GLOBADOM

Hello from Ottawa! Yes, I have actually ventured out of the relative warmth of the west coast to the wintry metropolis known as our nation’s capital. This week, I was assaulted at every turn by the ridiculous, but have been enjoying some sublime moments as well.

The process involved in getting from Vancouver to Ottawa was a most ridiculous one. When we arrived at the airport, we were first told there were no seats together on the flight and that we were going to be sitting two rows apart. Now, having known Ryan for more than nine years, I am able to be parted from him for four hours without undue angst. However, the prospect of being wedged between two individuals with bad hygiene practices and unlimited onboard alcohol consumption was truly frightening (believe me, I know of what I speak). Anyway, we were told that we could discuss this matter with the boarding attendant and see if two seats together could be found. While we were waiting for boarding, the gossip amongst the passengers was about the blizzard in Ottawa and the possibility of being re-routed to Toronto. Not a pleasant thought. As it turned out, two seats together were found on the flight. The flight itself was not uneventful. There was a bit of a rocky takeoff, considerable turbulence, an onboard altercation between two passengers across from us and some rather “institutionally-flavored” mashed potatoes. I’ve had more bizzare in-flight encounters, but I will restrain myself from the considerable digression I’m tempted to make and move forward. The good news was that we landed in Ottawa. The bad news was that it took about 20 minutes for the plane to drive around, find a spot and then wait for the snow to be cleared. We were greeted at the airport, which looked so much like the one back home, by my best friend. This was a very happy moment. Yet, more ridiculousness was to come. The luggage, for some reason connected with the snow and cold, could not be delivered to the airport with the same speed as the passengers. So, we waited and waited and waited….. We then decided to leave and come back. Ah joy, at 12:30 a.m. my luggage was delivered into my icy fingertips.

I return to Vancouver for my sublime moment, which occurred somewhat earlier in the week. My friend and I went to see the opera “Madama Butterfly.” I have seen this opera on at least two other occasions, but this was my friend’s first experience with a live opera performance. Briefly, “Madama Butterfly” is an opera written by Italian composer Giacomo Puccini. The story was based on an earlier, American play, but the opera was first performed only 100 years ago, relatively recently for opera. The story involves a sailor called Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton who arrives on the equally patriotically named ship, Abraham Lincoln, in Japan. He falls in lust with a beautiful geisha who was once a member of a wealthy family, but has fallen on hard times. He marries her, but like the leases in Japan, he says, he can give 30 days notice and get out without much ado. Sharpless, the American consul, warns him that the fifteen-year-old girl he has married is truly in love with him and he shouldn’t be so careless with her heart, but Pinkerton is unmoved and dreams of the day when he will marry a real American wife. By the second act, we find out that Pinkerton abandons Butterfly shortly after the honeymoon phase of the marriage. He says he will return and she believes him, unlike everyone else. Unknowingly, Pinkerton has impregnated Butterfly and is unaware that he now has a son. Finally, Butterfly gets Sharpless to write about her son to Pinkerton in an effort to hurry his return from America. He does return, but with an American wife in tow and a mission to take his son with him to America. Pinkerton is sorry for what he has done to Butterfly, but the damage he has done is irrevocable. Butterfly chooses to die with honour and kills herself. This particular performance of “Madama Butterfly” was the most moving one I have ever seen. It was sublime. The music and the story really were brought to life as the acting of the singers, particularly the soprano playing Butterfly, was so well done. I almost wept at the end when I realized that the real tragedy of the story was that Butterfly’s idealism about love is what is destroyed and her physical death is the manifestation of the death of her innocence. I know the story can be interpreted on the metaphorical level, as a representation of all the evils of colonialism etc… Yet, the story is at its most moving if taken on the personal level. Unlike many operas, “Madama Butterfly” tells us a fictional story that is realistic. There are countless examples of women in many nations who were left in situations very much like Butterfly and had very limited and unattractive options.

Staying in a friend’s 23rd-floor apartment, thus the stupid title.

Not much will be said: the flight in was bumpy, and Ottawa is covered in a thick blanket of snow. Went to a concert of swing tunes last night at the National Arts Centre (think Queen Elizabeth Theatre except with good acoustics and good sightlines), and due to illness, the concert was directed by last-minute replacement Senator Tommy Banks, OC.

There’s so much you could do with that. Canada has a top-flight swing bandleader as a senator. He’s from Alberta, which means he was appointed instead of one of the Senators-in-waiting.

However accidentally, he won my heart in his opening remarks by stealing one of Ronald Reagan’s favourite sayings: “When I met with the orchestra, I was able to say the most dreaded phrase by all Canadians: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.'”

Great concert, too. Nice and light, just what we were up for. Also, cheese is ridiculously cheap here: we got two small rounds of camembert and one of brie, all for $5. The Lovely One is ready to stay for the cheese alone.

I’m leaving on a jet plane. Instead of a real post, a few useful things I found:

Credit where due, these first two are from Joshua Paul’s column in Performance PC:

CutePDF is a free-to-home-users PDF-writing utility for PCs, so they can approach the abilities built into Mac OS X.

ALZip is a free-to-home-users Zip utility. Much less important to xp users, but I can assure you, very useful for Windows 2000.

Now for the actually fun stuff:

Slate has a nicely obsessive review of reasonably serious home-espresso machines. Notably, they reviewed my in-laws’ machine, the Starbucks Barista, which turns out to be both a decent machine (left-handed milk foamers are no problem for some of us) and made for Starbucks by Saeco, who are my irrational favourite coffee-machine company since they sponsor an elite cycling team. I use this machine to make nice lattes for my mother-in-law, though she believes my milk-foaming technique still needs a lot of work. It gives me something to practice.

But for real obsession, read this excellent espresso FAQ. The best part is the link to an even more obsessive discussion of espresso-making machines. It’s like audiophilia: no matter what equipment you have, there’s always some way of taking it to the next level.

This picture, much more accurate, colour-wise, than the one below, happened because I set a manual white balance using a piece of paper illuminated by the primary light source (an incandescent lamp sitting out of frame to the right). It’s a powerful adjustment, and useful when your photos aren’t coming out the proper colour. The instant feedback that your pictures are wrong is just another huge digital advantage.

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This boring photo is being used as a useful tutorial. The theme: manual white balance is your friend. This shot was taken in low-light conditions, using the automatic white-balance setting. It’s all orangey.
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So, I’m going to Ottawa very soon, and have been looking up the weather forecasts. That’s a link to the live forecast, so it changes every day, but as I write this, the current forecast calls for “ice pellets” this evening.

Ice pellets? They even have a graphic for it!

Hm. Actually, let’s just abuse Environment Canada’s system gratuitously (hey, I paid for that site, I oughta be allowed to leech their graphics). For your amusement, All 41 of their little icons:

I look forward especially to figuring out what this is:, and what different weather pheonomena these two represent:

Update: Environment Canada has a fascinating explanation of their weather terms, including the inscrutable “ice pellets,” which are different from mere hail!

A night shot, taken after dark with a long exposure. The illumination from below is coming from street lights. The trees are across the street from my house.
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Another week gone by. More sublime and ridiculous happenings to report to you. Interestingly, there have been an inordinate number of sublime moments this week. And, I have felt the lack of ridiculousness quite acutely. However, I shall not disappoint you. Yes, Virginia, there is a ridiculous posting this week.

Contrary to form, though, I am going to start with sublime. There are many sights to behold in the evening downtown: lousy buskers, amateurish drug dealers, angry shoppers, and overflowing garbage bins. Yet, our urban metropolis does sometimes contain elements of the sublime. Since I spend most of my evenings downtown, I get to see one of them quite regularly at this time of year. The Sheraton Wall Centre puts LED Christmas lights to the best use I’ve seen yet. Who could have predicted that energy-saving bulbs could look so lovely? If you don’t believe me, behold the pictures and judge for yourself – or check out the real thing!

Now, the ridiculous. I will preface this by saying that I am going to strech the constraints of this category by discussing something that appears ridiculous when first beheld, but upon further examination, is anything but. I am speaking of the poem, “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll. You will find it in Through the Looking Glass which is the sequel to Alice in Wonderland. Rather than post the entire poem here, I will give you some snippets of its seemingly ridiculous sections. The speaker in the poem cautions us to: “Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch!” He also tells us that: “The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, came whiffling through the tulgey wood, and burbled as it came.” And, finally, when the young man in the poem slays the Jabberwocky, he celebrates by saying: “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! He chortled in his joy.”

So, what was Lewis Carroll smoking and where can I get some!? I mean, it is common knowledge that Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote “Kubla Kahn” after having some drug-induced dreams. Was Lewis Carroll using a frequent flyer card at his local opium den? Possibly. Nevertheless, this poem actually demonstrates Carroll’s understanding of linguistics in amazingly complex ways. For example, “frumious,” is clearly an adjective. It precedes a noun and the suffix, “-ous” is commonly found on the end of adjectives. Carroll actually used the words, “fuming” and “furious” to create “frumious” which encompasses elements of meaning from both words.

Another example of the method behind Caroll’s madness is “burbled.” “Burbled” is a verb. Again, its placement in the sentence tells us this as well as the “-ed” ending, indicating that it is in the past tense. Carroll created this word using a technique called “blending.” He took “bleat,” “murmer,” and “warble” and combined parts of each word to create “burble” which, like “frumious,” takes on elements of meaning from all three.

Finally, “chortled,” a made up verb, created by blending “chuckled” and “snorted,” is actually one of two words that Carroll created in this poem that have ended up in the standard English dictionary. Inventing a word is the coolest kind of ridiculousness.

[Er, this essay is sort of stomping all over The Lovely One’s latest post, so go down and read that first. Then you can come back and check out my rant on digital photography. I didn’t plan it that way; I’ve been working on this essay for several days, and just finished it. -RjC]

Apologies to those of you who already understand digital photography. The following essay will mostly be old hat, but I hope it contains at least one or two new insights.

Digital photography is leading me into a picture-taking renaissance.

I have been a shutterbug most of my life, introduced into the hobby early on at my father’s knee, and for most of that time I used a Pentax Spotmatic SP, just a classic old manual camera. I never felt a need to upgrade from that tough, fully manual beast.

But as time passed, I found that I didn’t take a lot of pictures. The key reasons, I think, were the size and the cost of photos. Spending several dollars to print a roll of 36 shots was sort of annoying, especially since half the pictures were just terrible, another quarter were uninteresting, and if I was lucky, there was one really good picture on a roll that just happened to work right. Not that I knew what I’d done, since feedback was separated from shooting by a matter of days or weeks. No, I did not keep little shooter’s notebooks.

The size issue was simply that an SLR, especially with a reasonably flexible zoom lens mounted, is a huge chunk of metal, and it was always a deliberate decision to take it. Even with a nice lens like a 50mm prime, it’s still big, and only got bigger if I wanted to bring along a flash.

Maybe if I had been smart I would have bought a Yashica T5 (aka T4-Super), most beloved of the little rangefinder cameras, and made that my main camera. I have seen a great number serious amateur photographers be very happy shooting with good compact film cameras.

But I didn’t. Basically, I stopped taking photos. And that was fine with me: I had other hobbies to keep me busy.

But I’ve been borrowing a high-end Sony DSC-V1 from work for some time, and it’s a sweet little machine that really got me back into taking pictures again. The key with that camera was the ability to just shoot photos without worrying about burning film.

That decided me that I wanted my own digicam, if only for web work and because I kept getting nervous about endangering someone else’s $600 camera. Eric gave me a sweetheart deal on his retired Nikon Coolpix 2500, including a couple of memory cards.

By current standards, this thing is obsolete: 3 megapixels is the minimum resolution for a non-joke digital camera, and the offerings at that level are impressively diverse, from bargain-priced non-zoom Kodaks to reasonably serious long-zoom cameras like the Canon S1 IS (here’s a bonus hint if you’re shopping for a camera right now: if Eric hadn’t sold me the Coolpix, I would have purchased a Canon A75, which is a great camera with all-manual controls. This article was inspired largely by my desire to convince my father to buy the A75 as a replacement for a terrible Minolta film SLR he recently returned). The Coolpix I bought doesn’t even have any direct manual controls. It picks the shutter, the aperture, and I get to adjust the exposure values if I feel such a need. Normally, I’d find that intolerable.

But none of that matters, when balanced against the gross advantages of digital cameras. The Coolpix is well on its way to turning me into a much smarter photographer, mainly because of the things I noted above: I now take a ton of pictures (because they’re free) and I get instant feedback (from the LCD) and keep shooting (again, free photos) until I do something that makes the picture look good. Just think: 10 years ago, a proper studio setup would have involved the amateurs-need-not-apply investment in a Polaroid back for at least one camera, simply so that the photographer could get immediate feedback on how the lighting would work out. Now that feature is available on any digital camera worth buying.

All this, and the Coolpix has the natural virtues of any compact camera: fits in pockets, goes anywhere. Well, actually, it’s better than that. I would argue that a compact form factor is the natural form for a digital camera, as they already incorporate the key feature of SLRs: the LCD screen on the back shows you exactly what the image sensor is seeing. No parallax, and near-perfect coverage of the imaging area. (Indeed, so natural that I suspect there’s an untapped (?) market for a rangefinder-styled non-SLR digicam that still accepts current SLR and digital SLR (DSLR) lenses). My Nikon takes advantage of the LCD screen by not even bothering with a conventional viewfinder (a few other cameras on the market do the same, and some high-end non-SLRs (including the Canon S1) actually have a second digital viewfinder, a suspiciously hokey feature in my opinion).

But all the digicam makers have gone out of the way to take advantage of the fact that digital cameras just plain have a lot of CPU power inside of them. My under-featured Coolpix, for example, has exposure compensation, twelve (!) different specialty modes of varying utility for problematic shooting situations (everything from macro mode to a special “night scene” mode). I can almost always nudge the camera into a good picture by using these fancy modes, and trial-and-error possibilities mean I don’t lose the shot if my first guess is wrong (action photography excepted, of course). Nikon even throws in an amusing trick called “Best Shot Selector” (BSS), which takes up to 10 pictures in a series, automatically finds the sharpest, clearest one, and then tosses the rest. They tout it for circumstances when holding the camera is marginal.

Digital cameras have all kinds of other advantages large and small. My photos are automatically catalogued (I use Picasa, as I have mentioned previously; there are many other album programs out there), so unlike the box of slides in my parents’ house, I can see what I took at a glance. When I get smart, I’ll do the easy thing and archive every last picture to CD, then give them to my parents, just so I have a safe backup. Easy. Digital cameras can even capture primitive (or in some cases, not particularly primitive) short movie clips. (I have a theory that the inability of digital cameras shooting video to do the 30-minute shots beloved by duffer videographers would go far in improving the average home movie, but that’s another essay).

One of the more surprising advantages of my camera was that it allows my mother-in-law to take pictures again. She has vision problems which mean that framing a picture using a normal viewfinder is almost impossible. But lining up the shot with a 1.5″ LCD screen which can be held at arm’s length and which is nice and bright? That’s easy.

The Coolpix also takes advantage of the different physical configurations available to digital cameras. The lens and the main body twist separately, which is used on this camera to give the lens side really good protection when it’s not being used, and which also allows the viewscreen to be at an angle relative to the lens, making high- and low-angle shots easier.

In exchange for all these advantages, digital gives away to film, at most, superior image quality, mostly in large-scale enlargements, of the type that my serious, experienced, shutterbug father has actually created about once in the last decade. That’s not a lot to give away, and the speed at which digital cameras are improving means they are rapidly taking that advantage back. Indeed, among DSLRs there is no longer any resolution advantage, though there may still be a colour reproduction advantage. That is trickling down into consumer-land fairly quickly. By next year, 3-megapixel cameras will be very cheap, if they exist at all among high-quality camera makers. The sweet spot will probably be 5-megapixel cameras, at about the same price as 3-MP units today. Lenses will soon be more important than the digital sensor at determining the ultimate resolution of consumer cameras.

More important than any technical advantage, though, is this simple point: digital cameras, even relatively simple ones, are fun. They’re fun to use. They provide instant gratification, just like a Polaroid camera once did (and at a fraction of the marginal cost). They provide interesting ways of messing with the image, both within the camera and within the computer. They encourage experimentation. It’s fun to shoot digital! What more do I have to say?

If I had to imagine my ideal does-it-all digicam, within the constraints of currently available lens systems, I would pick one which was compact enough to put in a cycling jersey pocket (those jersey pockets are really big, so the criterion would be met by most digital cameras smaller than a DSLR), had at least a 3x zoom, as many megapixels as possible, fully-manual shooting, and I’d be very happy. If I could have two cameras, by name, right now, I’d pick a really teeny-tiny camera like the Canon SD (Digital ELPH) series that I would carry everywhere at all times, and then a nifty semi-compact like one of the several high-megapixel prosumer cameras recently released. Third camera, cost no serious object, would probably be the gross overkill of a really serious digital SLR and a couple of lenses. But I bet if I didn’t buy a DSLR, I’d never really miss it.

If you were paying for this article, or if the author was a serious pro-type, you’d get a nice conclusion now. You’re not, so the wrap-up is this: digital cameras are now good enough and cheap enough that I would recommend one to almost anyone considering a camera purchase, and with a budget of at least C$200. You’ll never miss the putative advantages of film, and you’ll have more fun taking pictures.

A most curious jar which sits on my co-worker’s desk. A faunaless aquarium, apparently.
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