My favorite color.
Green
Date: July 28, 2009
Place: Nob Hill, San Francisco
Modus operandi: Light and lively with the Panasonic G1
Weather: Typical overcast San Francisco day.
Time: 11:20am.
Gear: Panasonic G1, kit lens at 45mm, f/5.6, 1/80th, ISO100
Medium: Digital
Me: Just timing it right. Lucky, really.
My age: 57
Green, green and green.
It was nothing but a conditioned response that had me raise the camera to eye level and snap this picture.
Get ready to fry.
Earlier this week Apple announced the new iMacs in 21.5″ and 27″ screen sizes. The usual Cupertino Hype tells us there’s lots to like – bigger screens, slimmer, faster, etc. So it has an unusable high gloss mirror for a screen. A minor inconvenience for jewelry buyers.
But a moment’s review of the internal design gives one pause – and I’m speaking from expertise gleaned from having lost one iMac (a 20″) and almost lost another (24″) to bad thermal engineering.
Here’s how the new iMacs look under the skin:
Even those of you reading this without an honors degree in Mechanical Engineering (yes, I have one of those) who did not graduate at the top of your class (I did that too, around the time I took yesterday’s snap) can see the obvious design error in the older iMacs has been carried over to the latest iteration. The hot running CPU (because it is from a laptop, not built for desktop use) and the fan below are circled in red. The direction of the blast of superheated air emanating from this assembly is indicated by the green arrow. That hot air toasts the motherboard which is a seriously cramped and compromised design lifted from a laptop to ensure everything fits with Mr. Jobs’s thinness obsession.
I don’t think I need say more, even to readers who don’t know Farenheit from Celsius.
But wait, you exclaim. You said something about a toaster?
Why, yes. The bread goes in the right hand side, denoted by the yellow arrow. It has to be super slim, of course.
One of the world’s great cemeteries.
Arlington, Pere Lachaise and Highgate – these are the world’s greatest cemeteries.
Taken more years ago than I care to admit in Highgate Cemetery.
Leica M3, TriX, 35mm Summaron.
To be found at any public display of memorabilia.
Go to any public show of old stuff and you will find them. A bunch of old guys in GM caps sporting beer bellies, beards and boring.
Ready to regale you with tales of how much better it was in the old days (it wasn’t) and how their old car runs so much more reliably than your new Honda (it doesn’t) and how politicians used to be trustworthy (they weren’t) these senescent bores really need to be put out to pasture. Whatever you do, show no admiration for the objects of their worship, for you will be lectured at great length as to why the 1929 model was so superior to its 1930 successor.
These Old Farts were spotted at, where else, a display of old cars.
Snapped through the rear window of a Ford Model T, undoubtedly one of the worst cars ever made.
You are paying for this.
One of the least remarked scams foisted by American cities on their taxpayers is the ‘Handicapped Parking’ scam. As scams go, its a slick one. How dare anyone be so churlish as to criticize the creation of umpteen designated parking spots for the handicapped at any place where parking is available?
Yet, go to one of those public spaces and, time and again, you will find full parking lots except for, you guessed it, the many unoccupied handicapped spots. The number of such special spots vastly exceeds their use.
The reason is not hard to divine. Someone is making good coin from painting these spaces and cities can further clean up by levying egregious fines on taxpayers who actually work for a living and make the unforgivable error of parking in one of these. There was an oft quoted statistic when I lived in NYC that it would be cheaper to provide a chauffeur driven car service to all the handicapped residents than to build all those special bus and train entrances and attachments for the few who actually use them. The argument for parking spaces is little different.
Still, this blatant fraud does make for a nice snap, now and then.
