The contest is over, and I managed to place fifth in Tim Iacono’s “Guess the 2008 Mid-Year Price of Oil and Gold Contest”. The contest began about nine weeks ago in April, and I’m amazed that I finished in the top ten. My gold guess was nearly dead on with 0.3% error, but my oil guess was a bit low with 6.43% error. Unfortunately, there is no prize for fifth place, and now I have another reason to be upset about $140 oil.

Gold did exactly what I expected it to do. Kind of. Back in April, it was still slowly falling from its peak in March. I guessed that it would continue to fall in May, and begin to recover in June. My reasoning was that “stimulus package” euphoria would create a brief, downward effect in May, and that another Fed rate cut would send the price skyward once again. I don’t know if the former happened, and the latter definitely did not… but who cares! Three tenths of a percent error! Woo!

Well, not that wild. This week, I’m ranked first in the “Guess the 2008 Mid-Year Price of Oil and Gold Contest”, over at Tim Iacono’s economics blog, The Mess That Greenspan Made.

Of course, as Tim pointed out, there are still several weeks to go. The contest ends at market close on the last day of June. Still, considering there are 111 players, I’m pleased to be on top, if only briefly.

My father, who grew up in Anderson, SC, was featured in a story in Anderson’s Independent Mail this weekend. The article covers some of the experiences of my father and John McCain as prisoners of war in Hanoi.

Dad is currently writing the final pages of his book, and should be sending me a rough draft soon. He got me a autographed copy of McCain’s book, Faith of My Fathers, during McCain’s 2000 campaign-slash-book-tour. I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t read it yet. I had always intended to read Everett Alvarez’s Chained Eagle first, and I still haven’t done that. Course, now I’ll be reading my father’s book before either title.

Speaking of books, go sign up at Goodreads and add me as a friend. My email address is dbfant and I use the Google mail.

Canon’s next rebel will be out in April. At this point, it looks a bit disappointing. Here’s a table outlining the things that annoy me about the XTi, in descending order of severity:

That said, I love my XTi. It’s a great camera. I just hate to see such an absence of improvement in the 4th generation of the Digital Rebel.

I bought a Canon 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 lens.

This is my third lens, not counting the 18-55mm kit lens. I bought it as a walk-around-outside lens, but how well it fills that role remains to be seen. My reasoning was that 28-105 would be a decent range for the kind of photos I like to take. I wanted a zoom since I hate juggling lenses without a clean, flat surface to use. Though the speed of this lens makes me a little uncomfortable, it shouldn’t be an issue in sunlight.

It’s also a macro lens. I don’t know how much use I’ll get out of that, but it might interesting to mess around with some.

I considered a Canon 28-135mm IS f/3.5-5.6 as an alternative, but decided against it. I’d love to have an IS lens someday, but this one got mixed reviews. It sounded like the build quality might be inconsistent. Plus, the price was nearly double that of the 28-105mm. If and when I get an IS lens, I will probably buy the Canon 70-300mm IS.

A nice bonus, but not something I really factored in, is that the 28-105mm uses 58mm filters, so I can use the polarizing filter I bought from komara back in September.

Once I take a decent photo with this lens, I will do my best to deliver a finished edit in a timely fashion.

I bought a few things from ZipZoomFly.com and Frys.com recently. It was just a handful of items I had been meaning to buy for a while. Here’s what I ordered:

• An ultra-quiet CPU fan for my MythTV box in the living room
• A new set of computer speakers for my primary PC (the current set was salvaged from a PC headed for the garbage, and are a bit on the trebly side)
• A 5-port switch to reduce the number of CAT-5 cables that must traverse my apartment
• A 500 GB internal SATA drive
• A SATA data cable and an oldschool-to-SATA power cable adapter

Normally I’m good about researching my purchases. I do not like to waste money. I don’t know why it happened, but I could not have dropped the ball more on this purchase. In a word: botched.

The SATA drive, being from Frys.com, arrived first. It came with a cable and power adapter. I’d have know this if I had read the description of what I was buying. Furthermore, the day after I placed the order the price was reduced another $10.

The remainder of the items arrived a couple days later. I decided to set the speakers up first. I figured they’d be the least work, and I could listen to music (with some bass for a change) while I installed the other items. These were a set of Logitech 2.1 Speakers. They came with a subwoofer, which I wasn’t really interested in. But the price was right, the brand name was right, and I could always turn down or turn off the subwoofer if I didn’t like it. Bottom of the barrel speakers were fine for me–I mean, they couldn’t be worse than no-name speakers I rescued from the trash, right? Plus, I’m no audio junkie. I bought $80 speakers for my living room stereo and I don’t think I’ll ever upgrade–they sound fine to me.

Ho-lee shit. These Logitech speakers bring new meaning to fucking awful. The subwoofer has neither on/off switch nor volume control. And because the power supply is housed in the subwoofer and feeds the speakers, it can’t be disconnected. And it’s loud. Absurdly loud. It drowns out the rest of the spectrum, and makes the floor vibrate in a way that’s not only annoying to me, but would also give my downstairs neighbor just cause to kill me in my sleep.

And the rest of the spectrum? That’d be the treble that the left and right speakers spew at even more exclusive extremes than my old speakers did. So that leaves me with brain-thumping sub-bass and nails-on-chalkboard treble, but still lacking the plain-old-bass I was hoping to gain. Remember, I’m no audio expert. I’d settle for mediocre. This is not that.

I connected the Linksys switch next. At first, it seemed to be working even better than I expected. That is to say, with no fiddling at all, it was working. I hooked in two of the the three systems I had bought it for. I had to dig around for a bit to find a cable for the third, and it didn’t work. Well, drat… I’d have to hit Best Buy for another cable the next day. In the meantime, I swapped another cable out to connect that third system. Still nothing. It turns out that 4 out of 5 ports are functioning. I only needed three, but… dammit.

The HSF was huge and I was doubtful that it would fit in my Mythbox. I measured the heatsink with a ruler, and measured the clearance inside the case. Woot! More than 15mm to spare. I removed the old HSF, and… um, okay… this attaches how? Actually, it doesn’t! I bought the Zalman CPNS7000-ALCU when I needed the CPNS7000B-ALCU. Then I got to clean, re-paste, and reinstall my old HSF.

Granted, some of it was bad luck, but the worst of this debacle could have been avoided. I guess I’ll try and RMA most of this crap.

I’ve been trying to find myself a happy little Bob Ross print to hang on the wall, but there aren’t any. Nor can I find any explanation as to why there aren’t any. BobRoss.com makes no mention of such an out-of-this-world concept as prints, and I’ve found only one other person asking the question.

I’ve tried looking for high-res images of his work. I’d feel no remorse over creating an unauthorized print, since that’s apparently the only way to get one. The best I could find was 1024×768. I guess that might be enough for an 8″x10″ print, if no one looks too closely.

Seriously, what the hell?

Recently, I received some scam spam pertaining to an eBay auction. I wouldn’t have paid any attention to it had gmail’s spam filter caught it. It appeared to be a fairly standard scam: “Hey, the high bidder backed out so YOU WIN. Congrats. Now send me the money.” Except, of course, I hadn’t bid on any iPods. Turns out there’s an eBayer named “dbfant” who was bidding, and the spammer was just tacking on “@gmail.com” as a guess to his email address. See, eBay keeps the email address of users private to everyone except the seller in order to prevent this kind of scam. I assume “dbfant@yahoo.com” and “dbfant@hotmail.com” received it too, and one of those might actually be the address of the bidder.

In the course of pondering this, something else occurred to me. If you’ve shopped on eBay before, you probably know that in addition to the normal auctions, there are eBay “Stores” which are basically storefronts set up at eBay selling products at static, non-auction prices. A number of these stores are overseas and quite shady — offering products of questionable origin at low, low prices. But, hey, they’re great if you need something cheap and you don’t need it fast. But, since each purchase at once of these stores is basically a pseudo-auction that you “win” via Buy-It-Now functionality, the store now has your email address. My thought was this: wouldn’t it make sense if some of these stores were selling lists of eBay account names and their corresponding email addresses to phishers for use in such targeted attacks?

The woot.com plugin I’ve had on my iGoogle home page for the past 8 months has finally paid off. On Monday, I bought my first Woot, which was a refurbished Sandisk Sansa e260 4GB MP3 Player for $55 shipped. Now, I’m no fan of the MP3 format for music (or for any use, really). It’s rather obsolete, and represents what was cutting edge in audio compression about 12 years ago. Ogg Vorbis and AAC (Advanced Audio Coding, also known as MPEG-4 Audio, which is the format used by iTunes and most HD-TV signals, among other things) are much more reasonable for this decade, though the creation of the latter was political and unnecessary given the existence of the former. I’ll stop myself there, but I’ll be happy to share my complete rant on the topic of audio compression formats with anyone that is interested.

The point is that this player won’t tie me down to silly formats like MP3, thanks to a wonderful open source project called Rockbox, which offers alternative firmware for popular portable music players. The Rockbox firmware greatly extends the capabilities of these devices, not only by adding support for additional audio formats, but also extensibility through a host of plugins. Existing plugins include a voice-command interface, an image viewer, Doom, and a variety of other games and applications.

I’ll post again with my impressions, once I’ve gotten a feel for Rockbox.

My goal is clean water.