Larks Tongues In Aspic

Yet more fun...

2010-02-05T16:32:00.003Z

Out with colleagues and former colleagues, this was taken with a Casio EX-FC 100 in the highest-resolution HS movie mode. No sound, just a simple pan right across the beers...

This is an example of high-speed video, in this case using a very inexpensive consumer digital camera that has the option of digital video, including, in this case, 210 frames a second at basically a slightly reduced VGA mode.

I'm basically pleased with the Casio EX-FC 100, with a few caveats: as a still digital camera, it isn't the greatest performer, but then again virtually no P&S cameras are. Their sensors are simply too small for really high-quality work. Related to the sensor size, the low-light performance is disappointing, especially for video. But I knew both of those when I bought the camera, so I'm not totally miffed.

On the plus side, it fits into a cell-phone pocket and has become my constant companion at work and elsewhere. While my phone (Motorola Droid) has a camera as well, this is simply worlds better, especially with the high-speed option. The other-world-like quality of the high-speed video is a lot of fun to play with. Battery life is more than adequate: two days ago I recharged it for the first time in over three weeks of intermittent use. I put in a class 6 16 GB SD card so that I have plenty of room for movies, which especially in the high-speed mode really get large very, very quickly.

The camera also has even higher-speed modes, but these drop the resolution until the fastest speed is a mere 100 pixels or so in height, virtually useless for anything but the most quickest of movement (on the other hand, it does run at 1000 fps).

This particular Casio is simply fun: always with me, and the high-speed modus is the biggest selling point. While Casio does have a bridge camera with the function - indeed slightly better resolution and running 300 fps instead of 210 - I'm contemplating the new Fuji HS-10/HS-11 as a possible upgrade, depending on its high-speed resolution. Specialized tools for specialized work.

What would be interesting would be to take the time-lapse work I've done with a hacked Canon 11o IS and juxtapose it with the high-speed images available here...something for a rainy day.

Lotte

2010-01-09T14:30:00.000Z

This is a portrait of my sister-in-law, Lotte. In her kitchen, just a few days ago, using natural lighting and automatic white balance. Shot at 1/10th of a sec, f4, ISO 1000, 60mm focal length, handheld using the Olympus E-30 and the 12-60 lens. White balance cleaned up slightly in post-processing in, of all things, Picasa. Simply using that because it's easier to blog with it...

Summer Vacation...

2009-08-16T09:42:00.002Z

Was in the US for a couple of weeks and picked up some new kit.

After debating for a goodly amount of time about which camera to get, I decided to get the Olympus E-30 with the 12-60 lens.

Truly amazing bit of kit: this photo was taken about 20 minutes after I got the camera at B+H Photo, direct out of the box and without reading the instructions...

What struck me about the combination of these two (camera+lens) is that it is fast.

Seriously fast. This is one of a series of photos, the camera can simply take as many pictures as you want it to without pausing.

The next thing that struck me is that while it works extremely well out-of-the-box, I'm gonna need some time to understand the manual and do some custom settings.

What I really like is the ability to do a 5-stop bracket for HDR work, as well as the extraordinary quality of the lens. Anyone contemplating or using the Olympus digital SLR systems should take a really serious look at this lens...

Here's another. If you could only see it in 12MP, 1:1, as the sharpness goes as far as the eye can see...

That's all for now, more to follow...

Seriously good work...

2009-06-23T16:53:00.002Z

Samuel Cockedy, a Frenchman who moved to Tokyo in 2000, has not merely the right eye for photography, but has the right idea as well.

Photography isn't about simply capturing light on film or emulsion: it has everything to do with creating emotions, of putting you "there", of placing the photography involved in your heart, twisting and toying with your feelings of desire, of despair, of that elusive "Sehnsucht", something between desire, regret and distance. I think he's done a fabulous job here: watch it, if you can and your bandwidth allows it, full screen in HD. Absolutely marvelous.

The True End Of An Era...

2009-06-22T17:20:00.003Z

This blog will take a new turn, away from watches and more towards photography, my first real love.

An era is coming to an end.

Let us go back, if we can, to an era where things were more ephemeral, where permanence was fleeting at best: to the early days of color photography.

Color negative films use dyes to make the color. Complex layers of emulsions allow light to be filtered to expose various layers, leaving after processing tiny dye clouds in primary colors to be enlarged and printed. Color prints were fundamentally the same.

Color slides came in two versions: Kodachrome and all the rest. Kodachrome is and was the only slide film that uses pigments, rather than dyes, to create its colors, and which retains its colors under all but the harshest of treatments. Kodachrome didn't contain the pigments, it caught them during the developing process, and was fundamentally a black-and-white film that was colored using pigments during the processing of the film.

Any other slide film? Dyes. Dyes are organic and, especially in the early days of slide films (until, say, the 1970s), they were sensitive to both xrays and temperatures: if your film had the bad luck of being xrayed at the airport more than a few times, fog would set in, ruining you photos; if you spent time in the desert, your colors would show strange and highly inappropriate color shifts, especially for films that were relatively high speed.

Hence Kodachrome was the cat's meow: it simply had the best colors. It was slow as heck - ISO 25 was the standard for a very long time - but simply gave the best results. Very few labs could process it, since it was a hideously complex process that was completely unforgiving of errors in time and temperature.

But had the most beautiful colors.

It got better: ISO 64 came along, then even ISO 200. I loved the ISO 200 for medium-format work, since grain wasn't quite the concern, and it was a joy to use.

But there was competition, especially as the dyes got better - azo metal-based dyes saved the day here - and the films became less and less temperature sensitive and less susceptible to color fogging via xrays.

Well, those days are gone.

Kodachrome is no more. Now, I'll admit I haven't shot a chemical shot in at least 3 years. What little film I had left over is expired, and I haven't shot Kodachrome in ages.

But loading your camera with Kodachrome was the penultimate challenge: it meant that you were entrusting your images to the best there was, and gave you the incentive to really work at getting the best.

Kodachrome. May it live forever, at least in our aspirations...

Gigapan...

2009-04-16T18:15:00.001Z

Yep, I've got a gigapan. Fun stuff:

Now this is nice...

2009-03-08T16:27:00.000Z

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

Hattip: American Digest

WUS vs. Timezone

2008-03-02T09:14:00.000Z

For my friends at WUS...

Why I Won't Be Buying An Omega

2006-06-13T21:22:00.000Z

Hi -

Been a while: reality intrudes, as I always say.

I was planning on a big watch purchase this year. I originally had my sights set on a new Speedmaster, or perhaps a Seamaster Chrono with the coaxial calibre.

But I won't be getting anything new made by Omega.

Why?

Because of this. Hat tip, of course, to Velociphile. :-)

I've bought from Eddie Platts and he's been nothing less than an outstanding seller with a great product. I regret not having bought a Dreadnought, and if he ever comes up with a new watch like it, it's on my short list.

But Omega is behaving very, very arrogantly.

I think I understand where they are coming from - they don't want anyone coming anywhere near getting a handle on a name that they consider important to them - but they've gone off into the deep desert with this one.

Eddie has, I think - and I am NOT a lawyer - a legitimate claim to the name Broadarrow, as he's been selling watches under that name for quite some time, and he doesn't claim, never has, that his are in any way military issue or in any way associated with the broad arrow mark of British military equipment.

Omega, I think, just doesn't want ANYONE to be able to sell using what they seem to think is a unique attribute of certain hand types that Omega uses. What a crock. From what I've seen, they don't have much of a case (no pun intended).

I'm putting my money where my mouth is: I will not buy a new Omega until they stop
the lawsuit. Sure, my $3000 isn't much, considering what Omega sells every day. But it's the principle of the damn thing.

My Nomad...

2006-03-12T22:49:00.000Z

A Pontiac Hydraulica...

2006-03-02T22:44:00.000Z

What American could resist a watch called the Pontiac Hydraulica?

What this has to do with hydraulics, I cannot fathom. But it was in such absolutely perfect shape on EBay that I had to go for it, and it went for a song...

2006-03-02T22:35:00.000Z

Hey, it works!

This time two pictures of a classic Gruen from the late 1950s/early 1960s. It's hard to say exactly when the watch was made, since all records from Gruen were destroyed in a fit of utter stupidity as new management took over the company in the late 1960s, making it very, very hard to collect Gruens with any sort of confidence as to when the watch was made.

Gruen is a true piece of american horology. Will finish this tomorrow, time to sleep...

First eBay watch...

2006-02-27T21:21:00.000Z

My first watch on eBay, a Poljot Strela. This was perhaps my best purchase: with postage and handling, €104.60.

Damn did I luck out. I remember that it ended at a strange time, something like 11 AM on a Sunday. I hadn't started using sniper software and my reserve was €127.76, so I was very happy to not have spent that much.

The story behind this watch is a bit more complex than my previous Poljot.

The movement is the Poljot 3017, which is based on the classic Venus 175. It's a very smooth operating chronograph.

But the real story is that this is one of two watches that is/were certified for space walks. There are a number of watches that are space-certified, from the absolutely classic and immortal Omega Speedster Professional to a lowly but technically perfect plastic Casio.

But only the Strelas and the Speedsters were certified for extra-vehicular activity. Not that this particular watch left the planet, but you get the idea.

However, this watch has got a few problems.

First, the hands are not "right". They are the original hands, but Poljot has the infuriating habit of mixing up some of its products. These hands - straight batons, no lume - are for the civilian market. There are paddle hands - the same as these, but with a long rectangle about 2/3rds of the way up the hand, filled with lume, and with red tips from there on - that are the classic hands of this watch. You can see a good picture of the proper hands here. It's from a Sekonda, but that is just a name difference. The watch is the same. The watch came basically in at least 8 versions: black and white (creme) dial, paddle hands or not, Poljot or Sekonda, and English or Cyrillic inscriptions.

Why would they make a watch with different hands? The answer lies in the Soviet planned economy: in all likelihood, they simply ran out of the correct paddle hands and in order to meet their production norms, substituted the simple hands you see here. No planned model differentiation, simply planned economies.

The perfect Strela would be a black or white face, paddle hands, Poljot with Cyrillic inscription on the face. These are as rare as hen's teeth and they go for, in excellent condition, for 3-4 times what I paid for mine.

So what's the big deal on space watches?

Like I said, there are only two watches that have been actually used for space walks. This and the Speedster. The reason is that space is one hell of an environment for anything: extremes of hot and cold, the watch moves from a pressure environment to a no-pressure environment, and vacuum means that the oils and lubricants start to outgas what little volatiles they have, changing their nature and shortening their useful lives. Add to that the fact that metals mesh differently under atmosphere and in vacuum (since there is no atmosphere to act as a microlubricant to prevent molecular bonding), and you can see the kind of challenges that face any watch that wants to be certified for extra-vehicular excursions.

The Omega Speedmaster was the only watch that met these specifications without any modifications. We don't know if the Strela was modified in any way.

The other problem that this watch has is that it has a slight tendency to "stick" when it's been lying in the watch case for a couple of months: you can wind it up and it won't start ticking. If you give the case a little tap on the side, it starts right up.

This means one of two things: either the watch needs a complete disassembly, cleaning and reassembly, possibly replacing either the balance wheel spring - the heart of any watch - and costing significant money (it's a chronograph, a complication, which means that it's harder to take apart), or that it's an old watch that needs just a little help to get started.

I took it to the master watchmaker that does most of the work on my watches. He's a guy who likes to lecture me on why I shouldn't be buying such cheap watches - he's right, of course, but explain that to my wife - and who has done some real wonders getting my old Gruens to run so beautifully.

His opinion: it's an old watch. It needs a little love tap to get started - those were his words, "Liebesstoss" or love tap - like many older watches. The balance wheel spring is fine, the gear train is fine, the lubrication is fine: it's just an old watch. It was last worked on just a couple of years ago, he said, and after looking at the watch for about 3 minutes, including a minute under the microscope, he said that it was clean and running very well.

Sure, he could tear it apart and rebuild it. Would cost probably around €200 for him to do it - he's expensive, but very, very good - but he didn't want to. Why?

He gave two reasons. First, the kind of chronograph it is - based on the Venus 175 - is a classic pillar-wheel chronograph. These are not the simplest of designs, as can be seen here (Hi, Velociphile). Couldn't find a schematic of the 175, let alone the 3017, but here is a picture of the 175 from Ranfft, and here the 3017.

Since the watch keeps excellent time - had a mean variance of +7 seconds/day over 1 month - there was, in his opinion, little reason to fiddle with something that was working so well. Hence his recommendation of not wearing it too much and when it really starts sticking, such that it's not a question of a love tap but more a slap in the face, then it's time to take it apart and put it all back together again.

But his opinion was that these chronographs are often very problematic, since they tend to "settle" into a working mode that gets disrupted when you introduce new parts: they then must find a new equilibrium, as it were, that more often than not means that when you repair the watch, it will not perform as well until everything meshes back together, and that getting the complications to work properly is not a trivial task.

So I'll enjoy this space-rated watch while I can.

My First Poljot...

2006-02-26T23:07:00.000Z

Sorry, got sidetracked for a few days.

And this post got delayed as well from last night.

The Poljot above is a very basic Poljot, which I bought from ChronoNet. No longer there, unfortunately. But you can find it here.

What was I doing buying a Russian watch?

Very simple. The Fortis is, for me, still one of the more expensive watches I own (I'm a tightwad when it comes to my hobbies), and I didn't want to take it with me on vacation to the US.

So I was looking for what I would now call a beater watch, one that if you beat it to death, you don't get all upset about. I had set a strict, very strict, budget of €100 maximum, and was looking to see what kind of watch you could get for that price that had at least a small modicum of style/panache/whatever.

Why? Well, even someone who is as stingy about things like this as I am wants to have a modicum of style. In other words, there are watches that I simply won't wear, since they either remind me of times when I was so broke that I couldn't afford anything better than the cheapest no-name, or simply weren't my style.

I was searching for something that would have a certain style without breaking my budget and for the very, very first time did the search on the Internet. We are talking, what, 2002 or so.

The watch is built around the classic Poljot 2614 caliber, 17 jewels, with calendar, 21'600 bph, officially -20/+40s per day, power reserve 42 hours, manual wind.

Identifying the pedigree of this caliber is both simple and hard: on the one hand, it is the workhouse caliber of the Russian watch industry (well, what is left of it); on the other hand, a cursory search on more information on the caliber doesn't lead to much. I remember speculation that it is based on the French LIP movement of the 1950s, but what with the WUS database crash, that thread may be lost forever. Will have to check on that.

It came originally with your bog-standard aviator strap, black leather with white stitching, and I was very pleased with it: solid, screw-down crown, very assertive watch.

And then the troubles began. I had dealt with screw-down crowns before, since the Fortis has one, and thought I knew what I had to do: unscrew it mornings, wind the watch, screw it back down and that's it.

Three days after the watch arrived, the problems started. It was just a tiny, tiny smidge of condensation on the inside of the crystal, the tiniest of smudges. The weather was a typical German end-of-winter/begin-of-spring kind of weather: cold and rainy. And very, very humid.

I decided that I didn't want to have to send the watch back and instead wore the watch with the crown unscrewed in the hope that the humidity levels in the watch would adjust to ambient and the condensation would cease. It did, just took a couple of days to do so.

The watch kept very decent time, not as good as the Fortis, but very decent nonetheless. After wearing it for 2-3 weeks it was within 15 seconds +/- a day, usually on the fast side.

I wore it on our 2002 trip to the US, where we spent time in New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona and Utah.

The condensation problem came back with a vengeance. The climate in these states is so dry that you really do need to drink 2-3 gallons of water/day to avoid exhaustion and getting run down, and the high temperatures there increased the evaporation of whatever the moisture source was significantly. Undoing the crown and letting the watch more or less bake in the sun for a couple of hours a day (on the dashboard of our rental car) didn't really help all that much.

But the watch kept on ticking and keeping time very well. So I kept on wearing it, despite it being fairly hard to read through the collection of water drops on the inside of the crystal.

When we got back, I contacted ChronoNet and sent the watch back. He sent me back pictures of what the water condensation had done to the watch (I have no idea of where those pictures are...) , which, given the severity of the condensation and the amount of time that the watch was subjected to water in the works, was fairly minimal.

The connection rod between the crown and the winding mechanism was rusted, as was the sleeve. It wasn't that bad, but rust and watches don't get along real well in general.

He repaired it under warranty, despite feeling that the problem was on my side. Good dealer.

Since then: no problems. None whatsoever, zilch, nada. The only thing that I notice is that he didn'l clean, when he had the chance, the inside of the crystal, which, if you look really carefully - the above picture is useless for that purpose - has some drying marks where the condensation was particularly bad.

So what is the moral of the story?

Russian watches can take an incredible amount of abuse and keep on working under conditions where their more sophisticated counterparts would have given up the ghost. It is one of the two watches I wear when I go to the sauna: the other is a quartz watch that my youngest daughter persuaded me to buy when on eBay for much too much money (but still under €100), but that is another story.

This watch simply kept on working. The rust was limited to the parts mentioned above: the 2614 was completely unaffected by the condensation problems.

Today I have it on an original Poljot band which unfortunately is a bit of a hair-puller, which means that it doesn't get all that much wrist time. But once a week isn't bad: despite the terrible abuse that a sauna means for a watch (temperature of +100°C for 15 minutes, followed by 17° water immersion, repeat, then 20 minutes at 70° C with a 22° water immersion, etc etc), the Poljot deals with it as if it were nothing.

Fortis

2006-02-19T18:29:00.000Z

So this is the next watch I acquired. A bog-standard Fortis Aviator, 34mm in size. I've got small wrists, so I chose this one over a 38mm version because it looks better on the wrist.

I bought it after looking for a new watch for about 3 months during the last year I worked in Basel, Switzerland. I had been there for over 6 years and it was becoming clear to me that it was time to move on; I wanted a bit of a souvenir as well. This is back in 1996.

Fortis is one of the smaller Swiss makers that has specialized on aviation and aerospace watches, and are a supplier to the Russian cosmonauts for their official mission watches. This particular model is the 620.10.41.

Why this particular watch?

Well, first of all it fit my budget. Alway important, that.

Second, I had done some research and found that there were simply so many watches made with the ETA 2824-2. Hence I wanted something different, something that not everyone would have.

Companies like Tissot make fine watches, but they're simply, for me, too easily available. There's no sense of uniqueness, since they're mainstream watch makers.

Fortis, on the other hand, has a long history of supplying aviator watches. The company started up in 1912 (all info from their website) and were the makers of the very first automatic watch, the Harwood, in 1926. They won a design award at the Hannover fair in 1987 for their modern automatic flyer chronographs, and in 1994 the Russians chose Fortis to supply the Chronographs of the Russian space missions.

This means that Fortis has joined that relatively small circle of manufacturers that make watches that are technically able to handle space flight: Omega and Bulova are two others, and while the Russians used Shturmanskies and Strela watches from the 1st Moscow Watch Factory, they didn't make the grade in 1994 (there's a long story there).

Anyway, I've had this particular watch for almost 10 years. I wore it almost all the time from 1996 to 2004, a full 8 years, with virtually no problems. I went through a total of 5 straps, all original Fortis - and these were usually pretty hard to find - black with white stitching.

The strap you see here is not original, but rather a Poljot strap that I thinks works fine with the watch.

The accuracy of the classic 2824-2 is excellent: I usually would set the watch on Sunday morning, and it would rarely be off more than 1-2 minutes per week, which is excellent performance from such a basic caliber.

I started to wear it less when I began to collect watches.

After letting it gather some dust in the drawer, I started to wear it on and off, and noticed the first problem: setting the date got a little difficult, and I had to start setting it not by the quick date method, but by running the hands past midnight for each day.

So I sorta stopped wearing it, because it became more trouble than it was worth. But every once in a while I'd realize that the date was set (the month had turned) and I'd wear it a couple of days for old time's sake.

At some point I thought I'd give my oldest daughter a treat and let her wear it. She really, really liked the idea and wore the watch for a couple of weeks. One day, though, I noticed that she wasn't wearing it and asked why: she said that she had worn it while playing volleyball and that it had stopped working.

Uh oh, I thought. Sure enough, heavily scuffed and battered, and the tiny little ding you see between 9 and 10 in the casing was there. In addition, the watch really wasn't working; you could feel the automatic mechanism, the winding mechanism, sort of rolling around in the back, but no energy was being fed into the main spring, so of course it wasn't keeping time, and when I tried winding it by hand nothing happened.

So I took it to the watchmakers, a new one, to see what could be done.

Broken balance wheel post; winding mechanism stripped (gear teeth broken and twisted), winding post broken.

My dear, sweet daughter, all of 14, had slammed the watch. The glass was severely scratched up as well (mineral glass).

Now, this meant severe repairs. New balance wheel post, new winding mechanism, plus cleaning and oiling. Ouch.

But it was the watch I bought to commemorate my six years in Basel, and I knew that fixing the watch would be cheaper than replacing it.

I paid 398 Swiss France for the Watch in 1996, ca €160 with the exchange rate back then (to DM and then to €). I paid €200 to have the 2824-2 taken apart, repaired, cleaned, oiled and regulated; they also replaced the glass and put on a new crown.

But the case itself has been distorted from true round and the watch could not be made water resistant to 10m again: it is, at best, nicely protected against rain and dust, but given that the case opening is now slightly oval (never underestimate what a 14-year old can do to a watch!) and the glass is round, any sort of real pressure would break the seal.

It was the first and the last time for the watchmaker in question: they could have asked if I wanted to replace the 2824-2 with a new one instead of repairing the old one, since a new 2824-2 would've dropped the cost considerably: instead of taking the watch apart (removal of the watchworks from the case, removal of hands, removal of face, complete disassembly for cleaning and replacement, reassembly with new parts and oiling, reattachment of face and hands, reassembly in case) they could've skipped the disassembly and repair work and simply replaced the 2824-2 entirely. I've looked on eBay and found them going for as low as €69 for the basic caliber, which is what is inside the Fortis.

The repair would've been almost as expensive, but I would've had a better repair job. That's why I won't use them again: they didn't give me the option, which, given the damage to the watch, is something that should've been an option.

The watch gets fair wrist time, probably about 10% of the time. It's got two problems, even after the repair (and probably a function of the repair): it still has troubles setting the date (the winding post, when pulled out to set the date, tends to slip, meaning that setting the date isn't as smooth as it should be), and I have the subjective feel that the winding post is somehow wobbly. It's got two years' guarantee on the repair work, so I might take it back in at some point, but fear that all I would end up having is yet more repair work done.

The time-keeping qualities haven't changed significantly, so it's still a keeper and one well worth wearing.

Would I buy it again?

Certainly. It's a great watch.

As an aside, Fortis sued Poljot, the Russian maker of watches, and won an injunction against Poljot selling its Aviator series of watches in Germany and Switzerland. The reason? The design was too similiar, according to the court, to the watch that won the design award in 1987. How close?

Not that close. What set off the lawsuit were two watch resellers, one on eBay and one on the web, who advertised the Poljot Aviator I as being the same design as the Fortis.

While there certainly are some similiarities - I'll post them tomorrow - the differences between the two are, in my opinion, large enough that the comparison isn't fair: the Fortis wins hands down. But the real bone of contention was the marketing of the Poljot as being functionally a Fortis: this is what got the Aviator I banned. Didn't have anything to do with Poljot - except that resellers really should learn how to market something on its own qualities, rather than based on something that it isn't - and Fortis was certainly within its rights to nail the resellers.

More tomorrow on Fortis - which one I'd buy today - and Poljot...

Mechanical Watches...

2006-02-16T07:59:00.000Z

So why mechanical watches?

After all, quartz watches are generally more accurate, have become dirt cheap - Walmart sells 'em for only a couple of bucks, hardly more than the batteries cost - and you can get them almost anywhere. Broken? Throw it away. Stop working right? Throw it away. Scratched up and battered? Throw it away.

Mechanical watches are something completely different.

There is no logical reason to buy a mechanical watch. There is nothing that a quartz can't do better.

But a quartz watch is like the Terminator: relentless, heartless, inexhaustible, and doesn't need people. Put in the right battery and it'll keep on ticking until doomsday. OK, let's hope you need a battery the size of the empire state building, but you get the idea.

A mechanical watch shouldn't be anthromorphised into some sort of living thing: it isn't.

But a mechanical watch needs people: it will stop working if the owner doesn't take care of it. Now. I'm a father, I know all about that sort of stuff.

But what makes a mechanical watch different from a quartz is that mechanical watches are perhaps the ultimate in mechanical engineering, with extremely high levels of precision and intricate design. The fundamentals of horology, the science of time keeping equipment, aren't all that difficult: you've got a power source that is released in a controlled manner, thus measuring time. In the basic watch, without any complications, there are no wasted parts, no unnecessary stuff going on: the mechanical watch is a highly evolved time-measuring device.

The key is in the details.

I'll be posting links here in the next couple of days regarding how watches really work.

So why a mechanical watch, once again?

While I said that a watch isn't a living thing, in some ways it's about as close as you are going to find for a purely mechanical device. The balance of a modern watch - and it took a long time to get to that - oscillates around a central point, almost absent-mindedly ticking the beats away as it swings first one way and then the other. This is the heart, so to speak, of the watch: if your balance isn't running smoothly, then everything else in the watch, even if perfectly ok, isn't going to help you keep time worth a darn.

Breil Quartz, ca. 1984

2006-02-13T22:31:00.000Z

This is a picture of the Breil, a recent one. The band is different from the original one, which I was never really able to find again. The crown has also been replaced, as the original was very much worn, and it's not the best replacement, since the original was better rounded, while this one would have been better on a more business-like watch. However, it is in the original size, which is better than having some monster crown that would've been entirely out of place. This was done sometime in the late 1980s in Washington, DC.

It's an unusual watch for a quartz: decentral second hand, fixed band lugs (that's right, the watch band is glued into place, meaning it's both expensive and reltivaly hard to find) and it's a fairly small watch, around 33mm.

But it's quite a homage to classic manual wind Swiss watches of the 1950s and before. Just like many watches of these days, the lume is non-existent. But look at the dimensions of the watch and its design: there's a lot of harmony on the face of the watch. The hour hand is clearly shorter than the minute hand; the pointer doesn't quite reach the inner circle. The numbers - 12, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 - are in raised gold with angles cut into the letters to maximize their legibility, using reflection to capture light. The minute hand reaches exactly the middle of the dot at 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11, adding to the harmonic dimensions of the watch.

What sorta kinda ruins the face is the name of the model (Bartholemy) in the cursive script at the bottom of the decentral second hand. On the top third of the watch face you have a strong serif font for the company name and the movement, nicely spaced; the writing of the model name is in some sort of silly cursive font. If they had avoided this completely, putting the model name on the back of the watch, then it'd be okay. As is, it always annoyed me, deep down inside, as being out of place with the rest of the watch face.

Re-Wind

2006-02-13T14:02:00.000Z

Well, this blog has been very pathetic to date. I spend most of my blogging time, scant as it is, on my other blog.

So this post marks a change to the blog as a whole: it's now my watch blog. :-)

I've always been fascinated by watches. My grandfather, a very successful sheet-metal engineer, was a watch freak. My father says he would rarely walk into a jewelry store without coming out with a new watch, usually trading in the old one for some (probably imagined, given the kind of watches he bought) imperfection. Didn't inherit any of his watches, I was too young when he died. He did give my father a marvelous Omega when he got his PhD, but my father is left-handed and it was always irritating for him to more or less have to wear the watch on the "wrong" side, and it usually languished in his desk drawer, while my father wore inexpensive watches. I always remember the feel of the Omega, with its feel of incredible quality and seriousness: this wasn't merely a instrument to measure time, but went beyond that to have its own qualities.

I started collecting only a few years ago. Before then I would occasionally acquire a new watch when I broke one, or when the wear and tear and scratches made it too scuzzy to wear. I recently found one of these ancient beasts, a Casio from the mid-1970s, with a broken plastic band and no way to replace it. I think the first watch that I consciously made an effort to buy that was more than just an instrument to tell time with was when I was studying in Germany. My girlfriend of the time (and now my wife for the last 16 years and counting) and I went to Basel with some friends (Christoph and Bärbel, if I remember correctly) and I had more money than I thought I had due to a better exchange rate, and decided to get a nice watch instead of a simple watch.

I bought a Breil quartz watch. It was down to that or a Tissot mechanical, which one I can't remember. Breil had just gone through one of its rebirthings as a watch company and had abandoned its mechanical background (not much of one, admittedly), and came out with a very retro line of watches. The one I bought had a wonderful calf-skin band of light beige leather that set off the gold plating of the watch beautifully, and the back was smooth and polished. It had a seconds dial at the 6, which was - and is - very unusual for a quartz watch and I thought it was the cat's meow. Cost me something like CHF 200 back when, and I think I wore it for the next 4 or 5 years.

As a result, of course, the watch is a now a disaster: while the gold plating has held up, the crown was rubbed down seriously and the glass is unsightly due to scratching. Haven't worn in it years now.

But getting back to why I collect watches: it started when I was working in Basel. I worked there for 6 years and when I realized I needed to move on, I bought a new watch as a souvenir. Swiss watches, of course, range in price from the practical to the ridiculous, and given that I didn't have *that* much money to spend, I bought a Fortis 34 mm Aviator, blasted stainless steel, with an ETA 2824-2 hacking caliber inside, for around CHF 480 from a small jeweller near the Theater. I wore that watch every day for around 6 years as well, going through about 5 bands during that time period. It got scratched and needed to be repaired, but I never got around to bringing it in. I admired other watches, but always from afar, never thinking of buying a watch for a couple of thousand because I had a wife and kids to take care of first.

Then one day my wife and I decided that we were going to go the States with my daughters. I decided that I didn't want to take the Fortis with me, but rather wanted to get what I would now call a beater watch, one that can take a beating and which wouldn't upset me if it was destroyed or stolen whilst on vacation. I looked at Casios and whatever kind of electronic watches, and came across Poljot and realized that for my budget - 100 DM - I could get a mechanical watch that while not as elegant or refined as the Fortis, certainly looked good.

But why a mechanical watch? Stay tuned and I'll tell y'all...

I got spammed...

2005-08-15T08:51:00.000Z

Man, the spammers are pathetic.

This blog is functionally dead, since I'm too busy to post much, but I don't want to kill it entirely. So I logged onto Blogger, and saw that there was a post. Curious, I looked: a spam comment.

On a blog that hasn't had a post on it in more than 6 months?

Pathetic.

Not much will be here until I've got more time...

2005-03-15T20:34:00.000Z

Hi -

Work and family is keeping me much too busy to attend to this, but I will have some more time in April to talk about my watches...

John

Been quiet here, I know...

2005-01-30T15:56:00.000Z

Hi all -

Been really quiet here. Been too busy with life.

My grandmother died on Friday. She was 91, slipped away after going into a coma after getting spread too thin.

She was my step-grandmother, I never really knew my "real" grandmother, who died of cancer when I was a kid. I remember being driven in the middle of the night to my grandfather's house when I was probably around 6 or so and waiting what seemed to be forever in the car while my mother was with her mother for the last time.

Jean was my grandfather's second wife. She worked at Field's in Chicago and had an interesting life, but no kids of her own. She and my grandfather were, for the most part, I think pretty happy in being married: however, towards the ends of their lives there were unspoken tensions and unresolved problems between them that certainly didn't help.

I'm not into writing an obituary - there's too much I don't know about her - and just wanted to say how sad it is that we'll never see her again. I will miss her enormously: she was an important part of my grandfather's life, and he was important to me as well. He died on Good Friday of last year at the age of 94.

They were the major reason for us always heading down to New Mexico, to see them. In the last several years it was harder and harder to do so, since they would easily get exhausted if we hung around them too much. So we would go down there, stay a few days and visit them for a few hours a day. They were a long, long way from Germany.

I wish I could have been there more for them. They were in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where they were far, far away from all of the kids and grandkids. They wanted it that way, to a certain extent, but at the same time I think that they would've been pleased to see someone down that way as well. But the jobs down there are far and few between for what I do, and we never really looked at moving down there seriously. We've played with the idea of retiring in New Mexico, but that is still far away, but the state was, I think, good for them.

Grandma, I'll miss ya and you will always be with me. God bless and make some Manhattans for you and Grandpa for the porch. We'll keep an eye out for the hummingbirds and roadrunners out the back door.

John

Back From The Break...And What I'm Doing

2005-01-06T16:26:00.000Z

Hi everyone - if anyone is reading this at all!

Next Tuesday I go back to work. It's gonna be a rough first quarter, with an amount of work I would normally think of doing in about 6 months' time. But it's doable: while you can't program everything in my job, there is a *lot* that you can.

I'm now done with 62% of my tapes.

Huh?

I've got at least 2,200 cassettes that I collected from the years 1980-ca 1997. After 1997 I had simply too much work to do to continue collecting recordings from the radio. But more critically that's when I also started doing other things in my vast spare time besides listen to music, radio plays and the like.

But the 2200 that I've catalogued are worth a lot to me. Not only did they cost quite a bit over the years - probably in excess of $4000 or so - but there's a lot of rare stuff on them, mostly from my first stint in Germany from 1980-1986. I never thought that I'd end up back here at that point in time, so I deliberately set out to capture a historical moment in time based on that premise. I'd say more than 90% of my tapes date from this time period. So I've got a huge interest in keeping them in one way or another: I've already turned my oldest daughter on to groups like the Clash and Sex Pistols with some of these old tapes (and what doesn that say about the youth of today when their parents turn them on to the Clash???).

This sort of collector behavior invariably brings up two questions: What do you do with all those tapes? How do they hold up?

To answer the last first, they held up pretty damn well. Of the some 1,382 tapes I've transferred, only a double handfull ended up well past their expiration date. There are two keys to getting good tapes: a decent tapedeck, one that is fairly well maintained and capable of decent recordings; decent, brand-name tapes is also critical.

Virtually all of the bad tapes were no-name or OEM brandings that were just plain bad, with one exception of a batch of tapes bought in New York from a wholesaler who cut me 100 C-66 tapes for a fairly low price. But this guy sold these kinds of tapes for people making demo tapes, and these weren't supposed to be long-term archive stuff.

And what do you do with all of these tapes? Well, I'm transcribing them as soon as I can. Transcribing means saving an original performance in a different format: many old radio plays, such as my favorite "Johnny Dollar", are called "Transcriptions" and not original recordings. That's 'cause they were designed to be broadcast, not sold as recordings.

Now, the transcription process took me a couple of months to get down right. You need a computer, of course, with sound card and lots and lots of hard drive space. You need to have a tape deck that you then hook up to the sound card inputs, transcribe the original recording in real-time, and then write it to CD-ROM for archival purposes.

This sounds simple, but it's not. I started out with the original tape deck I was using - the 2200+ tapes were in large cardboard archive boxes, sealed in plastic bags loaded with packages of silica gel, and I had room in one of the boxes to put in the tape deck, so I did - but it died after a couple of months. I picked up a decent Harmon-Kardon tape deck, but that wasn't the cats' meow, and I now have two tape decks: a five-deck Sony TC-C5 autoreverse tape deck and a Yamaha K-960 tape deck.

The first is to deal with large volumes of clean tapes. I load this one up with five tapes, set the recording software accordingly, and then can leave for the next 5-8 hourse (depending on the tapes). The second is for much higher-quality recordings, usually classical music, and for all dbx recordings.

The noise reduction system dbx, for those who are curious, was probably the best available and was and remains a part of the professional recording world for its excellent expanders and compressors. You can think of dbx as taking the psychoacustical model in the analog world to an extreme, reducing its impact as much as possible: while Dolby B and C used psychoacustical models to help mask their compression schemes, dbx was a broad-band compander, pushing the analog signal into a relatively narrow bandwidth that fit well into the analog spectrum that cassettes were capable of easily reproducing faithfully. When expanding on playback, the signal-noise-ratio, which was recorded compressed with a 50dB signal-noise-ratio, was expanded to something like 100 dB, which within the analog world was nothing less than spectacular.

Using dbx on cassettes led to amazingly high quality, but, and this is a big but in the analog world, it also meant that if your original wasn't in excellent quality, dbx magnified the problems with the original quality. If you had FM hiss in the background of the recording, it pumped the volume up and down as it adjusted to the recordings levels, making the recording sound lousy.

I had for many years a Technics RS-M233x tape deck that I used to make most of these recordings, and it did a great job. I've even played with the idea of getting one on eBay, where I've seen them for not much money at all, but I ended up getting a better deck, the Yamaha. Got it on eBay for less than $75, but did need to have the belts repaired and a general clean up for another $40 or so.

But I'm getting off topic.

The software I use in Magix Cleaning Lab 2005 deluxe. The deluxe part merely means that the box came with some adapter plugs to hook up the tape decks to the PC soundcard. When recording at 24-bit accuracy, which I do, you end up with something like 1 MB for every second of recording time: you end up with a file well in excess of 1 GB when you record for 90 minutes or so.

So you need real hard drive space. I just added another 80MB to my system and have no less than 400 GB at this point (2 IBM/Hitachi 120 GB, both with 8 MB cache, plus a new Seagate 160GB with 7200RPM/8 MB cache to replace the older 5400 RPM 80 GB IBM that I now have in reserve for use in a future server. Add to that a 40 GB 2.5" Samsung external USB2 drive, and this gives me adequate space to work in. :-)

My system is a Dell 2.5 GHz machine about 2 years old, with an ATI 9500 TX 128 MB Card, 1 GB of RAM and a NEC 1860 NX 18.1" LCD screen. The sound card is a Creative Labs Audigy 2ZX, which allows me 24-bit recording accuracy and just plain sounds great. It's the fourth CL soundcard I've had, and while there well may be others that are great out there, it remains the great all-arounder for those rare times I get around to play Doom 3.

So the tapedeck is hooked up to the soundcard, the system is running the software. Once the recording is done, then I run it through some of the cleaning and mastering programs that Magix offers and edit where necessary: after this process, the transcriptions are converted once again to MP3.

I've now got 227 CDs of MP3 files from my own collection. I'll probably end up with some 366 CDs: once the whole set is done, then I will go through them all once again, review some of the older recordings, and then make sure that everything is fine. At that point I will write a database program to cross-reference and index everything, place it on a 300 GB hard drive, and never, ever, have to wonder how many copies I have of A Night In Tunisia and by whom...

Enough!

John

Break Time

2004-12-23T19:06:00.000Z

Have been a bad boy here, but have three weeks vacation coming up and will try and post something sensible. Mother-in-law is here, kids and wife are doing the tree, and I've got to transfer pix from the Nikon to the PC.

Be back soon...

It's Tedious...

2004-12-08T14:50:00.000Z

I'm home with a lung-sucking bug. Being home is tedious when you really can't do much other than sleep, try and get work done so that you can take vacation when it's scheduled (I have three weeks coming up, but only if I get something sensible out of the door on 17 December: otherwise I'll be eating into vacation time...).

And a hacking cough doesn't help you sleep. Last night I took a long - over an hour - very, very hot bath to try and melt whatever is congealing in my lungs, it helped some. But I feel like sleeping for about three days, but am working instead. Only difference between being here and at work is that I can listen to the radio here at home and wear sweats instead of suit and tie at work. And the hours are nicer, and there isn't any real reason not to take a nap in the afternoon...

John

PS: because of this posting will be light. More after the 17th...

Why Europeans Colonized The World

2004-12-05T16:34:00.000Z

There is a line of argumet that Europeans went out and colonized the world because of a search for riches, because of a desire to spread the word of God, to please King/Queen and country.

In reality, it was to escape the weather. Since Friday evening there's been a thick, icy fog on the ground here that has carpeted everything and has me feeling like there's something growing in my lungs that I'll spend the next week coughing out.

Time to take another look at real estate in New Mexico.

John

Best laid plans...

2004-12-04T09:44:00.000Z

The best laid plans always seem to go wrong. My wife is off with a girlfriend to the wilds of Frankfurt and I've got the girls to watch over, including the almost-15-year old daughter of the wife's girlfriend.

So I planned an early breakfast, then out to the Northwest Center, a shopping mall not too far away, then home for lunch and then to my youngest's play.

What happens? The girls don't want to put a foot outside of the door since it's cold out there (around 0° Celsius) and they don't have any money to shop with.

Never mind that they are already going stir-crazy. I'm going to go off and do the shopping, then come back and work.

The reason that utopias never work is that in reality they are populated with teen-age girls who don't want to do anything but go out and spend someone else's money.

A picture test...

2004-12-03T21:18:00.000Z

2004-12-03T20:36:00.000Z

Recently in London...

Living in Germany

2004-12-01T21:49:00.000Z

Living in Germany has its ups and downs. More often it is downs, rather than ups. One of the ups is the availability of cuban cigars: I have a Cohiba waiting to be smoked, but it was a present rather than a purchase. Don't know when I'll smoke it, since the damn thing costs a small fortune, but at some point I will.

Spent part of the day talking with colleagues about abstruse technical aspects of the job. Stuff that went on in the US five years ago are now appearing here, the lag is sometimes amazing. After work we went to my oldest daughter's recital, she played softly but nicely.

I've got two daughters, 14 and 11. I have two kid sisters, so the girls can't pull too many of the usual teenage girl tricks of sweet talking etc., which annoys them no end. My oldest didn't even want to play at the recital, she can be astonishingly shy. Part of puberty and growing up: I've got more patience there than my wife.

Wish I had more to say, but it's been a long day. I'm trying to find my balance here...

Banking in Germany

2004-11-30T19:18:00.000Z

Had a great conversation today at work. The guy I share an office with is buying a house here in Germany and had to make his down payment today. He transferred money from his money market account and expected it to show up on the same day into his checking account so that he could do a wire transfer for the down payment.

He thought because he had on-line banking that it also meant that his accounts were on-line.

Imagine his surprise when his bank told him it would take at least 4 days to process the transfer. He turned bright red, I could see the veins pulsing on his head and I wondered if I should duck & cover to avoid being splattered when his head exploded due to the massive increase in blood pressure.

Turns out that the bank offers on-line banking, but all that means is that he can access his accounts on-line. Doesn't mean that the bank has actually entered the realm of modern banking, just that he doesn't have to go to the local ATM to see what's in his account.

So instead of being able to complete the transfer in a matter of minutes, which of course any modern bank would be able to, he's gotta expect that bank to take 4 working days to transfer the money out of his money market account, then verify that the money's in his account, then wait another 4 working days to get the down payment out.

Eight working days.

Can you imagine the money that can be made off of that sort of float? We're talking €20k here, not a few Euros. But the bank involved is barely surviving and can't seem to make money at all...

Just another day in Germany...

Greetings and Salutations

2004-11-29T17:37:00.000Z

This is the blog for my alter ego...