Monday, September 29, 2008

Fiscal responsibility, coming to a government near you

I'm impressed. I really didn't think the U.S. House of Representatives had the guts to reject the bailout plan.

It's about time.

Look, I don't know what the consequences will be if we don't throw a trillion dollars at Wall Street, but I do know this: every major initiative of the 21st century has come out of the pockets of our children, our grandchildren, and their children. Iraq War? No sacrifice needed, because we won't have to pay for it, they will. Just keep spending, please, to keep the economy running full speed ahead. Want to go to Mars? Put it on MasterCard and worry about it tomorrow.

Maybe ten years of economic hardship will serve to remind us that debt exacts a heavy price.

Or, maybe it'll forever wreck our standing as preeminent power in the world, because the foreign credit that we've been using to pay our way will dry up.

But either way, I don't think our grandchildren will thank us. That ship has sailed.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Camera criteria

I mentioned in an earlier post that I'm interested in purchasing a new camera in the not-too-distant (but by no means near) future. While considering my options, I want to keep several criteria in mind.

  • Weight. My current camera is much too heavy to be comfortable carrying around for any length of time.
  • Size. A light-weight camera is nice, but only part of the equation. Pentax seems to be making pancake prime lenses that would make carrying around a small camera that much easier.
  • Size, the counter-argument. Many of the entry-level SLRs are too small, or at least their grips are uncomfortably small. Plus, a very small SLR is unwieldy with very large lenses.
  • Image quality. There are two factors of particular concern to me: image size (aka megapixels) and high ISO performance. Anything 10 megapixels or higher should be fine (although don't think I'm not drooling about the new 20 megapixel cameras), but quality at ISO 3200 and higher is of greater importance, and to some degree will be inversely proportional to the number of megapixels.
  • Viewfinder quality. I gave up on my Canon 300D because I was tired of looking at the scene through a tunnel. Give me a large, bright viewfinder, or I'll stick with my 1D.
  • Responsiveness. I don't need 8 frames/second, like my 1D has, but my 300D with a very slow boot time and impossible lag after filling the buffer was difficult to tolerate. 3 fps with at least a 10 image (RAW) buffer would be sufficient, I think, although I'd miss my 1D's speed a little.
  • RAW is a must; DNG output would be nice, but not essential. (Having said that, Adobe's DNG converter must be able to handle the camera's native files.)
  • Lens cost. I don't want to buy a camera only to discover that the lenses I want are unreasonably expensive. Canon's lenses, while quite pricey, will likely be my primary point of comparison.
  • Interchangeable lenses. I'd like a pocket camera to have handy at all times, but my primary camera must be an SLR, rangefinder, or perhaps one of the new Micro Four Thirds SLR-like cameras. (My iPhone is a serviceable pocket camera, albeit limited.)
  • Battery life. I'll have to research the SLRs driven by AAA batteries carefully; that doesn't seem like a recipe for long battery life.
  • Image stabilization. While I appreciate the advantages of lens-driven image stabilization, I'd like to have it in the body as well.
Note to self: do not buy a camera without handling it first. Thank goodness for Roberts.

The omnipresent Norbert Krapf

Indiana's poet laureate is Norbert Krapf, and I can't escape him. He's everywhere!

I first encountered him this summer at a jazz and poetry performance at the newly-renovated Indianapolis Central Library (he's a fan of jazz...more on that later). Shortly thereafter, I visited one of my favorite used bookstores Bookmamas (regrettably, one of the very few independent bookstores left in Indianapolis), only to see him on a poster: he was going to be there the next day for a book signing event.

I started a jazz appreciation class three weeks ago (taught by Monika Herzig, a local jazz performer/instructor/arranger/etc/etc/etc, who I had also seen for the first time at the library performance), only to discover that Mr. Krapf was sitting in on the class, having been a student of Monika's during a previous semester.

The following week, I started a creative writing class (instructed by Andy Murphy, another local gem), who was promoting the Indy BookTalk Conference. Prominently featured on the handout was, of course, one Norbert Krapf.

I've resigned myself to the fact that I can't escape him, so I'm feeding him bad ideas for poetry in hopes he uses them to ill effect and is driven from town by a frenzied crowd with torches and pitchforks. So far, I've given him a line about poetry and jazz being like cockroaches and rats: difficult, if not impossible, to completely kill off.

I'm not holding my breath on this strategy working.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

To buy, or not to buy

In 2004, almost entirely by accident, I discovered that I enjoyed photography. Over the next two years I took tens of thousands of (digital) photographs on a Canon 300D, better known in the U.S. as the original Digital Rebel.

For various reasons, I stopped shooting so much; around the same time that my interest waned, I "upgraded" from my 6 megapixel camera to a 4 megapixel professional model that was several years old, the original Canon 1D. Fewer megapixels, but that doesn't matter much; I upgraded because I wanted a large, bright viewfinder, and because the 300D was terribly slow at autofocus and shooting speed. As I liked to joke, I could shoot at three frames per second...for one second.

The 1D, on the other hand, can shoot at 8 frames per second for several seconds. Quite an upgrade.

Unfortunately, it's also a heavy beast with poor high ISO characteristics, and lacks several other features that a modern camera takes for granted, such as the ability to zoom while reviewing an image on its LCD, and the ability to shoot more than an hour on a single battery.

And the batteries are heavier than a small camera.

So, it's time to consider upgrading again. I probably won't buy anything any time soon, but I'll use this blog to keep track of my thoughts on various options.

Jazz: Of saints and sinners

Oliver Nelson Jr. gave a presentation to my jazz appreciation class about his father's work, and it really drove home to me just how difficult it is to achieve immortality. Here's a guy who collaborated with many of music's brightest stars, was widely sought-out to arrange and compose, created songs that many of us would recognize immediately...and now, only thirty-three years after his untimely passing, how many music fans remember him?

(If you really want to see double takes at a party, put some Soul on Top on the stereo. James Brown doing swing? Ambitious, but it works. For some. Maybe.)

I now have a craving to seek out some vinyl. It's been a long time since I've looked at an LP cover, and I'd forgotten just how rich with information and artwork the covers and liner notes could be. Just beautiful.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

The next generation of automobile technology

Finally, after all these years, we've reached the point where automotive nirvana is within reach. All we need now is for a brave lawmaker to mandate these improvements, and the world will be a better place, practically overnight.

My proposal: by 2012, all new vehicles must include negative feedback into the steering wheel for the following crimes against humanity.
  • Tailgating (defined as traveling less than 2 seconds from the car in front of you)
  • Changing lanes without using a turn signal (must be on for at least 1 second before the lane change is made)
  • Making a turn without a turn signal (must be on for at least 2 seconds before the turn)
  • Active cell phone connection while speeding (this is tricky–what if your passenger is the one talking on the cell phone?)
  • Driving with the windows up and air conditioning running on a 75˚ day (this one would probably be dropped in committee, but we have to have something to compromise on to be able to keep the rest)
The feedback should be in the form of a mild electric shock or strong vibration.

Anything else that's technologically feasible? The civil libertarians (like, uh, me) will gripe that government is sticking its nose into private behavior, but this is purely for training proper behavior. We're not actually imposing new laws on citizens, just corporations.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Shorthand training

Friend of mine asked me to keep an eye out for continuing education classes that cover shorthand. It occurs to me that, given the apparent rarity of such training, that a simple iPhone/Touch application to learn, practice, and take notes in shorthand might be a winner.

Then again, as I look at samples of the various forms of shorthand, it occurs to me that it's a lot of work for a dying specialty. Look at the Gregg vowels, for example.

Escape velocity

Colts squeaked by today. Even after drafting 3 centers this year they're struggling to maintain any sort of protection for Peyton.

I volunteer for my local library Sundays at 1pm; guess who wasn't thinking about the football season last spring. Oy.

Update: if you haven't seen the madcap sequence that led to the Colts first touchdown, NFL videos has it. Very sorry I missed it!

The Madness of the Apple

I've been an Apple fan for nearly 20 years now, although I used Linux at home for many years before switching to MacOS X in 2004.

So, of course, an iPhone was the natural next step: a real computer in my pocket wherever I went, with connectivity everywhere. What more could a boy ask for?

This weekend, I decided to establish a reasonable task management system. Below, sadly, is the best process I could find for keeping my calendar and my task list in sync. The first 4 steps are eliminated if I don't use Jott.

  1. Call Jott and leave a message.
  2. Jott translates my message to text and sends an update to Toodledo.
  3. At this point, Google Calendar has access to the new task "event", although the update may not take place for quite some time.
  4. Synchronize Appigo's Todo software on my iPhone with Toodledo.
  5. Update the new task via Todo to refine the details.
  6. Synchronize the Todo software on my iPhone with Toodledo.
  7. At some point, Google Calendar has synchronized with Toodledo.
  8. BusySync running on my home computer checks every 5 minutes to see whether it needs to retrieve changes to my Google calendar and push them to to iCal on my Mac.
  9. Every 15 minutes, my Mac pushes iCal changes to MobileMe.
  10. Immediately after this, MobileMe pushes the calendar update to my iPhone.


Total time? The big unknown is the frequency of Google's retrieval of new entries from Toodledo. Everything else is inside my control.

The cost?


Jott (pay as you go plan)
$10 for 10 minutes of recording time.

Toodledo
Free

Google Calendar
Free

Appigo's Todo
$10

BusySync
$25

MobileMe
$100/year