Because apparently I don’t have enough film cameras in the house, I got another one recently: the Canon EOS 620.

Film isn’t cheap right now, and some cameras are getting ridiculous. The Canonet QL17 rangefinder I bought in 2014, probably one of my best film cameras, costs roughly three times as much on the open market now. An Olympus XA2 you couldn’t give away for $20 back in the early 00s when digital hit could easily fetch $150 or more on the bay. Don’t even think about a used Leica.

But there’s a weird bubble at the end of the film era, where nobody wants those cameras. And that’s really interesting to me. I never had an SLR in college. Always wanted one, but wasn’t serious enough to drop the equivalent of a semester of tuition on a full kit. I could barely afford the hundred-dollar point-and-shoot Vivitar I bought in 1993. Now, these end-of-film-era cameras are going for cheap prices, maybe because they’re so similar to their digital counterparts.

Canon came out with the EOS 650 in 1987. (The EOS 620 came out a few months later, and added a faster shutter and some other minor improvements, despite the smaller model number.) The EOS was essentially a blank-slate start to an SLR, turning its back on the manual FD lens platform, and doing everything right the first time. Nikon was the choice of pros back then, and couldn’t turn their back on professionals who had massive investments in their existing lens system. Canon rolled the dice on this, and it was a good call.

The EOS 650 is built around the EF lens. EF stands for “Electro-Focus” and it’s an autofocus lens with no central mechanics in the camera itself. On previous systems, little gears levers or mechanical plungers were used between lenses and the body, so motors and other guts were kept in the camera itself. With an EF lens, there are seven little electrical contacts, and it’s all fly-by-wire. The lens contains any motors or electronics it needs to work. This was science fiction in 1987.

(Fun trivia: the very first image ever posted to the World Wide Web was taken with an EOS 650 and then scanned to a file. I’m not going to link to a Gizmodo story, but look it up.)

The EOS 650 (and 620) is also noteworthy because every EOS camera after it is based on the same essential design. I have the 620 and an EOS 750D sitting next to each other on my desk. The 620 is almost 30 years older, and the latter is a 24-megapixel digital camera that shoots video and has a fold-out screen. But there’s something in the basic design language that’s incredibly familiar with the two. Buttons are in the same place; the right grip feels similar; they both have a display on the upper right. The view through the viewfinder, the green aperture/shutter speed display below the image, looks almost identical. Obviously, one’s got no fold-out LCD screen and a little window that shows if the film is loaded, but they are very much from the same lineage.

The big attraction there is that the EOS 620 uses any EF lens from 1987 to present, and so do my DSLRs. I have a “nifty fifty” 50mm prime lens that I use a lot, and I slapped it on the 620, no problem. I’ve also got a nice 28-135 lens, and it works great on either.

(Minor nit: EF-S lenses made for crop-sensor APS-C digital cameras won’t work, and I’ve unfortunately got a lot of great EF-S lenses. Good news is EF lenses work great on APS-C cameras.)

(A less than minor nit: now that everyone’s going mirrorless, Canon’s introduced a new lens type called the RF. Mirrorless cameras with the RF mount can buy an optional adaptor and use their EF and EF-S lenses, but you can’t do the opposite. And there aren’t that many RF lenses yet. Also, this is the second time Canon’s tried this stunt. I have their older EOS-M, which used EF-M lenses, or an EF/EF-S adaptor. I’m not about to buy into this new system and have them change their mind a third time.)

Anyway, the EOS 620 is a strange shooting experience, because in many ways, it’s a normal shooting experience. It’s got a decent fast autofocus; a nice light meter; similar shooting modes and metering and exposure modes and all the usual stuff. Set it to P and shoot just like you would with a Canon Rebel. Swap to Tv or Av, same deal. Or shut off everything and go full manual. The one difference you’ll notice is the satisfying ca-chunk when you hit the shutter. It feels like a “real” camera.

There are some other advanced features I’d never expected in a film camera. The film loading is auto-everything, completely motorized. I guess my Vivitar point-shoot does this, but you drop in a cartridge, close the back, and it sucks in the film and tells you the frame number on the top. It’s fully motorized and fast (for the time), so you can set it on auto, hold down the shutter, and burn through three frames a second, much faster than simply lighting twenty-dollar bills on fire. And I never realized there were film cameras that did exposure bracketing, but if you want to shoot over/at/under a given exposure, set it to AEB and eat film three times as fast.

I think one thing that’s missing is there’s not any mystique or difference in the shooting experience versus using a modern DSLR. With a quirky camera like my Olympus Trip 35 or some vintage Polaroid, it’s so different from the typical experience, it’s like going from a Toyota Corolla to a Model T Ford with no roof. The 620 is like going from a 2015 Corolla to a 1995 Corolla. But try hand-cranking a Model T a few times, and you’ll see why a Corolla has its advantages. This won’t have any vintage vignetting or lens distortion like my toy cameras, but it will be nice to have something full-auto with no film loading drama involved.

Anyway, ran through a roll already, but let me do a few more and then get them off to the lab and see how it goes.

Related news: Kodak’s upping their film price by 25% in 2022. I’ve already started hoarding; I think I picked up 20 rolls since I heard that news.

I have a new photo book out. It is prohibitively expensive, but was fun to do. I enjoy making photo books on Blurb, but I don’t expect to sell any of them. It’s great to do if you want a few copies to have around the house, but like I said, Blurb’s prices are a bit insane, and just got worse. If you’re really interested, it’s available here, but I won’t be offended if it sells zero copies, so no pressure.

The book started as a dumb collection of my old Hipstamatic images, taken starting in about 2010, when that app was still A Thing. Then Instagram got bought by Facebook, and it all ended for them. But there was that brief era when it was fun to take pictures that looked like ancient film snapshots. And it was at the same time that I always had an iPhone with me, and photography went from something I only did on vacations or specific photo safari missions to an activity I did any time I was wandering from point A to point B and saw something interesting. Anyway, the book started as just a dumping ground of images, but the story of Hipstamatic and my memories of it gave it a through line, and I wrote a few hundred words about it in there. Maybe I will post the text here later. I definitely am not doing an eBook version, because Blurb would probably set the minimum price at ten dollars for a 24-page PDF.

---

I have been doing a lot more photography lately. I’m at the point where I’m hoarding film and trying to sort and order and edit and post things here and there on Instagram. (Yes, I now use them, even though they killed off Hipstamatic.)

I don’t consider myself a great or even a good photographer. I think the best pictures I’ve taken were accidents. I mostly try to capture memories as best I can. I feel like I need to do more of it to get better, so that’s where I am with it.

And it’s a distraction. I need more distractions. I have been trying to practice bass, and take pictures. I’ve been scaling back on everything else. More on that later, maybe.

---

It is pouring rain outside. We got more rain today than we did from March to October. So, this is winter for us. Dark, windy, and time to dig out the full-spectrum light. The concrete walls in the garage are weeping, and it looks like some biblical miracle where people flock to a remote corner of France to see a “crying stone” or whatever. So that’s going on.

I just got back from another walk around NAS Alameda with two of my film cameras, the Vivitar point-and-shoot and the Canon QL-17. Nice weather for a walk, although there was some event going on and the west side of the island was far too busy for me. I should probably get used to that, because at some point, they’ll tear down the old barracks and put in live/work condos and it will always be this busy.

Shooting with that Vivitar is always weird, because sometimes I forget it isn’t the same one that I bought in 1993 and had back in the 90s. When I’m walking around the Bay Area with it, it’s a strong memory hole back to my first trip to California in 1996.  Looking at grainy, faded analog pictures (like the one above) reminds me so much of that trip, and the late 90s San Francisco, and it makes me wonder what it will be like in 2045, looking at 20-megapixel DSLR images on whatever crazy 3-D 200K screens we’ll be staring at by then. (Provided I still have vision in 25 years. And will still be alive.)

I made a vow to not buy any more film until I shot everything I have on hand, and I did that today, minus the 20-some shots of black-and-white still in the Canon. I’m expecting some crazy supply-chain stuff that’s going to completely throw that off, though. I haven’t bought any film since 2018, and I’m sure things have changed. I’ve got a dozen rolls waiting to be processed, so maybe when I drop those off at Mike’s Camera next weekend, I’ll see what they have in stock. Or, it’s off to eBay.

---

Writing is still going nowhere. This week, I was revisiting a book I started writing in 2012. I’ve tried a few times writing a book that is basically a Summer Rain prequel, that takes place in the summer of 1989, between high school and college. I’ve had at least two false starts totaling maybe 100,000 words between them, and they always die about halfway through. I started a very Raymond Federman-esque book in ‘12 that was about the attempts to write this book, and the problems therein. It came from reading Double or Nothing too many times.

I thought I’d revisit it, thinking about how I look back at that era as a 50-year-old, and all of the problems I have now with nostalgia. And maybe a meditation on the need to write a memoir, and why it’s a bad idea, or has been distorted or changed in recent years. I think when I was living in that era, and a bunch of stuff happened that summer, I always thought, “this would make a great book,” because it all lined up so exactly with the traditional novel plot curve, and the events were so extraordinary or traumatic or whatever. That was before I considered myself a writer, and back then, writing a book was a giant, insurmountable goal, like climbing a mountain or running a marathon. The idea of “getting published” was such a high bar, a lofty thing, and I always thought maybe someday I would.

Now, I’ve published so many books I can never remember how many and have to look it up any time someone asks. (It’s seventeen, more or less.) Anyone can publish their own book in five minutes. And the national zeitgeist isn’t about publishing a book, because nobody even reads books anymore. It’s about going viral, making a fifteen-second video that catches on, or whatever. Old man shakes fist at air, I know.

The other main reason I need to put this down is I know I have some deep, unsettled trauma about those years. It’s not like Trauma trauma, like I watched my parents get killed after going out to a movie and had to become a crime fighter dressed as a Chiroptera. But there’s some heavy unresolved something there, something that’s best left alone. Nothing specific, just generalized. I don’t want to spend my time going back anymore. But it’s a problem that when I’m faced with a blank page and no ideas, that’s where I go.

---

Nothing else. I wasted about half of today trying to figure out how to roll over an IRA from Schwab to E*Trade. That place I worked in Denver got bought by McAfee a long time ago, and I had like a month of 401K stuck there, which got moved to an IRA, and they mailed everything to my old address and it got lost. After much phone tag, I found it sitting in an account at Schwab, then promptly forgot all about it. I just remembered, and 25% of it is gone because of fees. I thought transferring it would involve actually finding a fax machine in 2021, but it appears they take a PDF by email. Fingers crossed.

I am sort of done with the Random Life project. There are 100 videos there now. It was fun digging through some old stuff, but I got almost zero reaction from anyone out of it, and maybe it was a dumb idea. Oh well. Maybe in two or three years, I’ll look at it again and it will be interesting.

Been insanely busy with a big work release, and that’s finally done, but I haven’t been back on the horse with anything writing since then. It’s the time of year where I start to panic about not getting a book published this year, since the last year I had nothing published was 2010. But I’m in a weird place right now, where I am having a lot of trouble writing anything cohesive. I am just repeating myself at this point, and I really don’t like what I’ve been doing the last few books. And a lot of people agree, based on my sales numbers. So who knows what I will do. Maybe I will pull something together in the next 96 days. Or maybe I will pick up this writing thing after I retire. I really don’t know.

• • • For whatever reason, I started programming again. One of the three projects I always take up when I think I’m going to learn programming is writing a Zork-like game, a text-based RPG. Yes, I could just use Twine or some other game engine to do this. I mean, I could just play Zork. This is mostly just a dumb hobby for me to do because I can’t write, I don’t want to spend two thousand dollars on a gaming PC, and I am not about to start playing golf.

So I started writing this game in straight vanilla C, with nothing but the standard library. I still know a remarkable amount of C, given that I think I learned it thirty years ago. What I didn’t remember is that C is such a pain in the ass to work with. Every data structure that isn’t an integer requires you to either write or steal a library to do it. Dynamic arrays? DIY. Binary trees? You’re on your own. It all involves pointers and malloc’ing memory, and every time I would write ten lines of code, I’d think, “well, that’s going to break in actual use” or “that’s completely insecure.” I got a few hundred lines into the thing before I decided to switch to using Ruby.

I guess Ruby is now an inherently uncool language. All the cool kids use Rust, or JavaScript, or maybe Python. I first started messing with Ruby in the context of Rails development in 2006 or 2007, and spent a couple of years doing a ton of it, on a brief  sabbatical from tech writing. Haven’t done much since then, but I thought maybe I’d do this game in Ruby, no Rails, no ActiveRecord, no crazy gem dependencies. I think it took me about 25 minutes to redo the couple of days of work I did in C.

It was easy to get lost in this, but I also ran into a few issues. The first is the constant though of “nobody uses Ruby anymore.” The other is thinking that some bit of code is a very un-Ruby way to do things. I started reading more about Ruby, and it sort of drove me nuts because the Ruby way to do stuff is usually inherently unreadable. It’s neat and cool, but in my mind, doing a “if this thing is nil, do something else” is more readable than “do something else unless this thing is nil.” I realize I’m probably losing all of you non-programmers here, and I’m being pedantic, but I have some basic fear of writing this thing, publishing it on GitHub, and then having a seasoned veteran look at it like I’d look at a Reddit DIY post about some idiot who proudly enlarged their living room by removing every load-bearing interior wall in their house.

Also I get to the “why are you even doing this?” point. And the fact that I’m relaxing after a dozen of hours of hacking away at unreadable garbage in the Atom editor and pushing it to GitHub by spending a few hours hacking away at unreadable garbage in the Atom editor and pushing it to GitHub. So, yeah. How much does golf cost?

---

I bought this “Pocket Computer” - a Sharp PC-E500S. It came out in 1995, and has 32KB of memory. It’s roughly half the size of an iPad lengthwise, about 9x4 inches, maybe 3/4-inch thick. It has a 4x40-character display, LCD, and more or less a full QWERTY keyboard, except plastic little keys like a calculator. You can write BASIC programs in it, but it also has a bunch of crazy engineering software in it, so you can do integral calculus or pull up a periodic table of elements. It runs forever on four AAA batteries.

I don’t really know what I’ll do with it. I won it on a lark - made a hail mary offer on it on eBay, and the seller accepted. It has a serial port that uses a connector I’ve never seen, and a cartridge port for proprietary memory cards that are impossible to find. It is slightly more useful and interesting than the Casio FX-7000GA I have from 1990, which currently spends its time in a storage container in my closet. I need to keep in mind that buying things doesn’t really give me the joy I think it will.

---

The helicopter picture above is apropos of nothing. It’s from my Alaska trip in 2006. I think I’m at the point where I want to go back to Alaska, and I’m currently stuck with a bunch of Alaska Air credits I can’t use, but who knows when it will be safe to get back up there. I sometimes think it would be cool to go further north, head up to Fairbanks, but I don’t know the logistics of it. Maybe at some point.

The Random Life project is running out of steam, which is fine. I have posted 100 videos, and I’m about out of footage. They’re scheduled to come out one a day for the next month. 81 are live as of this second. I might get bored and post all of them in one big deluge. I’ve pretty much scoured all of my old tapes and what’s come out of my digital cameras. Maybe a second pass through the old Hi8 would reveal more, but I think doing more on this involves me leaving the house, which won’t happen any time soon.

I had some vague idea that I’d take all of the footage — I’m not sure how long it is, maybe an hour? — and glue it all together and make one long “movie” out of it. There are a few problems with that, most notably that that aspect ratios of things differ. The other is that iDVD was the perfect software for making a nice version of this, and it died a few years ago. Also, I thought it would be neat to list it using CreateSpace, and I could order DVDs on demand, but they stopped doing that a while ago. And I don’t know how I would even play a DVD anymore, without digging out an old external drive. The other issue is that with no plot or linear story, people wouldn’t “get it,” which is probably why the project has mostly gone nowhere. But I’m sure in a year or two when this is completely out of my head, this will seem interesting again.

---

So, I’ve had FreeNAS installed on my data hoarding server since maybe 2014, and never updated it. The machine itself is a Lenovo TS-140, which is great because it’s low-power but also supports server-type stuff like ECC memory. I threw FreeNAS on it and set up a ZFS pool with three drives in it, which gave me something like three or four terabytes of redundant storage. I run Plex on it and it can transcode videos on-the-fly, which is good because every time I have an AVI or something and I need to watch it on a real TV, I don’t want to have to google the entire history of video compression to figure out how to view it. The server is also a black hole of large PDFs I will never read. There’s about a half-terabyte of government PDFs about UFOs, and I now have zero interest in that, but I can’t just delete them.

Anyway, I had a drive fail in that pool in 2019? or so, and it was an easy and fun process to replace it. No data loss, because of the redundancy. I bought a larger drive, swapped it out, and it “resilvered” it with the stripes of redundant data from the other ones and magically healed itself. The pool size is calculated based on the smallest drive in the pool, and that thing had two 3TB drives and I replaced the dead one with a 4TB, but didn’t have the cash or will to buy three new drives. I replaced the 3TB with a 6TB, and that expanded the pool to 5TB. If I was smart, I’d do the math and come up with some schedule where I rotated out the oldest drive with the biggest I could afford at some regular interval, but I’m too lazy to figure this out.

Felt a need to upgrade this thing, because I’m sure it’s full of security holes, and my TV started complaining it needed a newer version of Plex, and the NAS wouldn’t upgrade it anymore until I upgraded the OS. I thought maybe I’d do incremental upgrades, like go from 9.0 to 9.1 to 10.0, etc etc. I did the first minor upgrade and it bricked the machine. So I needed a different plan.

I’d heard the new versions of TrueNAS (they changed the name from FreeNAS for some damn reason, probably money-related) kill USB thumb drives, which I was using to boot for the last 7 years. I’m surprised that one lasted as long as it did. So I bought a small SSD drive (120GB) for thirty bucks, and installed that in the box as a boot drive. Then I got the latest TrueNAS installer, booted from that, and did a fresh install. Imported the old pool, installed a fresh Plex install, added an AFP share so my Macs see it, and done. I ran into zero kinks in the install, and the web dashboard looks all shiny and new.

I just realized nobody will care about the last few paragraphs. I run into that a lot. Why do I even do this anymore? I think someone famous said “I write things down so I won’t forget them.” Or maybe that was the marketing slogan for a hipster notebook. I didn’t write it down, so I forgot.

---

Oh yeah, Shuttle photos from the trip are on Flickr: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmWub6uW

Also, I have a ton of pictures of NAS Alameda that need to be sorted and labelled and organized, but here’s a raw dump of all of them: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmWwqwem

I don’t know who still uses Flickr, if anyone. I noticed my last photo dump was my Vegas trip right before the pandemic started. I’m not sure if that’s because of the lack of travel, or my general apathy about sorting and organizing photos.

---

I have to drive to the dentist in a minute. I’ve already covered this earlier, but I still go to the dentist I had in 2008 when I lived in South San Francisco. The drive stinks, but he’s a good dentist, and he’s open Saturdays. His practice is attached to a rapidly dying mall, and there are all of the usual ghosts from living there way back when. Oh, and he’s got to drill up two teeth, and I have to pay for it.