The Sweet Setup I
October 11, 2019
Typhoon Hagibis throwing all sorts of ‘bows these days…
We were steadily making our way home when ANA announced the cancellation of all flights in and out of Tokyo on Saturday due to Typhoon Hagibis1 - just in time for us to get stuck in LA for at least 36 hours.
While we do love California dearly, after three full weeks of travel (and one more to go next week) we were pretty beat, so rather than trying to sneak out to Manhatten Beach or some other spot to catch some sun, we decided to just camp out in our hotel room and try to drill through our looming backlog of work.
Fortunately, this being a more urban-oriented work trip, we had most of our sweet setup with us:
- Apple 15” Macbook Pro2
- Roost laptop stand
- Apple Magic keyboard + Mouse
- B&O x Rimowa H9i earphones.
- iPhone 11 Pro (taking the photo with that sweet ultra-wide camera3)
- Evergoods Civic Panel Loader 24 (in grey, natch)
The hotel room certainly isn’t anything to write home about, but at least we’re getting some work done.
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Truthfully, Japan (Tokyo in particular) has a tendency to overreact to weather occurrences such as so-called snowstorms and hurricanes. Every time there is a hint of a small bit of snow or hurricane headed towards the capital everyone freaks out and endless airtime is devoted to doom-and-gloom-naysaying fear mongering predictions of death and darkness4, only for it to almost-always result in naught but gentle dustings of snow or gentle sprinkles that evaporate overnight. Unforutnately, earlier this year Chiba got smacked hard by a typhoon that knocked out power to entire swaths of the prefecture for weeks due to some unfortunately downed powerlines and that is undoubtedly informing some of the hubub this time around. To be fair, it was kind of crazy to see they still had tends of thousands of households in Kanto, one of the most heavily urbanised areas of the world, without power weeks after the previous typhoon hit, so perhaps some caution this time around is warranted… ↩
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Normally we carry the much lighter 12” retina macbook, but this time around we had a fair amount of heavy lifting to do work-wise, so we made the decision to haul around the big boi… It turned out to be the right decision, actually. ↩
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We don’t shoot much ultrawide stuff anymore these days (LR telling us that the most used lens by far in our arsenal over the past 4 years has been various 85mm f/1.2s or 1.4s) but having this sweet sweet ultra-wide perspective on our phones reminds us of the first “real” lens we ever bought for our first DSLR (oh Canon Kiss…) back in the day, the EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 and how we would run around Tokyo just drinking in the entirety of all the beautiful blue skies and jutting soaring concrete at 16mm… ↩
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Accompanied by the requisite b-roll of poor anchors sent out in full gortex waterproofs + silly helmets to stand in the middle of towns as the rain pours down and proclaim how dangerous everything is as school kids and townsfolk walk calmly through the 1cm of water to get to the convenience store in the background. ↩
