The Very Last Shoot (Really)

Well, I lied. I thought that this morning’s shoot at Anza Narrows was the only one I’d get today, the last day of 2010. The mercury climbed up into the low fifties by midday. With just a bit of cloud cover across the blue dome, the sky was cooperating with the clear horizons.

I rode out to Hidden Valley Wildlife Refuge, and climbed a hill, shown above, near the entrance to get these views. The trail grew progressively chewed up by horse hooves. It looked like two horses had gone up the trail two days ago when the ground was still soggy from the recent rainstorms.

The photo above was taken on the shoulder of the hill where the trail leveled out. The background peak is Mt. Baldy in the Angelus Mountains.

The photo above was taken on the crest of the hill. Again, all of the photos in this post were made with a 28mm, f/2.8 manual lens (42mm = 35mm equivalent).

The vertical frame above is a view to the east. The peak of Mt. San Jacinto is visible in the background.

The Last Shoot

The photos in this post are from the last morning shoot of the year 2010. It was the coldest morning of the year on December 31. The mercury was topping out at 32 F when I rode to Anza Narrows. The short ride was a test of a new jacket. The jacket seems like a good one, and it will work well as a jacket liner under my leather riding jacket.

Since the wreck that totaled my last motorcycle, I’ve been a bit skittish about riding with the windshield attached, since the edge of the windshield opened a 6-stitch scar just under my lip. I was wishing I had put the windshield on about the time I got up into third gear. The frozen air rushing against my face reminded me of the blizzards of the northeast. My face went numb from cold in short order. I was happy that the park is less than two miles away from my garage.

These photos were made with a APS-C Nikon and a prime lens, a decades-old 28mm, f/2.8 manual lens. This 28mm is turning out to be my favorite lens. I like using manual focus, and the extra aperture stop or two, though I use two telephoto zoom lenses when it make sense for sports like football and motocross.

The 28mm lens works out to a 42mm frame on an APS-C sensor. As it is turning out, I’m framing correctly for a photo with my eye before looking through the viewfinder, so it seems that I’m using the lens enough to get used to it.

Despite the cold, it was a good shoot. I liked the quality of the light and the long shadows from the trees. I kept my cloth glove liners on while I used the camera. In the photo below you can see my footprints in the frosted grass.

Art and Function

When we buy a new motorcycle, we spend a great deal of time simply admiring it. Particularly in the first few days of ownership, we spend hours gazing at it. It doesn’t matter if the motorcycle is new, ninety years from the gates of the factory, or born some time in between. A new-to-us motorcycle is a thing of great beauty.

It isn’t the function of the bike alone that draws our gaze, though it doesn’t hurt that the object of our affection will take us over farm lanes, through woods, along an ocean, across the desert, over rivers and streams, and through high mountain passes. The eye candy is in the way the exhaust pipes flow, cylinders thrust, frame arches, and fenders curl. It is in the way that art, or form, combines with function in perfect balance.

It doesn’t much matter which brand or model. All motorcycles are functional art, a blending of form and function. The example shown above is my ride, a 1999 Road Star. Yamaha did a wonderful job when they designed the Road Star, known as the Wild Star in Europe. As I mentioned in the Motorcycles post, this is my second Road Star. The first one didn’t survive an attempted-murder-by-automobile. At the time it was designed, this was a perfect long-haul cruiser. Now it is a bit dated. It would need a 6-speed transmission, and a displacement upgrade to 113 Cubic Inches to bring it current. A fuel capacity of seven gallons wouldn’t hurt, either. It seems unlikely that Yamaha will update the Road Star. During the past few years the company has been content to market the Roadliner, Stratoliner, Raider, and Stryker models, while ignoring the great need to update the Road Star. Why is an update needed? Well, just look at the four newer big cruisers. There are solid power plants buried under the bad design decisions that cover the four newer models. It certainly is just my opinion, but in stock form they look butt-ugly, but not quite butt-ugly cool. They could all be customized to the point where they looked as good as the Road Star for a few thousand dollars, but why bother? Just buy a Road Star and you are already there. Now, where can I get a six-speed transmission for mine?

A Holiday View

This is a somewhat rare view of Mt. San Gorgonio made on
12-25-2010. It is rarely this clear in the Inland Empire area.
Mountains always look more majestic to my eye when they
are capped with snow.

Beer Versus Anarchy

The Writing Technology/Beer Drinking/Alien Visitation thread continues…. This post answers a question posed by the author of The Blog of MAB in the Comments section of The History of Beer. See the post below titled The History of Beer.  Beer brewing and drinking has always been a positive force in the history of mankind. In fact, beer drinkers provided the prerequisite foundation for the continuous advancement of a series of innovations in writing technologies and brewing processes, along with thousands of years of records of alien visitations. A side effect of the alien visitation records was the speculations that were the impetus for the invention of myriad organized religions, and the organized religions themselves would not have existed without the former innovation of beer drinkers, writing technologies. As such, brewers and beer drinkers can only be viewed as the primary stabilizing and innovating force of civilization. In contrast, throughout recorded history wine drinkers have done very little of merit. They have caused many of the evils that have plagued mankind through 10,000 years of recorded history. If you think about it, it becomes obvious that the people like Bernard Madoff, who caused the recent worldwide recession (a polite word for depression) were and are wine drinkers. Here in Southern California we have another name for wine drinkers: Orange County Yuppie Twits. Other areas of the world have other terms for them, which recognizes their inherent evil. The photo below is an illustration of the difference between beer and wine drinkers.

Note that on the wine side of the photograph, only a couple bottles of wine are shown. That is because wine drinkers generally do very little of value, so nothing besides the wine is shown. Sure, they consume wine, which could be construed as a benefit to the human race, but it could also be easily argued that this produces an unnecessary wasteful demand for grapes, taking up a large amount of usable farmland which could be put to more positive use if planted with wheat and hops. In the English language there is a derogatory word for wine drinkers: “wino”. There is no derogatory English word for beer drinkers.  Wine drinkers are often anarchists, ready to tear down the whole fabric of civilization to get rid of a few minor irritants. They are always ruled by an overwhelming compulsion to throw out the baby with the bathwater. For a historical illustration of this destructive compulsion, we need look no farther than the French Revolution, during which the wine drinking French citizenry overthrew their royalist government and beheaded an entire class of people to simply get rid of powdered wigs, snuffboxes, and effeminate clothing styles. On the beer side, you will notice that the bottles and cans of beer are closely associated with Stage 3A writing implements for writing things down, and a camera for use in recording alien visitations. Beer drinkers and brewers are always prepared to advance the collective cause of human civilization in a positive manner.

Time Machine

The photo below was taken in 1954. It is my first memory of a photo being made of me, the first photo I distinctly remember standing still for. I was two years old at the time.

I’m the guy squinting into the sun. Holding my hand is my cousin Sheryl Newland. Holding her other hand is another cousin, Pat “Cork” Irwin. It was typical that Sheryl was holding my hand at the time the photo was made.

My mother gave me a box of prints about a decade ago. I didn’t think much about them at the time. I looked through them quickly, then stored them in my garage. A few years ago while looking for a particular book on the shelves where the photo box was stored, I noticed that the box was separating at the seams, so I replaced the box with a sturdier version.

A couple of months ago, I suddenly wondered if I still had the photograph above of myself and younger brother Joe, which was taken around late 1955 or early 1956. I always liked the photo, but I don’t remember why I set out to look through the photo box for it. The print definitely shows the wear of 55 years. In the process of looking for that photo, I uncovered the first photo above and numerous other photographic gems among the pile of a few hundred prints. Too bad the negatives are not in the box…

The point of this post is that it is enjoyable to wade through that box of old photos you may have stuck on a shelf in the garage or wedged between the rafters in the attic. Take a look. It is full of half and mostly forgotten memories. It is a time machine.

The History of Beer

This post is an answer to a question posed by Steve Vaughn in the Comments section of the previous blog post, Typewriters????. His question was “What is this beer you speak of???” Since Steve and I conducted extensive joint field-testing of beer during a two-year period that lasted roughly from 1967 to 1969, I know that he did not ask this question for his own education. Steve is a scientist, adept fly fisherman, and humanitarian concerned with the education of younger humans (and most humans are younger than the two of us). I have no doubt that Steve referred the question to me because I am a professional ‘Splainer, as in “How do you ‘splain this Lucy?”, a phrase that was frequently uttered in the iconic prototypical TV sitcom of the 1950s, I Love Lucy. ‘Splainers are also known variously as writers, scribblers, beer drinkers, hippies, nose-pickers, lunatics, and infidels, depending on one’s social circle and/or cultural viewpoint.

Sumeria The Sumerians were the first human society to develop Stage 2A writing technology. They were also the first society to discover, develop, and refine the brewing of beer. Beer, as we now know, is the very engine that has driven the progressive advancement of human civilization during the past 10,000 years. The Sumerians were no mental slouches. They were very aware of the importance of beer to humankind, and even had a god, Ninkasi, who was the goddess of brewing and beer, and brewed the beer that the gods themselves drank. An illustration of Sumerian clay tablets inscribed with the “Hymn to Ninkasi” is shown below. Within the verses, the hymn contains a recipe for brewing beer.

As I previously stated, the Sumerians were no mental slouches. Not coincidentally, since they both discovered beer and developed the first permanent writing technology, they have handed down to us the first written and illustrated records of alien visitations. They didn’t have words for aliens and spacecraft. They called the aliens “gods”, and their conveyances “chariots”. Alien visitations led to a couple side effects of drinking beer; writing things down, and the unbounded speculations which led to organized religion.

Egypt Ancient Egyptians were beer drinkers. Not surprisingly, they also developed Stage 3 writing technology to record their beer recipes. Like the Sumerian Ninkasi, the Egyptian god Osiris was said to have taught humans how to brew beer. It was used as the common mealtime beverage and in religious ceremonies. Ancient Egyptian beer was most commonly brewed from malted barley and emmer, a type of wheat. Hops were not used in the brewing process at that time. Using variants of their Stage 3 writing process, the Egyptians also recorded numerous instances of alien visitations.

India Indian beer was brewed from rice meal and wheat. Sugar cane and various kinds of fruit were added as sweeteners. Beer was brewed in this manner starting approximately 5,000 years ago. Indian writers of this period gave the world a rich, full bibliography of accounts of alien visitations and sightings of spacecraft. Those ancient accounts include very detailed records of “wars in the heavens” between aliens.

Rome Beer was a common Roman drink for a few hundred years, but they were not particularly good brewers and it did not have the generally pleasant taste of the brews produced in Sumeria, India, and Egypt. Romans later began experimenting with the production of wine and it became the drink of choice for the majority of citizens because they were apparently incapable of brewing a decent jar of beer. The Romans did not leave to history much in the way of literature about alien visitations. After wine drinking became widespread, Roman civilization entered a protracted period of cultural decay, then eventually succumbed to the invasions of robust beer-drinking groups like the Huns, Goths, and Visigoths. The Huns, Goths, and Visigoths left few written records of alien visitations because when they overran the Roman heartland they picked up the nasty habit of drinking the wine they found stored in the cities and farmlands.

Medieval Europe After the fall of Roman civilization, tax collectors in togas and their pernicious propaganda about wine no longer plagued Europeans. Left to their own devices, they began to slowly rebuild and advance human knowledge by returning to the tried-and-true method of brewing beer. In the year 1500, the German Hieronymus Braunschweig published Liber De Arte Destillandi, The Book of the Art of Distillation. This was shortly followed by the passage of the first Reinheitsgebot (German Beer Purity Law) in the city of Ingolstadt, Bavaria on April 23, 1516. The standardization of beer purity via the Reinheitsgebot was the catalyst that accelerated the Renaissance, and allowed the Europeans to colonize and dominate the continents of Australia, North and South America, and the tip of South Africa within a couple hundred years. Although few medieval Europeans were able to read or write, there was a surplus of beer-drinking painters, sketch artists, doodlers, and other illustrators who indulged in the widespread incorporation of illustrations of alien spacecraft in the religious art of the period.

Non-Beer Drinking Societies Due to the enduring influence of Rome, Italians were (and are) wine drinkers. One of the effects of this was the long-term fragmentation of Italy. Italy was a mishmash of small, disorganized city-states for a much longer period than the other nations of Europe. Italy’s attempts at overseas empire building in Albania and North Africa were dismal and complete failures by the 1940s. If only Italy had been able to produce a decent quality beer, things might have been different for Italians. Similarly, France is and was a nation of wine drinkers. France’s attempts to develop overseas colonies all failed. As far as conquest or colonization goes, the only bright spot in France’s history was short lived and largely the result of the efforts of a single man, Napoleon Bonaparte, who was a Corsican, and thus not really either French or Italian. France’s dreams of empire largely died at the same time as Napoleon. Now in the 21st Century, as it has been for over two thousand years, France contains very few beer drinkers, and produces nearly zero documented alien spacecraft sightings. Russia was and is a culture of vodka drinkers. Because they didn’t have the requisite beer drinking population, Russia lost its only overseas colony, Alaska. However, Russia did become an empire, because even without much beer, Russians could walk to places like Irkutsk and Siberia, places no other nation coveted and due to the vast size of the Russian empire, it produced a large amount of documentation of alien visitations and phenomena, including the Tunguska explosion of 1908.

Modern Beer-Drinking Societies The failure of the Beer Hall Putsch eventually, and indirectly led Germany’s National Socialist Party to dominate the country in the early 20th century, then nearly conquer all of Europe. Despite a substantial beer drinking population and a large library of documentation of alien visitations, Germany was defeated in its attempt to dominate Europe. Germany was defeated in 1945 due to the efforts of a coalition of other beer drinking nations; Australia, Canada, The United Kingdom, and the United States. All of the coalition nations possess records of thousands of alien visitations.

Summary Beer, in many forms, styles, and flavors is now readily available to all humans on this planet called Earth. This is a reflection of, and was the cause of the heights of technological innovation humankind has achieved and now enjoys. A photograph of a modern beer reefer, or refrigerator is shown below. A reefer is a device that keeps beer at the constant optimal temperature for the enjoyment of beer drinkers.

The cultures of beer drinkers and brewers have dominated the history of mankind, and in turn, driven civilization and technology to its present high state. Beer drinkers and brewers were also responsible for the accumulation of 10,000 years of documentation of alien visitations, spacecraft, and phenomena, which led to the invention of thousands of religions by the members of primitive cultures. Author’s Note: It is ironic, at the very least, that the collective compulsive obsession of beer drinkers who observed alien spacecraft in the ancient skies, then invented religions to explain the phenomena, will have their religions utterly destroyed by the eventual and inevitable contact with the non-earthling beings who piloted the spacecraft and apparently introduced humankind to the knowledge of brewing.

Typewriters????

This post is an answer to a question posed by an anonymous reader of this blog in the comments section of the One Million Monkeys post. The question was, “What is this typewriter you speak of????” See http://crossingsrralexander.blogspot.com/2010/08/one-million-monkeys.html. This is a serious question for anyone born after 1985, so I feel it is my duty to answer it. To fully explain the historical significance of typewriters as a writing technology, I did extensive research, then placed it in the following timeline.

Typewriters were writing devices that were widely used in the 19th and 20th centuries of the Common Era. An example of an advanced typewriter, the IBM Selectric, is shown below.

The history of writing technologies and the place of typewriters in that history can be thought of as occurring in the following stages.

1. Lump of charcoal on rock. Drawing pictograms on rocks with partially burnt wood. This method of writing was quite impermanent since rain and wind tended to erase the pictograms unless they were applied to the rock walls of caves. When pictograms, drawings of mammoth and antelope hunts, and alien visitations were applied to cave walls they lasted thousands of years. Beer was not typically brewed in caves at that time, so no recipes have survived.

2. The stick and mud method. Writing with a stick in the mud on the banks of a river or creek. This was an impermanent method for obvious reasons; Floods, rainstorms, and sandals all erased the writing in short timeframes. Since they were important sources of water, beer was often brewed near rivers and creeks during this time period, but due to frequent flooding, no recipes have survived.

2A. Stick and mud, advanced. Clay tablets were substituted for mud, then after writing, the tablets were baked. This was a more permanent writing method because the clay tablets lasted thousands of years if protected from moisture. Permanent records of beer recipes and stories about Nimrod and Gilgamesh were recorded this way in Sumeria with cuneiform writing. This writing technology was important to the rise of Sumerian culture, and was illustrated by their most important saying, “Bread And Beer”, which meant that with those two things, mankind would be forever happy.

3. Papyrus and brush. Form reeds into sheets, then write on them with brushes. This was also a more permanent type of writing than the stick and mud method. Being a relatively enlightened culture, the Egyptians used this writing technology to maintain their beer recipes for thousands of years by copying them every hundred years or so.

3A. Paper and pen. Quill pens were used to write with ink on paper sheets made out of cellulose fibers. When cotton was mixed with cellulose fibers, paper could last for hundreds of years, which is why we today have copies of important historical documents such as the Magna Carta and Martin Luther’s recipes for ale.

4. Typewriter. The typewriter was a mechanical device. One pressed a key corresponding to an alphanumeric character, then via a series of metal pivot points and levers, the machine caused the corresponding metal type to strike an inked ribbon held in front of a sheet of paper. This was magic compared to writing with pen and paper, and considerably more uniform than handwritten script. A trained operator could use a typewriter to produce a 250-word beer recipe in five minutes or less! (Author’s Note: Though Ernest Hemingway used a combination of Stage 3A and Stage 4 writing technologies to produce classics such as The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms, he drank very little beer and typed using the two-finger-hunt-and-peck method with his Underwood typewriter. He only averaged 500 words per day when writing his novels. Coincidence? I think not.)

4B. Typewriter, advanced. The advanced typewriter was powered by electricity, rather than heavy pressure applied by fingers. One merely lightly touched the keys to type a character, and the machine used the power of electricity to do the heavy lifting necessary to make the type strike the inked ribbon and paper. One did not develop the fingertip calluses necessary to use the purely mechanical typewriter. Because the development of fingertip calluses was not an integral part of the brewing process, it was simply a waste of time.

5. Word Processor. Word processors were simply electric typewriters that recorded every keystroke in a document onto a cassette tape. One typed a document once and simultaneously recorded it to a cassette tape. Later, when one wanted to give away multiple copies of a new beer recipe, one would put the cassette tape back in the word processor, then print out numerous copies – usually only stopping when one ran out of paper.

5A. Word Processor, advanced. The advanced word processor used 3.5” floppy discs to store documents, rather than cassette tapes. The advantage to this was that one could store hundreds of recipes on one floppy disc, and even include ales and stouts along with the usual lagers and pilsners.

6. Personal Computers. Personal computers were really very advanced word processors, though at this time we began calling particular programs “word processors”. One could then use a dialup telephone connection to post beer recipes on virtual bulletin boards, where they could conceivably be read (and printed out by) hundreds of people.

6B. PC & Internet. This stage is really just an incremental technological advancement of stage 6, but had massive consequences for humankind. Due to advances in computer technology and Internet bandwidth, one could then throw away the damn beer recipes, and simply order a case or two of Blue Moon or Tree Frog beer, and the order would be delivered in a couple days by UPS or FedEx. This freed up the kitchen space formerly used by over 6 Billion people to brew beer, and as a group, homo sapiens began experimenting with cooking more of the various foodstuffs that taste good while drinking beer.

Hidden Valley

This is a reprise of the blog post titled A Missed Setting. The two photos below were taken from Hidden Valley Wildlife Preserve.

I made the photographs in the morning early in October 2010. When I reviewed the images that evening, I discovered that I hadn’t reset the ISO after the previous day’s low light shooting. Everything from the Hidden Valley session was shot at ISO 1600, rather than my usual 100 or 200, and I was annoyed by how grainy the images were.

While sorting through photos a couple days ago I stumbled upon them again, took a good look, and decided that they aren’t as bad as I initially thought.

Random Frames

Sorting through photos from the last year recently, I found a few frames that slipped between the cracks. These are all photos that I like for one reason or another. The first frame is from Red Rock Canyon, Nevada. It didn’t make it into the Red Rock post. I’m not sure why.

The flowers in the photo below are unknown to me, which isn’t particularly unusual. This frame was captured near Nuevo, California.

The photo below is a view of the east side of the Mission Inn in Riverside, California. I had an apartment on this side of the Inn in the winter of 1971-1972 when I first arrived on the West Coast.

The photo below was made in Sycamore Canyon. I thought of it as a “practice” frame when I captured it, but I keep viewing it, so I suspect there’s more to it than that.

The below view is from Anza Narrows. The buildings in the middle distance are in downtown Riverside. The far ridgeline is the San Bernardino Mountains, including Mt. San Gorgonio.

Below, another view from Anza Narrows. The shadow is on Box Springs Mountain. Mt. San Gorgonio is obscured by clouds.

A night photo from my street in Riverside, California. I like the orange light from the streetlamps.

This long view is from Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah.

A Redirect Post: Stolen Photo

I'm not going to make a habit of this. But.


Sometimes I run into an article or blog post that is just so good that I want to share it with my somewhat tight circle of friends in an email. The blog post mentioned below is one of those. 


I started to write an email to my circle about this post, then thought better about it, because it really deserves wider circulation. Not that my blog has a huge readership, but it does have a small number of readers scattered across the globe in places far beyond the confines of the United States in countries such as Russia, China, France, Canada, Viet Nam, Slovenia, South Korea, and Malaysia, for example. I don't know why people in other countries are reading the blog, but I like the fact that they are. If you read this and are from a county other than the USA, please feel free to comment on any post you like (or hate, for that matter), and mention your country. Of course, you can comment if you are in the US - I'm not anti-American, heh, heh... I'd love to hear from you. For instructions on posting a comment see http://crossingsrralexander.blogspot.com/2010/04/posting-comment.html.


In any case, the blog post by Kirk Tuck titled Sometimes getting a photo stolen is flattering. A little. is definitely worth a quick read. Go to http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/ and scroll down to the 5th post (as of November 8, 2010), which has the title mentioned above. 

Anza Views

November 6, 2010. Like every morning, I walked outside to look at the dark sky and decide where to go hiking. The direction I would take depended on the cloud formations. If it didn’t look particularly good for photographs – no clouds, or one big uniform misty dome – I’d head for Sycamore Canyon Wilderness Preserve on the eastern rim of the valley. If the clouds looked likely to produce a photography-friendly sunrise, I’d head for Anza Narrows or Hidden Valley, since both parks have good long views of the valley and the mountains in and around it. The clouds looked promising, so I loaded the saddlebags and rode up to Anza Narrows. I thought for a passing moment about taking the Subaru, then remembered the gate at the park: If it was closed I could only get in with the Road Star, since I could ride in on the sidewalk, bypassing the automobile entrance. When I arrived at the entrance the automobile gates were unlocked. The County apparently doesn’t have enough workers to lock everything up every night. That’s a recent development, brought on by years of government mismanagement at both state and local levels.

Photo above. From left; Mt. San Gorgonio in the San Bernardino Mountains, Box Springs mountain, Mt. San Jacinto in the San Jacinto Mountains. Statistics: ½ second, f/11, ISO 100, -0.3 EV, 28mm (35mm equivalent).

Photo above. Left: Box Springs Mountain. Center, far distance: Mt. San Jacinto. Statistics:1/4 second, f/22, ISO 100, 67mm (equiv.).

Photo above. Mt. San Jacinto. Statistics: 1/13 second, f/11,ISO 100, +0.3 EV,157mm (equiv.)

Golden Hour

This post appeared earlier. I updated the search terms, and the editing software stuck it here. Nothing I can do about it, though it is now out of sequence. Let's pretend this is a "feature" of the editing software, rather than a "bug".
In photography, the first and last hour of sunlight during the day is known as the Golden Hour. At those times, when the sun is near the horizon, the light appears softer and warmer, and shadows are longer. "Hour" is used quite loosely, since the length of the warm light varies with cloud cover and latitude.

The photographs in this post were made in the golden hour around sunrise.

In landscape photography, the warm glow of the low Sun is considered desirable because of the way it enhances the colors of a scene.

Although generally warm, the color palette of the golden hour can vary widely depending on atmospheric conditions.

All of the photos in this post were made while hiking on Mt. Rubidoux. For more information about Mt. Rubidoux, see http://www.mt-rubidoux.org/.

In cinematography, this lighting is called the "magic hour". The 1978 Terrence Malick film, Days Of Heaven was photographed in golden hour light.

A Hunt For Herons

The photos in this post are from a group ride on Saturday October 23, 2010. For a number of reasons it was a poorly-attended ride. Only three of us, all at least 58 years old, could make it to the assembly point in Banning, California. The object of the ride was to photograph the clouds of Herons, specifically Snowy Egrets that during other years gathered on the shoreline of the Salton Sea in the Fall. In the photo below, taken by Dan Underwood, Mike Harmon (shading his eyes) and I (back to camera) search the shoreline near an old resort, now a community center, on the north east end of the inland sea.

Below: Startled when I walked too close, a Snowy Egret took flight.

In all, I counted only six Herons all day. It was a poor showing, but we were perhaps a few weeks early. Below, a single Snowy Egret stood on a wooden pole emerging from the water near a group of Pelicans.

We rode around the sea, stopping to look for the favored waterfowl at the Sonny Bono National Wildlife Refuge. Below: A view of the Refuge’s marshland from the observation platform at the south end of the sea. Nearly a mile from the shore at the platform, it was too muddy to chance riding our heavy road bikes any closer, and we were running out of time to walk to the edge of the water, though we could hear thousands of water birds hidden in the rushes.

The photo below shows the thick growth of “cattail” rushes. The rushes reminded me of my grandfather, who in the 1950s, gathered the rushes and used them to cane the seats of antique chairs, though that was nearly 3,000 miles from the Salton Sea.

Before leaving on the ride I had commented to Lisa that when it is only the “old guys” riding, it is often a somewhat slower, more relaxed ride. Oddly, that ride was over a hundred miles longer than our typical ride. My theory for the longer distance is that we got so involved in looking for Herons that we forgot to make the usual stop for beer…

Review: Velocity Micro's Cruz Reader

This isn’t much of a review of the Cruz Reader. But it is a review of the business and customer support practices of Velocity Micro, the company that makes the Cruz. The Cruz shown in the photo below was bought by my wife Lisa, as a birthday present for me in September 2010. I had done a good deal of research on eReaders and the Cruz looked like it would be the right eReader for me. In addition to being an eReader, it had a color screen which I could use to display photographs, would display Office documents, and would do email.

The Cruz arrived in twice the time paid for: Lisa paid for two-day delivery. It took four days to arrive, which is typical of UPS, in my experience. The Cruz seemed to be working properly for approximately 48 hours, then the WiFi went south (and no, it wasn’t dropped, heated, or hammered upon, etc.). Without the WiFi working properly, the Cruz was of little use to me since I couldn’t easily download books, Office documents could not be displayed because the Android application that handles that is Web-based, and email was impossible because it requires some sort of internet connection. After several phone sessions with Velocity Micro (VM) support technicians it became obvious that I had a defective Cruz. Other devices such as an iPod Touch and a netbook had no problem connecting with my WiFi network, whose signal strength was listed as “Excellent” by the Cruz. I spent a dozen hours field testing the Cruz over a three day period before giving up. During that period of field testing I had reconfigured my router, rebooted the unit and performed hardware resets multiple times, and installed the firmware update, all to no avail. When I contacted VM yet again to arrange to return the unit, I was informed that there was a 15% restocking fee. I sent an email message to the person I was told was the manager of Cruz Technical Support, an “Ellen”. I asked Ellen to waive the $30 restocking fee (15% of $200) since the Cruz I had received was defective. I received no response, though I had given my telephone number and email address. Several days later we received an email message from VM, which began with “Congratulations!”. VM had credited back $170 and retained the $30 “restocking fee”. Two more times into the breach: I phoned VM tech support and asked the tech for “Ellen”. The tech said she would connect me to Ellen’s voice mail. I told her I didn’t want to talk to a machine, that I wanted to talk to a manager who could be responsive. She replied that Ellen wasn’t available at that time. I asked when I could call back and she would be available. The tech replied, “Never”. That seemed somewhat less than helpful, so I located the email contact information for the President of VM (no phone number was available via the Website). I wrote to the President explaining my experience with the Cruz, and again asked that the “restocking fee” be credited back to us. I received the following message via email the next day.

That email arrived 12 days ago, as of this writing, on 10/12/2010. I have received no response from the President of Velocity Micro.

The Bottom Line: Because we took a chance on the Cruz Reader, and it is apparently the policy of Velocity Micro to “rip off“ customers who receive defective units, we are now out over $50 (the “restocking fee” and shipping two ways). Velocity Micro is incredibly unresponsive. It is quite apparent that it simply does not care about its customers. But it is not too late. Velocity Micro still has time to return the money we lost and redeem itself for its robber baron business practices. Mr. or Ms. President of Velocity Micro, I am still waiting…

Freckles

It may just be my viewpoint (and it wouldn’t be the first time), but doesn’t it seem that current print media has an unfounded prejudice against freckles? Before I show examples of that prejudice, let me state that the photos in this post are not mine. I made photos of magazine pages for illustration purposes only, and the photo copyrights do not belong to me. Both images are of ads for photo retouching software. Also, these were made very quickly by shooting the magazines on my concrete driveway in diffused light. I believe that they illustrate my point, though someone like Kirk Tuck (http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/) would no doubt have done a better job, producing somewhat clearer images. As usual, click on the photos to see larger versions. In the first image the “before” photo looks quite good to me. The “after” photo with all of the woman’s freckles removed simply looks wrong to me. It gives the woman an almost alien appearance (as in non-human, possibly non-Terran). The after photo is the result of too much altering of the image. Like an overproduced recording of a rock band, it strips away raw vitality and leaves something unreal.

In the photo below someone in the art department, showing off their skill with the retouching software, has cleverly used a single photo to show both before and after and help the ad fit a single column of the magazine. I think it is an effective ad, and shows exactly what the retouching software can do, but it is based on the idea that there is something wrong with freckles.

I have the opposite viewpoint. I think the freckling on both women’s faces just augments their natural beauty. To my eye, the second photo is the worst offender, because it presents the largest difference; a photo of a woman who is quite beautiful, and a photo of a woman who doesn’t exist. My viewpoint may well be cultural. I’m a Caucasian, and find Caucasian women to be beautiful and freckling often augments that beauty in my eyes.