I just found out flictr has a feature showing the most popular camera among its users.? It is surprise to see in the catagory of compact cameras, the top 5 positions all belongs to Canon.? To think a little bit more, actually this outcome is quite reasonable.? In the professional camera catagory, it is a even split between Canon and Nikon.? However the compact line of Nikon camera is just so and so.? So Canon is naturally recommanded when new buyers who don’t know much about cameras asking advices from their photographer friends.? Compact cameras from Sony and Panasonic seems quite popular, at least they runs lots of advertisement.? The problem for Sony is their camera is over priced and use their proprietary memory stick, which is quite inconvinient.? Panasonic is famous for their house hold electronics like rice cooker and microwave, customer won’t have much confidence in their digital camera yet.? The market of camera is perfect demotration of the power of prosumers, who are usually the early adopters or the hobbists.? They are usually the opinion leader among general consumers.? Winning their support can swing the market share to your advantage by a large margin.? Here is the link to flickr’s camera data.

In western culture, there are two topics your generally avoid with new friends.? They are religion and politics.? The reason not to talk about these two topics is to avoid unnecessary conflicts.? Religion and politics involves fundamental values of each person, which everyone may be different.? It is almost impossible to determine the objective right or wrong of those value without going through boring acedamic discussion span across all the spectrums in philosophy.? Instead, people choose to defense their value subjectively following their emotion.? If the party involved do not know when to stop the discussion before it gest too deep, most often the conflict between values will turns into flaming wars ended with personal insult.? The good thing about internet is you can talk about your religion and political viewpoint all you like with out fear jeopadizing any relationship.? Your opponent may hate you from the guts because you deny their value of existance, but they can’t do anything to harm you.? If the discussion turns into insults, you can just simpily ignore him.? You can’t ignore people you meet in real life.? The most thing you get from dicussion religion and politics on the internet is you get a sample of how people with different values will response.? If you can’t void those topics in real life, you know what is the best way to steer away from the hot spots that lead to conflicts.

Pat gave me a very cute CD of little kids singing classic love songs.? I was playing it in my car these days.? I drove a few friends at work to lunch today and they have some interesting response to the CD.? One guy first comment that it is church songs, which is not true.? After I pointed out those are classic love songs, he made an excuse by claiming he is too young to know those songs.? The fact is that he is the oldest person in the car and some younger one recongize the songs.? He just show his lack of knowledge in classic love songs.? Then another person criticize the singing and said that he like the original version better.? How can you compare the singing skill of a 10 years old kid with the super stars?? He just don’t know how to apprepiate the cuteness in the kids’ voice, which is the differentiating factor of the CD.? I guess someone really lack the cultural capacity to enjoy the CD.? He fled my car after lunch to get a ride from someone back to work.? I will play this CD whenever he get a ride with me.? I think with more listening training, he will learn to not scared by the cute classic love songs sang by kids.

Yesterday PS3 officially on sale in Canada.? As expected, it ran out of stock within the first 15 minutes.? I never own a console, and I am not planning to own one ever.? I just find people line up over night just to get the latest console unbelievable.? Well, I can understand if they line up to make a profit.? The PS3 is sold on eBay as high as $5000 a piece, where the original price is only $650.? Almost 8 times the profit, not bad for just twelve hours of waiting in line.? What I really don’t understand is why someone what to get PS3 right now.? There is no great release title come with PS3, only 4 medioce games.? If you can wait a few months, so that you can get it at the offical price with having to line up over night.? I doubt how many people own a 1080p HDTV to utilize the graphics power of PS3, never mind the dual TV support.? Probably it will be the most useless feature of PS3, who will buy two HDTV and put them side by side in the same room?? If no user has this setting, no game developer will make games for it.? The blue-ray disc drive come with PS3 is also useless.? There is no blue-ray movies out there.? By the time blue-ray becomes popular, you can except to find $100 blue-ray player in Costco. People may buy PS3 just for the sake of show off, demostrate they own the latest game console.? I won’t envy those who own PS3, I will simply laugh at their foolishness.? Owning PS3 right now only implies the lack of intelligence.? Why keep the console if you can make an instant profit of several thousand dollars?

The city of Vancouver issued a water warning today.? Due to heavy rain in the past few days, the reservior are contaminated.? The tap water is not drinkable and in fact it has brownish colour.? It is advised to boil and filter drinking water.? Actually, the tap water is not totally undrinkable, it won’t kill you.? The worse can happen is you will get sick for a few days.? Anyways, better safe than sorry, I went to supermarket to buy some bottle water after school tonight.? Not surprised, all bottle water are gone.? There are a few boxes left on the top shelf, but no one operate the fork lift to bring them down.? My water hunt turn to a nearby drug store.? Luckily the cashier was bringing out the last cart of bottle water.? I grepped two boxes immediately.? One for myself and one for pat.? So my drinking water supply is secured for at least 2-3 days.? The city should able to clean up the reservior by then.? City people like myself always take tap water for granted.? We never wonder what life will be without tap water.? Probably we couldn’t last more than a week if tap water is dry.? Water crisis is a serious threat to modern society.? I won’t mind paying the premium of regulated water company to ensure reliability.? Leaving water supply to pure market force is too risky, same argument for regulating other vital utilities like electricity or gas.? In longer term, Canada should still have adequate water resources.? Other countries will have serious shortage of water.? The next world war may not triggered by oil, which replacement energy is on the horizon.? It could triggered by regional conflicts fighting over scares water supply.