Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

Gubernator Arnold Schwarzenegger signed on Wednesday a bill to ban the production and sale of foie gras in California in 2012. The bill was pushed by his outgoing horse-trading partner, Democratic state senator John Burton. The highly dubious rationale is that the force-feeding of ducks or geese to produce foie gras is “cruel”. I can think of many culinary preparations that would qualify, such as lobsters or crabs boiled alive. Then again, many more people eat crustaceans than foie gras, thus they are not as safe a target for a grandstanding politician who has no compunctions about trying to stuff his unwanted offspring down San Francisco voters’ throats.

I think the last thing San Francisco’s stricken economy needs is another coup de grâce to its’ restaurants, one of the few local industries that can (just barely) survive its business-hostile climate (our restaurateur mayor Gavin Newsom seems to agree). In the meantime, better to make your reservations at the French Laundry while you still can. In seven years’ time, the only place you will be able to get your fix will be from shady characters in the dark alleys of the Tenderloin, if its gentrification is not complete by then. If you think foie gras is expensive today…

Since Gizmodo isn’t going to ask me that question anytime soon, and since I haven’t written a blog entry in all of September yet, I have decided to take matters in my own hands.

I carry the following in the pockets of my jacket:

• PalmOne Zire 72: far better ergonomics in practice than my previous Sony Clié UX50
• A pair of Maui Jim sunglasses (changed recently from a pair of Serengeti driver’s). The shades are polarized and mirrored to minimize glare, and have an incredibly flexible and lightweight “Flexon” nitinol memory-alloy frame. I got mine in bronze tinted glasses — they are also availabe in a darker neutral gray, but the warmer tint was more comfortable.
• A Sony-Ericsson T68i cell phone, somewhat dated but perfectly functional (this means a synchronized phone book thanks to iSync). It alsod provides my Zire 72 with Internet access via Bluetooth and GPRS.
• A PQI Intelligent Stick 256MB USB flash drive, small enough to fit in my wallet
• Three fountain pens in a leather case, a Montblanc Meisterstück (Aurora black ink), a Waterman Edson (Herbin Vert Pré green) and a S.T. Dupont (Private Reserve Naples blue).

My gadget bag is a Tumi expandable messenger bag. It holds:

• Contax T3: This diminutive 35mm film camera has a superlative Carl Zeiss 35mm f/2.8 Sonnar lens. Compact digital cameras are based on small sensors with high levels of electronic noise, and are totally unsuited to low-light shooting in available light.
• A Pedco Ultrapod mini folding tripod with a built-in ball head. Small and light, but quite versatile.
• Leica Trinovid BC 8×20 binoculars: these ultra-compact folding binoculars have excellent optics and can be used by eyeglass wearers thanks to their innovative fold-out eyecup design.
• A Moleskine pocket notebook
• An Edmund Optics Hastings triplet 10x folding magnifier, with high resolution and excellent achromatic correction.
• An Alumicolor pocket architect’s scale, metric, of course, and a self-winding tape measure.
• A Faber-Castell e-motion mechanical pencil: its thick 1.4mm lead makes it glide across paper and its cigar shape is very ergonomic.
• Surefire L1 LumaMax LED flashlight: I used to have mini Mag-Lites, but these flashlights, derived from military and law enforcement versions, have much more power (two beam intensities) and an even beam without dark spots. Ideal for reading. The only downside is they run off Lithium batteries, which can be hard to find (but Surefire will sell them to you in bulk at a significant discount).
• Apple iPod 15GB, with either Etymotic Research ER-4P or Bang & Olufsen earphones. The in-ear Etymotics offer significant passive noise suppression (ideal for airplane use) but are dangerous to use in environments where you need to hear some ambient noise for safety reasons, like when you are in the street. Ordinary earphones like those supplied with the iPod don’t stay put, the clip on the B&O ones will keep them in place. They also have excellent efficiency and sound quality.
• Böker Orion Ti-Carbone pocket knife. The Boy Scouts were started as an imperialist means of youth mass regimentation, much like the Nazi Hitlerjügend, Fascist Balilla or Soviet Komsomol. That does not make their motto “Be Prepared” less apt, and a pocket knife is always handy. While at it, why not get a good looking one like this carbon-fiber and anodized titanium-aluminum alloy one? Just remember to take it out before a flight…
• A Socket Bluetooth GPS receiver. This tiny gizmo (smaller than my T68i) has a rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery and will last over 6 hours on a charge. Combined with the free Cetus GPS software for PalmOS, it makes a decent handheld combo that can still be used with a phone. I have yet to look closely at navigation software for the Palm.

Update (2004-09-30):

Somebody at Gizmodo clearly has a sense of humor…

Update (2005-07-10):

I have altered my standard gadget bag configuration. The messenger bag is wider than deep, and does not hug the hips well, not to mention the weight. I now use a Tumi expandable messenger bag (apparently discontinued). This bag is deeper than wide, which gives it a low center of gravity and improves handling. The flap with magnetic closures looks hip, but is in practice more of a hindrance than anything (you cannot put anything substantial in the flap otherwise it stiffens and does not snap shut any more), and I am considering getting a Waterfield Designs Vertigo instead. The bag’s liner for expansion acts as a form of padding, which is just great as I now pack either a Leica MP with a 50mm Summilux-M ASPH or a Canon Digital Rebel XT with a 35mm f/1.4L.

Many gadgets from the bigger bag did not make the cut. The Edmunds loupe, Surefire flashlight, Faber-Castell pencil did. The regular Moleskine was replaced by the thinner notebook with a soft cover. The iPod — well, the only time I ever use an iPod is during long flights

Update (2012-03-16):

For some odd reason people still read this post (perhaps this has to do with the EDC craze), so I may as well post an update.

I still use the Tumi Messenger bag for work, at least when it is raining. I have way too many bags and will use one or the other depending on the mood and how much stuff I need to carry. I have also taken to wearing Scottevest jackets, which have absolutely gargantuan capacity.

My EDC camera is a Fuji X100, that I keep in my jacket pocket. Excellent optics, high quality sensor. It’s bulkier than a Contax T3, but more versatile than the Leica X1 it replaced. I keep a Manfrotto Modopocket miniature folding tripod, although I have been testing a Gorillapod Micro 800.

I replaced the binoculars with a Leica Monovid, which is lighter, and for someone with a strong dominant eye, makes little difference.

The Moleskine was replaced with a Rhodia Webnotebook with dot grid pages. The dot grid is less obtrusive than squared paper, and the Rhodia paper from Clairefontaine is leagues ahead of the kind Moleskine uses. It doesn’t feather with fountain pens, for starters.

The Surefire L1 was replaced by a tiny Fenix E05 AAA flashlight with a nice floody beam that I keep on my keychain, along with a  now discontinued Leatherman Squirt S4 (the scissors on the S4 are way more useful to me than pliers) and a minimalist PNY 16GB USB flash drive.

The iPod, Palm, GPS and cell phone were replaced by an iPhone 4 and an iPad 3. I seldom listen to music on the go, so the Etymotic ER-4P or B&W P5 headphones more often than not don’t make the cut.

This is my first public alpha release of my feed aggregator, Temboz. It is still rough on the edges, but I have been using it with success for the past 5 months. For a taste of the user interface, you can try the read-only public preview of the last 50 articles I found interesting (opens in a new window).

Bread is the staff of life. – Jonathan Swift

Atkins faddists notwithstanding, bread has been with us ever since mankind migrated from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture, and to urban civilization, its corollary. Bread plays an important role in religious symbolism, from the unleavened bread of Jewish Passover, the transsubstantiation of Christ and the Lord’s Prayer, or Muslim tradition according to which the cause of Adam’s expulsion from Eden was wheat, not apples. The emblem of the Nizam of Hyderabad, my parents’ birthplace, was a “kulcha”, a sort of flat bread. Legend has it, a hermit prophesied the Nizam’s dynasty would last for seven generations because its founder ate seven kulchas while the hermit’s guest.

You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread. – Henry Miller

The Bay Area is gifted with a plethora of artisan bakers, preparing all sorts of delights from the Noe Valley Bakery cherry-chocolate bread, to the more touristy (but perfectly acceptable) Boudin sourdough bread. There is even a website dedicated to local bakeries (it does not seem to have been updated very recently, however). Indeed, America has San Francisco to thank for the artisan bread revolution, started by Alice Waters and Acme Bread, just as Seattle is responsible for improving coffee standards nationwide. In America, restaurant critics inspect restrooms. In France, they ponder the quality of the bread and coffee served…

How can a nation be great if its bread tastes like Kleenex? – Julia Child

What’s more, good bread is actually cheaper. The plastery Wonderbread, originally introduced by the ITT conglomerate, retails for $3.69 a loaf at my local Cala Foods, whereas a loaf of Acme’s delightfully nutty “Upstairs Bread” is a mere $2.50. Some bakeries like Southern California’s La Brea Bakery are helping popularize bread by shipping frozen semi-cooked loaves to the large grocery chains, who finish baking on their premises. While purists sniff with disdain at the technique, it is very close in quality to the real thing, and miles ahead of industrial bread.

The photography world learned yesterday the sad but not entirely unexpected news of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s demise. Cartier-Bresson was 96 years old, and had prepared his legacy by setting up a retrospective and foundation in Paris. The catalog of the retrospective is one of the finest coffee-table books you can get, by the way. Cartier-Bresson is best known for his theory of the “decisive moment”. Although some wags would say the decisive moment was really when he reviewed his contact sheets, Cartier-Bresson clearly perfected a technique of anticipating the event and being ready to capture it on film, helped in this by his Leica rangefinder cameras.

Cartier-Bresson was known for his caustic wit and his often provocative statements. In an interview to Le Monde, he derided the “academic clichés of Weston” (les poncifs académiques de Weston), referring no doubt to Edward Weston’s still life studies of peppers. Someone using lightweight equipment like Cartier-Bresson has the luxury of spontaneity large-format photographers like Weston did not. Indeed, Brett Weston, Edward Weston’s second son, quipped that “Anything more than 500 yards from the car just isn’t photogenic” when working with a 8×10 view camera.

You don’t have to carry a behemoth camera to realize the virtues of forward planning. When doing landscape photography, it is helpful to know ahead of time what kind of lens or camera to pack, and the position of the sun. There are many ephemeris tables online to find the latter, but the easiest way to select a lens is to use a map. You could use a protractor to measure angles, but they are relatively small and fiddly to use. As I often shoot with a Fuji G617 panoramic camera and a Hasselblad system, I made a series of translucent templates to help with this – all I need to do is superimpose them on the map (such as a 1:24,000 topographic map produced by a National Geographic map machine).

I wrote a quick program in Python and PostScript to produce templates in PDF format for various film formats and lens focal lengths, ready to print on a laser printer (I used Four Corners Paper IFR Vellum). I hope this will be useful. As an example, here is the template I use with my Fuji G617.

Layout

A4 US Letter Portrait Landscape

Film format 35mm 1.6x DSLR 1.3x DSLR 65mm (XPan) 6x6 6x7 6x9 6x12 6x17 4x5 5x7 8x10    Focal length mm (separate multiple lengths with spaces)