are only $99 so why not give it a shot, right? Unfortunately when everyone else heard I was buying one and that I had Amazon prime I ended up having to order a handful of them as seen here:

When they arrived yesterday, of course everyone forgot they weren’t all for me and promptly accused me of pulling a “Bonforte” (Jeff Bonforte is a Yahoo VP who is notorious for buying new personal gadgets constantly, and never buying “just one”, but rather several even if the toy was expensive and/or he had no use for more than one). I finally got the chance to play with it tonight and overall have been very happy with the experience. A couple issues I found:

1.) Their installation is in a browser. Since Safari is my default system browser (as any self respecting Mac user would have it set to), the installation attempted to use it. Unfortunately they don’t support Safari and forced me to load a URL in Firefox instead. Thankfully they made it simple to do, but it’s still crappy they can’t make it work in Safari too.

2.) The app attempted to pull in my wifi password from the host OS. Since the machine never has been on a wifi network (heck, it doesn’t even have a wifi card) I am not sure where it got the password it thought would work. After sitting there watching it “attempt to connect” for a while I figured it was clueless, hit cancel, and then typed in the wep key manually. This worked flawlessly as expected and I was able to proceed finishing the setup.

3.) It seems that while you can configure multiple online services to upload to, you can only have one active at a time. Pretty lame if you ask me as I would love the ability to upload to both Flickr and Facebook, not just choose between them (especially since I can only choose online which I want to use). Another issue here is when I removed the Facebook account, it defaulted to selecting “do not share photos online” instead of flipping back to Flickr. The UI made this a bit more confusing since it hid that Flickr was even still configured, but thankfully it didn’t and Flickr still worked fine once I clicked the proper checkbox.

4.) While I can have it add the tag “Eye-Fi” to all photos it uploads, I can’t seem to have it add any other automatic tags. This would be immensely useful to be able to set a default group of tags to use on all photos, so maybe they will hopefully add this in a future update.

I’ve seen a lot of complaints online about it’s lack of ability to choose which photos to upload and other annoyances like that. Personally, that doesn’t bother me in the least because the intent I have for it is to sorta live blog my life. They are not meant to be high quality professional photos, they are meant to capture the moment. Since I am near the same set of wifi APs most of the time (home, work, friends’ houses, etc), the lack of support of public captured portals (aka coffee shop / hotel networks) doesn’t bother me much either. I know that once I get in range of one of my normal networks it will “just work” (assuming my camera is turned on) and my photos will be uploaded automatically. If you want one now too, Amazon.com will gladly take your money I’m sure.

If you are interested in seeing the photos uploaded by my camera, go here:

I will do my best to never delete photos and have it be a running capture of my life. If you decide to do the same, let me know your Flickr account!

A friend recently made the statement to me “you can learn a lot about a person by what they read”. Not quite believing in that premise, I decided today to round up the books I have read or are currently am reading over the past year. Surprisingly, I have more (at least) partially read books than I can count. Ok, I lied, I know of at least 55 books in the past year alone. That’s averaging like one book a week and mind you, many of these books are 400 pages or more (of course I haven’t finished the majority of them either).

After dividing them up into groups, I’ve found several general “themes” emerge. A big shocker to anyone who knows me I’m sure (hint sarcasm), but the biggest theme this past year was photography. I found 16 books at home alone that I have read in the past year. Interestingly, of all the “themes” this category had the highest percentage of books I actually finished reading cover to cover (roughly 60%). Not sure exactly why photography books I am more likely to finish, but could be the writing style or the fact it’s a fairly new subject for me to be reading. Of the books, about half are Photoshop books (with a lean towards photography and not graphics design) with most of the remaining falling into lighting or composition.

The next largest group (14 books, none of which fully read) is programming and technology related books. These books range from three books on OSX programming, couple ajax books, a handful of compiler theory/design books, to general stuff like Asterisk (a linux PBX software package). Something I found rather odd was the fact I don’t own a single Flex/Actionscript book, despite the fact over the past 6 months that’s been my day job (and something I had minimal experience with previously). I guess that can be attributed to how easy the language is to pickup because I feel I can hold my own against many with what I have learned in such a short amount of time (definitely not an “expert” yet though by any means).

The next group of books (14 books) in line is related to religion, social responsibility, and other thought provoking topics. The religious books cover a wide range of religions, from Christianity to Sufism to Taoism to Hindu. Several books that are also loosely related are around meditation. Other books in this group include a book on dreaming, Bill Clinton’s book “Giving”, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, “World Changing: A user’s guide for the 21st century”, “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” (a book I have been reading off and on for several years), and the classic “A Brief History of Time” which I reread in it’s 10th anniversary edition. This group also has the second highest fully read percentage hovering around 20% and the unique distinction of having every book had at least a few pages read.

The last group of books (11 books) are just what was left, a mix of random stuff. These include productivity books like “Getting things done”, to fictional books like the classic “The Time Quartet” (a collection of books from my childhood I wanted to reread), to general fact books like “What are the seven wonders of the world?” (a gift from my mother for Christmas last year). I also have a set of three books by Orson Scott Card, the “Ender’s” series, which a good friend suggested I buy that I haven’t had time to open yet.

So that said, based on the above books (and solely the above books) what do you think that says about “who I am”? I’d be interested in hearing your comments (either publicly on the blog or sent personally to me).

I personally do not state I 100% believe in what is said, nor do I claim the videos are accurate, but as citizens of the world I feel it is important we know the real truth about what is going on around us. Don’t let the media organizations form your view of the world, seek out other sources of information (like the below) and use all information (from both sides) to form your own opinions. To quote the creator of the following videos:

It’s important to point out that there is a tendency to simply disbelieve things that are counter to our understanding, without the necessary research performed. For example, some information contained in Part 1 and Part 3, specifically, is not obtained by simple keyword searches on the Internet. You have to dig deeper. For instance, very often people who look up “Horus” or “The Federal Reserve” on the Internet draw their conclusions from very general or biased sources. Online encyclopedias or text book Encyclopedias often do not contain the information contained in Zeitgeist. However, if one takes the time to read the sources provided, they will find that what is being presented is based on documented evidence.
That being said, It is my hope that people will not take what is said in the film as the truth, but find out for themselves, for truth is not told, it is realized.

Part #1:

Part #2:

Part #3:

I recently went ahead and broke down and paid for an Amazon Prime membership. I didn’t originally continue my membership after the trial because I didn’t think it saved me enough money to warrant it. Boy was I ever wrong about the savings and I sure am glad I went ahead and got the membership.

Case in point, I bought a new Pelican case on Amazon. Yes, I could have gotten it with free super saver shipping, but I am an impatient person when it comes to online orders. When I buy something, I expect to have it without much delay (5-10 days is unacceptable to me, two day shipping barely cuts it). So, I went ahead and got the next day air shipping (cost me $3.99 w/ my prime membership).

After getting the shipment notification, I notice the billed weight is 55 pounds! We won’t even go into how a ten pound case can have a shipped weight of 55 pounds (maybe it’s because of the size box w/ minimum weights or something), but next day air shipping on that much weight is freaking outrageous! Don’t believe me, look at the below screenshots. Now of course, Amazon I am more than sure gets massive volume shipping discounts, but even if it’s a 50% discount on the retail rate they still lost money on my Amazon Prime membership (only $90 by itself).

So, my question is, how does Amazon make money on this deal again?