I don’t think the answer to bad pitches from flacks has to involve public humiliation, even if I felt a moment of schadenfreude reading that post.

Which is to say, my own approach is much more passive. I usually just ignore the badly misdirected pitches, along with any pique I might feel about the disconnect between the cordial and warm boilerplate salutation and the obvious ignorance about what it is I’m up to. Why bother with pique? I mean … it’s a little weird to run a site with the words “networking” and “enterprise” in the title and get pitches about ultra-fuel-efficient heavy agricultural machinery, but it doesn’t warrant more than passing annoyance, and maybe a little bemusement over the crummy, wasteful mechanisms that caused that pitch to land in my inbox.

If I were the sort to characterize the relationship between editor and flack as one of never-ending war broken up only briefly by obligatory expressions of cordial solicitousness before a conference call prezo begins in earnest, I might even argue that the lameness of the ridiculously poorly targeted pitch-blast is a useful reminder of why it’s right to hate.

But I don’t see it that way. Most flacks — PR professionals, I suppose it’s nicer to call them — seem like decent people who’re entitled to a few mistakes. And I’m generally only mean when I think I have privacy.

I think the most irritating thing about that post and the ensuing comments is all the suck-ups falling all over themselves to show that they Get It. Anyone who doesn’t recognize the Hip Flack Who Gets It as its own kind of marketing campaign deserves to hear as much bilge about the flack’s clients and their “passion” as can be stuffed into an inbox or left in voicemail.

You know the bit about “If you have to ask, you’ll never know?”

If you have to tell, you’ll never be.

That includes any blathering about how much you Get It.

Or maybe that whole entry was a wily trap designed to trick all the Hip Flacks Who Get It into gathering in one place. The opportunity to crow about the failings of other flacks is like catnip to those people.

Update: Oops.

Leopard’s installer runs fsck on any potential destination disks it finds. Leopard’s installer also doesn’t bother to tell you it’s doing this*, even though it can take upwards of 10 minutes to finish before it returns a list of candidate drives.

In the mean time, if you get all Encyclopedia Brown on it and try to use the Disk Utility to see if it thinks something dire is going on with your hard drive, it’ll tell you it doesn’t know the drive’s name and it won’t let you verify the drive.

I ended up on the phone with Apple support after watching the iMac do nothing for a while, then sat and watched the Mac do nothing for a while longer while holding for support. I don’t know how many minutes, exactly … but I did manage to get in a good six or eight hands of Hearts in Clubhouse Games on the DS and the call management robot broke in three times to tell me I could expect a wait of fifteen minutes or more. I heard an Elton John song, a song from some female singer/songwriter type, a song from some Deathcab for Cutie derivative, and a song from some post-post-post-Pearl Jam stentorian crooners.

Then the support guy answered and it continued to do nothing while I pulled up the serial number, gave him all my registration information and explained the problem. It did nothing while he said stuff about how “it was on this screen” and “I have something on this.” It stopped doing nothing at the exact right moment required for The Comedy:

• The support guy said “Ah, yes … the installer is running a routine that uses the program fsck …”
• A lightbulb went on over my head.
• The disk manifested in the list of candidate drives.

So I kept trying to say “I think it finished examining the disk” but the support guy was going to explain it all to me no matter what, talking over me several times, so I went limp and waited for him to be done.

Then I said some sort of activity indicator would be aces next time, and he said something about how there’ve been a lot of people calling in with this issue so my comment probably didn’t require passing up to management. Then we bid each other a good day.

* Where “tell” can be read to mean “show a spinner, beachball, friendly ‘now scanning your disks’ message, progress bar, or video recap of Steve’s finest MacWorld keynotes”

MacUpdate - Stationery Pack 1.0: “111 high quality stationeries for Leopard’s Mail.app.”

Hopefully this will remain the cure:

defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE

Count of Ron Paul spams received so far this morning: 2

Opening sentence:

“Hello Scott, Ron Paul is for the people, unless you want your children to have human implant RFID chips, a National ID card and create a North American Union and see an economic collapse far worse than the great depression.”

Yet another example of that “Pick Your Candidate” calculator completely failing me. If Ron Paul is the only one who can save us from “human implant RFID chips,” we’d best get behind him!

The Associated Press: Porter Wagoner Dies at 80: Everyone else will remember him for stuff besides “Rubber Room,” which is an awful shame.

Today was a wonderful day to be out. After Ben got up from his nap I took him to the water tower playground down the block. There’s a community garden there. Until recently it’s been fenced off from the playground, but the fence was all taken down today, so we spent some time looking at what’s left of the vegetation and flowers there.

I took the G9 along, initially because I’m just trying to get in the habit of taking it with me. Once we were there, though, a lot of macro opportunities presented themselves, so I took them. I haven’t tried to do much macro photography with the Pentax k100d, so I can’t really compare the two cameras, but I was pretty pleased with what I got out of the G9 today. There are a few glitches here and there, but it did a nice job.

One area where it most definitely does better than the Pentax is in its automatic white balance setting. The Pentax always seems to be off. It’s nothing that isn’t easily corrected (telling LightRoom “auto” instead of “as shot” usually handles things just fine), but the G9 gets it closer to right the first time.

On the other hand, this Canon struggles the same as all of them with reds and magentas, which are much more saturated — to the point of being blown out — than the Pentax even dreams. It’s a deficiency that’s also recoverable in LightRoom, but it’s a much more fiddly one. Fixing white balance is your first choice in LightRoom’s develop module. Desaturating the reds and fiddling with their tint is further down the panel.

And the Canon has another problem, which is metering Ben, who is fair skinned in a way that defies easy photography. I always end up having to set the EV down a stop or so when I’m shooting him in daylight. I think the k100d has a little better dynamic range where Ben’s particular complexion is concerned. It’s easier to get something closer to his actual skin tone with the Pentax and a nudge of warming and saturation.

Anyhow, it was a pretty fun set of pictures. The colors were just exploding today, even in the high afternoon sun. By the time we were heading home the sun was much lower and the colors were even more beautiful.

for jbm: Today’s No. 1 Gmail support question.

This evening we bought pumpkins and went for a ride on the Boo Train at the Flower Farm in Canby. Ben was a little afraid of the monsters on the train ride, but we showed him how to yell back at them when they jumped out and that helped.

I packed a PowerShot G9 along for this trip. Not a lot to report at this point. It’s a black brick, it’s about the same size as the first PowerShot I ever bought, an S10. In fact, I just looked it up on DPReview: The S10 and the G9 are the exact same weight, and the G9 is only a half inch fatter.

My three main points of comparison, though, are the PowerShot G5 I bought the day before Ben was born, the Pentax K100d and the Nikon P5100 I traded in for the G9.

It’s so much faster than the G5. It still pays to be somewhat patient when shooting, because it doesn’t have an SLR’s speed, but it’s pretty quick all the same. The extra reach on the zoom (the G5 had a 4x zoom, the G9 a 6x) is nice. It doesn’t have the flip-out/tilt display of the G5, but since I’ve been shooting with the K100d so much, I’m a lot more used to composing in the rangefinder again, anyhow.

I can’t honestly compare it with the P5100 except superficially. It feels more solid, and the slight difference in size means it can’t be slipped in the front pocket of even baggy pants as comfortably. Nikon’s user interface is fine, though I think the G9 might expose a little more functionality up front. I prefer the G9’s two custom settings positions on the main dial. I had that with the G5 and it was nice to be able to just flip the dial to my preferred baseline settings. I also have the sense (though I would not fight with anyone about this) that the P5100 software might have been a little more quick to adjust the ISO up. The G9 seems more content to keep that locked down. That’s good, because even if it does have an ISO 1600 setting available on that dial, nobody reviewing it has had much good to say about settings above 400. Oh … and I can manually set the autofocus area much more quickly and intuitively with the G9 than I could the P5100.

I’m not knocking the P5100 at all, though. It was a pleasant little camera. If I’d been shooting with the CoolPix line for the past seven years, I’d probably find the G9 a little alien and off-putting. But for compact digital point-and-shoots, the P5100 was my first non-Canon ever. I could have gotten used to it, but in the end I kind of didn’t want to: I know the G9’s ancestors and I remember the G5 very fondly. It was much easier to pick up the G9, power it on, and start using it without having to wonder what any of it meant.

There’s an excellent quote from DPReview’s review of the G9, just out yesterday, though, that puts a bow on my thoughts about comparing any two point-n-shoots. Especially models like the P5100 and G9:

It’s the biggest irony of the compact digital camera market: since the cameras all use very similar sensors (often the exact same sensor) and many even share the same lens assembly, the price difference between the entry-level models and range-toppers such as the G9 simply isn’t reflected in a commensurate difference in output quality. And it doesn’t matter how much you are prepared to spend; you can’t buy your way out of the ‘compact camera problem’ - a small, noisy sensor is a small noisy sensor no matter what kind of tank you build around it or how many ‘professional’ features you build into the body.

So ultimately, what you are buying is flexibility and control, and that’s something both the P5100 and G9 have plenty of. In the end, the difference lies in how well each model exposes the features you most want.

That’s not to say there aren’t real differences. I spent some time on one forum looking over 100% crops from each and came away thinking the G9 might have had a slight edge. But for something pulling duty as a camera that fits in a jacket pocket or bag, the differences are negligible.

Comparing it to the K100d? It does what it was meant to do: Remove all my choices in terms of lenses and cut down on bulk. I can grab it and go knowing I’ll get good pictures out of it, and I can cultivate a habit of keeping a camera handy with it. The K100d is for much more deliberate situations, or settings like last month’s Last Thursday, where an SLR’s flexibility and speed is valuable. And it’s nothing I’m happy sticking in my bag if I’m just heading out for a walk or taking Ben to the park.

IMAP’s creator on Gmail’s implementation: “I feel that their current server should be considered to be a ‘work in progress’ and not as a viable ‘ready for prime time’ IMAP server.”

Macworld Review — Mac OS X Leopard:

In Leopard, Automator has been updated to address its two greatest limitations: you can now set and read variables during a workflow, and you can set a workflow to loop. Automator also now has a Record feature, which lets you record yourself performing certain tasks and then integrates those tasks into an Automator workflow.

I’ve recently rediscovered Automator, having decided I was wasting way too much time insisting on doing stuff in Applescript when it just wasn’t necessary. So out of all the things Apple has changed, these changes are easily in my top 10 list, because they’ll undercut the need to resort to Applescript even more.

Ed got Leopard yesterday, while we’re on the subject. Sorry to read there’s MacPorts breakage because I know I’ve got some stuff down in the guts of my workflow that depend on MacPorts bits. On the other hand, I built a GIMP development release from MacPorts just yesterday so I could take a look at the Resynthesizer plugin and was reminded why none of the MacPorts stuff I use involves a GUI — It never feels right and it doesn’t seem to talk to the rest of the Mac very well.

My inner tech Spartan id wants to mock the soft, indolent Mac bunny I’ve become when I try to drag an image from the Desktop into a GIMP window for editing. My tech superego reminds my tech Spartan id that only a dumbass would make fun of people who expect a UI to make sense and work fluidly. My inner Mac bunny whimpers gratefully (both for my tech superego’s intervention and Al’s substantial student discounts) and loads Photoshop.