red echo: September 2005

I want to go roller skating. I'd forgotten how much I used to enjoy it until Tuesday night at Burning Man: a whole crowd of us, out exploring, walked by the Black Rock Roller Disco and decided to take a spin. Rather to my surprise, I found that I still had the knack - as long as I didn't think about it too much, I could even do most of my old spins, jumps, and foot-tricks. It doesn't look like there are any rinks actually in Seattle, but I'm sure I could gather up a bunch of people for a trip over to Bellevue or Southcenter some night...

I've got the music cranked up, I'm playing along on my bass, I've worked out the chords and I'm really getting into it... then the track ends, and I realize that the whistling drone that came in on the second chorus was actually my teakettle, which has been furiously spewing steam (and irritating my neighbors, most likely) for a couple of minutes now. That's right, I was going to make tea. Oops...

I think I have a new band project. I responded to a craigslist ad a couple of weeks ago; we exchanged some emails, met up to talk, got along fine, and discovered that we want to make pretty similar kinds of music. Our skill sets match up well, and we like each other's demo work. Everything has gone so well, in fact, that I keep wondering where the catch is. I'm excited, but I don't think it's going to seem quite real until the practice sessions start.

We met again tonight to talk about plans and play more music, and each picked out some of our unfinished or partially-finished music for the other to work on. I'm going to remix one of her tracks, and rewrite the keyboard parts; she's going to write some lyrics and a melody for a couple of songs I was never able to finish. This should be a nice way to ease into collaboration; I'm looking forward to seeing what she does with my pieces.

I went out to the 9 lb. Hammer last night to see the Bad Things, a sort of punk folk gypsy carnival band with a great sense of black humor. All acoustic, and they had an accordion, a tuba, a banjo, all kinds of stuff. Zack and Wendy gave me a ride down, and most of the Kaos people were there - Sean was running sound, and the musicians all seemed to be friends of my friends. I've never been down to the 9 lb. Hammer before; it has a great obnoxious divey atmosphere, but it's really kind of a terrible performance venue, with big round tables taking up all kinds of space and a totally jury-rigged sound system. It was fun, though, and they have good stiff drinks, so we were all dancing and drinking and having a great time anyway.

I have a new camera - not a replacement for my dead Canon, but a medium-format TLR! It's a Rolleicord III that my grandfather bought sometime around 1952. It's full of dust now - I don't think he touched it at all during the last fifteen or twenty years of his life - but all of the mechanisms appear to work.

He was an avid photographer when I was young; I have fond memories of the darkroom he built in his house in Redwood City, and all of his prints around the house. He had other cameras later; a 35mm Mamiya, and I think a Pentax, but this was the first camera I remember him using, and it has always stuck in my memory as something special.

I haven't used film for several years, but I am suddenly interested in taking it up again. This camera has nothing but the essentials: all manual, no flash, square film, no swappable lenses, no zoom. You get nothing but shutter speed, aperture, and a great big ground-glass viewfinder. It suggests a certain deliberate style, quite the opposite of the quick-and-casual manner I've grown accustomed to with digital cameras.

I was introduced to a seven-year-old boy last night as “an inventor.” Ha! Well, I suppose that's as good a description of my gadget-making as any, though my motivations are anything but entrepreneurial.

Just like last year, summer ended while I was off at Burning Man. It's been cloudy, cold, and intermittently rainy for the last week; it felt oddly like spring a few days ago, when a grey, cold morning cleared up into a blue, clear, crisp afternoon. Oh well; there's still plenty to do around here in cooler weather. I'd like to get a couple of wilderness expeditions in before the snow sets in, and then - then! maybe we will have a real ski season this year. I went to REI the other day to look at ski boots, and the excitement started creeping in immediately.

I spent the day over in Bellevue at a workshop put on by Apple Computer, learning how to build “universal binaries” that will run on either PowerPC or x86 Macs. The conference room was full of the x86 developer boxes, which are basically just a standard PC inside a G5 tower case, and I'm happy to say that they look and act just like any other Mac. Apple did a great job with their last processor transition, from the 68k to the PowerPC, and I think this upcoming transition will be just as smooth. Even more to my amazement, the universal binary technology is great; it is simple, straightforward, uncluttered, and easy to support. I've grown to expect that every new Apple API will either be a massively over-engineered, world-spanning beast, or just a pretty name slapped onto a creaky old pile of kludges, so it was a pleasant and refreshing surprise to discover a simple, elegant API that is just as future-proof as it needs to be (and no more).

Dinner tonight: a hunk of steak, broiled medium-rare, brushed with lemon juice and cracked pepper, and a bowl full of fresh salad greens, mushrooms, and diced tomatoes, with a cold, wet bottle of beer. Mmmmmm. Grrrr. I cannot remember having ever felt so earnestly carnivorous as I have in the last four or five days.

Please help me find a new camera

I went to look at digital cameras today and found myself quickly overwhelmed. I have paid no attention whatever to the digital camera market in the three years since I bought my Canon A10, and the models available today have advanced so far beyond what I was expecting that I hardly know where to start. I turn to you, dear readers, for advice: what should I look at? My criteria are as follows:

• Good glass is important, resolution is not (the A10's 1.3 megapixels have always been adequate)
• No more than a quarter-second lag between pressing the shutter and taking the picture
• Flash setting must not require digging around in menus
• Camera must remember flash setting across power cycles (!!!)
• Should use normal batteries (AA or AAA) instead of some weird custom hard-to-find rechargeable battery [negotiable]
• First choice for memory format: compactflash. Second choice: secure digital. Third choice (tie): memory stick, multimediacard.
• 3x optical zoom [negotiable]
• Doesn't have to have an optical viewfinder
• Should be available on eBay for $100-ish, though I might go as high as $200 if it is really awesome or includes memory cards or extra batteries (if it uses the weird custom hard-to-find rechargeable kind, that is)

Back from Burning Man

I'm home from Nevada, tired but feeling good. There is a playa-dust-covered heap of gear in the middle of my living room which I will likely spend the next week or two unpacking. The Rover looks wretched - caked in roadkill bugs and a film of grey mud and dust - and badly needs a brake job, but it held up magnificently despite the extreme conditions and heavy load.

My camera broke a couple of days into Burning Man, so I don't have many pictures. I am less bothered about this than you might expect; I do love photography, but I already have two years' worth of Burning Man photos online, and it was a nice change to just run around and play without trying to take pictures of every amazing thing I saw. The camera is a small piece of baggage, but it is baggage all the same.

This was a really good experience. I didn't feel as much of an ecstatic rush as last year, but neither did I have any of the exhausted, depressive funks I went through last year or in 2001. I basically just had a good time all week. The weather was great - we only had one windstorm, right at the beginning of the week, and only two really cold nights. My art project worked beautifully; there were no major problems setting it up or running it, and people loved it. I felt connected, to the city and especially to my Kaos camp-mates; it was nice to be part of a group, a contributor to a shared experience.