William F. Buckley, R.I.P.

When the icons of your youth die it’s a shock. It’s one of the things you know, logically, will happen and by the time you reach your 60’s you’ve probably lost friends and family, but when your icons disappear, it comes as a jolt to the system. You feel sadness for their passing of course, but it goes beyond that. Certain people form part of the mental map of your culture and your passage through time. They can be actors, sports figures, musicians, artists, writers, professors — anyone who was part of the zeitgeist.

I first noticed this after both Mantle and Maris passed away. I was a big baseball fan in my young years and although I was a New York Yankee hater in those days (after all I lived in Illinois and rooted for the then perennial second-place Chicago White Sox), those two Yankees with their power and their crewcuts and their World Series rings represented, to a kid, the epitome of the game. The game changes, time moves on, but when figures like this are still around, they provide a symbolic living link to an era that was important to you. When they die, part of you dies with them.

Likewise I suffered an unsettling loss at the departure from this life of people like Alan Watts, Northrop Frye, Marshall McLuhan, Glenn Gould, and especially Carl Sagan. Their thoughts, ideas, and art formed many of my precepts of the world.

Recently, we have lost Canadian singer-songwriter Willie P. Bennett, jazz giant Jeff Healey, and American political pundit and conservative thinker William F. Buckley, Jr. All are grieved, but William F. Buckley (called Bill Buckley by his friends) was very special in my life, unbeknownst to him, of course.

A girl I dated in university would often have me over to her home on Sundays for some home cooking. I liked her dad and mom and a home-cooked meal was a treat after a steady diet of food at campus eateries. Her mom, especially, was a woman I respected deeply. She was a born and bred New Yorker transported to Phoenix and never quite accepting it. She’d been raised on symphonies, operas, art galleries, and sophisticated intellectualism and one of the political shows she watched regularly was William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. When I was visiting I would watch as well, first out of politeness, then out of fascination.

I’ve always been at the opposite end of the political spectrum from Buckley. It was the 60’s, just before my tie-dye days, and we were mired in Vietnam and only beginning to improve our domestic civil rights. Nobody with half a brain, I thought, could be a political conservative.

Buckley showed me how wrong I could be. His trenchant wit and biting thrusts and parries with various towering liberals he debated on the Firing Line showed a lively, masterful, playful, magnificent and kind intelligence at work. He was not a crank or a put-down artist like some of today’s conservative radio personalities. I even began reading his columns. I seldom agreed with him on anything, but I loved his style and his sweeping intellect.

This insight, that the Right wasn’t always wrong (or at least not dumbly wrong), helped balance my world view and to this day I never underestimate people simply because they’re conservative. This was Buckley’s second greatest gift to me. His greatest were his performances while debating. I’ve rarely seen his equal.

His third greatest gift to me was musical. Buckley was a devotee of Bach and had in his home a wonderful Bösendorfer grand piano. For one of his birthdays his wife arranged for Rosalyn Tureck, the well-known concert pianist and Bach interpreter (whom Glenn Gould once said to be the only influence on him), to play a series of concerts for her husband and close friends at their home, on the Bösendorfer. These concerts were recorded and issued as one of the Bach and Tureck at Home series by Troy. It’s one of my all-time favourite recordings. If you love Bach, this one is a must for your collection, though this recording is now difficult to find. Fortunately it is also available as Rosalyn Tureck Plays Bach.

William F. Buckley, thank you. Requiescat In Pace.

Linux on a Dell Inspiron 1501

Ubuntu Linux on my Dell Inspiron 1501

Ubuntu Linux on my Dell Inspiron 1501

Since I’ve retired from IT work, I don’t have much chance to keep my Unix skills fresh so when it came time for a new laptop, I decided I’d devote it primarily to Linux, with a dual-boot option to Windows. I didn’t want to spend a lot on one so I priced out various models for a few weeks and checked out reviews. Then I searched out newsgroup and forum experiences on their usability with Linux. One laptop I’d been looking at, an Acer, got a major thumbs down from Linux users who ran into serious problems with drivers.

Most of my computers in the past few years have been Dell, not because they’re necessarily better than anyone else’s but because they’re easy for me to buy and the extended warranty on them is worthwhile. They’ve come to my house a couple of times, one time swapping machines on a laptop that had developed a bad system board. That’s service!

One of Dell Canada’s least expensive laptops at the beginning of 2008 was the Inspiron 1501. It was spec’d at 2GB RAM, an AMD Sempron processor, and the usual CD/DVD burner. I upgraded to a 250GB HD on principle, and raised RAM to 3GB. That brought the price to around $700. A background check on Linux showed the 1501 to be a good Linux laptop, with a few caveats. More on this later.

On the 1501 I didn’t even purchase extended care. I figured I’d ship to depot if something comes up after the initial warranty period. The price was in my range and what sealed the deal was that the Inspiron 1501 was offered with a Windows XP option, rather than Vista. We had recently got Marion an upscale laptop that came with Vista and after both of us tried it for a few days, we ‘downgraded’ the machine to XP. Vista is rather like a bad dream turned into an OS.

Repartitioning and Re-installing XP

Of course when the laptop arrived, the entire disk was set up as a single C: drive for Windows XP. Even in a Windows-only setup, I don’t like this configuration. I prefer a smaller, 30GB, C: drive for the OS and programs, and a separate partition for user files. This makes things a lot easier if you need to later reinstall or upgrade the OS.

So after taking an inventory of the devices in the 1501 I rebooted the system from the Windows XP reinstall CD and repartitioned the disk into a 30GB drive for C: and left the rest unpartitioned. Then I reinstalled XP.

The base OS installed well enough, but the screen looked grotty, there was no sound, and the built-in wireless card didn’t work. That’s typical of a fresh install: the specialty device drivers need installing. I hooked up the laptop to an live Internet cable on my router and once on the Internet I visited the Dell site where they keep drivers for every machine they’ve ever sold. For the Inspiron 1501 I downloaded a bunch of drivers I needed, starting with video. Once that was installed, the screen looked excellent. Sound was next, then a bit of fumbling around trying to figure out which driver of the many available I needed for my wireless. Eventually I got it sorted out.

Installing Ubuntu 7.10

After I had Windows XP working — and it’s always best to install Windows first on a dual-boot Linux computer — I turned to Linux. I’ve grown to like Ubuntu Linux and downloaded the latest ISO file and burned a boot CD. I’ve installed Ubuntu onto a few machines now with no problem, but when I attempted to boot it on the 1501 the video disappeared and the system hung. I had to remove the battery before I could get control of the system back.

Next I tried “Safe Install” and that worked fine. I used the manual partitioner in Ubuntu to partition a swap drive, a 30GB EXT3 file system, and the rest of the disk as a shared FAT-32 file system. Everything seemed to go fine — the drives were formatted, the OS and programs installed fine and I was prompted to remove the CD to reboot. I rebooted, and lost the video again. Back to removing the battery to shut down the system.

I wasn’t too worried because before purchasing the Inspiron 1501 I’d discovered a fantastic Linux resource for it, in blog format, called Ubuntu on Dell Inspiron 1501: Ubuntu Guides, Tweaks, and Hacks. It turns out that the boot line in /boot/grub/menu.lst needs to have “splash” removed. I also removed the “quiet” attribute from the line because I like to watch the progress as my system boots.

With this fix, Ubuntu booted up quite well, but looked like crap. The open-source video drivers for the video didn’t do it justice. Perusing through the Ubuntu 1501 site indicated that it was possible to get a proprietary, non-open-source video driver. I’m no purist and I like a good video display, so I hooked my 1501 up to the router cable and got the driver and followed the instructions on getting it active. Bingo. Just like that I had a display that looked as good to my eyes as Windows XP provided.

I still didn’t have wireless working though, and these days a laptop without wireless doesn’t cut it. Even in my own home I like to use my laptop in an easy chair in our music room, one floor down from our wireless router. There were several entries on getting wireless to work on the 1501 but the one that sounded the cleanest was one involving ndiswrapper running the XP driver within Linux. I followed the instructions for getting it to work and on my next bootup it popped right into action, prompting me to join our home network. Once I entered the 128-bit encryption passphrase, it sailed out to the Internet. In contrast, I was unable to get Microsoft’s native wireless support to connect to my home network with either XP or Vista. I had to install Boingo to get proper connection. I don’t enjoy being a Microsoft basher, but why do they always have to be so clueless?

At this point Linux was ahead of Windows, because I could get all my desired software through apt-get. I use Firefox on both sides, synchronizing my bookmarks with Foxmarks. In contrast, it took hours to get all my necessary Windows programs installed, including all the little free or paid-for shareware programs I use.

To be honest, I haven’t explored Ubuntu very deeply yet. I don’t currently have any programming projects, and I’m not setting up any special services. Mainly I’m doing email, surfing the web, and writing. But since getting Linux installed I don’t think I’ve booted into Windows once in the last two months except to install software, just in case I need it.

Pinhole Camera Adventures

For some time I’ve been wanting a change of pace with my photography. It’s not that I don’t have a variety of equipment, but I wanted to experiment with a different kind of image — something less sharp and modern. I considered getting a Holga, and may still do so. The Holga with its less than sharp lens and unpredictable optical quirks and vignetting with almost no controls over exposure has the charm of being simple yet different. Many of my photography contacts use them as a kind of therapy when they need to freshen their outlook on the craft.I was in this contemplative frame of mind when I saw a haunting photo by Ian Phillip, a Scottish photographer known as mr_phillip on Flickr:

Tarbet Tree, Loch Lomond
Photo by Ian Phillip

There was something ethereal and romantic about this that attracted my attention. It wasn’t sharp but it was beautiful. Ian’s tech information indicated this was taken with a Zero 6×9. Zero 6X9? That was a camera I’d not heard of, so I did a Google search and discovered the Zero 6×9 Multi-Format, a 120-film hand-crafted teak pinhole camera that has inner wooden baffles or masks that can be adjusted for 6×4.5, 6×6, 6×7, and 6×9 format. The cameras are created by Zernike Au in China and sold through his Zero Image web store. One look and I was hooked.

But first I wanted to see more images, not just Ian’s. Mr Phillip is an exceptionally good photographer who can make great looking images with any camera so I was concerned that his lovely Loch Lomond shots might not be typical of what the camera produces. Ian had a link to a Flickr group called Zero Image and a look through the images there convinced me that this was the change of pace I was looking for. I was flush with a little extra cash, having recently sold some redundant gear, so I decided to buy the 6×9 (though the 35mm and 4×5 versions were tempting) with cable-release adapter and bubble level. It arrived within a week.

Zero Image 6x9 Pinhole Camera Zero Image 6x9 Pinhole Camera

Marion and Trevor loved it. I thought it looked like something from the movie set of H.G. Wells’s Time Machine.

The arrival of the camera coincided with a series of snowstorms. Unable to get out easily for a walk to the harbour and environs, I decided to shoot my first roll at home — in the yard and in the house. Calculating exposure with pinholes is an inexact science. I used my Sekonic hand meter in incident mode and took readings at ISO100 for the Plus-X film I’d loaded into the Zero. The Zero has a handy calculator dial on the back for getting you into the approximately correct exposure range. You dial in the reading from your meter, say 1/30 at f/16, then follow the dial to the 1/250 f-stop to get an exposure approximation. For my outdoor shots, on an overcast day with a bit of wan sunlight peeking through occasionally, the dial at f/250 read between 7-8 seconds.

However, most films exhibit reciprocity failure1 — becoming less sensitive to light — during longer exposures so you have to factor that into the exposure. The guide that came with the camera suggested a 2x factor for reciprocity failure for any exposures over 1 second so I used that to adjust my exposure to 15 seconds. I’m not all that good at counting seconds in my head so I used the digital stopwatch I use for my cardio walks.

It was a new and foreign experience, taking those first shots. There’s no viewfinder on the camera so I pointed the front of the box towards what I wanted to photograph and levelled the camera on my tripod. I used a cable release and 15-sec exposures outdoors. The first time you try something like this, you have no idea what to expect, but I liked the experience. It felt uncommonly retro. This photo of the front of our house (along with our neighour’s) was my first-ever pinhole photograph:

First-ever Pinhole Shot

On this one I corrected some of the typical vignetting to get more of a soft but typical medium-format wide-angle shot. I was on my way! One more from the outdoor shots: the accumulation of snow on our birdbath and back deck bench:

Back Yard

I didn’t correct the vignetting in this one, liking the way it looked as is. Next I went indoors. This shot of the top of my bureau took 30 minutes:

Dresser Top, Sharpened

A pinhole camera makes interesting ‘people pictures’. Because of its long exposure times, people are blurred while the surroundings are not. I sat for a self portrait — four minutes in this case — and worked on a sudoku while keeping an eye on the timer. Due to the length of exposure, my image is blurry, and my getting into the frame, then out of it, was too quick to be recorded. Despite being underexposed (eight minutes would have been better) this is my favourite image from the first roll:

Self Portrait

I hope to take more pinhole portraits. And when the wintry weather is better for walking (it’s been brutally cold for the past two days), I want to experiment with pinhole shots of the Port Credit harbour.

1Reciprocity (photography) – Wikipedia

PMA Announcements

Fujica 6x7 Folder

PMA is the big photo event of the year, similar to COMDEX for computing products. This year’s PMA is being held in Las Vegas and it is attended by nearly all the major camera manufacturers. It’s a place for announcing new products, most of which are the latest digital wonders from digicams to high-end digital backs. Tucked away in corners, here and there, are a few items related to film photography.

This year’s sleeper is a prototype medium-format film camera on display in the Fujifilm booth. It’s a modern folder: a folding camera that takes 6x7cm images on 120 film. It has an 80mm Fujinon f/3.5 lens, rangefinder, hot shoe, and what looks to be aperture-priority electronic shutter. There is no red ruby window on the back in the pictures that have been shown so presumably it has a frame counter as well.

Fuji has said very little about this camera in its press release, other than that it’s a prototype and if it gets built may only be sold in Japan.

I took one look at this camera and wanted it. When the information was posted on Rangefinder Forum and Nelsonfoto, the response was similar: gimme! To a film photographer, this is retro done modern, like an Ikonta built to modern specs with a modern lens and built-in metering.

Should Fujifilm manufacture this camera, and offer it in Europe and the Americas, I suspect it would fly off the shelves. Depending on price, of course. So far price has not been mentioned.

Sony CMOS Sensor

On a major note, Sony made a surprise announcement that it had developed a 24 megapixel full-frame (35mm) CMOS sensor and expected to be in production with it by mid-2008. They also pre-announced a Sony Alpha model that would be using this chip.

What I find most interesting in this development is that Sony is a major OEM supplier of sensors to other camera manufacturers, such as Pentax. So far Canon and Nikon have been the only players in the FF market, each developing its own proprietary sensors. The Sony sensor could level the playing field.

I wouldn’t be surprised if, within three years, full-frame DSLRs become the norm, at the prices of today’s APS-sized DSLRs. It’ll be 35mm all over again!

Sudoku & Mental Exercise

Tools of the Sudoku Trade

When my family doctor asked me what I did to keep my mind active, I mentioned reading (which didn’t seem to impress him very much) and crossword puzzles (which he liked). Then he said, in his blunt, but friendly, way: ‘Take up sudoku. It’s very good for the brain.’

I was skeptical because, like others I’ve talked to, I thought sudoku puzzles involved math. Curiously in my younger years I studied a lot of math and used it often in my science and engineering classes. I was a B or B+ type math student — competent, but not a math wizard. I liked math okay, but not as much as science and English.

But somewhere over the years I lost touch with math and I was never fond of arithmetic, the daily math most of us use. I’ve never been able to do arithmetic in my head. On paper I’m okay and I can wield a calculator with the best of them, but increasingly my mind doesn’t process or conceptualize math very well. Perhaps it’s an age-related thing. So I avoided the sudoku craze, thinking it was okay for the mathematically inclined, but that I was not among them.

Marion, who had done a few sudoku puzzles herself, and didn’t like them, told me differently: ‘It’s not about math at all. It’s pattern matching and solving.’ With that encouragement I bought a Dell book of Easy sudoku puzzles that included some 6×6 grids at the start for raw beginners. Marion was right — there wasn’t any math involved. The numbers could as easily be icons of chess pieces or Babylonian goddesses — they’re nothing but convenient place markers.

And so I began. I didn’t get it right away; easy 9×9 puzzles seemed to me impossible to solve. I tried the 6×6 puzzles and eventually got the hang of it, after working at them for a couple of days (I’m not a quick learner). After being able to solve 6×6 puzzles routinely, I promoted myself to the big leagues, tackling the easy 9×9 ones. A couple of times I almost succeeded, but discovered I have a brain condition I call ‘spatial dyslexia’. Even when I’m being careful and checking my work, I can unknowingly transpose rows and columns, both in my logic when I’m solving a space, and physically when I’m putting in my answers. To be nearly finished with a puzzle only to discover two 4’s or 8’s in the same row or column is disheartening.

I had to agree with my doc though — this was exercising my brain in a way that was new and rigorous. I stuck with it. I remember very clearly the evening I solved my first 9×9 puzzle: it took me 60 minutes. It was the motivator I needed, and within days I was getting down to 30 minutes, then 20, and often 15. I was (and still am) subject to my peculiar form of dyslexia, but I’ve become a little better at checking my work. Any time I try to solve a sudoku puzzle quickly, I make errors. If I take my sweet time and double check all my logic and then my answers when I enter them, I can usually solve a puzzle without errors. Easy ones, of course.

I got hooked. And in helping me learn, Marion got hooked too, though she still prefers crosswords. I now work on anywhere from two to five puzzles a day. After a couple of months of easy ones, I moved up to medium puzzles. I’ve tried some of the hard ones but I’m rarely able to solve them. I get to a point where, with the logic techniques I know, I run out of numbers I can puzzle out, and I refuse to guess.

I thought I’d be clever and look up some tutorials on the Internet. They’re there all right, but they make my head hurt. All that talk about hidden triplets and quads and x-wing solutions is about as clear to me as particle physics. So I decided ‘the heck with hard’. I do the puzzles for fun after all. Medium, with occasional forays into hard, seem just right to me, at my skill level. They’re challenging, but solvable.

I don’t make notations in my puzzles. All the tutorials recommend it, but the clutter bothers me and makes it more difficult, rather than easier, to see the patterns. Notation also takes a long time to do. I can solve medium level puzzles without notations so I’ve opted to keep it simple.

I must admit though, that it discourages me when I see my son’s girlfriend whiz through the hardest sudoku puzzles in ten minutes or less, completing them perfectly nearly every time. She uses no notation either. Some people are gifted. The rest of us plod.

Goodbye Leica, Hello Bessa

Collapsible Summicron

Bessa R3A

Goodbye Leica, hello Bessa
Some say more-a, some say less-a
I say ‘Phooey’ to the stress-a
And go shooting with my inexpensive Bessa
(with apologies to Allan Sherman1)

The Leica rangefinder camera, especially the classic M3 and M2 bodies, were the icons of my youth. So many famous photographers used them for slice-of-life realism on the street, in shops, at war, that the Leica name took on an image of not just the best-made cameras on earth, but also the coolest. The beguiling images of Henri Cartier-Bresson hover over the Leica name like an unexpurgated spirit. If you were young and excited by photography, you were excited by the thought of owning a Leica some day. They were, and are still, very expensive to buy new. Worse, for years even the used ones became collectibles, keeping the price out of the range of all but those most determined to own one.

Then came a sea change. Digital photography marked the start of a new era of photographic imaging and, slowly at first, then gaining speed rapidly, the price of fine film cameras began to plummet. In the past two or three years, even a good-condition M3 or M2 could be had for under $1000, then closer to $500. Like many who’d shared the dream, I bought a good M2 user. It had a little wear and a few scuff marks that prevented it, thankfully, from falling into collectible status.

It was everything it had been cracked up to be. Solid, with a deep feeling of precision and longevity, it made me feel like I’d joined the big leagues. The mystique held, for awhile.

Of course none of my images bore any resemblance to HCB or any other famous photographer. I don’t have vision nor am I a street shooter. I simply like to walk about with a camera and take photos of things that catch my eye. They’re usually things that would not interest many others. Not being a commercial photographer or having any aspirations to being an ‘art photographer’, whatever that is, I never minded this part of it. The camera itself was a pleasure to use. Mostly.

Then, as I worked my way through recovery from a heart attack and a couple of angioplasty/stent procedures, I began to feel the weight of gear in a different way than I had as a younger photographer. Every time I took out the Leica, it felt heavy to me.

I was also getting spoiled. Enjoying the bottom-feeder’s prices of film gear, I began collecting some Nikon SLR film bodies and I realized how much I liked built-in metering and swing-back loading. I picked up a Bessa R screwmount rangefinder and found myself actually preferring it to the Leica, even though it wasn’t nearly the same build quality. Moreover, when I went shooting with the Bessa, I didn’t feel the weight of history bearing down on me. It was just a good shooter, no more, no less.

I vowed to thin down my increasing collection of film cameras to just a few I enjoyed shooting the most. This applied particularly to rangefinder cameras. After a few years of shooting with them I had a handle on what I liked: bayonet-mount lenses, mostly 35mm or 50mm focal lengths, built-in metering, and swing-back loading. I never once enjoyed bottom-loading the M2 and I tired of carrying a separate meter. The Leica, I decided, had to go.

I opted for a fresh start, selling as much existing rangefinder gear as I could, and buying a brand new camera to take me through the next few years. I thought about the exciting Bessa R4 with its built-in framelines for wide-angle lenses, but with rangefinder cameras I shoot with my CV 21/4 infrequently while I shoot with 35/50 about 90% of the time. That tipped me towards the Bessa R3 series with its 1:1 viewfinder for both 40 and 50mm lenses. To top off the purchase I decided to get the CV 40/1.4 Nokton as my primary lens. I also chose the convenience of aperture-priority metering, with optional manual metering, hence the ‘A’ in my new Bessa R3A.

Regrets? None. In fact, I’ve never regretted selling any camera. I don’t get sentimental over cameras or lenses. They come, they go.

The Leica went to an especially nice home; a long-time member of the Rangefinder Forum purchased it from me. I know the M2 will continue to be appreciated, and that makes me feel good.

I really like the Bessa. It’s not too heavy or too big, and I intend to carry it around a lot. Of course it has to compete with my Nikon SLRs and DSLR for my attention, but I always want to have one decent rangefinder in my kit.

It’s a lovely thing to be able to live out a dream. Perhaps it’s even better to realize that the dream belonged to a younger version of yourself. At this stage of my life, I’ll take my ‘vernacular’ pictures and let someone else be haunted by the spirit of HCB.

1 Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh (Wikipedia article)

Lighthouse in Snowstorm

January 1, 2008, got off to a great start photographically. Because it started snowing heavily, with a high wind, I took along my best bad-weather camera: Nikon FM10 with E lenses, each covered by a UV filter. I wouldn’t have been able to keep the snow out of a TLR.

I met up with photobuddies Andy and Richard in the parking lot beside the Port Credit lighthouse and we slogged through the wind and snow taking what pictures we could. We walked over to Saddington Park and made a loop of the perimeter before calling it quits and walking back to the lighthouse, then across the street to Starbucks, which opened late on New Year’s Day.

A cup of coffee, lots of laughs, and some good frames for our efforts. I can’t think of a better way to start the New Year.

Orton Technique

Originally uploaded by StarbuckGuy

My first ‘new’ learning in 2008 started when I joined the Orton group on Flickr. They have two tutorial links on Orton technique, an article-based tutorial and an excellent video-based tutorial. Armed with these tutorials, I was able to get started.

As Darwin Wigget says in his article on Orton:

Early in my career as a professional photographer, I came across an article by Michael Orton in Popular Photography that literally stopped me in my tracks. The images included with the article were landscape and nature photos unlike anything I had seen before. The photos were painterly, ethereal, and romantic.

And ethereal they are. They were originally invented by Michael Orton who created them by shooting one slide overexposing a scene by 2 f-stops, then shooting another slide of the scene overexposed with the lens defocused and set to its maximum aperture. The two slides were then sandwiched together.

Obviously it’s much easier to do this with a digital image (taken with a digicam or scanned from film) and any photo editor that can do layers.

To date I’ve done three Orton images and intend to do more when I have the right kind of subject matter. I’ve created an Orton Image Set on Flickr where I’ll post my attempts.

Welcome to 2008

To the tune of Howdy Doody, “It’s res-o-LU-tion time, it’s resolution time …”

1. Shoot more film, especially medium-format B&W. My first photoshoot of the year is first thing New Year’s Day and I have my Minolta Autocord TLR ready to go, if the weather’s not inclement. If it is, I’ll switch to my Nikon FM10 with ‘E’ lenses.

2. Write more. During PicoWriMo in November I averaged nearly 1000 words a day in my journal and I wrote one short story and started another. The pace fell off in December and I want to increase it.

3. Explore more Linux programs. I have a new entry-level Dell laptop on order specifically to turn into a Linux portable so I can further explore open-source software while sitting in a comfortable chair or couch.

4. Trim the waistline. During December I shed ten pounds. I grew up as a thin, skinny guy and for cardio reasons, if for no other, I need to return to being that guy. Marion and I are following a Weight Watcher’s regimen of calorie counting. It works.

5. Laugh more. 2007 was a hard, serious year. Too hard, too serious. Life’s a dance.

Dumbing Down a Sandisk Cruzer

Sandisk Cruzer

Originally uploaded by StarbuckGuy

As thumb drives go, I rather like the design of the Sandisk Cruzer. It uses a slider to push out or retract the USB connector so there’s no cap to misplace or lose. The price has been dropping steadily on them and I found a nice little 4Gb unit in Staples yesterday for about $30 Cdn. Since I’d been wanting another one (I gave my first one to Marion), I added it to the pack of Sharpies I’d come in to buy.

The only drawback to the Cruzer is that it has a U3 feature that complicates what should be a simple technology. U3 first mounts the thumb drive as a CD-ROM volume, then uses another drive assignment to mount the storage partition. I suppose it’s set up so, in a pinch, you can run some programs from it. The U3 stuff takes quite a while to boot up and adds yet more clutter to the desktop.

I simply wanted it to act as a dumb thumb drive. I guessed that someone would have figured out a way to remove the U3 partition and reformat the device to be more simple minded and I was right. I Googled a blog entry that showed exactly what to do (in Windows).

All that’s required is a simple download from Sandisk — a special reformatter program that removes U3. It’s small and works a treat. It took mere seconds to reformat the Cruzer as a dumb thumb using the U3 Launchpad Removal Tool listed on the Sandisk site.

I’m impressed with Sandisk for making this utility program available. Furthermore, while reading an FAQ on the Sandisk site, I discovered that the ability to remove U3 is built in to the U3 Launcher software for Windows:

Can I remove U3 technology from my USB drive? Yes. To remove the U3 technology from the drive, simply go to the U3 Launchpad and, under Settings, select U3 Launchpad settings and click Uninstall. This will completely remove the U3 Launchpad from the drive.

Kudos to Sandisk for designing a nice little thumb drive and giving the user the option of removing the “additional features”.