Karl Wallinger

I haven’t figured out why some celebrity deaths hit harder than others. Very few if any celebrities are people I’ve met, but I spend enough time with the art of enough of them that I have a reflexive “oof” when I see some names pop up in the obituaries. Richard Lewis, Andre Braugher, Matthew Perry, Sinéad O’Connor — I took those a bit personally. But then Karl Wallinger from World Party (and briefly, The Waterboys) died a week ago at 66 and I’ve been thinking about him ever since.

I liked three World Party songs a lot: “Ship of Fools”, “Is It Like Today?”, and “Way Down Now”, and they were about all I knew of the band. “Ship of Fools” came on my radar when I was 15 and my obsession with nuclear weapons was still raw. Now that I listen back to the lyrics and see the video, there’s nothing in it that says the song is about nukes, but he’s obviously warning about many forms of apocalypse. I must have been seeing mushroom clouds in his eyeglasses with the way that creepy bluescreen effect worked.

So that one song of his had an outsized effect on me, and his name stuck with me for a long time. His other hits are blessed with hooks, and I always regarded him as especially gifted. And then he died, 13 years older than me. Maybe it was related to his aneurysm from 2001, I don’t know. But I felt sad and cheated when I heard about it.

And Karl was a friend and bandmate of Chris Whitten, one of my favorite drummers. He was fairly devastated by the news according to his post on Instagram.

And only because of all this did I learn about Karl having been in The Waterboys from 1983–1985. I never liked them before, but Sarah knows the Waterboys and she just introduced me to Fisherman’s Blues and now I want all those non-Waterboys years back. For some reason, my younger ears didn’t appreciate Mike Scott’s voice back in the day, but with age and the appetite for more varied sounds, I really get it. Like, I need it.

Even before you read or listen to the lyrics, you can feel Scott spinning like a centrifuge of grief. He might break apart any second and send shards of himself into the rest of the band and it’s one of the greatest things you can hear.

That’s a lot of stuff to learn and appreciate anew from the passing of one man.

March 17, 2024 music death

Fujifilm X100T JPEGs are sometimes better than RAW

I finally admitted defeat this afternoon in the Fujifilm X100T JPEG vs RAW battle and took a cue from Danny Ngan’s How I configure my Fujifilm X100T for everything I photograph, in which he leaves lots of settings at their default when shooting color. I reset all the Classic Chrome parameters to zero, except I kept noise reduction at -2, and all the camera JPEGs now have more pleasing colors than Lightroom’s guess at RAW Classic Chrome. None of my Digistock presets (great as they are) looked better on the RAWs, either. The only time the JPEGs fail is if I wildly miss exposure, or if it’s a dim room and there are peoples’ faces and then they get all waxy in the JPEGs. This may save a ton of time, especially when you just want a photo of your cat and you don’t want to mess with it!

By the way, nice talking to you as well on Saturday, Dave Rogers!

March 10, 2024 Fujifilm X100T Lightroom Classic

Seeing the big picture in Tinderbox

I attended the weekly Tinderbox meetup again just now and added this comment in the chat:

The thing I love most about Tinderbox is that the rich text part of a note can be arbitrarily long. With the nested/outline view that we’re looking at, you can see everything in context, but it’s trivial to dive into a long note, view the text of a list of notes together, pick and choose notes to combine, etc. This is historically done in the filesystem with files and folders, but these nodes can have much nicer titles, metadata, actions, etc. It fits the way my brain works.

Being an outliner and more, org-mode can do similar things when you expand/collapse headings at certain levels, but there’s something about Tinderbox and its malleability and suitability for incremental formalization that gets the wheels turning for me.

March 9, 2024 Tinderbox

What other people can do with my gear

Sometimes I fire up the Flickr Camera Finder and look for old cameras I still have, like the Panasonic GX1. Often I see images people make with that camera that far eclipse anything I’ve done with it or more expensive gear in the meantime. 16MP is still my favorite sensor resolution.

Here’s one by Calvin Lee:

And two by Takeshi Tanaka:

March 3, 2024 photography gear

Not Sure I’ve Helped Things with the Markdown Kanban

That recent post about the digital Kanban — I’m already not sure about it. The Kanban list of targeted outcomes for the week is getting polluted with a bunch of next actions. I keep looking at all the places I write things down in order to know what to do next: The digital calendar, today’s page in my spiral notebook, this new Kanban section, and the project headings and tasks further down in the file. There’s duplication of some things between all of those buckets and it’s wasting time and causing too much waffling about where to put stuff. Why does everything need to go on a paper list first? Can’t I just rely on that weekly Markdown file if I keep it lean enough? Am I supposed to be moving tasks out from under the project headings and into the Todo/Doing/Done parts of the Kanban? Is it better to copy tasks to multiple parts of that document? Which stuff am I really, really working on at any particular time? Where do I put things that I know I’m not going to start until tomorrow or 3 days from now? Do I resist the urge to tack on some todo-parsing plugin to the text editor? How do I work on five things in the Doing column at one time when I’m only one person? What have I done here?

February 28, 2024 kanban work

The Dumbest Possible Kanban That Could Work

I have a fixation with personal Kanban systems, where I think that if I find the right one, I’ll be able to limit work-in-process, get things through the bottlenecked pipeline (me) faster, and have a pile of Done stuff to show for all of it at the end of the week. We’re not allowed to just download whatever we want at work, and the list of Kanban-enabled tools we’re clear to use is limited. Seems like all of them have some fatal flaw anyway, and I had to admit to myself it was a bad idea to introduce another standalone tool on top of the blank daily page in my notebook, the weekly Markdown file of projects and their tasks, and the enterprise calendar with its task reminder system. I ended up making a super-dumb, high-level vertical Kanban at the top of the weekly Markdown project/task tracker. I’m in that file all day anyway, so it’s one less place to go. It looks like:

# Week of 2024-02-26

## TODO
- something bigger than a task but smaller than a project
- that thing I promised my manager I'd do this week
- that thing I promised to train a coworker on
- training I need to schedule

## DOING
- testing some new function in QA

## DONE 
- one unit of meaningful work I finished yesterday
- drafted document for new process

Sadly, there is some duplication between some items in the sort-of Kanban and the projects listed below, and there’s no tagging or filtering on any of these tasks, but it’s the only way I can work. I have to have non-smart lists that are anchored to a spot on the page (or in the file).

## Project A
- [ ] write up test plan
- [ ] test code in QA
- [ ] tell developer I'm done

## Project B
- [x] write up process for that new web property we inherited
- [ ] train coworker on it

## Project C
- [x] figure out what training looks good for 2024
- [ ] schedule the training
- [ ] tell manager I'm done

My brain needs the tiny little bit of focus afforded by that “DOING” header in the Kanban at the top.

February 26, 2024 kanban work