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Ended the day with a ride in a Waymo (Robo taxi) for the full San Francisco experience. Absolutely insane. This is the future. For the first ten minutes it is a little nerve wrecking until you start to relax because it does such a good job.

15 mile post thanksgiving hike through SF with the boys!

Happy Thanksgiving. I spent it with two young friends and their families. It was great.

I don't think Warwick are doing so hot these days... I snapped this in Selfridges on Oxfordstreet yesterday and I might have been tempted as an insane collector if I didn't already own one of those piece of shit amps. Well that and it sounds like shit... there is that issue too.

That's what I was thinking, the margins must be insane on these as its a store not really known for any good deals. Now I'm thinking if I did a deep dive on this earlier in the year when I got a set dirt cheap... or I just sent all of that to Kevin? Well first off input, bunch of parts here USB xmos, A/D etc: All of this leads to a pair of ESS 9028 dacs: Not the best picture but that looks a lot like filtering to try and make up for the utterly retarded driver design: Finally output stage... yeah this is pretty dire. Remember this thing is 4k$... Now how does this thing actually work? The clue is those two gray caps and the wires going to the headphone plug. 450V B+ on a single rail so shall we say a maximum voltage swing of ~840Vppss and the bias is clearly 2000V. The bias is superimposed on the audio signal after the output caps and then we have the grounded shield, that's it. These are even simpler than what Koss were doing in the 60's where the back stator on the ESP6 (and 7, 8 and 9) are grounded but otherwise normal electrostatics.

Nate, get a model that offers full manual control of aperture, shutter, ISO, exposure compensation and white balance (at least daylight/tungsten/flash). If you're looking for a Canon I'd investigate the premium S series (S95/S100/S110) over the G. The S has a faster lens (F/2) and while not as robustly built, it's not as ...brick-like as the G series. Lugging around a G gets annoying quickly. Like Blessingx, I have a 2002 vintage G2. Mine's IR-modified, because me. The S series have excellent LCD screens. I used a PowerShot G11 ...about 15 years ago and did not like the screen at all. The "other shoe" of this suggestion is that clean copies of PowerShot Ses cost more now than they did new. The new cameras that are are super popular are those goddamn Fuji X100 series models that every hateful "influencer" flogs are featured heavily on social media. The X100s are usually out of stock and always overpriced. I've seen the photo results and they're ...fine, but I'd rather read about a Kardashian plane crashian than use one ...what was I talking about again? Oh, yeah. Speaking of being an idiot with a camera, I got a combination that should not work to function a few days back. One of my muses is an Asahi Super-Takumar 35mm F/3.5 lens I got in a lot of old M42 primes I bought off eBay in 2007. It's a wacky design that goes back the late 50s, though my copy appears to be from the 70s. It's such a deeply flawed lens, it's hysterical. F/3.5 is a laughably small aperture for a 35mm prime. The back of the lens extends too far into the camera body so that it doesn't work with modern full frame models without using mirror lockup. It takes 49mm filters (I have an army of 52 and 58mms, and basically no 49s, because it's not 1977 and we don't wear rayon anymore.) The lens's aperture increments in full stops, because half stops are for suckers and third stops are unknown. It's not particularly sharp at any aperture setting and in fact is un-sharp in a very odd way. I think I mentioned a while ago I picked up a used 50D. It's a 2008 EF-S body and easily accommodates the Takumar. I used the combination quite a bit in early part of November: This time of year the sun spends most of its time on the horizon and produces very strong colors. I took this horizontal at the back edge of my property. It really illustrates what I like about the 35mm Takumar. The way it handles out-of-focus highlights is just odd. Also the way it handles details that are (theoretically) in-focus is just ...flawed. It never reaches proper sharpness even at small apertures. It has what a friend of mine described as a "horror movie" aesthetic. My grandfather placed some stones on the property line ~65 years ago. Photo taken with my 17-40mm, which is a workhorse of a lens since I got it in 2008. Since the the 35mm Takumar works without issue on my 50D, I did the logical thing and got it to work with my 5D IV. I spent considerable time learning to use mirror lockup and Live View (two things I avoid under normal circumstances.) I'm now sufficiently blind that I have to wear my reading glasses to see small details on the LCD screen. Focusing with live view is a shot in the dark. Metering is a lesson in chimping and re-shooting. 5K jpeg, feel free to pixel peep. How does the 35mm Takumar perform with the 5D IV's much better sensor? Fine, I guess. This shot was taken a very small aperture (F/16, IIRC.) This is about as sharp as my copy ever gets. Even though the DoF is pretty large, the farthest OOF highlights have that weird quality. The Takumar stands in stark contrast to my CZJ 135mm F/3.5 Sonnar, which is sharp at any aperture and paints OOF highlights a beautiful, ethereal way. The Sonnar hints at dreams and magic while the Takumar offers ominous uncertainty.

Dea Matrona from Ireland:

Al told me to stop building things. For variety's sake, Andrew and I emptied the bank account last weekend to go see the defending NBA champs. Was a lot of fun, got to see an OT buzzer beater from Tatum on our end of the court. Was a good dude's night out.

RIP Jim Abrahams https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/jim-abrahams-dead-airplane-naked-gun-hot-shots-1236071689/ The Abrahams in Zucker, Zucker, Abrahams. But that's not important right now.