Megapixel Madness

Sorry for not writing for a couple of days, I've been in my bed with what feels like a combination of the Ebola virus, Bird Flu and Pneumonia. Or, as you unsympathetic females like to call it, a Cold.

Whilst I was lying in misery, with only a headache and a hearty cough to keep me company inbetween unpleasant trips to the lavatory, I watched a program in which a bald guy helps out useless shoppers by getting them a better deal. Quite good, as it showed how much of a discount you can actually get sometimes if you push hard enough. In this case, he was helping a man buy a digital camera.

But what irritated me was his comment "the more megapixels, the greater the quality". This frankly is not true. It's not untrue, either, but it is only a small part of the story.

The more megapixels, the bigger the image. But what is of frankly more importance, is the lens and the size of the sensor. Photography is about light. If you have a tiny lens half an inch across, you will not get as much light in as if you have a lens 2 inches across. This is pretty obvious. What most people don't realise, however, is that the size of the sensor is incredibly important as well. If you have, say, 10 megapixels and you cram them all onto a sensor half the size of a postage stamp, you will simply not get such a good picture as if you stick the same number of pixels on a 35mm sensor (as found in VERY expensive digital SLR's). This close together you get a lot of interference and a grainy image. It might be a huge image, but the overally quality will not be as good, especially at higher ISO levels.

You often see tiny cameras advertised with 8 or 10 megapixels. The average consumer thinks these are great, beacuse they've got lots of megapixels. But they have tiny lenses, and tiny sensors, and won't actually be that good. You are probably better off with a 5 megapixel camera in most cases.

Example: I have a Panasonic Lumix FZ-10 that I recently retired. This is a 4MP "prosumer" camera. In other words, it has a decent lens on it. The sensor is not that big, but it is bigger than the one on the 5MP Konica Minolota X10 I bought to carry around in a pocket. The Konica has more megapixels, but guess which produces the better pictures?

Another example: My mobile phone has a 3MP camera built in. My first digital camera (a Casio something or other bought about 7 or 8 years ago) was a 2MP camera. Guess which takes the better pictures? Correct, the ancient (in technology terms) Casio. Although the phone camera is actually surpisingly good, considering. Good enough to not bother much with the little Konica anymore, anyway (that camera was a complete waste of money it's so bad).

Oddly enough, the Casio actually took very good pictures. This is because it had a reasonable-sized sensor. Back in the dark ages of digital photography, sensors had not yet shrunk to the degree that they had today, with the result that you got some pretty good shots from it. The only problem was they were quite small.

I bet you any money that the shots produced by the 6MP Nikon D40 digital SLR will be far better than any compact 10MP camera you can buy. It will also handle better and have no shutter lag (i.e. press the button, it takes the picture with no delay at all).

I am now the proud owner of a Canon EOS 400D, which is stunning. It is 10MP, but has a sufficiently large sensor that it can cope with this. Paying the extra money over the 350D with it's 8MP had nothing to do with the 2 extra megapixels, but more to do with the larger LCD and the sensor cleaner. £500 is a lot to spend, but in my eyes it was worth it. I truly treasure my record of our lives, especially Joe & Jess, and £500 is a small amount to pay for having lots of great pictures of them.

Don't be fooled by the marketing-hype. Bigger numbers do not mean better pictures.

Amazing experience

I'm a bit stuck for a topic today, so I'm going to talk about a holiday we took in 2004, specifically one part of it.

We went to Malaysia, staying with Saffron (Ele's sister) in Kuala Lumpur. Whilst there we also went on a road trip to the Cameron Highlands, Penang, and took a few days in Thailand in Hat Yai, Phuket and Ao Nang. Phuket in particular was fantastic. But that isn't want I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about is camping. Camping doesn't sound exciting. It promotes images of Cubs and Scouts sleeping in WWII-era tents in fields, cooking sausages and playing games. Or the same thing, but with the Cubs and Scouts replaced by a family of 5 plus a dog, with a tent pitched next to their people carrier. Most sites have wash facilities and toilet blocks; all mod cons.

This was not that sort of camping. This mixed powerful 4x4's (and even a 6x6), a three million-year-old rainforest, huge machetes, illegal chemicals (no, not that sort!), CB-radios and plenty of beer. The sort of stuff every man would enjoy.

The crew consisted of Me, Ele, Jess, Chris (Ele's mum), Saffron (Ele's sister), Vicky (Saffron's husband), and several of their friends, whose names I probably won't spell correctly: Atek, Keith, Stu, Sean, Len-Ho and Lee.

We had a convoy of 5 vehicles, A Land Rover 110 twin-cab pickup ("Two-Blue") with a huge V8 belonging to Keith and driven by Vicky with me, Chris and Ele as passengers, a Land Rover 90 ("Gazelle") owned and driven by Saffron with Jess as a passenger, a very odd Volvo 4x4-truck-thing ("Thunderbird-1") , a very odd Volvo 6x6-truck-thing ("Thunderbird-2") owned jointly by Keith and Stu, and driven respectively by them, and a Jeep Wranger ("Crap Jeep thing, buy a Land Rover lah!") owned and driven by Sean. The rest of the guys were distributed amongst these three vehicles.

We set off from Vicky's workshop mid-afternoon. The first amusing incident came when the police pulled up alongside Keith in Thunderbird-1. T-1 was not licenced for road use, but was being driven there anyway, given that things are not quite as strict (i.e. the police are more bribeable) than here. As they pulled alongside, Keith was simultaneously smoking a cigarette, drinking a can of beer and on his mobile phone. They had a look at T-1, gave him an appreciative nod and drove off! We stopped off at a petrol station and loaded up with basically their entire stock of bottled water, cigarettes and ice. The ice was put into the big coolboxes containing the drinks (4 of these full of cans of beer, 1 with non-alcoholic drinks!). We drew quite a bit of attention, especially from kids, with our convoy of heavily equipped vehicles. Some more police pulled into the station, so the Volvos made a quick getaway, lest they be discovered for being unlicensed!

We eventually arrived in a small town where we stopped for a quick bite at a suprisingly large restaurant (although that term is possibly a little grand!), and then headed off the beaten track into the jungle. By now it was dark, so Vicky took the lead as he had been there before. We drove down an old logging track for a few miles, forded a river, climbed the bank on the other side and made our camp. Camp consisted of a huge tarpaulin strung up between a tree and one of the Volvos. Under this we setup chairs and camp-beds and sat down to drink lots of beer. At some point Atek arrived, and he and some of the guys went off for a play in the 6x6. An hour or so later (at about 1am), Sean wandered back into the camp asking for some help... the rest of us piled into Two-Blue and set off down the track. We soon found them, stuck at 45 degrees sideways in a ditch... they were rescued quickly enough! Soon after we went to sleep, although I was rather unnerved by the hand-sized moths attracted to our light.

The next morning we were able to see our site by daylight for the first time. It was stunning. We saw monkeys in the trees, even. One thing that couldn't be missed in daylight was the bridge over the river. Vicky had just thought it more fun to drive through the thing rather than take the easy bridge. We had a wash in the river and packed up camp, before setting off deeper into the jungle.

Soon the relatively smooth track gave way to a rutted path. We came to bridges that were made of literally three tree trunks - one on one side, two on another - that crossed ravines deeper than I'd care to fall down. We inched over these, with one member of our party acting as a navigator by standing on the other side and guiding the drivers across. Hair-raising stuff. One slip and you'd be tumbling down. We drove up a steep track littered with HUGE boulders. Every obstacle I saw had me convinced we would not be able to get past it, but we did, due to the capabilities of the vehicles and the skills of the drivers. A couple of times we stopped and waited for the others to catch up. It was eerily quiet. The rainforest has this ability to absorb all sound. I couldn't hear the other vehicles until they rounded the bend.

After a few hours we arrived at the second campsite. This was not that far from the first (stupidly I didn't take a GPS with me to log the trip, but I suspect the overhead foliage would seriously have messed up the signals anyway). It was probably only 4 or 5 kilometers, but that was quite deep into the jungle, really. This camp had last been visited a couple of years ago, and had completely grown over in that time. The rainforest grows very quickly. A path to the river was made by bashing a clearance through with T-1. We then had a lovely spot by the river to camp in, after all the grass had been flattened by force-of-vehicle, and sprayed with DDT (that's the illegal chemicals I was talking about!) to keep the insects away. We had a BBQ'd dinner of sorts, and plenty more beer (although plenty had been consumed throughout the day anyway!). A big fire was lit to keep away the nastier of the animals prevalant in the rainforest and slept, this time under mosquito nets.

I awoke in the morning to find three nasty-looking gigantic fly-type things had somehow gotten through my net and were buzzing around my face.That woke me up pretty quickly! Some of the others had gone off early to explore (by 4x4, of course), so the rest of us put our camp-chairs into the river (more of a very-wide stream here, really as it was very shallow and not very fast flowing), and sat there chatting, eating, smoking and drinking for most of the morning. After a while we realised the others were taking a long time, and we couldn't raise them on the radio, so we hatched a plan to pack up some of the camp, leave the girls packing up the rest, and the guys would go off and try and find the missing others, or at least get to a point where they were raisable on the radio. Just before we were about to set off, they came back, though.

So we set off back to civilisation, except this time I was driving! It's a scary business and hard work! The vehicle was very powerful, a 4-litre V8 (although it wasn't running great), and in low-range it will just shoot up the steepest and bumpiest of slopes as if it wasn't there. Somewhere along the route we met up with another batch of 4x4ers. It was pleasing that on one steep downhill section I made it down without trouble, and one of them got really stuck. Beginners luck, presumably. Two-Blue had started to exhibit some reluctance to work properly (nothing to do with my driving, honest!), by misfiring and being very reluctant to start. Vicky took back the controls when we came to the first tree-trunk bridge, fortunately. Otherwise I probably wouldn't be writing this today...

At one of the log-bridges, Stu, in the 6x6, decided to go last, as it was looking a bit rickety and he was in the heaviest vehicle. When he was going over, there was a loud crack and the back of his vehicle dropped alarmingly and slid off to one side. The look on his face was a picture - of terror. With some clever winching he was hauled off, just.

Eventually we made it back to the first campsite, where we washed the mud off the vehicles in the river. Stu, the resident mad Australian then saw the slope between the exit-bank of the river, and the track leading to the bridge. It was at least a 70 degree angle, but he reckoned he could drive the 6x6 up it, so he did. It scrabbled for grip at the back and then launched itself into the air before crashing back down to earth. Quite impressive!

We drove back to the small village, with Vicky doing some rally-style driving at speeds that were surely far too quick for the terrain, and had dinner in the same restaurant (where fish is literally an entire fish, head, tail, eyes the lot, served up on a plate), who didn't seem to mind that we were all filthy dirty. Well, some had washed in the river. As I had to unload the vehicles back at the workshop I didn't bother. We then set off back for home. At some point we lost radio contact with Saffron, who had also been having a bit of car trouble. We doubled-back (it was just Vicky, Ele and me at this point, as Chris had joined Saff and Jess in Gazelle) and took a different route to see if we could see them. We couldn't, so we concluded they were Ok, but we were now approaching a toll-road that we didn't want to be approaching. Vicky therefore did the only sensible thing, and reversed down the 6-lane highway, to a point where we could drive over the central reservation. This central reservation was quite high and made of concrete, but we were in a capable vehicle. We bounced over it, but this had the affect of doing something nasty to the car, and we pulled over on the other side of the highway, immobile. This time it was more seriously broken and it took Vicky over an hour to get it going again. Worse, we only had one beer left and it wasn't even cold. Eventually it was fixed and with some more interesting driving (in the UK it would have resulted in road-rage, in Malaysia it was practically standard driving behaviour anyway and dismissed with a wave of the hand).

We finally made it back to the workshop. We used some metal ladders to drive Saff's car out of the workshop where it had been stored (there is a 2-foot concrete ledge to get up), and then it was decided to just drive the 4x4's and the 6x6 up the ledge as it was easier, so we laid the ladders down onto the ground. The 6x6 was the first to go up, and its wheels flung the ladders back about thirty feet across the carpark. Quite a spectacle!

We made it home at about 2am, where I had possibly the longest shower I've ever had in my entire life. We chucked all our things in the laundry room Saff had for the maid to deal with the next day (big benefit of living in Malaysia!). Believe me, that room did not smell very nice!

All in all it was an amazing experience, and one I'd like to repeat at some point. The fact that I remember it so clearly nearly three years later proves that. I normally can't remember what I did last week! It is also the only time I've ever done my "business" in a jungle with a hole dug in the ground. You haven't lived until you've literally shit in the woods.

It's coming!

The clocks have gone forward. Hurrah! Finally, we are putting the gloomy winter behind us and heading towards summer.

Summer in England is great. We appreciate it, because it only lasts for about three months. Those who have year-round sunshine don't appreciate it so much, because it's normal to them. There is nothing better than the English countryside basking in the warmth. The greenery takes on a more defined hue, flowers add vivid colour, and there are no insects that can actually kill you to. There is only the wasp to worry about, a thing that surely proves the non-existance of God. What intelligent deity would design such a pointless creature?

The period from October to about now is awful. When you wake up, it's dark. When you leave work, it's dark. All your daylight hours are spent in an office. This is not good for the soul. And even on the weekends, it's cold and rainy so you can't go out and do much. But now, it's light when you wake up and light when you leave work. It's still bloody cold, but at least it's an improvement.

After October you have the brief respite of Christmas where you get to be all cheery and happy, until January when the credit card bills come in. I suppose January can sometimes throw one of those clear, crisp winter days that are nice to walk in, provided you have enough layers of clothing on, but you still only have a few hours in which to enjoy them.

Many people state spring as their favourite time of year. This is stupid. It's like saying you prefer the warm-up band to the main headliners. And as for autumn, that's like preferring the Rolling Stones now to the Rolling Stones of 35 years ago. Not the same. Past its best.

Summer is where it's at for me. 30 degrees, sunglasses mandatory. I can even wear a baseball cap without looking like a chav, because it's necessary for the heat (it helps that mine says Land Rover Owner's Club of Malaysia rather than Nike on it, though). I can get into a baking car and put the aircon on full blast. I can go home and actually sit outside. Eating dinner outdoors is one of life's hugely underrated pleasures. We can go on picnics and nice walks in the countryside. I can goto the pub at lunchtime and sit outside and have a pint. Everyone is just happier in the summer. June, July and August are fantastic.

But then September rolls around, and whilst it often starts of promisingly, it soon deteriorates, then the clocks go back again, heat and daylight are extinguished, and another 6 months of gloom and despair set in.

But, for now, things are looking up. Summer is coming and not even Tony Blair can stop it!

Great journalism

It was funny yesterday, seeing the newspaper headlines with regards to the budget.

I didn't see many, but the Daily Express had clearly agreed with my views that it's all a big con. Their headline ran to the effect that it was all smoke-and-mirrors.

The Sun, on the other hand, demonstrated their normal lack of intelligence by having a huge front-page headline regarding the 2p cut in Income Tax and how great it was.

And somehow The Sun still manages to be the bestselling newspaper in the country.

How stupid do you think we are?

The new Budget makes interesting reading.

Gordon Brown is obviously trying to make everybody love him by announcing, coincidentally just before he takes over as Prime Minister, that he is going to cut the basic rate of income tax by 2p. This is something that hasn't been done for a long time.

Obviously at first glance, this seems like a good thing. We all imagine that we'll have loads of extra money.

But then you look under the surface, and see that he is abolishing the 10% rate that exists just above the "free" rate. So the net result is? Bugger all difference. Big headline, sounds good, but makes us no better off at all. Then factor in the increase in Road Tax, cigarettes, alcohol and everything else and, yup, I'm actually worse off than last year. Again. Worse than this is that when the income tax rate goes up again, let's say up to 21% in a couple of years time, that 10% rate still won't be there, so we'll be far worse off than we were before all this. Joy.

The weird thing is that half of the changes don't actually come into affect now. The 2p cut isn't for another year. The 15% increase in Child Benefit is not until 2010. And that's basically just the rate of inflation anyway - so it makes no difference in real terms! Stupid, stupid, stupid... it's just done on a spreadsheet with the totals all kept the same, but moving the amounts around the columns, I reckon.

Hopefully most people will see through the spin and kick out this idiot at the first available election.

I was right!

Only a couple of months ago, in these hallowed webpages, I speculated that the Olympics would end up costing £10billion, not the £3billion originally stated.

And in the news at the end of last week? The Olympics are going to cost £10billion. So I was right. As usual. As I said at the time, it was always going to cost that much, it's just that if they had said that from the start the plan would never have got approval. So they said it'd cost £3billion to get it off the ground, then hit us with the real cost later, when it's too late to back out.

The reason for posting this late, incidentally, is that Ele and I swanned off to Stratford-Upon-Avon for the weekend, sans kiddies. We had a nice, relaxing time, we saw Shakespeare's house (in the company of about a thousand Americans. In August I could understand this, but it was very suprising in mid-March), we shopped, we had a canal-boat ride and we visited a 14th century haunted house at night, for a lantern-lit tour. Very spooky. Ele was quite scared, and there was one girl on the tour that was really really scared. At one point we were all standing in a line up some stairs and the guide was telling us about how some people had felt their hair being tugged whilst standing there. I was standing next to the really scared girl, a couple of steps higher than her. I was so tempted to reach out and tug her hair, but I resisted. We visited some pubs, ate some nice food and stayed in a really nice hotel. Oh, and we managed to do a geocache, too.

Just what we needed!

Get your hands off of my money

So now there is nobody to vote for in the next election.

There was no chance of me voting for Labour, obviously, as they haven't exactly proven themselves over the past years. And the idea of Gordon Brown running the country for even longer is, quite frankly, a scary one.

But now both the Labour party and the Conservatives (who I would have voted for) are revealing ridiculous new environmental policies that I simply cannot endorse with my vote. And the Conservative ones are even worse than the Labour ones.

It's all expected, of course. Green is the new black, and all that. As this appears to be the biggest bandwagon in history, of course they are going to jump on it. But people are going to believe them, they are going to believe all the myth and hype and spin regarding climate change. And then they are going to accept the crippling extra tax burden imposed by these policies.

We used to have a system for dealing with this. It was called the Green Party. They would do all the enviro-nonsense, leaving the proper parties to get on with proper policies that actually affect us. Little things like crime, education and healthcare. Naturally I'm excluding the Labour party from this as they've done bugger all with those three topics.

But now it's just another excuse to grab more money from us. Politicians aren't stupid (I hope) and surely do not believe the nonsense themselves? Maybe they do, though. Maybe they've had years of people - paid for by the goverment (i.e. thee and me) - telling them that it's all real and can we please have some more funding for further investigations please, that they've started to believe it all themselves.

But now we are truly to suffer from it. Britain is a tiny spec on this planet. It may be overcrowded, but with 60m people on the island, and 6bn over the world, it only makes up 1% of the world population, and even less of its land mass. Even if all the man-made impact stuff were true (which it isn't), what difference would it make? Absolutely none at all, that's how much. I've said it before and I'll say it again; we could shut down all our factories, scrap all our cars and get rid of all our electricity. We could go back to living in caves and growing turnips, and it would make no difference in the slightest to the global climate. So why tax us more? What will it do?

The only real countries that can make a difference are the biggies and the newbies. The US, China, India, Russia. And if Africa ever drags itself out of its rut then that, too. But they won't. The likes of India and China are not going to restrict their economies and growth by adopting anything so stupid. The US won't either, because it doesn't care what the rest of the world thinks, and I admire them for that. Possibly the only occasion that Bush has been right on something, but I suspect oil interests play quite a big part here...

The bottom line is, taking even more of my money will not save the planet, so I want the politicians to keep their grubby hands off of it. The planet does not even need saving anyway.

But now, who do I vote for?

Who let the dogs out?

This morning I heard on the news that one of the London boroughs (I think it was Camden) was going to only allow dogs of the leash in dedicated "dog-walking" areas.

Can anyone else hear the sound of a knee jerking?

Just because over the past year or so there have been one or two dog attacks, now ALL dogs must be punished?

Ridiculous, but I think they've got the bones of an idea, here.

What needs to be done, is expand upon this thinking. If it will work for dogs, it can work for "Chavs" and other teenaged (and older!) louts.

So my idea is to only allow these sorts of people (i.e. those with "hoodies", people who wear trainers costing more than £50, people who drive Citroen Saxos with huge speakers and neon lights underneath, those with unneccessary amounts of cheap jewellery, those who drink super-strength lager etc) in specific "yob" areas. In these areas they will be allowed to drink, fight each other and litter as much as they like. There could even be a branch of McDonalds and a KCF in these areas. But, if they need to be taken through public areas, they must be put on a leash.

So there we go. I've now solved our yob culture problem. Somebody really should put me in charge.

Of course it'll never work because of human rights. Funny thing is, most of the time animals have more rights than us. Try comparing legislation on transporting cattle vs the number of people on trains and tubes in the morning.

Bleedin' Bodge-up Company

Read this quote from the BBC's website on Climate Change:

"The climate of the Earth is always changing. In the past it has altered as a result of natural causes. Nowadays, however, the term climate change is generally used when referring to changes in our climate which have been identified since the early part of the 1900's. The changes we've seen over recent years and those which are predicted over the next 80 years are thought to be mainly as a result of human behaviour rather than due to natural changes in the atmosphere."

What the hell? They are actually suggesting that for hundreds of thousands, millions even, of years, the climate of the Earth has been changing because of natural causes. But suddenly, it seems, at the beginning the 20th Century, Mother Nature went out for lunch and has not been back since. Instead, we took over the role of changing the climate. Very convenient that the Earth would have entered a period of complete temperature stability - for the first time in it's multi-billion-year histoy - at precisely the moment we became heavily industrialised. Except we have all conspired to ruin it by inventing cars, factories and planes.

What utter tosh. It is still natural causes that vary the temperature.

This is just a further example of the way Global Warming(TM) is now hyped up in a huge frenzy by those who have everything to gain by having people believe it.

Governments can increase taxes.
Newspapers sell more copies.
Scientists get more funding.
"Independant" research groups get to keep their jobs.

All of these people have lots to gain by perpetuating the myth. The problem is, this myth amounts to massive fraud.

Billions of dollars, probably Trillions, are being spent on the nonsense that is the Kyoto protocol. This basically sets out an agenda to reduce the temperature by 2050, by a tiny amount. And then it only actually delays that temperature by 6 years. In other words, it has no effect at all. All this money could be better spent on, for example, Malaria research. Malaria actually kills millions of people per year. They could all be saved with this money spent on research for new treatments. But that's not trendy, and would only increase the population count. Not good for politicians.

You never hear of the Medieval Warm Period, a fairly long period at the beginning of the last millennium where temperatuers were signficantly higher than "normal". Or the Little Ice Age, which occured afterwards where temperatures dropped. The evidence actually is that we are still coming out of that period now, hence the current trend for going up. Also note that these periods typically lasted a couple of hundred years or more each. You simply can't effect massive change in fifty years. That's a geological nanosecond.

The temperature might be going slightly up now, but then it'll go down again in another couple of hundred years time. Maybe it'll drop drastically and we'll have a ten-thousand year long ice age. What then?

We simply can't predict this stuff. So stop wasting my tax money on trying to change it and spend it on something worthwhile instead.