Yearly Archives: 2016

Pottering about

Photographs

Doing nothing with a vengeance.

I feel that I have been working like a Welsh Collie all week, or a West Virginia coal miner if you prefer, yet the herd remains in disarray and the coal face has not budged one bit. Such is the process of moving one’s home, one which makes a root canal an event to be gaily anticipated by comparison.

But, on reflection, things have moved forward. Yesterday I spent a pleasant few minutes just pottering about in the garage. ‘Pottering’, an old English tradition, is based in the pretence of being busy but practically achieving nothing. I suspect it originated as a means of avoiding the spouse. I moved a tool from here to there, arranged a few things just so, accomplished exactly nothing and had a heck of a time doing it. I excoriated myself for the 1/8″ drop across the 20′ run of the pegboards on the long wall, but concluded I could live with it. Even Titian’s horizons were imperfectly straight, after all. And gazing on tools here and there, handled with warmth and love, I realized how many were old friends, not given to answering back but just dedicated to doing their job.

When it comes to tools, the toolbox is the mechanic’s worst enemy. A tool not on display is a tool lost. This is the right way:


This does not just happen ….

I am so used to the layout of these pegboards that it’s a simple matter when moving to take a few snaps then recreate the result. That’s not to say it’s a speedy process and, in fairness, rushing the disposition of old friends along the acres of boards with holes and pegs would be poor judgment indeed.

Next, for one sadly never blessed with stereoscopic vision thanks to a poorly corrected childhood squint (you really do not want me pouring red wine over a white tablecloth at dinner), is this millimeter-perfect high tech positioning tool, one with laser precision which would nevertheless warm Fred Perry’s heart:


Drive in, center the ball on the steering wheel, touch gently.

Have you priced body parts on a 911 recently?

Finally, after falling flat on my face on the step in the garage many times, one rendered invisible by the mottled brown epoxy garage floor, I went to trusty Amazon (because you cannot find this at Home Depot or Lowe’s – which is why they will die) and bought some broad gaffer’s tape, beloved of professional cinematographers, for it clings like a politician to his donors and leaves no residue, with this happy result:


No more Garage Language.

Now, as I make my way through the new manse on a Friday night, the cares of the world a distant memory, I realize that maybe things are really moving along jolly well after all. The Engineer’s Curse is one that sees his love of accuracy forever dominated by his desire for precision. Tonight accuracy was the winner, as it always should be.

Phoenix, Sunday

Photographs

Deserted.

It’s a balmy 99F in downtown Phoenix right now and while the city may rise from the ashes tomorrow right now it is empty.

Some snaps showing the old and the new from this former wild west town:


‘Re-purposed’.


High noon shadows.


Brutalist architecture.


More of the same.


Tour guide.


Post modernism.


Lone cactus.


Tequila.


Old time parking.


Hard Rock Café.


High rent district.


Old Town Hall. A mix of neo-classical and Spanish Colonial styles the gaol is on the top floor. It’s an office building today, mercifully preserved. Completed in 1929.


The beautiful facade. The top floor gaol bars are clearly visible – explained to me by one of Phoenix’s finest who was on patrol.


Filigree cast iron detail.

All snaps on the iPhone 6, messed about with in LR.

The last great iMac – September, 2016

Bio, Macintosh

Times past.

With my son recently registered at a Massachusetts boarding school, the full force of the sheer horribleness of living in the Bay Area invaded my psyche massively as I contemplated that great day.

I moved to California in 1987, Los Angeles. Loved it. Later stints found me in San Diego, loved it, and San Francisco, loved it a lot.

But, after two decades, no more. San Francisco and the Bay Area are a living hell. Maybe if you are here on an H1B visa and MacDonald’s is a new taste sensation for you, it’s heaven on earth. But for long time denizens, it’s anything but. Take the Mission District, which I love, as a microcosm of what has happened. Earnest Googlites are destroying the Hispanic culture, replacing it with seven figure condominiums and chic restaurants. We really need more of those. Housing costs effectively gentrify all poor areas – Millbrae, South San Francisco, SOMA, Oakland, and yes, even as far north as Sacramento, as our great capitalist businesses force out all those who cannot code social media apps. The result is that the people who keep a city running, the waiters and cooks, the house cleaners and secretaries, cannot afford to live where they work. That is not right.

So within a week, emulating my son, I will also take a one way flight out of here, to the more relaxed vistas of Scottsdale, Arizona in the desert that I have learned to love on my many travels there these past two decades.

That move brings with it the inevitable rigors of packing precious possessions, though in my case they are precious by association, not by value. And one which ranks right up there is the greatest desktop computer Apple ever made, the iMac G4. Here it is after the ever amusing task of trying to figure out exactly how it fits in all those complex polystyrene pieces, packaging which is a design masterpiece in its own right:

Design genius.

The original, butt ugly iMac may have saved an Apple headed for Chapter XI, when Steve returned. But it was a prosaic CRT design housed in a funky translucent plastic shell which was mostly silly for all its ‘Think(ing) Different’. The G4 iMac was something else. First there was the use of an LCD display, 15″ or 17″. No one used LCDs. SSDs did not exist – at least not at affordable prices – so Apple housed the HDD in a cheeky gargantuan half-cricket ball (OK, baseball) which formed the housing for the electronics and fans. And they boasted about it on that splendid box. See above.

But the genius of the design, an ergonomic masterpiece, was the elegantly cantilevered ‘screen on a stick’. Move it up, move it down, move it toward you, move it away, move it around. It did what it was told. Burning DVDs? Easy. At a touch of the button Pandora’s Box opened, and the DVD tray magically emerged from the cricket ball. It was fun, it was new and it was magic!

And that magical G4 iMac defines exactly what is wrong with Apple today. It’s the same thing that is wrong with the Bay Area. Life is not a mobile device looking for a new app. Life is not an overpriced condo which displaces good people. Life is a contemplative experience attended by an extended attention span which rewards those who indulge in that rarest of modern pastimes: thinking.

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Click here for an index of all the Biographical pieces.

iPhone7

iPhone

Hurry up and wait.

The iPhone7 manages to be an exercise in three things at once: arrogance, greed and desperation.

Arrogance, as Apple has removed the traditional 3.5mm headphone socket replacing it with wireless earbuds whose poor 5 hour life and need to carry a charger manage to simultaneously break something which did not need fixing and make the result worse. “Our way or the highway”. Did the iPhone get slimmer, the rational (?) reason to pull that socket? Nope. It’s the same as the iPhone6+, but the battery life has increased. Given that the battery was already good for a day’s use (and more with the bigger model) this a solution looking for a problem. The iPhone ergonomics, meanwhile, make a kitchen knife look sophisticated, with poor placement of buttons and easy to accidentally shift modes in the camera. Yup, you have been there.

Greed, as those earbuds will run you a shocking $159 to remove that oh! so onerous earphone cable, while deleting its handy control button. This for a device which likely costs $10 to make.

Desperation, for Apple is clearly out of ideas – those went to the grave with Steve – and is trying to milk its margins with silly earpieces. Look out below.

Apple’s onanistic boasting about how they redesigned everything, with no user benefit, smacks of a loss of awareness of customer needs much as their bizarre new headquarters building smacks of a zenith in the company’s fortunes. Building castles all too frequently means you have peaked. Ask Henry VIII and the Tudors.

Meanwhile Siri voice recognition remains worthless (come on, do you know anyone who uses it?), there is still no ‘delete to the left’ (needing but one line of code) and spelling correction has zero contextual logic. iOS is an abomination, seemingly riddled with security holes. 

The other day I was in a Toyota Prius whose driver placed her Blackberry on a small shelf at the base of the console. Now I’ll admit the Prius is not everyone’s cup of tea. There are so many videos, tones and flashing lights going on that I swear the thing would drive me potty were I to stay in one over 15 minutes. But that little shelf contains an inductive charger, common to Blackberries and many Google devices which removes a cable which really needs removing – the charger cable. Not the one to your ears.

So we wait for iPhone8. Meanwhile I hope I can get the thieves at Verizon to reduce my bill as my iPhone 6 is now paid for.