First thing Saturday morning, I was on transport duty to get Finn to the dentist for the removal of some baby teeth that have been hanging on for too long. Her adult teeth were coming in underneath, and the root structure was all but gone, but they refused to let go. One side was hurting after eating some hard candy, so we were there to address that one, but Jen wisely suggested they pull both while she was under. The dentist numbed her gums, lit her up with laughing gas, shot her with some novocaine, and pulled them both out in no time.
I then hit the Home Depot for a new lawnmower and other supplies, selecting a Toro push model with a mulching bag and oversized rear wheels. It’s shiny and red and starts on the first pull and feels solid, unlike the ghetto mower I just retired. I guess I’m going to have to hose off the deck every time I’m done mowing, so that the moisture trapped by the grass doesn’t eat away at the steel of the deck like it did the old one.
I brought supplies home and got to work on chicken wire doors for the greenhouse, ripping some pressure-treated wood to build frames to fit in the doorways. They both went pretty quickly. I put a semi-permanent panel on the back and a removable panel on the front. Now, for plants.
By the time I was done with that and assembling the mower, it was time to stop and get ready for dinner: I made reservations at a fancy-looking place downtown based on a readers’ poll in Baltimore magazine for Jen and I to celebrate our anniversary. Upon entry we realized we were a little overdressed for the venue, but our extremely helpful waiter steered us toward some delicious cocktails and good food. Arepas are tasty but not exactly fine dining-friendly food, so we busted out our silverware and made the best of things (the entrees were not lighting our fire). After dinner we had some dessert and digestif cocktails, and our waiter had us sample Amari, an Italian digestif liqueur that was better than the cocktails. Overall, it was OK but not stellar; the service was the high point, but we made the best of it. Happy Anniversary, baby.
Sunday morning I got up early and headed over to Bennett’s house to return a favor. He’d been the catalyst for organizing my Scout brake workday, so I offered to help him clear out his Mom’s farm now that it’s been sold. I’ll leave the detailed version of that story for the Scout blog, but overall it was a great, productive day with one hiccup.
On Saturday, I dragged our lawnmower out of the garage, fired it up, and realized that it was Not Okay. The edges of the deck directly behind the rear wheels had finally rusted through so that the box surrounding the blade had lost its structural rigidity (think of a cardboard box where you’ve run a knife up two of the edges: it won’t stand up anymore). When I tried to turn it the box would warp and the blade would ping-PING-PING the side of the deck. Not exactly what I want happening 2 feet from my ankles. We’ve had the lawnmower for 15 years, so it doesn’t owe us anything, and considering I bought it for $150 I’d say we got our value out of it. The engine still runs fine, for fuck’s sake. Maybe I can make a go-kart out of it? Or a generator…
When I got through with that, I cleaned up the yard and then brought a socket set out to the back wall of the greenhouse. We haven’t used the greenhouse for years, and it’s really been bugging me lately. I’ve been trying to find a replacement door kit for it but just don’t know what I’m looking for, how it would install, or how much it might cost, so I finally figured the hell with it and unscrewed the panel edges to take the center section of polycarbonate twin wall down. That wasn’t so hard.
There. With an assist from a cheap Home Depot fan, that should get us enough airflow to keep the white mold from growing. I cleaned up the mess inside, threw a bunch of old crap out, leveled the tables and got them ready for some vegetables. My irrigation system still works but I need to get some larger mister heads for the near side and a new hose bib to replace the cracked one outside. I’ve got some plans drawn for two wood-frame chicken wire doors to cover the openings. They will get built this weekend. Then, I need five new rubbermaid bins, a pile of dirt, and some vegetables.
Wow, if Microsoft’s “method” of setting up a child’s account on an XBOX could suck a bag of dicks any worse. I just spent an HOUR fighting their fucking menu system to try and verify a second account just so my kid can play multiplayer Minecraft with her friend. AND IT DIDN’T FUCKING WORK. I created an account, fought with that, deleted the account, created a new account, and waited for it to “verify” the email address. and then it shit on itself like a week-old puppy. FUCK YOU, MICROSOFT. I used to repair computers and troubleshoot software for a living. This system is the biggest pile of Kafka’s steaming shit I’ve ever dealt with.
Finley showed Jen and I a completely new way of doing multiplication she’d been taught by her math teacher last night, and it completely blew my mind. It’s called lattice multiplication, and it uses a different way of organizing the two numbers–first multiplying pairs and then adding their results. It took a little time to get my head around it, but I found it a really clever and useful new way to look at math.
Now that Brian is finishing up work on his house and it’s getting warmer, the hunt for a new Scout has begun. He’ll have a garage to put it in shortly, so we’re casting about to see what’s available in the Mid-Atlantic region.
His needs are pretty simple: He’d like a running, driving Scout with minimal required bodywork. In reality, we could find him an inoperative example and have the mechanical stuff done easily; the body is the most important part of the equation, and that’s hard to find these days, as mentioned before.
I spied a shiny silver Scout on Craigslist late last week and shot him a text, and he contacted the seller immediately. Online, it looked great: a new engine, a soft top, decent body panels, and the price was fair. On closer inspection the pictures showed the issues that the seller did disclose: the door panels looked toasty, there was some visible rust in other areas, the pillars around tailgate were wider at the top by about 1/2″, etc. We knew it wouldn’t be perfect, but we had to do our due diligence.
We met up in Federal Hill and found the truck parked on the street. The seller was running late so we had about 45 minutes to go over it by ourselves with no pressure, and what we saw got more disappointing as we looked closer.
I should stop here and say that this was probably the best-looking Scout I’ve seen since Peer Pressure. For an east coast Scout it was in fantastic shape. But for Brian it was past the point of “easy project” and firmly at “involved overhaul.” In terms of real-world rigs it wasn’t at end-stage Chewbacca level (running roughly, doors sagging, floor shot, body mounts toasty) but it needed a lot of TLC to get right. Both doors were pretty much shot. The windshield cowl was toasty on both sides. The inner fenders were crispy and the driver’s outer fender was on its way out. The interior was a mishmash of poorly attempted fixes and bad ideas: the front seats were captain’s chairs cut out of some kind of customized van and bolted to the Scout floorpan.
But it did have its pluses; the floors were all solid inside and underneath, the engine was brand new and purred like a kitten, it had a $1,000 soft top installed, with a hard top that came along with it. It was a good platform for a sympathetic restore that wouldn’t be impossible to do (see: Chewbacca) and he’ll get the money he’s asking for it.
We talked with the seller for a while and went over the history, asked a couple of questions, and had him start it up. Brian went for a spin around the block while I chatted with the seller, and on his return Brian basically told him thanks but he wasn’t interested.
We hadn’t gotten our hopes up too high, so the letdown wasn’t bad; we continued down Fort Avenue and got some tacos and a beer to drown our momentary sorrow. There will be other Scouts out there, and we will find Brian the right one.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
I’ve spent a lot of time reading about, testing, and evaluating different bags and backpacks in the last 5 years, because I spend all day with one as my primary mode of organization. I have ADD, and I use a bag as my base of operations: If I need to take my wallet out of my pants, it goes in my bag. If I need to put my sunglasses away, they go in my bag: everything in its right place. I know where everything is, and if it’s not there, something is wrong. It’s a system I’ve developed over the last 20 years to avoid losing things, so the design and functionality of a bag is very important to me. This is even more important when evaluating a camera bag, when the amount of gear and accessories is multiplied times 10.
When I came to WRI I inherited a ThinkTank Airport 2.0 suitcase my predecessor used to carry gear overseas, and it worked really well for the first two trips I took. Designed within standard airline carry-on baggage measurements, it fits in an overhead bin and holds a huge assortment of gear securely and gently. This worked well until I realized I didn’t need to bring everything with me, and started to pare down my traveling kit for the sake of weight and simplicity. One drawback to its design is that it doesn’t hold a laptop, so once I was on the ground I had to either lug the whole suitcase with me or split gear out into a separate backpack I’d also inherited, which did some things well but came with its own limitations.
ThinkTank Airport 2.0
This was a LowePro Fastpack 250 AW, and while it held a camera body, two to three lenses, and my sound gear with a laptop, I found that when it was fully loaded it was extremely uncomfortable for long-term usage. For short distances it did the trick but most of my shoots are all-day events and by the end I’d be aching from the straps or the distribution of the load. As a light-duty, incognito backpack it’s aces but it’s not an all-day rig.
So I hunted around for a new pack to meet in the middle. What I settled on was a LowePro ProTactic 450, which itself fits inside carry-on measurements but adds space and is designed for longer-term use. It’s roomier than the first pack and will hold about 80% the gear the ThinkTank will, plus a laptop. It has two zippered doors on either side for easy access to primary or secondary cameras, plus a door on top for a third. The outside is covered with MOLLE-like webbing for addition of pouches or straps, which came in handy for strapping a mini-tripod to the bag in Colombia. There’s a waist belt which doubles as a removable fanny pack, and a built in rain cover in the bottom.
LowePro ProTactic 450
On this trip I pared my kit way back: I took a Canon 5D body, a 24-105 f/4L, 70-200mm f/2.8L zoom, a set of Sennheiser wireless lav mics, a Zoom H4 audio recorder, a Zacuto eyepiece, a GoPro Session 5, a DJI Osmo, and a mountain of batteries for each camera system. On the outside I strapped a Zomei q666 tripod. My laptop traveled through security in a messenger bag (easier and faster for airport security), along with a Kindle HD and my Fuji X-T10. I found it relatively easy to work with but found a few flaws in practice.
The bag held the kit above with ease. I stuck the 5D/24-105 in the right-side compartment, attached the tripod to the left side with one of the provided MOLLE pouches, and put the Osmo in the top compartment for most of the trip. Getting into and out of the main bag opening was easy as long as the waist straps were pulled out of the way. Jumping into cabs was much easier with a backpack, and I felt more secure on the street wearing it than I would have pulling a suitcase around behind me.
The provided dividers were plentiful but for some areas of the bag wound up being 1/2″ too short to allow the velcro to reach both sides of the chamber, so I didn’t feel like things were as secure as they should have been. The waist belt was good to use with a full load, but the front half is nothing but a thin nylon strap, which cut into my stomach after a while. The fact that it can be separated from the pack is interesting, but I’d prefer it to be permanently attached and fully padded to offset the weight of several big lenses. The shoulder straps themselves are comfortable but could stand to be reinforced and widened by another 1/2″ or so; after a week of constant usage I noticed the threads connecting the straps to the bag were visible and beginning to pull apart. This is the problem with making a pack built to carry lots of heavy equipment: it needs to be made heavier-duty to stand up to all that weight. This pack is underbuilt for a full real-world load, and that shows.
I like the laptop sleeve, and there are three flat zippered pouches on the outside for things like papers, small straps, and other flat objects. Anything larger needs to go in the main compartment because it closes up snugly to the dividers inside. The included MOLLE attachments work very well, although they aren’t standard military dimensions. I did buy a set of 10 elastic strap fasteners from Amazon which came in super handy for tying my jacket to the outside of the pack.
Overall, I’m mostly happy with this pack. I think they’d be able to make it better by addressing those few gripes, building it stronger for a full kit, and removing a few of the whiz-bang features with better-engineered, simplified elements.
I’ve had an iPhone 6 since early 2015, and with only a few hiccups, it’s been great. In 2018 it still does 95% of the stuff I need it to do, and seems to keep up with most of the modern apps I need to use. Unfortunately the battery was on its last legs last year, right about the time I wasn’t able to do anything about it. I was getting about a quarter of a day of light use, which was alarming.
I finally made an appointment at the Apple Store at the beginning of April to have the battery replaced, and in the meantime was using a Mophie battery pack to extend its life. Unfortunately on the Saturday before my appointment, the phone fell onto the concrete sidewalk out back and shattered the screen, so my service call now included two replacements instead of one. At the Apple Store I waited for a Genius to help me, and he told me they would have to send it out overnight for a fix instead of being able to handle it in-store. Grudgingly I obliged, and the next day I picked up my shiny phone–only to find the battery life still sucked. Unable to get back in before my Colombia trip, I stuck the Mophie case back on it and made do until I got back.
A brief note: the Mophie case is a great idea with one fatal flaw. In execution it works brilliantly: it goes on like a standard case but adds a switch on the back to send a charge to the phone when you need it. You charge it with a mini-USB connector and it charges the phone first and the battery pack second. The problem is that it’s not shock resistant, and with the added weight of another battery pack, any drop above about 3 feet will result in a broken phone.
Last Saturday I made another appointment at the Apple Store and went about my weekend. At the Dunkin Donuts on Sunday evening, as I jumped out of the Scout, my phone slipped out of my jacket pocket to the pavement…and smashed the screen again. Disgusted, I walked into the Apple Store today and explained the issue; the Genius looked up my account and admitted that they’d replaced the screen in April but not the battery. I handed over my phone and let them take it for a couple of hours to do the repair, and we went on with our day.
Upon return, the Genius showed me my phone, which had failed their validation test (the screen looked like a distorted screencap of Qbert) and they handed me a brand new phone, charging me only for the $30 battery replacement. I brought it home, restored it from a March backup, and updated the apps on board. All is well again, and it looks like that iPhone 8 will have to wait another couple of years.
I’ll write a brief rundown of my time in Bogota because if I don’t get to it now I definitely won’t do it later. I was in country to shoot video interviews with two city officials in locations I hadn’t scouted in a language I don’t speak, so I was a little nervous about the results I’d get. Luckily I had a colleague from work joining me who was familiar with the program, speaks fluent Spanish, and knows how to operate video cameras, so I had a translator who could act as a second operator with me at all times. This made the trip infinitely more successful, because she knew what we wanted to accomplish and could shoot B-roll at different vantage points wherever we went, so the sheer amount of footage we left with was more than double that of my previous trips.
My flight was direct from Dulles, so I got in late on Monday night and waited at the baggage area for Valeria to arrive. We were set up in a beautiful hotel in the northern half of the city, and early Tuesday morning (5:30 EST) we headed to the partner office in town which we used as a base of operations. From there we shot a bunch of B-roll around the central eastern section of town, pausing only for a brief lunch and shooting until 6:30PM.
Wednesday we were up at 7 to shoot our first interview and met with our subject at a park along a bike path. I found a good vantage point and we filmed him speaking, then some B-roll of him biking up and down the path. Next we returned to the partner office and shot interviews with several of the bike-riding staff (much easier than grabbing random people off the street) before heading back to the hotel to offload data to an external drive.
We spent pretty much the whole time on the ground running, and if I didn’t have a translator I would have been sunk; UBER in Bogota is illegal, and for some reason their mapping service there is terrible. We wound up in several random places where the app told us we’d reached our destination, and we had to spend time explaining where we really wanted to go to the driver.
I bought a new LowePro backpack to haul the gear around in and found it much easier to use than the ThinkTank suitcase I inherited at WRI, while being able to carry about 90% of the suitcase’s maximum load plus my laptop. This made packing once for the day feasible so I didn’t have to return multiple times to the hotel to swap out gear, although it made the pack heavy. I got skilled at keeping it to the barest load possible with enough batteries to last the day and only the lenses we’d need; only once did I regret not packing the heavy zoom lens for some good B-roll shots on the second day.
Bogota itself is a beautiful city. It sprawls at the foot of a mountain range bordering the east side, at an altitude of 2,600 feet. The architecture is an eclectic mixture of old country and modern jumbled next to each other, much like Mexico City, and I spent much of the time I spent in vehicles craning my neck to take it all in. We saw both the good and the bad, from the upscale neighborhoods where we were staying to the slum and industrial areas away from the mountains. Because the climate is often wet (think of San Francisco, but much higher) there are exotic, vibrant flowers everywhere. Calla lilies were blooming in pots outside our hotel, and across the street, brilliant purple bougainvillea draped over a residential wall.
We used a variety of cameras, with two Canon 5Ds as our primary shooters paired with a couple of key lenses, a DJI Osmo (verdict: pretty frickin’ sweet), three GoPro Sessions, and my Fuji X-T10. The 5Ds were used for all of the interviews, most of the stationary B-roll, and a few long takes for timelapse effects. We used the Osmo for traveling shots outside the windows of our cab, some pedestrian shots, and some interesting footage while riding bikes. The Sessions I used for stationary time-lapse footage in different locations and handlebar-mounted footage of our interviewees.
In the afternoon on our second day we headed north to some of the taller buildings and tried to access their observation decks but were told they were all closed until the weekend. Undeterred, we UBERed up to the side of the mountain and took a cable car up to the peak of Monserrate, a scenic overlook and tourist destination above the city (at 3,100+ feet above sea level). From here I set up the 5D and all three GoPros for an hour, shooting wide vistas and detail shots of the city. While I was there a nice police officer named Hugo came over and tried out his English on me while I tried the few Spanish words I knew.
I broke down my gear and walked around to find Valeria, and we stopped in to a cafe overlooking the city for a cappuccino and some pastries while exotic birds flitted through the flowers around us. When the sun got low in the sky, we huffed our way back up the steps and set gear back up to shoot it setting through the clouds.
Our final day on the ground began with a flurry of email as we tried to line up our final interview subject, the transportation minister of Bogota, and after nailing him down to a time, we went to the historical district and shot some B-roll of the original city square and surrounding streets. Then we jumped in a cab and headed to his office nearby. There we were faced with several lousy locations for shooting, but as I grudgingly set up in a bright and noisy hallway I glanced out into what had been a sunlit courtyard full of people and noticed it had emptied out after lunch. I grabbed my gear, told Valeria we were moving, and ten minutes later we were shooting outside with a vista of the mountains behind the minister in perfect light. Once that footage was in the can, we grabbed a steak and a beer at a restaurant across the street, toasted our success, and made plans to head back to the hotel.
My final evening was quiet, as Valeria had plans to go take a salsa class, so I transferred footage to an external drive and got all my gear packed for an early cab ride in the morning–I had to be at the gate by 7:15 the next morning. Even though I was up at 5:30 I didn’t make it through check-in, customs and security until 8, and ran to my gate. Once I was on my flight things were better, but it was scary for an hour or so there. The plane ride home was uneventful, and I was back at the house somewhere around 5PM.
Overall, despite the fact that I ran my ass off the whole time I was there and I don’t speak Spanish, I enjoyed my quick stay in Colombia tremendously. I’d consider going back there, with six months of intensive language training, for a long vacation with the girls.