IanETC

Bottle cages

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:16:05 -0500

For the new bike, this

Photo by Rivendell Bicycles

or this?

Photo by Arundel Bike

The correct answer is not “carbon.”

Columbus Max Bikes, a group on Flickr.Lots of Max goodness. Best...

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 22:55:56 -0500

Columbus Max Bikes, a group on Flickr.

Lots of Max goodness. Best of all, I’ll be adding my own to this group very soon.

Who Uses Twitter and How

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:00:58 -0500

andressilvaa:

Toy? Or future autonomous bringer of nightmares?

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:43:57 -0500

Toy? Or future autonomous bringer of nightmares?

JDRF Ride to Cure: Season Five

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:23:48 -0500

Registration for the 2012 JDRF Rides to Cure started at noon today, and within minutes I had signed on for the Tour de Tucson event. This’ll be season number five for me, and I’ll keep going back until we’re there to celebrate a cure for diabetes.

Let the training begin.

Lego man, or space man? Either way, one small step for low-fi...

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:54:04 -0500

Lego man, or space man? Either way, one small step for low-fi space travel.

9/11 Memorial, South Pool

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:38:04 -0500

9/11 Memorial, South Pool

aaknopf: [via: Book Riot]

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:53:09 -0500

aaknopf:

[via: Book Riot]

"You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t. You take the action, and the insight follows:..."

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:36:50 -0500

“You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don’t think your way into becoming yourself.”

- Anne Lamott (via paulisakson)

Yes, I’ve been in this room before. laughingsquid: Every...

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:35:38 -0500

Yes, I’ve been in this room before.

laughingsquid:

Every Presentation Ever, A Hilarious Video Template For Presentations

This inspired this. Maratac’s Elite band looks great on a...

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:59:48 -0500

This inspired this. Maratac’s Elite band looks great on a Seiko Orange Monster – better than I expected, given the heft of the watch.

"The devaluation of connections and commentary. A new medium: neither rare nor well-done Most..."

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 22:45:58 -0500

“The devaluation of connections and commentary.

A new medium: neither rare nor well-done

Most commentary on social media ignores an obvious truth—that the value of things is largely determined by their rarity. The more people tweet, the less attention people will pay to any individual tweet. The more people “friend” even passing acquaintances, the less meaning such connections have. As communication grows ever easier, the important thing is detecting whispers of useful information in a howling hurricane of noise. For speakers, the new world will be expensive. Companies will have to invest in ever more channels to capture the same number of ears. For listeners, it will be baffling. Everyone will need better filters—editors, analysts, middle managers and so on—to help them extract meaning from the blizzard of buzz.

”

- Economist, found via Matthew. (via wearethedigitalkids)

The anticipation’s killing me. But it’s now at the...

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 15:03:57 -0500

The anticipation’s killing me. But it’s now at the painter’s.

Choosing a digital camera

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 22:03:56 -0500

Every so often a friend will ask for advice about buying a camera. Here’s that advice, in a nutshell:

The best camera is the one you always have with you.

You have a better chance of capturing photos if 1) you always have a camera with you, and 2) that camera is easily accessible. So forget about anything that doesn’t fit comfortably in your pocket. If you have an iPhone 4/4s you’re set. For snapshots there’s little reason to look at anything else.

But what if I want…more?

An iPhone is limited, for sure. So if you want better quality images, or a very good basic travel camera, start with a Canon Powershot S100, which features a sharp, fast lens, and controls that allow you to set exposure and focus to match your creative intent. You can capture RAW files instead of JPEGs, which will give you the most control over the output of your images. And best of all, the S100 still fits in a pocket.

Yes, but my needs are more specialized.

If you photograph wildlife or kid’s sports, or want control over your photography that exceeds the capabilities of the S100, it’s time to look at a DSLR, or Digital Single Lens Reflex camera. These allow the use of interchangeable lenses, as well as add-on accessories like more sophisticated flashes.

I’m not fond of most entry-level DSLRs, which tend to be crippled by controls that assume the user has a low level of knowledge, and doesn’t want immediate access to some features. And it’s important to remember that the lenses you choose have a direct influence on image quality. So if you take this step, choose a body that allows intuitive control over the features you most commonly expect to use. Then, pick a lens that is fast enough (in terms of aperture, the “f” number, where lower is better) across its focal length range to give you control over depth of field, while offering sharpness across the entire image area. And if these terms seem foreign to you, it might be a good idea to rethink the need for a DSLR.

Yes, but Canon or Nikon?

Both make great DSLRs, and both have their true believers. I use Nikon bodies and compatible lenses, but could just as easily be happy with a Canon system. I’ll assume that if your feelings about this are strong enough, you have experience that exceeds the intent of this post.

Soup for one hundred.

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 19:49:53 -0500

Soup for one hundred.

Hitchens. On a bike. Breaking the law....

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 10:18:52 -0500

Hitchens. On a bike. Breaking the law. Awesome.

vanityfair:

Without a doubt, this is our favorite freewheeling photograph of the late, great Christopher Hitchens, whose passing we can barely comprehend. So we turn to the words of Graydon Carter, who writes of this image in his touching memoriam:

“I once sent him out on a mission to break the most niggling laws still on the books in New York City. One such decree forbade riding a bicycle with your feet off the pedals. The photograph that ran with the column, of Christopher sailing a small bike through Central Park with his legs in the air, looked like something out of the Moscow Circus.”

Photograph by Christian Witkin.

vintageanchor: An open letter from Richard Russo in response to...

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:54:41 -0500

vintageanchor:

An open letter from Richard Russo in response to an article in Slate from Mr. Russo’s Facebook page here…

“I read Farhad Manjoo’s Slate rebuttal to my recent op-ed in the New York Times with great interest, in part because it was so cleverly parsed, but also because it was in so many ways unexpected. In my Times piece, I and my author friends accused Amazon of malicious, predatory practices, and so I was unprepared for Mr. Manjoo to concede up front that Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, all too often (and in the present instance) do behave like thugs. When I go to trial, I don’t think I’ll be hiring Mr. Manjoo to lead my defense team. Still, he raises several points that go to the very heart of the discussion I hope we’ll all start having soon about the true costs of what we purchase. There’s a lot at stake.

Mr. Manjoo admits that he’s a fan of both Amazon and comparison shopping because, he says, he hates “paying more than he should.” That’s an interesting choice of words. Does he mean, for instance, that he hates paying more than he “has to”? This is the crux of the matter. What should we pay? That’s not quite the same as to ask, Where can I buy this cheapest? Mr. Manjoo is correct to point out that the analogy between buying books locally and buying produce locally is imprecise. The Steve Jobs biography is the same book wherever we buy it. It’s the effect of buying it locally that differs. If you buy the book locally, the sales tax you pay will fund local schools and fill local potholes. You aren’t paying more than you should. You’re just paying, up front, what it’s going to cost in the end, after your taxes go up. If you imagine that potholes get filled for free or that they’re paid for by somebody else, you’re deluding yourself. Or, suppose your taxes don’t go up and the pothole doesn’t get repaired. You drive over it and damage the bottom of your car. Won’t the cost of repair eat into your Amazon savings? And if you think local schools shouldn’t be funded adequately, then shame on you.

In my op ed I compared what’s going on in the book world to what’s happening in film. If I’d had more time and space, I’d have posed a question. How do we explain why so many of today’s movies suck? I think that’s an interesting question in its own right, but it’s even more interesting when posed in conjunction with another. Why is current television so terrific? (Honestly, I don’t know what to say to anyone who thinks the reverse.) I think the reason is pretty simple. Television is great right now because there are so many outlets and so much competition: pay tv, cable, network. Hundreds of channels, all hungry for content. As a result, you find wonderfully well-written, acted, and directed shows everywhere (along with, obviously, all manner of crap). On the other hand, movies suck because the studios that make them have been subsumed by entities that care first about selling things. To them it doesn’t much matter what. How can their philosophy not remind us of Mr. Bezos, who began selling books not because he loved them but because they had ten digit ISBN numbers he could track? Mr. Manjoo admits Amazon’s methods are often bad, but suggests that its vision of selling is true and correct. Mr. Bezos, in other words, may be a scoundrel, but he’s also a good man of business. That, of course, was Scrooge’s defense of his dead partner, Jacob Marley, who gives him a rattling reply.

But, having reminded myself that it’s Christmas and that I still have a lot of gifts to buy, I’ll bring this to a close by wishing all my fellow consumers, including Mr. Manjoo, the happiest of holidays. Thanks to technology, we have interesting questions to ask ourselves about what we’ll buy this year, and where and why. Our job, Mr. Manjoo’s and mine, is not so much to answer those questions as to articulate them clearly. I myself have much to be grateful for this season, and though I’ve never met him, I’m quite certain that Mr. Majoo does as well, starting with the fine woman he’s married to, who drags him from time to time to brick and mortar bookstores. I hope that, after reading the Slate column in which he suggests that we all owe Mr. Bezos a debt of gratitude for crushing our precious indie booksellers, she doesn’t have him sleeping on the sofa.”

—Richard Russo

(Here is a link to the article by Mr. Manjoo )

A great songwriter. Her music was on a loop in my car all...

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:08:31 -0500

A great songwriter. Her music was on a loop in my car all weekend.

nprmusic:

Today, musical performers from Kanye West to Yo Yo Ma are called “eclectic.” Laura Nyro was eclectic before people used the word to talk about pineapple salsa.

—NPR Weekend Edition’s Scott Simon, via Laura Nyro’s Lasting, Eclectic Music Legacy

All product videos should be this good.

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:02:29 -0500

All product videos should be this good.

Afternoon at Macy’s Coffeehouse on Flickr.

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 09:44:41 -0500

Afternoon at Macy’s Coffeehouse on Flickr.