Ruchi

Dining

Southern Indian food.

Ruchi, located in the SOMA district of San Francisco, is not much to look at, outside or in. Almost under a freeway overpass, it serves Southern Indian food. The plain interior has a few mediocre photographs taken in Andhra Pradesh and you order at the counter, with the food delivered to your table. Yet I must say the whole experience was thoroughly worthwhile. The people working in the restaurant are most charming, as gentle and well mannered as one could imagine. And the food I ordered, the Lamb Thali, was simply delicious, suffused with a thousand fragrances and gently spiced.

474 Third Street.

The Lamb Thali.

The crowd is 20% Suits, 80% software types, and the noise level is low.

The whole thing, with a Maharaja pilsner, ran me $17.

As usual, lunch inspired me and I lucked out with a snap of the only attractive Parking Warden in the United States, around the corner from the restaurant:

G3, kit lens.

My desk

Photography

Ordered chaos.

Inspired by Kate Donnelly’s site, referred to the other day, here’s a snap of my desk:

G3, Oly 9-18mm @ 9mm.

No punches have been pulled, no cosmetic arrangements added and, clearly, I need to do some dusting, as the cleaning lady is not allowed to touch anything here. The overall ethos at work here is consonant with my belief that ‘tidiness, like consistency, is the bane of small minds’.

This workspace reflects two of my interests – managing money and photography. Here’s what’s going on:

  • Three Dell 2209WA 1680 x 1050 21.5″ displays, color matched using an EyeOne colorimeter. I prefer the older coarser pixel pitch to the finer pixels in the latest ones, as it makes reading easier on my eyes. Supported on reams of paper because the world has yet to see a monitor that is as well designed as the one on the old iMacG4 ‘screen on a stick’ of ages past. Obligatory 3M PostIt notes come and go. My HP100 Hackintosh powering the Dells sits under the desk.
  • One artisan-made cup (the cup and the contents) of French Roast coffee.
  • The HP12C RPN calculator, used by Real Men whose ordered minds understand that input of variables must precede input of operators. 25+ years on that one. I occasionally badger HP for replacement rubber feet when mine fall off and, amazingly, they reply with free ones.
  • A classic Bic ball pen which is the only writing instrument I use.
  • The only phone in the house I use – the iPhone 4S.
  • A couple of inexpensive Logitech speakers whose sound blows away anything a stock Mac or PC can deliver.
  • An ancient DLO iPhone1 belt case, much repaired, and still fitting the latest model fine.
  • A Logitech USB Desktop Microphone, between the two displays on the right, used for emails and voice overs in the occasional video I make for this site. Outstanding voice quality for very little, putting the built-in microphone in my MacBook Air to shame.
  • My ‘wallet’, comprised of a small holder for a credit card, DL, etc., with some 25 years on it.
  • A couple of flash memory sticks under the center monitor, the ‘macho’ one being my son’s.
  • An iPod Nano in a LunaTik watch band which I never use but my son loves. I prefer a throwback to analog, mechanical days, one of the few concessions I make to ‘old times’.
  • An Edirol R09 digital sound recorder, in the $1 green canvas case at right, largely obsoleted by the iPhone.
  • A Kensington wired ‘Slim Type Keyboard for Mac’. With mechanical scissor switches for the keys, this one puts Apple’s offerings to shame and comes complete with the obligatory key pad numerate people demand. The keyboard cover protects against costly spills from the second item above.
  • An ancient Logitech MX900 bluetooth mouse, recommended by a fellow photographer, which goes through 2 AA rechargeable batteries in four days and that’s the only bad thing about it. The mouse rests on a 3M Mousepad, quite outstanding. I have experimented with tablet pads and they do not work for me.
  • Scribblings, jottings and prospectuses.
  • A magnificent Sligh pedestal desk with keyboard drawer – a rare concession to luxury.
  • No Border Terrier visible. I asked Bert, the resident hound, to put in an appearance but the modeling fee demanded was too high. These are hard times. You can just make out his little bottom on the snuggle ball at the right!

A long day

Architecture, Photographs

Reaching out.

Click any picture for the slide show.

Of the three lenses I own for my Panasonic G3, the kit zoom (28-90mm FFE) gets most use. The wide Olympus (18-36mm FFE) zoom is a distant second and the third, the Panny long (90-400mm FFE) zoom mostly gathers dust.

I have a strong belief in not owning things I do not use, so the other day I took the long zoom to San Francisco with the sole aim of taking ‘long’ pictures, along with the resolution that if the day was a failure, the lens would be sold. For me anything over 35mm FFE is ‘long’ so when using a 90-400mm lens I really need to think differently. There’s no thought of switching between the long lens and the other two; the visualization process is so different that my tired brain cannot cope with yet another set of variables.

So I set about my task by thinking and seeing ‘long’, and a few good things cropped up on a late afternoon with light to die for. Focal lengths shown are Full Frame Equivalents (FFE).

Guess I’ll be keeping that Panasonic 45-200mm lens for a while longer. Funnily enough, on returning home I found that I had accidentally switched the OIS anti-shake button to ‘Off’ but for the most part lucked out. At 400mm FFE, handholding without OIS becomes something of a challenge. On a related note, the G3’s sensor, some two stops finer grained than the one in my earlier G1, allows the use of faster ISO settings – and shorter shutter speeds – without degrading quality, a significant advantage with longer lenses. 800 ISO is just fine, and 1600 ISO works well at a pinch, both allowing high quality 18″ x 24″ prints to be made.