2006 Roundup - Shark-Jumping Edition

The last couple of years, it's seemed to me that certain companies, sites, people, and so on have clearly jumped the shark -- timed nicely to coincide with the end of the year. So let's take a moment to reflect on the 2006 jumpees.

Salon.com: Went from a daily destination site to something akin to a visit to the dentist, mostly due to their "Day Pass" system. I have to turn off half a dozen flash blocking, ad blocking, and Greasemonkey scripts even to see the Day Pass ad. Some article pages still won't load on the first try. The process is onerous enough that I only visit about once a week, opening up a dozen or two tabs. Then if I don't finish them within the prescribed time, or the browser crashes, the whole machine grinds to a halt as these dozens of pages all constantly reload themselves.

Microsoft: Do I even need to elaborate here? Vista. DRM. Free laptops for bloggers. All that "Live" business. Has a monopoly ever imploded so completely from its own actions rather than external forces? (Regardless of the money still rolling in.)

Photoshop: As someone with an Intel iMac, I'm faced with Photoshop CS2 that wants me to do all my file manipulation in the Bridge, yet the Bridge takes tons more memory and is far slower than Photoshop CS with the File Browser. Plus it's not a Universal Binary, so the slowness is multiplied. The only potentially compelling feature for me is HDR -- slow again. Perhaps CS3 can un-jump this shark...

Online air travel booking: Try to book a flight through any online consolidator. Get past pages that won't load, date widgets that don't display properly, and bad input fields. Get waylaid by links saying there is a better fare, or other flight times. Find out that those other options cost more because of bogus extra charges, or involve several stopovers. Finally make a decision, only to find out that the system breaks down because you had different tabs open for the same site, or you left a page up for more than 10 minutes. Repeat about 30 times. That's my experience this year, anyway.

Air travel in general: This liquids business is really the last straw. Half a dozen people in England had a plot that they didn't actually carry out, so everyone in Duluth and San Antonio has to throw out their bottled water and suntan lotion? This is the same administration that's talking about building a moon base, right? How will that work if all the astronauts have to keep taking off their space boots and venting all their liquids and who knows what else because of some terrorist plot in 2015 in Fiji?

Slashdot: The reader comments used to add details, perspectives, and alternative links over and above the linked articles. Not anymore. Better to find articles via Digg and ignore the comment sections altogether.

The word "sectarian": How did I manage to make it through university and into the 21st century without hearing that word used in a non-pompous sentence? Gee, maybe it's the most obscure way possible of talking about religious violence, religious fanaticism, fanatical religious violence... You'd think an administration that loves to talk about faith-based this and that wouldn't try to bury the word "religion"...

Gossip columns: Note to every syndicated gossip column in the world. No one outside the UK cares about Jude Law and Sienna Miller, Posh and Becks, or any other narcissistic British demi-celebrities. Note to every place that reprints these columns: stop recycling this British drivel. Also, spare us from the dispatches from every D-lister's publicist. "Rising star ___ was spotted cuddling and kissing ___ at dinner. They weren't even trying to hide it, said a source." Oh for the days of alt.showbiz.gossip.

Political reporting: Just take the last item and substitute "major daily newspaper", "White House officials", and "GW Bush" where appropriate. I hear in the NY Times that GW got bad advice from generals in Iraq and now has to deal with their bad planning. Anonymous senior officials say so. Careful not to mix in Jude Law and Sienna Miller by mistake guys.

New York Times movie reviews: What's with this trend of movie reviewers who think the way to write a review is to summarize every single plot twist and then give away the ending? You know, the kind that say, "...but then the best friend turns out to be a Russian spy, and the hero's wife leaves him for the dentist, and in the end the killer gets away". The New York Times takes the prize for this technique. Even when they're not actually reviewing a movie, they can't help themselves. I ready the NY Times retrospective on Robert Altman, and had to give up after it tried to make some point by saying how several of his movies ended. Hey, ever consider some of us have yet to see some of these movies?

Google: Hasn't definitively jumped the shark, but is showing signs. The press has stopped talking about how clever their strenuous hiring process is, and now focuses on how the system doesn't work so well for anyone over 30 or anyone already working who doesn't have the time to pursue the drawn-out interview process. The business of selling vested options could be seen as an innovative, or as a sign of major discontent among post-IPO hires. And now right at the end of the year, many legitimate bloggers find that their sites are pushed way down the rankings, and Google gives different results depending on which data center you happen to hit. Some people's GMail data gets nuked. The saving grace(s) are: Blogger and Maps continue to improve, and the second-tier search sites don't make much of an impact despite a lot of press hype. Today's San Francisco Chronicle follows the lives of some ex-Googlers, and their reasons for leaving sound like a shark of some kind is involved.

New York Times regular columnists: First was "Times Select" where you couldn't read the regular columnists without signing up and paying. Then some bloggers re-posted the columns, but the Times came down on anyone who did that regularly. Then any buzz around the columnists completely evaporated -- I still find links elsewhere to Times Select articles, but rarely if ever to Times Select op-ed columns.

Now it wasn't my intention to bash the New York Times particularly, but I see they've made several appearances on my list for various reasons. So perhaps they should win the award for "broadest" shark-jumping, alongside Microsoft which I would say did the "deepest" shark jump.

Newer Kid in Town: Canon SD700 IS Camera

Our household has always had a "small" and a "big" camera. My wife typically uses the small one and I use the big one. (Once I got a Canon 20D SLR, the former big one became the "medium" one.) This Christmas, I figured it was time to upgrade the small and medium cameras, to get better resolution, low-light capability, storage capacity, zoom, movie capability... and lots of other things.

For my wife, "pocketability" was the main factor holding her back from taking the camera everywhere, so the small camera got upgraded from a Canon S30 to a Canon SD700 IS. It actually has a bigger screen than the Canon S3 IS that we also got! Most of the familiar Canon controls are there, but in different configurations that present a bit of a learning curve for long-time Canon users. For example, the mode dial is on the side; review mode is a choice on the mode dial, so you can't just hit the shutter button to resume taking pictures; and "Manual" mode just lets you adjust things like flash and white balance, not shutter speed or aperture.

I'll put a full review up on Epinions.

Photoshop Tip for OS X: Use Aliases for Sorting and Sifting

This tip is all about ways to categorize pictures in multiple ways, without wasting space with multiple copies.

One of my big challenges with photography is figuring out what pictures to use in different contexts. When I come back from a trip, I might want to pick one batch of pictures to print, and different batches to enter in camera club competition, turn into panoramas, and so on. Yet I'd also like to dump the whole batch of originals into one directory for ease of backups and viewing thumbnails.

The way I have settled on organizing these different categories is with OS X's "alias" feature. Drag and drop one or many files while holding Option and Command, and OS X will create tiny files that point back to the originals. (The icons have little curved arrows in the lower-left corner.) Photoshop can work (reasonably well) with aliases; you can view their thumbnails and open them for editing. What I typically do is "Select All" in my Originals folder, and Option-Command-Drag all the files to a different folder. If it's easy to select a group of files, like a sequence of pictures all of the same subject, I'll only select those files before dragging. The other folder will be something like "Panoramas", "Black and White", or camera club competition categories such as "Travel" or "Pictorial".

Once these folders are full of aliases, I can look at the thumbnails in Photoshop. At this point, the Trash Can becomes my friend. As I decide which photos are relevant for each folder, I can trash all the others through Photoshop or the Finder. The alias goes in the trash, not the original file. If the choices are not obvious, I keep a large set of aliases in the folder and flag only the ones I think are best. This way, the same picture can be flagged in one category, but not in another.

Aside from the freedom to trash pictures without losing the originals, using aliases has two main benefits:

You can use the same pictures in many different contexts without creating separate copies. I always wait until the pictures are converted to PSD before copying aliases. Each PSD is on the order of 20 MB. So it wouldn't be practical to file separate copies under Travel, Nature, etc.

Any edits you make to the picture, either through the original or one of its aliases, are reflected everywhere. For example, if you improve the contrast while preparing a photo for a camera club Nature competition, you'll see that same improvement when you go back to the Originals folder to make a slideshow. Any dust removal, Levels, and so on only needs to be done once. For pictures that I want to try as black and white, I'll create the Channel Mixer adjustment layer, but turn it off before saving, so the B&W effect does not show up in all the other folders.

I find that having folders of just the relevant photos is more convenient than assigning keywords in Photoshop for all the different categories and doing a keyword search -- less typing, fewer dialogs, and the finality of trashing photos that didn't make the cut is reassuring.

Now, Photoshop's support for aliases is not perfect. Although you can do things like flagging and ranking, where Photoshop remembers your choice, you can't go through aliases to assign metadata that's stored in the file itself. So any keyword assignment has to be done using the originals. I'll typically go through a folder of pictures from Yosemite and assign relevant keywords like Deer, Hawk, etc. and then filter by keyword to identify all the pictures to create aliases in my Wildlife folder.

The other big drawback with Photoshop's alias support is that you can't run a batch operation on aliases you've selected. If you want to boost the saturation of every picture by using Automate->Batch and an action, you've either got to go back to the originals, or open all the files and choose Opened Files in the batch dialog.

When sending photos to get printed, you typically need to crop them to a particular aspect ratio such as 4x6, 5x7, or 8x10. Although you can sift through aliases to pick out candidates for printing, be careful not to save the cropped version and overwrite the original. What I typically do is to make a selection using the Marquee tool with a fixed aspect ratio, and then do Select->Save Selection and give it a name like "4x6 Crop". I might even save more than one selection if I plan to make both a snapshot and a framed 8x10 of the same picture. I save the uncropped version after doing "Save Selection", so that I have the full-sized original, but at any time I can load it, load the selection, crop and save the cropped version under a different name for printing.

Tennis: Don't Let That New Racquet Hurt Your Arm

Got a new racquet because I didn't feel like I was getting quite enough power behind my shots. The Babolat Z/OS felt the best in practice. Once I started using it "in anger", I realized that I needed to do some things to protect my arm from the extra shock that comes along with the extra power. (Not to mention, I overheard someone on the next court say they had to stop using Babolat because it hurt their arm.)

The first thing to remember is, since the ball is coming off the racquet with greater force, all things being equal, you can slow down your swing a bit and hit the same type of shot as before without any extra strain on your arm. This is especially important to keep in mind with any kind of awkward shot, like a wrist-flick to save a ball that's almost out of reach, or a desperation drive down the line while running wide. Don't hit these as hard as you can; chances are you're off-balance or not using ideal form anyway.

For normal rallying shots, what you need to keep in mind and practice is a return to good old "classic" form. With today's lightweight racquets, you might have adopted bad or sloppy habits like taking the ball late, hitting with all arm, or using excessive wrist. The heavier Babolat will make you pay for bad form -- the ball will jump off the racquet and zip through the air with a lot of spin, but all that extra force comes back to your arm. So remember what your earliest coaches told you:

• Step into the ball, so much of the force comes from the forward momentum of your body.
• Swing early and smoothly, don't wait until the last moment and make a rushed swing.
• Get the ball out in front, don't let it crowd you or get behind you.
• Get racquet speed by turning your hips and shoulders. I find it especially useful on the forehand to bring the left arm around as well as the right, and start the forehand by turning the shoulders so it feels like the left arm pulls the right along with it.
• Keep wrist motion to a minimum; get the racquet in position and on course early so you don't need any last-second adjustments with the wrist.

"Stuffed" Sweet Potatoes

Since John and I are both vegetarians, I keep running across variations on Stuffed Acorn Squash recipes as suggestions for Thanksgiving and holiday dinners. In fact, this was my choice of entree at our Thanksgiving dinner at Millennium. I decided to create my own version for our dinner the day after Thanksgiving. Since John prefers not to have to separate out skins or shells from his food, I baked one each regular and one Japanese white organic sweet potato, peeled and mashed them (one on each side to maintain the two separate colors) as a low bowl. I drizzled freshly-made pesto on these, and then filled the center with bhutan red rice, and added organic broccoli, onions, and chopped almonds and more drizzles of pesto. This was a rousing success and was heartily enjoyed by all!

I would like to dedicate my first food blog post to two of my favorite food bloggers, gluten-free girl and vegan lunch box, who write passionately about eating on diets limited, but not restricted, by health or ethical reasons. You are truly inspiring! I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday.

iPod, oh iPod, Where Art Thou?

When John bought his first iPod, it came with a bright blue case, and so was fairly easy to find. By the time he bought his 3rd iPod, the Nano version (which we affectionately call "Nanoo"), he also had a Palm, a cell phone, and a digital camera, all stored in small black cases. We took Nanoo on a trip in May and hadn't seen him since we got home until mid-November, when John did a massive desk clean-up and found the little black case resting quietly under some larger items! So my (self-imposed) project for the Thanksgiving week-end was to make the case more visible. I showed John the choices of colored ribbons I had available, and he rejected pink (you think?) for this pumpkin version. I gave the black case a kind of belt. I joked with him if I was Martha Stewart I would have needlepoint hearts or flowers on it! We haven't lost Nanoo since!

Photoshop Tip: Semi-Opaque Adjustment Layers

When exactly would you use an adjustment layer that's not at 100% opacity? Seems like a silly thing to do. If the effect didn't turn out exactly right, wouldn't you just re-do the layer from scratch or tweak its slider settings?

That's the way I worked for a long time, and still do in most cases. But there are certain times when it makes sense to create an adjustment layer that goes too far, then dial it back a little by lowering the opacity using the slider in the Layers window. That's a different technique than, say, applying a gradient to a layer mask to darken the sky but not the foreground.

When a photo has a colour cast, the natural adjustment is to do a Levels layer and set the Gray Balance. However, sometimes the photo doesn't really have any gray -- the rocks, street, or whatever is made out of the wrong-coloured material, is under reddish sunset light, and so on. In this case, pick the closest-to-gray colour to apply the Gray Balance, which will swing the whole photo too far towards blue, yellow, or sometimes magenta. Instead of endless re-doing the Gray Balance looking for an elusive speck of pure gray in the photo, lower the opacity of the Levels layer until you find the accurate-looking percentage.

When a subject is a little too dark, but the background is pretty much the right brightness, I like to apply a "spotlight" effect by doing a Levels layer and using a circular gradient for the layer mask, centered on the person's face, their whole body, or whatever subject is too much in shadow. But sometimes, the Levels adjustment that makes the subject look realistic is too bright to blend well with the rest of the picture. In this case, lower the opacity of the Levels layer until the falloff in brightness is imperceptible. You'll still have the "ideal" Levels adjustment setting that you can apply if later you decide to sacrifice the background by brightening the whole picture.

Mac Tip: Auto-Connect to Shared Drives

I don't use shared drives on OS X as much as I would like. It sounds great in theory: access a folder or entire hard drive on one computer, when it actually lives on another. Using drag-and-drop is simpler than ftp for copying files over to the laptop, or sharing song files between two computers, or editing a file from a different computer without making a separate copy.

In practice, this technique has always had a few glitches. OS X tends to be clumsy when you're connected to another computer and then that other computer goes to sleep, or you start a VPN which cuts off all other network connections. You might see a complete freeze for several minutes before OS X realizes the other computer isn't responding. You'll see that freeze at random times, for example when OS X puts up a File Save dialog and decides to check all connected drives. Once it decides the shared drive is kaput, you have to reconnect, which involves a sequence of dialogs even if you've stored the password in your keychain.

Lately, OS X has been improving in this area. There hasn't been as much freezing, the timeout period is shorter, and when the error dialog comes up, you can unsleep the other machine and the operation goes ahead without you having to reconnect.

One time-saving tip that I just discovered recently: If you make a shortcut to a folder on a shared drive, you can drop a file on the shortcut, and the shared drive is automatically mounted without any password prompts or other dialogs. The file is copied, and the shared drive stays mounted. I use this trick to do timed audio recordings on one computer, then shoot them over to the Music folder on another computer, even though most of the time the shared drive isn't connected. To make the shortcut, drag the original item while pressing Command and Option, so the mouse pointer changes to a little curved arrow.

The next trick will be to figure out some way to auto-mount the drive in the absence of a file I really want to copy. Perhaps have some dummy file that always gets copied to the same place. Also, this technique doesn't work when copying a file from the command line. The copied file just overwrites the shortcut.

Photoshop Tip: John's Shortcuts for Cropping

With a 24-inch screen and a DSLR that takes super-sized pictures, cropping is more of a concern than it used to be. Here's some Photoshop advice to make the process simpler.

• Use the Marquee tool to make a rectangular selection, then the Image->Crop menu choice, rather than the Crop tool. Using a selection gives more flexibility than the Crop tool, for example the ability to make a selection with a fixed size or to save selections as alpha channels.
• If you plan to make a photo print of the picture, make a selection with a fixed aspect ratio of 6x4, 7x5, 10x8, or whatever dimensions you plan to use for the prints. Reverse the numbers for pictures printed in portrait style, i.e. taller than wide.
• If you need to have different-sized crops of the same picture -- for example, to print both a 4x6 and make an 8x10 enlargement -- make the selection and choose the Select->Save Selection menu item. Save the selection as an alpha channel. You can make several selections this way with different sizes, save them as part of your .psd file, then later do Select->Load Selection and Image->Crop. Just remember to always save the file under a different name after you've cropped it.
• If you will be projecting the photo or displaying it on a laptop, crop using an aspect ratio that matches the projector or laptop. For example, my local photo club uses a projector with 1024x768 resolution, so I crop competition photos to an aspect ratio of 4x3. That way, I can always resize the cropped image to 1024x768 and not lose anything.
• For pictures where the subject doesn't take up a lot of the frame, such as a wildlife shot taken from a distance, consider doing an initial crop to match the dimensions of your monitor. You'll need to use the rectangular Marguee technique with options set to a fixed size. That way, you can do the rest of the work looking at the picture at 100%, and only later decide whether to crop even more. This technique works best if your screen resolution is greater than on the projector, laptop, etc. where the picture will end up. For example, I do my photo editing on a 1900x1200 screen but typically display slideshows on a 1280x960 laptop. If I am reviewing and working on dozens of surfing pictures where the surfer is surrounded by lots of ocean, I can work faster and save disk space by cropping out lots of blue. Using an absolute size of 1900x1200 means I don't have to worry about cropping out too much, there's always some excess to trim later.
  
• Once you've made a selection, you can preview how the cropped version will look by pressing Q to go into Quick Mask mode. The part of the picture outside the selection turns red, so you can visualize how the photo will look without the extra parts, the same as when you select with the Crop tool and it darkens the unselected portion. Quick Mask mode has many other uses, but for cropping purposes, just press Q again to go back to normal.
• Once you've made a selection, you can resize or move it with the Select->Transform Selection menu choice. Press Enter once you are satisfied. By default, the transformation ignores any size or aspect ratio options; hold down Shift while resizing to keep the selection consistent with those options.
• I find it inconvenient not to have keyboard shortcuts for Image->Crop and Select->Transform Selection. In Photoshop CS, you can assign your own keyboard shortcuts with Edit->Keyboard Shortcuts. Photoshop already has shortcuts using most combinations of letters and modifiers, but whatever operations used Shift-Command-C and Command-T, I never used 'em and so reassigned them to Image->Crop and Select->Transform Selection.

New Kid in Town - Canon S3 IS Camera

I recently recommended the Canon S3 IS to some friends as a good choice for a modest-sized camera with good zoom, good picture, and good movie capability. With my reputation behind it, what choice but to buy one too?

I'm already finding it very educational, with a live histogram showing how well the picture is being metered. The dedicated movie recording button is also a boon. Look for a full review soon on Epinions.

Memories, of a PC2-5300 DDR2 667 DIMM...

You know it's time to upgrade memory in the new Intel iMacs when it starts to make noise. Every switch between one big program and another involves grinding and endless waiting. Even switching to Finder or Terminal can be interminable. You start regretting keeping all your songs in one iTunes library, or keeping Firefox open with a week's worth of backlogged tabs.

Unfortunately, the stock memory comes as 2 512MB modules. Meaning any upgrade you do means selling or otherwise disposing of one or two old memory chips. You can upgrade from 1GB to 1.5GB by swapping in one 1GB module, or to 2GB by swapping in two 1GB modules. Upgrading to 3GB is way too expensive still, with 2GB modules running from about $600 all the way up to $900+.

The little latch door on the bottom of the iMac screen is easy to get off with a small eyeglass-size screwdriver. The screws are attached to the door so they can't get lost. The old modules come loose when you push on a couple of plastic levers. If you don't seat the new modules firmly enough, when you power up you won't hear the chime and the light flashes steadily. Since you might have to fiddle around with the chips a couple of times, leave the latch off until you've successfully powered up again.

With the extra memory in, you should see an immediate speedup in application switching or user switching. An application like Photoshop can be running a batch job while you switch over to iTunes or Firefox with everything running at full speed and no grinding (technically, paging).

Taj Mahal cools his heels in Berkeley again, blending thirst for world's music and its link to the land

Looks like I'll have to be on the lookout for Taj Mahal sightings when I go to Shattuck Ave. for lunch!

Taj Mahal cools his heels in Berkeley again, blending thirst for world's music and its link to the land

I Ain't Gonna Get No More Socca!

Socca Oven, which I blogged about previous, has closed:

eastbayexpress.com The East Bay Express Blog � Gregoire Sticks a Fork in Socca

(At least in this location.) Too bad, they were just about to go on my list of Berkeley-area pizza places!

Wiki Wiki Woo

The other day, I set up MediaWiki as a kind of household chronicle. You might ask, why yet another system when you already have half a dozen e-mail accounts, Palm desktop for to-dos, at least 3 calendar systems and 3 address books, not to mention spreadsheets for general-purpose lists, this blog or my personal site or my iWeb experiments for prose, and PBase for photos. (Note to self: must set up Flickr and SmugMug accounts soon.)

Good question.

It's an experiment. We'll see. I like how categories spring into being when referenced. So do stub articles -- create a link to a non-existent article, and the link goes red to show it's for future expansion. Follow the link and you're editing the article.

The ease of cross-linking appeals to me. Brings back memories of
Lotus Organizer. Back before the abomination of Notes, Lotus actually had a product that was enjoyable to use. ("To get away from Lotus Notes" is one of my stock answers to the question of why I left IBM.) You could link disparate things together in many-to-many relationships.

I'm also interested in the ease of getting pictures into the system, auto-thumbnailing, and how well the text flows around a layout with a lot of pictures. You know, all those travel stories with dozens of links off to photos, rather than photo galleries where all the text takes the form of captions.

The real test will be, how easy is it to get data out? Printable format for informal to-do lists. XML export format for bringing stuff up to my personal site. Copying the MySQL database to sync with another MediaWiki instance. These aspects are yet to be explored.

Tea for More than Two

In the ongoing search for good vegetarian dim sum in the Bay Area, tried out Tin's Tea House in Walnut Creek. Several reviews focused mostly on the traditional (i.e. meat-heavy) dishes: East Bay Express, San Francisco Chronicle. (Is there an editorial rule at the Chronicle that they are forbidden to mention a single vegetarian dish, unless it's a lame salad?)

But by wading through dozens of mini-reviews on Yelp etc., I pieced together that they really do have some vegetarian dishes. And it's true. I especially liked the sesame balls with lotus seed paste. In addition to half a dozen vegetarian choices on the dim sum menu, there is a vegetarian section on the regular menu and we ordered a couple of larger dishes there. (Mongolian faux beef for me, veggie chow fun for Lotus.) The only knock on the veggie offerings is that both the dumplings and the potstickers were jammed full of mushrooms and nothing else. A bit more variety there would be welcome.

All in all, a nice find now that Long Life Vegi House in Berkeley has stopped doing weekend dim sum.

Can I See Clearly Now?

Previously, I did some monitor calibration by eye using various test charts. I finally tried out some real calibration equipment (the Gretag Macbeth "Eye One Display 2"). Now, I know someone in the business of high-end color management who scoffs at all the consumer-level products. So my expectations are not sky-high.

Running through the wizard on the Easy setting turns out to be a snap. Just hang the mouse-like contraption over the front of the monitor, let the software flash different colors on the screen to be measured by said contraption, and it's done. Watching the software do a binary search with white and black squares to locate the sensor against the screen is kind of entertaining.

I read one review (ehhh, can't find the link now) that concluded that the Eye One Display actually was more accurate on the Easy setting than the Advanced one, so I left it at that. (Ran the process on new 24" iMac, old 15" iMac, and old 15" Aluminum Powerbook.) I can say that, subjectively, I do see some difference, with reds and blues looking a little deeper. The real test will be working with skin tones, gently graded skies, and high-contrast scenes.

My skepticism about color profiling comes from the fact that most color problems I experience are rooted in the camera (3x Canons). The S30 takes pictures that are a little too saturated. The G3 tends towards too much yellow in the color balance in any kind of tricky lighting. And The 20D oversaturates the reds (by about +15 in Photoshop terms) in any picture with big patches of red.

After a couple of days of use: I am actually seeing over-saturated reds now on the monitors, both flesh tones in news photos and solid red patches in GUI apps. The next test will come on Tuesday, when I'll have a couple of post-calibration images projected in the local camera club competition.

Gapless Playback in iTunes 7

Having used iTunes 7 for several weeks now, I'd have to say the worst thing about it (for me) is the whole "gapless playback" idea. On the surface, it seems fine. iTunes analyzes all the songs and figures out which ones don't need any silence between then when they're played consecutively. The gaps have always bugged me on, for example, Pink Floyd's "The Wall" where one song trails off into a bunch of sound effects and dialog, which then segues straight into the next song. But consider:

• iTunes 7 tries to analyze every song in the library the first time you run it. (That process is very slow, you might have to let it run all night and all the next day.)
• If you interrupt the analysis, iTunes tries to run it again for your whole library the next time you import any music.
• If you use the technique of removing the iTunes library data file, and re-importing a modified XML data file, iTunes does the analysis yet again! The "gapless / not gapless" setting isn't preserved in the XML file. I've used this technique several times recently while moving songs between hard drives, and the constant "analyzing songs for gapless playback" is driving me up the wall.
• How often do you actually listen to an entire concept album with shuffle turned off? I'm much more likely to hear a song from "The Wall" as part of some playlist. For me, it would be more useful to have a way to join two songs into a single unit retroactively. You can join songs like this, but only when you rip them; neglect to plan ahead, and you have to go back to square one with that CD.

A Canticle from Leibowitz

The National Kidney Foundation hosted its annual Authors' Luncheon, with featured speaker Annie Leibowitz. (Actually, I was only vaguely aware that there were five other speakers, because all the buzz among the local camera club members was about Annie and her new book.)

I did learn a number of things -- some contradictory -- from the other authors. From flipping through the Annie Leibowitz book, I got some ideas about portraiture (always more to learn there) and black and white. Now digital cameras are still weak when it comes to dynamic range, making for less overall contrast in black-and-white shots. But my impression, which goes against the conventional wisdom, is that when taking a single exposure, it's better to underexpose a little rather than try to get the histogram concentrated in the brighter part of the range. The photos in he book seemed to bear this out (despite being shot on regular film rather than digital) -- the brightest parts were well short of being blown out, and some of the darker parts seemed solid black.

Stop Draggin' My Heartbreaker Around

Took in the last Tom Petty concert at the Greek Theater in Berkeley on Friday. I think this is the fourth time I've seen him in the Bay Area. (Once in full concert at the Shoreline, a couple of times at Neil Young's Bridge School Benefit concerts.)

Stevie Nicks was a special guest who sang on a couple of songs, and sang backup on some others. Stevie can still hit the high notes.

This tour (for the album "Highway Companion") has been announced as the last from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Tickets were hard to come by. The first two shows at the Greek sold out pretty much before the box office opened -- we were first in line but couldn't get two seats together in reserved seating. Luckily, this third concert was added, several weeks later.

Interesting show. Good lighting. We had a great view of the sound guys and cameramen doing their thing. Each cameraman focused on one band member the whole concert, even when the lights were off them. I was jealous of one sound guy working 6 monitors at once.

Trivia time: The lead singer of The Dandy Warhols said the Greek Theater was designed by Bernard Maybeck, but it was actually designed by Julia Morgan. (Maybeck did some of the other buildings. Seems like every prominent American architect of the early 20th century had a hand in some of the UC Berkeley campus buildings.)

Separated at birth:

Guitarist, keyboardist, and singer Scott Thurston from The Heartbreakers. (He has less hair these days than in this picture.)



Canadian journalist and pundit Rex Murphy.

New Sensation

I've always had a love/hate relationship with my tennis racquets. The good ones made playing a joy, the bad ones prompted endless frustration. Sometimes I played with free racquets from a sponsor, even if the model wasn't the best choice. Whenever I would switch to a new model, I'd always have a couple of excellent matches to start. Several times I had to borrow totally unfamiliar racquets due to broken strings or cracked frames with no spares on hand -- resulting either in total disaster (that would be the Canada Games), or inspiring heroics.

The last few years, during my latest comeback phase, I've played with a very light racquet. It has great control for dropping the ball neatly into corners, the better to run opponents into the ground. But I was a little annoyed at not having enough oomph on shots to sock clean winners against speedy opponents, or having to finesse passing shots. Volleys seemed to require too much swing.

It's interesting to look back at previous years, when I would try to adjust my game based on the characteristics of a racquet, or tweak my strokes based on the tension of the latest string job. I reached the point where I realized, if the ball is landing 6 inches out, I'm not going to change my swing, I'm going to get the strings cut out and re-done at a tension that works better with my natural game. In the same way, I'm not going to rework my serve or volleys, I'm going to experiment with racquets to find the one that works the best for my particular style.

Years ago, I bought racquets sight unseen or after a single trial where they seemed to work OK. This time, I did a more thorough compare-and-contrast. I took out 2 prospects and tried them alongside the current racquet. Then 2 totally different models. Then the best of each group for a side-by-side comparison. Each time, hitting buckets of balls to check how each one worked for different shots.

The one I settled on is the Babolat Z-OS. (Yes, a tennis racquet that could be confused with a mainframe operating system. :-) It does just the right amount of work on volleys and half-volleys. Spin serves curve down to hit the sidelines at sharp angles. Groundstrokes kick up high, topspin backhands stay in the court.

When I tried the new axe for the first time "in anger", I could feel it in the wrist the next day. If the racquet is hitting the ball with more power, the force isn't coming for free. But soon I could play on successive days without ill effects. I'm taking this season off in the local tennis league; things are looking good for next season.