Category: Thoughts

Just thinking out loud you know…

Contemplating a new Camera

One of my frequent commentators, jculpjr recently asked about what sort of camera gear I use. It was a timely question as I’m seriously considering a new camera. I’d like to throw out a wish list so to speak and hopefully get some feedback that will help me make a choice. Your participation is welcome.

This is the machine (photo from a contemporary review) I’ve been using to capture images since 2002:

It is an Olympus C-5050 zoom. It has been a great camera for me and I still find it useful, however it is getting a tad beat up and it has some weaknesses that I’d like to eliminate with a new machine. However, let me start by telling you what I like about it most, in order of importance:

  • It is small and lightweight.
  • It runs on AA batteries.
  • Did I mention it is small and lightweight?
  • It has fairly easy controls, and a lot of manual settings.
  • It works well on “point & shoot” mode quite well.
  • It shoots VERY well in low-light conditions.
  • It has this nifty flip-out LCD:

You have no idea how handy this is when shooting with the camera at arm’s length, something I do a LOT. It flips both up AND down, meaning I can hold the camera way above my head, or down on the ground an still see the LCD screen.

Some other nice things about it:

  • It has a “movie” mode, so at the flip of a switch it can be a video camera, with sound.
  • It has lens adapters so I can shoot with a wide-angle or a telephoto.
  • It has never given me trouble.

Now, here are the things I hate about it:

  • Whenever I change batteries, the date/time reverts to midnight 01/01/2002. This is annoying especially since all the other settings (flash, drive mode, etc) are saved!
  • It is NOT an SLR. It has a viewfinder, which I adore, as that is how I prefer to shoot, rather than looking at a screen, but that viewfinder does not see what the lens sees. This is fine when working with the built-in lens, but utterly fails when you add a lens adapter. In the latter case the lens almost always blocks the viewfinder. This hurts as I shoot with a very wide angle lens MOST of the time.
  • The tripod mount is off-center from the lens. A design crime of the highest order in a camera!
  • The LCD is small compared to today’s cameras.

So my ideal camera is a Digital SLR, that is small and lightweight with a good, reasonably-sized multi-angle LCD. After that, I’d like it to have great lenses, good controls, and the ability to shoot video & sound. Size is my primary concern though. I used Mark Collien’s Nikon D-something on the GTTSR and it is am amazing camera… great lens(!) and awesome photos but my gawd… it was friggin HUGE! I just don’t want to lug around something that big & heavy.

So I’m all ears if you have some suggestions. I have ZERO brand loyalty, and am open to any and all comers.

Mini Movie Review: Religulous

I saw this movie a few weeks ago. I had an evening free, and a coupon for a free movie, so for the price of expensive popcorn, I had some entertainment for about 100 minutes.

(Note: I love movies and as a person with a lot of visual training I appreciate films and filmmaking. I have a continuous NetFlix queue and watch about 5 movies a week. I could probably post as many movie reviews here as I do car photos. Who knows, perhaps I will.)

This movie is not really an artistic expression, or an example of the filmmakers art however. It is a shaky-cam documentary with Bill Maher questioning religious believers about the bizarre and illogical portions of their religions. He takes great joy in revealing the ironies, hypocrisies, and logical fallacies of organized religion. Organized western religions that is, as those of us in the western world have very little knowledge or context to analyze eastern religious belief, so he left those out.

It was of course thought provoking, and entertaining. The relentless knife of Occam’s Razor leaves very little left of religious belief, since so much of it appears to be stuff people made up as they had no other mechanism to answer questions of the unknown. As mankind gains knowledge, mythology is revealed for the nonsense of which it is, mostly. When intellect and empiricism is applied to mythology, very little survives. For example Thomas Jefferson, a man of considerable intellect, endeavored to condense the New Testament into logical statements, devoid of supernaturalism, and it ended up being less than 20 pages long. In large print. Go ahead, it is a quick read.

Or, you can flip it 180° to JUST the mythology and get it down to one small image file.

Of course Judiasm and Islam get equitable treatment in Religulous. Maher is an equal opportunity offender. Even Scientology and pot smokers gets skewered. It was good fun though everyone he interviewed became defensive and hostile when confronted with absurdities they held dear, whether it be virgin birth, talking snakes, expending effort on a particular day of the week, or eating one food but not another. Ironically the exceptions were two Catholic Priests, representing the Vatican no less, who seemed to take it all with a great sense of humor… It only took them about 400 years to come around to accept a heliocentric understanding. Perhaps there is hope after all?

The very fact that every religion continually subdivides into factions, big and small, is sufficient proof to me that nobody has a monopoly on truth. Every religion has at its kernel the golden rule, but wrapped around it are layers and layers of bullshit, mythology and irrelevant minutiae, and wrapped around that is an a hard shell ethic that says “everyone else is wrong.” “Others” are doomed to eternal punishment, or deserving of death, or whatever – and that certitude is in direct opposition to the core belief itself.

Unfortunately humans cling hardest to beliefs that are unknown, and refuse to subject them to serious inquiry and questioning. Instead they accept words written a millennia or more ago, and handed down through time as the divine word.

Then they fight over them. Usually to the point of violating commandments.

Where Religulous fell apart was the ending. Literally the final few minutes. It attempted to draw a conclusion to the previous 98 minutes of lighthearted inquiry. It fell into the same logical trap that religion does: “All those other people are crazy, so we are doomed.” In other words “They are wrong.” This was accompanied by a barrage of disturbing images delivered in a propagandistic style that would make Leni Riefenstahl proud. For me it literally ruined my night. C’mon Bill, you can do better.

One of the founding principles of this country is religious freedom. People can believe in whatever they wish, and so long as they don’t harm, or steal in the process, they’re welcome to be here. The Constitution says that Government has to butt out, and not try to impose any one belief system on its citizens (unfortunately something it fails at in innumerable small ways however.) Roughly one-fifth of all Americans are non-believers, or have chosen to not follow any specific faith, a fact that the believers often forget or ignore. But you can not legislate thought, or belief. Nor can you deny others their freedoms to speak, think, worship, and believe. I have no problem with fundamentalists building museums showing people and dinosaurs living together. Just don’t use government funding to build it, expect tax breaks because of it, or attempt to push it into the public school curriculum. I’ll defend to the death your right to believe batshit crazy stuff. Just don’t expect me to buy into your beliefs.

Bill Maher should have left his doom-filled conclusion on the cutting room floor and left us to draw our own conclusions… but hey, he’s entitled to his own opinions. 😉

An old habit dies… hard.

I have a confession to make: I’ve been using the same email user agent for about eighteen years. Yes… EIGHTEEN years. How many software products from 1990 do you still use?

In 1990 I was using a Macintosh IIsi, System 6.0.7, and Eudora 1. If I recall correctly it was version 1.3 or 1.5. I used my wife’s student account at the University of Washington to get online at first. A shell account on a UNIX host, a newsfeed (Newswatcher!) and trusty old Eudora for reading mail. I had a Hayes 2400baud modem at first, then I joined the 90s eventually with a Prometheus 14.4k modem, with built-in fax AND voicemail. (I was doing full-blown telephony in 1991!)

But trusty old Eudora was my mailer. It stayed my mailer.

I went through many machines (MacII, Centris 650, PowerBook 170, Duos, the infamous green 2400c subnotebook, iMacs, G4s, a TiBook that wheezed itself to death eventually, and now my current, though aging aluminum G4 PowerBook.) But Eudora remained my mailer.

I upgraded operating systems (System 7, OS8, did my best to skip OS9, jumped to X when it finally stabilized, through all the iterations of OSX up to 10.4) and Eudora kept on chugging. I managed to keep just about every bit of mail I had sent or received from about 1994 through 1998… when the great Jaz drive failure hit me as I was moving machines in the UK. Did I give up? Nope, I just started again.

Now I have just about every mail I have sent or received since 1998… all carried around in a pair of “Eudora Folders” on my hard drive (and backed up here, there, and everywhere!)

I have adapted to Eudora and it has adapted to me.

I have two distinct mail modes: work and non-work. I don’t read non-work email at work (except around lunchtime) and I TRY not to read work-related email when I am not at work, at least not on my laptop (that is what my Blackberry is for!) I have YEARS of well-tuned mail filters built (I should screen-shot them… they would astound you! Want to see them? Ask in the comments) and a signature file that is very long (it is how I have packed the “random quotes” here on my site.)

Unfortunately Qualcomm announced Eudora’s demise a while back and I knew this day would come. I test drove several other mail clients, but to be honest… all of them sucked. I know people think Eudora sucked, but it worked for me and I liked it. Hell, I stuck with it for EIGHTEEN YEARS!

I thought about Entourage. Yuck. Way too MS Office-ish. That big honking monolithic mail database terrifies me. Eudora has always stored mail is unix mbox format – plain old text files. Dealing with a corruption was just a matter of firing up BBEdit or vi. Clickty-click. I think that has happened to me three times in 18 years. I have known way too many folks who have had one form or another of Microsoft mail database files go tango uniform on them at inopportune moments. Frequently. No thanks.

I tried Mail.app. I really did. Inertia almost drove me there. It was the one I have test driven the longest. But the rules/filtering is just abysmal compared to Eudora. The mailbox handling lame. And I noted that it becomes a complete pig when you try to deal with large volumes of mail like I do. Searching through my multi-gig mailing list archives for some string of words? Seconds in Eudora! Minutes or a system crash in Mail.app. Yuck.

I’m planning a jump to OSX 10.5, mostly so I can support my family members who all use it. There have been issues reported for the last version of Eudora (6.2) on the latest OS from Apple. I figured now is the time to make the leap away from my old friend.

I thought about Odysseus, as it is billed as a modern replacement for Eudora. However it seems to be in perpetual beta, that seems more like alpha from the users I’ve talked to.

I looked at Thunderbird. No thanks. The UI is just … well… bleagh.

I stumbled across a likely little application that seems to fit the bill: Gyazmail. It has a very flexible UI that allows me to make it behave very Eudora-like when I want it to. It has very good search, rules, and filters. It can import all my old mail(!)

I’m test driving it at the moment and liking it so far. Switched my work mail to it late last week, and my personal mail is still coming over one account at a time. So far so good. If you regularly contact me via email be patient while I work through this transition period.

Good-bye Eudora… it has been a good 18 years.

Apologies to my readers…

I have not done a very good job of keeping this site updated during the past week on the Going To The Sun Rally. Not up to my usual standards. I managed to get the JagCam movies posted almost every day, but really haven’t been able to keep up with writing and photo editing. I will admit to having some serious challenges with JagCam footage editing… mostly to do with my now 4 year old laptop and cranky editing software. Import & Rendering times usually stretched to many hours and iMovie frequently crashed. It got to the point where I could not insert any titles or effects for fear of ruining the output, or just having hours of work vanish in a blink of an eye.

So… often I would just give up and go have a drink.

I’m back at home now and have a pile of work to do, most of it lots of finish work involving the deck and painting, plus some BioDiesel processing… but I promise I’ll set aside some time (and the bottle) and plow through the writing and photo editing backlog as fast as I can. Thanks for your patience!

–chuck

Some thoughts about the passing of somebody I knew… Jerry Nell, Jaguar Driver.

Note: If you knew Jerry, please add to this memoriam by commenting. Feel free to share your “Jerry Stories” too. If you don’t want to login or create an account here send me an email “cg at goolsbee dot org” and I’ll add it in for you. I know a lot of folks in the Jaguar community and GTTSR “family” knew Jerry far better than I and can do a better job at memorializing him.

I always have a hard time explaining to people what I do for a living. It is an esoteric industry that has existed only for the past 15 years. When people ask I say “we operate an Internet server colocation facility”… and they look at me with a blank stare. In my more flippant moments, I say “We transform electricity into bits, on a very large scale“… only real computer geeks get that joke. But if you were to compare the Internet to a big old Ocean Liner of old, I’m basically one of those poor saps way down in the bowels of the big elegant beast shoveling coal into the boilers. I’m only saying this as an introduction because I was deep into the activity of coal shoveling yesterday when Shaun Redmond interrupted me to suggest I write this post. I was in the datacenter, taking measurements on some high-voltage equipment as part of a large-scale assessment project I am working on; I logged into AIM on the DC Admin workstation, literally just to call for one of our staff to come into the datacenter to be with my when I re-installed a panel cover (since there was a slight risk of electrocution, this sort of thing should always be done in pairs for safety reasons… in other words if suddenly I started getting cooked by a full 480V three-phase contact they could knock me off the gear with a fiberglass ladder… not really to save me, so much as to maintain uptime for the connected servers… again a joke that I bet only a few people get… ) Anyway Shaun popped up on AIM and said to me: “I know what you should do… write a tribute to Jerry Nell on your blog.”

I had passed the news to Shaun earlier, that I had heard through Jag-Lovers that Jerry had lost his battle with cancer and passed away earlier this week. Shaun was my traveling companion for last year’s Going To The Sun Rally. Shaun had no idea how busy I was at that moment, nor how distracting it was for him to be making suggestions for what I do in my spare time. But, here it is at 5 AM the next morning and I woke up to realize Shaun was right, I should write something about Jerry. I can’t really write a “tribute” to Jerry Nell, as I did not know him well enough to do that justice… I only spent a few moments over two weeks of his life with him. However, those moments stand in stark contrast to everything I’ve said above… those moments were in the context of a passion that Jerry and I both shared: driving old Jaguars. I have no idea what Jerry did for a living. (And he looked at me with a blank stare when I told him what I did for a living!) As much as we define ourselves by what we do, in a lot of ways it is irrelevant… we should be remembered for what we loved to do. Jerry obviously loved Jaguars, and loved to drive them. He was the sort of guy who loved to pull your leg, and press his – down on the accelerator.

Jerry always reminded me that I was there to have fun. Last year Shaun & I pulled in a little late to the the GTTSR’s “welcome” in Helena. Shaun and I had just driven the E-type for two days to get to the rally (“I don’t trailer cars, I DRIVE them!”) and both the Jaguar & I were hot, dirty, bug-splattered, and tired. Shaun was checking us into the hotel and I was under the Jaguar’s bonnet trying to sort out some fiddly little issue. Jerry was sitting on a bench just across the way from me, enjoying a smoke break on a nice late summers’ eve. I hadn’t even noticed him since I was focused on the car. He said something very Jerry-like such as: “Hey kid, get your head out from under that bonnet and get inside and socialize with everyone else!” Any other “car guy” would have asked what I was doing or how the car was running, but not Jerry. He was reminding me of what was important. The car obviously got me there from a thousand miles away… whatever was the issue, it could wait. Jerry was right of course. The car was fine, I needed a beer. 🙂

I looked through all my photos from the two GTTSR’s I shared with Jerry Nell, looking to see if I had any photos of him to put here. I only found a couple of shots where he was easily spotted. I don’t usually take pictures of people… I prefer to shoot cars. However I did find this shot from the The Lodge at Whitefish Lake, taken at the end of the first day of the 2007 GTTSR. At first I thought it wasn’t very good; it is shot into the sun, it is grainy, and the composition and lighting don’t really show Jerry that well.

Jerry Nell

But now that I have looked at it for a while I realize it actually captures Jerry’s essence perfectly! I don’t recall the circumstances that lead up to this moment but looking at it I can imagine it. Jerry is on the right, on the far left is his wife Kathy, and in the foreground with her back to us is Francoise Reyns. It appears as if both Kathy & Francoise are laughing… Kathy is even hiding her face in embarrassment. Jerry looks calm however… as if he’s just delivered some outrageous comment and now is letting it lie there and sink into his audience. If you knew Jerry, you know that scenario is quite likely correct.

The best “Jerry Story” I have was from the last day of the 2007 GTTSR. This was the magical morning I spent with Philippe Reyns in his Jaguar XKSS. he invited me for a ride, which I leapt at the chance to accept. Francoise rode with Shaun in the 65E, I hope enjoying the relative comfort, peace and quiet compared to the raucous and outrageous XKSS. Jerry & Kathy had brought their XKSS as well, but on the second day, it suffered what the rally mechanics thought was a blown head gasket. Despite their heroic efforts, including an all-nighter and trailer-run to Calgary, they could not get it running again. I do not recall the final diagnosis, but the engine required a rebuild. Making the best of a bad situation Jerry rented a car, and he and Kathy stuck with the rally. That was a tribute to Jerry’s optimism and sense of fun. Most other folks would just bail out, but Jerry was there to enjoy himself, and stuck to the plan.

On this last day I was making the most of my time in the Reyns’ XKSS. To me it was a magical experience, and I was conflicted between just sitting there and soaking it all in, and properly documenting it with some photography. Photography for me is a passion – It is the only way I can tap into that creative streak that I spent half my life dedicated to, but abandoned as life and family pressed me into more financially stable pursuits. When I compose photos, I have to concentrate on the task. So there I was, concentrating on taking the perfect shot of the XKSS’ curvaceous bonnet, and to my left appears a car passing us! It shakes me from my focus. First of all, the XKSS is FAST, and Philippe is a veteran race car driver… nothing has passed us yet! In fact we’ve passed everything in sight… so what on earth could posses this Subaru Forester of all things to pass this rare and treasured machine?

Jerry Nell of course!

As the Subaru settled back into the lane, a car length or so off the nose of the Jaguar, Philippe and I leaned our heads close together to speak (the only way you can communicate amid the outrageous mechanical clamor that is a Jaguar XKSS at speed!) and we simultaneously said only one word:

“Jerry!”

We both smiled, as it was a truly comical moment.

Jerry had ruined my photography session, since you can’t really compose a beautiful shot of an XKSS bonnet with a Subaru Forester as your background! But for this I owe Jerry a debt of gratitude, because for those minutes that Jerry’s rental Subaru prevented me from composing photos I was able to turn off my desire to shoot and its required need for concentration, and really focus on the experience of being there in that amazing car. To close my eyes and listen. To feel the tingling in my spine in resonance to the exhaust note. To soak it all in. It was truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience and much like his reminder to me a few nights before to quit worrying about the E-type and go have a beer, Jerry was instrumental in reminding me of that – allowing me to imprint this experience in my memory. Thanks Jerry.

Not long after the GTTSR ended I received an email from the Reyns’ telling me about Jerry’s diagnosis. The outlook was not good and honestly we knew we’d lose him soon. I can not imagine what these past months were like for Jerry & Kathy. I spoke to Francoise Reyns the day I heard that Jerry had passed away. She said that she & Philippe are going to Jerry’s funeral. I told her to extend my condolences. I don’t have much more to say, but I do have a selection of photos of the two Jaguars that Jerry & Kathy brought to Montana for the 2006 & 2007 GTTSR. I’ll miss seeing him and what car he’d bring next at this year’s rally.

What a great guy. Good bye Jerry.

Above: The two XKSS’ together on the road. When I showed this to Jerry he said ‘I was never that close to Philippe!’ which is true… I edited the photo to put the cars closer together. He chuckled at that and slapped me on the back.

Good bye Jerry.