A couple of years ago I said, in some meeting or another, that soon we would all be required to log into Facebook regularly. I think I was right, but I’m not at all happy about it. Facebook sucks. Wait, let me rephrase that. Unless you’re 17 years old or completely fascinated by everyone’s latest list of 25 useless things or you’re trying to promote your new self-help program, Facebook sucks.

I hear the argument that it’s so great being able to keep in touch with all 1200 people from high school. Really? I never even go to the once-every-five-year reunions. I surely don’t need daily updates.

Maybe I’m just an anti-social dick. Or maybe I’m doing it wrong. Either way, I need some new friends soon or Facebook has gotta go.

In the meantime, see you on the rest of the internet. Oh, and Twitter

The problem with being exposed to the best of anything is that everything else becomes, well, not the best. A few years ago I owned a Leica Summicron 35mm ASPH. Best 35mm lens on the planet. Then I sold it with the rest of the film gear when I went insane digital.

Now that I’m back in the Leica fold I had to choose a 35mm lens. I want the Summicron, but finding a good used copy for less than $1500 is tricky. Right now that’s just too much money. On the other hand, the Voigtlander lenses get great reviews, and they’re inexpensive. I went with a Color Skopar 35mm f2.5 for around $300. I don’t like it at all. It’s not the images, they’re fine for the most part. What I don’t like is the handling. Those little plastic “ears” on the aperture ring drive me nuts. It’s so compact that it can be difficult to use. For sale.

I needed to find some reasonable compromise between the little VC lens and the crazy-expensive Summicron ASPH. The Zeiss optics have always seemed to be highly-regarded, and not as costly as the Leicas. I found a Biogon 35 f/2 for $650. I should be getting it in the next few days. Assuming the optical quality is as good as everyone says and that it doesn’t suffer from the “Zeiss Wobble,” the only variable will be handling. I’m used to tab-focused lenses. The Biogon has a little gnurled “nub” instead.

Can’t wait to give it a try on the M4! If I don’t love it, I’m going to sell the other kidney and get the Summicron. I hope it won’t come to that.

Lifehacker Code: Todo.txt CLI Manages Your Tasks from the Command Line: “Dozens of fancy point-and-click task managers promise to organize your to-do list, but so often power users find that nothing outdoes that trusty old classic: the todo.txt file.”

I would normally be all over this. I love Vi, love text files, and so on. What I don’t want is to fart around with yet another task management toy, so I’ve got to pass. Every day in every way I am getting better and better.

Y’all have fun with it, though.

This may suffer from motion blur. It may be slightly out of focus and it’s loaded with dust on the negative. It’s still a good photo.

Twitter Groups: Loren Brichter on the problems faced by Twitter client developers tempted to add ‘group’ features.

Except of course that other than group synching between multiple computers, TweetDeck already does this perfectly.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

A camera is most decidedly not just a light-tight box to hold the film. This one isn’t anyway.

This is my new Leica M4. It was built in 1966 and looks practically new. You camera nerds might notice that it has been customized with the much cooler M3-style levers. I love everything about this camera. It’s small, built like a tank, and every single thing it does it does with buttery-smoothness. You’ve gotta love buttery-smoothness.

I’m getting used to shooting without a built in meter, which is challenging. One thing I’ve noticed is that I no longer meter every shot. Just once per situation and from then on I just fire away. Gives me goosebumps.

Give Up and Use Tables

“Take three minutes to build a table. And ten minutes to get a donut. Bill the client for an hour. Done.”

I know it’s supposed to be a joke. It’s funny because it’s true.

During any given day I run into a few articles or blog posts which look interesting, but are a bit long and should probably be saved for later.

Enter Instapaper.

Instapaper facilitates easy reading of long text content.

We discover web content throughout the day, and sometimes, we don’t have time to read long articles right when we find them.

Instapaper allows you to easily save them for later, when you do have time, so you don’t just forget about them or skim through them.

At first glance Instapaper might be just another bookmarking service. It’s not. It saves the article or post in a nice, easy to read, text-only format. This works very well for longer pieces. Another quote from the Instapaper FAQ…

This is for temporary storage of links you’d like to read.

When used for this purpose, Instapaper is nice, but it doesn’t really shine until the iPhone app kicks in. I

List of articles…

Single article…

It goes like this…

1. Click the “Read Later” bookmarklet whenever I run into an interesting article that I don’t have time to read right away.
2. Fire up the iPhone app whenever I’m waiting, bored, or otherwise have time to finally read something.
3. Archive the article (this happens automatically) so it just goes away.

The best part is that there’s no filing, tagging, naming or otherwise futzing about with things. I just click “Read Later” and then I, you know, read it later.

Recommended.

Developing film is a constant process of figuring out what works and what doesn’t. So far I’m pretty good at discovering what doesn’t. I’ve been shooting either Ilford XP2 Super and having Meijer process and scan it or Tri-X shot at ISO 1200 and processing it in Diafine. My last roll or two of Tri-X has been too contrasty and grainy even for my tastes, so I thought I’d give old faithful, Kodak D-76 a try.

One of the reasons Diafine is so great is that it’s not sensitive to time or temparature. D-76 on the other hand, requires much more accurate tracking of both. Here’s a test shot processed for 9 minutes in D-76 at 68 Degrees. The box time for this combination is 11 minutes, but I cut it short in an attempt to control the contrast. I don’t mind the results at all.

Agitation was 5 inversions every minute.

I occasionally switch back to using Apple Mail, thinking it will be better than Gmail this time. The concept is there. It’s a native app, integrates with every other real OS X app. I really like the idea of it, but it never sticks. Trying again over the weekend to see how it goes. Mail Act-On will probably help, but I want single-key interaction like Gmail offers. Still looking for a plugin or something that will let me do that.

Let’s see.