A 1950's lens in 2007

Abigail
Originally uploaded by chmoss.

My 35mm Summilux is off to Leica for 6-bit coding, so I am using a Canon 35mm f3.2 that was built in the early 1950s. Still looks very nice to me.

The Leica Freedom Train - A Journey to Freedom

A short video about the efforts of the E. Leitz Co. to help their Jewish employees.

Abigail in the park

abi 2x2
Originally uploaded by chmoss.

Abigail and I visited a park yesterday. We both had fun.

Jacob Reads Torah for the first time

Reading
Originally uploaded by chmoss.

My grandson, Jacob Bokor, read Torah at the Monday morning service at his school. This was his first time reading Torah as part of the service. He used ahis new "Yad" that we bought for him on our recent trip to Israel (Pics will be up soon).
We were all very proud of his performance.

Hopeful in Haifa

Our day began with a thunderstorm - a cloudburst, really. We set off North from Haifa to visit Acre (Acco), Rosh ha-Nikra, and a friend on the kibbutz Gesher ha-Ziv. We made only one wrong turn on the way.
I guess intelligent life without a GPS may actually be sustainable - but that is still an unproven hypothesis.
When we returned to Haifa we set off down the main drag of Carmel to find a kosher restaurant that served meat dishes. When we reached the end of apparent civilization and restaurants without finding anything other than coffee shops and fast food joints, mostly not kosher, we were, to put it mildly, surprised. We asked a doorman/guard at a hotel where we could find such a restaurant , and he directed us to an Argentinean steak house a short way off the main drag. There we had a very fine kosher steak meal, the size of which we justified by the few miles we walked to locate it and the subsequent walk home. The waitress informed us that they were the only kosher meat restaurant in Haifa. I suspect that this may have been a slight exaggeration, but close to true. Thus was shattered our illusion that eating kosher anywhere in Israel would be easy. It turns out that Haifa is just about the most secular of Israeli cities, and Carmel is the most secular area of Haifa.
Tomorrow morning we drive to Jerusalem, where there are more kosher restaurants.
This blog may pause for a while - we are going to a wedding tomorrow night, and I will need to find another wireless network access point for my phone

Digital Data Damnation

So, tonight I dumped the contents of my 2GB SD card containing two days shooting to my Epson 2000 - or at least I tried to do so. After about half the card was transferred, I got a disk full message. I checked the space available. Plenty. Pop the card back in the M8 and find that a couple of images are corrupt. Delete them. Try to copy again. Same thing - disk full. Try to copy a few at a time. Some give the same error message. Fortunately, most copy successfully. None of the lost images were very important.
Lesson learned. Use smaller cards and save to the hard drive more often. I have 2 1GB cards with me. I will stick with them for the rest of the trip.
I have used Compact Flash cards for several years with no problem - now I get a failure of an SD card within three weeks. I hope that this is not an omen.

We are in Israel

We arrived in Israel Thursday April 6 after a flight that was uneventful, except for a moment after we checked in when Delta agent demonstrated his concern for customers by jumping over the counter and beating up a passeger who groused a little too much about a late flight.
We spent a couple of days in Herzliya with my old friend Peter, and are now in Haifa with Hilda's family.
It is wonderful to be travelling without touring. We are just hanging out with friends and family - no serious sightseeing yet.
My new Leica M8 digital camera is behaving wondefully, despite my misgivings about travelling with a new camera.
I am posting this from my mobile phone - I have not remembered how to upload pictures to the blog from the phone. I forgot to research it before I left. I will try to find out.

Spring in Highland Park arrived, and nobody noticed

Originally uploaded by chmoss.

Spring arrived - I went out to get some pictures of people in spring in Highland Park. Everybody else stayed indoors, almost, The high was 79F - not enough to get peple outside. Very wierd.

More thoughts to live by

This has been widely posted, so I do not know how to properly attribute it - but I find it very funny and worth repeating. If it violates a copyright, please let me know.

• Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.
• Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.
• If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.
• If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
• Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me, either; just leave me the heck alone.
• It's always darkest before dawn. So if you're going to steal your neighbor's newspaper that's the time to do it.
• Don't be irreplaceable; if you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.
• Give a man the fire and you'll keep him warm for one day. Set the man on fire -- and you'll keep him warm for the rest of his life.
• No one is listening until you make a mistake.
• Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else.
• It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.
• It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help. If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
• Some days you are the bug, some days you are the windshield.
• Good judgement comes from bad experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgement.
• There are two theories to arguing with women. Neither one works.
• Generally speaking, you aren't learning much when your mouth is moving.
• Never miss a good chance to shut up.
• Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.

Severely edited subset of my pictures from India

Chinese nets

I have selected a few of my favorite pictures from our trip to India and put them up here on Flickr

Pictures from India

At last I have finished culling the pictures I took last December in India. Click on the image to see all of them.

We visited Poughkeepsie and Tenafly last week

Poughkeepsie was cold - below zero Fahrenheit. We visited our dear, old friend Brenda who had a massive stroke in January. Her recovery will be a long slow process. She has not regained her speech. It is very sad to see her in this state - she was a very active, vital person, now reduced to a vegetative state.

Digital Domesday Book lasts 15 years, not 1000

The "showcase for Britain's electronic prowess" - the Digital Domesday Book - has proven itself to be just that. Its is now unreadable, reported the Observer
in a recent article.
So, to preserve your records for posterity, you can:

• Print them using pigment based inks on your digital printer

or

• Put them up on a website and hope that a web archive project crawls your site. You can ask them to do so, and access the result with the Wayback Machine.

Molasses

I have had no time to edit/post any more India photos :( but I am still working on them. Watch this space ). It is amazing to me how much the details of running a life impede on time spent on hobbies. In retirement I thought that I would not need to manage my time efficiently. I would have at least 12 hours a day extra to do whatever I wished. Ha!
So, I have started organizing myself along the lines suggested by the "Getting things done" cult. So far, I feel much better. I have lots of lists of things I need to do. I do many of them every day. However, the harder I work at the lists, the behinder I get.
But...having lists of all things that I have not done is very liberating. I don't worry about them any more - except for taxes, and the market, and...

More pictures from India

I am slowly getting my India pictures posted online. This latest set is from the eleventh day AC (After Chicago), which corresponds to the 2nd day WB (With Bags).

I can't make Blogger show a picture now, so I will go with this text link.

This is the set from Agra

Propinquity - someone wants to bring the term into more general use

I am listening to a podcast by Dr. Karen Stephenson - she wants to get the word propinquity into more general use. Seems like a good idea to me. Propinquity is the foundation of functional mailing lists and internet groups.
Propinquity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

D-Wave Demonstrates First Quantum Computer: Practical Uses

This minor announcement may be equivalent of the first computer in 1837.
D-Wave Demonstrates First Quantum Computer: Practical Uses

The Build-a-War Workshop

At last the obvious has been officially discovered. Now it is time to throw them in jail. See The Build-a-War Workshop.

"The inspector general did not recommend criminal charges against Mr. Feith because Mr. Rumsfeld or his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, approved their subordinate’s “inappropriate” operations. The renegade intelligence buff said he was relieved."

But how about charges against Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Cheney?

Microsoft Office 2007

Today I attended the launch event in Chicago for Microsoft Office 2007. Not very exciting. Very proprietary and server based. Their technology seems to have stood still for several years. Web based applications will do to Microsoft what Microsoft did to IBM.
This blog entry is being prepared as I wait for a train. They run every hour - I missed the last one by 5 minutes!

Back from India

We toured India for three weeks in December - hence the long break in posting. It is impossible for me to comprehend such a vast and diverse country in a three weeks - three years would be too short. The population of India is over three times that of the USA, The country about 1/3 the size of the USA.
Travelers from time immemorial have not hesitated to form opinions based on a short visit so I will conform to precedent.
I observed and felt:

• Tremendous diversity at all levels - like walking on a strange planet in a scene from the movie "Starwars"
  
• Huge disparities of wealth
• Spirituality in all aspects of life
• Public filth, personal cleanliness
  
• I was seeing the world as was 5,000 years ago
  

We visited Delhi, Jaipur, Ranthambore, Agra, Varanasi, Cochin, and Mumbai - and many points in between - we drove a lot. We did not see the high tech area in Bangalore.

My pictures are slowly being posted at:
http://clive.smugmug.com/Travel/274602