20130228

Bravely Ralphing

I think maybe I'm getting close to writing about the trip to HK, finally.  On the planes, each way, there was a huge selection of movies available (over 100).  I'd loaded a bunch of movies onto my iPad, in expectation of playing them on the plane, and didn't even touch it.

Anyway, I'm not going to talk about them now, but after seeing one of Posnanski's recent columns, I do have to write at least a few words about Pixar's releases last year.

What ties them together is that, while I'd seen Brave long before we left, I didn't see Wreck-It Ralph until the flight back (wasn't available on the flight over; let's hear it for coming back in a different month, so the selection got updated a little bit).

Brave certainly had better art, of the two (which was actually deliberate; Ralph was done as a throw-back to eight-bit game systems), and its Merida's Day Off sequence was better than any part of Ralph.  But as a whole, Ralph was much better.

Better characters, better plot, funnier, more creative idea... You name it, it was better.

So, despite the fact that I pay very little attention to the Oscars, I was still surprised that Brave won over Ralph.  A grave injustice was done.  (Heck, I also managed to catch Hotel Transylvania on the way back, and I think that might have been better than Brave also, although that's a closer call.)

Bedeviling, caning, blown away

Been having trouble finding time to write this, as well (yes, one of these days, I'll post more about the Hong Kong trip).

I felt good, three games ago, when OV got his hat trick (and quadrupled his career goal total against Hedburg). I'd said he'd score a lot if he kept playing like that; didn't expect it to be that soon, of course, but was still very happy to see it. One other thing I didn't mention was that, this season, they've dropped the Ovechcam in favor of the Iso Cam. Well, if OV keeps playing like that, they can change the name back. We'll see.

Serious kudos, also, to Fehr in that game, for getting the Caps a shortie. That was a damned sweet play, resulting from skill and hard work. The rest of the third line was also pretty good in that one.

And Brouwer had a good game there, as well.

The game, two nights ago, against the Hurricanes, was really an excellent one. The Caps played well from start to finish, and was seriously dominating for much of the game. My wife says I jinxed them doing better (and us getting cheap pizza), when, five minutes into the second, I said that if they kept playing like that, they'd win 5-0 or 6-1. Granted, the Canes have a lot of injuries, especially on the back end, but that still felt really good to watch.

Oh, and Erskine scored a goal. What were the odds? If he could do that with any regularity, I wouldn't mind the ridiculous contract extension he signed the day before. The length was fine, but just paying way too much for a 6/7/8 defender. Can't understand it at all.

Moving on, we then they got to last night's game against the Flyers. Wow, that was ugly. A couple of bad bounces, coupled with aggressive play by the Flyers, gave the zoomies a lead thirty seconds in. A power play shortly thereafter led to doubling that lead four minutes into the game. Despite being heavily outplayed, they did manage to keep that margin from growing for the rest of that period.

But it didn't significantly improve in the second. Ward got sent off for a pretty ticky-tack boarding call early on (he'd pulled up, and didn't even lead with his shoulder, so I was certainly surprised by the call), and the orange and black converted again. Eleven minutes later, Philadelphia extended that lead again, and I had had enough. Apparently, Oates had had enough of Holtby as well, as he was sent to the showers early.

The thing that blows my mind most about the game is that, usually when a team is down by more than two goals, they heavily outshoot the opposition. This time? Nope. I'm not sure, but I don't think they outshot the Flyers when down four; they definitely didn't do it when down three-plus.

The only positive I can come up with is that Grubauer (backing up Holtby because Neuwirth was sick) did pretty well, stopping all fourteen shots he faced (incidentally, IIRC, Holtby's first NHL action was taking over mid-game against Philadelphia as well).

It was just butt-ugly, and I'm glad I turned it off when I did. I almost wish I'd turned it off even earlier, in fact.

Oh well. A couple of days off, then to face the Jets on Saturday in Winnipeg. Don't want to know how cold it will be, there.

The state of our health

I recently saw a really long, and well-researched, article from Time (of all places, who'd'a thunk it?) about the state of the medical industry.

One thing I didn't really know about, beforehand: the use of the chargemaster (well, I assumed something like that existed, and I knew insurance companies always negotiated significant discounts off of it, but had no idea how disconnected from reality it was.

Out of work for a year, Janice S. had no insurance. Among the hospital’s charges were three “TROPONIN I” tests for $199.50 each. According to a National Institutes of Health website, a troponin test “measures the levels of certain proteins in the blood” whose release from the heart is a strong indicator of a heart attack. Some labs like to have the test done at intervals, so the fact that Janice S. got three of them is not necessarily an issue. The price is the problem. Stamford Hospital spokesman Scott Orstad told me that the $199.50 figure for the troponin test was taken from what he called the hospital’s chargemaster. The chargemaster, I learned, is every hospital’s internal price list. Decades ago it was a document the size of a phone book; now it’s a massive computer file, thousands of items long, maintained by every hospital.


I also hadn't realized how much consolidation there is among hospitals and healthcare providers (I've seen some signs, like the DC hospital where my kids were born being bought out by Johns Hopkins hospital just before my son was born, but had no idea how widespread it is). I also hadn't thought too much about nefarious effects coming out of that:

But insurers are increasingly losing leverage because hospitals are consolidating by buying doctors’ practices and even rival hospitals. In that situation — in which the insurer needs the hospital more than the hospital needs the insurer — the pricing negotiation will be over discounts that work down from the chargemaster prices rather than up from what Medicare would pay.


Other nefarious effects are how lab work is a major profit center for hospitals, plus I had no idea how much more profitable outpatient care was vs inpatient at a hospital.

Put simply, inpatient care at nonprofit hospitals is, in fact, almost nonprofit. Outpatient care is wildly profitable.


I also learned a lot more specifics about how little administrative overhead there is in medicare (I thought the overall number was about twice what he quoted, but knew none of the specifics of how they keep that overhead so low).

That’s an overall administrative and management cost [for Medicare] of about two-thirds of 1% of the amount of the claims


As a sidenote, the Bush administration, some years back, set aside $8M to track down Medicare fraud. They found a couple hundred thousand dollars worth. Love that ROI.

One question that was never answered (or even addressed) was how non-profit hospitals were making consistent profits. That is, non-profits get special tax status, but the return for that is that they pay very high taxes when they do turn a profit. And he makes the claim that they are, in fact, making very high profits. I don't know the verity (or lack thereof) of that claim, but I do know that if it is true, they will pay very high taxes.

The rest of what I liked about the article are that it is fact-based, rather than ideological, and most of it has a very practical focus.

The one part I wonder about is the claims about tort reform. I know some states have attempted to tackle tort reform via claim limits, and those have resulted in no tangible benefits. I'm a little bit skeptical about the safe harbors suggestion for tort reform, only because liability comes out of judicial standards, rather than statute (that is, is isn't due to changes in law that a drunk person can end up falling down on a sidewalk, hurting themselves, and successfully suing the city. Instead, it comes from judges deciding that the standard the city must protect against isn't a competent person). Having said that, I guess it wouldn't hurt to try it.

Oh, and there was also the claim that,
Then again, however much hospitals might survive or struggle under that scenario [single payer system], no doctor could hope for anything approaching the income he or she deserves (and that will make future doctors want to practice) if 100% of their patients yielded anything close to the low rates Medicare pays.


This seems completely bogus to me. Do European countries, with salaried doctors and single payer healthcare, have trouble recruiting doctors? I very much doubt it (and certainly have never heard any indication of it being true).

Other than those quibbles, the only other things I would disagree with are the lack of mention of a couple of things in the concluding paragraphs. The first of these is the statement, in the close
Put simply, with Obamacare we’ve changed the rules related to who pays for what, but we haven’t done much to change the prices we pay.


What's wrong with this? First, Obamacare does make some improvements to costs (I saw another report, quoting OMB, that said projected medicare costs had already dropped by $500B by 2020; I can't find my source on that one). But the real reason it bugs me is that, earlier in the article, there were mentions of Obamacare saving money. I'll grant that the bill could, and should, have done better, but to say it did nothing is certainly not true.

One other thing not mentioned about the ACA (Affordable Care Act) is that it put forth incentives to try new models. In Vermont (California is also looking into this), this is being used to implement single-payer healthcare. But in the private sector, it is also being used to find alternatives to the current fee-for-service business model. One (not applicable to all health problems) that seems pretty good is called fee-for-care, where, for example, a pregnant woman pays one fee to cover the entire pregnancy. If complications arise, the provider pays the additional money, so that some risk is pushed back onto the provider, and the patient has much more cost surety.

The second is, when mentioning practical things to do to save money (again, in the conclusion), allowing Medicare to negotiate drug and durable good prices is missing. Again, earlier in the article, it was pointed out how much this would save.

And as a side note, my pet idea for improving the healthcare system is one where the government will pay for someone to go to medical school. After graduation, that person will work for the government (on salary) for X number of years, treating only medicare/medicaid patients. Obviously, it's modeled after ROTC, and I can't claim to know what X should be. One important feature is that it would be only (or at least the vast majority) for general practitioners.

The one part I wonder about is the claims about tort reform. I know some states have attempted to tackle tort reform via claim limits, and those have resulted in no tangible benefits. I'm a little bit skeptical about the safe harbors suggestion for tort reform, only because liability comes out of judicial standards, rather than statute (that is, is isn't due to changes in law that a drunk person can end up falling down on a sidewalk, hurting themselves, and successfully suing the city. Instead, it comes from judges deciding that the standard the city must protect against isn't a competent person). Having said that, I guess it wouldn't hurt to try it.

Oh, and there was also the claim that,
Then again, however much hospitals might survive or struggle under that scenario [a single payer system], no doctor could hope for anything approaching the income he or she deserves (and that will make future doctors want to practice) if 100% of their patients yielded anything close to the low rates Medicare pays.


This seems completely bogus to me. Do European countries, with salaried doctors and single payer healthcare, have trouble recruiting doctors? I very much doubt it (and certainly have never heard any indication of it being true).  Did the US have trouble back when doctors made only a little more than teachers?

Other than those quibbles, the only other things I would disagree with are the lack of mention of a couple of things in the concluding paragraphs. The first of these is the statement, in the close
Put simply, with Obamacare we’ve changed the rules related to who pays for what, but we haven’t done much to change the prices we pay.


What's wrong with this? First, Obamacare does make some improvements to costs (I saw another report, quoting OMB, that said projected medicare costs had already dropped by $500B by 2020; I can't find my source on that one). But the real reason it bugs me is that, earlier in the article, there were mentions of Obamacare saving money. I'll grant that the bill could, and should, have done better, but to say it did nothing is certainly not true.

One other thing not mentioned about the ACA (Affordable Care Act) is that it put forth incentives to try new models. In Vermont (California is also looking into this), this is being used to implement single-payer healthcare. But in the private sector, it is also being used to find alternatives to the current fee-for-service business model. One (not applicable to all health problems) that seems pretty good is called fee-for-care, where, for example, a pregnant woman pays one fee to cover the entire pregnancy. If complications arise, the provider pays the additional money, so that some risk is pushed back onto the provider, and the patient has much more cost surety.

The second is, when mentioning practical things to do to save money (again, in the conclusion), allowing Medicare to negotiate drug and durable good prices is missing. Again, earlier in the article, it was pointed out how much this would save.

And as a side note, my pet idea for improving the healthcare system is one where the government will pay for someone to go to medical school. After graduation, that person will work for the government (on salary) for X number of years, treating only medicare/medicaid patients. Obviously, it's modeled after ROTC, and I can't claim to know what X should be. One important feature is that it would be only (or at least the vast majority) for general practitioners.

One other problem with current healthcare, not discussed in the article, is that we have too many specialists, and too few GPs. This gives another way to move away from fee-for-care, and increases the supply of GPs. It might also allow Medicare/Medicaid to cut costs a little bit more.

But despite those quibbles and problems, I highly recommend reading the original article.

Aper-ent Fail

A short follow-up to my post last week about equipment success and failure in the trip.

When I got back, I had a couple of 32GB CF cards with, between them, almost 3000 images of the trip (which is to say, among other things, that they were full. Glad I resisted the temptation to only get one). I knew that this would end up, with additional edits, completely filling up the hard drive in my iMac.

So I knew, immediately, that I needed to move my Aperture library off of that drive.

Happily, I had a spare hard drive sitting around. After kvetching a bit about USB transfer speeds (and, especially, that my iMac doesn't have USB3), it finally occurred to me that I did have a little-used firewire port that I could use for fast transfer. So I got a firewire 800 (and USB3) case for the drive. That has been a major win.

But, even before I got the case, I was trying to read all those images off the cards. To that end, I copied my Aperture library onto the new drive (thank goodness I didn't delete the original), and tried to import the images into that. Disaster. I waited a couple of days (until I went multiple hours without any data being written (using inode counts to verify)) for the import, to no avail. I then tried again with the whole process, hoping it was a transitory problem (and, by this time, I had the firewire case) or related to the drive and reader both being USB (one of the less-talked-about benefits of firewire over USB is that, because of its latency guarantees, firewire handles flooding of the bus much better).

Second verse, same as the first.

Ok, need to do something different. For surety (and to ensure USB was not the issue), I copied the files to the hard drive before importing. The surety part came when that made it easy to back them up.

Anyway, I tried again, this time with a new (ie: empty) Aperture library. Third verse, same as the first.

Tried again with a subset of the 1500 (ie: one card) I'd been trying to import. Fourth verse, same as the first.

Tried again with an even smaller subset (mind you, I've been using Aperture for several years now, with no serious problems, which is a large part of why I gave it so many chances); one gross of them. Appearances looked the same (it seemed hung at a certain point), but while I was waiting to verify, my son turned off the UPS to my computer. Ugh. After turning the computer back on, I fired up Aperture, and saw that it appeared to have succeeded in importing.

I tried again, with a larger subset of files; do import, wait for apparent hang. When it hung, I manually killed Aperture (one thing I'd found out during this process is that you can't gently kill Aperture. It gives a warning, then tries to undo what it's been doing if you tell it to quit. This has no more success than the import. So I used the old UNIX standby, kill), and then fired it up again. It worked again.

In this manner, I was able to get the rest of the images imported, but it took nine days, total.

Pissed me off enough that I was seriously considering switching over to Lightroom (and I really don't like Adobe, so that would not have been flippant decision). I'm hoping that the problem won't repeat the next time I need to import stuff.

The one positive indication (which I forgot about until just now) is that, after that first failed import, I did successfully import from my XQD card, some pictures which I'd taken the Sunday morning after we got home. Maybe it's just an indication that my computer doesn't like compact flash. Or me using the GPS device (not nearly all my pictures from the trip had GPS coords, but the ones that did were the first pictures I'd taken that had them).

Oh, one other thing I learned about during this. You can get a progress indication on an import job by clicking on where it says 'Importing'. Didn't get me through this, but the feedback was sometimes very useful.

Do I have a conclusion? Not really, although it certainly shows an epic fail by Aperture vis a vis this trip. Let's hope it's the last failure. One more, and I'm giving up on it, and going to Lightroom. Ugh.

Oh, and Apple?  When are we going to see a new version?  This one's a couple of years old, with the only updates being photo stream support and recognizing new RAW formats.

Screw-up

I was very proud of myself, yesterday. I mentioned in my HK equipment article that I needed a screw to cut down on my ballhead weight. I also found out, recently, that the hook for hanging weight on my good tripod was too small to easily hang a 'biner on it for my bag.

I was trying to figure out what to do about these, and was going to get the one screw from Really Right Stuff, and see about buying something professional for the other. But I went to Home Depot yesterday, and found screws to fix both of them. Total cost? Under $2. Win.

(And yes, I probably should not be as happy about that as I am.)

20130223

Devil of a time

[note: I wrote this yesterday, but forgot to post it last night.  Also, forgot to mention the positive that Mike Green skated in pre-game warm-ups, hopefully indicating that his injury that prevented him playing against the Rangers is not serious.]

Last night's Caps game was rather... disappointing. I was frequently interrupted through the first period, but was able to watch the rest straight through (let's hear it, again, for DVRs).

The first period was hardly a good start; New Jersey was all over them, but didn't manage to find the net (Holtby did well, from what I could see between interruptions from the kids). The Caps had a few decent moments, but nothing especially sustained. They were very lucky to escape the period scoreless.

The second period largely reversed the first period, with lots of sustained pressure (and even some breakaways). Oddly, all the scoring in this period came on the Caps power play. The Caps had two nice power play goals: one where Perreault followed up a beautiful Brouwer drive, potting the rebound as the defense stood around; and one where they worked it down the right half-wall, and got it to Ribeiro in the slot, who shot it home.

It wasn't all good news, though. At the beginning of the same powerplay where Ribeiro scored, Carlson had two brainfarts in a row trying to collect the puck behind the net. That allowed Henrique to control the puck and get it to Elias, out front, who scored. Ugh-ly.

The third period, the Caps gamely tried to stay with NJ, but they couldn't stay out of the box. The Devils got five (!) power plays in the period, including two lengthy 5-on-3s. Given all that, the Caps did well to only give up one power play goal, but were obviously unable to sustain any offense. In fact, the PK did so well, that the first of those 5-on-3s (1:53, worth, IIRC) generated NO shots on goal. Carlson and Backstrom were particularly good at the blocking, here.

Unfortunately, the Devils also got an even strength goal in the third, which made the later power play goal the game-winner.

It was an extremely frustrating period (especially for the guys not on the PK, I'm sure, who were largely stapled to the bench). What was especially galling was that the first 5-on-3 came about as the Devils were able to argue for a delay of game penalty that wasn't called. Gallows humor, here, but I was amused that Kundratek served the penalty when Beagle hit it out. Oh, and it was pretty funny that Brouwer managed to get a misconduct after the game ended, as he really let the refs have it as he was heading off the ice.

So, ignoring how frustrating it was to watch a team spend so much time in the penalty box, there were some positives. The biggest one was that OV had a fantastic game. Even though he didn't score, he was threatening all night, and looked like he'd score several.

The third line again looked very good, generating pressure and generally tilting the ice in Washington's favor. Too bad they didn't get any ice time in the third, due to all those penalties.

I already pointed out both sides of why, but Carlson had a very mixed game, with some very good and some very bad.

Brouwer had an excellent game; his toe-drag right before his shot on which Perreault scored off the rebound was a thing of beauty. I love seeing him going strong to the net.

But, that's about the most I can say as positives. But it did still make me hopeful; if OV keeps playing like that, he'll score bunches of goals.

I think they're toast, as far as the playoffs are concerned, but I love seeing OV playing like that. That would give something positive for the season. We'll have to wait for tomorrow at noon to find out.


20130216

Where are we now?

I previously mentioned that I spent two weeks in Hong Kong. I wasn't able to watch any games while I was there (heck, I even missed the Super Bowl. Forgot about it, actually, despite being reminded a day or two before); heck, their play before leaving didn't exactly inspire me to try GameCenter Live or look for illicit streams.

But I did still check on the stats of the games... well, at least the scores; I only looked at the full box score once or twice. Man, was it depressing.

We did get back just in time (technically, a few minutes late, but the DVR was still running) for the Caps/Cats matchup on Saturday. Despite not sleeping on the plane (16 hrs of flight. ugh), I still managed to stay awake to watch it.

The fact that the Caps were kicking butt (and getting a bit of puck luck) certainly helped with the staying awake part. I don't really remember a whole lot, beyond Perreault having a good game and the team generally getting all the breaks. No complaints (to be clear, without the luck, it probably would have been a 3-1 game, rather than 5-0; the team was still doing a lot of things right and Florida wasn't).

I had to watch Tuesday's game against Florida as well, of course, though I might remember even less of it. It certainly amazed me that they came back from being two goals down; nice to get that kind of surprise, for once. My hazy recollection has them playing well for most of the game, with some terrible puck luck (what are the odds Erskine would deflect TWO shots into his own goal?). I do remember thinking that Holtby had actually had a pretty decent game, despite all those goals. There was some fluky stuff in there (although at least one fluke, Florida managing to not get a shot on goal on a 4-on-1 (those exist?!?) did go the Caps' way).

Thursday's game was excellent, though. They came at Tampa hard, took it to them, and dominated the game solidly (well, except for a five minute stretch of the third, where they had some breakdowns). Perreault again looked excellent, with some very nice assists (although what that left defenseman thought he was doing on the last goal is an interesting question). Fehr, finishing two of those assists also looked very good. OV looked good, mostly avoiding trying to do too much. And I loved the shot differential for the team as a whole.

You'll notice I haven't talked about Brouwer or Ribeiro, who have both been excellent for the whole season. Brouwer tried to get his third consecutive game-winning goal, but had to settle for just having the first. Ribeiro continued his trend of getting whacked in the face with a stick, and the other guy not getting a penalty.  It's really irritating (more so for him, I'm sure).

Anyway, that's about enough for now.  Now that I'm caught up, hopefully I can write a little more constructively when I'm only writing about one game.  And hopefully I can get started writing about the trip, which was great.

How does it work?

I mentioned being in Hong Kong recently. I want to talk about the trip more generally soon, but this is easier to write.

What do I want to talk about now? Well, a lot of photographic equipment got used in the trip. Some worked great, some didn't, really.

Let's start with the backpack I got for the trip. It was a Think Tank Airport Commuter, which I guessed to be enough bigger than my StreetWalker Pro to hold everything I needed. It turned out it wasn't really big enough to hold everything, but it did get all of the critical stuff. The only things I really ended up missing was my heavy Gitzo tripod (the extra height would have been useful once or twice, and the hanger for weight would have greatly improved my night-time stop on Victoria Peak), and the lens stabilization package to hold the 70-200 (also for Victoria Peak).

I did have to get a bit creative, though, to hold as much as I did. On top of the multi-row pano holder, I had to put a divider to protect the camera battery charger (thank goodness I remembered that; I wondered if two charges would be enough, and they weren't).

One thing I did do, which I'm really glad of, was to get the Pro Speed Belt to use as a replacement belt. I'd noticed that the hip straps on my StreetWalker Pro weren't great, so got this as a replacement. It saved my back, no doubt (I have a bad back to begin with, so I need to be more careful now).

Another, that didn't work out so well was to get the Camera Support Straps. They're made to work with Think Tank's camera strap, which I don't have. It didn't occur to me how to use them with my strap until after we'd gone, so I didn't use them. that was a mistake, I think.

The one problem I had with the bag relates to the tripod holder being on the side. That did not work out very well. It meant I stuck out farther than I was accustomed to on one side, which caused me some problems. It also meant the weight was off-balance, which caused different problems. Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's really a good alternative. It makes me think this is a great bag for getting from point A to point B, but less good for getting stuff done once you're there.

One seemingly minor point did end up being quite important. That is that the bag fits in overhead compartments, even of small, regional jets. You'd think that wouldn't matter, going to Hong Kong, but our flight connected through Newark, and we took small planes to and from Newark. In fact, the flight back from Newark was a Dash 8 turboprop; I did have to take my iPad out of its compartment in the bag to fit it into the overhead (not a big deal, as I would have taken it out anyway, but it does illustrate how tight the fit is). But the important part was that it did fit; I would have gone ballistic if it hadn't.

For lenses, I ended up with just the Nikon trinity and a 50mm f/1.4 AF-S. I ended up mostly using the 24-70mm and 70-200mm. I only occasionally used the 14-24mm, but was still very glad I'd brought it. The 50mm I brought for (and used) only for our day at Disneyland. I should have just used the 24-70mm (which I ended up using at Ocean Park, which is also a theme park). I also brought, but didn't use at all, the DR-5 right-angle viewfinder adapter (I'm beginning to think this is only useful for macro work).

I alluded to this, but my Hakuba tripod did not come through with flying colors. I wish it was a little bit taller, and that I could hang weight from it. I think I might need to replace it; we'll see. For what it cost, though, it's fantastic. I knew I'd outgrow it at some point; I thought it'd be because of the center column. Bit of a surprise.

The reason I didn't take the big Gitzo tripod is that it's just too heavy. And weight was a problem even without adding almost five pounds of bigger tripod, so that was the right choice.

There were a couple of issues with the BH-55 tripod head. The first is, simply, my fault. I use it with the quick-release plate it shipped with, and have been using a dovetail adapter to hold the PCL-1 panning clamp. I should have bought the screw to let me directly attach the clamp and ballhead and save myself some weight. The second is weight-related also, and relates to me not having any big glass. It's just too much ballhead, especially carrying it around all day. I'll probably want to get the BH-30 before taking another trip where I walk so much (especially if the kids are still young enough to want to be carried around as much as they did; it probably wouldn't have mattered without this factor). It's also smaller, which might help keep from banging it against as many walls and doors as I did (nothing broken, but I felt bad every time I heard that "bang").

And this is probably as good a place as any to talk about the PG-02 multi-row pano adapter. I've been using it on top of the ball head, similarly to how I've been using the PCL-1. I think this magnified my problems with the wind on Victoria Peak, but I'm not sure of a good alternative. The only thing I can think of is a leveling base, and I'm not sure I can use a decent leveling base with that Hakuba tripod. Other than that caveat, it worked great. I do wonder, though, if skipping it in the future, in favor of a gigapan, might be better. Well, if I can afford it, that is, and can deal with the added bulk (the weight isn't too big a deal, since I wouldn't be carrying it all the time; and never for an entire day).

In a last-minute remembrance, I got the Opteka GPN-1 geotagger. After using it, I had mixed feelings. I did like how small and light it was. I think it significantly added to battery drain, although that wasn't a big deal. Better than having to carry another set of spare batteries, actually. The wired remote trigger on it didn't work, the one time I tried. Not a big deal, but annoying (since I can't use this and my wireless remote at the same time). The bigger deal is that the cable, where it connects to the unit, was all but broken just by carrying the camera around my neck. I think I need to see if there's some way to attach it to the camera strap; that might work better.

I also had a ZyXel MWR-211 that I had bought for photography. It's a mobile wireless router/bridge that I bought to use to connect to my camera via cable, with which I could connect via iPad to use the camera's web server for aiming (it having a battery back-up is significant). I haven't really used it for that purpose yet, but we knew before we flew over that we were only going to have a wired connection for our hotel room, so I brought it. And it worked like a champ, helping us stay connected (vital for my wife's work, but also nice for tracking Caps scores and such) with our iPads and iPhones (yes, we used our phones, despite not having phone or data service on them).

Oh, and I suppose I should also say a word or two about the camera, too. The fact that I got this far is a pretty good indicator that I was happy with it. I wasn't sure, especially given how big it is. But it did everything I asked, and asked if there was anything else. The one caveat to that is that a D800 might have done better for almost everything (the major exception being the dolphin show at Ocean Park, although that would have been a tradeoff of speed vs resolution. Not sure which would have been more important. Sitting at a better location would have made a big difference with either camera), and would have been lighter. But I couldn't afford both, and do think I got the right one for most of my circumstances.

And one other peripheral note. Several days we were there, I left the bag behind, and only carried the camera and one lens. Some of those times, I was wishing I'd brought one more lens (the 70-200; the aforementioned dolphin show was the time I most missed it). I mentioned that using the Pro Speed Belt was a good idea. Having that, I could have also brought a belt pouch for that that would have carried the lens. I definitely wish I had done that, and will get one of ThinkTank's Digital Holster or Lens Changer models.

So I was mostly happy with performance, but there are definitely some tweaks to be made around the edges.

To what do I owe?

Just got back from two weeks in Hong Kong; got lots of stuff I want to write about, but been having trouble sitting down to do it.

So a brief shot before I get to the important stuff.

Was listening to NPR on my way in to work this morning; they were talking about a proposed government program to provide more accurate information to prospective college students. The idea is to get more accurate info than US News & World Report gets, plus make it a little bit less gameable.

That all sounded interesting, and useful (except, they said, graduation rates would be based on students who graduate w/in six years, rather than four or five).

But the reason I'm writing this is that, at the end, they stated that average student debt upon graduation is about $26k (I forget the exact figure). That does seem a little low to me (they could be adding in community college students, perhaps), although I don't know.

The bigger point is that they took that value and compared it to a car loan, saying that many people take out car loans for that much. True enough, but it isn't people just graduating from college (who may or may not have a job lined up) who are doing so, so I'm not sure of the value of the comparison.