Over a year ago, I speculated on what I might miss most about Ann Arbor and enjoy most about Syracuse. Since I’ve had some time to mull it over, I’ve decided that an updated version is in order.
Let’s start with Ann Arbor. I still miss it quite a lot, but my predictions were off a little bit. Here’s my updated list of things that I miss about A2:
- Convenience to family
- Ann Arbor Flickr geeks, too many to name
- Salons chez Jeff and all the cultured, interesting people who gather to toast and talk
- the Michigan Theater
- Silvio’s Organic Pizza
- Mast’s Shoes
- UM’s massive resources, especially
the UMMA and the Askwith Media Library the library’s electronic subscriptions and enormous holdings
Proximity to Detroit: the DIA, Detroit Zoo, and Detroit Tigers A pedestrian downtown, walkable from residential areas. Well, we can (and do) walk downtown from our house in Syracuse, but it’s about 2 miles.Ann Arbor parks Michigan lakes and camping. Especially Lake Michigan and camping with friends.Familiarity Running into people I know every day. I don’t really know many people here at all.
So let’s move on to Syracuse. I’ve gotten used to saying I’m from New York, I’m comfortable enough in my surroundings, and I’ve had a chance to check out some of the local resources. Here’s my updated list of what I’ve most enjoyed about Syracuse, to date:
- Affordable housing: Check and double check! I love owning a house.
Syracuse University; I am moving out there for the information school, so I had better like it! The iSchool at Syracuse University- Central New York’s great outdoors,
especially the NY State Parks. Or at least Oakwood Cemetery, where we walk our dogs. We haven’t visited much of the state parks just yet, but the Adirondacks are only 2 hours away…
Community Darkrooms CSA CNY: fresh local organic veggies all summer and into the fall! The produce from Grindstone Farm and Wyllie Fox Farm is just fantastic.- Syracuse Real Food Cooperative, which makes wind energy available to the locals: I go here pretty much solely for the corn flakes. But the corn flakes are worth the trip. And I did sign up for wind energy.
Syracuse’s professional theater, opera, symphony, and modern art museum Dinosaur Bar-B-Que: a honky tonk rib joint. Simply superb.- Rosamond Gifford Zoo at Burnet Park: We’re volunteering to pour beer at the upcoming Brew at the Zoo event this weekend.
- Syracuse Sky Chiefs, Toronto’s AAA baseball team: And they serve Dinosaur Bar-B-Que pulled pork sandwiches at the ballpark!
- Less frenzied traffic than in Southeast Michigan: Well yes, the traffic is less frenzied. But Everett and I both agree, it’s a lot stupider. No net gain there.
- Exploring
My advisor at Michigan is responsible for my foray into 16mm photography. When he learned that I was using vintage cameras, he handed me his father’s WWII Mamiya Super-16, a superb piece of subminiature photographic engineering. I found the film available through eBay seller subtimes in handmade epoxy reproduction cartridges, and a daylight developing tank with a reel that would go down to the 16mm size at the A2 Kiwanis sale for $0.50. So I gave it a shot. The negatives were tiny!
16mm cameras are the classic “spy” cameras of yesteryear. They had their strongest following decades ago, and while they are compact and convenient, they failed to standardize on a film cartridge style. Each camera manufacturer made their own proprietary film cartridge, constraining the supply of the essential material that would have extended the era of these small cameras. As a result of these and doubtless other market forces, 16mm cameras became obsolete, used only by afficianados and photography geeks, and rarely at that. There’s still a small but interested market for the instruments, as a Mamiya Super-16 in good condition is a rare find and can command a respectable price, given that it’s a collector’s item for almost any buyer.
My friends saw me using a 16mm camera, and over the last year, they gifted me two Minolta subminis. Mark gave me the ultra-basic Model-P, a 16mm point-and-shoot camera with a powder blue plastic carrying case. Ross presented me with an MG-S, which is a bit fancier; it’s got several whizzy accessories, including shiny chrome plumb-bobs that correlate to focus distance, close-up and color filters still in their original cellophane wrappings, and even unused flashbulbs for the flash unit!
The fellow on eBay also sells Minolta-style reproduction cartridges loaded with fresh film, so one batch of five rolls will feed both Minolta submini cameras for awhile. I’m very slow to use the film because it’s a bit costly, but actually nowhere near the current cost of Polaroid exposures, come to think of it. I’ve actually only used one roll of film in each, and haven’t even tried out the whizzy accessories for the MG-S just yet! I’ve also been sent some “original” film from an estate sale, courtesy of Mark, which is a good 20-odd years expired and should make a fun experiment. Some of that film is actually color film, but I’ve located several places that handle C-41 16mm film processing by mail order. Supposedly any photofinisher that can handle 110 film can also do 16mm, though I’m not sure I would trust people who don’t explicitly state a capability for processing 16mm film. The film isn’t too hard to get, and developing isn’t much trouble if you stick with black and white and do it yourself.
Scanning the negatives is actually the biggest nuisance for me; they’re too small to work in the film-holding cartridges that my scanner uses, but without a frame of some sort to keep them off the platen, the negatives will scan with unsightly Newton’s rings. My work-around is to tape a piece of archival photo sleeve in the 120 size cartridge, and insert the 16mm negatives in there for scanning. It’s not a particularly elegant or even fully functional solution; if I lose tension on the sleeve taped into the cartridge, I still end up with Newton’s rings, and if I reuse the archival sleeve too many times, it gets scratches that are quite apparent (and also unsightly) in the scans. Nonetheless, the process works reasonably well, or at least well enough to prevent me from coming up with an alternative.
The 16mm cameras make a great travel camera; they’re compact, easy to operate, and uncomplicated. The images bear the mark of an uncommon camera; the tiny negatives don’t have the same sharpness of their larger counterparts, so the photos tend to have a softened, dream-like quality that I actually quite like for travel photography. I can print out my scans from the negatives just like any others, and recently had MOO postcards made using one of them. It’s an image I particularly like, taken in the Getty Center gardens in Los Angeles during the iConference reception, when two colleagues and I were exploring the gardens in the gloaming.
It’s been awhile since I mentioned photography on this blog, yet it’s an enormously consuming passion. When I have a little time to devote to it, as I have this summer, I spend it trying out “new” (old) cameras, developing my own film, scanning the negatives, and posting them on Flickr - all of which amounts to a lot more effort than blogging.
I recently received a present in the mail, or more like a legacy or inheritance or some such. It was my Grandma Grover’s Yashica-635 TLR (twin lens reflex) camera, which is in amazingly good condition. My grandmother was a good photographer; I remember going to local shows in which her work was presented, and her prints are prized possessions in the family. I took apart the viewfinder assembly to remove some large chaff and clean the mirror to brighten up the viewfinder’s image, but the camera required almost no additional attention.
The viewfinder is the inspiration for the title of the post, by the way. It’s a large ground glass viewfinder, which is unquestionably a glass made for looking; everything is represented upside-down (unless I use the flip-out magnifying lens) and you have to move the camera in the opposite direction of what you perceive visually in order to frame a photo. In addition to using it to make normal photos, you can use it to make TTV, through the viewfinder, photos. Of course, that was one of the first things I tried out, before even loading it with film.
In addition to simply trying it out in my sunroom, I also made what’s known as a “contraption” for more TTV adventures in the future. It’s basically a sleeve that darkens the space between the viewfinder glass and the lens of a second camera, which is used to make a photo by focusing on a subject through the viewfinder of the TLR camera. The contraption is made from boxboard, gaff tape, and matte black spray paint. The boxboard was carefully fitted to the viewfinder for a tight light seal, taped with sturdy gaff tape and reinforced in critical locations, and then spray painted matte black to reduce the chances for light bouncing around inside of it. I haven’t done much testing of the TTV contraption just yet, but hopefully I’ll make a photostroll in the near future and really give it a run.
I did a little research and found that this camera is one of the Yashica Mat series, and it’s the only 120 roll film camera engineered to also take 35mm film. However, to do that requires an adapter kit that I don’t have, but reputation has it that image quality for roll film is a lot better, and I prefer medium format anyway. After developing the first couple of rolls, I find that its calculation of the “start” point for film advance without a red window (which is dandy) is off just a bit for the cheap Arista.EDU film that I use, so I got a couple of images with cropped bottoms where the exposure actually overlapped with the masking tape holding the film to its paper backing.
Aside from the film loading quirk and the fact that I got 11 exposures instead of 12, somehow, I’m pleased with the image quality and expect that I’ll continue to have a lot of fun with this camera in the future.
Like so many other crazed tech geeks, I went out and waited in line on the morning of July 11, 2008, to get my very own iPhone 3G. This is not my normal behavior - I’m no fangirl and I don’t actually like using a telephone much at all. What the iPhone has that I could not resist is a good interface, unlimited data services, and a lot more functionality than any other smartphone I’ve ever encountered.
My justifications are simple. I need a global phone. I’m traveling enough that it’s becoming problematic not to have one. To get one from my prior cell provider (Verizon) I would have two options: shell out full price for the device or wait until February for a device that’s at least discounted. Verizon only offers three phones that are global phones (and two of those are different colors of a Blackberry model) and I did not want to be stuck with either of those devices. They were so complicated - about a zillion teeny little buttons for the Blackberry and crazy flipping-out stuff on the other one. So I didn’t really like that option much, and the only option anywhere that I actually did like was the iPhone.
What I like about the iPhone, besides the fact that it’s a terribly sexy little machine, is that it’s a lot more than a phone. It’s a lightweight computing device. I don’t really care that it can act as an iPod (I have two of those already!) and the phone part is a necessary evil. What really does it for me is seamlessly, effortlessly, and completely syncing with the applications I already use on my MacBookPro to provide me with timely, mobile access to my full address book, my calendar, and my email. It also gives me maps with turn by turn directions, which is invaluable because I have no sense of direction of my own. Even though the GPS location functionality hasn’t been working for me, I can get directions and local weather reports, including a Doppler radar map, and both of those have already proven quite useful. I’m also enjoying the apps, all of them free, that bring me local movie listings, currency exchange values, Google, IM, Twitter, and nutrition information for fast food restaurants. I can browse the web, make notes, and even use my iPhone as a flashlight.
And it hardly cost more than a global phone from Verizon. I’ll have to pay slightly prorated early termination fees for two lines, and even so, it’s still not much more expensive. On a monthly basis, the Family Share plan for 2 lines with 700 minutes costs the same as Verizon’s service and seems to be about as good. The only difference in the ongoing cost is the additional $30 for the data plan. That’s unlimited data. And now I’ll get a whole lot more use out of the services I’m paying for than I ever would have gotten out of anything else. The switching cost was well worth it for me.
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I’d stop there, but since I actually bought the phone on release day, I’ll tell my little iPhone release day story. I went to Carousel’s Apple Store at about a quarter after 8 in the morning; I didn’t realize that they were opening early at 8, or I might have arrived earlier and saved myself a little time later on. The queue wasn’t too long, and I was prepared for far worse, so I didn’t mind waiting the hour and a half that it took to get into the store. While I waited to get into the store, I had some Starbucks coffee that one of the staff brought to me in line; the new roast isn’t half bad. Once it was my turn, I had an Apple Store staff member assisting me personally the whole time - great service and very good humored.
Everything went easily until it was time to go through the contract approval stuff; my timing was lousy and it was just after the next time zone went online. AT&T’s national servers crashed. I had to wait about an hour in the store to complete my transaction, unable to even sign my contract until AT&T rebooted their servers at 10:30 AM. Shortly thereafter, I was on my way with my white 16 GB iPhone (with AppleCare) in hand, ready to activate. We gave it a try in the store, but iTunes was already hosed by then due to the extreme traffic load. The nice guy who was trying to help people activate their phones sent me home; my phone was “bricked” as they say - a shiny, pretty, expensive brick that does nothing, except glisten enticingly, without activation.
At home, I plugged it into my computer, brought up iTunes, and over the next four hours I click-clicked every so often to attempt to access the iTunes Store for activation. I even downloaded a few apps while I waited. Eventually, it worked, and then I spent a couple hours playing with and exploring my new iPhone. I have to admit that I’m duly impressed with the UI; the touch interface is so easy to get used to, and the consistency in the behavior of the device and its apps is reassuring and makes each new one quick to learn. Overall, I’m thoroughly delighted with my iPhone and really glad I made the leap. It is definitely the best solution for my needs and desires.
Social media is a pretty hot topic of late. In addition to the popular press and blogosphere take on the phenomenon, there’s a whole MSI degree specialization in social computing over at SI, so it seems that social media has already become something of an institution in a rather short time.
I’m not sure where I stand on social media these days (as I write this in a blog post…) I didn’t adopt the first social media apps and sites particularly early, but I signed on to quite a few during my stint at SI. Since then, my attention has become even more precious, and I’m much slower to join one more SNS unless there’s a really good reason. For my personal use, a social media service has to be directly useful to me in some fashion, and that’s in addition to whatever social network functionality it might offer. LinkedIn and Facebook (ever more similar these days) provide informal contact management, Walker Tracker lets me track daily step counts, del.icio.us helps me ‘remember’ web sites, Twitter allows me to chatter with some friends, MyExperiment lets me share research workflows much like SlideShare allows sharing of presentation slides, Ravelry assists with organizing and documenting my knitting, and Flickr - well, I shouldn’t have to explain that.
Maintaining a presence in all these spaces takes some time and effort. Lately, the time and effort that I can invest is generally pretty minimal. I still spend most of my social media “face time” with Twitter and Flickr, but I just don’t have much energy or inclination to invest a lot of effort in Facebook, for example. What I’ve noticed over the last year is that most of my online social networks mirrored my offline social networks - until I moved away from Michigan.
Since leaving my home state, I’ve found that a lot more of my socializing is both provided and constrained by online social media. I think there are two underlying reasons for this; Ann Arbor is a hotbed of social media adopters (true story!) and I just don’t have much of an offline social network in Syracuse. Maintaining contact with friends through social media certainly eased the transition to a new community, as I was never completely socially isolated. After a year here, I’m just starting to have a few local contacts unrelated to the iSchool, and they are mostly people I’ve met through Ravelry. It’s somewhat embarrassing to admit that outside of school, most of my social contact occurs through the Internet, but as a PhD student, I just don’t have a lot of time to go out and build my local social network. The motivation is also missing; while I’ll be in Syracuse for another 3 or 4 years, there is a definite plan for departure, which amounts to disincentive to developing roots here.
I’m glad to have social media as a way to maintain contact with distant friends and relatives, but it doesn’t really replace face-to-face interaction. Being far away from most of the people I love makes that all the more apparent, and yet we keep in far better contact through the social media than we ever would have through other means. The role that social media plays in my life has shifted over the last three years, since I first started using del.icio.us; I find that today I am slower to adopt new social media, but a steadfast user of those which meet my needs, social or otherwise.
