At the end of August I posted a video of Abi and me on the swing on the A’DAM Toren Lookout deck. Here are some more images from that day (26th August). It was a lovely day, just after a major heatwave. We were just back from California, and mum & dad were taking a couple of days with us after driving up from France. None of us had much energy for a big sightseeing trip, and we figured that catching the view from the tower would be enough activity for the day.
First of all, at the base of the tower, there’s an iron throne of guitars:
The elevator up to the 20th floor is itself quite an experience. It has a glass ceiling, and the elevator shaft is a light show of strobing and shifting colours for the thirty seconds or so it takes to reach the twentieth floor. It’s quite impressive, but also vertigo-inducing. When you exit the main elevator, you still have to get up another floor to the lookout deck. We got lost trying to find another elevator to take us up, but we made it there eventually. (They still need to work on their accessibility.)
The views from the lookout deck are fantastic. There are beanbags for sitting down and catching some sun (I assume they’ll be anchored on windy days), and of course there is the swing.
After we’d been on the swing, we went back down a floor to have a coffee in the Madam panorama bar. It was lovely during the day; I’m sure it would be spectacular at night. There’s also a disconcerting glass window in the floor that allows you to see straight down the side of the tower.
Looking down
Here’s the view from below, showing both that window in the floor, and the swing.
Looking up
If you’re OK with heights, it’s well worth a visit.
I bought a Lumia 930 in October 2015 to replace my old iPhone 4. I didn’t want to spend €800+ on a new iPhone, and my feelings about Android were mixed. The Lumia 930 was the previous year’s Windows Phone flagship. The 930’s camera was very well-regarded (the most important feature for me), and I have always found the Windows Phone UI pleasing. With lots of people waiting for the release of the 2015 Lumia models, I was able to buy a 930 at a great price.
I wrote about it again in March, just after it had received the Windows 10 update. So how do I feel about it now, after using it for a whole year?
Well, hmm. It still works, but I wouldn’t say I’m loving it.
Let me take a minor niggle first. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I use the default Windows 10 Podcasts app. I pause and restart podcasts from the lock screen all the time. If a podcast has been paused very recently (and I haven’t timed this, but it feels like about five minutes or so, before the phone puts the app into some kind of deeper sleep mode), pressing the side power button will bring up the lock screen with audio playback controls visible. I press play, the podcast starts again, and all is good.
But if the podcast has been paused for longer, I have to press the side button to bring up the lock screen, and then use one of the volume buttons to show the audio controls. Fair enough; another button press doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is the fact that the “play” button doesn’t work immediately. I have to press it twice to get it to actually start the podcast going again.
Minor niggle, but I find it disproportionately annoying. Also, in the last couple of months, every now and then the Podcasts app just won’t stop playing. The controls on the lock screen don’t work; the controls in the app don’t work; plugging and unplugging my headphones doesn’t work; force-quitting the app doesn’t work. The only thing have found that will stop the podcast playing is to reboot the phone. Maybe I should try a different podcasts app. But I’d prefer the default one to work better.
I also have minor gripes about the browser (no ad blocking), the email client (not great at displaying HTML formatted mails), and the lack of apps in the app store (getting better now that Windows 10 has been around for a while).
Worse, though, is the camera. I have taken some pretty nice pictures with it over the last year, but its low light performance has been consistently disappointing. Earlier in the year I also started noticing a pronounced blurring in the bottom left corner side of (landscape) photos. It’s there in portrait orientation as well, but because that part of the picture often captures the sky, it isn’t always obvious.
Here are some of the first photos where I noticed the problem, back in April. (Click for full-resolution versions, and check the bottom left and top left corners respectively.)
I’ve gone back to some of the early photos I took with the phone, looking for sharply focused images with enough detail in that bottom left corner that a problem would be visible. And sure enough, it looks like it has always been there — I just didn’t spot it.
It has bothered me since I became aware of it, but I’ve just put up with it. I’ve learned to frame my photos with that in mind, or to strategically crop them afterwards. But that’s not a great solution, and it has been contributing to my general feeling of discontent with the phone. I’ve been thinking about photos a lot lately (another post about that coming up soon), and earlier this afternoon I downloaded a set of lens correction profile reference images from Adobe for an experiment. I don’t have a tripod for my phone, and I didn’t set up additional lighting, but I took some reference pictures with my Lumia 930 and my iPad mini 2 (2013) anyway.
Lumia 930: top right cornerLumia 930: bottom left corneriPad mini: top right corneriPad mini: bottom left corner
Even poorly shot reference images like these make it easy to spot flaws. There appears to be some minor vignetting in the top right corner of the Lumia, but it’s obvious that the bottom left corner has some pretty severe distortion going on. I don’t know enough about camera optics to guess whether this is the lens or the sensor, but something is awry. Also: what the heck is going on with the Lumia’s colour processing? This is one of the things I meant by its poor low-light performance. The iPad mini captured the green wall accurately under the indoor LED lighting. The Lumia is just badly confused.
I can live with a podcasts app that has hiccups and crashes. But an unreliable camera makes me sad, and makes makes me use it less — which is exactly why I wanted to upgrade from the iPhone 4 last year. When the iPhone 7 was announced with two cameras in the Plus model I was excited and tempted by it, but I still can’t get past the price tag. I know I could get better photos than even the iPhone 7 would yield from our ten-year-old Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200 (which has a colossal aperture compared to every phone camera), but I’m not going to carry that around with me all the time.
Maybe I’ve been going at this with the wrong attitude. I’ve been assuming that there’s nothing I can do about it except wait until I upgrade again. But I just dug out the invoice for the purchase, and apparently the phone is still under warranty for another 9 months. I don’t know if that’s the store’s warranty or the manufacturer’s, but I think I need to find out. I’d happily keep using it for another year if I didn’t feel a twinge of regret every time I wanted to take a picture with it.
Update (20 October): I took the phone back to CoolBlue on Monday, and they took it in for a warranty repair.
Abi and Fiona went to Imagicon today. They’ve been planning their Doctor Who cosplay outfits for a while now, and today saw the culmination of those efforts. Early this morning I took Fiona to the hairdresser for the first time in about three years, to get her hair curled as the finishing touch on her Amy Pond. Abi went as an alternative incarnation of Matt Smith’s Doctor.
I love Schiphol airport. (Which is a good thing, given the amount of time I spend there.) Aside from the fact that their ground handling is generally fast, friendly, and efficient, that also take the time to add neat design touches to the airport itself whenever they can. Here are some videos I took of two of them: a section of glass floor through which you can get a glimpse into the underground baggage handling operation; and a clock that appears to be being updated every minute by someone standing just behind the clock face. In fact, that’s what I really thought was happening at first. It’s really subtle, and fun when you figure out that it’s not real.
These browser tabs won’t close themselves, you know. (The new “Universal Clipboard” feature in iOS 10 and macOS Sierra makes it easier for me to copy links from my iPad to my laptop, though. When it works.)
When I first encounter René Redzepi, he is cutting a live elk in half with a chainsaw. Noma’s unwavering commitment to native, hyper-local Nordic foods requires its kitchen staff to spend hours every morning foraging the neighboring woodlands and shorelines for wild ingredients, and Redzepi has a gift for sensing gastronomic potential in everything around him.
“A lot of times you can find these lovely little rose hip flowers pickling in the stomach fluids of the larger field mammals that live around here,” Redzepi says, his arm elbow-deep in the abdominal cavity of the freshly bisected animal, its viscera still twitching and gurgling as he fishes out two small, pink, slimy flower petals from within. “Sometimes you have to saw through 20 or so elk before you find any, but it’s always worth the effort. They’re absolutely perfect with caramelized sweetbreads.”
If you live in New York City long enough and appear to be successfully employed in an industry that Bernie Sanders dislikes, you will be asked at some point to do three things: sponsor a table at a vanity fund-raiser, become a “producer” of a Broadway play, and invest in a restaurant. I had no trouble declining the honor of hosting a benefit or helping “Hedda Gabler” back to the stage.
I did the restaurant.
And while I am not dumb enough to have imagined I’d make much money as a passive, partial investor in a New York City restaurant, I was dumb enough to think that I could probably earn my money back-ish, while at the same time helping some decent young men fulfill their dream. (Also, it seemed more fun than investing in a municipal-bond mutual fund, which cannot, thanks to the killjoys at the S.E.C., give investors free beers.) But of the many failures of logic and foresight of that investment, which I made in 2010, the one that stings the most is not realizing that so few restaurants in New York make money precisely because too many restaurants in New York have investors like me.
Eponymous Laws — pithy rules with someone’s name attached to them, like the Peter Principle (“In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence”) or Betteridge’s Law of Headlines (“Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no'”) — have a disproportionate air of authority to them. Ryan Schmeizer writes about how the very appearance of authority can influence us as much as real authority, and that by appealing to authority, eponymous laws can have more persuasive power then the underlying concepts themselves. Also, how to steal 16 cases of beer from Walmart in broad daylight.
This led me to look into the Lindy Effect, which presents a sobering picture for software developers trying to update legacy code.
On the subject of lesser-known sports, I played (indoor) cornhole for the first time while I was in New York the other week. For a game whose commonly used terminology includes phrases like “Mustachio”, “Slippery Granny”, and “Dirty Bag”, it’s surprisingly cerebral and tactical.
FanDuel’s sport research lab
I may not like what Medium is doing for the web, but being transparent about their interview process is a bold step. Leslie Miley spoke about how being intentional in the hiring process is necessary for diversity. The UK GDS (Government Digital Service) is explicit about what is OK. Working remotely (or, to turn the concept on its head, location neutral) is still hard, no matter what kind of spin you put on it. All this is important when trying to deal with (and emerge from the shadow of) startupculture.
The Marianas Trench concert at Tolhuistuin this evening was cancelled because Josh Ramsay is suffering from laryngitis. Fiona and I are disappointed, but they say they’ll try to reschedule. So I spent the evening booking my travel for a few months ahead instead. Yay? As an experiment, I’m going to stay in Glasgow a couple of times rather then always be in Edinburgh.
