Salad days

In some respects I regard Greek Salad as just a means and excuse for shovelling kalamata olives and feta cheese into my maw. That is not to say that the salad is not good in its own right, but I could (and have) shamelessly make a meal of the cheese and olives.

Pictured here is the base salad, made almost exclusively from ingredients from the farmers' market or our own garden. Obviously the olives and cheese are not local, but I will convince myself that they are organic and ethically-sourced. As you can see, I am not big on lettuce when it comes to my Greek salads. This one includes a red onion, sweet white onion, green peppers, a couple of hot peppers from our garden, a few fresh tomatoes, a cucumber from our garden and then a generous helping of olives and feta cheese.

The dressing is a red-wine/wine vinegar and olive oil base with garlic, dijon, and some lemon and sweet basil from the garden. I brought some of it to work for lunch today, and I am happy to report that it tastes just as good as it looks in the picture (take that as you will).


We've been going to the farmers' market for years, and we have seen groundcherries for sale every year at about this time, but we finally decided to try them this weekend. When you peel away the paper husk, there is what looks like a tiny cherry tomato inside, but much sweeter. I brought a few in my lunch today, but I think that I will bring a few fewer tomorrow. They are nice, but almost too sweet in large quantities.


Somebody posted a list to Reddit today of all the bad behaviour he saw at EFNW this year. I slapped his wrist over it, asking what he was hoping to accomplish by posting such a list other than arming the media and blind siding the convention staff. He responded that he was trying to "raise awareness." Well, everyone is aware now, but I'm not sure what the hell he expects us to do about it.

Also, it is starting to look like the list of grievances are unsubstantiated accusations posted on the tumblr of a girl who was a) not at the con, and b) has a personal axe to grind with some of the con staff.

Camera geekery

I am still mulling over the idea of getting a new lens for my older DSLR - though in fairness, "still mulling" refers to a subject that I only broached just over a week ago.

I decided to go with dakhun's suggestion, and I put together a histogram of how often I use various focal lengths. I parsed through ~10,000 pictures, figuring that would be a decent sample size to establish some trends.

The first thing I did was eliminate 18mm, 50mm, and 200mm. I took out the two extremes because in the heat of the moment, I tend to turn the lens to the extremes (zoom right in, or right out) with the intention of fixing/cropping the picture later if needed. I took out 50mm because I already have a fixed 50mm lens, so the sample had a very strong bias.

When I removed those numbers, noticed some interesting trends in the graph.

- I definitely favour the wider focal lengths over the narrower ranges, with >45% of my shots coming in <48mm, and the other 55% spaced out with increasing rarity up to 170mm, then nothing at all between there and 199mm. I guess if 170mm doesn't cut it then I tend to just zoom in all the way.

- There are definite data spikes in the around 24mm, 70mm and 100mm.

On first glance, it looked like I would probably be better served by a more expensive 24mm lens, but I've worked around data long enough not to fooled by the pretty spikes on the chart. I plotted out a trend curve to see where the majority of my shots were happening, and the peak rose fairly quickly to about the 30mm point and then slid away slowly as it worked toward the narrower ranges.

Based on the numbers, I would probably get decent use from either a 24mm or a 35mm lens, since they both fall in the curve.

My gut feel is that if I got a 24mm lens, it might not see a lot of use. Even though I factored out the extremes from my sample, the fact remains that in the majority of cases, once I zoom out as far as 24mm, I typically just zoom the rest of the way out to 18mm. A lot of the settings in the 20+ range were from me backing off a bit because at the widest setting, the filters encroach on the picture, causing vignetting around the corners.

On the other hand, I fear that if I get a 35mm lens, then my 50mm lens will start gathering dust. In retrospect the 35mm lens is probalby the one that I should have bought instead of the 50mm, but it was twice the price, and money was tight at the time because atara was going to school.

Also, is 35mm enough of a difference from 50mm to be worth the price? I wonder if the camera shop would let me borrow a 35mm lens for a few days to that I could try them both out and see if I think it's different enough to be worth considering...