According to the email, “it’s easy to join the party and take off overseas with Jestar“. Clearly this is a typo, and what they actually meant was “Jester“.

You can find a copy of the email here, but in case they have changed it there’s a copy below as well.

Today I came across the car pictured “parked” at Warringah Mall on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. It’s parked in a no parking area, and one right outside the pedestrian exit from the mall – in other words, in a dangerous place.

Over an hour later when I returned to my car it was still parked there, and still unattended. This wasn’t just a case of someone dropping off someone/something – they had actually parked there long-term.

The difference between this and most other times this occurs is that this time we all know exactly who it was that was parked there – it was Zoe! Now if this is how Zoe treats the law and safety of others, I hate to guess how she treats the pets she’s washing and clipping!

So take my advice and join me in boycotting Zoe’s Woofy Wash.

Click on the thumbnail to see the full screenshot.

In the end the choice came down to one of three…

Canon EF 1.4x II Extender (US$280)

Tamron 1.4x AF T/C (US$100)

Tamrom 1.4x SP AF T/C (US$180)

I ended up picking the Tamron 1.4x SP AF. The Canon had the advantage of being, well, Canon, but from what I had read on the Internet the Tamron’s had the advantage that they would work on my 100-400L without loss of auto-focus as they didn’t report their presence to the camera. I went for the “SP AF” over the more basic “AF” as the quality is apparently better.

Unfortunately it turns out that what I had read about loss of auto-focus is only true for the “AF” – the “SP AF” does let the camera know it’s there (it has a 10 pin connector rather than a 7 pin) which means the camera sees the 100-400L f/4.5-5.6 as an f/6.3-7.8, which disables auto-focus.

Thankfully the usual trick of taping over the extra connectors works and I was able to get it to auto-focus.

The results are pretty much what I expected – good without being great – but given that I’ve got an equivalent focal length of almost 900mm at the long end I can’t complain! (400mm x 1.6 x 1.4 = 896mm)

This was one of the first shots I took with it – at full 900mm equivalent focal length, hand-held in reasonable light. If you click on the photo you’ll be able to see the 100% crop (All Sizes->Original).

All up the quality isn’t perfect, but for the $180 outlay I’m more than happy!

They are, in alphabetical order :

Chichén Itzá, Mexico
Christ Redeemer, Brazil
The Great Wall, China
Machu Picchu, Peru
Petra, Jordan
The Roman Colloseum, Italy
The Taj Mahal, India

Unfortunately one of my favourites on the list – Angkor – missed out. The Sydney Opera House also missed out, but given the competition that’s hardly surprising.

So far I’ve been to 2 of the 7 winners (The Great Wall and Machu Picchu) – looks like there’s 5 more places to add to my list of places in the world to visit! If you haven’t been to Machu Picchu, you can try the next best thing by going to my 1500 Megapixel photo of it.

The Sydney Morning Herald today has a story on it’s website – “Chamber of secrets” covering the security measures being taken to keep the latest Harry Potter book under wraps until it’s released in 2 weeks time. The owner of one small bookshop in Sydney, which is named in the article, is quoted as saying that to keep in line with the security requirements “We’ve got to keep them in the back of the car” for 2-3 days before they are released.

They didn’t actually say “please break into my car and steal a copy”, but they might as well have – especially given that it took about 2 minutes to find the address of both the bookshop itself and the home address of the owners. Even if the statement was only a joke and they actually intend to keep the books elsewhere, they’ve still left themselves open to a broken back window if anyone feels the need to try!

For the most part it’s business as usual. The IronPort name will stay, with the official title now being “IronPort Systems, a Cisco business unit”.

So after slightly less than 2 months working for a small company (around 500 staff) I’m back to working for a large company (around 47,000 staff according to the Cisco website), but as we’ll be our own business unit it’s still going to have that small company smell!

There’s also been some local press coverage in the past few days of a few happy IronPort customers, including Slingshot (CallPlus) in New Zealand and RACQ in Queensland.

Canon’s website has a brilliant video on how their top-end lenses (like the 100-400L!) are made – from the raw materials right through to the final lens assembly.

http://web1.canon.jp/camera-museum/tech/l_plant/index.html

Enjoy

So if something is advertised for $10 – that’s exactly what it’s going to cost you. No extra taxes, charges, or anything else.

Unfortunately the USA doesn’t have the same concepts. I recently bought a digital photo frame ($69.99) and a coke ($1.29) from an OfficeMax store in San Francisco. To an Australian the total price should be simple – $69.99 + $1.29 = $71.28. But no, not in America…

First the $69.99 photo frame. In addition to the listed price there’s a $6.00 “CA Disposal Fee”, which apparently applies to all computer monitors and CRTs (is a Digitial photo frame with no computer connection a monitor? Apparently it is). So we’re up to $75.99.

Next there’s Sales Tax, which in CA (or at least this part of CA) is 8.5%. But the Sales Tax doesn’t apply to the “CA Disposal Fee”, so it’s 8.5% of $69.99, giving a total price for the $70 photo frame of $81.94 – 17% higher that the listed price.

Next the bottle of Coke. $1.29 according to the price on the shelf, but that doesn’t include the 4 cent “Deposit Redemption” ($1.33) or the 8.5% sales tax (which appears to also apply to the deposit) – so $1.44 total, or only 12% higher than the listed price.

All up, the two items that were listed on the shelf at $71.28 ended up costing me $83.38.

Of course it’s not the actual cost that annoys me, it’s the fact that you have very little idea of what something is going to cost. Can you work out 8.5% of $69.99 in your head? What if, like me, you didn’t even know the existence of the “Disposal Fee”?

The Australia method, where the price on the ticket is the price you pay – taxes and all charges included – is far, far simpler…

After a few changes on the website to handle the load (some more memory to the virtual server, and dropping most of the logging) the host is handling the load OK. In the last 6 hours it’s up to a bit over 10 million requests, and about 75Gb of traffic.

The usual Viral spread has started again – although Digg is still by far the biggest referrer I’m seeing hits from dozens of other new blogs/news sites.

If only Digg readers clicked on a few more ads I wouldn’t mind so much!