Time Immortal

I do…which is the only reason I will be able to tell my wife, when I get home, that all the pictures our various relatives took at our wedding are safe and, you know, still in existence.

As opposed to having a more awkward conversation instead.

My current backup scheme is probably not ideal but it is effective, at least. I stuff everything onto optical media (gold-layer DVDs, in fact) as I edit it, and I’ve just started backing up all my photos (RAW files and edited JPEGs) to a large external hard drive as well. I have fallen behind in using the family website as a third backup repository…although in this case, it’s the web-based copies of the photos that saved my butt.

Nothing was lost (amen!)…thanks to backups.

Back up your files! I’m not going to tell you again! Actually, I probably will tell you again…but you should still be backing your files up.

No, really — only about 5% of returned products are actually broken.

Blame it on poor usability or just not reading the frickin’ manual, but it turns out that 95 percent of all returned gadgets actually work despite what customers may say or think. That’s right — of the $13.8 billion worth of returned products in 2007, only 5 percent were because gadgets were truly broken. According to Accenture, 68 percent of all returns work but aren’t meeting customer expectations — or they are simply too confusing to use. The other 26 percent are returned due to straight-up buyer’s remorse (AKA significant other budgetary freak-outs). Accenture executive Terry Steger believes that the complexity of gadgets is to blame here, and not the fickle nature of American consumers who tend to give up on product setup within a few minutes. We believe this ia all actually due to the implicit nature of — ooh, look at that shiny thing over there!

We have become such an ignorant and impatient people. Working in camera retail was sometimes difficult, because too often one would see people coming into the store with more money than brains — they’d load up with a massive, expensive, full-featured camera and a few high-quality lenses…and then use the thing for birthday snapshots, never moving their powerful SLR camera off of its default, JPEG-only “Auto” setting.

More than a few times, I told a customer flat-out that I wouldn’t sell him the product being requested, since it would both be a waste of his money and my time. Funnily, when the customer in question finally did settle on a camera to his liking, he usually kept it, rather than returning it a week later.

Near to the Ancient Agora in Athens is an ancient cemetery in the process of being excavated. Situated just a bit north and west of the Temple of Hephaestus, some of the graves in this cemetery evidently date back a good 3,000 years; there is so much history there that you can even track the changing attitudes in ancient Greek society toward full-body burials vs. cremation.

Also, they have tortoises there.

Grace and I were just walking along through the cemetery when I glanced down and saw this guy just sitting there. I almost thought he was a statue at first, until he moved. I took a couple of different photos of him, including this one from essentially ground-level.

This was an unaimed shot, as I was holding the camera by my feet at the time and hoping for the best. Fortunately, the best more or less happened, and the tortoise was even obliging enough to stick his head up and out (just a bit) for the photo. Edit-wise, I didn’t have to do much (shooting all of Greece in JPEG mode was such a good idea) to this shot apart from some chromatic aberration correction — the camera handled the saturation and sharpness just fine, and the picture turned out great. I’ve learned to keep the 17-85 mm lens locked at f/8 whenever possible, and this picture demonstrates why for how sharp the details are.