Short Mt. Tam Ride

 

This ride really took it out of me. Despite being short, the day was well over 90 degrees by the time we started riding over towards Fairfax, and the tandem makes all climbs about twice as hard. Mike didn't have much trouble and was quite strong at the end. Definitely needed to eat more ice cream!

A Quick Tutorial on ND grad. filters

Now that I have sample photos up, I can discuss ND graduated filters, which are my favorite tool for serious landscape photography, so much so that I feel naked without them when I'm on a serious photography trip. As described earlier, the fundamental problem of photography is to be able to render a scene that your eye can see into one that the digital sensor and your monitor (or print) can present.

Since slides and monitors can present about an 8:1 contrast ratio between the brightest and dimmest section of an image, while your eye (because it moves constantly and your brain composites all those images with no effort on your part) can see about 1000:1 contrast ratios in the same scene, you have a problem with a typical sunset or sunrise:

From Grand Tetons and Yellowstone

Note how the light (which your eye will render as yellow if you were there) is washed out, and the dark sections of the scene hold no shadow detail. (This is in addition to this film being shot by a point and shoot camera) The solution is to eliminate the dark portions of the scene through careful framing, and then placing an ND grad. filter right where the cloud-line would otherwise blow-out:

From Grand Tetons and Yellowstone

Now the light on the mountain looks closer to what you would see in reality if you were there. In the digital age, you can use Photoshop and Lightroom's HDR facilities to achieve something similar through multiple exposures instead of carrying $100 filters, but if the clouds in the scene were moving at all, for instance, you can forget it! One reason I converted over to Lightroom from my beloved Picasa is that you can apply an ND grad. filter after the fact in Lightroom (you must shoot in RAW mode for this to work --- storage is so cheap nowadays there's no reason not to)! This is huge, since even if you habitually carry ND grad. filters, what this means is that you get effectively 2 more stops of additional filtration after the exposure if that's what you need.

When in doubt as to whether the scene requires the use of an ND grad. filter, what you can do is to switch the camera to spot meter mode, and quickly spot meter the brightest and darkest parts of the scene. If the difference between the two is more than about 2.5 stops, you need an ND grad. filter. To decide how much filtration you need, figure out the difference between the highlights and the shadows, and subtract 2.5 (or 2 stops if the arithmetic is hard) from it --- this is how many stops you need. I usually carry both a two stop and a three stop filter, and can combine the two to create a five stop scene. If you're shooting RAW digital, you can be off in this calculation by about two stops, since Lightroom will give you that much leeway. (If you're shooting slides, you better be exact, or spend more film and bracket)

A really important tip about placement of the line in the view-finder. It is essential that you stop down to shooting aperture before placing the filter! Where the line on the filter is changes depending on your shooting aperture, which is one reason why the SLR is a superior tool for serious landscape work than a TLR or a rangefinder camera. This is why even though you might be able to use a polarizer on a compact point and shoot, it will be difficult to use an ND grad. filter on one --- there's no way to see the shooting aperture.

Another place where ND. grad. filters are useful is in reflections:

From Grand Tetons and Yellowstone

Not all the light hitting the water bounces back in the direction of the camera --- some of it goes into the water as well, and as a result when you try to take a picture of a reflection, the reflection often looks too dark. The solution: an ND grad. filter with the gradation line placed right where the reflection is.

Graduated filters are not a panacea --- used wrong, they can look unnatural, and frequently there's not a good line you can use. But when faced with a high contrast scene (especially those wonderful alpenglow scenes that nature photographers love), they are indispensable, and well worth their weight in the camera bag.

From Grand Tetons and Yellowstone

Recommended Eqiupment:

• Singh-Ray ND Grad Filters (2 stop and 3 stop hard)
  
• Cokin "P" Filter holders (Wide Angle)
• Adapter Rings for the Above
• Tripod

(In a hurry you can drop the filter holder and adapter ring and just hold the filter in front of the lens) I also have a full review of the Singh-Ray filters and why they're worth $100 each.

From Converted

An example of an unnatural look when an ND grad. filter is used. Notice the blue sky above the clouds but yellow below. Of course, unnatural doesn't always mean that the picture isn't pretty

Grand Tetons and Yellowstone Trip, September 2002

Grand Tetons and Yellowstone

For the longest time I promised myself that when I had time, a fast computer, and a place to host photos, I would go back and scan all the pictures I have on slide film into digital format for display. Part of it is that in this digital age, no one seems to have time to show up for a slide show any more. The other part of it is that I like to have images up for instructional purposes as well, and some of those pictures I had back in the old days were especially good. Slide photography is the most demanding form of photography there is --- unlike with color negative or digital photography, there's no possibility of rescue from a bad picture --- you can't even crop! Everything has to be done before the shutter is pushed. In addition, the very best slide films were slow (Fuji Velvia is ISO 50, Kodak Kodachrome is ISO 25).

Now that I have a little bit of time and a fast computer, I'll start with my Grand Tetons/Yellowstone Fall 2002 collection. That was one of those photo-trips where everything came together --- the light, the weather, and my gear all operated in peak condition, and I was very pleased with the results. The camera gear was an Olympus Stylus Epic 35mm point and shoot, and I had both my Canon bodies with me: EOS-3 and Elan IIe, as well as my entire collection of lenses and filters. I did suffer a mishap though --- as a cheap-skate I was always camping whenever I could, and after a stint in the hot springs with the tripod, the next morning I'd found my tripod legs frozen solid! I had to sit in the car with the heater full on and aimed at the tripod legs to get them to unfreeze so I could use them! All in all, I shot about 30 rolls of film for a 2 week trip, of which 7 days were spent in the back country without the serious equipment.

Scanning was performed on a Canoscan 4000US slide/negative scanner. It works like a champ, but of course, even the comparatively cheap Canoscan 8800F nowadays will be fast and probably just as good. I had to buy Vuescan because Canon does not provide a 64-bit Vista driver for that old scanner, but even if they had, neither Lightroom nor Photoshop support TWAIN scanners any more anyway! It sucks to be obsolete. Fortunately, Vuescan is very good and well worth the $40 --- the scans are so clean that I only have to crop them and post.

In any case, click through on the link, click "slideshow", and enjoy the show!

Review: The Steerswoman

The Steerswoman is such an old book that it is now out of print. You can, however, buy the Steerwoman's Road, which contains the first two volumes of the series.

The novel starts in what you would think is a typical fantasy universe, with mentions of Wizards, no high technology, and long travel on foot, sail, and all the usual inconveniences. The story revolves around Rowan, who's a Steerswoman, a combination of sage and wise-woman who acts as a repository of information for the community.

At the story's start, Rowan stumbles on some interesting jewels at an inn and feels compelled to investigate further. Before long, however, she finds herself under attack, and the story proceeds then to investigate the world she lives in, which turns out not to be the usual straightforward fantasy world after all.

The reveals are well setup and put together intelligently, but the characters are perhaps a little wooden. Nevertheless, I'll be tracking down the rest of the novels.

Review: Absolution Gap

Absolution Gap is the last book in the Revelation Space trilogy of connected novels. The first two volumes were Revelation Space and Redemption Ark. You could read this novel standalone, but the universe would be a lot richer for you if you read those first two volumes before tackling this one.

Unlike the previous two volumes this one is a downer. Reynolds almost immediately wipes the slate clean by getting rid of characters we know from earlier novels. Second, he then provides a bit of misdirection by providing a separate plot on a new system known as Hela. As the two plots converge, we learn more about the nature of the planet, and how dire the fate of humanity is under the threat of the inhibitors.

Unfortunately, as warned by the reviewers on Amazon.com, the book has a bad ending. It's bad not necessarily because the plot is no good, but because after all that build up, the ending has nothing to do with either of the plot strands discussed earlier. It's as though Reynolds decided to pull a massive bait and switch. The science parts of the novel are fun and interesting, but I'm afraid even Reynolds can't hold a novel with just that. I can't recommend this novel as a result, though I think the overall series is still worth reading on the strength of the first two novels alone.

Review: The Science of Fear

The Science of Fear is a great book! It covers why fear seems rampant in this modern age, when life expectancies are longer than ever before, and wars seem less frequent than ever (though the 20th century was still the bloodiest in history, neither nuclear Armageddon nor famine became prevalent). The book covers all the elements of fear, starting from why we remember negative news better than we remember positive ones.

It then goes on to examine who has an incentive to make you fear the world. Product companies (such as security specialists) have an incentive to sell you a product, and by making you afraid (of say a break in), they make money. Politicians such as George H. W. Bush have an incentive to sell fear, because that enables them to stay in office. Finally, the media has an incentive to sell news stories, and the best news stories involve fear, since nothing else sticks in your mind like the latest disease or disaster, no matter how statistically unlikely it is to affect you.

The author also dissects why we are so vulnerable to such institutions and people preying on us: our brains aren't evolved for modern society, from photography to round-the-globe 24-hour news coverage, so while we're capable of driving at 65mph down the freeway, our brains haven't adapted to the idea that perhaps the fact that we spend all our time driving and very little time exercising is much more dangerous to us than that news story about the serial killer or what-have-you.

What I love the book is that it's not afraid to name names and debunk myths. The breast implants scare comes up early on, and he follows through with such examples as the primary cause for cancer (I won't spoil it for you, but I guarantee that it's not much of a surprise if you think about it). Even sacred icons such as Rachel Carlson are not spared from Mr. Gardner's research and analysis.

All in all, this book is highly recommended.

The Relay, 2009

So two weekends ago, I participated in The Relay.  As part of the third Google Team, we ran 199 miles.

This blog chronicles everything that my team went through, giving pretty much a blow by blow account of the entire race. =)  

Yes, we blogged on the run.  Say yay, to mobile WiFi!

The race was more of a logistics challenge more so than a challenging run.   As a bonus though, I got to run one of my favourite hills to ride up, Redwood Gulch. =)

Ironic, I never thought I would be running up that hill!  My time for that portion fortunately is worse than my ride up it (50 minutes for the 3 mile stretch)

I don't think I'll quite do this again as it didn't turn out to be difficult and was just long stretches of waiting.  It IS quite incredible to do this as part of a team though, and that I'll treasure more than anything else.

Review: Black Diamond Orbit Lantern

I bought the Black Diamond Orbit Lantern during the REI 20% off period. I actually spent some time debating between that and the Apollo, but decided that the lighter weight of the Orbit would soon meet my needs.

Prior to this purchase, I always used a candle or a Coleman gas lantern, but the Stephenson did not come with straps for hanging the candle lantern, and the Coleman always had problems with use inside a tent --- not only is it dangerous, but a topple could burn up your tent!

The Orbit is tiny. It weighs 5 ounces with 4 AAA batteries. Each set of AAAs will go for about 10 hours, which is more than enough for a 5 day backpacking trip during the summer, or 2-3 days in the fall. It is bright!. With it fully lit, the inside of the tent feels very much like daylight. (that's an illusion, since it only has a 1W LED) It's so bright that your see white spots for a bit after you stare at the lantern directly.

As a reading light, it is so bright that I had to turn it down (fortunately it comes with a dimmer switch). I found a great way to use it, which is to lie it down on the side and then read on my back with the book (or Kindle) held up in my hands. For extra battery savings stick a mirror behind it, and use the dimmer.

Needless to say, this light is highly recommended. I'm retiring all my candle and gas lanterns as a result.

Cazedero LDT

From Piaw's Blog

From Piaw's Blog

What a gorgeous weekend it was! Not wanting it to go to waste, I joined the Western Wheelers for the Cazedero Circuit rides, a combination of really gorgeous rides in Northern California, on the Sonoma Coast. I knew I was out of shape, but this ride told me how badly off I was. Two years ago, I did the E ride on Saturday, 85 miles and 8500' of climbing, and was surprised on Sunday by how easy the ride up Coleman Valley road was. This year, I did the C ride, 65 miles and 6500' of climbing and was exhausted, feeling a lot of lower back soreness from the climbing. Then Saturday's climb up Coleman Valley road was a slog, no question about it. I was just too tired to be frisky.

Nevertheless, with wild poppies abound and gorgeous coastal scenery, I can't complain. It's good to be able to enjoy California after spending so much time away.

Kindle DX a massive boon to travelers

I did not bother upgrading to the Kindle 2 because I thought it was an inferior product compared to the Kindle v1. Today's announcement of the Kindle DX, however, will likely have me digging out my wallet to pay for the next time I travel. It's heavier (8 ounces more, so it will now compete with my CPAP machine in weight), and bulkier, but has one major feature, which is PDF support.

For the traveler, that means all the lonely planet PDFs can be stored for searching when you travel. When cycling in Europe or backpacking through Japan, this is a massive weight and space savings over the paper books. I begged Lonely Planet a year ago for a Kindle edition, but now I don't have to wait.

I don't know when the newspapers and magazines will switch over to PDF content, but it's only a matter of time --- now you'll be able to get all those glossies with images, etc. In other words, if you're about to travel somewhere independently (i.e., not part of a guided tour), this will become an essential accessory for you.

Review: My Life as a Quant

My Life as a Quant (kindle edition) is Emanuel Derman's memoir of his journey from being an ambitious Physicist to being a much lauded financial engineer.

The first half of his book covers his training and education as a physicist. There's not a little bit of the usual physicist's arrogance built into his training. There's the note that in Physics, you frequently run into people so smart that you know you'll never be at that level, and the widely accepted opinion that Physics is so much better than other fields that a poorly paying post-Doc as a physicist is better than almost any other profession. From being a professor at the University of Colorado to finally ending up at Bell Labs where he was essentially trained as one of the early C programmers, Derman's gradual disillusionment with Physics and his lack of material progress in that field shows through.

The second half of the book is much more exciting. It's provides a good layman's introduction to financial engineering (that Derman's currently a professor of financial engineering shows through), as well as Derman's life in Goldman Sachs and Saloman Brothers, firms which were central in the financial collapse last year. Now that he's a successful theorist in financial engineering, Derman's a lot more humble --- he ends with a long treatise on the limits of financial engineering, and emphasizes that ultimately, it's the trader's human intuition that makes the final decision, and that no model in finance can give you the same exactness as the ones in Physics --- in one you're playing a game where the rules do not change, and in the other you play against humans, who learn and always find new exploits.

The book was worth my time, but I wonder what he would say now, given the events in 2008.

Review: Escaflowne

I found this in my archives on my hard drive, and still have fond memories of the TV series, which is now available in all sorts of special collection editions on Amazon, and decided that Escaflowne can't possibly be popular enough, so I'm resurrecting it on my blog.

Vision of Escaflowne is a science fiction adventure. Produced by Shouji Kawamori, who also produced the delectable Macross, Escaflowne is a story that combines fantasy, romance, and adventure in 26 25-minute episodes. Aired in Japan in 1996, this TV series is now available as a complete DVD collection.

The story revolves around Hitomi, who is a first year student in high school. Hitomi has a crush on one of the seniors on the school track team, Amano. When she learns that he is leaving for England, she gathers up her courage, and asks him to clock her on the track. And if she gets in under 13 seconds, would Amano-sempai please give her her first kiss?

Unfortunately, during her run, a boy from one of Hitomi's dreams show up in a flash of light, followed closely by a dragon. In the events that transpire shortly thereafter, Hitomi is transported along with the the boy to his planet, Gaea, with no apparent way back. I'll let other sites do the rest of the plot synopsis. Rest assured that the adventure never lets up, and surprise after surprise will challenge the viewer to keep the story straight.

As a world, Gaea evokes Edgar Rice Burrough's John Carter, Princess of Mars series. There are ape-men, and cat-women, boy princes and dashing swords men, flying ships which levitate using anti-gravity rocks, and powered-armored suits (called Guymelefs in the story) which transform, fly, and draw their energy from a stone called a Dragu-Energist, which can only be found in the remains of a dragon. The title of the series, Escaflowne, is the name of the Guymelef that Van Fanel pilots.

The boy whom Hitomi rescues is Van Fanel, a prince of a small country on Gaea. When Fanelia is destroyed by an invisible army of Guymelefs, Hitomi and Van spend the rest of the story trying to discover who is doing this and why.

The Characters
There are four major characters in the story, along with a large supporting cast. Hitomi is the viewpoint character, a natural choice, since the audience is far more likely to identify with her than with anyone else. Van Fanel, the King of Fanelia starts the story appropriately enough, as a King without a country, and eventually grows to become the warrior that he did not want to be at the start of the story. The third leg of Hitomi's romantic triangle (you knew there was going to be one, didn't you?) is Allen Schezar, a dashing, handsome swordsman of Asturia, the country Van and Hitomi flee to when escaping from Fanel's destroyers. Princess Millerna, who's the third daughter of Asturia, however, is in love with Allen, hence the romance turns out not to be a simple case of who does Hitomi chooses?

The interactions between characters is entertaining and perhaps classically romantic. The characters have histories that come back to haunt them, as well as unresolved pasts that they eventually have to confront. But as with most good stories, the most impressive thing about Escaflowne is that the characters do grow and mature. Hitomi does not return to Earth as the same girl who left for Gaea.

Plot

This is a fast paced series. There are at least one or two plot twists every episode,
so watching it in a collection is much better than trying to pick it up off broadcast TV. Escaflowne was first conceived as a 39 episode series, but the budget was set for 26 episodes, hence the tight pacing. In many ways this is a good thing, since there are no episodes where nothing happens, and even the character development episodes don't leave a viewer feeling cheated.

What I really like, however, is the fact that for a romance, Hitomi definitely does more than her fair share of rescuing in the series. The female leads are strong characters, and the story is compelling and full of the kind of wonder I started reading science fiction for. Of course, there are a few inconsistencies, such as Hitomi's school uniform remaining intact and immaculate despite the rough treatment she gives it, and the number of adventures she puts it through. (And except for a few episodes, she doesn't wear anything else!)

Is it worth 13 hours?

Yes! If you don't feel like buying the series, rent it, borrow it, or pool money with your friends and buy it, but by all means watch it. This is Japanese animation at its best. Unlike older series such as Macross or Gatchaman, this series is incredibly well-drawn for a TV series. The art is uniformly high quality, and consistent from episode to episode. Sure, there are the usual cases of long still shots and reused footage from episode to episode, but by and large the animation, even on a small screen is as good as anything I have seen. You won't be disappointed.

There is a movie, but as with Macross, the movie has no plot resembling that of the TV series, and in fact, will have some of the characters redrawn so dramatically that you will not recognize them except by name.

For More Information

The Big Escaflowne Website. This is a well-designed site, with lots of production information and notes on the show, as well as episode guides and a good idea of what's going to be in the movie. Spoilers are carefully marked.

A Consolidated Cycle Touring Page

For years, my cycle touring travelogues and web pages have been all over the place, ranging from my Alma-Mater to this blog to geocities. With recent news that Geocities was to be shut down by the end of the year, I asked on FriendFeed where to host all my soon-to-be-gone content.

The overwhelming vote was for Google's App Engine. I had played with it 2 years ago when it was a Google internal alpha, but I didn't think of using it for hosting static content. It does have a few quirks, but it's cheap, and visitors are unlikely to overwhelm the free quota, which is more than I can say about the Geocities page! I do like that I finally get to use the domain that I registered two years ago.

The runner up was DreamHost, which came with rave reviews by many users, but my experience with their promotion for migrating Geocities was less than ideal, and I have reasonable confidence that Google's free quota will always be more than I can use.

I'd like to say that I rescued everything before bit-rot set in, but unfortunately, I've already lost quite a number of photos, and in many years had to settle for just rescuing the text.

So hop over to my Consolidated Touring Pages and have a look! (I do apologize for the years in which I didn't do write ups of my trip --- I intend to remedy them eventually)

Review: Almost Perfect

One of the best things about owning a Kindle is that items that are too long to read entirely online are easily converted to Kindle format and then are indistinguishable from books. Almost Perfect is one such item.

Almost Perfect was written by W. E. Pete Peterson, one of WordPerfect's early employees and CEO in all but name. For those of you who remember the era of desktop software, there's the usual Microsoft story of the evil empire using its formidable influence to tilt the market to its playing field. I was on the sidelines at the time, and my observation was that most Microsoft competitors didn't need Microsoft's help doing themselves in.

In WordPerfect's case, it was clear that they had an incredibly good product for DOS and character-based interfaces. I was an early Wordstar user, and I remember how MicroPro shot itself in the foot with the introduction of Wordstar 2000, destroying all the backwards compatibility the users had come to expect. Frequently, the lack of backwards compatibility was what killed a lot of software companies. (Microsoft's current woes with Vista driver and application compatibility is only the latest such example)

The book is short and well-written, and unremittingly describes WordPerfect's success (listening to the customer, supporting them well, and learning from their mistakes) and mistakes (supporting platforms and programs that didn't make money, never developing in house management talent that could think the way the founders did, and being too optimistic about the resources required to compete in GUI-oriented word processing programs). In this case, the attempt to diversify across product lines extracted a costly toll on the company that it could not afford, since it did not have a monopoly that Microsoft had to sustain as many disparate development efforts as they did.

Ultimately, however, I consider this book a good example of the importance of building an organization that can function along without key people, rather than an organization composed of superheroes. While Pete Peterson was undoubtedly a talented executive (proving once again that business school is no substitute for hard work and common sense), towards the end he was strained past the breaking point by WordPerfect's growth, and could not keep track of all that was essential for success. He wanted to run a flat organization, but the shortage of management talent in the company (and his flailing attempts to remedy it at the last minute) eventually came to roost, and WordPerfect paid the price.

Recommended for its brief, honest appraisal, and a good look at the inside world of desktop, shrink-wrapped software.

Review: Redemption Ark

Redemption Ark (dead tree edition) is Alastair Reynold's third novel in the Revelation Space universe.

This novel introduces Nevil Clavain, one of the original Conjoiners who fled the Solar System ages ago (in a back-story that's revealed in Galactic North). One of the best things about the series is that the science is impeccable. We have explorations of inertia, of relativistic interstellar combat and tactics, and an amazing amount of exposition that's not very neatly hidden amongst the conversations between the characters.

Yet the characters, I feel, are the best Reynold's has come up with yet --- they're still wooden, but at least their motivations are sensible. Even more interesting, the presence of the Inhibitors (Reynold's answer to the Fermi Paradox) is explained well, and a far more interesting answer than I expected. We do get an explanation about the hell-classed weapons that were presented but not explained as part of Revelation Space, and some of the characters from both that novel and Chasm City show up as well, though not in such a way that you'll need to read those two novels before reading this one (but those novels are recommended, so you might as well read them).

While other books in the series have been self-contained, this one does manage to end in a very bad place --- a place that leaves you wanting to flip the Kindle over to the Amazon.com store and click the buy button for Absolution Gap. The reviews on that novel, however, are leaving me cold, so I'll check it out of the library. Nevertheless, Redemption Ark is highly recommended --- old fashioned science fiction that doesn't leave out the science and gives you the good old tingly sense of wonder that science fiction is supposed to provide!

Australia: A Photo Journey

At last, it is done! I have processed all the pictures from the Australia Trip. I still have a few that need work --- for instance, all the panoramas need to be stitched, and I need to play with the HDR, but the bulk of the work is done. Enjoy!

Sydney

Blue Mountains

Great Barrier Reef

Atherton Tablelands

Melbourne

Tasmania

Tasmanian Overland Track

Great Ocean Road

Perth and Margaret River

Ningaloo Reef

The Red Center

Australia Panoramas

Black Mountain Summit

I'm definitely out of shape --- it took 110 minutes today to reach the summit, and just as long to get to the bottom. It was hazy but there were lots of flowers (though there're signs that they'll all be gone next week). Unfortunately, none of the flower pictures turned out, but the panorama at the top did.

Review: HP m9600t Desktop PC

After returning from Australia, I had to buy a new PC to cope with the 100GB of pictures and run Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CS4 to deal with the output from the Canon 5DMk II.

Interestingly enough, the HP m9600t went on sale the day after I returned. HP is kind enough to give Google employees a 10% discount, so for $973.59, I configured a machine with the ATI Radeon 4850 (1GB), 4GB of RAM, and a DVD writer. I did not upgrade either the hard drive or the memory, since those were much cheaper if you bought them and installed them yourself.

If you want to go over every nook and cranny of the machine, there's a more thorough review elsewhere. I'm just going to summarize my impressions of this machine.

First of all, the inside of the machine is cramped! To install memory or to install a hard drive, you have to pull the drive cage out. The first time I opened up the machine to install the hard drive, I had no problems --- following the instructions the cage came right off --- and then I discovered that in their infinite wisdom, HP had not left me even a spare SATA cable, so I had to run out and buy one. Once I had one, I discovered that I had to cut the zip tie to the power cables so that I could extract one and use it for the new drive. Not having any spare zip ties sitting around, I left the wire loose and one of them got into the fan of the video card, which created a god-awful noise until I figured that out and moved the wire out of the way and zip tied the cables.

The second time I opened up the machine it was to install memory --- and this time I just could not for the life of me get the drive cage out. Fortunately, I have slim fingers and good manual dexterity, so I worked the DIMMs down below the drive cage and plugged them in with no problems. The resulting total cost was around $1300 when all said and done (including taxes, shipping, and everything). I even got to figure out how good their tech support was --- I had an intermittent fan noise from the video card for a bit, and was surprised to get their weekend support crew, which while it seemed was staffed by high school kids, they seemed to know what they were doing.

My first impression is that the machine is quiet! It's much quieter than my Infrant NAS box, and it only makes noise when it first spins up. I'm very impressed. Secondly, it is fast. In fact, at this point, I'm completely disk-bound except for generating large panoramas in Photoshop or HDR involving 5 or 6 RAW files. What I did discover was that 4GB was insufficient for running Lightroom and Photoshop together. Photoshop wants about 3.7GB of RAM, while Lightroom wants about 700MB. That makes 6GB comfortable (until you're dealing with 5 RAW files), and 8GB just enough. Purists will want to go for 12GB to make use of the triple channel RAM, but since we're not CPU bound anyway, there's no point going for more speed --- the next step really would be getting a striped disk array to reduce the delay from reads, or solid state disks (which realistically speaking, isn't cheap enough for what is essentially an accessory to my SLR!).

I plugged in two Dell 2407wfp monitors, and the result is I can view all the thumbnails on one monitor while doing photo manipulation in the other. The extra real-estate is very nice, and my work-flow is now relatively efficient.

Games: wow! This is the first time I've got a machine with a graphics card powerful enough to play most PC games, and I'm impressed. Now if only I had more time --- I could get some gaming in and get my photo editing done, but I guess that's going to have to wait. All this super duper compute power does come at a cost --- the machine dissipates about 127W while browsing the web, and about 206W (peaking to 220W) when crunching through photos with all 4 cores busy. Fortunately, I expect not to have to keep the machine on all the time once the initial backup to off-site storage is done.

All in all, I'm very pleased with this machine. I usually like to keep machines for 5-6 years, but had to upgrade earlier than expected this time because of digital photography. I don't expect to have to upgrade for another 5 years. I did have the usual people bugging me to get a Mac, but realistically, a quad core Mac starts at $2500, which doesn't come with the Radeon 4850 video card. I like the Mac Pro's case, but I don't like it so much that I'd be willing to pay $1300 for it. Realistically, the next time I get a PC, I'm just going to have to build it from components if I want a less cramped case with more room for drives (or better yet, hot-swappable drives). But that's 5 years away.

The Promise of Sleep

(A hat-tip to Niniane Wang for loaning me The Promise of Sleep to read)

I was diagnosed with Sleep Apnea 3 years ago, yet it wasn't until last year that I managed to adapt somewhat to it by using CPAP therapy. The Promise of Sleep is ghost-written by William Dement, the person who opened the Stanford University Sleep Disorders Clinic, and who was the first person to document the various stages of sleep. Amongst other things, one of the big features of this book is that it mentions the names of some doctors I'd heard about and one I actually met!

The book covers very quickly the history of sleep research --- extremely valuable and told from a first-hand perspective of course. Then it jumps into our biological clock and the opponent-process model for why we feel sleepy at certain times of the day and not others, despite a large amount of sleep debt. It turns out that this leads to certain dangerous situations --- if you're a night person, you might be extremely awake at a party, but then when driving home you could doze off and crash your car and lose your life because of how this process works.

He then covers certain sleep orders that were discovered --- restless leg syndrome, sleep apnea, and insomnia. In particular, he recommends sleeping pills for insomnia, especially since he feels that building up a dangerous level of sleep debt is much worse than the possibility of any addiction to sleeping drugs (which are by and large quite safe nowadays).

Finally, he shows you how to apply these theories to every day life, jet-lag, napping, and the life cycle of a person's sleep (for instance, we sleep soundly and well as children, most people shift from being Owls to Larks in middle age).

I found myself enjoying the book, even the parts that I've read before, and would heartily recommend this book over Take A Nap and other shorter books. Thanks, Niniane!

The lifetime of bike parts

I broke another set of industry standard SKS mudguards yesterday, marking the second pair of SKS mudguards I've destroyed in 5 years. I'm generally sanguine about parts failing, since they do face a harsh environment, but I guess I have a few months before the next rainy season before I start thinking about getting Honjo fenders.

Over the years, I've collected through personal experience various expected life time for parts, so I'll summarize them here in order (from most frequently replaced to least frequently replaced):

• Chains. These don't last more than about 2000 miles if you ride every day and don't keep them squeaky clean. If you keep them clean, you might get about 5000 miles out of them. The longest lasting chains are single speed chains on fully enclosed crank case bikes --- those will go about 10000 miles between replacements.


• Tires. Depending on how heavy you are, these can range from 1000 miles (28mm tires on my tandem) to 4000 miles (23mm tires back when I was running Michelin Hilite Comps). You can double their lifetime by starting new tires on the front and then rotating them to the back when the back is worn. (That's the recommended replacement procedure!)


• Bar-tape. These usually die every year or so.


• Deraileur cables. These don't last much more than 2 years or about 8000 miles. The inner wire usually frays from the end if you don't cap them, or snap in the shifter if you have bar-ends or STIs. Downtube shifters will give them longer life. By contrast, deraileur housing lasts almost forever. I've only replaced one due to rupture in about 15 years of active cycling.


• Brake pads. These are entirely dependent on weather conditions. On fair-weather bikes, you can run the same pads in California for a decade or more! For commute bikes, I replace them every 4 years or so, but if I was living in Germany or Seattle, I'd have to replace them every year. Heck, mountain biking in Seattle, I had to replace the brake pads every other ride!
  
• Chainrings. These last about 15000 miles in optimum conditions (tandem timing rings, which don't have any cross-chaining during their life), or 10000 miles in on a normal bike.


• Bottom bracket. Phil Wood sealed BBs are supposedly good for about 20000 miles. I once rode one for 40000 miles, but apparently you couldn't turn the spindle by hand after that if you removed the cranks. After last year's stint in Germany and France, though, I ended up with a BB that wasn't smooth after only 8000 miles. So much for 20000 miles...


• Cassettes. These go every 30,000 miles or so. If you don't replace your chain often, you can expect them to go earlier. The strange thing is that if you do replace your chain often, the failure mode isn't that they wear down --- the failure mode is that you break teeth in the sprockets! Very weird.


• Brooks saddles. On my singles, these have gone as much as 12 years. But on the tandem, they don't last more than about 5 years or so. That's because you don't stand up enough on a tandem so the leather gets soaked every hot ride.


• Seat posts. To be honest, I've never had to replace one in 15 years of riding, except for the carbon seatpost after only 3 years, which has scared me off carbon seatposts for a long time.


• Cantilever brakes. These have proven extremely unreliable for me. I've gone through 3 sets on about 8 years of active mountain biking, and they fall apart in weird ways, most of it having to do with the springs inside popping out. I don't think they should be spec'd on bikes.


• Deraileurs. The front ones don't seem to be good for more than about 5 years or so --- at least, until recently, that's how frequently I've been replacing them. Recent stuff seems to be getting better, so now I don't know. Rear deraileurs are good for about 60000 miles, with a pulley replacement every 20000 miles or so. I used to be able to say that I've never worn one out, until I sold a bike to Lea that she claimed had a worn out deraileur. In my defense, I never noticed a problem when I was riding the bike, but then I wasn't running 10-speed either, which has much closer tolerances than the 7 or 8-speed stuff I was running. According to an old-timer in my bike club, you used to have to replace rear deraileurs every 20,000 miles or so, until Shimano came along and started actually engineering the part!


• Cranks. Now we're getting into stuff I've never broken. My 17 year old bike still has a good crank. Now if you're big and strong you might expect to break one every 10 years or so, but the real answer is if you're that big and strong you should be examining your bike every year with an eye to seeing cracks in frames and stuff.


• Frames. For me at least, these don't go bad unless you get run-over by a car (and unfortunately, that's happened). Update: I've broken 2 Ti frames now. Ti frames seem to be very much subject to manufacturing defects.