The litter in littérateur. Ricky Opaterny on Books, Music, Art, and Sports

1/30/2010

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-30

Filed under: General — Ricky @ 3:18 am
  • A few photos from the GF1 of @josepharthur at @rickshawstopsf on Tuesday: http://gen-o.com/shorturl/jasr #
  • The Formula For Perfect Parallel Parking…fun, but no help to this parker. -More at http://npr.org/122880263 #
  • These coaches' challenges seem like a bad idea! #
  • I feel like I felt in 2006 while rooting for Zidane in the World Cup final, hoping Favre can still win this one after his mistake. #
  • How do people not understand the necessity of the AIG bailout? Who are these people?!? Are they human, much less American? #
  • That was a very good speech. Now, how about some results—and by results I mean universal health care not pandering economic rhetoric? #
  • Point by @CBSNews about how the Internet has trained people to be terribly impatient and that impatience shapes public policy for the worse. #
  • Re Chris Matthews: Who knows what sort of productive conversations we could have, as a society, if people were allowed to mention race! #
  • Salinger gone. Don't ever tell anybody anything. #
  • Why opinions about the Apple iPad are meaningless: http://bit.ly/bDAu6F @COOLERebook, I'm looking at you and your empty, rhetorical retweets #
  • Newsday spent $4MM to put up a pay wall last fall. In three months, only 35 readers paid for access. http://gen-o.com/shorturl/ndpw #
  • RT @NewYorker: Dave Eggers remembers JD Salinger: http://ow.ly/11YAw #salinger #
  • "…what struck me most was how wounded they were with…all the thorny emotion of life, of the world." http://bit.ly/dwQXpE #

1/29/2010

Responses to Salinger

Filed under: Books,General — Tags: — Ricky @ 8:56 pm

Over at the New Republic, Gish Jen asks, Why Do People Love Catcher in the Rye?

Meanwhile, the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog has collected remembrances and responses from several people, including Wes Anderson, Dave Eggers, and Joshua Feriss. The New Yorker’s Lillian Ross has also unearthed some photos she took of Salinger during the 1960s.

James Barron, who often lends his voice to the Times’ daily Front Page podcast, goes over the New York sites from Catcher in the Rye on the City Room blog.

The Guardian has a good roundup of other coverage.

News from New York bookstores

Filed under: Books,General,Save Kepler's — Ricky @ 8:49 pm

Vanishing New York collects some news on a shake-up in Manhattan bookstores: Biography Bookshop in the West Village, which you might know because it’s across the street from Magnolia, is moving. Left Bank Books, which has a wonderful selection of collectible and signed editions. Finally, Skyline Books in Chelsea is closing.

1/28/2010

Why the iPad buzz doesn’t matter

Filed under: Books,General,Music,Technology — Tags: , , , , — Ricky @ 1:29 pm

A lot of people are saying a lot of things about the iPad. It’s revolutionary! It’s too compromised to be useful! It lacks important features like a phone, multitasking, camera, Flash support, etc. What’s certain to me is that the reactions—pro and con—are pretty much meaningless right now. I was trying to think last night about previous Apple product launches and how I felt about them. As I recall, there have been two Apple products in the past ten years that, when introduced, immediately prompted me to say, I want that! One was the Titanium PowerBook in at MacWorld in 2001 and the other was the iPod with video in 2005. Both products were updates to existing product lines. In the case of the PowerBook, it added a design unlike any other that I had seen before. In the case of the iPod, I thought that video would be a great feature that was worth waiting for. (Everyone knew it was coming once Apple had introduced the iPod Photo.) But here’s the thing, I’ve ended up not using the video feature at all during the past four years, really. I watched one movie on a plane once, and that was it. It wasn’t until I got an iPod Touch with a larger screen and better battery life that I really bothered to use an iPod to watch video.

The greater point here is that no one disputes that the iPod and iPhone were both game-changers—products that people now love and that redefined Apple as a company and a brand. I can safely say that when they launched, I didn’t want either one. I didn’t have anywhere close to enough of my music in MP3 format to make the iPod useful, and it was expensive too! The iPhone was even more expensive when it launched, and I remember thinking that there was no way I would get one because it would never handle email as well as my BlackBerry did. Of course, I did eventually get one, and it still doesn’t handle email as well as my five-year-old BlackBerry. But I don’t care because it does so many other things that I value. I can read the newspaper—several newspapers—in formats that are actually useable! I can listen to Internet radio. I can listen to live baseball games. I can listen to NPR on demand. I can browse the web. I can read stories from the web that I started reading on my laptop. In short, I can do a lot of things that I either didn’t know I wanted to do or whose value wasn’t properly contextualized for me until I actually had and lived with the device for a while.

I’m not saying that the iPad will succeed, but I am suggesting that the factors by which people are predicting its success or failure are, more than likely, incorrect because they are captive to our previous experiences. Who knows that developers will come up with for the device? Who knows what features a second or third generation update might add? Who even knows what it’s like to live with an iPad in your bag or on your desk for even a week? If anyone can take a product for which I feel I had no need and make it desirable, it’s Steve Jobs and Apple. As usual, I’ll be rooting for them. (more…)

1/27/2010

How to recover erased .RW2 and other RAW files from SDHC cards

Filed under: General,Photography,Technology — Ricky @ 9:30 pm

I recently lost all my GF1 photos from my SDHC card. After shooting about 70 photos, I put the card in a USB reader and it appeared to be empty on my computer. There are several free programs that will recover JPEG images from cameras’ memory cards, but recover RAW files—especially those from non-Canon/Nikon cameras—can be a little more difficult. Fortunately, there’s a free, open source program, PhotoRec, that will recover your deleted image files. You should note that once your files have been deleted, you should not continue to shoot any photos with the card in your camera. Any additional photos may overwrite the deleted photos that you want to recover.

Reactions to the iPad

Filed under: Baseball,Books,General,Music,Technology — Ricky @ 9:20 pm

Adam Gopnik and other New Yorker staffers responded to Apple’s iPad announcement.

1/23/2010

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-23

Filed under: General — Ricky @ 3:18 am

1/21/2010

Joseph Arthur at Rickshaw Stop or the GF1 and concert photography

Filed under: General,Music,Technology — Ricky @ 8:52 pm

I took my GF1 to a show by Joseph Arthur earlier this week, and although the noise at 1600 ISO is considerably higher than that of any dSLR, it held up reasonably well. I also tested out Panasonic’s EVF live viewfinder for the first time. Unfortunately, it is small, low resolution, and not particularly good. However, it was better than having the huge LCD on the back of my camera lit up in a dark venue. Click to enlarge the images below.

Powered by WordPress