The Civic Type R has 20-inch wheels!?

One my biggest pet-peeves when it comes to modern automobiles is the needlessly enormous wheels that comes standard in cars, performance-oriented or otherwise. Why in the world does the new Honda Civic Type-R require 20-inch wheels? The car’s 235/30R/20 tires are practically rubber-bands, and surely the wheels themselves would explode at the first moment it passes over a modern city pothole.  

I’m old enough to remember 18-inch wheels were the gold-standard in performance cars, whilst any wheel sized 20 and above where the domain of automobiles frequently purveyed by rap stars and sports figures. I understand completely that having a thin-sidewall tires mean less flex and sharper turn-in, but automaker’s have got to balance that with the realities of contemporary road conditions, otherwise the car’s ride would be horrendous. A Ferrari road-car that seldom sees the road? Sure, give it the biggest wheel with the skinniest tire as you please, but not in a mass-produced hot-hatch like the aforementioned Civic Type R. 

If my ND Miata can offer the most sports-car purity this side of the wallet to a Porsche Cayman, all the while running on positively tiny 16-inch wheels shod in 195/50R16 spec tires, then there’s simple no excuse for other brands. 

Except there is, and I found it when I saw a base Jaguar F-Pace SUV running on base-model 18-inch wheels: it looked horrendously tiny. The reason automakers put unnecessarily large wheels on cars is the design dictates it! Engineering probably had no choice but to comply with design dictum even though deep down I’m sure engineers know how absurd it is. Colin Chapman would. 

I eagerly await someone to put some aftermarket RAYS wheels in 18-inch sizing on the Civic Type R. My guess it’d save many kilograms of weight (stock wheels are nearly 30 pounds each), but from a visual standpoint, likely lopsided and top-heavy. Blame the designers. 

Dunkirk is a masterpiece

Finally got to see Dunkirk earlier this evening, in IMAX of course, and the film is a cinematic masterpiece. Just the visuals alone is worth the price of admission. Director of Photography Hoyte van Hoytema is an absolute master in framing and light manipulation (handheld IMAX camera shots!). Add that to on-location filming in actual Dunkirk with Hans Zimmer’s heart-thumping score, it was as if I was watching a war documentary in VR, which is to say, utterly immersive. 

And (spoiler) to end the film with a narration of Winston Churchill's famous speech! Ah, so brilliant. As a sort of history-buff, it brought a smile to my face. 

Christopher Nolan does well indeed to interweave a story, hitting specific marks and rhythms to draw the emotion out of the audience. A more linear storyline would not have had the same amounts of gravity and impact. Nolan isn’t performing a show of history lesson per-se, but rather he is placing you in the drama, shaking and shattering your senses. Dunkirk in its entirety is as if the total chaos of Saving Private Ryan’s opening Normandy sequence was the whole of the film. 

You are utterly short-changing yourself if you don't see Dunkirk in proper 70MM IMAX film projection. It's the only medium acceptable for such a spectacle, to see the ideal that Nolan had in mind. People speak of heading to the theatre for the cinematic experience; watching films shot with an IMAX camera in a proper IMAX theatre is that epitome. 

RIP Chester Bennington

Chester Bennington, melodic front-man of legendary band Linkin Park, committed suicide. 

I haven’t been this crushed over a celebrity death since Robin Williams’ unfortunate passing, and in such similar way that Robin also couldn’t handle the weight of the world and had to kill himself, it’s just immensely sad. The only good thought I can possibly conjure up is that I wish Chester found the peace he sought. 

As Robin’s death ripped away a piece of my childhood, Chester’s untimely passing achieved the same miserable result. Linkin Park’s music got me through much of my teenage years, through all the angst, frustration, and confusion. The lyrics Chester belted was the figurative chicken soup to my teenage soul. No memory for me was more vivid than listening to ‘In the End’ repeatedly on September 11th, 2001, because on that morning I was cloistered in a middle school classroom with 30 other kids, confused as to why the World Trade Center is burning. 

Rest in peace, star.  

Why is Adobe Lightroom so slow?

Adobe Lightroom is one of worse applications in terms of proper usage of computational resources. I’ve recently upgraded to the latest 5K iMac, quite the snazzy with ‘Kaby Lake’ Intel Core i5 processors and AMD Radeon 500 series graphics, which one would think should chew through Lightroom tasks with surgical ease. 

Completely not the case.

Lightroom ran the same on my new 2017 iMac as it did on the 2014 Mac Mini it replaced(!), which is to say, inadequately slow. It’s unacceptable for a company like Adobe to be putting out products like this (Premier Pro users on the Mac platform should understand my pain), wholly unable to utilize the computational reserves to the maximum. How on earth can there still be agonizing lag when applying sharpening to my Sony A7R2 RAW files when the iMac’s got 40 gigabytes of memory and the fastest consumer flash storage yet available?

And it isn’t like I can simply switch to another editing platform. Apple has long abandoned it’s once glorious Aperture app, and my blood isn’t rich enough for Capture one. At least Adobe has recently (finally) acknowledge the utter slowness of Lightroom and is supposedly working hard to remedy the situation in future releases. 

Perhaps late this year, Adobe? Pretty please?  

Wanderlusting

Right, I've largely recovered from my brief cold, so it's just a matter of getting back into the regularly scheduled programming. Not having worked out at all the entire week has left me with palpable withdrawal symptoms. Looking forward to a hardy run round the lake this Sunday. 

Been posting lots of pictures from my venture up north a couple of week ago, and they will only keep on rolling as I edit them. I'm really happy with the photographs, and post-processing them in the newly acquired Lightroom 5 has been an absolutely joy. The sort of manipulations possible in that program is practically cheating. 

Also, I've been wanderlusting pretty bad post that trip. Sometimes you just want to get up and go, to see new things. Everyday I'm setting the foundation to allow me to do exactly that, so am fervently looking forward to the next opportunity. Got a few trips lined up for June and August, though always on the lookout to add more dates. 

Climate control is awesome

In what was a tremendous Mother's Day weekend for me got bookended by a terrible case of the sore throat sickness. Obviously, it hasn't been much fun these couple of days. It's definitely passing out though so hopefully I'll be alright by the latter half of this week. 

Temperature has returned to the 90s here in San Francisco once again, which can only be described as torture. At least its forecasted that during the nighttime the mercury will come back down to sane levels, so at the very least I don't have to lie in my own sweat just to get a decent sleep going. Because you're delirious if you think we got air-con here in San Francisco. 

Air-con in the car though, is very nice indeed. Who cares if it degrades my car's already horrendous gas mileage. First world solution to nature's problem, yo. I bet there's a huge subset of people who couldn't care less about climate change because they're so used to man-made climate control in cars, building, and homes. 

Get your face off the phone

It used to not bother me at all, but lately I've been rather miffed when I'm amongst company and people are constantly on their mobile phones. I understand the need to check whether or not a message is important, verify a scoring alert for your favorite sports team, or looking up something on the web the relates to the topic at hand - otherwise, you really shouldn't be on your phone.

Speak; have a genuine conversation. 

That bad habit is made even more glaring when you see one friend who's never had a smartphone before and only recently (finally) transitioned to one. Yup, unfortunately, he has also joined the cult of screen staring. It's a virus.

Of course, I've been guilty about this too. These days I'm really trying to make a conscientious effort to not have my mobile strapped to my face when I'm hanging out with other people. 

Weird-Al is a legend. That parody of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines", turning it into a song about proper grammar usage, is absolutely genius. I'm certainly not the staunchest of grammar nazis but I do appreciate well-constructed sentences that are free from blemishes. 

Plans to go to the Ramen Festival in Japan-town this past weekend were a bust. The festival was beyond crowded, and reportedly it took a good three hours of waiting in line before one gets the opportunity to savor a bowl of noodles. While I like to think I've more patience than most, waiting multiple hours for what ultimately boils to food just doesn't seem right to me. I don't care how awesome that specialized bowl of ramen is - there's but a finite amount of hours in a day. 

Besides, the San Francisco Bay Area has no shortage of ramen restaurants. Now that I think about it, not sure why there was a need for a ramen festival at all. At the very least, organizers should procure a (much) bigger venue next time.