Tralfaz

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  • How Pop-Culture Ruined Me

    I am reading a great book by Daniel Boorstin, called “The Seekers”. It is a book about the different philosophers throughout recorded history, and how they influenced civilizations, arose as the religions, and in general seeking the meaning of life.

    The section I am reading now is about the Greek philosophers, particularly about Socrates. Great stuff, and I highly recommend the gook (and the series, including his book “The Discoverers”).

    Enter: Pop Culture

    Formative, bad pop-culture
    Formative, bad pop-culture

    In the way back time, I saw “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure“. It was one of those movies that was being spammed on HBO in the early 1990’s, so I must have watched it 10 or 12 times in a couple of months. Moderately entertaining, and mindless, it, like “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” was part of my watch list.

    Don’t judge me.

    However, reading a chapter that is focusing completely on Socrates, I find my self saying in my mind “So-Crates” like the characters in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

    I am beyond help.

  • Leaving Arizona – Part II – the politics

    I moved to Arizona in 2003 to take a job. Landing in Tucson, solidly in the southern part of the state, I grew to love the area. Fabulous weather (albeit blazingly hot in the summer), quirky neighborhoods, and outstanding outdoor activities like hiking, and biking.

    I lived in Tucson for almost 10 years, and while I enjoyed it, there are problems with the area. Civic planning is at best an afterthought. Poor growth policies and pathetic allocation of greenspaces was a frustration. Still, it was home.

    2012 found us moving to a suburb of Phoenix for my job. It was a culture shock to say the least. Urban sprawl everywhere, yet with some clear planning so that the neighborhoods are well laid out. Plenty of green space reserved. Adequate distribution of shopping and restaurants. It “feels” like a real city, where Tucson felt like a town that just kept bursting at the seams.

    While I lived in Tucson, I was aware of how bizarre the politics of Arizona are, but we lived in a pocket of rationality. Moving to Phoenix was a culture shock. Arizona has always been a Republican leaning state, with some characters that make you facepalm often. You get this front and center in the valley. Intolerance, bigotry, hatred are front and center.

    I used to read about places in the deep south and shake my head at their antics, but Arizona seems to want to outdo them at every step. I shouldn’t be surprised at a state that didn’t observe Martin Luther King‘s birthday until the loss of tourism dollars made it really painful (they were denied the 1993 Superbowl due to their backwards-ness)

    Things that should be no brainers, like shoring up public education, improving the lot of the residents, and promoting freedom and equality are ignored, instead the politicians here want to punish gays, and hispanics, protect the unborn (or restrict women’s reproductive freedom), promote the propagation of firearms, and in general hassle brown people.

    Sheriff Joe Arpaio is hailed by the constituents here as a great man, but he is a walking liability, and is probably costing the state more in defending his inane tactics at the federal level than the cost of illegal immigrants. All the rest of it is just being mean, trying to extend the old white male domination.

    Oh, and making it legal for anyone without a felony conviction to be able to just carry a concealed handgun, no permit required. Fairly often, there is a push to allow college students to carry concealed on campus. Yeah, barely out of their teens, lots of emotional issues, and rampant alcohol (and drug) use goes great with deadly weapons. SMH.

    On concealed weapons, it is really bizarre here. Getting a concealed permit is easy. Take a class, pass a background check, and some pretty easy marksmanship test, and you are golden. While I think it should be a bit mroe strenuous (particularly the safety and marksmanship part) I am cool with that.

    However, a while back the legislature made it legal for anybody with a clean record to carry concealed. No background check, no safety training, no basic shooting skills. Sigh. Anyone who thinks that random people should be able to just carry a weapon anywhere should be required to watch a class of their fellow citizens who are taking the extra step of getting a CCW permit do their shooting qualification. Some of the worst marksmanship I have EVER seen, and they are the “good” ones who are taking the effort to get the permit. They would have trouble hitting the side of a barn from the inside.

    Summary

    Arizona has a lot of good things going for it. However, the politics are a bit wacko. In most of the backwards states (like Texas) the tide of demographics will reduce the power of the old white male bigot. Alas here, while demographics are changing, a unique phenomenon seems to happen. Being a destination for retirees, we seem to be replenishing our dying racists with imports from the north faster than the population browns.

    This leads to some of the most insane policies, and laws from our legislature. Things that make most rational people shake their heads in wonder.

    There are plenty of sensible people here, it is just that their voices are squashed via gerrymandering, and the inanity of legislature.

    There are some signs of progress. Last election saw Joe Arpaio coming ever closer to losing his office, we often have a democrat in the governor’s mansion to balance out the wackos, the racists, and the homophobes that seem to win local seats.

    I am under no delusions, California has its own problems, but 11 years in Arizona has given me a new appreciation for my home state.

  • Little Secret – I don’t like onions

    This little fact is something that has hounded me my entire life. From a very early age I just hated eating onions. They were soggy, gross, and made me gag, so I would spend an eternity to pick them out of my meals as a child.

    This is odd, as for a good chunk of my adult life, I was a professional chef/cook. Italian, Mexican, Seafood, bistro food, catering, large banquet cooking, I did it all. Yes, I used onions when needed, but to this day I remain not a fan of the onion.

    Not sure how this started, but I have strong suspicions. My mother (rest her soul) was a heavy smoker. She cooked for us growing up, and being a smoker her taste buds were impaired. So she compensated with onions (strong yellow onions) and salt.

    Every meal was loaded with large chunks of onions. Cooked, raw, or partially cooked, they were in everything. Blech.

    Add to that the fact that she was never skilled ad dicing and chopping, all the onions were large, stringy, and gross. Ewwww.

    Of course, being a professional chef, I know how to keep a knife sharp (essential for any knife handling), and how to slice and dice from 1/16″ up to quarters. As the recipe calls for.

    I do use onions on occasion, as some recipes demand them (a good chile verde, or a lamb vindaloo), but as often as not, I will substitute garlic or some other aromatic herb, and nobody notices.

    No doubt, you will not find me making french onion soup for myself to eat. There are some limits.

  • Leaving Arizona – Part I, the good stuff

    We moved to Arizona in 2003 for a job. We spent nearly 10 years in Tucson, then in 2012 moved to Chandler for another job.

    In general I liked Arizona, and will miss much of what the state offers. This post is what I will miss. Some of it greatly, some of it less so, but I am headed back to a place that has equal yet different charm.

    The Weather

    While my wife will grumble about the brutal summers, you do get acclimated, and the mild winters are awesome. With planning and preparation you can do outdoor activities all year.

    When we lived in Tucson, there was an impressive summer monsoon pattern. Brutally hot in the morning, building clouds by noon, brief but INTENSE rain in the afternoon, and then a remarkably pleasant evening.

    The monsoon rains really brought out the fresh smells of the desert.

    Chandler/Phoenix, not so much monsoon pattern. This leads to a more brutal summer, as there isn’t the rain to bring respite, and the monsoon storms are replaced by brutal haboob dust storms.

    The Critters

    Living on the edge of civilization in Tucson was always exciting. We had plenty of wildlife walking through our yard and property. Javelinas, Coyotes, a variety of snakes (venomous and non venomous), wolf spiders, tarantulas, and even our local den of gila monsters.

    Our last year there, we had a nest of Cooper’s Hawks and their fledglings flying around the neighborhood. It was always exciting.

    In Chandler, the closest we get are scorpions (lots of bark scorpions) and stray dogs.

    The People

    We were fortunate to make several good friends in Tucson. There was a very nice “homey” community there that felt great to be part of.

    We also were quite involved with the local Greyhound rescue organization. Great people and great dogs.

    Our neighborhood in Chandler is also full of great families and friendly people. But Phoenix is a major metropolitan area, so it has a much more detached feel to it. I will not miss Chandler too much.

    The activities

    I touched on this with the weather, but if you like outdoor activities, Arizona is hard to beat. Great cycling, motorcycling, hiking, shooting, it is all good.

    From our house in Tucson, less than 3 miles away were trailheads with 50+ miles of great hiking.

    25 miles and you are up at over 9000 feet, with a completely different climate. Go to the south, and there is Patagonia, Tombstone, and Bisbee.

    The Arizona Sonora Desert Museum is a true jewel of the area, and the destination of choice for our visitors. We were members every year we were there.

    And the Pima Air and Space Museum, with their complete SR-71 is a stunning attraction.

    Like food? Great restaurants, and the bonus of the summer is that the population drops by the departure of the snowbirds and the students from University of Arizona. Walk into any restaurant, even on Friday or Saturday evening and be seated instantly.

    Phoenix is different, but in some ways better. A bit more cosmopolitan, but we haven’t lived here long enough to really get the lay of the land.

    Wrapping up

    Regardless, I will miss Arizona. It is a beautiful state, it has many wonderful sites from the Grand Canyon, to the Sky Islands, from San Francisco peak to the White Mountains.

    Next up, what I will not miss.

  • Saying Goodbye to a Faithful Friend

    It is with sadness in my heart that I must announce the passing of my Cateye Enduro 2 cycling computer.

    I acquired it in early 2002 when I bought my road bike, and it has been a rugged companion since then, logging and recording over 9,000 miles on the bike.

    It was not the first (my first cateye was on a roadbike I bought in 1988), but it will be remembered as the last.

    The Cateye Enduro 2The UI was meh. The process to set it up and program the correct wheel circumference was a bitch. But it kept decent time (I think I reset the clock only a couple of times in the 12 years it was on the bike).

    But its real strength was in the design. As an embedded system, with a very limited size envelope, it lasted 12 years on one CR2032 battery. Crazy in this day of having to recharge your cell phone every day.

    The engineers who designed this fine piece of equipment knew how to optimize for low energy usage, and long battery life. 12 years, 9000 miles of pulses on the speed sensor is a mighty impressive feat.

    But alas, in the era of the iPhone, GPS, and cool bluetooth connectivity, I log more and better data to my phone than ever before. The concept of a dedicated cycling computer is dying.

    I will miss it, but the future is bright.

  • Photo Management, An Odyssey

    I was a relative latecomer to the digital photography world. We got our first digital camera in 2003, a Canon sureshot.

    It lasted us a couple years before the desire to go DSLR bit hard. But this isn’t about the camera, but instead about how to manage the deluge of images that come poring in.

    Alas, us mere mortals take lots of pictures and have no discipline as to the filing, organization, and culling of the stream. As well the early days of wonderment lead to a burgeoning collection of images that threaten to bury us.

    The early days – iPhoto

    Being Mac people, my wife and I used the bundled photography app with our Macs, iPhoto. It groks most cameras, it imports, and it “just works”.

    In 2003 it had tools to create projects, albums, and grouping of photographs. You could tag photos, and later versions also included facial recognition. You could do some rudimentary processing of images (adjust exposure, remove redeye, fix horizon tilt and some more).

    But it’s downfall was that it keeps all images in a big library (hidden in a folder) and managed it with a database. When your collection/library gets close to 20K images, it begins to choke.

    Aperture

    Not sure when Apple launched Aperture, their pro photo app (2008 or so), in 2009, I took the plunge. It was iPhoto on steroids. Better management, better tools, and some assistance for the “workflow”.

    Its plusses:

    • Much better handling of a large number of images. I probably got to 75k images without it borking.
    • Projects. Your library is easy to put into separate projects that are somewhat self contained (even if they are buried in the main library). Also tools for archiving and restoring projects. Good workflow enhancements.
    • Much better tools for image optimization. Color balance, adding presets, customizing presets. All sorts of cool things. Also it allowed easy export and import with Photoshop or some other external photo editing tool.
    • Great tracking of versions and masters. When you edit something it creates a copy. You can undo things easily.
    • The lightbox mode. Create lightboxes within projects to again instill a workflow to get to the best and most useful images.
    • It can handle a lot more images without choking. Libraries that would bring iPhoto to its knees are manageable. Additionally, there are plenty of tools for having multiple libraries, and to save them to different drives.

    But it isn’t all cookies and unicorns. There are some shortcomings.

    Its minuses:

    • The default storage is as a monolithic library. Yes, it can work with a plain directory structure, but it really guides you into a monolitic library structure.
    • If you acquire bad habits with iPhoto, it will let you continue them. This is a lot bigger of a deal than it sounds, as at some point you need discipline, and this tool will not force that discipline.
    • It is just a Mac tool. If you are multi platform, then you can’t have a single workflow across all your systems.

    But, in the balance, it is a huge step in the right direction to a good photography workflow.

    Google Picasa – not really a contender

    During the time that I was a Mac Aperture user, I started doing more with my work PC, so I grabbed a copy of Picasa.

    Picasa has been around a while, and was acquired by Google some time ago. It is an OK photo tool. It has some image manipulation tools, and it can handle most raw format files. But it isn’t really a workflow tool.

    Yes, you can create albums, and it will search your computer and index ALL your images. But its organizational schemes aren’t very robust. It is, like many Google products, more of an aggregator service. It will find all (and I mean ALL) of your images and mash them together. It will let you email them (and conveniently scale them to be reasonable), and if you are one of the 3 power users of Google Plus, it will make managing your online images a snap.

    But it falls very far short of a workflow management tool. I am pretty sure that Google is fine with this. They target the casual user, and Picasa fits that need. But even with my limited needs on my work PC, it quickly fell on its face.

    Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

    Lightroom has been in the Adobe portfoliofor some time. As a partner to the iconic Photoshop, Lightroom has some great features.

    • Native directory organization. Everything is in a human navigable directory structure. No monolithic libraries. If you handle and move files from within LR, it will never lose track of them. This also makes it easy to backup, and to archive.
    • Support for the Adobe Digital Negative format. dneg files are a standard raw data format. Not a big deal if you only shoot one brand of camera, but if you have several, it does simplify the organization, and long term storage of files. Of course, this isn’t a mandate. If you prefer to keep it in the RAW format, you are free to.
    • Extensive, and customizable importation. If you are a pro, you can streamling the importing with your IPTC tags, copyright terms, and others. For us mere mortals, it allows us to save common terms.
    • Multiple vehicles for grading, sorting and ranking images. COmparable to Aperture, but the interface is a bit cleaner for setting flags, tags, and priorities. Little things make a difference, and LR has clearly put a lot of thought into the process
    • Huge variety of image processing options. In fact, much of what I would jump over to Photoshop for can be done right in LR. Aperture has much of this, but LR has more, and more extensible options. You can also choose to process each image you import with one of the processing options (but I will admit this isn’t too useful to me).

    I have just started using Lightroom, and I like it. There is, like with many pro quality applications, a learning curve. Fortunately, there are some really high quality training and videos available from Adobe.

    Final thoughts:

    Of course, making the transition is a bit of a pain. I have to extract files from my Aperture library, and then reimport them. But this gives me time to plan my organization a little better, so I don’t have to go through my entire library. I can also deep storage archive some(many) of my pictures that aren’t needed to be at hand.

    I have a CSS license for Photoshop and Lightroom, so I can (legally) have it on both my work computer, as well as my home Mac.

    Check back as I relate my experiences further.

    (Oh, today I shoot with two main cameras, a Canon 5D and a Canon sureshot G12, both take wicked awesome pictures.)

  • My Nomination for the Stupidest Drivers is:

    I would like to formally nominate the drivers in Phoenix AZ as the stupidest in the world.

    This AM, on the way into the office, there was an accident (not surprising) just before Chandler Boulevard crosses the 101. You could easily see that 2 lanes of traffic were closed about a mile and a half before this (pro tip: 8 or so police cars with lights flashing should tell you something.)

    Of course, seeing that, I got into the far right lane, the only through lane.

    Of course, idiots kept going into the middle and left lane because they were free. Only to beg and try to squeeze in.

    Sigh, I guess that as well as not teaching people in Arizona how to ride bicycles and signal their intent, they also don’t teach them when to merge right due to shutdown lanes.

    Idiots.

  • Pleasant Surprise – Cell phone

    Yesterday I had a great experience at the local AT&T store, and I have to share.

    My wife has been a Verizon customer forever. She chose them way back because they had better coverage where she spent a lot of her time. Being somewhat of a luddite, she has been using a flip phone (a pretty plain, but solid LG flip phone) for about 5 years. As time went on, she began to use it more, and often went over limits on messaging and phone calls, so she has increased her plan accordingly.

    About 2 months ago, I spied one of her bills, and almost threw up. She was spending $80+ a month on her boring, non-smart phone. About the same time AT&T came out with their mobile share plan, where all phones/tablets etc were pretty cheap to add, and shared a big pool of data.

    We can thank T-Mobile for starting this trend, but it is really refreshing.

    I had been dallying lately on getting her moved/added to my account, and giving her my old iPhone 4S (still very serviceable) since she had been dealing with her parents, and other things that kept her away from home.

    Yesterday, we just drove to the AT&T store in Gilbert at the San Tan Village. In the space of about 20 minutes, that phone was reactivated, added to my mobile share account, my ipad moved to it, and we have a 10G plan to share.

    As a last thing they asked who I worked for, as I might qualify for a discount. Thinking this was a waste of time, I played with them. Sure enough, I will get an additional 22% discount on my bill. Net results is that we add my wife to the plan, get two iPhones, plenty of data, and my ipad, all for about $40 less than we paid for our separate cell plans.

    Oh, and it took about 15 minutes for her number from Verizon to port over. Sending calls immediately, receiving them before we left the store.

    Awesome.

  • Dreaming time – SR500

    I have long desired to own a Yamaha SR500. A big, single cylinder street bike. Fun to ride. Not a lot of power, but enough. Light, easy to ride, and distinctive.

    The Yamaha SR500, the classic big single street bike
    The Yamaha SR500, the classic big single street bike

    Several times in my life I have run across one for sale, but never had the money to buy one. And, when I had the money, they were scarcer than hen’s teeth.

    Yamaha took the SR500, and its successor, the SRX600 off the market in the US in the mid 1980’s, but the bike has lived on in many markets. There is a market for a reliable, easy to maintain, frugal with the petrol conveyance.

    For 2014, Yamaha brought the SR400 back in the European market, and in mid 2014, will bring it back to the US. Slightly less displacement, but it is still the same basic bike.

    Alas, my riding days are over. A shame, as I could totally see myself with one of these in the garage.

    Getting old sucks.

  • Wow – high end audio

    Last week, I fancied a bit of nostalgia, and enjoyed playing LPs on a real turntable. The ritual of playing the music harkened back to a much simpler era, and it was quite enjoyable.

    I can't way that the vinyl sounded better, or even different than CD's (alas, I don't have an apples-to-apples comparison set), but there was something satisfying from digging out a Miles Davis album, removing it from the sleeve, cleaning the dust off, and dropping a needle on the vinyl. 20-ish minutes later, getting up and switching sides.

    Good stuff.

    So, to extend the experience, I thought I would look up some old school hifi gear. Tube power amps, tube preamps, better turntables. Exotic speakers. Hand crafted, walnut knobs that improve sustain (yes, they make lame claims like that).

    Bwah ha hahahahaha. So much money you can spend. Alas, I think I will be satisfied with the hand me down gear that we will pick up from my father in-law's estate.

    Even 60 year old, Harmon Kardon tube amps in questionable condition can cost well over $1,000.

    And phonograph cartridges. C'est bon!

    I don't think I will even dream.