Testing one more time.
Still screwed. Completely illogical. Getting there. Slowly.
Trying to fix my RSS feed. With limited results.
Expression Engine has difficulties with time ... sorry for meta-postings in your aggregators.
Good morning, mountains.
Shorpy: The Big Pennsylvania Hole - 1908.
My last years in NYC, I looked down over the hole to Penn Station. In the 80’s and 90’s. This is just astonishing to see, then. Click on it to view large.
WSJ: What’s Wrong With the Teenage Mind?
“The crucial new idea is that there are two different neural and psychological systems that interact to turn children into adults.” I remember, as a kid, not being able to correlate my logical brain to my physical actions. I’ll have to keep track of this ... fascinating.
Valet.: Invest in Leather.
If you’re gonna wear a motorcycle jacket, I feel you should be driving it.
Getting better. Catching up.
Being out of commission means two things ... no blog posts, of course, and most importantly, no work. Now I’ve got to catch up on all I’ve promised to do. You won’t be forgotten, just back-burner’d more than you’d like.
I’m back at about 80%. Nose is still running so fast that I can’t catch up.
Still a phlegm machine, but at least I’m upright.
You’ll see a little linkage here. My voice is still either in the depths of Hades, or missing in action.
Thanks for all the well-wishes.
Day Three of misery.
Not sure if this is cold or flu. Settling into my head and chest now ... my voice sounds like the croak of a tomb-raven. Fighting it. Hot toddys and hot-packs. Links will be sparse, until I feel substantially better.
Still under the weather.
Catch as catch can.
Sick day.
I seem to have ... er, ‘inherited’ ... someone’s illness. Sore throat, in particular. Weak. I suppose it’s flu. Links will be sporadic, but present. Good thing I don’t have to say them out loud.
CNN: Turbulence injures three flight attendants on flight to Miami.
Worst turbulence I ever encountered was leaving Miami for Newark. Fortunately, all the passengers were fresh from Disney World, and threw their hands up in the air yelling “Whee!” as the bumps hit. Seriously.
Luminous Landscape: Everything Matters.
“DO NOT rely on engineering specs and marketing claims. Test a product and look at the final results. Sensors with exactly the same DxO dynamic range measurements can produce completely different visual dynamic range results, lenses with exactly the same resolution specs can look very different in terms of sharpness, and so on. Your eyes and brain should be the ultimate judge, not some numbers on a piece of paper.” I received similar advice from a local pro photographer nearly a decade ago. I was complaining that I had just purchased the latest camera, and I just couldn’t make good photos with it, in spite of all the great specs. “I don’t like the feel of the thing, it doesn’t work in predictable ways.” He said: “Your relationship with your camera is essential. If it’s not working for you, get rid of it. Sell it. Get another.” Seems simple, but it didn’t seem so at the time - product reviews of ‘best’ cameras tend to make us blind to very real limitations.
It’s gonna be another catch-as-catch-can day.
Sorry, duty calls. Links will be spotty and unpredictable, since I’ve got multiple appointments around town.
Hey ETP’ers …
Busy morning.
Links later on.
The Atlantic: Average Kindle Book 6 Times More Expensive Than Self-Published Titles.
“In 2010 there were zero self-published titles among Amazon’s top 100 bestselling books. In 2011 there were 18. What is drawing customers to these books in such large numbers, many of which are from new authors? Price, says a new report ...” I suspect a section of the market just wants a lot o’ good-lookin’ covers in their book reading app.
Speaking of which. Nosing around on someone else’s tablet or smartphone currently has the cachet of snooping in a medicine cabinet while visiting a friend. Noone admits doing it, but everyone does it. I hand mine over to a client or friend to show a particular item, that interest lasts for 15-30 seconds and then the snooping starts. Seems to be as natural as breathing for just about everyone. I’m going to squirrel away some real doozies on mine, just to scare the hell out of snoopers.
The Bookseller: The lovely hardback.
Everything old is new again? Reminds me. How about this:
Eurekalert: Illusion of courage: Why people mispredict behavior in embarrassing situations.
“Because social anxiety associated with the prospect of facing an embarrassing situation is such a common and powerful emotion in everyday life, we might think that we know ourselves well enough to predict our own behavior in such situations. [snip] But the ample experience most of us should have gained with predicting our own future behavior isn’t sufficient to overcome the empathy gap — our inability to anticipate the impact of emotional states we aren’t currently experiencing.” Empathy gap. I’ll have to remember that one. A lack of empathy with one’s future self. Sets up all kinds of permutations.
Metafilter: Piston engine goes boing-boing-boing, but the rotary goes hmmmmmmmm.
Unless you run a Wankel without a muffler. You’ll almost never hear anything louder, outside of an airport jet repair hangar. I owned an RX-7 shortly after my 240Z. NO comparison. The Wankel had no torque, could only summon power at high RPMs, and ate oil like I eat unattended popcorn. No throaty roars, just vibration. Numbing. Driving it in a performance manner took a whole lot more concentration than a comparable piston-engine car. Looked nice (at the time), girls loved it. Suffice it to say in the list of cars I’ve owned it’s one short of the bottom, just above my ‘74 MG Midget.
WaPo Gallery: Paradise is a plane ride away.
Auuuuuggggghhhh. Been over a decade now since I’ve seen the ocean. This makes my eyeballs bleed!
Hmmm. Am I courting disaster, thinking of applying Mac OS updates on Friday the 13th?
“Superstition ain’t the way”, but I think I’ll wait till the weekend.
Inspired Magazine: 10 Extremely Useful DSLR Camera Lenses.
Content farm pablum. Did this tell you anything you didn’t already know? Would you make a purchasing decision from this? I sure as hell wouldn’t.
Here are a couple of really useful suggestions, mostly aimed towards Canon, because that’s what I own:
1. Wide. The Sigma 12-24 is worth a serious look. Big, heavy, just plain weird. Only buy this lens if you want rectilinear (no distorted lines) images. Can be extremely handy in architectural situations. I would have purchased this lens for my own use, but you need to be in a location with good photo stores who have multiple copies. The manufacturing on the lens is quite variable and you need to try a few to get a ‘good one’. Test it on your own camera, in-store, at various f-stops. If you’re intending to someday move to a full frame sensor from an APS-C camera, it’s a dandy solution. Otherwise, the Canon 10-22 EF-S is perfectly good, and the Nikon 14-24 is UNBELIEVABLE (both in performance and price). If I still had a slew of architecture clients, I’d switch over to Nikon just because of that one lens.
2. Long. The 75-300 IS Canon EF. This is the ‘sleeper’ L lens in Canon’s lineup. AF’s slow, so don’t buy this for birds or sports, but it beats anything else in it’s price range for sharpness. MAKE SURE IT’S THE IS VERSION. Note Canon now has an “L” lens in this range, that’s about three times the price. The 70-200’s are nice (if you don’t need the 2.8 wide aperture, the f/4’s are significantly cheaper - but if you’re doing any portraiture at all, don’t waste your time, do the 2.8 IS and feel the burn in your wallet), but I seem to always want more range. I constantly rent the 100-400 L. Despite its many quirks, I keep coming back to it time and time again. I’ve not found a suitable replacement from other manufacturers that performs as well in so many situations.
3. Get yourself a fixed-focal lens. A ‘normal’ lens on an APS-C would be a 35mm; not many good ones out there. Read the reviews to match your preferred strengths, but always remember that any fixed-focal lens is light-years sharper than any zoom. I nabbed a 60mm Canon EF-S macro, because I wanted the ~90mm length for portraits (APS-C). The super-sharpness means I need to do some retouching on portraits, but using the adjust brush in Lightroom with clarity slammed to 0 is a fine trick to smooth out facial lines and blemishes. Apart from that, any of the manual-focus fixed-focal Zeiss lenses are to die for in spite of some weaknesses (which may be strengths, depending on your use). They have a certain look and feel, heavy vignetting at wide apertures and require a certain working style, but the results are characteristic enough that you can identify them immediately.
There now. That’s more like “extremely useful” now, isn’t it? Remember, double-check my opinions. Lens tech is changing rapidly.
ESC: Heart attack risks of exercise, cars and televisions.
“The study shows that mild to moderate physical activity at work, and any level of physical activity during leisure time reduces the risk of heart attack, independent of other traditional risk factors in men and women of all ages, in most regions of the world and in countries with low, middle or high income levels. Interestingly, heavy physical labour at work did not protect against heart attacks.” Not surprising. I am going to experiment with switching to a standing desktop, a la this concept.
NY Times: Trinity Church, a Sanctuary for Music, Cuts Back.
“All this adds up to deprivation and uncertainty for parishioners and followers of Trinity’s music program. And for all the current caricatures of classical music as an elitist pursuit, no one would mistake the crowd at the free Bach at One concerts for 1 percenters. Many are tourists, stopped in their tracks by what they hear.” A shame. Trinity sits at an important crux point, between Wall Street, the Stock Exchange, the waterfront, the site of the former WTC. It remains a connection to the past, to the future. If you work in the area, you often eat lunch in the cemetery with Alexander Hamilton, John Jacob Astor, Luther Martin, Robert Fulton and others. Nice green space in the concrete jungle.
