Monthly Archives: April 2018

Checking Out the Sharks’ next Opponent

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While working on, well, work, I’ve got the Nashville-Winnipeg game on. It’s been a pretty good game. Gritty but not dirty, some good skating, each team making the other pay for mistakes. Hockey.

The winner of this game will play the Sharks, after San Jose despoils Cinderella.

I’m not sure who I’m rooting for. On the one hand, Winnipeg may be the most miserable sports city, and as a former resident of San Diego I have to feel for people whose teams always lose the way San Diego teams do, but who also don’t live in San Diego. That would really suck.

But Nashville fans have a song for everything. Seems like every tape-to-tape pass has the fans singing the “Nashville Tape-to-Tape song.” And the whole damn arena sings. It might be the best fan experience in North American sports. (Don’t tell Las Vegas, because dang they’re building an awesome fan experience in the way only Las Vegas can.) Nashville is the hockey arena I’d most like to visit for a game.

On the other hand, I’m more afraid of Nashville. This might be naive; Winnipeg is really good this year. But Nashville has been a problem for a long time now.

On the other hand…

There are an infinite number of hands. I’m enjoying a good hockey game, and both these teams deserve to be here. Either will be a challenge for the Sharks. Either will make for a fun series.

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A few thoughts about the Sharks/Knights series currently under way:

One of the great things about being a fan of a team is having rivals. I hate the Ducks and I HATE the Kings. Then there’s fuckin’ Buffalo, a hapless team that somehow keeps beating the Sharks (although now we have their best player). Las Vegas is new; they have no historic slights to fume over. I volunteer my team to be the team the Las Vegas Knights fans learn to hate. Step 1: Knock them out of the playoffs.

I call the Las Vegas Franchise the “Las Vegas Knights”. It is a far better name than the official title: the “Vegas Golden Knights”. “Las Vegas Knights” speaks to the character of the town itself; it echoes the allure of being there. It sounds like the title to a novel — or a memoir — or a song — or… It sounds like Las Vegas. Eventually the Las Vegas franchise will fix their name.

Talk about home ice advantage — whoo boy that city knows how to put on a show. To build the drama before the opening game of this series, they had a really cool lighting effect that made it look like a huge shark was swimming under the ice. Of course in their show the shark was eventually slain, but San Jose should seriously steal that effect.

While I think you would be hard-pressed to find a resident of the Las Vegas metropolitan area who agrees with me, there is supposed to be hardship when a team is first getting started. Without that hardship you can’t have fans who can say “I was with the team back when…” It’s the lean times that scar a true fan. (Scars are cool, right?)

I kind of feel sorry for the Raiders, trying to move football into a rabid hockey town.

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Took My Data Privacy Training Today

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The European Union is enacting a new policy concerning the way companies treat the personal information of their customers. Today I went through the training to make sure I understood what those rules meant to me.

Spoiler: nothing new. But there are a lot of other companies in this neighborhood that are probably scrambling. I’ll name names later.

The new privacy training was pretty much exactly the same as the previous data privacy training I have gone through, with the exception that there is a new report to fill out to make the decision process on using customer data visible to the outside world. There is also a new portal so people can see all the data my employer has collected on them, and request that that data be deleted.

But overall, the new privacy regulations in Europe might have been written by my company, they match our existing policy so closely.

Remember back when Google was “accidentally” collecting information about open home WiFi networks? Accidentally in this case means accidentally creating database tables and queries to store that information. I mean hey, accidents happen. That was a while ago, but that shit is really not going to fly now.

Hey! So much for “later”. I’m naming names.

The regulations go something like this:

  1. You have to spell out what you will be using the data for BEFORE you collect it.
  2. You have to protect that data.
  3. You have to let people see the data and tell you to delete it.

The Google thing was years ago. (There are plenty of current investigations, however.) But hey, remember last week when an Android user discovered Facebook was recording the recipient and duration of all his phone calls? Yeah, the beat goes on. In the aftermath of that I downloaded my own information and there were only a couple of surprises, none shocking. Hint: I don’t use Android.

At Google they must HATE Facebook for being so damn sloppy and leaking data all over the place, rather than just efficiently selling it. Regulators are swarming! Maybe now Google might consider putting in place basic security measures to prevent apps from rooting through shit that is none of their business.

My Facebook information was mostly unsurprising, but I suppose it’s possible that in the last few days Facebook has decided that fraudulently withholding some of the data they have collected on me is better than confessing to all of their shenanigans. Ironically, the ability for people to download their information was probably implemented by Facebook to comply with the new regulations. Sadly for them, the more people who download their personal info, the more trouble will arise for Facebook.

I encourage everyone to request a data download from Facebook. And from Apple, and from Google, and from Amazon. Probably Ebay, too, and the list goes on.

For the rest of this episode, I am full-on partisan. Just so you know. But there’s nothing I’m going to say that is not easily documented.

Google has a vast amount of data on you. If you use Google Wallet, downloading your data might be downright scary; if you use ApplePay instead you will find a big empty nothin’ concerning your spending habits. Apple built it so that it was not possible for them to learn anything about you from your spending. It was not easy to do.

I work for Apple. I am proud that my company puts privacy over profit — that HomeKit is slow to be adopted because it protects privacy and home-gadget manufacturers want to profit from personal data (and the hacking-resistance of HomeKit is more expensive to implement — something I’m also fine with), and I am proud that ApplePay was first out of the gate but isn’t growing as fast as the competitors because privacy requirements make it harder for banks to join in. Apple is losing money protecting privacy.

Unless protecting privacy becomes law. Then, suddenly, my employer is in the catbird seat, having built its information structure around privacy from the get-go. Apple has put a lot of systems in place to make sure they cannot collect large categories of personal data. Currently that data is an asset that they are failing to exploit. In the future, that data will be an onerous responsibility for any company that holds it. I hope so, anyway.

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The Second Intelligence

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Alice scratched her hide behind her earpatch with an idle claw, the way she did when she was distracted. Danny had done it again. The fishmother spawn of worms had taken her scientific paper and written a bestseller — neglecting, of course, to mention, except in very small footnotes, where his ideas had come from.

She tried to look on the bright side. If people understood that the First Intelligence had destroyed itself, that was something worth spreading. The Second Intelligence, her own people, should learn from that.

“Miss?” The earnest student watched Alice over his notepad. “Were you not aware of Mr. Burrowmaster’s work?”

“I’d hardly call it work,” Alice said, “But no, I have not read it yet. I’m not sure I will.”

“Really? It seems like something you would be interested in.”

“It seems like something I’ve already published.” Alice immediately regretted her unprofessional words. The people who mattered would know already; she was supposed to be above the bog of petty popularity. She wrapped her tail around herself and gripped it will all four hands.

“Could you explain Mr. Burrowmaster’s ideas?”

They were not his ideas. Alice took a breath. “Danny draws on a lot of research from field scientists like me. I think… I know… We know now that we are the second intelligence on this planet. We know the first intelligence disappeared suddenly. What I demonstrated with my research is that there is a singularity in the ice record. We have geological evidence now that there were glaciers in the past, but they disappeared quite suddenly.”

The student paused in his scribbling. “Can you explain glaciers for my readers?”

“You have seen ice, yes? Imagine great masses of it, collecting on mountain tops and slowly flowing down like a terribly slow, unstoppable river, carrying massive rocks and carving valleys. There used to be a lot of ice, we can tell by the valleys the glaciers left behind. We have to assume it all melted. That moment in geological time, give or take a million years, is when the first intelligence abruptly ended.”

“A million years?”

“It was a long time ago; it is difficult to be precise. But the evidence is overwhelming: They heated the world and melted all the ice, then they died. Countless species died then, to be replaced with a new countless. We should all understand that, lest we fall in the same trap.”

“Gustav Mudman believes that radioactivity killed them.”

Alice was impressed that the reporter for the university rag had done such thorough research, but it was time to bring him back to the fold of science. “Since the discovery of radioactive elements a decade ago it has been very popular to imbue them with every conceivable supernatural power. But there is no mechanism for them to suddenly rise up and destroy a civilization.”

“But there is the radioactive stripe.”

Alice rolled her eyes. “It is not a stripe, no matter what the popular press would have you believe. It is a hint, here and there, that perhaps a hundred million years ago there was a brief period on Earth where radioactive isotopes were more common. It would be foolish to place too great an import on that.”

The young reporter gathered himself. “Mr. Burrowmaster believes that the timing of the radioactive stripe, the disappearance of the ice on Earth, and the demise of the First Intelligence are too close to be coincidence. He thinks when the ice melted it created an upheaval that led to a war with radioactive weapons, that ultimately no mammal survived.”

“It’s a pretty picture,” Alice said, “But it’s purely conjecture.”

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Old Lenses on New Cameras – A Beginner’s Guide

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When considering whether to buy a “vintage” lens to put on a modern camera body, there are a few things to consider:

1) Will it work at all?
2) Assuming it works, what lens should I get?
3) How do I take good pictures with this thing?

This episode is to answer question 1. It’s the simplest.

When electronic auto-focus was invented, camera and lens manufacturers rushed to produce systems that took advantage of the technology. The lenses weren’t necessarily optically better, but they were a heck of a lot more convenient. Nowadays, auto-focus performance is one of the things lenses and cameras are graded on, and it can allow photographers to get shots they never would have before. Cameras can actually track a moving object and keep the focus on it.

But what became of all those old manual-focus lenses?

They’re still out there, sitting in closets and gathering dust in pawn shops, forgotten. And while optical and manufacturing technology has advanced in the last few decades, there are some very nice lenses that can be had for a very good price.

But before you go diving through eBay, scratching your head over Russian-made bargains and obscure Japanese masterpieces, there are a few fundamental questions you need to answer. The most important is, “Will this lens work on my camera?”

The question is pretty simple to answer, but first there are a few things you need to understand. They aren’t complicated, so pretty quickly you will be able to build a list of which lens mounts work for you.

A brief aside: The answer to the question “Can I make this work on my camera?” is always yes. You can find a way. HOWEVER, some lenses will require an adapter that has yet more lenses in it, which will cost a lot and impact the quality of the photo. So I’m concentrating here on simple mechanical adapters that don’t have any glass elements themselves.

Most of the “will it fit?” answer is simple geometry. Each lens is designed to fit on a hole on the front of a camera. The two key measurements of that hole are how big it is, and how far from the film or the sensor the hole is. If the lens expects a smaller hole than the one on the front of your camera, no problem. If it needs a bigger hole, you’re out of luck — you can’t enlarge the hole in the front of your camera without a saw.

Similarly, the lens expects to be a certain distance from the film (this is often called the flange distance or register). If your lens expects to be farther from the sensor, that’s fine; the adapter can push it farther back. If it needs to be closer, then even if you find an adapter the lens is going to be poking down into the guts of your camera, which is not good.

There is a tricky range where the lens expects to be just a tiny bit farther from the film, and in this range, though it’s theoretically possible to make an adapter, the adapter would have to be so thin it’s not practical to manufacture.

For example, my camera body has a Canon EF mount. The flange distance is 44.00mm, and the diameter is a mighty 54mm. I can safely assume that it will be easy to mount any lens that expects to be 45mm or farther from the camera, and needs a hole less than 54mm. There is a range between 44 and 45mm that is dicey; the metal used to make the adapter has to be extremely thin. (That’s too bad, because There’s a Minolta lens at 44.5 that I really want. It’s a magical lens, a lens that literally* redefines bokeh.)

You don’t have to go through the will-it-fit calculation every time, of course. I happen to know that old lenses with the very-common M42 mount work just fine on my camera with an adapter that costs maybe $5 or less. Therefore one of my common eBay search terms is “M42”. Here is a list with many of the mounts you will encounter. If you shoot with a Canon EF, the size of the hole is never an issue (the EF hole is very large), so this even more comprehensive list may be helpful.

Suddenly you have a very long list of great lenses to choose from! There are a couple more things to take into account, however.

When you are shooting, it is best to focus your shot with the lens aperture wide open. That means that when most lenses are “at rest” they are all the way open. Older lenses have a mechanical link to the camera, either a pin or a lever that is activated before the shutter releases, that closes the aperture down to your selected value.

Obviously modern electronic cameras lack that linkage. However, most lenses also have a button on the side of the barrel that closes the aperture. The original intent was to allow the photographer to get a better feel for the depth of focus they would be getting for the shot, but you can hold that down when you fire the shutter and get the f-stop you want. Pushing sideways on the lens is a great way to get unwanted camera shake, however.

As an alternative, you can look for lenses with “preset” in the description. These are lenses that allow you to disable the aperture mechanism (or sometimes these lenses just don’t have that mechanism). My Mir-42 is a good example of one of these; I can get the focus wide-open and then flip the switch on the side to put it into preset mode. Once that’s done I can shoot normally.

So now you have a couple of keywords to look for when searching for old manual-focus lenses. You know which lenses will physically fit on your camera, and you know which ones will be easier to work with. That won’t help you figure out which lens you should buy, but it will sure rule out a bunch you should not.

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* yes, literally.

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