March 2010 – beeby.org

Brompton US Championship

I participated in last weekend’s Brompton U.S. Championship in Philadelphia’s Fairmont Park. The race was only six miles long, but it was brutally hilly and unseasonably warm.

In a tongue-in-cheek nod to the Brompton as a commuter bike, all participants are required to wear business attire during the ride (coat, tie, collared shirt, and helmet). The event begins with a Le Mans Start where each racer runs to his/her bike, unfolds it, and pedals across the start line. My buddy Ted was first out of the gate and I was four riders behind him much of the time. He finished 10th overall and I came in 12th (in a field of approximately 60).

Tons of photos are available here.

If you own a Brompton and this event is offered in 2011, it comes highly recommended. The event went smoothly and was a lot of fun.

Epson R-D1s

Body pictured with 15mm f4.5 Voigtlander & finder and Jupter 3 (50mm f1.5), Jupiter 11 (135mm f4.0), and Jupiter 12 (35mm f2.8) lenses.

There are many good things to be said about youth (not just that it’s wasted on the young), but there’s also something to be said for growing older. At 40, I’ve become the recipient of a long-awaited, but well-timed gift: an Epson R-D1s. Craig’s list brought me a body and lens that were well used, but well cared for and they will continue to be. I’ve been able pair it with a number of old Russian lenses that I collected during my Peace Corps days and the results are very pleasing.

I won’t try to review the camera (that’s been done very well here), but I will second one complaint I’ve read about inaccurate framing lines. Other problems I’ve had with the camera are due to “user error” (it’s so hard to remember to focus and set apertures in this world of full-auto digital SLRs and P&S cameras), which I hope will be remedied over time. Regardless, a couple of missed/soft-focused shots are worth it from a camera that’s such a pleasure to use.

Public shots that I’ve taken with the camera will appear here.

A Post About Classical Music and Blog Syndication

There are a number of blogging solutions at Columbia (CUIT and Pressible both offer personal blogs and CCNMTL offers course blogs via EdBlogs). One interesting use is to have students’ personal blogs (like this one) feed into several course blogs via a tag. As an example, I’m feeding this post into this fictitious Music Humanities site via the tag “humaw1123”.

Now, to satisfy the other element in this post’s title, since I don’t have much interesting to say about classical music, I’ll simply mention a CD that I’ve liked for a long time: Schubert: Impromptus, Moments Musicaux perfromed by Ethella Chuprik. This CD was originally released on Naxos in 1995 (?) and if it were vinyl I would have worn it out. If you’re on Columbia’s campus, please feel free to give it a listen.