Tea Leaves

In Shadyside tonight I noticed that the queue for the iPhone has already started:

I took the opportunity to do a quick on-the-spot interview with the guys who dared to be first. The video and audio quality is pretty poor, but nonetheless…here it is.

As psu mentioned yesterday, Pokémon on the Nintendo DS is the new obsession.

Being a consummate joiner, I am not afraid to admit that my descent into the Pokéworld was due to Penny Arcade’s ungrudging respect for the game, coupled with a purely base financial motivation: I’m reviewing Pokémon Diamond and Pearl for PTD Magazine. After just two days playing the DS game, I found myself scrounging the local used game stores for the older GBA games so I could understand exactly what I had been missing all these years: the best Japanese RPG since Earthbound.

I consider myself a gamer with a particularly broad background, but I was an adult long before Pokémon became popular. Perhaps to avoid even the appearance of creepiness I just never bothered to find out what Pokémon was about. I knew it had something to do with monsters, and collecting, and battling, and it was marketed directly at grade school children. And that’s about it.

So what is Pokémon, really? Quite simply, it is a traditional Japanese style RPG with a collecting game built in. In the prototypical JRPG, your character has “stats”, and can pick up items which enhance those stats, allowing your avatar to kill bigger monsters. In other words, RPGs are games about making a number — here at Tea Leaves, we call it “R” — bigger. In Pokémon, your character has no “R” of her or his own. Instead, you carry around little balls with monsters in them. The monsters have “R”.

The game is superbly designed and balanced. At almost every point when you are uncovering “new” territory, battles are challenging without being impossbile. This means the game feeds you a constant sense of achievement. Healing for your little monsters is freely available practically everywhere. The game allows (and even rewards) iterative play (fight the first foe in an area, go heal up, return to fight the next guy). You can save anywhere, when not actually in the middle of a battle (so it’s already better than most other JRPGs out there by default).

There are times that I wish I could turn down the random battle encounter rate, yes. But to paraphrase the great jazz saxophonist Cosmo Jacobi, “With chicks like Shalimar, there’s just some things you gotta put up with.” Random battles are, to a large extent, what the game is actually about.

Different people get into different aspects of the game. Last week on vacation I was playing the DS when my friend’s kid asked what I was doing. When I told him “Pokémon Diamond“, he commenced to chatter for an entire hour, quizzing me in great detail about exactly which pokémon I had caught, and whether I liked Pikachu or Raichu more, and did I have this one, and he knew this guy who finished the whole game by catching every Pokémon. For this kid, the RPGness of the game was nothing more than a superstructure on which to hang the very serious work of catching them all. For me, catching them all is just another task I need to undertake to complete the game.

This latest version of Pokémon comes with substantial online features. I need psu to hurry up and level up his little monsterlings so that we can have a proper battle which results in more than his quick and ignominious defeat. In a nice twist, pokémon that you trade via the wireless connection gain more experience than pokémon that you find in the wild, which provides a nice incentive to interact with your friends in homeroom. Uh, I mean, on the internet.

The one thing about the game that I find disturbing is the somewhat relentless self-reference of it all. In the world of Pokémon, everything revolves around the little bastards. If you need to open a can, there’s a can-opening pokémon somewhere that can do it for you. There are even churches where little characters sit around and make poetic comments about how important peace and love is between man and pokémon. It’s a bit like wandering into a world populated by the sorts of people who go to Star Trek conventions. This, in turn, makes me realize that somewhere out there there is probably Pokémon “slash” fiction, which in turn makes me want to curl up into a fetal position and weep (update: oh god, it’s true).

All that being said, complaining that a game marketed to children takes itself in earnest is a bit unfair. So if you can get past that bit, and past a slightly clumsy user interface, what you’ll find is a game with intricate, yet easy to grasp, rock-paper-scissors mechanics that are more absorbing than they have any right to be. And that’s for half the price of the latest boring World War II Xbox 360 shooter. I have already spent more time walking through the virtual wilds in Pokémon Diamond than I spent playing most of the PS2 or Xbox games I bought last year. This is in part because the game is constantly giving you little micro-rewards (through collecting new pokémon, or through other mechanics), but also because there is no flailing. It’s always crystal clear to me what I need to do next to progress (compare this to, say, Viva Piñata, which for all its beauty always leaves me saying “Huh? What did I just do to make that happen?”)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go read a walkthrough so I can find out if this Pachirisu I caught will evolve into another form if I train it enough.

Today a discussion of two games that have been around for a long time, and are still more interesting to play than most of the new games. I suppose it’s possible that my current state of mind makes me more inclined to stick with the familiar. I think it’s more likely that these games are just better.

First, Resident Evil 4 again. For some reason I just can’t stop playing this game. This time it’s on the Wii, and this version of the game combines what was best about the previous two releases into a single package of enjoyable zombie slaughter. Now that I’m in the habit of buying this game once a year, I wonder what they’ll do next year to make me buy it again? Maybe an Xbox 360 port with multiplayer?

So, here is what to like about the Wii version:

1. 16×9 progressive scan graphics without the mushy jaggy PS2 “looks-like-ass” filter. This is a slight upgrade from what was on the ‘Cube and what was on the PS2.

2. Same great zombie head exploding gameplay.

3. Same great pacing.

The Wii controls are hit and miss. I find the nunchuck to be a poor substitute for the left analog stick on a regular controller. It is tiring to hold it in place and push the stick around to move. Also, the gun aiming mechanic in this game is wierd. You use the pointer to aim the gun, but the pointer cannot actually move the camera. So really you have to use the Wiimote *and* the stick on the nunchuck to aim. This works OK when the zombies are on the other side of the map and you are sniping them. It doesn’t work so well if they get too close. In fact, the best way to use the new control scheme is to just hold the gun target near the middle of the screen and aim with the nunchuck stick. But if you are doing that, you might as well just be using a Gamecube controller.

Happily, if you want you can do just that. I plugged in my Wavebird and unplugged the nunchuck from the Wiimote and the game instantly switched the controls back into the classic GameCube configuration. I might spend one more session trying to acclimate to the new way, but I’m pretty sure I like the old way better.

No matter which control scheme you pick, RE4 on the Wii is still better than every single shooter that has been released for the Xbox or the 360 in the last three years. This will continue to be true until Halo 3 comes out.

The second game takes us from the world of bloody zombies to the world of adorable and cuddly pets that also engage in fierce turn-based combat. Four or five years ago, I had a fellow parent tell me that the Pokémon games were really some of the best RPGs out there. At the time my eyes glazed over and I sort of stepped away slowly. I was only dimly aware of Pokémon as some kind of card collecting game.

So I was surprised to get an IM from Pete a couple of weeks ago that went something like:

Pete: You know, this Pokémon game is just like a JPRG, only not annoying.
psu: Huh. Maybe I’ll try it.

In the end, I got Pearl and he got Diamond and he and my other buddy were right. Pokémon has distilled the three basic activities that appear in any RPG into a single streamlined game and stripped it of all the pretentious extras that RPGs usually try to layer on top of the gameplay. There are no heroes with amnesia, no worlds to save, no intricate yet juvenile narrative, no cut scenes, and no whiny NPCs who you would rather just kill. Instead, you do three things:

1. Go there and fight that.

2. Collect those.

3. Increase R.

I’m about 10 hours into the game and I don’t think I’ve even scratched the surface. I can see myself playing this game in 20 minute snippets and one or two hour extended sittings for the rest of the year. Plus, there is the online battle angle and the integration with the upcoming Wii title. If they made a World of Pokémon MMO, I could probably not buy another RPG for the rest of my life. Hmm, perhaps that’s over the top.

Anyway, if all the sucky new games are getting you down, here are two alternatives. One is actually old, the other is only old by association with a long-standing franchise. But that’s close enough for me. Older games are always better.

…and I sort of suspect it’s a bad sign that the planned highlight of my week is likely to be the release of Pokémon Battle Revolution for the Wii.

More on that soon.

When I was a graduate student, I lived in North Carolina for a couple of years. I didn’t personally enjoy the area, although I can see why others might. One thing though. The fresh fish was fantastic. There was this guy just outside of town who would go to the coast every week and bring stuff back directly from the boats. In the summer, we’d gorge on snapper and live soft-shell crabs. Back in Pittsburgh, it’s been hard to find stuff that good. Until now.

Since they opened, I have had the pleasure of obtaining consistently excellent fish of all kinds from the newly opened Penn Avenue Fish Company in the strip. Everything I have gotten there has been uniformly excellent, but I feel I have to express extra appreciation for what they have done for me in the last couple of weeks.

First, they have become the only decent place in town where one can find live soft-shell crabs. These are almost as yummy as the NC ones.

Second, the snapper I got there this weekend was as good as any fish I have ever consumed anywhere on Earth.

Therefore, for you all reading out there, I have this ultimatum:

I don’t want to catch any of you buying fish in the city at any location in Pittsburgh other than the Penn Avenue Fish Company. Don’t make me cut you.

Ingredients:

-Juice of a lemon
-6 fresh figs
-lots of rum
-ice
-about a tablespoon of sugar (depending on how sweet the figs are, adjust to taste)

Instructions: blend everything and pour into a frosted glasses. Makes 2 big drinks.

The good: The fig texture works with the ice to create a drink that will stay frozen for a while, even when there is a ton and a half of rum in the drink. It tastes like fresh figs. It’s refreshing.
The bad: Boy, this sure is expensive for something that isn’t that much better than a standard girly-drink strawberry daiquiri.

Summary: An interesting experiment, but not one I’ll do again.

…and tonight, I will determine if it is possible to make a cocktail with them.

In what has become something of a yearly ritual, the time between early Spring and the next release of Madden brings with it almost nothing of interest to play. Last year, I was saved when Oblivion hit and kept me busy for a couple of months in this normally empty time. This year there is no such white knight to save the gaming industry from my disinterest. Worse, some new equipment and a nice overseas vacation have awakened other obsessions that have for the most part been dormant while the gaming obsession has taken its course.

It was probably inevitable that the lull this year would be worse than last. We are, after all, in the middle of an awkward, lurching transition into the latest generation of new hardware. There are not many good new games. Even Nintendo, the current darling of the universe, has only a few real titles for their adorable little box. Meanwhile, Sony is still selling stupidly expensive boxes that no one wants and Microsoft seems to think that the way to beat Sony is to do exactly the same thing. As a bonus, the Microsoft boxes also break all the time.

I think at some point the army of Sony first/second/third parties will step up to the plate and provide the machine with the library that it needs. I think when this happens the only thing the Xbox will really have going for it will be Halo 3, which I will play for a few months. Then maybe my 360 will melt and I can get just get rid of it.

All of this leaves me bored. I should be happily curled up with my copy of Puzzle Quest, or Pokemon Diamond or Paper Mario or Zelda instead of writing about how I’m not playing anything. Instead, I have found that I just don’t have the mental energy to invest right now. There are other things occupying those slots in my brain. Luckily, I can still get my gaming fix. I just let others do the playing for me.

Every week, I download the Gamers With Jobs podcast. Then I listen to these guys tell me what all they have been playing. It’s mostly a lot of obscure PC stuff (like World of Warcraft, ha ha just kidding) with the occasional console title or downloadable game tossed in for variety. They cover a lot of ground, and I get to hear about games that I probably would never attempt to play (I don’t own a PC). What the podcast does is allow me to vicariously consume some of the content of these games while never actually having to pick them up and play them. Thus, they remain latent objects, and as such can be somewhat idealized, and yet I still find out a bit about what goes on. The best of both worlds. It’s like reading a very detailed review or synopsis of the final season of The Sopranos. You get to find out roughly what happens, but you don’t have to sit through, or pay for, 20 hours of HBO content to do it.

For years, I have had a similar relationship with World of Warcraft. For various reasons that are too boring to go into, I will never play this game. Luckily, I don’t really need to because everyone else on Earth has already done so and told me what it’s like. I have one buddy who shall remain “anonymous” who has had his entire gaming life replaced with WoW. Where he used to play two or three different games each week, I believe he’s basically done nothing but WoW since the game launched. Whenever I need any new poop on the game, I just ask him. And, if I really need to be immersed in the WoW culture, I can go and watch that episode of South Park again. Really, that’s all I need to know.

The result of all of this is that I’m not feeling too bad mired in my little lull. The combination of other activities and these indirect gaming streams will keep me busy until the next thing comes along. Meanwhile, the occasional bout with the DS and a few innings of baseball on the PSP have been enough to keep my gaming brain happy.

Note

As a side note, if you don’t know about Gamers with Jobs let me encourage you to go over there. It has the distinction of being the only place on the Interweb that I am familiar with that has a “message forum” where nitwits and assholes are largely absent (except for me). This is nothing short of a minor modern miracle.

I had what started off as an extremely productive weekend. I got a lot of work done at my job, did some house stuff, changed the oil on the car, and was otherwise efficient and in a good mood. As a reward, I decided to play some more Forza 2, a game I’m reviewing for PTD Magazine. I’ve been enjoying Forza, and approached my Xbox 360 with some enthusiasm. This should have been a warning sign. Because, inevitably, as soon as I turned the machine on, 3 blinky red lights appeared, and the machine was officially as dead as a doornail.

The machine was one year and one month old. Translated, that means the machine was one month out of warranty. 45 minutes on the phone with Microsoft customer service in Durban or Chennai or somewhere resulted in them agreeing to drop the repair fee from $140 to $65.

Now, there are a few directions in which I could take this article. First would be the observation that I would rather simply not use an Xbox 360 than pay $140 to get it fixed, and that from Microsoft’s perspective, asking for that much seems sort of, well, goofy. You’re already losing money on the console. The only way you reach profitability is if I buy games. But this isn’t really a topic about which there’s very much to say. Philosophically, it’s not actually surprising to be asked to pay money to fix a machine that’s out of warranty.

Perhaps a little more interesting is that they dropped the price simply because I bitched about it. That seems to me to be a poor customer service experience by definition. It’s used up 45 minutes of their support time, and I’m left with that “just negotiated to buy a new car” sort of feeling. Maybe if I’d stayed on the phone for an hour they’d have dropped the price by another 25%? Will someone who reads this article who did pay $140 to fix their machine now be furious and feel ripped off by Microsoft? It just seems to me that by removing certainty from the equation you’re making the entire experience more hateful, and squandering company goodwill on something that, in the long run, is pretty picayune. Either make the transaction completely painless from the beginning (”Here’s your new Xbox 360,”) or stick to your guns (”We’re sorry that you don’t want to pay the repair fee, sir. Have a nice day.”) But making the transaction turn into a negotiation worthy of an Algerian souk just seems pennywise and pound foolish.

But the most interesting question to me is that of consumer electronics and reliability. Now, I’m picking on Microsoft here because I own a console that blew up, but I presume that once 10 or 20 people buy PS3’s we will see similar reliability problems with those machines as well. Consider how unusual it is to hear of nonportable consumer electronic devices that just stop working a year after purchase. How old is your DVD player? How old is your stereo receiver? 2 years old? 5? 10? I still have VCRs that work after 20 years, and those have more moving parts than an Xbox. As long as we’re talking about game consoles, I still have Atari 2600s that work just fine. Yet the Xbox 360 has developed such a reputation for bursting into (virtual) flame that its failure mode has garnered a nickname and a Wikipedia article.

This is the collision of two worlds: the world of computer hardware and software, where the people developing on the “bleeding edge” expect some number of problems, and the world of consumer electronics, where things are supposed to just work. I’m extremely unimpressed with any company pushing products that lean towards the former rather than the latter.

I understand the technical reasons why the Xbox 360 is prone to hardware failure: Microsoft chose a design where they crammed a bunch of extremely high end equipment into as small a case as they could manage. Their engineering decisions create unreasonable amounts of heat, and unreasonable amounts of heat lead to an unreasonably low mean time between failures. That there are technical reasons for the console bursting into flame whenever a goldfinch looks at it sideways doesn’t make it acceptable.

In the meantime, we can compare this to the Nintendo Wii, which, through conservative design and engineering puts out nearly no heat, and certainly has not (yet) garnered a reputation for being unreliable.

All of which leads me to the question: what good is the most advanced graphics subsystem in the world if you’re incapable of packaging it in a way that performs reliably for an acceptable period of time?

10. Clifford The Big Dead Dog (peterb)

9. If You Give A Mouse Some Serum (peterb)

8. Horton Hears His Doom (peterb)

7. Goodnight, World (peterb)

6. Where The Dead Things Are (kosak)

5. Bedknobs and Boomsticks (peterb)

4. Olivia’s Favorite Flesh Eaters (psu)

3. One Vein, Two Vein, Red Vein, Blue Vein (peterb)

2. Click, Clack, GGGGgggaaaarrrrrrrgggghhh (psu)

1. Green Eggs and Hand (peterb)

Please feel free to pile on with your own suggestions in the comments.

Our first full day in Paris was gray, wet, and cold. As a result, I didn’t take a lof of pictures of the city. It’s hard to make nice landscape or cityscape photographs when the sky is white. But, I dutifully carried my camera into the early evening just in case. You never know what might happen.

What we did this evening was walk over to Joel Robuchon’s restaurant to see how long we’d have to wait for a table. This was at 6:30pm. At about 6:45 they told us to come back at 9:30. It turns out that at this time of year in Paris, it is still light out at 9:30, so we spent some time walking the streets. For the most part, the sky remained white and boring:

I forget why, but we went back to the apartment we had rented to drop some stuff off and pick up a warmer jacket. I also dropped off my heavier zoom lens and put the 24mm/2.8 on to the camera. This would limit me to some extent, but it makes the camera a lot smaller. We walked back out into the early evening, and Karen noticed a splotch of blue sky above the buildings to the West. Since we had time, I figured we could walk out to the Seine, where there are great unobstructed views both East and West just in case the sun peaked out and gave us some nice golden light.

When we got out to the river, we walked down the Quai towards the Museé D’Orsay where there is a nice pedestrian bridge. By now the sky had cleared up but there was still no direct sun on anything. This lets you make boring pictures of buildings, but at least there is blue behind them.

I spent ten or fifteen minutes dorking around with the side of the Museé when we got what we wanted. The sun came streaming out from a bank of clouds. Now I had a two more problems though. While the light was that fantastic warm late afternoon light that you want, all I had with me was my semi-wide lens. This means two things

1. I need something in the foreground.

2. With the bright sky in the shot, I’d have contrast problems.

It turned out that the bridge we walked to was close to where the river tour boats start out, and all of the dinner cruises were happily motoring down the river. This solved my foreground problem. I shot a picture of a boat coming down river looking into the sun. This picture made it clear that even if I had a nice big boat in the foreground, I’d continue to have contrast problems:

Without some adjustment, I’d have a choice between a blown out sky or a black boat with no detail. Neither of these choices works. In the past, this is where people might use an ND-grad filter to darken the sky, but I’ve never learned how to use those. I do know a bit of Photoshop though, so I had planned for this situation.

The D200 can shoot 5 frames in one second. In addition, you can program it to shoot each frame with a different exposure. So, I lined up one of the river boats with the bank of clouds that was quickly dissipating and shot off 5 frames between -2 stops under to +2 stops over. I figured if the frames were well enough aligned, I could glue them back together in Photoshop to balance the contrast. Luckily, the boats don’t move too fast. With a bit of Photoshop work the next day, I got what I could have gotten if I knew how to use an ND-grad. I’m happy either way:

After shooting some more into the sun, I turned around to catch the light off of the buildings in the area. One reason Paris is such a great place to take pictures is that when the light is good, there is always good light on all the architecture. The Museé was much more interesting now with some good side light:

And the bridge we walked past on the way over looked good too:

At this point, I had shot about 60 or 70 pictures, and it was time to get back to the restaurant to see if the table was free. We ended up waiting another hour before we could sit down, which means I missed out on the sunset. But these are the things you give up to get into Joel Robucon’s place.

Anyway, all was not lost. At night in Paris, you can always count on the shop windows:

Lessons learned:

1. Eat dinner late if you want the good light.

2. Be aware that just because the light isn’t there now doesn’t mean that it won’t show up later. Don’t give up, chase the light anyway.

3. Have a plan to deal with high contrast.

4. Bears and sunflowers are cool.

A while ago you may recall that I posted an enigmatic call for writers to assist in some-project or other, without saying exactly what.

Now I can tell you what that project was: PTD Magazine’s latest issue is devoted to retrogaming, edited by your humble narrator. You can download the digest version here, or subscribe to PTD for a mere 99 cents per issue to read the rest.

If I do say so myself: it’s awesome. In addition to making lots of complaints about how game writing is hidebound and formulaic, I also hear other people making those complaints too. Here’s an attempt to break out of the mold.

I like Thom Hogan. He is an intelligent writer, photographer and fellow technical geek and his web site is one of the better collections of information about Nikon cameras. As a bonus, the overall design and layout of the site shows a lot of taste and restraint, unlike almost every other such site in the universe.

This week, Thom posted a nice rant about the sad state of the compact digital camera. This is a subject that is close to my heart. I love small cameras but very few are well executed. In fact, one could argue that no one has yet built a nice small digital camera.

I don’t really need to repeat Thom’s main points here, but I will anyway. Compact digital cameras suffer from a proliferation of useless differentiation. The result is that they do not serve any of their potential markets all that well. People who want simplicity get a choice between hundreds of models all of which have complicated user interfaces supporting dozens of complex features. Photographers who want a useful tool get a choice between hundreds of models all of which have complicated user interfaces supporting dozens of features which are all useless photographically. I would suggest, for example, that no one who wants to buy a useful camera really wants any of the following features

1. Face detection.

2. A zoom lens that is a 400/F11.2 on the long end.

3. 18 bazillion point autofocus.

4. Digital Zoom (e.g. automatic stupid cropping).

5. Auto modes that generally do nothing but pop the flash when you are taking a night shot from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Not only do people not want this, they don’t want to have to decide between 50 models of cameras at various price points all of which appear to have this same list of features that they don’t want. This is especially true when the people you are talking about are enthusiastic photographers.

What we want from a camera is an effective tool that is predictable and easy to control. We want

1. Good focus and exposure controls.

2. A good viewfinder.

3. A good fast lens.

and most of all

4. A good sensor with a high quality fast imaging pipeline.

Thom’s extensive feature list basically boils down to these four points. You put these four things into a small camera and you would basically have a digital version of some classic point and shoot cameras like the Olympus Stylus, Ricoh GR-1, or the king of them all: the Konica Hexar. All of these cameras had the ability to capture pictures every bit as well as a big Pro SLR if you knew how to use them.

Instead what we get are cameras like the dozens of Canon SDXYZ, the Panasonic/Leica point and shoots, 50 different ugly cameras from Fuji and 89 different cameras in various odd shapes from Sony, Casio, Samsung and all the rest. A few of these come tantalizingly close in terms of lens quality and controls. The Ricoh GR digitals are nice. The PanoLeicas are OK. Sadly, few of these cameras can generate a decent ISO 100 JPEG file and none have an image pipeline that is even 1/10th the speed of a D-Rebel shot to shot.

This, in the end, is the ultimate insult of the digital point and shoot. Even if you learn to work around the control and interface problems and you get a decent shot, in the end the sensor will let you down because the manufacturers have spent the last five or six years in an irrational penis waving contest to see who can get the largest number of noisy pixels onto a thumbnail sized sensor, rather than building a machine with a decent imaging pipeline in it.

I’ve whined about this before, but Thom’s article depressed me even more than usual, and led me to think that we who want decent sensor performance at ISO 400, or a fast shot to shot time are doomed to carry big cameras (even as small as it is, you can’t fit a D-Rebel in your pants). He made me think this because here he was laying out an intelligent design agenda for a compact camera any photographer would love to use, and any point and shooter could just point and shoot, but he had made one fatal mistake which all intelligent engineering types tend to make. He assumed that his interests were those of the mass market, and that building such a camera would bring people and money in droves.

I don’t think this is true. The market for an intelligently designed, relatively expensive, enthusiast camera is vanishingly small. Most people don’t want an easy to use photographic tool. They want a box with a single button that takes pictures. It doesn’t really matter to them that the latest Canon PowerSnoot SD5867 IS VR AFS also has 59 other buttons and takes video that can be sent directly to Youtube. They just put the camera into the “this button takes a picture” mode and go off and start hitting the button. When they hit the button at the right time, they get a JPEG file that can make a print at Costco that is approximately 15,000 times better than what they used to get from the film mini-lab. And thus, they are happy.

Where this leaves the poor photography enthusiast is with hundreds of models of compact cameras all of which have complicated user interfaces supporting dozens of features which are all useless photographically. The feature sets will not go away, because the camera companies think that it’s the lists that sell. The badly designed cameras will continue to sell, because most users will just work around the bad design by ignoring it and hitting the one button. What this means for the photo geeks is that there will never be a small camera that makes us happy because the industry does not know how to manufacture and market such a device. It requires that you make a camera that does “less”, but is better in a way that is difficult to explain. All such products are usually doomed, although there are a few exceptions (hello iPod).

All of this, in the end, leaves me melancholy. I would actually be willing to pony up a lot of cash for a high quality fast small camera. I’ll be the first in line if the heavens open up and deliver such a miracle to us. But I’m not holding my breath.

Pete mentioned last week that I was in Paris on one of my periodic visits. These started over ten years ago when a friend of mine got a long term consulting gig over there and we went and visited and got hooked on the place. Now I try to take a trip once every year or two. This trip was much like the others. Mostly what we do is walk around, sit in the gardens, and eat. On the other hand, there were new things too.

Camera Review

A few months ago I bought a shiny new Nikon D200 mostly to bring on this trip. I was hoping it would help out with some action shots that I had missed on my previous trips. In many ways, the D200 is the digital camera I’ve been waiting for. The viewfinder is great. Unlike the D100 and D70, you can actually evaluate focus by eye. The controls work well and are fast. Dedicated buttons and switches make setting many operations that were tedious on the D70 quick and easy. There is a nice B&W mode. Finally, the camera is fast. The D70 was generally fast enough, but had a small memory buffer that tended to fill just as you wanted to squeeze off one more shot. For me, the D200 can essentially shoot as many RAW frames as I’ll ever need in a continuous 5fps burst.

In every way, the D200 is essentially a Nikon F100, or N90s, or 8008s for the digital age. It’s the smaller, lighter alternative to the full on pro body that does most everything anyone ever really needs. Smaller is always better. Unfortunately, the D200 doesn’t quite take this principle far enough. My only real complaint is that it’s too big. For some reason, the body is noticeably larger than either the N90 or the 8008s, even though it has a smaller viewfinder and has no need for a film transport. I’m not sure why this should be. So while I’m thrilled with the AF and the handling and the speed, i found myself looking longingly at all the tourists with their D-Rebels and their Nikon D40s, wishing my camera wasn’t so large.

Camera Bag Review

Because the camera was too big, I bought a new belt bag to try on the trip that can hold the camera and another lens. The ThinkTank Photo Changeup is a shoulder/belt/chest bag that is designed as a compact way to hold a body and a couple lenses or just a few lenses if you have the body out all the time. The bag is a top notch design and very well built. I could get the D200 (with an L-bracket tripod plate I never used attached), 18-70, 12-24 and a flash into it and walk all day without much trouble. It only suffers from one problem: I hate belt bags. You can’t really say this is ThinkTank’s fault.

My problem with belt bags is the belt. It’s always too tight or too loose. If too tight, I can’t spin the bag to get the camera out. If too loose the bag hangs down on my ass and bounces as I walk. I hate the feeling of the bag sitting there on my hip bouncing up and down as I walk. Somehow the bag in the same place hanging down off my shoulder is not as annoying. The belt on this bag had the same problem, and it was made a bit worse by the fact that the shoulder strap was too skinny to really work well.

I think I’ll go back to my Domkes, or maybe I’ll try and rig something up in my North Face backpack.

Food Reviews

We found out this trip that one of our favorite local eateries, Les Fontaines had changed owners and no longer had the same great menu of meaty traditional French dishes. This made us sad. On the other hand, it also meant we had to try lots of new places to find a new place to go for meaty traditional French dishes. This turned out to be a fun task. We tried several new places this time around, and they were all winners. Here are the highlights.

1. Chez George. This place had the best steak ever. It was the subject of an NYT feature on steak places in Paris. Perfectly cooked and tasty meat combined with great fries combined with a wonderful old school atmosphere made for a great time. Karen also scored a language coup here, correctly using a past imperfect verb conjugation to win us some fraises du bois, the wonderful little wild strawberries that were in season. This illustrates the first fundamental principle of eating out: you always get better food if you can speak the language.

2. Bistro de l’Olivier. We ducked in here on a rainy day for lunch and had a great time. Nicely prepared provencal dishes, suprisingly friendly service for clueless tourists, and a winning chocolate fondant cake. It also has a cool looking bar.

3. Cafe Constant. This place is close to the cheese shop. We got there early for lunch on sunny afternoon and watched all the locals stream in ordering the special of the day: grilled fresh langoustines. This was the best seafood I have had since the first time I got steamed live shrimp in a Cantonese seafood joint in L.A. We remarked to our table neighbors that these were actually better than the fancy langoustine ravioli I had gotten at Joel Robuchon for much more money a couple of nights before. The nice old French man knodded and said that this was called, in English, “value for money”.

Wine Review

That aformentioned trip to the Robuchon restaurant also provided us with the mystery of the trip. In the past, we had never been much for ordering wine. There are various reasons for this that are complex and boring. This trip we made an effort to order at least a glass with every meal. We got a red wine at Robuchon called “Coteaux du Languedoc, Chateaux Sergnac.” It was awesome. If anyone can find it for me I will obtain some illegal Camembert for you the next time I am in Paris.

Mustard Review

We got four jars of Amora Dijon mustard. They cost 0.85 Euro each. They are better than any mustard I have bought in the U.S. at any price.

Airport Review

PHL has improved a bit since the last time I was there. Now it’s merely horrible instead of a being a spinning vortex of unbearable suffering. I still felt sorry for the couple traveling with the two toddlers and a double stroller though.

I think that just about covers the whole trip. The gardens and cafes and the rest of our normal haunts were their normal wonderful selves. I even took up a new photographic hobby: taking pictures of people taking pictures of themselves in front of famous things:

Maybe over the next ten trips I’ll shoot enough of that sort of thing to make a book.