Old in computer years anyway. Old in Apple computer years specifically. Which is to say only a decade old and still perfectly good. Anyway…

Some years ago I bought a nice second hand Macbook Pro laptop. In 2012 it was the very top of the line for fifteen inch Macbook Pros. It has the 256k SSD, and 16gb core ram, and the new and improved “Retina” video display. It was expensive even for a Macbook Pro. But now it’s “old” and I got it for a much more reasonable price. I fell in love with it instantly. New Macs don’t have all the connection ports this one does. You have to buy their adaptors. This one not only has all the connection ports built right in, it has a built-in Superdrive, and an SD card slot, which makes it a nice travel companion for my DSLRs. And lord have mercy that Retina screen is Very Nice. It was everything I wanted in a Mac laptop, though it was admittedly somewhat heavy. Problem with it was it had a couple intermittent keyboard keys. E and D. They worked, but sometimes I had to press more than once to get their attention.

Eventually that became annoying enough that when I saw a Facebook ad for a place in Severna Park that repaired older Macs I took it to them. It was slickly and professionally laid out, not at all like some computer nerd’s basement. They not only repaired but also sold old Macs, and they claimed to be a fully authorized Apple service shop. I had great expectations.

The plague was in full swing then, and I was told when I dropped it off that it might take a while. I was fine with that. I told them if the keyboard needed replacing I would pay for it. The guy behind the counter, who was a bit stand-offish and rude, said it probably only needed cleaning, which would take less time and cost me a lot less. I was skeptical, but willing to be convinced, and I counted it a plus that they were telling me the repair would probably be cheaper than I expected. I asked if just having the Guest account was okay. I didn’t want to give out my admin password. They said Guest was fine. Several weeks later I got a call to come pick it up, it was fixed.

But it wasn’t. The same keys were still intermittent. So I took it back. I had to show the guy behind the counter that the keys were still intermittent, which wasn’t easy when the problem is…you know…intermittent. But I got it across eventually that the repair, whatever their technician had done, hadn’t worked. Fine says the guy behind the counter, still a little standoffish and rude, if it needs a new keyboard after all we’ll deduct the cost from what you paid previously. A day later I got another call that it was fixed and ready to be picked up.

This time I tested it at the counter. Same problem as before, but worse. The keys weren’t even intermittent anymore, they had simply stopped working. I was directed to another counter off to the side, and showed the guy there the problem. He said it might take weeks to get a new keyboard on it because it was a very labor intensive process to remove all the little screws they needed to remove. He really emphasised that. Very labor intensive. Very Very labor intensive. Probably take weeks. Maybe even months. Okay, fine, says I, but I want this fixed. I really want this laptop working because it is everything I want in a travel laptop. 

Two hours later I get a call saying they’d put in a new keyboard. I drive back and brought it home, not even bothering to test it at the counter because I pretty much figured they had done no such thing and it was either fixed now or I was taking it elsewhere. Ah yes…Now the 3, E, D, and C keys weren’t working…the entire vertical row was inoperative. Later I discovered that now the operating system wasn’t detecting the Superdrive. So I was done with them.

I looked around Google some more, and found a place in Parkville that did work on older Macs. It was a much smaller place than the one in Severna Park; basically a basement shop in what used to be a house on the main drag. I explained the problems to the lady behind the counter who, let it be said, was Much nicer to her customers than the guy in Severna Park. I asked again asked if Guest was okay. I couldn’t imagine why it wouldn’t be since all that was needed was to check that the keyboard and Superdrive were working. She said it was fine.

Two days later I get a call from some older man there telling me he couldn’t do the work without my admin password. Oh really? I told him I would take back the laptop instead.

So for nearly a year now the laptop has just sat idle. I could use it with a USB keyboard, but the firmware wouldn’t allow me to plug in another Superdrive. But this was a top of the line Mac not that long ago, and everything I want in a travel laptop. I just loved that big sharp 15 inch screen. A little on the heavy side maybe, but worth carrying it around for that screen, the big fast solid state drive and every port and connector I could ever need right on it. So a couple weeks ago I tried Googling for Mac repair near me, and discovered a new place had opened up in the Rotunda, which is walking distance to my house.

It’s part of a chain called “Juvix The Tech Guy”. They’d just opened shop at the Rotunda. I brought the laptop there and explained the problem. They asked Me right away if I had Guest enabled and I said it was. I told them about the trouble I’d had in Severna Park and the lady behind the counter grinned like she’d heard it before from her other customers. I wondered if it was that specific place or just all of them nearby that people were venting to her about.

First email I got from them a few days later said the Superdrive was working again and all it needed was to be plugged back in. Also that a new keyboard was on order. Apparently the Enter key and one of the shift keys weren’t working now either. A week later I got an email saying they were still waiting for the keyboard to arrive. A couple days later I get another email saying the new keyboard had arrived, and a few hours later another saying it had been installed and everything tested and my laptop was ready for pickup. Total bill was $141.

I bring it home. So nice to live where everything is in walking distance. I get it running and…wow…Everything Works. Just like that. My ideal Mac laptop is ideal again.

Sweet. I can’t speak to all the shops in the chain, but the Juvix The Tech Guy at the Rotunda here is a first rate operation with a good crew and not atrociously expensive. Email me if you need to know who the crappy repair places were.

One more thing…

That professional cartoonist I mentioned above. He was a Hugo Award winner, with a presence in both fan art, and in commercial and underground comics. When he discovered Adobe had turned off the licensing servers for his version of Photoshop, he spent the last days of his life looking for a good replacement for it, and trying out new tools, because the tool he had used for many years and was familiar with suddenly stopped working thanks to Adobe. He did that instead of creating art.

I know how it is to suddenly have to struggle learning a new set of software tools because Adobe pulled the rug out from under you. It is very time consuming and frustrating. And of course Adobe thinks you just give them more money for new software you don’t necessarily need, or just submit to paying them rent every month whether or not the software gets better in any way shape or form…and everything is fine. But even successful cartoonists are living on the edge these days, and this one simply didn’t have the money to spare.

And so all the art he could have made, instead of struggling to find some new tools that would work for him, is lost. Gone. Never to become. And not just lost to him, but to all of us.

There’s how Adobe supports the “creative class”.

My new Canon 6D mkII will produce CR2 camera raw files like the 7D and the 7D mkII, but for Some Reason (to force users into their rental software model) Lightroom 6 won’t read them. Which is interesting since the old version of MacOS I’m running does.

This was a problem I ran into with the Canon R, which wrote to CR3 files. I expected that, since it’s the latest and greatest iteration of the Canon raw format. But I expected CR2 files to be the same as always and…apparently…they’re not. Either that, or Lightroom maintains a built-in file format reference and it is checked the camera version not the file extension.

The last buy it once use it always version of Lightroom…version 6…was released April 2015. The 7d mkII was released September 2014. The 6d mkII was released June 2017. Even if the file formats are the same, and I strongly suspect they are because of all the new and old software I have that reads the 6DII raw files, if Lightroom is going by the camera version then my Lightroom six won’t know about the 6DII, but does know about the 7DII.

So I just throws up it’s hands and gives up on the 6DII CR2 files, even though they’re the exact same file format.
I don’t know this for a fact…it’s just a hunch…but it’s an informed hunch based on Adobe’s predatory corporate behavior. Yes citizen…you must pay our software rent from now on.

But…no. I left Photoshop when GIMP finally evolved enough that I could use if for everything I used to use Photoshop for. My problem moving away from Lightroom is it was a comprehensive photographer’s workflow system: it does both image cataloging and editing and exporting to web gallery pages I could upload to my website. Apple Aperture used to be that, but it never worked very well, so I moved to Lightroom, blithely thinking that I could trust Adobe with my creative work. Hahahahahahaha…

Okay. Fine. Here’s what I have so far. Affinity Photo actually seems to handle camera raw edits Much better than Lightroom. So there’s my image editor, but I need to try it with my film scanner TIFFs to be sure it’s going to work for me as a Lightroom replacement. Digikam is a good cataloging application, with the extra advantage that it is open source, and runs on Linux as well as MacOS and Windows. Awkwardly, it won’t let me use Affinity as an external editor; I have to open an image file in Finder and then tell Finder to open it in Affinity. But at least that’s do-able. jAlbum looks like an excellent replacement for Lightroom’s export to web function. Affinity and jAlbum come in buy it once use it always licenses. Digikam is open source and would like your contributions very much. Once I’ve become comfortable that it’s my new photo catalogue, I will.

Adobe makes a big deal out of making tools for the “creative class”. But they actually don’t give a good goddamn about individual artists, cartoonists, photographers, creators, who are, if they can even manage to make a living at their art, usually living hand to mouth. They argue that the rental scheme allows artists to use high quality software tools for just a little money every month, but that cost, like everything rented, is at the discretion of the landlord and I’ve never in my life seen rents go down. What Adobe cares about are its big institutional customers. And Wall Street. For instance:

I knew a professional cartoonist who remained on Photoshop CS2 because that version worked fine for them and they were content. Now you can argue that this means they’re not supporting maintenance, but if a user does not need the later versions they’re not costing the company one thin dime? You want more money out of me, give me something I need in a new version. Then one day Adobe shut down the licensing server for Photoshop CS2… And It All Just Stopped Working. And they were fucked. How about instead of giving you something more that you might want to pay for, we just turn your software off.

Now, instead of paying for maintenance, you are paying to simply keep the software running. Every month. Or Else.

When you buy software that requires permission to run from the corporate licensing servers every time you run it you have bought nothing. And that perpetual license you bought from Adobe means whatever Adobe says it means at any given time.

I will not rent my creative software tools for the same reason I don’t rent my pens and brushes. I’ll buy a license. I’ll pay for the updates…if the updates have anything in them I need. That includes support for the current operating systems, and security bug fixes. I’ll pay for those. If and only if what I get for my money is software that runs without needing to check a corporate sever for my license Every Time It Runs. Because buried deep inside Every software license agreement is the clause that allows the vendor to unilaterally change the terms of the license out from under you whenever they want, whenever their business model changes.

I have a Nikon film scanner…the best one they ever made…it scans both 35mm and 120 roll film. But they stopped updating the scanner software for it sometime back in 2005. It does not run on any current version of MacOS or Windows. So I bought one of those half a beach ball iMacs that run Tiger…the last version of MacOS that the Nikon software ran on…at a computer flea market, and I installed the scanner software on it. Then I connected the Mac to my network. And I still have a film scanner that works.
I would pay for a software update but Nikon won’t bother with it anymore…the brave new world is Digital, sorry. I don’t think they even make a film camera anymore. But…okay…the software will run without having to get permission from a corporate licensing server. Suppose it wouldn’t. I’d have a very expensive doorstop now and no film scanner.

When you buy software that requires permission to run from the corporate licensing servers every time you run it you have bought nothing. You have made a bet.

Brood X is but a memory now…but its mark can still be seen if you know where to look and what it is you are seeing. Here’s a couple iPhone photos I took today at work. I’ve lowered the image size for the page here, but you can see them full size if you click on them.

That first photo is of trees behind the Institute today, at the edge of Wyman Park. Those reddish branch tips are dead leaves where the females laid their eggs. Those branch tips have died off which is why the leaves are dead. Why did they die?

The second photo is of a branch end I picked up while walking across campus to get lunch (a thing I haven’t done in 18 months but was able to finally do today). It had fallen from a campus tree. Lots of those have the same dead branch tips. Some of them are going to start falling off shortly. Maybe the wind blows them off. Maybe they just drop. Look carefully and you can see where a female made slits in the branch to lay her eggs in. What I learned this year was she also deposits some sort of egg nutrient that also prevents the tree branch from healing over, and locking the eggs inside. And so the tips of those branches die off and you start seeing the dead branch tips everywhere, on certain favored trees, sometime after the last cicada finished the last song of their emergence.

See all those dead branch tips in the first photo? This is why you cover small saplings with a net the years brood X is out and about. They can’t handle it. The trees in that photo will just grow out new branch tips. I like to think they remember them fondly. Oh…I knew your great great great great great great great….etc times a zillion…grandmother cicada. I was just a young tree then and she needed a home for her children… Much of planet Earth’s life cycles are vastly longer than our little three score and ten.

I’ve no idea whether the eggs had hatched or not so I tossed the branch over onto a grassy spot. Eventually the eggs hatch and the tiny little cicada nymphs drop to the ground and dig in, attach to a root somewhere, and their unique cycle of life continues. At least we get to know our parents, and maybe even our grandparents.

I had a full day today in the JWST Mission Operations Center, working on an automated performance testing program (‘program’, not as in software but as in “a set of related measures or activities with a particular long-term aim.” It’s very tedious because it’s running through the same set of operations over and over and over and over and…so on… But this is necessary to insure the MOC systems can handle the stress of launch and commissioning, and also to make sure that the small fixes and updates to the systems haven’t broken anything that Was working previously.

As I said…tedious. And I have other things on my plate at work that I need to attend to. But for various reasons I won’t go into here, these tests needed to be done this week. It is Important to do these tests at this time. So I stay on it. Everything we do now is critical to moving us toward launch, and after that, commissioning. Then we have a space telescope that will show us amazing things about the early universe, and maybe even find life on nearby planets. I was in on Monday…I’ll be working this through Thursday at least. I want to see this thing through to launch (still scheduled for the end of October), but I am counting down the weeks until I retire. I have other things I want to do with my life, before I run out of life.

I come home, tired…very tired. I’m feeling my age more now. There’s a Hemingway quote about going broke that maps very well to getting old: gradually, and then suddenly. Yeah. That. I make some dinner…a frozen package thing from the chest freezer because I am too tired even to think now. I just want to sleep. It’s the routine repetitive work that drags me down.

I turn on the TV. Smithsonian channel is running stuff about the Apollo moon landing. Oh yeah…that was today. 52 years ago. I remember watching it raptly on the black and white vacuum tube TV in our 1969 garden apartment living room. I even took a few snapshots of the TV screen while it was happening. There were no home video recorders in 1969.

I remember how it felt, I remember how amazing it all was. There really was a great big beautiful tomorrow shining at the end of every day back then. Everything was possible. I watched them put human footprints on the moon.

And then I realize I spent the day today working in the JWST MOC and I hadn’t even remembered today was the anniversary the entire time I was in there. I was busy. I had a job to do. Solidarity reaches across the decades and taps me on the shoulder. I’m really here now. I’m really part of all this. It’s about time I started believing it. I don’t think 15 year old me would have figured there was where I would be in 52 years. Certainly certain maternal family members would never have believed it. I should really stop carrying that weight around with me. I did my job, and I’ll get back to it tomorrow.

And I will feel a little less old and tired…

This challenge came across my Facebook stream this morning, because a friend replied to it jokingly. Oh…there is lots of joke material in this one…

You walk into your house & all your ex’s are there. Reply w/ just 3 words.

Alone again, naturally.

I don’t have ex’s…just a lot of near misses and strike-outs. And soon I’ll be 68.

This world I’ve come to learn, is equipped to handle lovers, ex-lovers, couples and the tragically dumped to the curb. It can handle the married…happily or otherwise…and the divorced. It has room for them all. What it can’t seem to wrap itself around are the one’s like me who never got the chance, who went from one end of a human life to another without knowing what it was like to be in a lover’s embrace. Ever.

So when one of us enters the room, the world looks the other way…and doesn’t see us at all…

Some years ago I had a dream one morning just before waking. I was watching some sort of music video channel and it was broadcasting a collection of videos themed as “The Descendants Of PDQ Bach.” So you had PDQ Moby, and PDQ Mantovani, and PDQ Yanni, and PDQ Vangelis and PDQ Horner, and so on and it was hilarious.

Somehow my dreaming brain was able to construct believable parodies of all their musical tropes and it was so funny I woke up laughing. Of course now I couldn’t remember any of the actual tunes, but I still vaguely remember PDQ Mantovani’s easy listening rendering of a Celine Dion song that was itself a parody of something Dion might have sung that cracked me up.

Someone should do this.

The one thing that might have made me change my mind about keeping the Canon R is being able to get a fast 24mm prime for it. They don’t make those in R series lenses, but the camera came with an R to EF lens adapter and I spotted a 24mm EF L f1.4 at Service and gave it a try after picking up the camera from a detector cleaning. It works.

My FD 24mm f1.4 is about all I ever put on my Canon Fs anymore. For my art photography that’s just about the only lens I need. I quickly gravitated to that focal length back when I was a teenager and nearly everything I’ve ever done, apart from my photojournalism work, is in that field of view. It just works for me. So much that now when I’m out and about and looking with my eyes I am judging what I see against what I know from long experience what that lens will see.

I couldn’t use any of the lenses I have for the 7D because those are all optimized for the APS-C detector, which is smaller than the so called full frame detectors. I had ideas of buying a full frame 5D, but that would come with the additional expense of a set of all new lenses and it just wasn’t in the budget. And anyway the 7D is a Nice camera and I have no issues at all with it’s image quality. I eventually found all the wide angle lenses I needed for it, but they’re all zooms, and some of them are very slow. I wanted another fast 24mm like that FD lens I have for the film Canons.

Well…I have one now. It could work on the 7D but on that camera it amounts to roughly a 38mm equivalent. Which I might someday need but it’s far from the angle of view I want for art photography. But it works just fine as the primary lens on that R. So I reckon now I’m keeping the R.

I have two 7Ds now…the one I’ve used for a decade for photojournalism and art, and the 7D mk II I recently bought because it has a built-in GPS. So I’ll probably sell the older one and some of its lenses. Won’t get much for it, but I don’t need three DSLRs. I’m still primarily a black and white film photographer.

I hate selling equipment that’s been good to me over the years…it feels like separating from an old friend. But sitting in a camera cabinet doing nothing is not a dignified end for a good camera. It needs another artist to love, or a photojournalist. There should be camera adoption agencies so I can approve the buyer before I let a camera go.