As is the case with baseball, I have intended to learn about photography for a while now. Since upgrading my Olympus E-PL5 with an OM Systems E-M10 Mark IV, and then subsequently finding a new use case for my E-PL5, I’m starting to pay more attention to gear and technique.

The E-PL5 came with a kit lens, an M.Zuiko zoom that shoots from 14mm to 44. I understood that this was some kind of zoom lens, which to a budget-minded buyer dipping a toe into the prosumer world of digital cameras, makes a lot of sense. I had, in short order, added a 17mm Panasonic Lumix 1.7 pancake lens to the E-PL5, and that was pretty much curtains for the kit lens.

For the rare instances when I might need some serious magnification, I purchased a cheap Olympus 40-150mm 1:4–5.6 Zoom Lens.

The kit lens, though, is neat in that you can switch between focal lengths that equal 35mm and 50mm, a lens shooting at which is referred to as a “nifty fifty.” And having researched lenses a bit, the kit lens actually is well regarded. It is, however, plasticky.

I decided to order a used Panasonic LUMIX G 25mm f/1.7 off of eBay in the interest of experimenting with this length. I have nothing but praise for the 17mm wide angle LUMIX, but the temptation of a “nifty fifty,” with its lifelike perspective, was too irresistible to bear.

I forgot to include this pic in last night’s duck post. We grabbed a growler of Bellview’s Demeter Friday. It’s a dry red, blended from their San Marco, Merlot, Chambourcin and Petit Verdot. Paired nicely.

I mentioned OmniOutliner 6 in a recent Sunday Serial. It’s a great Mac app, incredibly powerful if you need it, and a simple outliner if that’s all you need, too. I harbor a great affection for OmniOutliner; it came bundled with my some of my earliest Macs from the heady early days of OS X, and in those days, there was a dearth of software. OmniOutliner was a NeXT app that moved over to the Mac, and will always have a place in my heart–and my SSD.

But this post isn’t about OmniOutliner. It’s about Bike.

Bike launched nearly twenty years after I found OmniOutliner, from the great developerJesse Grosjean, who operates Hog Bay Software. Hog Bay has always made fascinating writing apps: WriteRoom, one of the earliest Markdown writing apps available for both the Mac and iPad, FoldingText, TaskPaper, and most recently, Bike.

Digression Alert: TaskPaper

I have always loved Hog Bay’s TaskPaper, even though I don’t use it. I have a license, because I want this app to thrive. It’s a simple, text-based task manager, and there’s nothing about it I don’t like. My professional life and its attendant needs don’t scale to its parsimony, but that’s not TaskPaper’s fault. It is, in spirit and function, essential–not in the sense that it’s a must-have, but that it’s born of a pure, distilled focus. It could not possibly attract any kind of casual fan base; the person who downloads, uses, and purchases TaskPaper is a rare bird.

What’s beautiful about TaskPaper is what’s beautiful about html: you type plain text, but the interaction you have with what you typed is decidedly–magically– rendered. In the same way that modern Markdown writing applications render your Markdown syntax on the fly, TaskPaper recognizes particular formatting characters, and render the results in a functional way that harness the power of the Mac’s GUI.

Mac Nerds Only

Hog Bay’s wares are pretty much Mac only. You can open most of their file formats on your iPad or iPhone, but it’s not a simple multi-platform affair a la Notes, OmniFocus, or OmniOutliner.

Again, this isn’t so much Hog Bay’s hangup as mine. As I need the complexity of OmniFocus, I want to hop between Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

I do, however, like to imagine myself as the inevitable old duffer I’ll become, with simpler needs than I have now, using TaskPaper for imposing a modicum of order to what will surely be an inordinate amount of farting around.

Bike

Back to Bike! I found myself this week needing to write a summary for our legal counsel, and in a fit of indecision, prevaricated on which text app to write up my thoughts. BBEdit? Notes? Drafts?

And the thought seized me: Hey! Bike!

You can easily cobble together a simple outline in Bike. It tis built for outlining. But it’s a great rich text editor, too, so you can use it that way. It’s less intimidating than an IDE or text editor like BBEdit, but it’s dead simple to use. It’s markdown friendly, but boasts its own file format, which you can render simply by changing the file suffix.

At the office, I tried to format some text, and Bike prompted me to upgrade my license, which had lapsed. I didn’t need to–but I wanted to. I want Bike around. I want it around for a long, long time. Just like TaskPaper.

It’s on sale for Black Friday. Check out Bike!

My process for Sunday Serial involves taking some notes in Ulysses during the week, scanning my “Grist” and “Drafts” collections in said app, and browsing pics I took during the week for content. I was nervous yesterday prepping for this week’s post, because I didn’t have much going on. Fortunately, Saturday and Sunday yielded some fruit, enumerated below for your reading enjoyment.

Need I saw its spritzes and apps before we have some shrimp later on?

Aaron’s coming home Wednesday for Thanksgiving, so we’re both looking forward to that. I imagine I’ll have plenty of grist for next week’s post, and curating today’s left me some future grist for this particular mill. Best to you and thanks for stopping by!

OmniOutliner 6

OmniOutliner version 6 is currently in beta. Like its more famous offspring, OmniFocus, version 6 brings a unified architecture to all of Apple’s platforms. OmniFocus sprang from the venerable outliner, inspired by Ethan Schoonover’s Kinkless GTD. Kinkless was a set of AppleScripts that enabled OmniOutliner mavens a way to automate a GTD-style productivity system. I’ve used OmniOutliner for all kinds of things, and still do. I love the new color-swapped black and orange icon.

Cedar Rose Winery

The ladies in the office were very kind in gifting me a certificate to Cedar Rose, a local winery across town that we haven’t been to yet. Rhonda and I were put off by the gray cold Saturday and Bellview’s lack of torches last week, so we opted to burn up the gift certificate and try something new. Fun fact: when I was at Vineland Public Schools, the winery’s founders participated in an advisory board for an agricultural tech program the district was exploring. They were local high school grads who had gone to school together for agricultural science, and then came back home to found one of the many local burgeoning wineries in the Outer Coastal Plains.

We had their rosé, which is dry and made with a locally common grape, Chambourcin. It’s intensely red compared to our other local favorites, maybe closer to Valenzano’s aspect than, say, Bellview or the Cape May rosés we’ve tried. It’s very good: sturdy, tart, and dry.

I ordered a glass of their orange wine as well; I almost never see orange wines on menus, and notably tried my first (and maybe only) orange wine at the excellent Vetri in Philadelphia. That particular glass was a revelation: a deliciously oxidized glass of wine, with terrific color. This orange wine was a bit too Kombucha for me, on the vinegary side.

Sidebar funny story: my first blush with kombucha came after I stopped at the Target in Marlton after a long afternoon, and I was parched. I saw a green tea kombucha in a bespoke glass bottle and figured it would be delicious. I got in the car, gave the bottle a vigorous shake, ripped off the cap, and took a swig. I nearly spit it right back out. I didn’t expect the light carbonation or the vinegary flavor at all.

Peripheral to this, people at work started drinking kombucha, by choice. I saw all manor of murky brown drinks with suspended mother detritus floating around in it. I even found someone selling gray market mothers in a nearby town. So weird.

Back to Cedar Rose: we also tried their barrel chardonnay, which was one of the two varietals they offered, the other being a lighter, more lemony take. I was surprised by the acidity in this wine as well; it struck me as less buttery than the description suggested. After repeated sips, though, I felt its groove and we both enjoyed it.

We tried a few menu items as well, including the melted brie, which came drizzled with honey and sprinkled with nuts. The dish would be better presented on a larger dish, but it was excellent. We also tried the calamari, which was crunchy and delicious, sprinkled with pickled pepper rings and tartar sauce. I think they should upgrade the sauce to something a little more contemporary, but I don’t have anything against tartar sauce. It just feels a little 70’s-crab shack-with-fishing-nets to me.

We also split the cheesesteak, which is a nice size for one (not too big), but also eminently sharable. It’s topped with fried onions and Cooper Sharp, the darling of the cheesesteak world these days, and comes with a side of their fries, which were the standout surprise of the night. The fries at Cedar Rose are of the exquisitely thin shoestring variety, crunchy yet supple, edible one at a time or by the handful. We will definitely be back soon for the fries. Sorry I didn’t get a pick of the sandwich.

A Kitchen Cleaver

I absolutely endorse the recommendation that you only need one good knife for cooking, kept sharp. I’d say a standard chef’s knife or a Santoku blade are both good choices, the latter especially if you have a mechanical sharpener (you do have a sharpener, right?).

Parsimony aside, I’d recommend a cheap cleaver just for shits and giggles. Compared to the Hencklels chef and Santoku knives I have, it’s a breeze to sharpen and tends to keep its edge longer. It’s a challenge for more detailed work when you need to get leverage on the tip of your blade, but for most things, I wield it just fine. I sliced up some raw breasts using it today for dinner tomorrow (see “Chicken Marinade” below) and it was smooth slicing for sure.

Cook’s Illustrated Chicken Marinade

I subbed our usual chicken marinade, the lime-soy one I posted about a while ago, for this Cook’s Illustrated version. It imparts much less overt flavor, but does kick otherwise delicate breast meat up to a more supple texture and gentle sweet, briny flavor. Fish sauce is just amazing. We’re having them again tomorrow for dinner, and I might marinate Tuesday’s pork chops in the same marinade, too.

Aaron exhumed this before heading off to school. I put a new SD card in it. So tiny.

Fall continues its inexorable march towards winter and the holiday season. We’ll be hosting Thanksgiving and Christmas again this year, which is fun to prep for. Dad is getting some bespoke meats from Pat LaFreida; we’ve had lots of good roasts from him, but this year I think we’ll be trying his turkey as well. We usually just get the freebie turkey from Shop Rite, which I brine, spatchcock, and smoke on the Weber Bullet smoker we’ve been using for probably a decade now. I have to remember to get some smoke wood. I guess that’s my prompt to start a Thanksgiving project in OmniFocus!

So it’s spritzes now with some cheese and cured meats. There’s chicken in a marinade that I’ll be grilling shortly. Be well and thanks for reading.

Garden State Comics Fest at the Vineland Convention Center

That Vineland was hosting the Garden State Comics Fest somehow escaped my notice, but Joey and I rolled over there yesterday. I hated paying $30 a head to get in, but we both wanted to check it out (Joe especially). Aaron would have been keen to attend, but he was on a scavenger hunt with his pledge class in New York City, which is a decidedly more exciting experience for sure. YOLO.

The venue was Vineland’s recently rechristened Convention Center; it used to be an Amish Market, which is a regional trope in my opinion. They can’t possibly be truly Amish, and there are a lot of vendors that are local “English” hawking wares. The market closed in 2015, and has sat unused since. This was the first event to be hosted since it’s been turned into a convention center, and while I’m skeptical of anything downtown maintaining a foothold, I am hopeful that it will. Landis Avenue was once the crown jewel of a thriving city commerce center; it is long, wide, and boasts spacious sidewalk space. It’s a true shame that the downtown hasn’t witnessed the kind of revivals we see in nearby Camden County, but maybe there’s hope.

Joe and I walked around and checked out the vendors: there were lots of comic books, toys, and artsy/craftsy things available for purchase. There were some cosplay enthusiasts prowling around, including a notably awesome Darth Vader. It was small but fun.

Panasonic Lumix G 25mm f/1.7, a “Nifty Fifty” Lens

I took yesterday’s pics with a Panasonic Lumix G 25mm f/1.7 aspherical lens, which I found on eBay. I’m pretty sure I’ll purchase most of my photography lenses etc from eBay from now on; I’m not serious enough to need new gear, and what I’ve gotten so far has been in exemplary condition.

A 25mm micro fourth-thirds lens corresponds to a 50mm full-frame lens. It’s not terribly different from my 20mm Panasonic f/1.7 lens, but enough to look a bit different. 50mm approximates what we see with our eyes, uncorrected, so I thought it would be fun to shoot with. I still get great bokeh with this lens, but with a tighter field of view. So far, so good.

Black Stallion Chardonnay

Rhonda and I went to Five Points for parm and mussels last night, but we faced a 30-minute wait (and we were early diners). We said nah and continued on to another local favorite, the Savoy. While a long wait at one place often presages a long wait at another, we were relieved to be seated immediately. And Tommy’s house is a veal house, which is always a good thing. As an aside, the Savoy has been consistently excellent for a while now.

Anyway, we ordered a bottle of the Raeburn Chardonnay, which we had a glass of the last time we were there; it was recommended by the owner’s son, TJ, as a cost-adjacent but more interesting chard than the two house wines (Carmel Road and I can’t remember the other one). They didn’t have it on the menu, though, so I ordered a bottle of the Veltliner they had on the menu, which I figured we’d get into, since Bellview makes an excellent Grünner Veltliner and we have it from time to time.

The owner, Tommy, appeared within moments with a bottle in hand, and asked us, “Do you trust me?” He asked if we would consider the Black Stallion Chardonnay in his hand, and said of the Veltliner that we’d ordered, that the Austrians only make one wine, and it’s not that good. I pointed out that we had it at Bellview and loved it, but he said it’s different (which makes some sense, since we’re not in Austria). So we tried a sip and nodded our approval. It’s a bright, citrusy take on the varietal, less oaky. It was really good and I plan to shop for it when I need a bottle for a BYOB night. As it stands right now, we have a couple of bottles of Bellview’s rosé in the stash to ride out the lull between batches; they’re supposed to have a new vintage debuting in December, so we’ve a few weeks or so to sit on our hands and wait. I’m hoping they have it on tap again for growler fills.