Lightly Organized Chaos

I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been (approx. 285lbs). Sigh.

Time to really make a change. I’m going to try to post regularly to see if I can humiliate myself thinner.

Over at The Online Photographer blog there’s been a bit of a ruckus over their suggestion to spend a year using a Leica to develop photo skills. I think their suggestion is valid, and mostly a reasonable (if somewhat inconvenient) thing to do.

You can find the initial and follow-up posts here:

• The Leica as Teacher
• Why It Has To Be a Leica
• Variations on a Theme

I do own all the equipment necessary to run this experiment, and I might go ahead and try to. But even for others there is a lot to be said for trying out this tactic for a year to improve one’s skills. I was surprised to find that when I shoot with a Leica there’s a visible difference in the style and quality of the photos I make. Also my M4-2 is a pretty simple camera (no built-in metering), so I’m in total control (and have complete responsibility) for the images I produce. It doesn’t take long to realize that all of the buttons, switches, and menus only serve to make using the modern digital camera tedious to use. There’s also a serious advantage to shooting film, you become more cognizant of the costs of taking shots. You learn patience and the need to “get” the shot instead of just pulling the trigger at random. Then at a later time, you get to review your work and consider how to change your shooting style to improve. If I were a working photojournalist I’d go digital to guarantee the photo, but for a hobbyist film serves as a mechanism to instill distance between the shot and self-critique. Lastly, and possibly most importantly, a Leica allows you to focus on the event around you. There’s no chimping, no fiddling with small switches, or other things to steal your attention.

Overall I agree with the TOP recommendation, and suggest if you have the means, you give it a try as well. Either way, if you’d like to go take some photos, let me know in the comments — I’d be happy to have the company.

As snolan pointed out in a recent comment, I’m a geek. Specifically, I’m a technology geek. but I don’t insist that only the latest and greatest tech is always the best (or most interesting).

I love bicycles, photography, and even horology. In fact I have a decent retro-bent going these days. I ride an old, steel, lugged touring bike. I’ve toyed with the idea of grabbing a fun ld-school film camera (well I have a Rolleiflex already) like a Polaroid SX-70 or Holga toy camera. I also tend to love analog watches.

The watchmaker Bell&Ross is helping me out by taking my obvious computer geekdom (and love of my iPhone) and mixing in a healthy dose of watch geekery with a dash of airplane cachet. Specifically, they’ve released an iPhone app that simulates their most popular line of watches (BR 01-92’s). I’m guessing having an real one on your wrist is somewhat nicer, but you can’t beat the price of the iPhone app. Also this is likely to be the closest I ever come to owning one.

I just wanted to document how I installed TeX on my MacBook Air.

I grabbed and installed BasicTeX-2008 from the MacTeX folks.

TeX binaries were installed in: /usr/local/texlive/2008basic/bin/universal-darwin.

So I added that directory to my path.

Next I updated the installed packages:

tlmgr update bin-texlive texlive.infra
tlmgr update --all


Since the ACM style file seems to need to more fonts, I installed the recommened font set:
tlmgr install collection-fontsrecommended

Also we’re apparently still using (the deprecated) subfigure.sty, so I installed that:
tlmgr install subfigure.

At this point I can build our most recent paper on the Air.

It looks like I need to use Skim and one of the visual editors to get source/PDF sync’ing working (using the installed synctex package). I’ll probably setup Textmate and Skim next.

It started innocently enough, I wanted a 36 gallon bow front tank, and Kim wanted to find me another nice christmas gift (we got each other a couple things each). She got a great deal on craigslist (on x-mas eve no less). A 36 gallon bow-front with stand for $100.

Of course a month later as I started working on filling it, we discover we actually had a 46 gallon tank. Huzzah!

Lesson learned: craigslist will get you cheap fish tanks, but make sure you know what you’re getting.