Is is

One rarely writes two identical words together in a sentence   But one hears this particular twinning all the time, often form the smartest people in the world:

The question is, "Is this OK?"

This bugs me.

If I had to write this sentence, I would say something like this:

We fundamentally need to know if this is OK.

Whatever.

Scoring an exercise session

I joined Fitocracy some time ago.  It is a nice social site for posting your workouts and getting points.  But of course, the points don't matter, except to motivate you.

Having said that, the Fitocracy algorithm strongly favors weight lifting: Lifting 100 pounds five times is "equivalent" to running a mile.  Yeah, right!

Therefore, I decided to create my OWN point system (again, the points don't matter), which rewards the sort of exercise *I* do (jogging).

Here is the way I figure it (qualitatively).  You get more points for:

1. Running farther,
2. Running faster,
3. Running with extra weight (including your own weight).

The last item is based on the reality that heavier runners expend more energy.  For example, let's say you are a svelte 130 pound marathon runner, who averages around 5:30/mile for short runs.  What would she be able to do with, say, 60 pounds of extra weight?  Could she halve her pace (11:00/mile) for a 5K with that extra weight?  Hmm?  HMMMMM?

Long story short (and I think this will need tweaking), I'll take this form for the algorithm:

Points = (scaling1)*(C1 + miles) + (scaling2)*(C2- pace) 

I'll arbitrarily say that a 1-mile run at a moderate pace for me is worth 5 points.  I'll also set scaling2=C1=1.0 (yeah, I know, the units don't match; ignore it).  A moderate pace for me is 13:00/mile (C2).  Do the arithmetic to see that scaling1=2.5:

points = 2.5*(1 + miles) + 13 - pace.

Now, we add a factor for the weight.  Since BMI is a better measurement of your overweight-ness, I have settled on this formula:

Points = 2.5*(1 + miles) + 0.4*BMI - pace.

There is only one more factor that I have to add in: you can only get points if you go at least 1/2 mile.

Using this scoring system, here are some examples of an 11-point 5K run for different BMI values:

• 25:00, BMI=22
• 30:00, BMI=26
• 32:30, BMI=28
• 35:00, BMI=30
• 37:30, BMI=32

The world record 5K is 12:37 by Kenenisa Bekele of Ethiopia.  Let's say this particular human specimen has a BMI of 18.  Kenenisa would have received 13.4 points for this run.  Patrick Mahu's world's best marathon of 2:03:35 would have earned him (assuming a BMI of 16) 64 points!

My point system favors more frequent, shorter exercises, which is what I need right now.  That is, it is better for me to do five 2-mile runs in a week than three 5K's (about 40 points versus 33 points).

My sort-term goal is 25 points per week.  I hope to increase this to 40 points per week over the coming weeks.

Zoom versus Prime lenses

I know how I stand on the whole "Zooms versus Primes" debate: I prefer primes.

A "zoom" lens has the ability to change its focal length; a "prime" lens does not.  Here is a link to my son's incredible Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L zoom lens.  Here is a link to my incredible Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 lens.  In terms of image quality, it is arguable that these two lenses, at 50mm, are quite similar.

	Zoom	Prime
PROS	Variable focal length You can often get a decent zoom lenses with image stabilization for a reasonable price.  For example, this new kit lens from Canon. Heavier lens is sometimes easier to hold steady. It seems that the newest technologies appear on zoom lenses first (like the kit lens linked to, above).	Great IQ for not much money Small and light (in most cases) Usually, primes are faster (have a larger maximum aperture) than zooms Many artistic photographers like the constraint of a single focal length (and I am one of them).  It forces you to look at the scene carefully and find the interesting perspectives. Only one moving part (focus) Some primes are incredibly small (e.g., this Canon 40mm pancake lens).
CONS	To get comparable image quality to a prime, you have to spend a lot of money Large and heavy Usually, zooms are slower (have a smaller maximum aperture) than primes Lots of moving parts (focus, zoom and (often) image stabilization)	Cannot change the focal length Image stabilization is not common.  When you can get it, it is quite expensive (at this time).

So, I prefer primes for the reasons I state here.

The bottom line for me is stated as Image Quality/Price--you can't beat that ratio in primes.

IMHO.

Leica, continued.

Actually, I think I need (someday) to buy a Leica body.  This one would work for me:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/860536-REG/Leica_10760_M_Monochrom_Black_and.html

Contributions are welcome to my PayPal account.  Contact me for details.

WTF is wrong with my home PC?

Introduction

The home PC has been driving my wife and me nuts for a long time.  It runs everything, and since I have replaced the power supply and installed an extra fan on the video card, it does not crash any more.  But the memory usage over the course a day (after a reboot) goes from just under 2GB to 6GB (the amount of physical memory I have).

A wee bit of background: HP Pavilion (bought August 2009), Intel i7 (8-core) processor, Windows 7 Home Premium (upgraded from Vista when 7 became available, approximately 5 months later).  6GB of memory (as I said), three internal disks (system disk is 0.6TB; photos is 1TB and videos is also 1TB).

Symptoms

If we use the PC normally for several hours (which is how the day usually evolves) and then go away for a while (e.g., a good night's sleep), when we come back it takes for-EVER to come alive.  For example, I'll jiggle the mouse, the screen will come alive and I look at the screen.  The internal clock say a time that is about an hour after we stopped using the computer.  After about ten seconds, the clock changes to the correct time, and MS Outlook pops up all the emails that have arrived over night (a little pop-up indicator associated with the Outlook icon in the System tray).

I use Adobe Lightroom a lot now--it is a well-deserved memory hog [loading and interpreting dozens of 25MB images].  When I start LR immediately after startup, it works fine.  But when I try to use it at the end of the day, it takes for-EVER to do anything.

My wife tends to use Chrome for everything.  On a normal day, she'll have a dozen or two tabs open.  She likes it a lot.

The Task Manager has some interesting things to say.  First (and foremost): the CPU is almost completely idle.  The other very interesting aspect is that when I sum the memory usage of all the processes running for all users, it is nowhere near the amount that the Task Manager says the system is using: like 2GB in the sum of all the processes, but 6GB total memory used (in the summary box).

Measurements

I have figured out a few things to measure.  First, as indicated above, rebooting the system resets the memory usage to a normal level for a while.

This morning, I closed all programs and watched the task manager for a while.  I forced several background processes to close: Amazon Sound Cloud, DropBox, Chrome, a couple of ready-to-launch things (e.g., my Garmin GPS watch has one, as does the Logitech camera and a Logitech steering wheel that Son #3 uses), CrashPlan.  The odd part of this operation is that there were about 7 instances of Chrome left long after I had closed it.

Then I logged off my wife and logged into Windows 7 as me (we have two such accounts already setup).  I did a few simple things (checked a web page in Chrome and then exited Chrome), changed my background (to show a series of pictures of my lovely granddaughter), and then watched the Pebble Beach golf tournament.   At the end of this (ahem!) 2 hour experiment, the memory usage had stayed at 0.9GB the whole time!

Hmm.

Then I logged off and logged back in as my wife.  She has several things that run automatically (e.g., Sound Cloud), so the initial memory usage was 1.8GB.  I did some work on Lightroom (it was great and snappy!).  I closed LR and I went away for a while (I watched "Looper"--great movie, if you can get through the violence and gore of the first 110 minutes of it and see the last 5).  When I returned, the memory usage had not increased!

Hmmmmmmm!

Working Assumption

There is something we run normally that has a memory leak.  My current guess: Chrome.

How do I test this theory?

Here are the ways I can image testing this theory:

• Uninstall Chrome and re-install it.
• If this works, it would indicate to me that some sort of stupid-ware has been picked up by this installation of Chrome.
• Uninstall Chrome and install Firefox.
• Any other ideas?????

So, that's it for now.  The working assumption is that Chrome is Evil on our home PC.

Update: 2/10/13

The PC ran overnight with nothing in the foreground.  It was using 5.5 GB.  Oops!  I killed a couple of background processes (Amazon Sound Cloud) and the memory allocation went to 4.7 GB.  There is something else wrong besides by "Chrome" assumption.

A Facebook friend (Todd R.) pointed me to the following interesting web sites:

• Memory discrepancy between taskmanager and Resource Monitor -- Someone else has the problem with calculating the memory being used by the processes on a W7 PC.
• Google search on "Chrome Memory Hog" -- I'm not sure any of the links here are more than people whining about Chrome, but here it is.

Using my daddy's Leica lenses?

Well, if I am not going to buy the Ricoh GXR, and I refuse to sell my daddy's Leica lenses, how will I use my them?  I have a tentative plan: Wait for a good version of the Canon EOS-M camera to be created and buy that.

This plan has several advantages:

1. I can use my daddy's Leica lenses (assuming that there will be an adapter for this)
2. Since I am assuming that there will be a Leica M lens adapter, I'll also assume there will be a Canon FD adapter.  Thus, I'll be able to use all my old FD lenses, too! (I have three that would be interesting to use: 24mm f/2.8, 50mm f/1.4 and 200mm f/4)
3. I can use all my EF lenses, and they will autofocus and auto-aperture!
4. Putting the little 22mm f/2 EF-M lens on that camera means that it is very close to pocketable.  I'd carry it all the time.
5. Maybe my wife would use it all the time, too.  She is not happy with the point-&-shoot camera(s) she has now.

But Canon needs to fix these problems

1. It needs a viewfinder (rumor has it that this is coming in 2013)
2. The speed of the autofocus has to improve,  The Sony NEX and (especially) the Olympus 4/3's cameras set the standard and Canon needs to get close to that.
3. The price needs to come down (since I'd also buy the EF lens adapter, the get-started price is (B&H) $921 -yikes!).

My perspectives on the Ricoh GXR with Leica M mount

I rented the Ricoh GXR with the Leica M mount front from lensrentals.com over Thanksgiving 2012.  I also rented the electronic viewfinder, which fits in the hot shoe.  I used my father’s two Leica lenses on this camera:  The 35mm f/1.4 Sumilux and the 90mm f/2.0 Sumicron.  Both of these lenses are, of course, completely manual: manual focus and manual aperture. These lenses have outstanding reputations, and I know that my daddy took lots of great pictures with his 35mm film Leica M2.  He especially liked the 35mm Sumilux.

Note that the GXR is an APS-C sensor, so these lenses translate to the equivalent view of 52mm and 135mm on a 35mm, full-frame camera.

Pros

The camera is a great size and it feels great in my hand.  The shutter has a very satisfying click to it.  It responds quickly—no shutter lag that I could perceive (but see below).

The focus-assist is very good.  There are two ways this comes into play:

1. There is a slider bar along the bottom that turns green when the camera thinks you are in focus.
2.  There is a glittery effect in the image on the contrasty spots that are in focus.  This is particularly effective on eyes and carpet patterns.  (You can see a range of sparkly carpet patterns, which moves back and forth as you focus.  Often, this was the most effective way for me to get my subject (mostly my granddaughter) in focus: move that sparkly band back and forth until it coincided with where she was sitting on the carpet.)

The electronic viewfinder is really, really nice.  It shows exactly the same stuff as would be shown on the back screen, including the short review of the image that you just took.

The images from these Leica lenses were very good.

Cons

Despite the nice focus-assist mechanisms offered by the GXR, it was hard for me to get a good percentage of shots that were in focus.

The image review in the viewfinder was disconcerting!  It looks exactly like the image you were seeing as you snapped the picture (of course), but the subject keeps moving and this image stays frozen.  This was weird.  (I suppose this could be turned off, but I did not have time to figure this out.)  But what was worse was that you could not snap another picture until that review finished!  This was bad!

The 35mm Sumilux has a minimum focus distance of 1 meter.  This was not close enough for the sort of pictures I wanted to take.

The manual aperture, with this camera and (I suppose) with any other modern camera, is not useful.  You pretty much have to focus at maximum aperture and then stop it down prior to snapping the picture.  I could never get the hang of this operation (find the focus knob; get it focused; find the aperture knob; stop it down; snap; find the aperture knob again; open it up; repeat).

I discovered the problem with the 90mm Sumicron.  I had previously used it on Daddy’s Leica M2: none of the pictures were in focus.  I determined with the GXR that this lens has shifted by a little bit: infinity on the lens has a subject at 20 meters in focus; everything else is shifted by the same amount (e.g., lens at 10 meters puts a subject at 7 meters in focus).  I may have to take the lens apart and put it back together—maybe the problem will be obvious.

Summary

I doubt that this is the proper way for my photography gear to evolve.  This setup is too limited (for me)—Daddy’s Leica lenses are great and all, but the focusing is too hard, and the rapid-fire mode is pretty much non-existent.  If I took a lot of posed pictures (especially of things that don’t move), it might be useful.  But I don’t do that.

The image quality did not blow me away.  I was expecting stupendous IQ, what with no anti-aliasing filter and Leica lenses.  But I did not get a single picture that actually had blow-it-up-to-billboard-size IQ.

If this cost something like $400, it would be a tough decision.  But at close to $1000 ($930 with the discounts I usually see), I conclude that this is a bad way to spend my gear fund.

The question remains: How do I use my daddy’s Leica lenses?  If I don’t use them, I should probably sell them (but I just can’t bring myself to do that).  I am holding out hope that I will win a Sony NEX in a contest.

Update: 12/20/12
I got one of the pix with this camera posted in Fermi Today.  Here is a link to the issue, and here is the image:

  

Leica 35mm Sumilux at f/1.4, 1/800 sec at ISO 271 (The Ricoh chooses crazy ISO values like this all the time!)