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A few thoughts from a weekend visit to Manhattan…

Metropolitan Museum: Gertrude Stein exhibit (see it); new Islamic art wing (nice, but the non-expert may have trouble understanding why these particular objects are different than those decorative items one might see in a wealthy Turkish home, for example); Byzantium and Islam show (skip; any connections between Byzantine/Christian art and Islamic art are tough to see); Naked before the Camera (skip; photographs from the Met’s collection in which people happen to appear naked); Fu Baoshi (see it; the career of a Chinese artist develops during the Communist revolution).

MOMA: Diego River murals (see it, especially for the sketches from a 1927 visit to Moscow (Rivera was a devout Marxist)); Cindy Sherman exhibit (sad because the late 1970s small scale black and white untitled film stills were the best work; the more recent pictures taken with super high-res cameras and blessed with unlimited printing and framing budgets were hard to understand).

Seminar: Funny script, brilliant acting (especially from Zoe Lister-Jones). Alan Rickman has been replaced by Jeff Goldblum, but in some ways he seems better for the role due to the need for him to be attractive to a couple of young women. The ending is a little weak/confusing.

I noticed, apparently rather late, that the Triborough Bridge has been renamed the “RFK Bridge”. It made me kind of sad that the U.S. is building so little new stuff that we have to find something built in the 1930s and rename it. It also saddened me that the current crop of politicians is so uninspiring that we have to keep reaching back to the 1960s and naming more stuff after the Kennedys. (My companion in the taxi, not a U.S. citizen, pointed out that it would have been more sensible to rename the Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick after Ted Kennedy.)

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I went to see Jeff Who Lives at Home with a friend the other night. She has been a W2 employee her whole life. I have spent much of my working career as a business owner. Spoiler ALERT. In one scene, a character talks about a desire to be kissed under a waterfall. A work colleague who has a crush on her sets off the sprinkler system and fire alarm, forcing an evacuation of the cubicle farm and enabling the potential lovers to kiss under the sprinkler. My employee friend teared up at the beautiful romance of the idea. I cringed in horror as I thought about all of the PCs and other equipment that were being destroyed as well as the lost productivity. I did weep, but it was for the shareholders.

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Folks: If you know any young people interested in getting a start in the aviation industry, please forward this aviation internship to them. Thanks.

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I ran into a friend the other day who was nursing her new baby. Her elementary school-age son was across the table from her and full of questions regarding wet nurses. It seems that the boy had been wondering why his other parent (also a woman) had not also been nursing the new baby. Apparently a full explanation had not been forthcoming.

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My Canon 5D Mark III arrived yesterday from Adorama (also available from amazon.com but shipping date is unclear). I immediately took it out in the bright sunshine and tested the autoexposure system in the high-contrast conditions that often resulted in exposure errors of more than two f-stops by the 5D Mark II. The Mark III handled these conditions beautifully.

The amazing new autofocus system is not all that amazing for taking pictures of children (my subject). There are 61 autofocus points but the probability that the camera chooses the one that corresponds to your subject’s eye is very small (about 1 in 61!). The $3500 camera actually has face-detection capability (just like a $100 camera!), but as far as I can tell it is only available in the video mode. This is presumably because the sensor doesn’t see the image until the mirror flips up, but in any case it is not really a wonderful thing to have a picture of a child with a perfectly focused elbow and an out of focus face.

The silent operation mode is very nice. I’ve heard enough SLR mirror slap to last me the rest of my life.

A huge number of the camera’s features relate to post-processing of the image, e.g., optimizing for tone and contrast or correcting for lens design shortcomings. The 400-page manual does not make it clear if these settings have any effect on RAW files or if they are only applicable to JPEGs produced in the camera.

The switch layout is slightly different than on the Mark II camera and the menu layout is dramatically different. Some of the differences relate to giving more priority to video capture with a big “still/video” switch on the back of the body. The baroque custom function interface of previous bodies has been cleaned up.

Overall it is impressive that the camera, part of the first batch shipped to the U.S., works at all. If this amount of new software were delivered by a typical software company, there would be daily required patches!

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I noted that New York Times is reducing the number of articles available to non-subscribers to 10 per month (from 20). An 11th article is supposed to result in hitting the paywall. But anyone who downloads the free Google Chrome browser can just right-click to open an article in “incognito” mode. Given that an unlimited number of articles are available for free simply by choosing incognito mode in the popular Chrome browser, why are 450,000 people paying them $250 per year (source)? Do subscribers (I’m not one of them) see fewer ads? Fewer interstitial ads? Or is it just that they want to support the newspaper?

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I read in the news today that the a group of U.S. government workers are going to collect tariffs on Chinese-made solar panels. This group will presumably supplement those federal and state government workers whose job it has been to stimulate demand for those same solar panels with tax subsidies. Could this be the magic recipe for a government of infinite size?

[I still want a solar panel system for my roof, but I’m waiting until I can buy it at Home Depot or Lowe’s and I really would like to use it as a source of backup power, though it seems that isn’t practical.]

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Four friends and I went to the Boston Lyric Opera‘s Barber of Seville last night. It is a fantastic experience that compares very favorably to anything in New York City. One nice thing about the BLO is that the production is in a theater closer in size to the venues for which Rossini wrote. The Metropolitan Opera is wonderful, but the theater is so large that I often feel that I would have gotten a better view staying home and watching on television. Also, the singers have to work a lot harder to be heard adequately in such a large space. The show closes on March 18th (Saturday night), so hurry to get tickets!

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… and I haven’t even gotten it yet. I’ve placed an order with Adorama for a Canon EOS 5D Mark III and expect to have the new full-frame body in about three weeks. I was never in love with my 5D Mark II, which was subject to massive autoexposure errors in contrasty outdoor scenes (i.e., the very conditions in which most families would be taking photos) and whose autofocus system was at best fair. From what I’ve read about the 5D Mark III I’m already a bit disappointed. Despite having a massive battery and enormous processing power, the camera lacks an 802.11 modem. A $49 Android phone can trickle JPEGs up to Google+ for sharing with friends, etc.; why can’t a $3500 camera? I’m sure the image quality will be higher than from a camera phone, but the workflow for simple photography tasks will be vastly worse.

I will try to write more after I receive the camera from Adorama.

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I decided to try out Carbonite for online backup of a desktop PC. The machine has a 160 GB solid state C: drive and a 2 TB traditional hard drive. After 1.5 months, Carbonite is about 74 percent done with the initial backup (about 300 GB total?). The seasonal pace of the backup isn’t a serious problem for me, but the fact that the software has built up a 31 GB log file on the C: drive is. WinDirStat (awesome free software) shows that this single carbonite.log file is now larger than all of Microsoft Windows 7. I spent two hours this morning in chat with Carbonite support (in Lewiston, Maine) and was eventually simply disconnected. I tried another couple of hours on hold with their technical support phone line, but never reached anyone with any technical knowledge.

I’ve tailed out this log file and it doesn’t seem as though it could be useful to a computer program. It has entries such as

1330816462 # 7336:Backup progress: completed 1%, file counts last 1:41:31 A
ll: 42 (490M bytes) Unique: 42 (490M bytes), Compressed: 499M bytes.
1330816462 # 7336:Backup progress: remaining 12 days, file counts All: 1030
722 (174G bytes), Pending: 290 (58G bytes).
1330816476 # 6824:Pending file "K:\AdobeMediaCacheFilesFromCDrive0076.MTS
48000.cfa" (C3463626-S3445-F1214382-G1-V1:V1).
1330816476 # 7224:PutFile: Backed up part 1 of file/folder "K:\AdobeMediaCa
cheFilesFromCDrive0075.MTS 48000_1.cfa" (C3463626-S3445-F1214380-G1-V1, 129 bl
ocks).
1330816476 # 7224:Backed up file "K:\AdobeMediaCacheFilesFromCDrive0075.M
TS 48000_1.cfa" (C3463626-S3445-F1214380-G1-V1:V1), size 8M, sent 10M (126%).
1330816479 # [Activity] 7232:CPU usage: 0% process, 3% system
1330816479 # [Activity] 7232:DISK usage: 366892 bytes/sec process, 644193 b
ytes/sec system
1330816509 # [Activity] 7232:CPU usage: 0% process, 2% system
1330816509 # [Activity] 7232:DISK usage: 139762 bytes/sec process, 37003 by
tes/sec system
1330816512 = 18:15:12

I’m reluctant simply to delete the file, however, because I’m afraid that it might cause Carbonite to start over and throw away 1.5 months of uploading. The software does not seem to have any settings where one can specify that a drive other than C: be used for logging.

Thoughts on this? Or suggestions of an alternative to Carbonite that won’t result in unchecked consumption of C: drive space?

[November 1, 2012 update: After seven months, Carbonite has managed to back up 384 MB of data and still has 88 MB to go. Buried deep within the Carbonite web site, very far from anyone making a purchase decision, is a disclosure that bandwidth is throttled at 100 kbps or 1 GB per day. So while Carbonite technically is “unlimited” in its ability to back up a desktop PC, it will take 2000 days (5.5 years) to back up a standard 2 TB hard drive. A photographer who captures more than 40 digital SLR RAW files per day will never be backed up. A parent who takes more than 8 minutes of HD video from a compact digital camera (AVCHD format) per day will never be backed up. Carbonite never developed a fix for the “creates huge log file on C: drive” problem, though maybe it is by design. If Carbonite itself fills up the C: drive then the user can’t add too many photos and videos!]

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