As you may recall, towards the back end of last year I had a play around with the focusing screen of my SLR. Specifically I ordered a split image microprism focusing screen as a replacement for what I believed to be a scratched normal screen.
6 months on, and I’ve just switched back to the normal screen (although I may yet go back again).
The split image screen in itself is great – far easier to see when the subject is in focus, and generally what’s going on, and, all other things being equal I would run with it every time. They’re not perfect by any means, and in particular the way they collect light is different, and so at apertures smaller than about f/5.6, or if light levels are low, the middle bit blacks out. Obviously the f/5.6 isn’t a huge issue, as you tend to preview fully open, and if you have stopped down for depth-of-field preview the precise focus point is less critical.
However, there are 2 specific deal-breakers for me with the specific one I purchased (which was dead cheap):
The provided shims didn’t really do the job.
The focus confirmation lights don’t show.
The first is the big problem. It came with 4 or 5 bits of thin plastic shaped in the same way as the real metal shim. (I should add that the purpose of the shim is to ensure that the screen is the correct distance from the lens, so the focussing is correct). These were immensely fiddly to fit, and I don’t think made quite the right gap. This in turn meant the focus was ever so slightly off – actual focus on the sensor didn’t match the screen. It was a tiny amount, but enough to shake my confidence in the focus – which makes the whole exercise kinda pointless.
The other problem is the pathetic plastic shims don’t sit flat – they slipped out and are visible in the viewfinder (but obviously not the images).
The second is less critical – and apparently you can draw little pencil marks on to make them show up again.
All of this said, I’ve just fired a couple of test shots with the old screen, and I don’t like it half as much! I may yet switch it back, and persist with the shims to try and sort out the focus point.
I have been randomly looking back over my blog, and settled on 2004 for no particular reason. It’s like it was written by a different person! I don’t mean in terms of personality, but I talk about doing things I have almost no recollection of. It’s a very strange experience to read a review that you wrote of a book or a film that you can’t remember reading/watching.
It’s also interesting to read entries about No. 1 son from that year (his first 12 months), as there is all sorts of bits and pieces I’d plain forgotten, but which are now relevant for No. 2 son.
For instance, we were sure that B. had never rolled onto his front in the night, and woken up stuck, but the record shows otherwise.
So it’s probably worth jotting down some notes about what’s going on with T.
He’s essentially sleeping through the night (for a week or two now). Goes in the crib at 6.30pm ish, and doesn’t come out again until about 7am. He’s a noisy herbert, and his favourite trick is to give a couple of squawks – just enough to wake us up – then happily go off again leaving us awake! Grrrrr!! 🙂
His second favourite trick is to lift up his legs, and then slam that back onto the mattress with a loud bang.
No teeth yet.
On solids – mainly baby rice, fruit and veg thus far.
Can roll onto his side, and onto his back from his front (if you put his arms in the right place).
No words, as such, but plenty of babbling and syllables.
A. and I also made it out for our anniversary meal (albeit a month late) – went to the Boar’s Head in Ripley, happily with a half-price voucher. No. 1 had a sitter, but No 2. came with us and slept in the carseat (or, at least, didn’t complain).
While I’m here (lunchtime nearly over!), films and book catchup:
Another little review of my progress, seeing as we’re now into April. What’s actually spurred this post is that I weighed myself this morning, plus I started climbing again this week, AND I’m about to cook a new dish, so I’m feeling preeety chipper.
One humorous moment first. Was cycling home from work in my horrendous luminous yellow jacket, with waterproof trousers and a dodgy helmet. Two teenage girls waiting for some mates on the corner. As I cycle past, one chips in Looking fly.
Well, it amused me.
Anyway, here’s how I’m doing:
Climbing – have started again. I now need to go more than once a fortnight to meet 20 climbs this year, but I’m hoping to do a few weeks on the trot to get my fitness back up. Was a good session this week, but ran out of grip near the top of the auto-belay 5+. 5+ was almost warm-up territory for me last year!
Blogging – This is my 11th entry in 14 weeks, so I’m slightly behind. Must try harder!
Growing Leaders – going well so far. Very challenging and enjoyable course to deliver, and it would appear the delegates are benefiting from it.
Cinema – Planning to chalk up visit 1 with No. 1 son over Easter. My sister kindly gave my a gift subscription to LoveFilm for my birthday, so that’s going to dramatically increase my film consumption rate too!
Weight. Well, I am (as of this morning) at 72.2 kg, which is pretty darn close to my target range (68 – 72). I suspect with climbing again it will rapidly drop to 70 over the next few weeks, and I can start eating biscuits again!!
Photo – well, haven’t submitted one for publication, but I am doing Practical Photography’s DSLR skills, and have uploaded a photo for Module 1 (a “contrasty” still life). My submission is slightly quirky, and I don’t think it really works. Oh go on then, here it is:
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The focus point is intentional, but I think it needs something behind to balance it up. I’m happy with the exposure (which was the objective of the homework). I also did a flash + long shutter one with it rocking which is funky, but doesn’t mee the brief (natural light). But it is a competition, so I think it counts for the purposes of my targets. Still building up to submitting one for publication…
Camping – pending
New dish. In honour of Mothering Sunday, I’m cooking for the missus at lunchtime. The main dish is shepherd’s pie, which I’ve done before, but for pud I’m going to bake a treacle tart. In fact, I’ve never cooked any sort of tart, or particularly worked with pastry from first principles (although I did make profiteroles once with homemade choux pastry, and was almost disappointed by how easy they are). Ready rolled pastry from the freezer is so convenient (and probably better than I could do!) there doesn’t seem much point in making it – but I’m going to give it a whirl. I may even post a piccie of the result.
All in all not too shoddy. Need to pay some attention to climbing and blogging, but otherwise I’m content with progress.
Forgive the pretentious title – it is intended to be ironic, but I’m not sure it comes across.
This week saw my 37th birthday, and as I trotted out the old phrase one year older and wiser, I actually stopped and thought about it. Sure, I’m one year older, but am I any wiser?
Wisdom is a very slippery fish to catch. The more you think you have of it, the less you probably do. In fact I’d go so far as to say that it’s an attribute that can only be conferred, not assumed. On the other hand, decisions and opinions can be examined in retrospect, and this perhaps provides a rough indication?
But I digress. As a proxy for an increase in wisdom, I decided to reflect on what I’ve learnt. Or perhaps more accurately on something that has struck me in a more than superficial way.
The two items I have chosen are both “soundbites” which have resonated with me. In both cases they are quotes from a blog (although not the same one).
Keep the room clean where you are, and in God’s time, the door to the next room will open.
This quote really struck me, because of my personal profile. I am very much an initiator – I love starting new things, taking on new challenges, attacking new problems. The downside is that I get bored quite quickly, and want to move on to the next thing. I find it easy to lose interest in the ‘room’ I am in – allow dust and cobwebs to settle in the corners, leave stuff all over the floor. I know there’s a new exciting room next door, so I stop looking after this one as well as I could. God, I believe, is teaching me patience – to take pride in the room I’m in, and get it absolutely as clean as I can. To expose all the dark corners, have it open for inspection at any time with no fear of a moudly sandwich being found under the sofa.
While this piece is particularly about software developers, I believe it applies across life. His paragraph clarifies the sentiment. I hope he’ll forgive me quoting him verbatim:
Once you think you know it all, you’re pretty much done and are only harming yourself, your customers and the poor people who have the misfortune to work with you. Instead, keep reading blogs and books by people who are smarter than you, who are talking about things you don’t understand. When you’re reading their material and their code, you’ll probably feel stupid. Which is great because those are the times when you are most open to learning new things. Keep reading until you get it, and then, start experimenting with what you’ve just learned. Keep doing this over and over again. In short: Keep feeling stupid, it’s the only way to keep learning.
If you generalise the business and computing specific stuff, isn’t that great? Nobody likes feeling stupid, but it’s actually doing things you can’t do, or don’t find easy that provide the best learning.
As it’s now March, and my birthday approaches, I thought I’d take stock of where I am on my 2011 targets. This is my 8th ‘blog entry in 8 weeks, so I’m actually on track on that one. No climbing yet (although I’m thinking it’s going to happen soon).
Growing Leaders is going really well so far. Had two sessions (“Leadership Matters” and “Establishing Identity”), and the feedback I’ve had has so far been very positive. Best part is how the people on the course are being challenged by the material. It feels like we’ve almost settled down into the rhythm of the course now, and we’re starting to do some serious stuff.
Managed one cinema trip (“Tangled 3D”, with 2 seven year old boys!!). I think I had imagined films for me rather than kids, but I’ll take what I can get. Tangled was very good actually – hugely enjoyed it. I cried a bit near the end, when all the lanterns are floating up in the air, but I suspect the cause was actually over-tiredness and having a baby in hopsital. It really is a very emotional experience having a young child. He’s fine now, by the way!
We’ll skip over the weight part, as I haven’t dared weigh myself. I have been less then exemplerary in the snack department, and still using caffeine and calories as a substitute for sleep, and that combined with no climbing has not done my waist any favours.
Photos are looking more promising. The two top candidates at the moment are the Harrogate Advertiser (which periodically prints readers’ pictures), and Gardener’s World magazine (which prints them every month). The Advertiser was asking for Spring flower pictures this week, but I haven’t had time (or daylight) to do anything about it. The crocuses on the Stray are lovely.
Camping – not gonna happen for at least a couple of months.
Cooking. I did bombay potatoes tonight with our curry, but I’ve cooked those before, so it doesn’t count. Souffle still very much on the agenda.
As previously mentioned, one of my targets for 2011 is to cook something I’ve never cooked before. Actually the scope of this challenge is growing a little as I’ve come across a few dishes I like the look of.
On the subject of cooking, I really do like Prue Leith’s book. It’s a little bit “first principles” at times – for example the recipe for lasagne starts with making the pasta. But I find her instructions very clear, and I very seldom have disasters with her dishes. That said, I use Delia for my annual Christmas Cake, and get annoyed every year that the recipe starts like this (my emphasis, and not verbatim):
Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 1.
An 8 in cake tin, greased and lined.
The night before you make the cake…
What is the point of putting the pre-heating instructions and tin preparation instructions before the stuff you have to 24 hours in advance?!?!?!
When I was younger, I always wanted to be a radio presenter. I used to rock out to “Radio James” in my bedroom. I had 2 turntables (which I wired up for remote start), mic, mixing desk, and some jingles recorded off Capital Radio. Actually I probably shouldn’t admit to recording jingles off the air… I think I’ll risk it this once.
For one reason or another, I essentially gave up radio and the media when I graduated – I decided to go out and get a real job instead. After all, why would I want to spend all day entertaining people and listening to great music when I could be sitting at a desk staring at a screen… Anyway, I digress.
So assuming I had pursued my dream, the one thing I didn’t ever settle on was a radio name. On IC radio I was “Jaymz Pace”. The “Jaymz” actually came from my season with PGL – we all had our names on our T-shirts, and everyone found crazy and alternative spellings (like “K8 the trekker”). Hey – it was cool at the time (or, at least, we all thought it was). By the time I did student radio the “Jaymz” was largely ironic, as I recognised its naffness. “Pace” just came out of thin air, as something that sounded good with “James”. I even had a “Jaymz Pace” phonecard, in the days when these things still existed.
But what’s wrong with “James Handley” though? I don’t know – it just doesn’t fly somehow. When I think of the Capital Radio DJs of the era, they nearly all had snappy names – “Pat Sharp”, “Mick Brown”, “Neil Fox”. I don’t believe any of these are their real names. There were some less snappy ones “David Jensen”, “Paul McKenna”, “Richard Allison.”
It’s a similar story for singers, actors, and to some extent authors. Very few (I believe) operate under their real names. Is everyone with a public face essentially unhappy with their own name? I’m aware that Equity has rules about this, but I think it does deeper…
It may have its roots in call-signs, from ham radio days. And of course the advent of networked computing rapidly brought screen names, and avatars. My online presence is principally “eutony” (eutony.net, eutony on Twitter and photobox). Not entirely by design, but it grew out when I decided to purchase a domain so I wouldn’t have to keep changing e-mail address. I probably would choose something different next time, but it’s too hassley to change now.
Humourously enough, I actually now know someone called James Pace. And no, he doesn’t work in radio.
I’ve not made any New Year’s resolutions this year, as such – instead I’ve decided to make a set of targets I am going to (try to) meet in 2011. I’ve also decided to record them here, so in 11 months time I can measure against how I’ve done! These ‘targets’ are actually the minimum I hope to achieve.
So, in no particular order..
Go climbing 20 times.
Write 50 blog entries.
Deliver the Growing Leaders course.
Go the cinema twice.
Obtain and maintain a weight in the range 68-72 kg.
Submit a photo either for publication or to a competition.
Go camping.
Cook a dish I have never cooked before.
It’s not an entirely ambitious list. Climbing, and blogging are potentially challenging (I managed 12 climbs in 2010, and about 18 blog posts). My ideal is to climb once-a-week, but I’m given myself until the summer to get into this groove, mainly because of the littlest Handley. To be fair 11 of the climbs in 2010 were Feb-July, but in July I had an awkward fall which put me out of action for 6 weeks, and then a baby inconveniently came along.
I haven’t been 70kg in 11 years, but I did get down to 72kg in October (before I started using chocolate and caffeine as substitutes for sleep) – it’s subsequently started creeping back up. Actually the graph of my weight for 2002 – 2010 is quite interesting. Don’t often put pictures in my blog, but here goes:
What’s interesting to me is, apart from the outlier in 2004, I’ve been more or less constant around 80kg, until 2009, when it suddenly plummets. For a while I was half-worried I had some awful illness, but I think it’s just that late 2009 is when I started climbing again, and the energy expenditure combined with a bit of motivation to stop snacking tipped the balance. You really notice an extra 10kg when you’re hauling yourself up a wall!
So far I’ve managed 5 blogs in 2011 (including this one), which is well on track for 50 over the year.
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(which is indeed my bible when it comes to cooking – awesome book) very quickly brought me to the soufflĂ© section. We have a winner.