I know International Harvester was toying with a new design for the Scout in the late ’70s, and the pictures I’ve seen of it turned my stomach in disgust. Today I stumbled upon this article, which contained pictures of a prototype I’d never seen before:
Not as ugly as the SSV, but about as bland as a cheese sandwich. Still, if I squint, I can see the Scout II windshield; it looks like they stuck an Astro van nose on the front and just sketched in the rest. And they took the Hoffmeister kink out of the rear window.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
So, a used Fuji 27mm f/2.8 popped up on Craigslist before Christmas, and due to the holiday I had to pass. It came up again after the new year, and I only just linked up with the seller before the snowstorm. The lens checked out and I bought it, hoping it would be lighter, sharper, faster, and more useful than the kit 16-50mm that the camera came with. So far, I’m happy with the results.
The biggest peeve I have with the X-E1 is its glacial autofocus speed. I’m learning how to allow for that when I compose shots, but I know the higher-end Fuji bodies are faster. Some part of this is the lens, but some part of it is the body. The 27mm isn’t as fast as a DSLR, but it’s faster than the kit lens, and it’s plenty sharp.
Meanwhile, I did some research and sorted out the conversion rate between Series and MM lens mountings in order to use a second-hand fisheye I got through a friend last summer. It turns out Series 7 equals 54mm in real-world use. I found a $4 adapter on Amazon and had it shipped to the house; it screwed right on and I was ready to go.
This shot is with the Fuji through the 16-50 zoom and cropped to size; it has little to no effect with the 28mm and looks very interesting with a 50mm on the Nikon. So for $4, I’ve got a fun toy to play with.
Yahoo is going nowhere, so they’ve decided to do the easy thing, and cut jobs, instead of actually, you know, fixing shit. This means Flickr is going to get trimmed, and, according to the article, “Yahoo will be reducing Flickr’s resources and attempt to run the photo service in a way that requires minimal overhead.”
I’m going to be very upset if the whole thing folds and I have to go back through fifteen years of archives to relink every single picture.
Most CEOs hire experts—branding agencies that specialize in translating corporate values into fonts and colors—or tap an in-house team. Not Kalanick. For the past three years, he’s worked alongside Uber design director Shalin Amin and a dozen or so others, hammering out ideas from a stuffy space they call the War Room. Along the way, he studied up on concepts ranging from kerning to color palettes. “I didn’t know any of this stuff,” says Kalanick. “I just knew it was important, and so I wanted it to be good.”
This is the kind of shit that makes Creative/Design Directors resign and change careers. While the sentiment is appreciated (“I wanted it to be good”) the micromanagement is absolutely ridiculous.
Here are some crappy cellphone shots of my kick panels. The driver’s side was patched crudely before I got the truck, but the passenger’s side has always been swiss cheesy. I think I’ll wait for warm weather, take the angle grinder to both sides, and hit them with some rust encapsulator. One of my goals for this year is to get a decent welding rig and start practicing again so that I can take some smaller repair projects on; this would be a good one.
Driver’s side
Passenger’s side. Interesting to see the original gold paint there, isn’t it?
In other news, a printing vendor I use at work had a special on circle-cut stickers last week. I’ve been noodling with a design for our ad-hoc Maryland IH group, called Old Line State Binders, but I was having a hard time nailing down a design incorporating the Maryland flag. It’s a great flag but very visually busy, and in the last year there’s been a glut of shape-plus-flag stickers out there: a crab, deer, dogs, mustaches, etc.
My original idea was to use something ubiquitous to vintage 4-wheel-drive trucks: the locking hub. That part was pretty easy to nail down, and I took away some of the visual clutter to clean up the image. Integrating the flag and the name was the hard part. In order to keep the design circular (and get my cheap stickers before the deal expired), I left out the name and went with the following design:
Eventually I’ll figure out how the rest of the design should look. If you’d like a couple, drop me a line and I’ll send you one when I get them.
I’ve been really quiet on the Scout front for the last year or so due to work and family commitments. I haven’t visited the Binder Planet in ages. I’m hoping to get some time in the spring to organize a meeting and get back in touch with people.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.