Mylos

X-rays can fog photographic film. The damage is cumulative, repeated passes will have an effect even on low-sensitivity film that would not suffer too much from a single pass. Most of the films I use are specialized professional emulsions not readily available in ordinary stores (or even in the USA, as with the three rolls of Fuji Natura 1600 I recently ordered from Japan). That is why I travel with film, and on general principle avoid having it passed through X-ray machines by requesting a hand inspection instead.

Grousing about the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has almost become a national sport. I tend to disagree — TSA has set uniform standards and a measure of courtesy and customer-service orientation compared to the earlier hodgepodge of private contractors. It is much easier to travel with unexposed film in the US today than it used to be post-9/11, pre-TSA. In other countries, screeners will routinely ignore your protests and unceremoniously shove ISO 1600 film into a high-energy scanner, all but ensuring they have fried it.

These common-sense guidelines will ensure speedy processing and avoid aggravation, for yourself as well as for fellow passengers down the line:

• Unpack your film from its cardboard boxes and plastic canisters (or foil wrappers for 120 film), and put it in a transparent zip-lock bag (the ones with the easy-open plastic sliders are best).
• If you are (justifiably) afraid that film outside light-tight canisters may be fogged over time, carry your canisters separately (J&C photo sells inexpensive plastic canisters for 120 film, or you could splurge for the aluminum ones by Acratech). Probably a better option is to use a thick black plastic bag like the ones used to pack photographic paper.
• Pack at least a couple of ISO 1600 or higher rolls of film so you can ask for hand screening. Some TSA personnel will ask you if you have any film higher than ISO 400, having some on hand is simpler than haggling for hand-inspection of low-ISO film. Only once did I have TSA staff separate my higher than ISO 400 rolls for hand screening and pass the rest through the X-ray machine.
• Lead-lined, supposedly X-ray safe film pouches are a waste of money. Not only are they heavy and ungainly, but the X-ray operators will simply increase power when they see an opaque bag that could conceal a weapon or explosives. TSA policy allows you to ask for a hand inspection, just avail yourself of this.
• Pack your film in your carry-on luggage, preferably in an easily accessed compartment

For more authoritative statements, check out the official TSA and ITIP pages.

Digital photographers are not completely off the hook. While ordinary X-ray machines do not affect flash media, the newer high-energy machines currently considered for deployment can alter electronic media. Another interesting aspect is that of cosmic rays, high-energy particles from outer space and which can “flip” bits in a flash card or magnetic media. In a negative, the blip will be imperceptible, but digital files are less tolerant of corrupted bits. IBM has spent quite a bit of R&D effort in quantifying the problem. When you have several billions of bits in RAM or trillions of bits in a hard drive, even an unlikely event like an alpha particle becomes statistically probable, and they have taken special measures against this. Many commonplace materials are also naturally radioactive.

The effect of cosmic rays at ground level is limited, but airplanes flying at 10-25km altitude are much more exposed to them, by a factor of hundred or so — see Dr. Ziegler’s article (PDF) on terrestrial cosmic rays. The impact of cosmic rays on flash and microdrive media is poorly understood today and the risk not fully assessed. Due to short-term financial thinking encouraged by Wall Street, few corporations invest today in the kind of R&D that could conclusively answer this question.

The dukes of Praslin-Choiseul stem from one of the most illustrious noble families in France, but they are best known because one of their pastry chefs invented the confection known as praliné in honor of his patron. Brillat-Savarin famously wrote “the invention of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a new star”. Apparently it does wonders for a family’s name recognition as well.

Praliné is basically a blend of finely ground hazelnuts and almonds and cooked with boiling sugar (otherwise, it would just be another form of marzipan). If it is mixed with chocolate, it becoms gianduja. If the nut fragments remain discernable in a matrix of caramelized sugar, the result is nougatine, one of the heights of French pastry-making. One interesting variety is feuilleté praliné, where the praliné is blended with pieces of extremely fine and crisp wafers to yield a confection that has at once the smoothness of praliné and the crispiness of a flaky pastry. When I was a kid, I would often buy “Lutti Noisettor”, a hard hazelnut-flavored candy where the core had this same stratified laminated and crunchy texture, but it seems it has been discontinued, perhaps the fabrication technique was too complex to be profitable.

Michael Recchiuti is a chocolatier who moved to the San Francisco about a decade ago to start his confectionery business with his wife Jacky. He has a boutique in the Ferry Building food court and a number of the better groceries in the city carry his products. A small operation like his cannot make its own chocolate couverture, and it appears he relies on Guittard, another reputable San Francisco company. In addition to his lovely chocolate bouchées, Recchiuti makes a line of chocolate tablets.

My favorite one is the Hazelnut Praline, which is actually a feuilleté praliné. A safety disclaimer ought to be mandatory on the wrapper, as biting into a piece is an amazingly intense experience. The couverture is excellent, but it is the praliné that grabs your attention: rich, dark, clearly made with a high proprtion of nuts to sugar and blended with dark rather than milk chocolate, and with the delightful crispy texture of feuilletine. Everyone I gave a taste of this bar had the same reaction of utter amazement, it is that good.

The chocolate bar is clearly made by hand, as you can see from the irregular shape on the other side of the mold. This is unfortunate in a way, as it means distribution will remain limited for the foreseeable future. I have worked it into my standard tour of San Francisco for visiting friends and relatives, as they are unlikely to experience it elsewhere.

Update (2006-11-24):

All good things come to pass, and this product has been discontinued. The other Recchuti bars seem uninspiring.

There is definite sense of malaise at Microsoft today. On the face of it, this is odd – the US government, while successful in demonstrating illegal behavior, only struck them with an ineffectual slap on the wrist and no monetary damages. Microsoft then settled all its legal liabilities with AOL, Sun, Burst et al for what amounts to pocket change for them. The nuclear winter in the tech industry means there is no investor money flowing to a challenger, with the possible exception of Google.

Yet the MSFT stock price languishes (that has a corrosive effects on employee morale as stock options no longer function as incentives). More worrisome (for them), there seems to be a sentiment the company has accreted bureaucratic bloat and lost its ability to deliver products.

Think whatever you want of Microsoft products, their modus operandi has always been to come out with a laughable 1.0 product, then a so-so 2.0, followed by an acceptable 3.0 and a 4.0 to mop up the competition if the 3.0 has not already. In many cases, Microsoft products prevailed not because of their intrinsic brilliance, but because of their evenness – no brilliant features, but then again no fatal flaws either. This takes a very disciplined software development process. The fact is, no fundamentally new version of Windows has been released since Windows 2000, and Longhorn keeps slipping and shedding features like integrated search that Apple, a much smaller company with a far less impressive R&D budget, manages to deliver today.

Bill Gates saw first-hand how the IBM anti-trust process, while never brought to its conclusion, paralyzed IBM’s decision-making with legal hand-wringing over compliance issues. Some pundits believe the Microsoft is being gradually enervated in the same way . As anyone who has worked with corporate lawyers can attest, they sometimes seem to think the only way to avoid liability is to do nothing, much as decapitation is a sovereign remedy to headaches. That said, Microsoft has consistently shown a pattern of brazen contempt for the law, it is hard to imagine that changing just because Bill Gates was ridiculed for his testimony.

Others, of a more curmudgeonly bent, attribute Microsoft’s inability to deliver products to their recent emphasis on blogging. Writing a half-decent blogging certainly takes time, more than one realizes because intense cognitive activity alters the perception of time. That said, it is hard to take this hypothesis seriously. Few Microsoft bloggers have the prodigious output of a Scoble, and arguably his blogging is a direct part of his job as evangelist, not a distraction.

The core of the problem is that Microsoft is still a two-trick pony. The bulk of its revenues and profits come from its Windows and Office monopolies (and ancillaries like development tools). Despite all the cash poured into diversification efforts like MSN or PocketPC, they have not managed to expand significantly outside these two cash cows. The problem is, both desktop operating systems and basic productivity suites are maturing markets that are fast becoming commodities. Having successfully fended off commercial competition, they are now left with competitors they cannot financially choke away.

Free (as in beer) software threatens not so much to destroy their monopoly but rather to put such intense price pressure on their margins as to effectively condemn Microsoft to stagnation. Electricity, gas and water utilities are also monopolies, but they do not enjoy the same pricing power or stock multiples, and that’s due to the commodity nature of their businesses, not just regulation.

The corporate market is saturating, and IT managers have learnt from the bubble that applying stable technology to business problems is much more profitable than constantly chasing the bleeding edge in search of an elusive payoff. Microsoft pulled a fast one with their notorious Licensing 6.0 program that left a sour taste in many an IT manager’s mouth, and any further attempts to gouge the business market will likely lead to widespread rebellion and wholesale moves to OpenOffice.

The consumer market is left, and that’s where I think Microsoft is in the biggest trouble. At one point Office was more valuable than Windows, but it has been stagnating of late. The dearth of compelling reasons to upgrade since at least 1997 or so certainly accounts for that, leading Redmond to clutch at straws with ridiculous ad campaigns.

I have two Office licenses at home, Office 2000 on my PC (well, it has broken down last week, and I simply can’t bring myself to care), and Office.X on my Mac. I never use either. It’s interesting to look at why:

• Microsoft Word is a program consumers mostly use to write administrative correspondence like letters to their banker – those trying to write the Great American novel are probably not a significant user base. Guess what? You don’t write letters to your banker anymore, you use their online banking site, and at worst write them an email. I haven’t used Word for personal use in at least three years. Not a good sign for the flagship component in the suite.
• Much the same can be said of Excel – it is used mostly for personal finance or as a simple database program. You don’t use a spreadsheet to manage your bank accounts or stock portfolio – you use your online banking or a more specialized program like Quicken or Microsoft Money (the latter is the only Microsoft program I still use regularly for my personal use). As Microsoft Money is now for all practical purposes a loss-leader for MSN, it is hardly going to be a savior for Microsoft’s margins.
• As for Outlook, three words: Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail. Enough said…
• Frontpage is still popular with small businesses but is declining. For personal publishing, it has been all but superseded by easy to use blogging software from the likes of Six Apart or Google.
• Powerpoint and Access are more specialized programs that are mostly used in a business setting. In this networked age, databases are meant to be shared and the kind of people who can deal with Access are more likely to set up a small PHP+MySQL app on a cheap hosted account.
• The more consumer or small-business oriented editions of Office include their also-ran photo editing suite. It faces crowded markets with good-enough free competitors like Picasa, or Adobe Photoshop Elements, the de facto standard for advanced amateurs, not to mention the myriad of so-so shovelware that comes bundled with digital cameras or scanners. Video editing is another segment where Microsoft is weak.
• Microsoft Publisher is similarly a program that has trouble breaking out of a crowded field.

In all these examples, there is one constant – most applications other than rich media creation are moving to the web. Not in the way originally envisioned by the advocates of the network computer, circa 1998 – not general productivity suites (à la Office, only ported to Java), but rather the underlying business processes themselves reimplemented in a way that does not require editing documents, and more importantly for the companies concerned, no manual processing of documents on the other end, with huge labor savings for those concerned.

So what is the way out? Perhaps the audience for software is fragmenting the same way mass audiences for other forms of software such as music or television have exploded with the proliferation of choice. Apart from video games, writing software is still a low-overhead industry with few barriers to entry, and the Internet has made distribution much more cost-effective for small software companies, specially when the product is delivered as a service over a web browser Microsoft can buy out small startups, but the opportunity costs of management attention often outweigh potential revenues. Quite possibly there is no way out of Microsoft’s (admittedly comfortable) predicament.

The world’s best chocolate comes from the criollo variety of Venezuela, renowned for its complex and subtle flavor. Unfortunately, this variety, the original and purest variant of cacao, is fragile and has poor yields, making it expensive to produce. That’s why bars like Amedei Porcelana sell for more than $10 per tablet.

Fortunately, there are inexpensive alternatives. For those who live near that great South California institution, Trader Joe’s, run, don’t walk, to stock up on Chocovic Ocumare, which retails for a mere $1.79 a bar. Chocovic is based in Barcelona, and has a line of single-origin Southern American chocolates named in honor of their places of origin (Ocumare is a coastal cacao-growing district of Aragua state in Venezuela). Few people immediately associate Spain with chocolate, but the Spaniards are the ones who first imported the cocoa bean to Europe, and Spain obviously maintains a close relationship with Latin American nations which produce the best cacao (unlike the more industrial but lower grade stuff that comes from Ghana/Ivory Coast and South-East Asia).

As with all criollos, the Ocumare is relatively mild but has a very rich taste that lingers in the mouth. It may seem like sacrilege to use it for cooking, but when made into a ganache and poured as a frosting over a cake, it is simply phenomenal. Just make sure the cake in question is exceptional enough to deserve this truly regal treatment…

Once you have used a digital SLR (DSLR) with a nice, clean, large, low-noise sensor, the poor image quality of most compact digicams becomes hard to tolerate. This is in contrast with film, where a $70 Olympus Stylus Epic can compete in image quality with thousand-dollar cameras.

Then it hit me: don’t consider a pocket digicam as a camera, think of it as a pocket photocopier/scanner instead, like HP’s ill-fated CapShare. I use my pocket digicam mostly to record specials in stores, flyers, magazine articles, diagrams on a whiteboard and the like. Japanese otaku teenagers are way ahead of me, as many bookstores in Tokyo now ban cameraphones because the kids would just snap photos of manga comic books and not pay.

A 5 megapixel digicam, pretty mainstream nowadays, with a 4:3 aspect ratio can “scan” a standard US Letter or A4 page at an approximate resolution of 240 spi. This is significantly better than a fax, which scans at 150 spi. Many pocket digicams have lenses that are serviceable in macro mode. The limiting factor is probably setting up the camera, as you can’t find portable copy stand like the vintage Leica BOOWU (also shown top left in this outfit photo).