RIP: Stanislaw Lem

Noted Polish science fiction writer, I enjoyed his work because of the unconventional style and language, though the language issue may have been a translation artifact. He was 84.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislaw_Lem

Slashdot thread: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/27/189234

Iron Chef America: The Game?!

http://www.koreus.com/media/iron-chef-america.html

Flash stuff, sound. I didn't play it, but if I can use it to club Bobby Flay in the head, it might be fun!

NEW LIGHT METER! WOOT!

I've used a Sekonic L-398 light meter for a considerable number of years. Wonderful meter, powered by the selenium cell that takes the light reading, so you never put batteries into it: it's self-powered. VERY strongly made, it's survived banging around with me for 20 years or more.

Unfortunately when my portraite studio photography class started this semester, I found out that it was not reading accurately, so it's sort of been semi-retired for the last couple of months.

Well, if there's one thing true about serious photographers, they're gadget freaks. I am certainly no exception. An incident light meter like my L398 is of limited use in a studio photography class, our main need is for flash meters. They work the same as incident light meters in that they measure the light falling on the subject, but they have the addition of being able to plug the flash cord into the meter then pressing a button to fire the flash.

We have one in the studio for, drum roll please, studio use. I never cared for it: the ergonimics of how it feels in my hand just didn't work (such things are very important to me), and the auto-shutoff powers down the unit in just a minute or two of non-use.

Not acceptable.

So I started cruising eBay. I found a really cool Minolt Auto Meter IVf for a very attractive price: $108 including shipping. AND NOW IT IS MINE! It arrived today, and I used it in tonight's shoot. Feels very good in my hand, very easy to read display, and the auto-shutoff is ten minutes! And since it's powered by a single AA battery, it's easy to get replacements.

I had some concerns about buying it. They seller had a high rating, almost 1000, and it was over 97% positive, so I had no problems there. But I really didn't look at the add close enough. He doesn't take PayPal, they closed his account for selling "adult material". I consider that a little hypocritical: if eBay lets him sell it, PayPal shouldn't have a problem since they're owned by eBay. ANYWAY, I had to go to the hassle of going to my bank and mailing him a cashier's check. My concern was that if there was anything wrong with the meter that I'd have a hard time getting satisfaction from this guy. The high rating and high positive score assuaged that fear somewhat, but it still nagged at me.

I mailed the check off last Tuesday. Didn't hear from the guy. Sent him an email last night asking if he'd received the check. He said he had and that the meter went out Friday.

And Monday it was in our mail box! SQUEEEE!

Memowies, wike the cownahs of my mind....

apostate_96 was posting that change over the last 50-100 years is phenomenal, and that people would lock you up if you were to tell them that you could fly faster than sound or get music out of a little box the size of a bunch of folded up dollar bills. So I started thinking about what change that I’ve seen in my life, and this is what I came up with.


When I got my first car in '79, (a hand-me-down '73 Impalla 4-door), I had a cassette deck installed because it just had an AM/FM radio, not stereo. I used LP records, though mostly bought pre-recorded cassettes. Laserdisc and VHS were new tech, CD was a hideously expensive audiophile toy, we didn't even sell CD players at the store that I worked at. The first Sony Walkman cassette deck sold for $100-150 IIRC.

Pioneer, Sony, Technics were the big audio names at the time for home stereo. Cerwin-Vega was one of the premier speaker manufacturers, Infinity speakers were very expensive and Bose was very new at the time.

The spiffiest personal computers going were the TRS-80 Model I, the Apple II, the Commodore CBM, TI-99/4A, and the Atari 400 & 800. Later the TRS-80 and the Apple got floppy drives. 300 baud modems, and getting disconnected every time someone picked up the phone when you were online. Sprint Mail, CompuServe, The Source. Mainly we used personal bulletin-board systems (BBS).

We had rotary-dial (pulse) telephones, later my mom had a slimline phone in the bedroom that had to plug into the wall to light the push buttons. I remember black and white TV when I was a kid, not to mention that we had five channels, maybe six, I don't remember when the local UHF religious station went on the air. I remember ON TV, a broadcast subscription service: it was a UHF station that at night started showing movies and some adult content (soft-core), all scrambled. Atari 2600 game machine, definitely the best available. No other video game had the market success, we always sold out of that box during Christmas when I was working retail.

For cameras, bayonet-mount lenses and through-the-lens (TTL) metering were still fairly new. Auto-winders were a third the cost of the camera body and advanced your film at 1.5-2 frames per second. Zoom lenses were very pricy, the 70-210 being the most popular that I saw and sold. My current 28-300 zoom was pretty much inconceivable back then.

Paperback books were $0.25-0.75 typically.

And most of the improvements since then are due to improvements in electronics which lead to more powerful computers.


Of course, I’m utterly full of it because there are so many other factors at play here that I can’t account for, but still, it’s interesting reminiscing every now and again.