Insightful portrait of Tim Duncan on the cusp of his 5th NBA finals (he won his first fours):
Sometimes people will mention the swimming when trying to pinpoint the origin of Duncan’s remarkable discipline and relentless consistency. Duncan swam until he was 14 and seemed on a path toward the Olympics like his sister, Tricia. That was when Hurricane Hugo roared through the Island and wrecked the swimming pool. More, that was the year his mother, Ione, died of cancer. She had been his greatest fan, the loudest cheers at the pool, the voice inside his head. He would talk about the little nursery rhyme that she would repeat to him over and over and over …
Good, better, best Never let it rest Until your good is better And your better is your best
You can’t help but think that if you cut Tim Duncan open, those words would be etched on his heart.
There has never been a basket-ball player so consistent for the whole span of his career (stats per 36 minutes):
1st year - 21 year old, 19.4 points, 11 rebounds, 2.5 assists, 2.4 blocks, 57.7 true shooting %
7th year - 27 year old, 21.9 points, 12.2 rebounds, 3.0 assists, 2.6 blocks, 53.4 true shooting %
17th year - 36 year old, 21.3 points, 11.9 rebounds, 3.2 assists, 3.2, blocks, 55.4 true shooting %
I am rooting for the spurs for these finals! #GoSpursGo
This sunday was held the 2013 edition of Uriage Cabriolet Classic, a large gathering of classic (and more recent) cars.
I am not a connaisseur of cars but I can recognize a beautiful one when I see it. I really enjoy the attention to details of these cars and the love and care of their owners (the engines were all shining!).
This gathering is an opportunity to appreciate all the shapes and colours of cars. Even the most modest cars look fantastic with out of the ordinary colours.
Spoiler: he loves the camera and, unsurprisingly, makes beautiful pictures with it.
I bought his book, The Print and the Process, this week-end. It is a beautifully crafted book composed of 4 sections, Venic, Iceland, Kenya, and Antarctica providing a variety of scenes (it's mostly landscapes and portraits though, it's a David duChemin's book after all :) Each section is composed of a set of 20-30 images without any text that helps appreciate the flow of pictures without any interruption. At the end of each section, there is a text for each images where the author describes what his intent or feeling was when he took the picture.
The book is bound along the short edge in landscape mode. This design makes the beautiful landscape images really stand out.
Beautiful book, gorgeous photos and instructive reading. Heartily recommended.
With the release of the 55-200mm ƒ/3.5-4.8 telephoto lens, the Fuji X system gains enough reach to build a complete system and the announced 56 ƒ/1.2 will make an awesome portrait lens.
Fuji XF Lenses
It's getting harder and harder to resist getting a X-E1...
Last month, my girlfriend offered me for my birthday a cooking class with a chef to make macarons. We already tried several times to make them without much success. The recipe is simple but not forgiving: one has to pay attention to a lot of details to cook macarons that please both the eyes and the palate.
This week-end, we had the cooking class with the chef and made macarons garnis à la pâte d'amandes et au caramel au beurre salé
The chef was friendly and gave us lot of explanation to make the best macarons and we are quite happy with the results. They look good and taste even better!
We heartily recommend anyone in Rhône-Alpes, France who is interested to improve its cooking craftsmanship to take a class with Jean-Luc at http://www.coachculinaire.fr.
I read two interesting articles about the shortcomings of JavaScript callbacks. I played a bit with node.js and I find that the use of callbacks makes the code more convoluted that it could be.
I find Erlang's mailbox approach simpler to understand and read (but I can not warm up to Erlang syntax...).
Promises looks... promising but I'd like to try them out on a pet project to get a better feel on them. In France, we have a saying that said that "promises bind only whose that listen to them", so I prefer to be cautious :)
Awestruct is the static web site generator I use for my Web site.
This 0.5.0 release is a big one which simplifies rendering by using Tilt and provides an Amazon S3 deployer (that I contributed) out of the box among other other features.
I upgraded this morning and it worked like a charm.
