My dad and I did a weekend trip to Yosemite Valley to see the area before the end of spring and hike up Half Dome (our second time).
Summary
Yosemite Valley Hiking Trip: 5 June-7 June 2009
Day 1: Four Mile Trail, from Yosemite Valley to Glacier Point and back. 8.8 miles.
Day 2: Half Dome, from Yosemite Valley, via the JMT. ~18 miles.
Participants: 2
Last weekend, me and my father joined a Sierra Club backpacking trip on the Lost Coast (between Mendocino and Eureka). It proved a neat 3-day trek along an isolated and gorgeous stretch of coastline.
Summary
Lost Coast PCS Backpacking Trip: 14 May-18 May 2009
Route: Lost Coast Trail, from Mattole River Trailhead (Lighthouse Rd., near Petrolia) to Black Sands Beach (near Shelter Cove). 24.6 miles over 3 days.
Participants: 6
As mentioned previously, I’ve been mostly happy with my Thinkpad laptop, with the obvious exception of the occasional Microsoft-induced breakage. The modifier ‘mostly’ is used advisedly because there are two issues I’ve not yet fixed. The first problem is easily solvable, with the proper application of cash that I’d rather not spend: the battery has run itself down to the point that it can only hold 16% of its original capacity. This after barely 20 months of use. Let’s just say that it doesn’t exactly encourage mobile computing.
The more serious issue cropping up now and again is that under heavy load, the machine simply overheats and is forced to suspend itself. While I’m grateful that the power manager is smart enough not to simply keep on going and crash, I’m quite unimpressed that Lenovo couldn’t be bothered to design a cooling system that was actually capable of keeping the CPU temperature below 100C under normal circumstances. Even with the fan manually set to maximum speed, rapid edits of files in Lightroom quickly push temperatures to the shutoff threshold.
I don’t have anything terribly original to say about the current meltdown, but the near-constant revelations of mismanagement and outright fraud suggest that a great many people belong in jail or somewhere less pleasant. That there have been basically no prosecutions, punishments, or even confiscations of ill-gotten gains is unsurprising but still discouraging. Americans have always been depressingly well-behaved when it comes to respecting the property and persons of the upper class. More peasants with pitchforks, please!
Winter is effectively over here in New York. Temperatures are up to the point that the few remaining snow patches will be completely gone in the next few days. And the forecast for the next few weeks says they’ll only be going up. Spring on the other hand is taking its sweet time coming back, and the trees and grass look just as dead as they have for the last three months.
Finally, I’m suffering the usual ’embarassment of riches’ with regard to photos – too many hundreds of shots that I’ve not had a chance to properly sort through, select out the promising ones, and do a quick editing pass over before posting. I was sort of hoping this’d be the year of fewer better shots, but thusfar that’s not exactly happening. Sooner or later I do expect lack of patience and hard disk space to kick in though.
Last week driving back from one of my morning walks in northern Westchester I ended up listening to a radio program discussing the potential long-term changes that the current unwravelling economy is likely to bring about. I wasn’t terribly impressed at first, because the program’s main guest (A University of Toronto economist whose name escapes me) seemed to be rather too ready to exercise magic thinking and assume away some of the darker long-term scenarios.
Still, despite the relentless (and in my view unwarranted) optimism of the guest, one of his points did make sense: describing this mess as a (potential) ‘depression’, while historically accurate, is unhelpfully reductive. Major changes, even the bad sort, can lay the groundwork for a new order. Or put more simply, when things can’t go on, they don’t, and something else replaces them.
The major thrust of the program was the affect of this economic ‘reconfiguration’ on population. The speaker pointed at length to the devastation wrought first by the subprime collapse then by the severe disruption of the service economy on boomtowns and exurbs of the sort that comprise much of the sunbelt. His essential claim was that the suburbanization of American society which has been going on since the 1940s has reached its peak. Resource constraints (energy, water, etc.) and financial realities make sprawl not merely unsustainable, but increasingly unaffordable and impractical.
To me, this would be welcome news indeed. Suburbia is perhaps the most pernicious example of the current consumption-oriented American dream. From citizens, we became consumers. Now suddenly, economic realities may render defunct the dream of the 5 bedroom 4 bath McMansion with the 2 SUVs in the driveway, or at least force its reevaluation.
And indeed ‘reevaluation’ is the appropriate sentiment. The old modus operandi has led Americans down a blind alley. Economists now tell us that not only did the economic ‘gains’ of the last decade accrue almost exclusively to a privileged few, but that most of those ‘gains’ were only on paper anyway. Now that the debts are being settled, folk find that they are neither as secure nor as prosperous as they had believed. What next?
Being in the position of having no real bearings so far as my next step is concerned, I’m not so much reevaluating as simply trying to articulate some vision for a desirable future. And perhaps it’s simply my natural laziness kicking in, but the model of slaving away to get ahead is really unappealing. Ahead doesn’t interest me. If there’s a choice (and I guess usually there isn’t), why not cover the basics and leave it at that? Enough sounds drastically more pleasant than more, and there are more interesting things in life than progress.
On a macro level, the current mess does suggest to me that maybe, just maybe, there will be some larger societal adjustment to the fact the producing and consuming ourselves into oblivion is not merely stupid and inefficient, but undesirable as well. Or maybe not. Human capacity for stupidity and self-destruction is notoriously unlimited. Time will tell. Still, as long as the opportunity remains, I plan to do as much non-consumption and non-progressing as I can reasonably manage.
I alluded yesterday to the fact that I’m not entirely thrilled with my current camera, an Olympus E-420. Truth is, it’s a far better camera than it has any right to be given the price, but I’d gladly pay double for something that got rid of my main complaints. Of course, Olympus doesn’t sell such a camera yet, and even the newly announced E-620 doesn’t fully address many of them.
The good:
1) The lenses. Olympus doesn’t make bad lenses. My main lens, the ZD 12-60/2.8-4 SWD (24-120mm EFL) is the best standard zoom lens I’ve ever used, bar none (and that includes Nikon’s monstrous, expensive 24-70/2.8).
2) The size. The E-420 is the size (and weight) a DSLR should be, which is to say a little smaller than my old Nikon FM2n film SLR. It fits well in my hands and it sits well on the shoulder even on all-day hikes.
3) The controls. Surprisingly for a camera with few hard-button controls, the E-420 is very easy to configure, and once set up requires menu diving only rarely.
4) Handy features. There are a lot. Mirror lockup. Sensor-cleaning (from back when such was rare). Live View with both phase detect and contrast detect autofocus. Really, there’s a lot there.
The bad:
1) Noise. The worst problem is pattern noise (banding) at high ISOs (800+). This seems to be largely fixed with the E-620’s newer sensor. More pervasively though, the chip simply produces more noise than its competitors and even at low ISOs, raising the shadows in software reveals a lot of ugliness. And at lower ISOs, the E-620 looks like it may actually be *worse*.
2) The viewfinder. It’s *tiny*. All digital cameras I’ve tried pale somewhat in comparison to my venerable FM2n, but the E-420 is the smallest of any currently shipping DSLR and a good 40% smaller than that on serious amateur DSLRs like Nikon’s D90. And it makes accurate framing and judging composition a pain. Only one Olympus DSLR has a decent viewfinder, and that’s the big and heavy E-3.
3) Autofocus. In other than good light, it’s quite slow. The E-620 purportedly has a much faster version (with more AF points) derived from the one in the E-3. Good, right? Not exactly. The E-3’s AF is notorious for having accuracy issues. I’m hoping the kinks have been worked out, but initial indications aren’t encouraging.
4) Customizing the output. On the surface, there are a lot of options, but in practice, the level of customizability isn’t very impressive. You can’t upload custom curves. Color settings are limited to a few standard settings (Saturation, Contrast). The result is that the out-of-camera output can made good, but never truly great. This is in contrast to the D70 images I mentioned in the previous post.
The ugly:
1) Camera/RAW performance. It is reasonably snappy (3.5fps, 12 frame RAW buffer) but the Olympus software is horribly slow processing RAW files, so if you want JPGs, better shoot RAW+JPG in camera. Strangely, even Adobe Lightroom is pretty sluggish processing Olympus RAW files (considerably more so than RAW files from other 10MP cameras).
2) The sensor size. Beyond the noise issue, the smaller 4/3 format sensor that Olympus uses has two primary effects: the aspect ratio of images is 4:3 and not the more common 3:2 and at the same aperture, you get more depth-of-field (DoF) than with competing DSLRs. In practice, I find both of these a nuisance. You can always stop down to get more DoF with competing cameras, but you can’t necessarily open up a lens more to get less DoF, as the lenses aren’t always that fast. As to aspect ratio, I shoot mainly landscapes, and 3:2 generally suits them better than 4:3, although for portraits and most print-sizes, 4:3 is probably better.
3) The lenses. What, again? Well yes, specifically the selection, or lack thereof. Only 3 companies make lenses for Olympus DSLRs: Olympus, Panasonic and Sigma, and the total number of current lenses is about 2 dozen. Obviously, this means there are holes. You want a fast normal lens? The only good one (Sigmas don’t count) is the big, heavy and expensive Panasonic 25/1.4. You want wider than 18mm EFL? You’re stuck with the (big, heavy and expensive) ZD 7-14/4. You want narrow DoF at wide angles? The ZD 14-35/2 is your only choice…
4) Weather-sealing. It’s a bit strange that Olympus has so many good weather-sealed lenses, at reasonable prices, but no good weather-sealed camera in the same size and price range. I sense an untapped market.
The rub:
As a DSLR for travel and hiking, the Olympus E-420 (or upcoming E-620) is still the best option. It offers a nice mix of portability, quality and convenience for a reasonable price. For more general use, things are more mixed. For action or low-light, there are considerably better choices available. And for a little bit of everything? I’ve not quite decided…
(Parenthetical note: most manufacturers seem to believe that small DSLRs should be cheap and crippled, presumably to encourage upgrades. Were Canon or Nikon to change this attitude, and release the appropriate lenses, I suspect they would find a profitable largely-untapped niche.)
Two of my favorite Olympus E-420 samples (Lassen National Park in August, and New York state in October):
The annual Photo Marketing Association conference is on now, and it’s looking like a bit of a bust. A few announcements from Olympus, Samsung and especially Panasonic notwithstanding, there’s not been much of note from any of the other camera-makers. Between the collapsing economy and the apparent dearth of recent innovation, PMA seems to mostly be about showing off new releases of nearly-identically specced compact ‘point-and-shoot’ digicams.
Meanwhile I’ve had occasion to go back over the ‘negatives’ (RAWs) of the last few years worth of captures.
Now the great thing about RAW is that software improvements translate directly into better images. When I first started shooting RAW with a Nikon D70 SLR, I used Adobe Lightroom (LR), one of the few programs capable at the time of rapidly viewing and editing that camera’s RAW files. I knew that of course that LR wouldn’t deliver the best results, but I figured it should do okay.
Imagine my surprise when I ran the same files through Nikon’s own Capture NX (CNX) program today and found that my flat dull-looking images actually had a fair bit of color and ‘punch’ (not to mention detail) in them.
I won’t say categorically that LR ‘ruined’ the old photos, but it didn’t exactly do them any favors. For the future, I’ll be sticking to the vendor’s own converter when practical. Indeed, that’s precisely what I did for the morning’s walk at Ward Pound Ridge (lots of snow on the ground there) and I’m liking the result.
The other less helpful discovery is that the old Nikon may actually have nicer colors and better sharpness, out of the camera, than my current Olympus E-420 does. I may have to rethink my current gear strategy…
Before (LR conversion, image from 12 May 2007):
After (CNX conversion):
I’ve mostly gotten used to the quirks of Windows XP on my Thinkpad X61. True it’s not exactly as painfree as OS X on my PowerBook used to be, but for the sake of the hardware, I’m willing to put up with some inconvenience. Every so often, though, I seem to get a reminder of just how fragile and poorly designed the whole thing is.
Yesterday I made the mistake of allowing Windows Update to install an ‘optional hardware’ driver along with the usual raft of security fixes. Spectacularly bad idea. The particular ‘update’ was a driver for the ‘Cypress AT2LP’ which subsequent investigation reveals as a popular bridge board in external HDD enclosures such as the Venus DS3 I rely on.
Naturally, when I connected my main external data drive this morning, I got nothing. Windows didn’t even acknowledge there was a USB device attached, let alone a drive of some sort. Figuring that my enclosure might just have chosen this innoportune moment to call it quits, I tried it on my grandmother’s Mac with a Firewire cable, and it of course worked just fine.
After a few other experiments (different enclosure, different boot disk) it became clear that rather than a dead drive or fried USB port, I was simply suffering from yet another broken Windows update and the ‘Cypress – Other hardware – Cypress AT2LP (3.03.0000.2)’ entry near the top of the Windows Update log was to blame (confirmed by Google).
Naturally, Microsoft has created no simple way to remove individual ‘updates’ like this one. Their preferred solution involves doing a ‘Rollback’ to an earlier ‘System Restore Point’. Nice way to lose all sorts of other updates and changes. Also useless in my case as System Restore has been disabled from day 1 as a waste of limited disk resources.
After a fair bit of searching and fiddling, I did come up with an actual solution which involved:
1) In the System control panel, going to ‘Environment Variables’ under the ‘Advanced’ tab and adding the system variable ‘devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices’ with a value of ‘1’.
2) Checking ‘Show Hidden Devices’ in the ‘View’ menu of the Device Manager.
3) Going to the ‘Universal Serial Bus controllers’ section of the Device Manager and for the ‘Cypress AT2LP (3.03.0000.2) entry, going to Properties -> Driver -> Roll Back Driver.
Not my idea of elegant or even particularly straightforward. Somehow the whole sorry episode reminds of the lipstick-on-a-pig joke. Microsoft Windows XP: 8 years of development and patches and still nowhere near ready for prime-time.
Fortunately, with the exception of an all-day snowstorm that dumped about a foot of the stuff in the streets outside, the rest of the day was pretty relaxed.
I saw ‘Waltz With Bashir’ this afternoon, Israeli director Ari Folman’s animated documentary of his attempt to recover his ‘lost’ memories as a soldier in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and ascertain his own role in the war and the events leading up to the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
It’s a film well worth seeing. Aesthetically and technically brilliant, it offers an often jarring look into the experiences of half a dozen Israeli young men thrust into the midst of a situation for which they were wholly unprepared. The visuals (and the soundtrack) give ample play to the frequent brutality and insanity of the events recalled. Finally, uncomfortable questions about ultimate responsibility for failing to stop the massacre are not unvoiced.
As good cinema, documentation of the ‘fog of war’ and an exercise in Israeli soul-searching and collective therapy, the film works well. Unfortunately, that’s as far as it goes. It concerns itself only with Israeli experience and memory. Individual Arabs have no voice. As undifferentiated collective or silent adversary, the Arab occupies the margin throughout, without ever having the chance to speak. The war itself is not questioned, save perhaps implicitly. Public support for the war is not interrogated.
Given Folman’s project, these omissions are not wholly unexpected or unjustified. After all, a documentary is not a soapbox and 90 minutes is scarcely enough time to lay out the issues, let alone explore them in depth. But ‘Waltz’ does suggest an uncomfortable reality: while liberal Israelis are willing to revisit the traumas and darker moments of their past, they are far less interested in examining the lives which that past so irrevocably altered. And a war in which only one side fights is just another name for a massacre.
Well, I’m back.
Again. Maybe this time for real. I hope?
A few brief points:
I’m (still) in New York. School stuff finished. And yes, I will finally be going home (California) by the end of March. For good. I hope (and intend).
I’ve done a pretty lousy job keeping in touch with folk. I mean to remedy that RealSoonNow(tm). My apologies to all of you. No, I didn’t forget. I’ve just been, well… really disorganized and tied up. Not a good excuse, I know.
In contrast to this part of the website which was (is?) in need of great deal of updating, the photo area has been seeing regular additions. Have a look if that sort of thing is of interest.
The server here is running Fedora (10 now). Took a few hours to first get the relevant updates and second fix the breakage those caused. There may be a few glitches to be worked out…
And lastly, welcome back.
We were looking for an end-of-summer mountaineering trip in the high Sierra, and after examining and discarding several ideas, we were fortunate enough to find a Sierra Club trip to Mt. Brewer which we joined. The trip was my first real peak-climbing trip with the Peak Climbing Section.
Summary
Mt. Brewer PCS Trip: August 15-August 17 2008
Day 0: Driving to Cedar Grove
Day 1: Backpacking in to East Lake, and setting up camp there.
Day 2: Ascending Mt. Brewer (elev. 13576 ft.) via the class 2-3 route along the southeast slope.
Day 3: Packing out and driving home.
Participants: 6