A charitable photographer, well done Scott Kelby

http://www.kelbytraining.com/springsofhope/

Today, August 25, 2008, you can have your passion for photography help build that orphanage, because if you pre-order my new book, "The Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers" today (before 6:00am tomorrow, Tuesday, August 26, 2008 Eastern Standard Time), I will donate 100% of the entire cover price of the book to the Springs of Hope, Kenya, the non-profit grass-roots group put together by Joseph and Molly.

This is great, well done Scott Kelby. There are lots of creative ways that people can support charities (actually sending straight money is a good option too !) – and this really encourages me.

I wasn’t going to get this LightRoom 2 book this time round (I got quite a few LR1 books), but decided that I was so impressed he was making this offer, I couldn’t hold back any longer.

adobe owns me far more than microsoft

So I reletend recently and paid for the upgrade from Lightroom 1 to Lightroom 2. I was always going to upgrade, but wanted to wait and see what Adobe had to say about their international pricing. I had a good hunt around the blogosphere and saw that Adobe was firmly entrenched in their current pricing regime. It is absolutely their policy to charge more for international delivery of their products. They do have some reasons for this, and I can’t see them changing any time soon.

Annoying but hey that is how it is.

Just thought that it was interesting that I have paid $315 for LR1 and $165 for LR2 upgrade being $480 to be able to run Adobe Lightroom. This is the cheapest/easiest path I could find. The initial $315 was a special short-term price at the end of the Lightroom 1 beta testing period.

By contrast I paid $149 for the OEM copy of Vista Home Premium that I use. It does seem a bit strange to me that Adobe has already extracted more than twice as much as Microsoft.

OK I neglect to mention the $226 I paid for Office 2007 Home and Student – but I can claim that as a legitimate business expense and I get a GST receipt.

Adobe domecile their Australian online sales through Ireland so I don’t even get a GST receipt to claim the input credit (should I be eligible to do so as a business expense).

Translucent Creatures

From National Geographic.

more here; http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photos/translucent-creatures/translucent-pelagic-octopus-newbert.html

Google has 1 million servers ?

From: Look Beyond Google’s Plan to Become Carbon Neutral (26 June 2007)

Gartner estimates Google has over 1 million servers (more than any
other company), which means its power consumption and carbon dioxide footprint are
substantial.

wow, oh wow. I have enough trouble keeping my network (and family’s) of a few PCs, a windows home server, a couple of laptops, wireless and internet all humming.

Imagine trying to manage that many !

WordPress plugins that I use

The wordpress platform is a lot of fun and it also lets you customise how your blog behaves. I have been using it for just over a year now and just love it.

I can use all the smarts of WordPress for free. WordPress is open-source, yay !

So in the interest of giving at least something back to the community, below is the list of plugins that I use after a year of playing around with what I want and need.

Add Meta Tags

Adds the Description and Keywords XHTML META tags to your blog’s front page and to each one of the posts, static pages and category archives. This operation is automatic, but the generated META tags can be fully customized. Also, the inclusion of other META tags, which do not need any computation, is possible. Please read the tips and all other info provided at the configuration panel. By George Notaras.

Adsense-Deluxe

Place Google AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts. Requires WordPress 1.5 or higer. For complete usage and configuration click on AdsenseDeluxe under the “Options” menu. By Acme Technologies.

Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin. By Matt Mullenweg.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Configuration Page By Arne Brachhold.

This functionality is slated to be included in the Core WordPress 2.7.

Subscribe To Comments

Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. Based on version 1 from Scriptygoddess By Mark Jaquith.

This functionality is slated to be included in the Core WordPress 2.7.

the_excerpt Reloaded

This mod of WordPress’ template function the_excerpt() knows there is no spoon. By Kaf Oseo.

WordPress.com Stats

Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key. By Andy Skelton.

WordPress Hashcash

Client-side javascript blocks all spam bots. XHTML 1.1 compliant. By Elliott Back.

Even Amazon won’t ship Lightroom 2 Upgrades

Thought I’d just see if the US Amazon store would ship me a Adobe LightRoom Version 2 Upgrade.

Alas no go.

Adobe still seems to very quiet on the whole “International Adobe Lightroom users are pissed” front. This is not a good sign. The more time passes the more I believe that Adobe is taking the piss with its’ users.

Michael Martin-Morgan says

I won’t bore everybody with the figures – those who want to can justtry visiting their respective Adobe sites and check the corresponding rip-offs concerning ALL PRODUCTS, against the US site – I’ll just say that I’ve been grilling Adobe over this for some 5 years now and they’ve not bothered to do anything about it. I’ve told them time and again that their stupidity foments illegal downloading of their products to such an extent that I bet if Photoshop cost just a hundred dollars and everybody in the world who uses it had paid for it they’d be making more of a profit.

Only conclusion: they’re great software artists but complete idiots when it comes to selling the stuff.

Adobe is drowning in the complaints. Please respond Adobe !

Perhaps 2 clues as to why LightRoom is a rip-off

From Tom Hogarty, Senior Product Manager Lightroom and Camera RAW’s blog.

quoting a snippet here ;

There are tax rules that need to be accounted for in every region and pricing considerations based on our relationship with retail partners. –TH

OK, So there are local taxes and local retailers. I assume that local retailers in the US also need to make a profit, so surely the same margin can be enjoyed by international retailers ?

And another one ;

[Reimo, price differentials are not based strictly on the cost of localizing a product into a different language. Each price point is determined by local market factors and obviously affected by exchange rates. -TH]

Ooooh the conspiracy theorists will see this as actually saying that because the US dollar is so weak that Adobe is trying to recoup some profit from their international customers.

Apologies if these quotes are too cheekily taken out of context, but I’m seeking for good story from Adobe and feeling frustrated that I can’t find one.