Teich.Net :: All In

Congrations to all the excellent food bloggers featured in Best-Shot Blogs in the August issue of Food and Wine. Their related story “Shoot First, Eat Later” included a tip from one of my favorite food photographers, Heidi of 101 Cookbooks. I was a little disappointed that the ideas in the article were so elementary (wiping the edges? yep, got that one already) so I was excited to find that Heidi also posted a few more technical and specific suggestions than those in the article. I’ve already sent it on to the food photographer in my house, though he’s definitely already got spending more on equipment down. Hopefully we’ll come up with something good enough to entire in the F&W Food Photo Contest. Happy shooting!

(Full disclosure: I have a familial Yahoo! bias.) I’m all for software trying to “do the right thing,” but this is just silly. I’m sitting here in Japan and do a quick search on Google. (For some reason my Firefox insists on switching back to Google every now and then. I’m sure it’s me, but I don’t know what I’m doing.) It gives me results from google.co.jp… in Japanese. That makes sense, and I’ve noticed this behavior in many other places as well. Only one problem. I can’t make it give me English results. I type in google.com, changed the URL, and it keeps sending me to co.jp. I figure that one of the links is preferences, but the language list is in Japanese as well. Luckily (?) the internationally popular “Elmer Fudd” language is written in English.

Be vewwy, vewwy quiet…

I usually leave the tech commentary at All In to Oren, but having played with the new Yahoo! Maps over the last few months and seeing the leaps and bounds forward in the new public beta (which I happen to think trounces the competition), I felt the need to share this news with all of you. It’s easy to miss the link to the Maps Beta on Yahoo!, but follow it here or seek it out. It’s worth it. There are sure to be tons of awesome mash-ups to come (like this Local Events Browser) and how fantastic is it to finally be able to do multi-point driving directions?! Drag and drop and integrated Local Search are pretty nifty too. I mapped out where I’m headed this weekend–point D was the site of the best meal I’ve ever had–but mailing and copying links doesn’t seem to be working for me. Hopefully that will be fixed soon.

It’s a familiar problem to all of us: your cellar is full of thousands of bottles, all properly stored and cared for. But at some point, it gets hard to remember if that was a ‘82 or ‘86 Lafite that you had a case of tucked away, or just how many cases of ‘01 Screaming Eagle you got as part of the latest auction. But perhaps the greatest problem we all face is: just how long do you lay down your Charles Shaw?
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What’s with the low-bitrate songs on Pandora? I’ve been listening to a few different radio stations, and it seems like about 20% of the songs are 64bit max. It’s enough to make me want to stop listening! For example “Somewhat Off The Way” by “Dogs Die in Hot Cars” sounds just plain bad.

That sad, they’re making it better. I still am not a mood person though. Even after adding a bunch of different artists and songs to a random station, I’m still bored. Plus I love those last.fm stats!

After a few months of being a relatively happy last.fm user, I started reading some reviews and profiles of a new radio service called Pandora. Pandora, like last.fm provides you with your own personalized radio station. Unlike last.fm, it bases the music similarity on profiles of individual songs characteristics, input by musicians who actually listen to the music toiling away for YEARS to generate their 300,000 song library. An interesting concept to say the least! About 24 hours after submitting my email address on their site, I received an invitation.
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I was looking at Yahoo’s self service ads today. Out of curiosity, I started going through the sign up process, and found that yahoo is sharing some interesting data.

When you are trying to choose your keywords, yahoo provides a nice way to see how popular those keywords are. This means you can also see how many searches they are getting for each term. For example, last month there were 30,051,991 for “google” on yahoo. Heck, there were 849 searches for “oren”. 676,724 searches for “xbox 360″ vs. 333,527 for PS3. It appears that Google just gives you an estimate on how many clicks you will recieve based on your CPC, without actually telling you how many hits that search will get.
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