Commencement Day

Photographs

The address not given.

Quite the worst part of my son’s middle school Commencement ceremony yesterday was the execrable address given by the Principal. Laced with the usual platitudes about equality and inclusiveness, it was an exercise in toeing the party line …. and saying nothing at all.


Winston graduates. Panny GX7, 45-200mm at full chat.

Here’s what should have been said:


“Graduates!  Congratulations!

Each of you is the beneficiary of the finest public schooling there is to be had. My son Winston is fortunate indeed to be amongst your number today.

But today, rather than building on your warm feelings of success and relief at having survived these past three years, I want to speak to you about but two things:  

Risk and Success.

Risk is about making a decision where the outcome is uncertain or unknown.  It’s about doing what you believe in and hang the consequences.  Only if you take Risk will you live a full life, one to be proud of.  Taking Risk is not about winning or beating the other guy.  It’s about having the courage to fail and fail you will often in your long lives.   You will all fail many times but accepting and taking Risk will make those lives full and successful.  And only by taking Risks can you Succeed.

A life devoid of Risk is existing, not living,  Do what you believe in, have a passion for that belief and you will come out a winner in the game of life.

Each one of you has some hidden set of skills superior to everyone else in this wonderful audience today.  Yet, if you take no Risk, if you dare not fail, those skills will remain buried and you will not enjoy a life well lived.

When Winston Churchill, having just won the War and lost the Election, returned to his High School to give the Commencement Address, the hallowed hall at Harrow School was packed to the rafters. Winston had barely scraped a passing grade from Harrow some 60 years earlier. “We have come to hear Winston speak” they all said to a man.

Churchill arose, walked portentously to the dais, and gave the shortest speech of his life.

“Never, never, never give up”.

Then he sat down ….

He had taken massive Risks in his political life.  He had made equally massive errors.  He had failed so many times that most of his contemporaries had written him off.  Then he took one more Risk.  Appointed Prime Minister in 1940 he Risked all in his faith in the British and American people.  With a British father and an American mother, no leader was better suited to the task of defeating Nazism, the greatest evil of the past century.  Had he not taken that Risk, Success would not have been his and we would all be speaking German today.  Winston succeeded.

Let me share with you some thoughts about Success.

Success is not about money.  

It is not about power.  

It is not about wealth or possessions.  

Success is doing the very best with the many talents you, as a member of the human race, have been endowed with.

The divine spark which will make you a Success resides in every one of you.  Light the fire.  Let it burn!

Go out into the world, take Risks, do your best and never, never, never give up.  And Success will be yours.”


Winnie bids adieu to his favorite teacher.

Stone Canyons of the Colorado Plateau

Book reviews

By a master of the landscape.

Jack Dykinga has been featured here a decade ago and his work in the American west continues to define the standard for landscape photography.


Click the image for Amazon.

Dykinga works with film in 4″ x 5″ field cameras using the finest Schneider lenses, and it shows. While film in small sizes is largely the province of cranks and those who place little value on their time – not to mention the quality of the results – the use of large format sheet film is thoroughly justified in this case. High pixel count digital sensors may be the thing for landscape snappers today, but it’s hard to beat the sheer plasticity of Dykinga’s results. Add an expert’s eye and you have a book to wonder at. There is absolutely nothing dated about the images on display here.

Long discontinued, it’s abundantly available from Amazon and resellers like Abe Books.

Memorial Day

Photographs

At the National Cemetery, SF.

The military always puts on a great show on Memorial Day at San Francisco’s National Cemetery, and today was no exception. This being the 50th anniversary of the Viet Nam war the crowds were heavy, complete with TV crews. Ugh!


A stiff breeze, with the GGB still in the mist.


Regimental flags.


Navy.


Grim database.


Family affair.


Vintage cars from the WW2 era.


Young recruit steers a classic Willys Jeep.


In memoriam.


Zooed, with the Mayor present.


Keeping Hishonner safe is not cheap. Alcatraz behind.


Flower vendor.

All snapped on two Panny GX7s, mounting that estimable pair the 14-45mm and 45-200mm Panny compact MFT zooms. These optics may be almost a decade old yet continue to provide a broad and versatile focal length range while weighing (and costing!) little.

Kindle Paperwhite – 2015 edition

Photography

Never say never.


The 2015 Kindle Paperwhite beside the iPad Air1, both on maximum brightness in room lighting.

Every few years, it seems, I succumb to the temptation to buy a Kindle EInk book reading tablet from Amazon. And a few days later I sell or return it in dismay.

My previous Paperwhite, a 2012 model, was the best (OK, least bad) yet, but I sold it when the unevenness of the built in illumination started driving me to distraction during bedtime reading. Kindles are easy to sell and very few crop up on eBay, testifying to owners’ loyalty.

Since that 2012 model Amazon has increased definition from 160ppi to 300ppi in the 2014 model (not a big deal on the smallish 6″ display) but inexplicably dropped battery capacity by 25% in the 2015 model (the battery capacity has been reduced from 2800mAh to 2100mAh). The disingenuous advertising of battery life, with ridiculous claims of months of life if you never actually use the thing continues, and Amazon really should be ashamed. Read a couple of hours daily (what serious reader reads less?) and you can reckon on one week’s life at best, assuming you do not turn the display brightness way down or constantly futz with switching off wi-fi and the optional 3G. 3G costs an additional $70 with no usage charges, using AT&T’s cellular network, so check for coverage before springing for this if you want it. I got 3G then splashed out an additional $20 to delete the default advertising and the whole thing came to $210, exactly the proceeds of sale of my glutinously slow iPad3, obsoleted by a no less dishonest Apple with its purported iOS ‘upgrades’. Best as I can tell the primary purpose of these ‘upgrades’ is to make older devices useless.


Pure BS. You can get like life on a tank of gas, so long as you don’t drive.

E Ink is the technology – another great invention from MIT, the best engineering school the world has ever seen (along with Caltech, to respect my friendships there!) – which makes possible the low power consumption of the display in the Kindle. Unlike LCD or LED displays, which remain useless in bright sun, the biggest disappointment is that the rumored hybrid technology of a few years ago has never seen the light of day, or of the sun, come to think of it. That technology promised to combine the best of LED/LCD and E Ink so that displays would remain readable in any weather from California sun to London gloom. So those of us who think the beach is a jolly place to be in the summer – or in the CA winter for that matter – two devices are required. One for iOS based use where you actually need, you know, to do things, and the other for vegging out with book consumption in bright light where the single purpose Kindle, errr …. shines, though its matte screen makes sure that it does not, unlike every iOS device ever made. Maybe if Apple had invested its $1bn in display research rather than sending that sum to China to bribe, oops!, invest, in taxi services for Android users, they would today have a distinguishing technology to keep the iPhone ferris wheel running for at least another couple of device generations before the whole thing collapses around their single-product ears?

Amazon continues to do an excellent job of pre-registering your Kindle for use even before it arrives. Your device list is automatically updated at Amazon.com and your login information and book library are there when you open the box. Just add your wifi password. Your Amazon password is already there on receipt. Nice, unless your mailman is a thief.

Mine performed a software update over the air when first turned on which took ten minutes, with much flashing of the screen which even the meanest of code monkeys could have prevented. It just says schlocky, like much of Amazon from their gauchely (un)formatted emails to their clunky site with its awful navigation and look. No class.


The day before receipt. My account at Amazon has already been updated.

So what’s the deal with the 2015 Kindle after the dismay with the 2012? Well, the OS remains hostile to the common ePub book format, but a few moments with Calibre will allow the user to transform ePub books to Kindle format (AZWx) for upload to the tablet.


Calibre supported formats.

A pain in the nether regions, but hardly a disqualifying reason to avoid the Kindle. Mercifully the Gutenberg Project, a vast library of free books (Shakespeare gets no royalties), increasingly shows Kindle format available for download, not the case when I dumped my previous Paperwhite.

Weight, or lack thereof, is a far from trivial consideration, with the 3G Paperwhite weighing just 7.6ozs, assuming you don’t waste time and money on a cover. That’s featherweight and never tires a hand whose fingers easily span the back (unless you are a short fingered vulgarian running for the Oval Office, but that means you do not read in any case, so no biggie) or hold one of the front bezels. The comparably sized iPad, the iPad Mini 4, comes in at 10.7ozs, the full size iPad at 15.7ozs. The first two are easily held in one hand, the last is not. And, yes, the Paperwhite will easily fit into the back pocket on your Levi 501 buttonfly jeans, the pants which conquered the West. Just don’t sit on your Kindle. Save that for your horse.

Like every Kindle before it, the 2015 Paperwhite is not waterproof, so it’s probably not a good idea to use it in the bath.

For faster recharging Amazon milks the margins by asking an additional $20 for its charger, but you can simply plug in the provided microUSB cable with its USB plug into any iPhone or iPad charger for like results, meaning faster charging – 2 hours, not 4. Failing that, plug that cable into any USB2 or USB3 socket for slower, no adapter recharging. The keyed microUSB cable has to be one of the worst connectors ever designed, especially as it’s never easy to know which way to insert it – unlike Apple’s superb current Lightning connector – and just feels fragile. Still, it works. I put a blob of white paint on mine to ease connection hassles.

The Paperwhite retains a touchscreen for page turning and it works well. The screen’s sides, when touched, turn pages and a touch on the top discloses the simple menu system. The power button is still a small nub at the base and is easy to use. Power up is a matter of a couple of seconds to the last page at which you left off. Or just leave the thing on, as it’s page turning/screen refreshes which use power with E Ink technology, not continuous display (assuming the lighting LEDs are turned down). Amazon claims that the lighting LEDs adjust to prevailing light levels, suggesting that the device includes an ambient light sensor. You can also adjust screen brightness manually. I have mine set at maximum for daytime reading, half of that at night in a dark room.

So that leaves the key question which is have they fixed the uneven illumination issue with the four LEDs buried at the base of the display, one so much on display in the 2012?

Yes. Illumination is excellent, with the merest hint of shadowing at the very base of the screen which is not in the least obtrusive. The long columns of local specular lighting emanating from the base of the display which distinguished the 2012 Paperwhite are gone and illumination in the dark is almost perfectly even all over. That reason alone, plus the instantaneous page turns, makes me unreservedly recommend the Kindle for the first time. Fourth time’s a charm in my case. Do you need to blow $70 on cellular connectivity? If you download many books outside wifi range, or like to sync to the last location from your iOS reading when out of wifi range, then cellular will probably pay for itself as there are no use charges. $20 to get rid of advertising (‘Special Offers’ in Amazon-speak)? Worth every penny. The home screen is the home screen with an abstract display, not a diaper ad.

The Kindle boasts 4GB of RAM but as any previously purchased book from Amazon is easily re-downloaded to the device in seconds, that will not be a limitation. Most Project Gutenberg titles in Kindle format run 1-2MB so even a great many of those, which have to be stored on the Kindle, will not challenge storage availability. We are talking thousands of titles here.

Borrowing books from the local public library is easy.

This is a simple, one purpose device and while there are niggles – the awful microUSB connector, the misleading claims about battery life, which are contractually correct but ethically deeply wrong – Amazon has stuck to its knitting and finally got the Kindle right. At some $120 for the base Paperwhite model it’s highly recommended. Does it make sense to own a Kindle if you have an iPad? Absolutely, if you like reading in bright light and favor the lightest possible device for your monochrome reading.