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MyCokeRewards vs. PepsiStuff

I’ve been thinking about a quick and probably oversimple financial analysis of the benefits of the MyCokeRewards.com and PepsiStuff.com rewards programs. I’m typically more of a drinker of Coca-Cola products–mainly Coke Zero and Powerade (after kayaking or cycling)–and have participated in that program for much longer, but the affiliation of PepsiStuff with Amazon.com and the ability to buy music there with the points has gotten me interested in that program as well.

The simpler analysis is probably PepsiStuff. One 20 oz. bottle gets you one point. Five points gets you a song download on Amazon. A song typically goes for 89 cents. So each point is worth about 18 cents. The caveat is that not every song is buyable in this manner.

With MyCokeRewards, I often redeem 220 points for a gold movie pass good at AMC Theatres. The maximum current price of an AMC movie ticket is $9.50. The makes each point worth about 4 cents. One 20 oz. bottle of soda gets you three points, making the value of the points per bottle about 12 cents. I often buy my Coke products in 12-packs, however, and the point value on the 12-pack then works out to 40 cents.

I also saw a sign on the convenience store door that said MyCokeRewards was like, “buy eight, get one free” on 20 oz. bottles. In that case, if the store charges $1.39 for your 20 oz. bottle, the value per point is close to 6 cents and the point value per bottle works out to about 18 cents, which gets us back into the PepsiStuff value ballpark per 20 oz. bottle purchased.

I might have to do a further exercise to see if the point differential would make it beneficial to buy six-packs of 24 oz. plastic bottles rather than 12-packs of 12 oz. cans. Then you’d have to get into the eco-friendliness of plastic bottles vs. aluminum cans, too. I always recycle both, btw.

Stop and shoot the flowers

Just a reminder that no matter how busy or hurried you are, you should always be willing to stop for a moment and listen to the call of the flowers. If you have your camera with you, that’s all the better.

Red Buckeyes and what they attract

Ruby throated hummingbird.

Cloudless Sulphur butterfly.

Austin bound

I head out early in the morning to journey to this year’s SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, TX tomorrow through Tuesday (flying back Wednesday). One way to describe it is to say that it’s a giant, five-day-long group hug for the builders of the web. This is my third trip to this conference.

You can follow me around on

• Flickr
• Twitter
• Sched
• Upcoming

Lunar Eclipse

My best shot on a night of fighting with the clouds.

Update: View my whole set from the evening on Flickr.

The photo above was my first shot posted of the event and that got it picked up on a couple of eclipse stories (1, 2) on Yahoo! News. It was viewed over 3,000 times during the course of the evening and is now over 4,000 total views, by far my most ever.

My December “Photo Assignment” contribution

The photo was published as part of Derrick Story’s “Photo Assignment” gallery for December 2007 on The Digital Story web site.

View the photo on Flickr

Signs of Spring

Shot with “super macro” on my new camera.

My new camera

This post is only about a month late. I didn’t feel like writing though. So shoot me.

The aformentioned camera conundrum was resolved in mid-December when, after spending what seemed like a couple of hours in Best Buy going through every menu and setting on the camera, I brought home an Olympus Stylus 770 SW.

I feel guardedly positive about the purchase. “Mr. Though shalt buy Canon” brought home an Olympus and I’m not used to the UI or the handling quite yet. One thing that’s taking getting used to is the lens being up in the corner of the body. I’ve taken several pictures that contain a fat-finger corner vignette.

It has performed very well on its first couple of kayak adventures–to Turkey Creek in Palm Bay during Christmas week and up and down the Ichetucknee River on New Year’s Eve.

I love the sturdy feel. The handling is good even with my big, thick-fingered hands, but I sometimes find myself pushing the wrong button due to unfamiliarity. The screen is good enough to shoot with in broad daylight which is good because there is no optical viewfinder.

I haven’t tried the panorama feature yet because I just got an Olympus xD card last week (a gift). I don’t like that Olympus makes you buy their memory cards in order to unlock features. I wish is used SD memory instead just because the world doesn’t need so many memory card types.

I wondered today, when I read the Olympus announcement of the Stylus 1030 SW, whether I should have waited. I like the look of the Canon-ish mode dial. 10 megapixels (vs. 7) and the more versatile zoom specs might come in handy too. This isn’t my first experience with this, I think I bought my Digital Rebel not long before the Rebel XT came out.

Happy Holidays 2007

Here are some links to stories and photo sets from my adventures of 2007:

• Tubing with the Byrneses and Kinseys
• FamiLee beach weekend
• Panama City Beach Vacation
• My new kayak
• Cycling and swimming at Fanning Springs in the Summer
• Sail Jacksonville Fireworks
• South by Southwest Interactive conference
• Kayaking in Sebastian
• Winter mountain biking at O’Leno State Park
• Mario, 9 Sep 1990 - 12 Jan 2007
• Christmas Update 2006

Keep checking back. I might not be done yet.

Another camera conundrum

It’s been two years since I last bought a camera so I guess it’s once again time to hem and haw about my equipment and making changes to the toolkit. One major consideration is that a lot of my more interesting recent work has been from the seat of the kayak I bought over the summer. My rig for that work has been the venerable Canon G1 in its Aquapac bag. The G1 still takes great pictures, but the system has some deficiencies:

• The camera seems to take forever to start up, at least compared to the instantaneousness of more recent models. It’s also so slow that I’m sure shots have been missed.
• The camera’s autofocus doesn’t work through the Aquapac bag so I have to use the camera in “Pan Focus” mode which limits you to wide angle focal length.
• Handling the camera in the bag is cumbersome.

So here’s what I’m considering:

• Buy a waterproof camera. Specifically, buy an Olympus Stylus 770 SW. The cons of that choice are that it’s not a Canon (and I instinctively know how Canons work) and it uses xD memory cards and I’ve always been critical of the need for that card format (and I have big SD cards already). The big pro is that it wouldn’t require a waterproof case for kayaking, tubing, wet bike rides, etc. The shockproof feature would allow it to replace the G1 as the bike camera too. Michael Reichmann from The Luminous Landscape took one on an Amazon expedition and recommended it afterward.
• Buy a Canon SD850 IS and the accompanying waterproof housing. My guru Derrick uses an earlier-generation version of this rig with outstanding results. The big pro is that it’s a Canon so I already know how to use it. It would also replace the SD450 as my pocket/belt camera that I take everywhere (as might the Olympus). I don’t know if it would replace the G1 on bike rides though, maybe. I’m a little leary of proper care of housing 0-rings.
• Buy a Canon A720 IS and keep using the Aquapac bag. Canon lists a housing for this camera on its site too, but it is apparently not yet available as of this writing. I wonder about the autofocus performance inside the Aquapac. I’d hate to waste the 6x zoom by having to use pan focus mode.

I think a reconnaissance trip to Best Buy just may be in order.

Like last time, I may do nothing and just be suffering from what Dad would call “money burning a hole in my pocket.”