my life, my thoughts, my world.

Nobody ever shoots a full roll of film and loves every single frame, but on my most recent outing I came pretty close on two rolls. When you only bring three rolls of 120 film and a square format Mamiya C3 to shoot the pace slows down a lot, after all you’ve only got twelve exposures per roll. Keeping things flowing is important, but you definitely do not want to go off releasing the shutter when you are not within a hair of certainty that the resulting negative will contain the image you desire.

For my last shoot of the semester break, I only ended up shooting the two rolls of black and white film I brought – Kodak Tri-X Pan 320, and Ilford Delta 3200. The roll of Kodak Portra 400, the best color negative film in existence for portraiture as far as I am concerned, I had with me will have to wait for another time. Having never shot with this particular girl before I was unsure how things would go, but it was evident from the start that if nothing else we would at least have a good time. When I took my film out of the tanks and held the negatives up to the light, I knew I had some winners.

Joe has been a good friend of mine since the mid-90′s when our families both lived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. When he asked if I would take a few photos of him and Miriam after their wedding of course I said yes. I wish them all the best in their future together.

Words I heard many times as a private, and probably told my privates a dozen times as a sergeant, still hold true today. You either give it all you have, or stay at home. With my first attempt at the Houston-to-Austin MS150 cycling benefit for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society coming up in 104 days, it is time to put in extra training effort. What does that even mean? Hours of intensity training on my mag trainer to build endurance, and at least a 80 miles of actual road riding every week.

My personal goals are as follows:

• Complete each day of the MS150 in less than six hours, including stops.
• Raise the remaining $575 of my $1000 fundraising goal before I start the ride

Completing the first goal is entirely up to me, and I think it is well within my grasp. The second goal is going to take some help from anyone who feels like donating to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society is something they’d like to do. If you’re one of those people, the following link will take you to my donation page and you can help me with my goals while also helping those who have been touched by a terrible illness: http://main.nationalmssociety.org/goto/ajmartinez

On the trainer

Fall 2011 proved to be an incredibly stressful semester for a number of reasons, but I survived and did well enough to continue my pursuit of a mechanical engineering degree. When grades posted, I had managed to turn what started as my best grade into my worst, and what started as my worst grade into my best. In the spring, I will see if I can manage to just keep them all at a respectable level. At any rate, the prospect of actually finished one of the four degrees I have started in the last eleven years still exists and that was really the best Christmas present I could get myself.

As far as Christmas itself went, I made out pretty well with some gizmos for my road bike, a stein from Germany for my beer, and some new clothes. I also picked up a new-to-me large format camera, a 4×5″ Shen Hao, with a 135mm f/5.6 Symmar-S MC lens. That will help me blow off some steam in the limited free time to come, and hopefully let me make more things to hang on my wall. The gifts I gave out this year were all framed darkroom prints from photos I took this summer in Scotland. People seemed to enjoy and appreciate those, so it may become a tradition for as long as I can source film, paper, and chemistry.

A week of solid use has me convinced that the Kindle Fire was a worthwhile purchase. While it hasn’t displaced any of my textbooks yet, I was able to cut my laptop out of the mix for the week. The courses I’m taking right now are not computationally intensive on the scale where I need to write anything in MATLAB to solve equations. Wolfram Alpha has been sufficient for my needs thus far. I’m able to keep up with news, friends, and entertainment very easily.

Now, this device has cost me a good deal more than the $200 initial cost. The ease of integration with Amazon’s multitude of online stores makes purchasing things a little too easy. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Between 2001, when I graduated high school, and the day before my Kindle fire arrived I probably bought somewhere on the order of 10 books of my own choosing (read: not textbooks). I’ve purchased eight books in the last week alone. My classical music collection was leaving a lot to be desired, and two classical collections were purchased to address that problem. Somehow, in all of my years of Apple use I never once purchased anything from iTunes. A week with the Kindle Fire, and I have to exercise restraint for the sake of my credit card.

After a few reviews were out in the wild, I decided it wasn’t too much of a risk to pull the trigger on my own Kindle Fire. This should be prefaced with the fact that I see no point in tablets. I have computing ADD – if I’m using something that purports to be a computer it’d better be able to multitask its face off. Fortunately, the Kindle Fire seems to be marketed more as an eReader with some mobile entertainment features and not as a laptop replacing tablet. My intentions with this device are simple: reduce the weight of my backpack by purchasing engineering textbooks digitally. As an Amazon Prime member, the free content offerings from Amazon are a nice benefit. The question is, will this device do what I want it to do well enough that I feel like I didn’t blow $200 on something I won’t use?

A solid day of use may have provided some insight into my last question. Books that are published as print reproductions, which as far as I can tell is marketing speak for low-resolution image exports of page layouts, may not be of any use at all on the Kindle Fire. Magazines published this way are certainly not worth a second glance – full zoom fails to yield text that is in any way a joy to read. Viewing PDFs of lecture slides is not a problem, and for the last several semesters that’s how most of my required material has been delivered, so at least there’s that. Publications that actually take the time to format their content for mobile devices are excellent. While I’ve never used an original Kindle, and can’t comment on the differences, I will say that using Kindle-specific content is very enjoyable. Two such publications are Science News, and The New Yorker. The latter is delivered through a standalone application, rather than the Newsstand, but offers several features that make content consumption more dynamic for the user – namely the inclusion of links to multimedia content which the Kindle Fire happily plays. The former populates the Newsstand, and reads much like a Kindle eBook.

As far as the other features are concerned, the Kindle Fire seems plenty capable of handling most light tasks pretty well. Silk, the browser Amazon spent so much time talking about, is kind of a dud in my opinion. It’s certainly not the fastest browser I’ve ever experienced. It loads pages though, and renders most things pretty well. The browser does seem to report as computer rather than a mobile device, leading to some pages coming up in a less-than-ideal format. The Amazon Appstore leaves a lot to be desired, for instance Dropbox is not available. Fortunately, you can get the apk directly from Dropox and it functions just fine. Anyway, it’s not going to replace my desktop by any means. My laptop will still be coming with me in the event I need MATLAB or any of the other major software suites I have installed on it. For light browsing, chatting, video, audio (through headphones, the speakers aren’t that great), and the obvious Kindle features I think this device will work just fine for me. Your mileage may vary.

This coming April, I’ll be joining several thousand other cyclists on a charity ride in support of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Over the course of two days, we’ll pedal the 150 miles between Houston and Austin. Anyone interested in donating to my fundraising efforts for this cause may do so by clicking here. I have set a personal goal of $1000. As of this posting have already raised $425. With 151 days to go, I hope to break my goal. Any support is greatly appreciated.

My training for the event has already started, with my completion this past Sunday of the 62-mile Bike the Bend for Literacy. The wind was a major factor in that ride, more of a factor than the steep climbs I encountered in Little Rock back in September, and I’m going to have to get out there to battle the wind some more to make sure I can survive two days of more than 60 miles of riding. Having gone between Houston and Austin by motorcycle at least a dozen times in the last year, I know there is plenty of wind between here and there. Hills have tops, but wind can blow strong for days.

About two weeks ago I brewed my third original beer. This time, and in keeping with the season, I brewed an oatmeal stout. To make sure I had plenty of body in this brew, I mashed high and used plenty of oats. Pre-boil gravity was 1.046, that boiled down to a starting gravity of 1.054. Airlock activity ceased after about four days, which seems to be the running average on my all-grain beers, but I left it alone until today. My final gravity, which I’ll confirm over the weekend, was 1.012. I hit my target OG on the nose, but it seems I either did not mash hot enough or the yeast were just really happy with the meal they were given because my FG is three points lower than I planned. Fortunately, it still tastes great.

Recipe:

• 6lb – 2 Row
• 4lb – Munich
• 2lb – Flaked Oats
• .5lb – Roasted Barley
• .5lb – Brown (British Chocolate)
• .5lb – Amber
• 1.75oz – Kent Goldings, at boil
• Irish Ale yeast (I used Wyeast)

My first round of exams has come and gone, and with the exception of one class, I did fairly well in all of my exams. It sounds like everyone in the one exception class is equally concerned that anything above a 30 will be seen as brilliant. At this point in our careers as students in the mechanical engineering department we’re used to that. Gone are expectations of an A meaning you scored near 100 on everything. In a few weeks the second round of exams will come around, and I’ll be more prepared this time – or at least more evenly prepared.

Clearly, since I’m posting this, I survived the 68 miles in Little Rock. Those hills were way harder than I expected, and by the time I got to them stopping was not an option for me. If I’d walked up the hills, like many did, I’d have finished the ride in the back of a truck. Thank goodness for having a 30-speed with good hill-climbing gears. It was a good time, and I look forward to doing more cycling events in the future.

Beer is a big deal to me. You should know that by now. The pale ale I brewed over the Independence Day weekend, with my friend Joseph, was well received. It needs a little more body, and I’ll either solve that by a higher mash temperature to preserve more sugars the yeast won’t ferment into carbon dioxide and alcohol or an addition of some Munich malt to the grain bill. Depending on how I decide my school schedule needs to look over the coming weeks, my second original recipe beer (autumn amber ale) will either spend a little longer in secondary or it will make a trip into a keg this weekend. Next on the list of recipes I’ve been working on is an oatmeal stout. After that we’ll see what comes next. Maybe a wit or something. Who knows.

As far as photography goes, school has been keeping me too busy to enjoy that hobby much right now. I still haven’t made any prints from my Scotland negatives. I need to replace the relay in my darkroom timer before I can do any of that anyway. For a while I was kicking around the idea of buying a Hasselblad, but reviewing negatives from my Mamiya C3 gives me no reason to spend that extra cash on a format I already have well represented by three different cameras. What I do not have is a camera that produces 4×5″ negatives, and that is next on my list. In fact, I’m planning on making that step as a Christmas present to myself this year. I’m looking at a used Shen Hao field camera to fit the bill. Perhaps my next trip to Scotland will involve a 4×5″ camera. If my sister thought I took a long time taking photos last time, she hasn’t seen anything yet!

It’s been nearly a month since my last post. School is consuming a ton of my time. So much of my time that I’ve not logged any miles on my road bike since the 9th. That won’t stop me from my trip to Little Rock this weekend to ride a 68mi event with my younger brother. Before I leave, I’ve got a dynamics exam to face. Here’s to hoping all the studying pays off.