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From Wednesday’s NYT Minimalist column:

Recipe: Lamb or Chicken in Onion-Yogurt Sauce

Time: 1 1/2 hours

2 tablespoons butter
2 large onions or 4 medium onions, sliced
10 cloves garlic, peeled
Salt
2 teaspoons ground coriander
1 tablespoon minced ginger, or 1 teaspoon dried ginger
10 cardamom pods
1/4 teaspoon cayenne, or to taste
1 cinnamon stick
3 cloves
1 1/2 pounds lamb shoulder or leg, cut into 1- to 1 1/2-inch chunks, or 4 whole chicken legs
2 cups yogurt
2 tablespoons cornstarch
Chopped fresh cilantro leaves for garnish
Cooked basmati rice for serving.

1. Put butter in a large skillet or casserole that can later be covered, and turn heat to medium-high. Add onions, garlic and a large pinch of salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, until onions become very soft and brown, at least 15 minutes. Stir in spices, and cook another minute or so. Add lamb or chicken, and stir.

2. In a bowl, whisk yogurt with cornstarch until smooth. Stir it into mixture; if using chicken, add 1/3 cup water. Bring to a gentle simmer over medium heat, then cover and turn heat to low. Cook at least 40 minutes (by which time chicken will likely be tender) or longer, stirring occasionally, or until lamb is quite tender. Taste and adjust seasoning, then garnish with cilantro, and serve with basmati rice.

Yield: 4 servings.

The lessons from this recipe: long-cooked onions give a lot of flavor and color, and, while yogurt tends to break up when cooking, you can mitigate this by whiskingi n some cornstarch and reducing the temperature.

I’ve been getting a lot of comments spam in the past few days trying to improve the pagerank of some online pharmacy. Firewall rules haven’t been that effective, since these appear to be sent by robots running on zombied machines across a number of IP nets. Turning on moderation was also not particularly effective, in the sense that the robots are already running and aimed at my site, and I don’t want to wade through all the comments moderation email.

The best thing I could think of was a captcha, which requires an extra field entry before the comment can be approved. The font is actually a bit hard to read, even for humans, though. The hack was found at Gudlyf’s World, after a pointer at a general WordPress anti-spam page. The only modifications had to do with how authimage.php was being referenced, i.e., a URL path issue.

My site isn’t sufficiently interesting to go through the effort, but I recalled reading a few months ago that captcha techniques had already been circumvented, or at least defeated in theory. Basically, spammers have harnessed the power of porn on the Internet to defeat captcha. Ingenious. Evil, but ingenious: it’s a simple idea, obvious when you hear about it, that defeats any sort of captcha performed on the Net. A further implication, I’m sure that’s already been brought up elsewhere, is that, for certain puposes, the Internet can be considered a cyborg, a mixture of organic and machine. As a cyborg, the Internet displays sufficient (collective, human) intelligence to pass Turing tests, or exhibit encyclopedic knowledge about obscure technical questions, like the capabilties of an IBM Selectric, circa 1972. The trick is to be able to harness this potential.

A couple of weeks ago, I was stuck in the queue at Sam’s Club waiting for new tires for the Honda. The mechanic told me it’d take a couple of hours before they’d even get to my car, so I might as well go out and get some food (it was around noon) and come back a bit later. Not wanting to wander too far way, I just went back to the main Sam’s Club warehouse and did some shopping for cleaning supplies and other miscellaneous items, going up and down each and every aisle in the store. Still with time to kill, I wandered over to the book section and picked up The DaVinci Code because it was the only thing interesting enough for me to pay money for.

This wasn’t a particularly good book, especially at the beginning, though it did start to get rolling towards a somewhat predictable unmasking of the bad guy somewhere in the second half of the book, after the hard to digest chunk of exposition in the middle. I had similar feelings a decade ago after reading The Alienist by Caleb Carr after it had been hanging around the bestsellers list for some indeterminant amount of time: why was everyone talking about this book? The DaVinci Code featured less than interesting prose sprinkled with some puzzlers, but nothing too remarkable. There’s a mediocre X-Files vibe to the whole thing, what with the skeptical female sidekick that needs convincing, the learned-in-esoteria male lead, the conspiracies that should be obvious to any that would look. The only difference is that these were old conspiracies and mysteries, not modern paranoia of shadow government projects and men in black.

While in the Sam’s Club waiting room, as I started leafing through the first few pages of the book, and older Russian woman who was waiting with her son for a battery change saw what I was reading and started talking to me about it. Her accent was thick and her English wasn’t fluent, but I think she seemed to think that it was mostly real. A number of amateurs and professionals have gone through some effort to debunk some of Brown’s statements in the book, but Brown’s apparent efforts to present the book as containing truth has apparently been more powerful.

It’s also not clear to me how good a Grail story The DaVinci Code is: I don’t know how modern anthropology regards Jessie Weston’s From Ritual To Romance nowadays, but that actually was a more interesting (and plausible) exploration of the Grail Legend to me, describing how it was an amalgam of Christianity and pagan folklore and the whole wounded land/wounded king fable. Interestingly, Brown’s book omits Grail Legend elements like the Fisher King and the Gawain/Percival/Galahad figures. Didn’t fit, I guess.

I finally got around to getting new tires for the Civic. I used Sam’s Club, which had relatively inexpensive tires and installation charges, and wound up with Goodyear Regatta 2 tires, as these seemed to be most appropriate, given what Sam’s Club had in stock for this car. Everything is running much more smoothly now: the semi-polygonal tire (distorted from running for a while with bad alignment) is gone, and there’s no longer a big vibration coming up through the steering wheel.

Sam’s Club service isn’t bad, though I got stuck behind five people in the queue and spent more than 90 minutes wandering through the warehouse store after I signed in. The tire replacement itself was $9/tire, and took well under an hour. The mechanic, when signing me off, told me that they will do a free rebalance after 7000 miles. Current mileage is around 67K miles, so more or less 2 oil changes from now.

The mechanic did find that the driver’s side rear wheel was a little bent, though not severely. It just has to be take care of. A new steel wheel for this car is $30 + about $11 shipping from tirerack.com. Note that the tirerack.com website will take you to all sorts of expensive bling-bling wheels if you just go to the “wheels” selection in the Products menu. You have to go to “winter” products, then “build” your own winter wheel package to be able to find plain steel wheels. I’ll have to see how much the Honda dealership charges (the nearest one is across the street from the Toyota from which we’re buying a new Matrix XR, which will hopefully be in next week), but there’s no big rush, and after I have it, I can pop over to Sam’s Club again and have them put it in and balance it for $9.

A follow-up to the mail server upgrade from a few weeks ago, and we’ve wound up upgrading Sendmail and Cyrus to the FC3pre versions (8.13.1 and 2.2.6, respective). These simple upgrades didn’t fix things, but I think the following did:

The mail server at work had a few intermittent issues which I suspect is due to the way we had Sendmail and Cyrus communicating with each other and checking for existing user accounts, so as to do an immediate REJECT on old or fake addresses, and prevent delayed bounce messages.

I’m not sure what the exact problem was, but I think we were seeing two things, though they may have the same underlying cause. The most obvious thing was the messages stuck in queue after processing by milter and before delivery to LMTP. It was obvious because it happened fairly frequently, so we could see it easily with a ps. Interestingly, the Sendmail queue serial numbers on the vast majority of these were consecutive: two or three consecutive messages would get stuck.

The less obvious thing we were seeing was hung SMTP connections that seemed to be stuck before milter, when Sendmail was checking for account existence by querying LDAP. This happened less frequently, and was masked by our quick-and-dirty remedy for the first thing, which was a hard restart of all sendmail processes. This less obvious problem became apparent when we shifted to doing kills on the individual from-queue sendmail processes, and we observed the stuck SMTP processes and correlate these to netstat output and see that they were stuck with open LDAP sessions, presumably just after the RCPT line in SMTP communications. Milter isn’t hit at this point, as the DATA portion of SMTP hasn’t started.

The change we did for the fix was a configuration change in the way Sendmail and Cyrus communicated the existence of user mailboxes. Such communication was necessary to avoid delayed bounces of unknown users, which got us into Spamcop a few months ago. Until the most recent Sendmail upgrade last week (when we rolled 8.13 from FC3pre), we could not do a direct query of Cyrus and had to rely on indirect means/procedure, where Sendmail would query passwd/PAM (which then talked to LDAP). The assumption was that only legitimate accounts — those found in LDAP — should have deliverable mailboxes. Sendmail 8.13 allows SOCKETMAP as a compilation option, though we had to do our own build of sendmail to turn on the new feature and use hacked/contributed m4 maps to make it work. SOCKETMAP allows direct communications with non-standard mail spools such as Cyrus, so Sendmail did not have to (implicitly) check with a third source for account information.

Sendmail had been shipping a Cyrus V2 mailer definition m4 map as part of the standard distribution since 8.12, but our old mailer definition (carried over from Cyrus 1.x days) didn’t have any problems until now. At the time, using the old mailer definition also allowed us to deal with the delayed bounce problem, because we could see where we had to put in the flag to have the mailer check passwd/PAM before accepting the message. I’m not sure how easily we could have implemented this check if we had been running the packaged m4 map with the older mail server: as usual, a one-character change in the *.mc file may result in all sorts of changes in the *.cf file after m4 processes everything. So, while we may have been able to change to the packaged mailer definition earlier, we may have opened ourselves up to the delayed bounce problem again.

Real-time integration was done according to http://anfi.homeunix.net/sendmail/rtcyrus2.html, which is referenced off the Cyrus wiki.

The following tasks were performed for the integration:

1. sendmail-8.13.1 was rebuilt to support SOCKETMAP: in the sendmail.spec file, the following was added: APPENDDEF(`confENVDEF’, `-DSOCKETMAP’)dnl. The form used was along the lines of how the spec file turned on and off other compile-time options.

2. /etc/cyrus.conf was modified to tell Cyrus master to start the socket map daemon, smmapd, and master was HUPed to reload the configuration file. FC2 (or maybe FC3pre) Cyrus 2.2 supports smmap out of the box.

3. The new sendmail-8.13 packages were installed.

4. /usr/share/sendmail-cf/m4/proto.m4 was patched according to http://anfi.homeunix.net/sendmail/mrs.html. Note that the patch file referenced on the page must be applied by hand, as it was written for the sendmail distributed proto.m4 file, not the Fedora modified one. I may get around to rolling a new sendmail RPM where these changes were put in at build time.

5. The LUSER_RELAY option was followed in http://anfi.homeunix.net/sendmail/rtcyrus2.html as it seemed the least disruptive. Note that following these instructions, we are now running with a version of the Sendmail Cyrus V2 mailer definition, as opposed to the Cyrus mailer definition we carried over from 1.6.x days (which was removed from the sendmail.mc file). Note also that the mailer definition didn’t seem to be responding to DEFINE directives in sendmail.mc and was pointing sendmail to the wrong location for the LMTP socket. This was fixed by editing the /usr/share/sendmail-cf/mailer/cyrusv2.m4 file directly and building the *.mc file afterwards.

6. sendmail was tested using “sendmail -C test.cf -d60.5 -bv user@the.domain”. We have a dummy user that exists in Cyrus and we observed the mailbox check sequence was proceeding correctly. After this was working, sendmail was started up.

tail -1000 /var/log/maillog|grep verify shows the verification messages for unknown mailboxes.

In any case, the system seems to be working much better now. We’re not observing stuck from queue messages, and we don’t see any jobs with held open SMTP communications at the RCPT stage.

Nine Innings From Ground Zero is HBO’s new documentary on baseball in the weeks following 9/11, where this game fulfilled some of its brilliant promise — “they’ll watch the game and it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters…. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again.” — even in our city’s and nation’s dark hour. It’s a wonderful documentary. Watching it, I remembered some things I had forgotten: Jeter’s flip to Posada to stop the A’s and turn the tide, and the consecutive miracles at Yankee Stadium during the Series, possibly the greatest pair of games played, if only because the city’s emotional burden rested on the Yankees shoulders, and they came through in such dramatic fashion. I remember staying up late to watch these long games, and not regretting the lack of sleep at all. I don’t think I learned anything I didn’t already know when watching Nine Innings, but it re-emphasized the lesson that life will go on, that we would still play baseball in the fall even in the shadow of war.

During Game 7 of the World Series, we were in Massachusetts for a wedding rehersal dinner, and I really, desperately needed to hear what was happening. On the way to the hotel-restaurant, I picked up a cheap little radio and hoped for reception, with the darkness of the dining hall hiding the earbuds. But the dinner ended before the game ended, and there was a TV in the restaurant’s bar where various guests dropped in to get a new drink and lingered for a while: the Yankees took the lead, Mo was on the mound, and this fairy tale of the team from New York winning the Series in the year of 9/11 looked like it was going to come true.

But in the end, we come back to the cliches of baseball and life: baseball and life aren’t fair, not always, and miracles can’t keep happening or they wouldn’t be miracles. The font that ran so freely in Games 4 and 5 ran dry, and disaster for Mo came suddenly and out of nowhere. In the end, I think I just sighed — oh, well, wait till next year, three in a row is enough — because I couldn’t be crushingly disappointed by the results, not after the gifts the Yankees gave the city throughout the postseason. And that was enough: life goes on, and baseball is still played in the fall.

It had to happen sooner or later, so I guess my third class was going to be it. The instructor, after the class was doing shomenuchi iriminage, said that we were going to do the technique again with different partners, but tori should try to not clobber uke’s throat with his arm on the takedown: aikido is about harmony and blending with uke, and who would want to go to class if they were going to get clobbered every time? She was looking vaguely in my direction when saying all this.

On the plus side, she complimented me after class on how well I was following lead when she was demonstrating technique for me or my partner. I apparently move fairly lightly. She still wants my rolls to be different though: for their forward rolls, the arm is more rounded, with the hand pointed back towards yourself instead of out in the direction of the roll, palm flat on the mat. The shoulder/torso is also twisted into the direction of the roll somewhat. I’m told this will work better for the higher energy throws. They must think our rolls are as horrible and clunky as we think the judo ones look, with the judoka’s lower leg pounding into the mat. Of course, I haven’t been injured with our ukemi, and the big judo throws seem to have more energy than the aikido techniques I’ve seen.

I generally recognize all the techniques I’ve seen (though I haven’t seen their more advanced classes), though there’s a lot more circularity and taking uke along for a ride along these circles compared to jujitsu. For example, their tenkan is done with the leg describing a fairly wide circle, instead of an almost linear movement to switch to the other hanmi and power the hip turn. Tsuki kotegaeshi also has tori spinning around a point (with uke moving in a much larger circle), as opposed to the fairly-linear-yet-adorned-with-small-circles movement we do for the same technique (uke also doesn’t need to breakfall out of the kotegaeshi since he’s allowed to follow in such a way as to almost slide into the fall when the lock is applied, at least in the version they’re showing). Arms are also held relatively high, over the head in many cases, with shihonage and the various entries against shomenuchi. We also did katana-nage, but tori was more static on the throw, and wasn’t shown to be moving body weight through uke to force an awkward roll (tori was recommened to be on his heels, in fact, though no one really corrected me for the katana-nage I was doing).

Uke’s movements on the techniques are also more prescribed. It’s not just a cross-hand wrist grab: it’s the wrist grab followed by an attempt by uke to get around tori’s back and grab the other wrist from behind. Or it’s the wrist grab followed by an attempt to get around tori and get a mug/choke. Or the first grab is followed by an attempt to grab the second wrist while tori is turning. A lot of these techniques seem to be based on uke moving in particular ways, where the movement is used to supply energy for the throw. I suppose a lot of this is to try to illustrate blending to the beginners — uke moves this way, so tori does this to match the movement — but I got a bit confused by this, since we tend not to do the second phase of the attack because we can’t assume what will happen next, and uke doesn’t really get a chance to once the technique starts.

One of the initial problems I’m having is to know what are aikido techniques and what are aiki-style jujitsu techniques. In my first class, at the end, we were paired up to do a few minutes of back and forth straight punches (“New Student, how fast should I go with my attack?” “Whatever.” Surprised/skeptical look.), and for the most part I did what I saw in the class. Towards the end, however, I did a technique I didn’t see, but was what I thought was an aiki technique (Hitch in along the punch, inside hand on the crook of uke’s elbow, snap the hips and drop. This was in fact similar to a technique that was demonstrated earlier, but tori does the full tenkan turn before pulling uke into that same off-balance point and dropping.), and the black belt I was working with was very surprised, saying “That’s not aikido. It worked, but that’s not aikido.” I know I’m not supposed to, say, do a judo throw on uke’s shomenuchi (though they do a version of o-goshi, although I’m not clear on how uke is moved to get to the point of doing o goshi) or go in for, say, shime-waza (which may be too horrifying for words, given the lecture after the first round of iriminage), but which of jujitsu techniques are allowed? They have nikkyo for lapel grab, but nikkyo seems to be applied tori gets uke moving in circles for a bit, as opposed to a relatively direct application. At what point does one put on the lock?

Interestingly, they’re doing a bunch of tests next Saturday. This should be good to watch. I’m under the impression that the senseis will call out a technique — the technique names describe what both uke and tori are doing — and that’s the technique. There might be more freedom in the higher belt tests, where just the attack seemed to be called. At the end of last night’s class, sensei had two of the test takers demonstrate as if for a test. One was more or less a raw white belt testing for, I guess, rokyu. The other wore a hakama with a brown belt underneath, possibly testing for nikyu since she started off with suwariwaza before the standup techniques. The one with the hakama also had to do a pretty relaxed two-man randori: after each takedown, she had time to lock up uke, with the other uke waiting around for her to finish instead of trying to whack her on the back of the head. There were a number of other techniques, or sets of techniques, though I don’t remember that well. I actually got called up to uke for this, since the sensei thought my ukemi was perfectly fine for this even though it was my first class with her as instructor (“Uh, just follow what the other guy does.”). It was some sort of lapel grab (kata dori?), ending in a projection after running around tori for a bit. Whee!

Update: I forgot to mention that the head instructor was perceptively amusing. After I mentioned that I had just moved to Cleveland after three-and-a-half years of jujitsu in New York, he thought about it for a moment and said, So we’re your second choice because you couldn’t find jujitsu here?

To reiterate: we are near the beginning of a decades-long conflict that must end with the entrenchment of liberalism and liberal ideas in the Islamic parts of the world. Such a cultural shift will span presidencies and generations, but is the only way we can address the root causes of apocalyptic terrorism. We must make apocalyptic terrorism unthinkable, not in the sense that it is too horrible to contemplate — because it plainly is comfortably contemplated by a significant segment of Islamic society — but in the sense that it never comes to mind as a reasonable course of action. The cult of death that has taken hold so many people, of which Al Qaeda is merely its most powerful manfestation, must be destroyed and replaced by liberal ideas of tolerance, respect for others and the rule of law. Remember that “freedom for others is safety for ourselves.”

And at the start of the fourth year that America faced that fact that it is at war, where are we? War in Afghanistan that drove out the Taliban, depriving Al Qaeda of direct access to state resources. War in Iraq, which I feel was necessary as a first step to the liberalization of the Middle East and was prudent given the knowledge of the time, though I’m unsure of timing (but will accept if changing the timing prevents the overthrow of Saddam). A difficult occupation in Iraq: though going better than the quagmire pundits would have us believe, it is still a long-term national project to introduce the notion of liberal society to post-totalitarian states. Large-scale terrorism from Indonesia to Madrid to Moscow, each of which would have rated among the worst terrorist attacks in history only a few years past, which showed this disease had metastized a long time ago. But there have been no new attacks in America, in part through luck, in part because the intensity of our response took Al Qaeda by surprise.

The most distressing thing has been that Paul Berman’s analysis of liberalism’s reaction to terrorism seems to be more correct than not. This political season, at least from the point of view of someone watching the RNC protests in New York, has been dominated by the fringes, most loudly by the leftist fringe who don’t seem to realize that there’s a war on, who are more afraid of Ascroft than bin Laden, who apparently believe that America is the source of all evil flowing through the world. Even the mainstream left seems to have lost its way: shortly after Beslan, I heard NPR’s commentator dance around the word “terrorism” and refuse to call the people, who deliberately targeted children and shot them in their backs as they ran, by the proper label of “murderers”. What has happened to liberalism and the left to become so bloodless, to not call murderers by their name?

A long time ago, I had thought the Republicans had been driven into insanity by Clinton’s successes and apparent invulnerability to there attacks and insinuations in the 1990s. How times have changed: the Democrats are now far beyond the borders of sanity now. How else to explain the paranoia and self-destruction they’ve found themselves in for the past few years? The recent spat over the forged — obviously forged — Bush Guard Documents have been the height of insanity: someone on the left created these documents, and 60 Minutes, apparently hot for a masterstroke to destroy Bush and locked firmly in a “Bush is a liar” mindset, ignored obvious problems with the document to broadcast it nationally. What are Democrats thinking? At least some are aware of the damage this can cause the party.

The beginning of this Year Four coincides with the height of the American political season, and I don’t know who to vote for. Oh, if Lieberman had been a candidate, it would have made it easy for me, but there was no chance of that: I feel that Democratic primary voters are more interested in “electability” than in thinking about the larger war, who apparently think that this larger war is an invention of Karl Rove. On the other hand, I feel that Rumsfeld should have been fired for the post-Saddam planning, and for Abu Ghraib, which has arguably damaged the reconstruction as anything else that has happened in Iraq. I feel Bush has failed to articulate the overall strategy of liberalization in a useful manner, and may not be able to because he’s been tarnished by arguably unfair characterizations. But I feel that he believes that there is a war going on, though some of his advisors may not. And I believe a Kerry Administration will consider the war as a police or prosecutorial matter, not as a war of ideas and a priority for national efforts. Foreign policy and national security trumps domestic issues for me right now: we’re not badly off, and a lot of the unresolved things will fix themselves over time.

So we’ll wait and see what happens in the coming year.

While half the city has apparently fled the circus around the convention or is joining in the protests, I took a long walk up Broadway in a sort of farewell to this city. Up from the Battery and South Ferry, past Chinatown, past Union Square and Madison Square before the protestors had started to gather, on past Herald Square and Times Square and the looming glass mountain at Columbus Circle, past my home IRT stations at 72nd and 79th. Up through Morningside Heights and Harlem and slowly up Washington Heights and into Inwood, until I saw water again, rushing through the Harlem River Ship Channel separating Manhattan island from Marble Hill and under the Broadway Bridge. All this time, I was taking a picture each block, more or less. I have 254 pictures from just north of South Ferry to the final view of the water in the Ship Channel. Manhattan is around 13.5 miles long, though I’m not sure how long Broadway is in Manhattan. The total time was about seven-and-a-half hours, with time for snacks and lunch at Caffe Swish near Columbia.

(Yes, this is apparently similar to a trip taken by Rosencrans Baldwin last year, but I had a camera, and stuck to Broadway without too many sidetrips, and had a better bathroom break strategy.)

The pictures aren’t particularly exciting: lots of pavements, lots of buildings from uninteresting angles (i.e., just kitty corner across the street). This didn’t turn out to be art photography, and I used the D70 mainly because it had much, much more storage capacity than any other camera I have handy: there will be blown out highlights and murky shadow details that I haven’t fixed in post-processing. Make of them what you will.

I mainly stuck to the eastern side of the street, for sun reasons (better light, and to get out of the sun), deviating a few times to get around the police barricades at the Federal buildings downtown and around construction. Most the shots are pointed up Broadway: I missed a lot of good shots looking down the street, such as the Flatiron and Woolworth Buildings, which was a pity. Maybe a decade from now, I’ll do a walking-down-Broadway photo tour. The great mistake, though, was not taking a picture of the waters of New York Harbor lapping against the rocks of the Battery Park shoreline. This series could then have been bookended by water.

I started at around 7:20 when I got off the IRT at South Ferry and walked up State Street, bordering Battery Park, to get to the foot of Broadway, and then continued up from there (pic #1). I hit Canal Street at 7:50 (pic #29) and north Union Square (pic #53) by 8:20. My schedule was to get past the protest zone before stuff started, though I did see the news people setting up their crane for the overhead shot of any crowd that comes marching down Broadway, and there was a group of protestors carrying red flags that stopped in the nearby Starbuck’s for a latte. I followed them in for a snack and restroom break.

Resuming about half an hour later, I got to Times Square (pic #83) by 9:20 and Columbus Circle (#96) by 9:45, where I stopped at the Whole Foods Jamba Juice for another drink — it was going to be a hot day. I got to 77th Street (#116) at around 10:30 and stopped at home to check email. 96th Street (#135) , a bit past the half way mark, was at 11:10, and Columbia (#155) was around 11:30, where I stopped for lunch. There are a lot more restaurants and coffee places at the main campus: in the early 1990s, the only place to get coffee and sit was the Hungarian Pastry Shop. No more.

Harlem and Washington Heights in the early afternoon were lively with street life. There were a lot of street vendors hawking all sorts of goods, and a lot of fruit stands with cleverly sliced up mangos and pineapples on skewers for snacking. Interestingly, at 144th Street (#181, around 12:45), a trio of Chinooks flew past, going north along the Hudson. They make a different sound from the smaller police helicopters that hover over the city. Presumably, these Convention-related flights. Cheney just arrived at this time? Interestingly, while Manhattan south of, say, Columbia’s main campus was rife with little anti-Bush stickers and signs and protestors going to the neighborhood subway station to go downtown, I didn’t see many (any?) north of 125th Street. Up around 176th Street (#212), there was in fact a large pro-Bush banner.

I got up to Columbia Presbyterian (#201) at around 1:15 and stopped at Carrot Top for some ice coffee and a yummy muffin. I got to 181st (#217) at 2PM, and realized I’m more familiar with Ft. Washington than Broadway at that street, that Ft. Washington was over a bit to my left. Around here, Broadway curves so that the afternoon sun is on my back, and there’s no shade on the east side of the street. I’m tempted to cross to the west side and take pictures from there, but decide to tough it out.

Somewhere around 190th Street (#225), the numbered grid disappears and I went up Broadway crossing named streets, wondering how much further I had to go. They reappeared after some ten or fifteen blocks. I popped into the 207th Street IND station (#241) to take a look at the detailed MTA neighborhood map to see that it wasn’t far now. The 207th Street station has amusing mosaic work: “At Last… The End.” I believe the A line, which terminates there, has the longest run of all the subway lines, finishing in far-off Far Rockaway. The mosaic’s message and encouragement was appropriate for my little trip, too: I was almost at the tip of the island.

I passed 215th Street (#247), where the IRT is once again an el, and which would be last stop for the 1 on Manhattan Island. A few blocks up from there is Baker Field (#249), which I never visited while I was at Columbia and was now seeing for the first time. A few blocks past the stadium, underneath the el tracks, Broadway and 9th Avenue cross each other again. 9th Avenue (#252) is the last street before the Broadway Bridge and the waters of the Channel. It was about 2:50PM now. After admiring the swirling waters a bit, I made my way back to the 215th Street station to take the train home (what I should have done is go to the Marble Hill Station, which was closer, and technically still a part of Manhattan county, which would have been a more complete final waypoint; Marble Hill Station was visible just past the bridge, and I foolishly turned south instead of north).

That’s basically it. I wish the pictures were better. But, still, it’s a set of photos that stretch from the temples of finance to the seedier parts of town, with bright, colorful, chaotic city life along the way.

On Sunday, the Cleveland Clinic alumni’s association sponsored its annual boat cruise for residents and fellows. This was aboard the Goodtime III, a dining/cruise boat that goes around the Cleveland/Lake Erie waterfront, and up the Cuyahoga River to just past the Tower City Center area. We didn’t actually know anyone — the Clinic has hundreds of residents — so it was a time to take pictures, eat, sit back and watch the scenery.

There was also a B-25 buzzing around the lakefront, apparently taking off from Burke field, possibly giving tours. I was able to get off a few quick shots as it flew by. The engines are very loud on this plane. We were also moored a few hundred feet from the end of the runway, near the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

I was actually surprised that we entered the river: the boat seemed too large to do that, but it was apparently no problem. Also we found out that the draw bridges still moved: the river is still a working river, and the bridges are working bridges. We, in fact, waited at the mouth of the river for some fifteen minutes for a train to arrive and pass, before the bridge could be raised to let us through. On the way back out the river and into the lake, we waited for two trains to pass, and we saw a large lake freighter being tugged up the river past us.

Here are the photos:

This was also a chance to try out the 50mm f/1.8D lens on the D70. Reasonable results: I was able to continue shooting much longer than if I had only the kit lens: it’s how picture #50 (_DSC0070.JPG) came out, with the family standing at the end of the breakwater, waving at passing ships. The fixed focal length was a little bit annoying for composition reasons, mainly because we were on a boat and couldn’t control where we were standing relative to the subject, but being able to shoot for an extra hour was worth it. I did like how #40 (_DSC0052.JPG) came out with the kit lens, though.

The last photo in the set was my playing around with the GIMP (yes, I’m too cheap to pay for PhotoShop, especially when there is a free alternative and I don’t have the skill to take advantage of any differences between the two) on a relatively noisy photo (ISO 1600 after nightfall on a moving boat). You now, take advantage of noise/grain and all that. It would have helped if I saw this tutorial first. Maybe I should pick up books on this program. The first three shots were an attempt at a panorama, but I realized that I didn’t have the tools or the skills for this. Anyway, the shots weren’t off a tripod, so the angles are going to be wrong.