Amvona bill their Umbrelsoft II as a “soft box style umbrella”. It’s a neat idea, but, hype aside, it’s a silver umbrella with a diffuser over it.

In the case of the Umbrelsoft II, it’s a poorly-made silver umbrella with a poorly-made diffuser over it. For a ludicrous $195 “list price”, and a “wholesale” price of $65, I’d expect a pretty well-made piece of equipment. It’s not. In all areas - material quality, fit and finish, overall design - it comes up inferior to el-cheapo $20 no-name umbrellas. I picked mine up on eBay for about $20, and consider that a pretty fair price for the flimsiness you get. I pity any poor fool who paid full “wholesale”, though.

I’m sure it works reasonably well. It just looks and feels like a piece of garbage, and however well - or poorly - it performs, I have no great confidence that it’ll do so for any reasonable amount of time… like six months, even.

Face it, there’s a reason they sell these things super-cheap on auction sites - they are super cheap, in every sense of the word. Caveat emptor, eh?

I shouldn’t be surprised that James Dobson’s new blacklist of companies for conservatives to avoid patronizing includes Microsoft. That Microsoft are evil is most likely the only think the “doctor” and I will ever come close to agreeing upon.

Alas, it looks kind of bad when the servers hosting the list are running Windows 2000 and 2003. Somehow I expected better from Mr. Dobson than “Do as we say, not as we do”. I mean, their IP addresses are owned by another company on the list, Raytheon. Good move, James.

Seeing as how Intel is on the list, I really hope the processors in those servers are AMD…