Category: Creative Work

My Right Brain at Work

Gearhead Flix: “Truth in 24”

Truth in 24

I just finished watching Truth in 24, and if you are a geadhead I have to say you owe it to yourself to watch. The 24 Hours of Le Mans is for me the only truly compelling event in motorsports. F1 just seems way too technical, delicate, and overdone. NASCAR reminds me of driving down the freeway, only with just left turns and more noise. Indy seems like an anachronism, or open wheel NASCAR. Le Mans however is completely different. It has deep history, combined with all the technicality and strategy you could imagine. They race, balls-out, rain or shine, in daylight and darkness, at speeds that boggle the mind, on a course made partially from public roads. The cars are all radically different, with four completely different classes on course simultaneously. The machines have to have seriously high top-end speed, while still being able to brake and turn at very low speeds. Best of all, the race is not a fixed distance, but merely hours on a clock. Endurance. The car has to be built to last, and the crews have to be able to keep it running, or rebuild it on the fly. Teamwork is vital. Engineering is critical. Driving skill is tested. Survival is as important as speed.

One item on my “bucket list” is to attend the event, by DRIVING there, ideally in the 65E. Meanwhile I have Steve McQueen’s iconic and epic Le Mans, and this wonderful documentary, Truth in 24. While nowhere near as compelling as McQueen’s classic, it has perhaps even better photography, which is saying a lot. It follows the 2008 Le Mans event from the perspective of Audi’s R10 teams. Despite having dominated Le Mans with their R8 and R10 cars over the past decade, Audi was viewed as the underdog last year as Peugeot had their Diesel-powered 908 HDI prototypes. The Peugeots were 3.5 seconds faster per lap around Circuit de la Sarthe. While that may not sound like much, over 24 hours that adds up to a daunting lead. How the Audi team pulls off a win is documented in this film. The difference at the end comes down to one decision, by one very tired engineer, who is being second-guessed by everyone at the moment, but he sticks to his guns. To show how truly grueling this event is, he savors his victory by walking to a quiet place and sitting down to rest, outside the whirlwind of everyone else spraying champagne.

My only complaints about this film is the obvious hand of Audi’s marketing department, and the trademark ‘NFL Films’ style and soundtrack, but if you can do your best to ignore those and soak in the excellent photography and the raw, “unedited for cleanliness” character of the people, the cars, and the emotions you really get a sense of the endurance part of endurance racing. It impossible to watch all of the event, but this film comes very close to doing so, albeit from the perspective of just one team.

One highlight that sticks in my mind, which oddly is not at all visual, but is just a straight sequence where driver Alan McNish takes us on a “guided tour” of the course, while sitting in a chair and watching a video taken from a car on-course. He relates the gear changes, the speeds, the line of the course, which apexes to hit, and which once to miss, where the car will fight you, and where you have to let it go. The video shown is taken at speed and the rate at which the course comes at you is mind-bending. He relates it all in real-time and is breathless by the end. Now imagine doing that for hours on end, through rain, darkness, harsh low-angle sunlight, and traffic.

Amazing.

Another highlight is a passage near the beginning where they briefly talk about the amazingly quiet TDI engine. The Diesel race cars are shockingly quiet. To anyone accustomed to the scream and roar of a typical race car going by the silent “whoosh” of the TDI is startling. More startling as “quiet” is not usually the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Diesel! Ulrich Baretzky, the head of the development of this engine says something very interesting in the film: “Noise is a form of energy, the less you hear the more you use in propulsion.”

This film is being shown on cable TV here in the USA, but best of all you can download it for FREE from Apple’s iTunes Store.

If you want a preview, head on over to the film’s official website: www.truthin24.com.

(Thanks go to reader Wil Langford for pointing me to this!)

Intersections of Interest

Occasionally several of my personal and professional interests converge at one point. I enjoy making images. I enjoy telling stories. I enjoy technology. I make my living in the datacenter industry. I enjoy sharing all of these with others.

This week at work is the culmination of over a year’s efforts by my employer, and one of our clients. A medium-scale project is coming to fruition, involving the client, several contractors (Engineers, Mechanical, and Electrical contractors) our Sales & Operations teams, and mostly our Facilities Manager, who as always is able to make things happen timely and with a smile. My job? Capture it all, and present it as yet another example of what we can accomplish for potential clients: We’re flexible. We’re available. We’re here to serve the client’s needs, even if they are “off the price sheet” so to speak.

You can follow along on our Support Blog. First post is here. The second one is here. I’ll be posting again tomorrow with an update, and a wrap up later.

Speaking of the Going To The Sun Rally, this is for Mark C…

St. Mary's Lake, Glacier Park, Montana

THIS is that viewpoint I was telling you about when we were driving down the east side of Logan Pass, but somehow missed the turn for. I said to you, “as a photographer, you’ll recognize this vista” and then managed to go right past it (was I driving or you?)

Anyway, this is that view I promised you and failed to deliver. Note this was from the 2006 Rally when all of the northwest was blanketed by smoke from forest fires that were burning everywhere that year.

Speaking of photography, I’ll hopefully be picking up that new camera soon, Stay tuned.

Movie Review: Mi Mejor Enemigo (My Best Enemy)

I am a movie junkie and I have a huge NetFlix queue. I love to watch movies as I appreciate them as an art form. I imagine if I had any exposure to a movie camera as a boy I would have pursued a career in film making, likely as a cinematographer. I have no desire to act or direct or anything like that, but I love seeing life, light, and space through a lens. I can watch a movie in any language and appreciate it for what is on the screen. My NetFlix queue started out several years ago as this huge “gotta see everything ever made” pile of eccentricities and is now down to “only” a few hundred films.

When Christopher was in Chile (two years ago now… amazing how time flies) I threw some examples of Chilean cinema into the queue. Machuca is one I actually watched while Chris was in Chile, and I found it a wonderful view of astounding historical events from a perspective that provides a unique vision: that of a child. I highly recommend seeing it. I did not know of Mi Mejor Enemigo until I saw it mentioned in Wayne Bernhardson’s blog in a post last month. I tossed into my queue and set it to a place that would coincide with Christopher’s Spring Break home from College. I watched it the other night and found it to be a very nice movie. VERY well photographed, and a good story. I had to resort to subtitles, as my Spanish stops at “Dos grandes cerveças por favor.” The tragicomic story takes place in the midst of the Beagle Conflict which occurred at the end of 1978, where Argentina was preparing to invade Chile over a border dispute concerning 3 islands at the southern tip of the continent. Rather than focus on the broader conflict, this movie revolves around 12 men, two squads of 6, from either nation, essentially lost in the featureless plains of southern Patagonia. Each is lead by a practical Sergeant, and filled with semi-stereotypical soldiers. The shy & sensitive city kid pining for his girl; the hard-core soldier ready to die for his country; the country bumpkin – in this case a more indigenous, less-European looking fisherman from Chiloe. While stereotypical in nature, the characters are not caricatures however and each is very believable and sympathetic. Through accident, and the sheer expansive and featureless space they occupy the Chilean squad has no real idea of their location, but somehow find themselves in a trench opposite a squad of Argentines. A unique aspect here is that unlike many international conflicts the soldiers share a common language, and are able to relate to each other. First they trade tea for cigarettes, using a sheep dog to run between their trenches. They then come together to assist an injured soldier. Food is shared, along with water, though the dog is lost in the process (I won’t share how though.) This escalates into football matches, and settles into an easy truce after they establish, through mutual agreement a “border” between them. (Something the two countries themselves did with the mediation of the Pope at the same time.) While neither is the “main character” the two Sergeants, wonderfully played by Erto Pantoja (Chile) and Miguel Dedovich (Argentina) are really what hold this movie together. They represent the practical and reasonable while the emotional and unreasonable soldiers they lead, and countries they represent ride a seesaw. There is all sorts of subtle humor here, as well as pathos. I imagine for those who fully understand the language and cultures involved there is even more.

I haven’t had a chance to confer with Christopher about the movie yet (he’s spent the majority of his Spring Break borrowing my car and visiting friends he has not seen since summer!) to see how well it dovetails with his experiences with Chileans. I did note a character referring to all of the Chileans as “northerners” despite every one of them being from places in what I would consider southern or central Chile. Christopher’s time in Chile was indeed spent in northern Chile, a place the Chilean’s call “the little North” as it is situated in the southern half of the Atacama desert, specifically the town of Copiapo. Of course given Chile’s unique geography and extreme length the characters may have been using the term “northern” in a relativistic way, since they were so far from anything really feeling like home. An analogy for an American would be one of our soldiers standing on Adak calling somebody from Idaho as being “from the south”, since in that context they’d be right.

Here is the movie’s trailer (sans subtites) from YouTube. If your Spanish is up to snuff you can watch the entire movie (in 11 parts) on YouTube. If you are like me and can’t comprende Español, or prefer to watch the excellent cinematography in high quality, then grab the DVD from your local video store or NetFlix. It is a great film from a source rarely recognized in this hemisphere. The tale has universal truths about human nature. You’ll love it.

GyazMail update.

GyazMail on my MacBook Pro

It has been several months, and to be honest… I’m very happy. So happy I stopped noticing the fact that I was “in transition” away from Eudora, and just got settled into using GyazMail. I still fire up Eudora about once every two weeks, usually to search for some obscure older bit of correspondence. I’ve moved most of my relevant mail archives directly into GyazMail anyway, so this need is really only for the truly obscure stuff. If you recall, I wanted to leave Eudora behind as it was becoming orphanware, and started showing some odd behaviors under 10.5. I know, somebody will chime in and say it is working just fine for them… but it was getting unstable in my case. I tried using Apple’s Mail.app. It reminded me of all the things I hated about NeXTMail, it’s predecessor under NeXTStep (which was really MacOS X Version Minus One… or perhaps MacOS X is really NeXTStep 5.5? …but I digress.) Mail.app is loaded with annoyances for me. So much so that I would rather continue using Eudora. Entourage is another one I looked at and dismissed quickly as it reminds me too much of everything else in Microsoft Office: overly mouse driven with buttons galore, screen real estate taken up by unused elements, and an odd focus on integration with other Microsoft products, rather than integrating with ME. When I found GyazMail I was intrigued, as it appeared to do 95% of the things I wanted it to do right out of the gate. Looking further I could bend about 3% of the rest of it to my will, leaving a small percentage (do the math, there will be a quiz later!) remaining for the developer to fix, should I choose to bug him with requests. To date I have made no contact with Goichi Hirakawa, GyazMail’s developer beyond sending him some money via my friend Kee Nethery‘s Kagi for his work.

Here’s a short list of the highlights and lowpoints, with full exploration to follow:

Why I left Eudora behind:

  • Lack of stability and compatibility with MacOS X 10.5 and beyond.
  • Lack of support for OS X technologies, notably integration with AddressBook and iCal. These were key to successful syncing with my smartphone, be it my old Treo, my current Blackberry, or whatever I use in the future.
  • “It’s dead Jim.”

What I miss about Eudora:

  • The ability to search across multiple mailboxes and accounts, based on easy search terms.
  • Stationery: The ability to have pre-built mail content, complete with headers, available from the message menu. This is very handy for those of us who administer mailing lists. I had a bunch of mail templates I used for interaction with the list server, as well as canned replies for frequently asked questions from or situations with the list subscribers.
  • The “read through everything with the spacebar” nature of the inbox.

What I love, so far, about GyazMail:

  • Fast, lightweight, stable.
  • EXCELLENT integration with Apple’s AddressBook.
  • Easy to import old Eudora mailboxes into GyazMail.
  • Growl notifications.
  • Excellent multi-account & multi-server support.
  • Better handling (though still not perfect) of HTML-formatted mail.
  • Excellent preference/filter/rule UI and handling

GyazMail annoyances:

  • Overly “clicky” UI. Especially in multiple accounts, when reading new mail, I find that I spend too much “mouse time” bouncing between the left (accounts/mailboxes) pane and the right (message reading panes) of the main window. Eudora had this wonderful way of just space-barring your way through all unread mail. In GyazMail you have to click TWICE to change the mailbox you are reading. Once to change accounts/mailboxes, then once more into the message reading pane to change the focus of the spacebar’s reading emphasis. If you don’t make that second mouseclick
  • Some HTML rendering bugs.
  • Lack of finer control over HTML behaviors within incoming mail. A sort of “all or nothing” approach.
  • Mailbox-intense left pane can use up a lot of screen real-estate, making navigation a scrolling chore. Eudora’s choice to bury this in a menu was more elegant.

(Note: This post is still a work in progress, check back often)

Continue reading “GyazMail update.”

What’s wrong with this Picture? (Plus John Fitch Bonus!)

OK, so it isn’t a picture, it is a movie.

I don’t know if it is my design training or perhaps an innate ability, but I spot these things all the time. In fact I am likely one of the most prolific contributors to IMDB in this respect. This isn’t a movie, so I won’t be heading over to IMDB now… but do you have any idea what I’m talking about?

On a more obvious note, I never watch Jay Leno on TV really, but I do visit his website from time-to-time*, as he shares amazing stuff like this:

*I just wish his website had an RSS feed for new content. (Get with the program Jay!)

Book Review: Team of Rivals

When I was officiating hockey games in my younger days we were provided a lot of coaching, more so even than the players in the contest. One of the things impressed upon us was the fact that the best officials are invisible. The ideal contest is one where the participants and spectators went home having remembered only that an excellent game was played, with no memory whatsoever of they guys out there in striped shirts. That is not to say that we shouldn’t be there, only that we should not impose ourselves upon the contest in a fashion that would have us stand out. As an official our duties were to the game, and to only see that it was fairly played. Doing so takes a tremendous amount of skill. That fact seems counter-intuitive, but it is true. The best Referees and Linemen however are always the ones you never notice.

In many ways the same can be said of authors. If their storytelling craft is well-developed your mind becomes immersed in the tale. You see the images, the places, the people. Your immersion is so deep that the teller of the tale, through their very skill, becomes invisible. Doris Kearns Goodwin comes very close to this level of perfection in her book Team of Rivals. The only times I became aware of her were the moments when historical fact did not align perfectly with her central thesis; that Lincoln’s choice of Cabinet was political genius. Several grave errors and embarrassments were tossed off as minor when in the end they proved to be major. Otherwise however the read was delightful, and truly transported me back 140 years to this country’s darkest days; our Civil War. Growing up, as I did in “The Land of Lincoln” (as our license plates confirmed) we were taught as schoolchildren about the brilliance and greatness of Abraham Lincoln. He freed the slaves and saved the Union. But other than some dates, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, that night at Ford’s Theatre, and the 13th Amendment, we were rarely taught much in school about the man, as President, as a politician and leader. This book provides an excellent primer on the latter, while skimming over those towering issues linked above. It served therefore to me, as a nice counterweight to my schooling on Lincoln.

I’m glad I stumbled upon this book in the bookshelf and grabbed it, as it has provided me with a lot of food for thought. Thought concerning conflict resolution mostly, but also about our nation’s history and how political wounds can be healed. It was not until I was a few chapters into this book that I heard that our new President is also a fan of it. His choice of Secretary of State was lifted right from the pages. We’ll see how the rest plays out.