Startup central may be SOMA, but the finantial District is seeing a huge boom of its own. There’s a group of folks from work that almost always go for salads at an undisclosed location in that area (nobody wants to advertise). I’m not a salad eater by any stretch, but I do like the walk, and the light of all the giant glass building is nice. There’s something to these photos, a complexity, that I really like. They have a lot going on. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about subject. Specifically, what my subject is. What do I want to be looking at. It seems a lot of the most interesting things are already covered, in depth, by geniuses, sometimes many times over, in the face of change. I’m not sure where I was going with this paragraph. You can stop reading now. (ed. note: obviously the last picture wasn’t taken at lunch; it just fit with the building thing I had going, and happened to be next, chronologically)
Posted on 2014-02-06T06:25:40Z GMT
Last December at work had a visit from a really great teacher, “Sandi Metz”:http://www.sandimetz.com/. We spent the week mostly workshopping about object oriented design. I gotta say I learned a ton. It’s like there’s a whole different world of how to program that I was only dimly aware of. Patterns and antipatterns, refactoring to expose complexity (sorry Jacob, for thinking you were crazy when you showed me this before), and even one “miracle of programming”:https://github.com/skmetz/socialchorus-dec-2013/tree/miracle. Do you ever look at a problem, and you have solutions for it, but none of them are very good, and you suspect that there’s something even better just over the horizon? It’s the same as that feeling when you can’t quite remember the word you’re thinking of. Now, imagine someone came along and showed you how to go over that horizon, and, really, it was just a little hill in your way in the first place. That’s what Sandy did for us, in a nutshell. Some of the good advice, which I will attempt to summarize: 1) Do the simplest thing possible. 2) Take small steps. 3) Trust your feelings in areas you have experience; that’s your preverbal brain telling you something’s up. I really can’t say enough nice things about the whole workshop, so here are a couple photos I took on a coffee run.
Posted on 2014-02-05T15:15:28Z GMT
I just realized I know two Ronans. One is in Oklahoma, and is distinguished from the one I know in California by being a) a toddler, and b) a girl. The one here is a 30 year old Irishman. Try not to get mixed up. We started at a tiny pizza place called Slicers. It was packed, just from our party. Place was tiny, and at the point we numbered about 15. Really, really good pizza though, and beers. Before too long, we moved down the road to this Tiki bar, where everything got both blurry and darker, if you catch my drift. No, It was literally dark in there, lit only by candles, and feeble, tiny bulbs on the wall. Last night, I nearly had a panic attack when my RAID stopped working. It was appearently one of those little blips that shuts the whole thing down entirely. A half an hour of troubleshooting and a reboot later and it was fine. For that half hour, I was thinking, fuck this, I’m going back to film. Film doesn’t have these problems. But with film, I simply couldn’t have shot in this light, at all. Reciprocity breakdown would have dragged these shots dow a couple stops below whatever ISO film I’d be using, and there’d be nothing in the shadows. 1/4 of a second at f/1.2, at least. So, I realized this, and then started looking at cameras again.
Posted on 2014-02-04T14:35:23Z GMT
That’s all I was doing. I had my camera out, and I was walking. There was a dude in the street, and it looke like he had been hit by a car, but he was talking. Ambulance was on its way. So I took two photos, and finished walking home.
Posted on 2014-01-30T05:24:55Z GMT
Just so you know, I’m writing this wearing a clown nose, and I purposely didn’t title this with the SEO grabbing headline “Topo Designs Mountain Bag review”, but that’s what it is. If that sounds terribly boring, please feel free to skip to the end, where there’s a nice picture of Sophie, and also some leaves still on a tree in early December. Those of you that know me know that I am hard on my personal effects. I need durability in everything, and that goes double for what I put my things in. It’s led to something of an obsession with the right bag. What goes in it is usually pretty mundane, but I care about the bag I carry. So, I’ve been known to put down some signifigant coin down on them, or to mark occasions with new bags. For xmas, Sophie’s mom gave me a nice gift card, which I decided would be well spent on a bag I’d been lusting after for a while, the Topo Designs Mountain Bag. First the good: It certainly looks good, all strappy and with oversized, durable zippers. 1000d cordura and lined with some plasticy stuff that seems pretty warterproof, and all the inner seams are at least covered with bias tape of some sort. When I got it, I was pretty happy, as the capacity is just what I was after (officially 1200 cu. in, although probably only 1000 in the main compartment), it’s ambidexterous, and has just the right ammout of organization for me. It comes in a good variety of colors, and is fairly good looking, at least to my eye. Unfortuantely, that’s all the good. It’s like no one field tested the bag at all. The top flap pocket is easy to lose stuff out of: if you put anything small and heavy in there, like a multi tool or a set of allens for your bike, and then flip the flap up, the stuff gets stuck in the little space above the zipper, and will fall out the next time you open it. Luckily, I was still in my living room when this happened to me. Then there’s the shoulder strap. The little tabs at the end for tightening it aren’t long enough, especially if you have gloves on. Then there’s the way the strap hardware is attached, sewn to the bag with a single seam at each end, just a line of heavy stitching. This is not how to secure a strap and have it hold. There are two good ways to do it that I’ve seen: the approach favored by seatbelt makers and the makers of Rucksack, ReLoad, and a host of other bags: to “make a box”:http://www.carryology.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/RELoad-Bags-2.jpg on top of the strap where it meets the pack, and then sew an X over the box, or the approach that Domke takes: “sew strap around the entire bag”:http://www.wexphotographic.com/webcontent/product_images/large/66/1013942.jpg, so that the pack cloth isn’t holding all the weight. Also, the bottom of the bag is a piece all by itself, just a rectangle on the bottom. It’s two extra seams at the sides taking weight, and two more places for water to leak in, if you should happen to set the bag down somewhere damp. The right way to do this is of course to have one piece that makes a big u: starting from one side at the top, going continuously around to the other. Like “this one my friend Sarah makes”:http://martineusa.com/products/oakland-messenger. All that to say that I’m still carrying the bag. Day to day it’s not bad at all. I’m doing my best not to overload it, and to keep it out of the wet. I just don’t expect it to last. (ed. note: Sophia says after heraing me bitch about this stuff for a couple minutes last night: ‘Why don’t you just design your own bags?’, and you know, I just might.)
Posted on 2014-01-29T06:24:45Z GMT
