Lightroom, Mobile, Nexus 28 Feb 2016, 12:00 pm

In which I report on using the Nexus 5X in RAW mode, with the help of Adobe Lightroom, and on workflows for mobile photogs. With illustrations from Vancouver’s Lighthouse Park.

Backgrounder on RAW

(Skip to the next section if you know all this stuff.) A “RAW” picture is supposed to be a bit-for-bit reproduction of exactly what the sensor in your camera saw. RAW pictures usually take up lots of memory, and doing a good job of presenting them on your screen often requires inside knowledge of the quirks of the camera and its sensor. There are a bunch of different RAW formats, but the industry seems to be converging on DNG, which is proprietary but still reasonably open and apparently technically sound.

The images you see on your screen are mostly not RAW, but JPEG or PNG format, the result of taking the RAW bits and producing a compressed, color-corrected, standardized format that’s easy for software to display.

Back in the day, digital cameras produced only JPEGs; anything serious, these days, also produces RAW. Until very recently, phone-cams were all-JPEG-all-the-time.

The reason photographers like to work with RAW pix is that they contain lots more information, so there’s a lot more scope for correcting color or exposure problems.

Finally, there is no good reason why the perfectly good English word “raw” needs to be rendered as RAW, it just is. I was arguing this on Twitter with David Heinemeier Hansson and he suggested that the caps made it look like an acronym so they’d feel comfy in sentences with other acronyms like JPG and GIF and so on.

Mobile RAW is a thing

Let me show you; here’s a shot toward Bowen Island, the way the bits came out of the camera; then, as tweaked via Adobe Lightroom.

The biggest virtue of RAW is exactly this kind of thing: Pulling out bits of the photo that are over-exposed and under-exposed, before they get compressed away into the JPEG. Here’s another:

To be fair, the 5X’s images don’t have the immense data-richness that the Fuji cameras’ do, with oceans of rich detail hiding in the shadows and glare, begging to be pulled out. But I’m pretty sure that if I’d been in JPEG-only land, I would have just deleted both these photos.

Workflow 1: RAW capture

First, you have to convince your camera to take pix in RAW. The last couple of releases of Android have included the API you need, and there are a bunch of camera apps on Google Play that support this.

It turns out that one of them is a camera app that’s unobtrusively embedded in the Android Lightroom app. So that’s what I used here. It’s an OK camera; I wouldn’t say the ergonomics are dramatically better than the one that comes with Android, but it does have a little button with “RAW” written on it. It has nice tilt/level adjustment. In these pictures I basically took all the defaults.

Workflow 2: Edit on the phone?

That Lightroom app can edit photos as well as take them. The idea is, you’ve taken a shot and you’re burning up to Instagram it, but some dork photobombed his selfie stick into the top left corner, so you need to tidy first.

That picture came out quite OK; given enough light, the 5X has an appetite for detail. I’ve totally got out of the color-correction habit while shooting Fuji because the X-cams just get it right. The 5X pix often need help; but Lightroom is good at helping.

Since I only do light editing on the phone, I don’t have an in-depth opinion about the Lightroom editor vs the one Google ships. But Lightroom’s can handle RAW photos, which is what I mostly plan to be taking.

Workflow — Networking stuff

Up until now, I’d set up DropBox to auto-upload photos on WiFi, then I have a little script that copies them into a handy non-DropBox directory for easy import to Lightroom. Works just fine, if you don’t mind typing a shell command.

When I installed the Lightroom-mobile app, I noticed that it had an option for adding photos to Lightroom, so I turned that on.

When I got back from the park, I waited a few minutes for the phone to upload, then went looking for the photos. Took me the longest time to find them; the Lightroom “Filmstrip” thingie across the bottom has a black toolbar where you can select folders and things, and one of the things you can select is “All Synced Photographs”. That’s them.

You can drag them from there to any other folder, but then they’re still in “All Synced”. And if you edit them, then go back to the version on your phone, that version is edited too. I guess that’s cool if you want to show off your pix on your phone. It also means, I suppose, that they’re really in Adobe’s “Creative Cloud”. Now I’m worried, because the Nexus 5X RAW files are 25M apiece — remember to turn that “Sync only on WiFi” option — and I apparently I have a mere 20G of space there.

But wait — when I follow Adobe’s instructions, they seem to be telling me that I have zero bytes in the cloud. So I’m kind of baffled.

Its still not obvious to me whether I’m going to be happier with the Adobe or DropBox workflows.

But like I said above, mobile RAW pictures are totally a thing.

Dell U3415W 24 Feb 2016, 12:00 pm

34", 21:9, 3440x1440. Which is to say, pretty big and pretty sharp. Full name: Dell UltraSharp 34 Curved Monitor. It’s curved. I like it a lot.

What happened was, Amazon’s got an engineering hardware refresh rolling around, which included a choice between either this beast or dual 27" monitors. The guys who deal them out tell me the choice is breaking more or less fifty-fifty.

What’s hilarious is the blank incomprehension that prevails between the 2x27 and 1x34 camps. Neither side can understand why their colleagues, who normally seem pretty smart, would foolishly make the other choice. I’m part of it; anyone who would trade this sweeping expanse of tiny pixels for, well, anything else, is just Doing It Wrong, as far as I can tell.

You want to read a review?

Go visit PC Monitors or TFT Central or Digital Trends or Tek Everything (nice video) or Tom’s Hardware or TechRadar.

Those guys will tell you about brightness and sharpness and color fidelity and latency and that stuff. The TFT Central review in particular is awesomely detailed and includes lots of graphs and charts describing things that I don’t understand at all.

Software geek with a Mac?

This part’s for you. Key points:

1. You can plug it into the Thunderbolt or the HDMI. Depends which side you want the wires on.

2. I can get a browser and a Terminal and an Emacs and an IntelliJ all visible at the same time.

3. It has lots of buttons and menus and options. I can testify that the on/off button works great, dunno about any of the rest.

4. Its resolution is advertised as WQHD. If I get my nose up close to the screen and squint then I can see pixels, so I guess this isn’t what Apple would call “Retina”. But when my head’s in my actual working position, it has that same creamy ultra-smooth look as the 15" MBP I’m typing this on.

5. It has a ton of connectors. I have a powered USB hub on the desk (visible in the picture above), maybe I can discard that.

6. It has “dual 9-watt speakers”. ROFL. My computer is plugged into a Schiit Modi 2 Uber DAC, driving a nice old NAD integrated driving nice old Totem speakers.

7. The pedestal setup is really extra-good; totally effortless getting it at just the right height, pointing just the right way.

I think we are now living in the era of the big-ass screen.

Modern Corporate English 20 Feb 2016, 12:00 pm

“The client’s ask is simple,” he said, “but I’m not convicted that’s a good criteria; anyhow, there are important learnings for us.” How much of that do you hate? Whatever; living languages don’t care what you think.

The awful truth

English, among languages, is a shiftless tramp, equally at home in the alleys behind mansions and hovels. It’s always ready to pilfer a scrumptious linguistic pie left to cool on a metaphorical windowsill, or fetid food-waste from the metaphorical gutter.

These growths on English’s not-so-fair face are harvested from the hallways and meeting rooms of North American high-tech, which is after all renowned for its creativity.

Which is to say, let’s consider neologisms on their merits. Not that that’ll do any good, often the lamest stick while the jewels crumble.

“ask” n.

I actually kinda like this one. Yes, you could say it before, along the lines of “the specific item that was requested” or “the core demand” or some such. No, it’s not a synonym of “request”. It’s only got three letters. It’s a nouned verb, which is rarer than a verbed noun. Good on it.

“criteria” n. sing.

This one hurts my brain, but Latin’s admonitions about pluralization are coming, after all, from the language graveyard; when did you last say “datum”? I hear it more and more. I defiantly say “criterion” given the slightest chance but find my passive-aggressive usage policing rarely even noticed. Also, there are these kids on my lawn.

“learning” n.

I never heard this before I went to work for Google and now I hear it everywhere, so let’s all see if we can drive Alphabet’s share price down until they promise to make it stop. Oh wait, I’m still a shareholder.

There will be those who point out that by replacing a descendent of Latin lectionem with an ordinary verb participle we actually add regularity to English, which in general could really use it. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

“convicted” adj.

Ewwww. Blecch. I mean, seriously. The leap from “conviction“ to the past participle of an inferred verb is sort of wryly daring, I suppose. But were there a court somewhere with jurisdiction over really stinky neologisms, this one would be found guilty.

CL XXXVI: Island Ingress 13 Feb 2016, 12:00 pm

On a wet grey February Saturday we combined two of our amusements on a boat trip to Keats Island: Cottage Life and Ingress. Some of this will be comprehensible only to Ingress players, but there are a couple of fairly groovy pix.
Updated with an apology.

What happened was, right near our cabin there’s North Keats Crosspath, an Ingress portal (that link will only work if you’re a player) which I had owned for an awesome 449 consecutive days, until one of the opposition made a fairly heroic night-time boat trip and captured it a week ago. This was Not To Be Tolerated, so I and my wife (and fellow-player) arranged child-care, broke out the boat, and put to sea in adverse conditions.

It was a perfectly OK crossing; low visibility, but we’ve been there and back enough that we can tell one island from the next even when they’re vague looming grey shapes.

A short winter cabin visit is sort of heartbreaking; it’s so extremely cozy and peaceful, and we wanted to settle in for a few days of gazing at the view with our feet up.

During winter in a temperate rainforest, evergreen ferns fill open spaces and delight the eye but are hard to photograph. I ended up overprocessing these and they look fun albeit lacking in photointegrity.

Anyhow, an hour and a half of boating, an hour of walking through the forest, a nice cup of tea in the cabin, and a blow for the Ingress Resistance faction. What a refreshing Saturday.

Ingress sidebar: North Keats Crosspath

What happened was, I thought it’d be cool to have a portal near our cabin, and there’s an interesection five minutes’ walk away, so I snapped its picture and got ready to submit it. The GPS said it was way off in the woods, but the GPS is flaky there because we’re on the north slope of a mini-mountain, so I adjusted it to put it at the intersection, as you can see perfectly clearly on the Intel map.

Except for, it turns out Google Maps is wrong and the alleged intersection where the portal ended up is an undistinguished public right of way close enough to our cabin that we can hit the portal while lying in bed. I actually submitted a correction but Niantic thinks Google Maps is right and I’m wrong. Isn’t that awful.

Ingress sidebar: Pretty field!

We managed to expunge the green from the island and make a pretty decent field, too. Thanks to agent @Ba1r0g for the idea, and @Mitallust and @Isentrope for the keys.

Ingress sidebar: Bad behavior

When the other side took the North Keats portal, I was surprised, because it’s hard to find at the best of times, and they took it after sunset. So I emailed the guy who did it asking for details. Which he decided was an accusation of cheating and sent me back a rant about how dare I, because my side are a bunch of rancid cheaters. Jeepers; what is it about being online that makes people act like pricks? I was actually pretty impressed at what he’d done, but I see no point in trying any further conversation.

Apology

In the description above, I originally said that the email I got was misspelled; that turns out to have been wrong, and I apologize unreservedly.

The gentleman in question wanted to reproduce the whole email thread in a comment here but I won’t, because there’s enough juvenile mean-spiritedness on the Internet already.

Low-light Phone cam 5 Feb 2016, 12:00 pm

Regular readers will know that I have a thing about low-light photography. My new photo-toy is the Nexus 5X and I’ve the urge to push it further into the dark than it really wants to go.

I remember, all those years ago, when the original Nikon D3 came out, the first digital camera that could see just as well as you in the dark. They more or less all can, these days.

So, while I still like the shades and textures of dusk and winter, there’s less challenge to it, with a real camera.

Ah, but the Nexus; it can’t go even as far as ISO1600 and it’s not among the select few handsets with optical image stabilization. The lens is said to be F2, which isn’t terrible. So it’s about striving for a steady hand or, better, finding something to brace against or, best, good luck

But at the end of the day — which is when low-light pix happen — it’s really mostly about finding things that deserve pointing the phone at.

Marlowe, RIP 2 Feb 2016, 12:00 pm

Our big male cat, announced in this space in 2005, died suddenly. Bloggers’ cats get obituaries.

Marlowe always had a great coat and there was a lot of cat under it; in mid-life he became obese, but when we put him on a diet and his waist re-appeared he was one damn fine-looking cat.

He wasn’t terribly smart or terribly affectionate. He liked the outdoors and was a pretty good rat-catcher. Hey, we live near the middle of a port city and that’s a big plus.

His greatest joy in life was a warm stationary lap, so he approved of long TV shows. He had one remarkable skill; on those occasions when I didn’t want a lap-cat, I’d reject his advances. He’d go into stealth mode and ooze in so smoothly that I wouldn’t even notice he was on my lap till I couldn’t get my hand on the mouse-pad.

If I were irritated about the oozing-in, I’d tickle him, and if I tickled him too much, he’d stab me. I guess you call this a relationship.

A couple months ago he was OK at his regular vet checkup. A week ago he was fine. Then he was poorly, and suddenly his abdomen was grossly swollen; after a night in hospital, the ultrasound revealed the cancer all over the place, everything all blocked up.

We racked up a couple thousand in vet bills in his last 48 hours; I give thanks for living in a civilized country with socialized medicine for humans.

He only had a very few really bad days. He had a lot of really good ones, lots of laps and not that many tickles.

Tender Sky Shoehorn 24 Jan 2016, 12:00 pm

In which I reveal a little life-hack that can get you out your front door noticeably quicker. First, a picture.

That’s a really long shoehorn. You can use it standing up, just a slight stoop even for 5'11" me. This one comes from Daiso, a Japanese 100円 (think $1) store, which has embarked on world domination.

Why you should do this

So you don’t have to tie your shoes. Slip ’em off when you come home then use the shoehorn to slip ’em back on when leaving.

Now, we all know that your Mom told you never to do this, because it would ruin your shoes; they’d get all crushed at the back. But since she didn’t have a long shoehorn in the front hall, we can forgive her slight wrongness in this case.

I have evidence: In 2007 or so, I fell in love with a pair of hiking shoes from Zamberlan, and since then I’ve worn Zamberlan every day I’m not wearing sandals (less than half the year in Canada) or shiny-blacks (only when I give a speech or meet a future Prime Minister). And as I write this, I’m waiting for delivery of a new pair. Which will be the third pair I’ve owned. Since 2007. Which is to say, slipping your shoes on and off doesn’t necessarily ruin them, if you do it right.

Consider the aggregate time I’ve saved over those years, not tying shoes once or twice a day!

On Daiso

In full, the text on that shoehorn: Tender Sky/Passion to build new lives. I wondered about that; suspected Brand Marketing. But nope, Net searching suggests it’s just a thing Daiso puts on merchandise; the usual cheerfully-deranged Japanese English-flinging.

I recommend everyone check out a big Daiso at least once; they update regularly and manage to be interesting. Having done that, I can no longer take the cheap/exuberant onslaught, and wait elsewhere in the mall while loved ones do the Daiso.

Anyhow, stop tying your shoes!

#Bike2WorkPix 19 Jan 2016, 12:00 pm

I’ve been cycling to work since late last year. It’s good, for me and the world. But there are more convenient alternatives, and they tempt. So here’s a little incentive: #Bike2WorkPix. Consider joining in!

The Hashtag

It’s like this: You can autopilot a bike commute; but it’s harder than in a car. You can ignore the world too; but that’s way harder. What’s easier than in a car is to stop and take a picture, and everyone’s got a phone in their pocket, most with good cameras. So I’m gonna try and do that every day I ride, and post it somewhere tagged #Bike2WorkPix. I suggest that my fellow-bikers out there give it a try. Geo-tag the pic if you like. It’ll add less than a minute to your commute.

Ever been on a “photowalk”? It means you head out with the idea of taking pictures. The effect is amazing: you start to see pictures wherever you look. Since I got this idea, I’ve seen lots of opportunities each leg of the commute; but I’m only stopping once per leg. Call it a “photopedal”.

Why bike?

Well, it’s really cheap. You can get a perfectly decent brand-new commuter bike for $500-ish, and spend a whole lot less if you’re willing to take your chances with Craigslist or consignment stores. Or if you want a high-tech ultra-light, you can drop thousands. Bike repairs and maintenance are absurdly cheap. I’ve never driven to this gig, so the competition is $4.20/day on public transit, or $15-ish when I succumb to the temptation of the car-share service.

It turns out my office building has a nice bright heated locked bike room in the basement, which makes the whole proposition more attractive. Yours might too. If it doesn’t, just a little bit of activism might fix that, what with green urbanism being the new hotness.

It’s OK exercise. This US NIH data suggests my 50-minute round-trip is burning less than 400 calories; I’d do better playing softball and a lot better running. On the other hand, I am now meeting NIH’s recommendation of 150 minutes of aerobic activity a week. Also, it’s low-impact. Also, the downhill parts are hella fun. Also, I get to cross a bridge over the ocean. Also, there are lots of attractive women walking, jogging, and biking.

Confession

I don’t bike every day. Factors apply, including temperatures below 5°C, extreme precipitation, icy ground, and a car-share parked right outside. But more days than not I do; and purism about this kind of thing isn’t helpful. I’ll take any help I can get; for example, turning the commute into a photopedal.

Speaking of not being a purist, these photos are dressed up in Lightroom a bit, while sitting on a nice cozy sofa at home.

Associated equipment

My wheels are laughable, a 15-year-old Specialized mountain bike, good in its day. Theft is a threat here in Vancouver but I protect my bike by never having washed it. I could probably get there faster by buying something lighter and newer.

All these pictures are the Nexus 5X, which is just dandy for this purpose, as long as you remember that for low light, you need a Real Camera, or to brace against a solid object. My fave accessory is a pair of Lizard Skin “Monitor” gloves that let me use the phone’s touch-screen to take pix.

Looking forward

So far, this being midwinter, the pix are mostly urban-experience things. But the days grow longer and the sprouts are sprouting; I foresee more nature in this space.

As I write this, the five pix herein are the only ones in the world in #Bike2WorkPix. All aboard!

On the Nexus 5X 17 Jan 2016, 12:00 pm

Well, the OnePlus One was a lot of phone for the money but, only a year old, is dying; the GPS has checked out and the pictures it takes look bad. I didn’t feel like phone-shopping but when I did, the 5X was an easy choice. It’s just fine, but only three features matter. With winter beach pix.

What doesn’t matter

The screen’s great; the phone’s thin and light; the GPS is as good as I’ve had; the LTE’s fast; the OS is contemporary and fast; the battery gets though a day. And these things are true of every phone at every kiosk in every mall.

The 5X isn’t the biggest but I don’t care, I use a 7" device for book-reading and game-playing and so on.

Fingerprint!

The fingerprint sensor is da bomb. So far, a few days in, it just doesn’t miss unless I totally miss. Actually, the first time I hit the thing sideways with the corner of my finger and it misfired, I was relieved; reassured that it was actually checking.

Dunno about you, but I turn my phone on a whole lot. Which with the sensor is a lot of not tapping in my (nontrivial) PIN; it adds back a chunk of time to every day, and subtracts significant irritation.

The sensor’s on the back, right where your index finger wants to land, with a little ring around it to help you land right. They tell me some other phones put the sensors elsewhere; I can’t imagine why.

Camera!

When the phone cams started getting good, I gave my Mom my excellent Sony pocket cam. So it really hurt when the One+’s started failing, and “good camera” was high on my shopping-list criteria. Reviews suggest that the 5X’s is as good as the best, more or less.

These pictures (taken on Vancouver’s Point Grey Foreshore) won’t tell you much about camera quality. There was plenty of even, grey light coming in from all directions, and any phonecam would have done well. Having said that, I thought the review link above made a good case for the 4:3 aspect ratio, as opposed to the skinnier 3:2.

I do have one issue; the built-in Camera app is very bare-bones. I might like to experiment with aperture and RAW mode and so on, but it doesn’t offer that. The underlying Camera API can do all sorts of cool stuff, and there are a bunch of photo-taking apps for sale; I’d like one of the good photo sites to do a comparative review.

Hmmm… if I shot RAW, I wonder if Lightroom (or any other good photo editor) would be able to deal with the files?

Being a Nexus

With scary stuff like Stagefright in the wild, you really want to be carrying a phone that gets OS patches promptly. The Android ecosystem is getting better at this, but for now, a Nexus means rarely having to say you’re sorry.

Connector

It’s a USB Type-C. Which is good, I guess, because it doesn’t care which way you put it in. I suspect there’ll be a measurable bump in global productivity once we’re no longer taking, on average, 1.5 attempts for every mobile-device cable insertion.

In the here and now it’s a major pain in the ass; our family has a half-dozen or so mobile devices, and many many charging cables, none of which work with the 5X. Progress, sigh…

Will it change my life?

Nope. The days when a new mobile device would do that are long gone.

Cloud Eventing 11 Jan 2016, 12:00 pm

So, I helped build Amazon CloudWatch Events (blog, AWS console), which just launched. Been a while since my last extended spell of being an actual software engineer. Shipping feels good.

What it does

The cloud’s asynchronous; changes happen when they happen. Maybe you called an API a minute ago, maybe a database failed over, maybe your app saw a traffic surge. Assuming you want to know when they happen, the traditional approach is POLL LIKE HELL. Oops, I believe the polite usage is “repeatedly call Describe APIs”.

The idea here is for our services to broadcast “Events” (OK, they’re really little JSON blobs) and for you to write “Rules” that match events using “Patterns” (OK, they’re really little JSON blobs) and route ’em to “Targets”, which are often Lambda functions but can also be various kinds of queues and streams and so on.

So for example you catch an EC2 instance’s transition to “running” state and run a Lambda to tag it, or fix up its DNS. Or you catch a certain class of API calls and route them to a DevOps Slack channel. Or… well, a bunch of other things, both obvious and strange.

Which is to say: Less polling, less latency, more automation. We’ve been running a beta for a while and the people who’ve seen Events have mostly said “Yeah, we can use that” and then they get on the air more or less right away. So I’m optimistic.

Is it interesting?

Being event-driven isn’t a novelty, nor are message buses. But from the biz point of view, cloud automation is pretty hot these days. And building anything at AWS scale gets fun fast.

This service has a part that soaks up the events from all the other AWS services. Then there’s the part that figures out which events match the rules. And of course, there’s a rules database. Finally, matching events have to be sent off to the appropriate targets — Lambdas or Topics or whatever.

Of those, only the Rules database is sort of obvious. The rest would be too, except they have to operate at AWS scale, which means there are remarkable numbers of Events and Rules and Targets in flight. And of course the Cloud infrastructure we build this on is fallible, so all the designs have to assume that Shit Happens.

When there’s a change in your AWS deployment and you’ve posted a rule to route it to a Lambda or whatever, it gets there pretty damn fast. That makes me happy.

What I did

The thing wasn’t my idea; that came from Jesse Dougherty, the guy who hired me into AWS Vancouver. His pitching me on the project was one of the reasons joining up seemed like a good idea. I didn’t touch the database, nor the machinery that delivers matched events. But I did leave fingerprints on those JSON blobs, and on the event ingestion and matching software. I think this bit exhibits my simplest-thing-that-could-possibly-work engineering aesthetic.

But to be honest, I probably added more value working on six-pagers and convincing people the whole thing was worth doing.

Where’s the magic?

The databasing and streaming and syncing infrastructure we build on is pretty slick, but that’s not the secret. The management tools are nifty, too; but that’s not it either. It’s the tribal knowledge: How to build Cloud infrastructure that works in a fallible, messy, unstable world.

Mobile Counter-theses 28 Dec 2015, 12:00 pm

This is in response to 16 mobile theses by Benedict Evans of Andreesen Horowitz, a firm that’s central to Bay Area VC culture. The theses are about half wrong, which isn’t too bad.

I’ll run through his theses one-by-one. But first, I think our differences center on two things; one that’s predictable given who I am, namely the cloud. The second is perhaps surprising: Whether keyboards matter.

Here we go; you might want to flip back and forth a bit because I reproduce Mr Evans’ subtitles but not his arguments.

“1: Mobile is the new central ecosystem of tech”

Tech is bicentric, these days: Cloud and Client. The cloud doesn’t care that much what the clients are, and the clients don’t care that much what’s inside the cloud. The technologies, implementers, and financial structures have become unsurprisingly disjoint over the years. Which I don’t think is a problem, and the fact that it’s even possible is a tribute to the power of Internet protocols.

So, half right.

“2: Mobile is the internet”

That’s just dumb. I work for a business with an annual run rate of ~$8B, growth of ~75%, and a healthy profit margin. If someone figured out how to take us and our competitors down, it’d blow a pretty big hole in the side of the Internet.

Also, large parts of the cloud spend their time talking to other parts of the cloud with little client involvement.

This kind of thinking is not only wrong but dangerous to investors’ money. Maybe not to a16z money, and Mr Evans is obviously talking his book, but still.

“3: Mobile isn’t about small screens and PCs aren’t about keyboards - mobile means an ecosystem and that ecosystem will swallow ‘PCs’”

Mobile is absolutely about what fits in a pocket, and increasingly I think that PCs are about keyboards.

I nearly always have instant access to a mobile, and most times to a PC too, but only if I’m willing to sit down, pop it open, and type a password. Since I’m impatient and short of time, the incentive to do everything on the mobile is overwhelming. And yet often I don’t, and the biggest reason is the keyboard. It’s just too much work and irritation to squeeze coherent rhetoric or pictures or conversations through the brain-dead fake on-screen keyboard.

Now, this is changing; the most recent tablets are starting to have keyboards that are pretty good. I personally have never yet run across one that would let me really work, although I haven’t tried the very latest from Apple and Microsoft.

But then, once it’s got a sizeable screen and a keyboard, it probably doesn’t go in a pocket any more, and… it’s a PC! Screw the OS, that’s a distraction. Thus, my conclusion is exactly the opposite: I think a “mobile” is more or less defined as “fits in a pocket, no keyboard” and “PC” as “has a keyboard you can use for work”.

So, wrong.

“4: The future of productivity”

The argument here is that big screens and spreadsheets and keyboards aren’t what matter for “real work” (quotes in the original). Instead, “What matters is the connective tissue of a company - the verbs that move things along. Those can be done in new ways.”

Well, I suppose that large parts of a VC’s job can be accomplished without recourse to typing or making presentations, and indeed we do find new ways of getting shit done. But for the moment, wrong, because spreadsheets matter and documents matter and keyboards matter.

“5: Microsoft's capitulation”

Fair enough, “Windows Everywhere” is history, and that’s a capitulation.

But… used a Surface recently? And while the success of cloudstuff like Azure and Office365 isn’t guaranteed, anyone who isn’t taking those efforts seriously is, once again, putting investors’ money at risk. Still, not calling this one wrong.

“6: Apple & Google both won, but it’s complicated”

Great stuff; really, if you’re not following along on Mr Evans’ side of the argument, flip over there now if only to read this little gem.

“7: Search and discovery”

The question is: What comes after search, and who gets the traffic?

Since it’s not conceivable that a serious Bay Area VC is ignorant of Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and so on, this little item totally baffles me. Dunno about you, but I discover the Internet through the people I follow, and I don’t think I’m weird. I suspect that there’s an interesting point here that Mr Evans just didn’t quite manage to connect with; but still, wrong.

“8: Apps and the web”

This starts out strong but then concludes that what matters is which icons are on your home screen. I’ll call that mostly-right.

But here are two things: First, a large and increasing proportion of my app interactions start with me pulling down my notifications, not hitting a home-screen icon. Maybe this is an Android-vs-Apple thing?

Second, the home screens on all my mobiles have Bookmark widgets for obvious online things and I hit them as often as any app.

“9: Post Netscape, post PageRank, looking for the next run-time”

This  —  it begins “For 15 years the internet was a monolith: web browser + mouse + keyboard” — is incoherent.

Sure enough, the platform contention on the client side, between Apple/Google/Microsoft/browser-tech, is fierce. And in the cloud, there is ferocious competition between vendors, to define the “X” in XaaS, and then over what X should be built with.

But still, he’s right that at the end of the day, it’s all about gathering users.

“10: Messaging as a platform, and a way to get customers”

Yep; good thinking here. Plus, I can tell you as a Cloud insider that messaging occupies a whole lot of our server-side thinking too; but you probably already knew that.

“11: The unclear future of Android and the OEM world”

I’m down with every word here. Android has served its purpose by keeping any player from getting a lock on the channels that advertising wants to flow through, and thus on Google’s oxygen; and then again by routing a bajillion people to Gmail and Maps and so on. But what next?

“12: Internet of Things”

I have to be careful talking about IoT, not so much because it might be career-limiting, but because smart people I respect seem, unlike me, to think there’s a there there.

But yeah, to quote Mr Evans: “talk of standards for IoT misses the point - ‘connected to a network’ is no more a category’ than ‘contains a motor’”.

“13: Cars”

Yep. Me, I worry a lot about whether the shiny New Economy has replacements for all those vehicle-driving jobs.

“14: TV and the living room”

Bah; the TV doesn’t care whether it’s being driven by a mobile device or a PC, and the distinction is whether or not I need a keyboard to pull up and manipulate what I want on the screen. Now obviously, if there’s anything you can do on either your mobile or your PC that can’t use the nearest TV as a display, that’s a bug.

So he’s half-right here.

“15: Watches”

Whatever. I just don’t see lives being changed or substantial businesses being disrupted, so this being here is wrong.

“16: Finally, we are not our users”

Inspiring, heart-warming, but wrong.

Most people are perfectly happy to use mobiles as designed, for chatting and YouTube and Candy Crush, and PCs as designed, for spreadsheets and planning and reporting. The last thing most people want is to “take ownership of the tech in their lives”; they just want it to work.

And the score is

By my count, a total of eight points I think wrong. If so, Mr Evans is still doing OK; I’ll take a .500 batting average on my tech prognostications home with a smile any day.

And also, he’s asking good questions, which I’ve long thought more important than offering the right answers. So, thank you Mr Evans. Seriously, go read the thing.

Motorized Desk Tour 27 Dec 2015, 12:00 pm

For office workers: If you’re among those (relatively few now, I think) who haven’t had a chance to try a sit/stand desk, I totally recommend them.

Here’s mine, cranked up:

These things are becoming ubiquitous in high-tech offices. I decided to give one a try because I have occasional pain in my upper-back and neck caused by decades of looking down at laptops. Amazon gave me a consult with an ergonomist, who said it’s not that sitting is bad and standing is good, it’s that you want to avoid being in one position all the time. So if you’ve been sitting down for 45 minutes, stand up; and vice versa.

I find I go home feeling better every day I use it. Your mileage may vary but my guess is that one of these would improve most people’s lives.

On the rare occasions when I have a couple hours uninterrupted by meetings and I have some challenging code or document to work on, I get too zoned in to raise or lower, then eventually notice either my butt or my feet yelling for relief.

Desktop tour

The surface expresses the well-known Amazon door desk aesthetic — I like it.

See all the wires? There’s a problem I don’t have a good solution for yet, in that it’s hard to find the right place to put the power bars so that plugs don’t pull out when you raise the desk. One day I’ll bring some wood screws to work and fasten the suckers to its bottom. For the moment, I put the little drawers-on-wheels thingie under the desk and the power-bars sit on top of that.

As you can see, I have a Mac and a Dell/Linux box; the combo works well for building and then testing cloud-infrastructure services. The Dell’s screen is (as usual) dark, because ssh.

I’m an audio geek and tend to have old gear around the house, so what you see there is a nice old NAD 40WPC integrated amp driving an ancient pair of Totem Acoustic Model Ones. The Mac drives the NAD via a tiny Schiit Modi 2 Uber outboard DAC (recommended) that you can’t see behind the books, and on the rare occasions when I want to listen to the Dell, I route the sound out of its headphone port.

In the blocks of time when I’m not in meetings, I usually have Google Play Music’s “African Dub” radio channel playing quietly; I recommend it.

Now, those books; due to some combination of tribal culture and Amazon-is-frugal heritage, people prop up their laptops and monitors with idiosyncratic combinations of packages of printing paper, old shipping boxes, and all sorts of other weird shit. I use Java in a Nutshell (also see here), Unix Network Programming, and the Fifth Edition of The Unicode Standard. I think that any of these books would enrich both your desktop and your mind.

One important feature of my desktop is the absence of paper. I totally suck at managing paper and finally, all these decades into my career, have learned to do without. Yes, I regularly both read and write the famous Amazon six-pagers (recommended); but then they go straight to the shredding bin.

Also in this image are my World Wide Web Consortium coffee mug, and a OnePlus One, which I don’t recommend; mine is barely a year old and is failing.

Finally, there’s a picture of Lauren Wood (recommended).

Christmas Decorations 26 Dec 2015, 12:00 pm

I hope that lots of you are having an excellent Christmas; I am. Here’s an illustrated card featuring Vancouver Christmas visuals.

We took our visiting Prairie relatives for a waterfront Christmas-eve walk, and it struck me that putting Christmas lights on barbed-wire looks dystopian by day, but is probably pretty at night.

Just around the corner was a little nautical structure, and a dinghy in Christmas colors.

Then Christmas came, and here’s a bit of orgy-of-materialism hangover.

Christmas day had the only sun of the week so between presents and turkey we took a stroll in a local hilltop park. A couple of guys had set up with pails of soapy water and that sticks-and-twine rig so you can blow huge bubbles, twisting and sparkling in the summer sun, letting all the kid passers-by take a turn. That’s what I call Christmas spirit.

Nearby they were practicing Tai Chi.

and what with the sideways solstice sun through the patchy clouds, the city was one great big festive decoration.

Best of the season to you and yours!

The Wrath of Heaven 21 Dec 2015, 12:00 pm

May it afflict intermittent left-channel outages, and an audiophile neighbor who lives for operetta, on the gormless enthusiasts who maladjust the audio in the car-share cars so everything sounds like a Bad Hair Band.

Modern car-audio systems are tuned by professionals to sound reasonable out of the box. Maybe you like a little more punch in the bass, good on ya. Maybe you’re listening to talk radio in a staticky zone, you want to lift the mid-range and back off the treble; who could object?

But what is the pervasive pathology that leaves approximately 50% of all car-share vehicles with the bass and treble cranked right up, and the fader dialed to the back-seat? Maybe they’re using the music for vibrational dandruff therapy? Maybe it’s the right way to listen to Nickelback? Maybe I have a nemesis who spies on my reservations and sneaks around to sabotage the sound just before I get in?

I have learned to Fix The Sound in the parking spot before I mind-meld with the rush-hour. Because I care about good sound, but not enough to die for it.

Music Nights 16 Dec 2015, 12:00 pm

Been going out a bit more than usual; four nights of live music in the last month. The object of the game here is to convince a few more of you to get off the sofa and go hear people play. The entertainment was Big Sugar, Patricia Barber, Muse and a carol sing. Each was magic.

Big Sugar

Unless you’re Canadian you probably don’t know about them. They’ve never quite decided whether they’re folkies or rastas or bluesmen; have had a couple of hits over the years, you might have heard Diggin a hole.

They were playing Vancouver’s Commodore Ballroom, one of the nicest places anywhere to drink and dance and listen. Lots of nice seats, huge sprung dancefloor, pretty decent sound. So the crowd boozed it up and danced furiously and had an awfully good time. In between the dub-flavored stuff they covered Dear Mr Fantasy (huh?) and Rollin’ and Tumblin’, leaning so far into the groove it made my whole body warm.

Lots of good guitar, lots of better-than-good bass, OK singing, sharp dance moves, fun fun fun. We’d had a hard day, were tired, so when they said “…and for our last song”, we started shuffling for the exit. But stopped. They ended, of all things, with a straight albeit metallic take on Oh Canada. Huh? The beery audience ate it up, roaring away loud enough to be heard along with the guitars. It was impossible not to smile. Live music, there’s nothing like it.

Patricia Barber

I had a travel routing through Chicago so arranged to stay over a Monday night where, as on most Mondays, Patricia Barber, my personal favorite living jazzbo, holds court, playing two sets for some laughably small cover charge. If you get there a little early you can sit close enough to spill your drink on the stage.

The venue is the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge. The name’s a tribute to the Moulin Rouge and it’s formerly Al Capone’s favorite bar. It’s about booze and jazz; no food for sale of any kind. It’s hard not to love.

The crowd is apparently half local regulars, half jazz enthusiasts from all over the damn planet who can’t believe the intimacy and the price.

Ms Barber’s music is melodic and virtuosic and emotional, but you need to be comfy with jazz idioms. I’ve seen lots of different players with her over the years, all good; these days mostly young pups. Occasional musicians like me go weak at the knees over high-level jazz players’ effortless surfing around and through chords and rhythms that we’d have to practice for months to replicate.

So on this last occasion, a tune I hadn’t heard before touched my heart, seemed to be about “Persephone”. After the first set, I stood up to stretch and, since I was right by the stage, in a break in the band’s conversation with each other I caught Ms Barber’s eye and said “The song about Persephone, that was beautiful. Is it new?” She beamed at me and said no, that it was years old. I was a little surprised since I have most of her records; I said so, and repeated the compliment. During the second set, between songs she said to the band “We got a compliment on Persephone, let’s play it again.” So they did; reached back for more and took it higher. What a thrill. On the way out I called out thanks and got a friendly wave.

There’s a lovely Persephone on YouTube, but maybe a little too polite and controlled, plus Patricia doesn’t stretch out on piano. It’s from her 2006 album Mythologies, which I’ve since purchased and totally recommend.

Speaking of recommendations, here are two more: If you’re going to the Green Mill, get there early, and sit at the bar or in a booth. The plastic chairs they put up in front of the stage will give you severe back damage.

Muse

Ah, a guilty musical pleasure. They’re a power trio and play power pop somewhere on the U2-to-Queen axis. They have some great songs, sing beautifully, and the guitar orchestration is tremendous. There’s nothing innovative in the slightest and you really don’t want to look too close at the lyrics or sentiments; just listen to the guitar and shake your booty.

I took my whole family, including the nine-year-old and the sixteen-year-old. And what a show! The massive set filled most of the floorspace and airspace in the local hockey rink. The latest record is called Drones and sure enough, at the opening the air filled with big balloon-drones in a slow orchestrated dance. It sort of didn’t work because the song is dystopian, but the drones were adorable.

But wow — great staging, great lighting, great visuals, great sound, polish polish polish. The moment the band came on stage the audience leapt to its feet, and then never sat down. There were only a couple of weak songs, and then on the big hits, everyone sang along.

Now… if you’d come looking for spontaneity or soul or blues influences, you’d come up empty. It was obvious that every move, every hell-for-leather charge out to the stage’s wings, every stiff-legged leap, was precision choreography, practiced heavily and pulled off effortlessly. I respect that, a lot; people who take entertaining other people seriously.

By the way, Psycho, from the latest record Drones, is a terrific concert opener, and Dead Inside works well on-stage too. Of the band’s chestnuts, Madness is the most fun as a sing-along.

Are they gonna play a song twice because a fan likes it? Are they gonna cover Rollin’ and Tumblin’? Are they going to raise your consciousness? None of the above. But it’s got a good beat, you could dance to it, and everybody did. Both kids had a good time and we all sang along to the hits.

I recommend taking Muse’s tour in. But I also recommend an evening in a good local rock-&-roll or jazz bar.

Christmas sing-along

Finally, just the other night we went along to a caroling evening featuring Simple Gifts, a Vancouver choir; my wife is one of their sopranos. The choir sang a few, then the whole room sang a few, traditional and modern, and there was a food and clothing drive and we raised a whole bunch of money for charity, and everyone had a good time.

They had all the carol lyrics printed out and let the audience pick the ones they wanted to sing. Here’s what’s surprising; one of the choices was Imagine. I wouldn’t call it a carol but that didn’t seem to bother anyone. I’ve never had a chance to sing it, and it turns out to be a little more complicated than it sounds on the radio.

Also, I suspect there are very few members of my generation who can sing that song without getting all choked up. Certainly not me.

So get out and involve yourself with some music that’s coming from real people in real time. Also, try being one of those people.

Twitter Numbers 14 Dec 2015, 12:00 pm

I still think Twitter’s interesting; it informs me and pleases me in ways no other service comes near. Also, it lets me talk to the world, and when you do that, you find yourself asking “is anyone listening?” Fortunately, Twitter will tell you. The numbers are big enough that the stats might be of general interest. Of course, Social Media Professionals all have known all this stuff for years, but most of us aren’t those.

Where the stats are

On Twitter I’m @timbray, so my stats are at ads.twitter.com/user/timbray/tweets (you can’t see that, you’ll need to plug in your own handle).

It’s well-put-together; words whose meaning aren’t instantly obvious are nicely linked to explanations. I’m not sure I would have tracked precisely the same selection of data, but it’s not obviously crazy.

Also, you can click on any individual tweet and get the real poop on its interaction with the world; see below.

Where I stand

As I write this I have 32,870 followers. If this were still 2013, that would be top-0.1% territory. I honestly don’t have deep ideas as to why, but suspect starting early, having interesting employers, trying to amuse, and flaming soft targets like Apple and Oracle all help.

Big take-aways

I have two:

• On average, anything I write here appears on a number of screens which is about 1% of my nominal “follower count”.

• My follower count changed hardly at all in the last three years.

That last one could imply that Twitter’s not growing very fast. Or that it is, but that I’m becoming less interesting at an almost exactly equal rate. Or something else.

So, what gives a tweet impact? I could speculate at length but I honestly don’t feel very wise on this subject, so I’ll just reproduce the numbers for a few days’ tweets and let you draw your own conclusions. Haven’t put too much work into the table formatting, and the timezone is wrong; sorry.

One Amazon Year 1 Dec 2015, 12:00 pm

December first made it a year here at Amazon Vancouver’s engineering castle in the sky. I’m working with good people in a cool office on interesting stuff. It’s at the white-hot center of server-side computing but surprisingly unsurprising.

Making vs talking

It turns out that building and shipping nontrivial software is a lot harder work than evangelizing it and writing about it. I come home awfully damn tired some days.

I’m less engaged in the Internet conversation and miss that some, but I’ve tasted more of that joy than almost anyone. And then the actual stuff I’m working on — making AWS more useful while keeping it reliable — is so blindingly obvious that it doesn’t really need evangelizing.

Yeah, computing is moving to a utility model. Yeah, you can do all sorts of things in a public cloud that are too hard or too expensive in your own computer room. Yeah, the public-cloud operators are going to provide way better uptime, security, and distribution than you can build yourself. And yeah, there was a Tuesday in last week.

Behind the scenes

Keeping all the world’s infrastructure on the air is a ton of work. Every day you have to balance risk reduction with shipping features. Bearing cloud growth rates in mind, 2018’s load could be 5× or 10× today’s. Thus we better be treating any current infrastructure creaks as Job Zero, and screw the shiny new.

But the high-tech biz has been all shiny-new all the time. Me, I think being reliable and available and fast in exchange for a monthly usage-based bill is the shiniest, new or not. Which is why I’ll never be a product manager.

What I do

I have a grandiose title and nobody can really tell me what to do, except for there are a million reasonable requests for help I really shouldn’t turn down, each an opportunity to feel bad about things fallen by the wayside. Fortunately I learned to ignore triage guilt a couple decades ago.

I get a few hours here and there to code, and thus a funny story: Sometimes my code-review requests came back with polite WTF’s about things that look like amateurish ignorance of obvious best practices. Finally someone asked why I was ostentatiously ignoring the common wisdom. So I shared the awful truth that in my lengthy career I had never previously written a single line of server-side Java. The silence that fell on the email thread was palpable.

But hey, at the end of the day, the server-side is all about message-exchange patterns and payload design and buying scale with sublinear algorithms, and I do know some stuff about that stuff.

So unless something goes terribly wrong in the next few weeks, some T.Bray code will soon be at work at scale, facilitating the Cloudification of online properties you spend time with.

How I feel

Corporately, I’m a burnout. I’ve co-founded two startups and worked for Sun and Google; most would see that as a trip through the Good Bits Of Capitalism. Still, I’m not a believer.

It’s stimulating to work for Amazon, which is approximately the most interesting company in the world by a factor of two. First, the pursuit of retail ubiquity; I won’t say at all costs, but with cheerful disregard for certain ratios thought important in the (detestable) finance biz. Second, the wholesale replacement of on-premise computing with Cloudstuff.

But at the end of the day, it’s a job, which is to say a financial transaction. My employer rewards me fairly, making a bet that what I help build will pay off for them. In exchange, I’ll work hard to help build things that do that.

But will I actually care? Enough to sacrifice family time or personal time or cottage-life time? Well, sometimes; when I’m convinced the work will touch people’s lives — especially my software-tribe peers’ — in a good way.

My whole career’s been blessed by luck. This feels like more. Don’t think I’m not grateful.

Anniversary resolution

Today, I tried switching my commute from bike-train-walk to bike-all-the-way. It’s refreshing, and just as quick; but we’ll see how my legs feel hold up.

Game of Homes 29 Nov 2015, 12:00 pm

What happened was, I got on an airplane, unexpectedly finished my book, and discovered there wasn’t much else downloaded on that device. So I started re-reading what was there, namely Game of Thrones. It’s hard to stop doing that once you start, and what’s worse, I can’t help thinking about Vancouver Real Estate.

You may not have thought that our local home-selling business featured royal incest, bloody slaughter, and the frequent display of bare breasts. And well, you’d be right, it doesn’t. But bear with me.

Sidebar: The Ice and Fire Books

If you haven’t read these — in particular if you’ve been watching GoT on HBO and haven’t — you really ought to. They’re a rich, polished tough-to-put-down body of work and given their thickness, at thirty bucks and change pretty cost-effective entertainment. We started watching the HBO series but gave up on it —  our video time is limited, and GoT is OK but it’s neither Joss Whedon nor Orphan Black. Anyhow, I’m enjoying re-reading the books.

Back to Vancouver

Real estate here is ridiculously, ludicrously ovepriced; both absolutely, and measured by the personal-income-to-housing-cost ratio. It’s a real problem. Families with kids are being priced out of the kinds of neighborhoods they really belong. And at work, Amazon’s ability to hire senior employees is limited to local people, and to those from similarly-insane markets such as San Francisco, London, New York, and Hong Kong. People from anywhere else can’t afford to buy a family-suitable house, even on high-tech salaries.

Two of the reasons are easy to understand. Most obviously, Vancouver is one of Canada’s nicest places to live, regularly scoring in the world’s top three in one ratings guide or another. Also we’re boxed in by the mountains and the Pacific and the USA so we can’t sprawl; which contributes on the nice-place-to-live front.

The legend

It turns out that a great many people in Vancouver totally believe there’s a third dimension to the real-estate madness:

1. Foreign buyers.

2. Specifically, Asian foreigners.

3. Chinese, to be precise.

4. Not just any Chinese, but wealthy mainland Chinese.

5. That wealth being of sketchy provenance.

6. The purchases often left standing empty.

7. Or perhaps inhabited by students or Mom and the kids, while Dad works on more wealth back home.

8. And finally, that these inhabitants report no income, pay little or no tax, but use lots of the social services.

Is this true? Totally? Mostly? A little bit? At all? The thing is, nobody really knows. Reliable statistics seem unavailable — to the point that gathering some was an issue in our recent election.

Anecdotal evidence is thick on the ground. Time after time I hear people talk about their neighborhoods; about the dark windows at night, about the solo student in the mansion, about the mansion being torn down to build a bigger mansion.

What’s the elephant in the room? Racism. Not overt, of course, partly because if you have a group of more than about four people here, one or two of them will look Asian. But actually Western Canada has a 120-year history of anti-Chinese racism . Also, Canada’s population has been built on wave after wave of immigration, and there’s a long tradition of each wave wanting to slam the door shut behind it.

What I think

I bet the reality isn’t as simple as the legend, and I don’t see that stuff happening in my neighborhood. But I’m pretty sure that when real statistics arrive, they’ll show that some of the things on that list are happening, to some degree.

For straightforward reportage on what people think is happening, see Kathy Tomlinson’s Vancouver house-buying frenzy leaves half-empty neighbourhoods. For a more nuanced take with good journalistic values, read Frances Bula’s What data is it really that we’re looking for in Vancouver’s housing market? It’s easy to believe that, as Ms Bula argues, even if our real-estate market dosn’t have a Chinese-money problem, we quite likely do have a global-capital issue. She also points out the glaring absence of hard data, in Why you should be wary of stories saying “census proves rich Asians live in mansions and pay no taxes”.

Why?

Let’s assume that buckets of overseas money are flowing into Vancouver. The conventional explanation — which I find believable — is that the local real-estate is being used mostly just like a bank account; a safer place to put money than under your mattress. Why here?

At this point I’d ask you to step aside and read a wonderful blog piece from last year: The Rule of Law is Vastly Under-Priced, by “Cassandra”. The piece echoes its title but is rich and entertaining.

And that’s why; global money sloshes in here seeking the Rule of Law. Which is to say, looking for places that are maximally unlike Game of Thrones. I was reading one of the episodes where Arya Stark trudges with temporary allies through a war-torn landscape, seeking safety at all costs; and thinking that that’s how people in many parts of the world feel about trying to protect their life’s savings.

There is nothing people won’t do to protect their families. I grew up in the Middle East and have seen the awful landscapes the desperate Syrians are trudging through to get to the high-risk boat-ride to Greece. Trying to stop people fleeing war is not only despicable, it’s futile.

Trying to stop the wealthy from putting their capital out of reach of an Anti-Corruption Campaign may be not be despicable, but it’s not easy either.

The differences between one rule-of-law jurisdiction and another are qualitative and significant. But once you’ve stepped outside that Rule of Law, it can start to smell like Westeros very damn fast. And these days, you don’t need crossbowmen in the musician’s loft, or swordsmen on horseback, to create a climate of fear. And drive up housing costs on the other side of the world.

Long-form Reviewing 19 Nov 2015, 12:00 pm

This is a love letter to an automotive review, which turns out to be one of the best applications of blogging I’ve ever seen. Specifically, the “Long-Term Road Test” format over at Edmunds.com.

What’s happening is, the 2003 Audi A4 — my write-up on it was one of this blog’s launch features — is, well, as old as this blog. It’s still a pretty nice car but has to visit the Audi doctor too often. So, we’re idly thinking of new wheels.

Specifically, a run-about-town thingie: Smaller is better, and large fossil-fuel engines are inappropriate.

Teslas are overpriced, which sort of leaves the Nissan Leaf and the BMW i3. And, while nobody would call the i3 a beauty, it looks like a pretty compelling package.

So I was poking around looking for useful reviews, and found the 2014 BMW i3 Long-Term Road Test. It’s a months-long mini-blog with (as of now) 81 entries, covering everything from child-seat stowage to climate controls to parking issues.

I now think that all other big-ticket-item review formats are obsolete. I am really quite 100% confident that I know pretty exactly what the trade-offs in owning this car are; what will please and what will aggravate.

Last time I was car-shopping, if you wanted an unbiased write-up in any detail, Consumer Reports was about all there was. Some things do get better.

Also, it’s axiomatic that automotive writing should be amusing, and the Edmunds-ites are. Even more so in their fairly-brutal long-term Viper review. And for serious fun, they’re also long-terming a 1989 Yugo.

As for the i3? So far, the family is dubious; my daughter, who remembers no other car, is tearful at the thought of retiring the Audi. And we’d have to run a power line out to where we park. So we might not get one, but it’s a pretty cool piece of work.

CL XXXV: Fading 3 Nov 2015, 12:00 pm

This year’s Cottage Life chapter is over. Not the best, either; what with my new gig and all we visited less, and the kids would as soon be in the city. Still, it’s a rare privilege.

I could show you more mountains or birds or trees and trees and trees. Instead, let’s settle for three fading hydrangea blossoms.

All on the same plant on the same afternoon. This guy puts on a pretty nice show from spring through to fall and its pretty parts age then die with grace. I admire that.

With any luck we’ll be back lots.