The Latest — Steve Block

The Latest

  • Christmas beers are bottled and ready

    I brewed beer twice in the past few months. I wanted beers to share with family and friends this Christmas. One is meant to be a warming and flavorful high gravity beer and the other a tasty session beer. I settled on brewing a robust porter for the former, and an ESB[1] for the latter.

    These were the first two original recipes I developed. Previously I was brewing either extract-based kits or all-grain recipes developed by others. I developed these recipes myself based on the BJCP guidelines and a few published recipes for style-leading examples I knew.

    The ESB is based on a Northern Brewer recipe, notes on ESBs in general, and some recipes people shared on forums. It uses the Fuller’s yeast strain. The porter is based on Dry Dock‘s Urca Vanilla porter (without the vanilla) and a different English yeast strain. The porter has some Belgian Special B malt and some chocolate malt (for raisin and chocolate flavors, respectively), which contribute to a high finishing gravity. This should be perceived as a thicker, more fully bodied taste. I’m actually a little outside the guidelines on finishing gravity but I decided that’s OK.

    I bottled these beers over the Thanksgiving weekend. The process went smoothly, but as always it was frustrating and somewhat messy. There may be ways around this but I haven’t found them. Kegging seems obvious but that requires more space than I have right now.

    I took my final gravity readings and calculated the apparent alcohol and nutrition content of each beer. I also tasted the samples, which even when warm and flat give some hint of the final beer.

    ESB

    StyleExtra Special BitterBJCP Reference
    Calories (12 oz)170N/A
    IBUs (bitterness)4430 — 50
    Color (SRM)8.3 (pale brown)6 — 18
    ABV5.5%4.6% — 6.2%
    OG1.0521.048 — 1.060
    FG1.0101.010 — 1.016

    Robust Porter

    StyleRobust PorterBJCP Reference
    Calories (12 oz)220N/A
    IBUs (bitterness)4925 — 50
    Color (SRM)27 (deep brown)22 — 35
    ABV6.4%4.8% — 6.5%
    OG1.0671.048 — 1.065
    FG1.0181.012 — 1.016

    The ESB was very clean, with a strong bitter flavor but not a lot of hop aroma. My last hop additions (at flameout) should impart some aroma but I’ll have to wait until the bottles carbonate and I try one to know for sure. Otherwise since it is an ESB it should be bitter in flavor but have less of a hoppy nose than an IPA. Once this carbonates I think it will be if not very good at least a pleasant session beer.

    The porter on the other hand was full flavored, and although it has a decent amount of bitterness in the recipe the malt flavors show through more strongly. The chocolate malt is quite noticable. The relatively high alcohol level is also noticable. The beer at bottling time still had very minor yeasty hints in the smell, but I’ve had this before and they settled out with carbonation and chilling. Hopefully that will happen here as well. I have a feeling that the porter will taste good, but may not reach peak flavor until a few months of bottle conditioning, as even with over a month in the secondary fermenter it still had a bit of an edge. Again, we’ll see. I won’t know until early December how the final result will be, and I didn’t want to wait to post this.

    I’m really looking forward to sharing these beers with my friends and family next month. And now it’s time to develop and brew a new recipe.

    — Steve

    1. Extra Special Bitter, a stronger version of an english Premium/Best Bitter↩︎

  • Lightroom and Fuji X-Trans sensor raw files

    Adobe, I need your help.

    I finally decided which of the new breed of mirrorless cameras to buy. I’ve been looking for almost a year, and since April I’ve rented and tested four of the most interesting mirrorless cameras on the market: the Sony NEX-7, Fujifilm X100, Fujifilm X-Pro1, and Olympus OM-D E-M5. The choice was difficult but I finally settled on the X-Pro1’s recently announced little brother, the X-E1, which shares the sensor, lenses, and processor of the larger camera.

    I came to this decision after a couple of nights spent taking a hard look at the photographs from each of these cameras. While I liked the results from the Sony and Olympus cameras a lot, the results I got from the Fuji X-Pro1 were the best to my eye. It doesn’t hurt that Fuji has the best lens roadmap of the bunch.

    But the Fuji camera also has a crippling flaw. Although Adobe Lightroom can technically read raw frames from the X-Pro1, it does a terrible job.

    This wasn’t immediately apparent when I started working on photos from the X-Pro1. They looked excellent, with great color and image quality. But after a trip up Mount Evans that included a lot of rocks and foliage with fine detail and small patterns, I noticed a very strange look to the images at full pixel resolution. The best words I could come up with were “painted” and “smeary”.

    This can be clearly seen in the full-size crop of a recent shot. The rocks look smooth and angular, like Bob Ross painted them with careful strokes of a knife; not at all real at this scale. At smaller sizes you can’t see this, but for large viewing or printing it is very apparent.

    The JPEGs out of the camera didn’t exhibit this. They show some smoothing but nothing like what Adobe is producing. It is not some inherent problem with the camera or the sensor layout.

    Since I mostly shoot raw, and rely on Lightroom for my photo management and raw processing, this is a real problem.

    It starts with the unusual layout of the Fuji’s sensor. The X-Pro1 and X-E1 don’t use a simple Bayer pattern sensor which almost every single digital camera on the market uses. Instead, Fuji went with a highly modified sensor layout they called X-Trans. The reasoning and concept behind this make sense on the surface, but the end result of this unusual array is that most raw processors, including Adobe’s, suck at demosaicing the data. If they even support it at all. The well tested Bayer algorithms don’t work, and developing new ones for this sensor is apparently a hard problem involving more difficult math.

    Several raw processors have even stated they won’t support the camera at all, or that it will be hard to do so and they have no timeline. I understand that they want to support more the common cameras first, but if selling raw processors is your business then it is also your business to support unusual cameras in addition to the common ones.

    Adobe, probably the leader in the raw photo software world with Adobe Camera Raw and Adobe Lightroom, does support the X-Pro1 (and will presumably support the X-E1), but it does not do so well.

    I decided to buy the X-E1 anyways, but this problem bothered me. Was this going to stop me from being able to get the most out of this camera? Should I give up on the camera I wanted because the software had trouble with the hardware? The JPEGs are so good that in the short-term I can use them, no problem. But there are some photographs, like the example I’m using here, that really need the extra data in the raw file to get the best final result. In weirdly lit cases like this I need all the extra headroom I can get.

    Lightroom did a fine job with the scene and with recovering the blown highlights (not shown in these crops), but it did a poor job at resolving fine detail. What about Fuji’s processor?

    Fuji supplies a raw file converter with an engine based on SilkyPix, a japanese raw processing studio that makes very little sense to me. The translations are really bad, and the interface is confusing. But Fuji worked with SilkyPix up to the release of the X-Pro1 so that it would be able to process the raw files, and is generally considered the reference raw processor for this camera.

    It’s much more difficult to use than Lightroom. I wouldn’t want this converter to be my permanent solution, but it works. I processed the same photo using the Fuji converter and tried to duplicate most of the processing settings from my original work to get a similar look. I didn’t spend much time matching them perfectly, but the comparison is telling. Adobe’s processor (shown above) is failing to retain fine detail and introducing false colors.

    The results are easier to see at higher magnifications. Here are 2x crops from Lightroom, SilkyPix, and out of the camera, in that order.

    So, as discussed, Lightroom really struggles here. The result is smooth but it definitely does not look realistic. The SilkyPix conversion on the other hand looks like actual rocks. It also clearly resolves more detail from the same input data. But the software is a pain to use.

    This gives me hope though, because turning a raw file into an image is basically a math problem. If one developer can solve that problem then so can another. But it does mean that right now Lightroom is basically useless for the camera I just ordered. And that’s really too bad.

    For now the plan is to keep using Lightroom, but only for basic photo management. I’ll shoot raw+jpeg, and use the jpegs for most things. I’ll process individual raw files in the SilkyPix converter when I need to get the most out of the data, but otherwise mostly just hold onto the raw files in the hope of some future Lightroom update where they fix the processing problem.

    It’s definitely not ideal, and I wonder if I’m just getting myself into trouble by not choosing a more conventional camera. But find me a more conventional camera this size, with lenses this good, actual traditional controls, and image quality this high for a price like this[1].

    Adobe, I need your help. Bribe Fuji if you have to. Charge me for an update. Buy SilkyPix and steal their processing engine. Just get this working.

    — Steve

    1. I did get a picture of the same rock face from a similar position with my older Olympus E-410 and an equivalent focal length lens. I was a little farther away, but it definitely resolves less detail than the newer Fuji, and has more noise.↩︎

  • Racking the porter and preparing for an ESB

    There is a lot of brewery action happening here in Denver this weekend. The dunkelweizen I bottled 2 weeks ago is ready to drink, and appears to have turned out very well. Good carbonation and great head retention, with the right color and a very nice flavor. I’m quite happy with my first wheat beer.

    Meanwhile, I racked the robust porter I brewed 3 weeks ago to its secondary fermenter, and I’m preparing to brew an all-grain ESB tomorrow.

    The ESB is a recipe I developed based on the BJCP style guidelines and suggestions from Ray Daniels’s Designing Great Beers. I’m again going with a 50/50 mix of 2-row pale malt and Maris Otter, with about 7% of 40L caramel malt and 5% Munich malt for color.

    I made the yeast starter this afternoon; this is the first time I get to use my stir plate from Stir Starters

    Recipe (90 minute boil):

    Malt

    • 4.75 lbs Rahr 2-row
    • 4.75 lbs Crisp Maris Otter
    • 0.75 lbs Breiss 2-row caramel malt 40L
    • 0.5 lbs Weyermann Munich I

    Hops

    • 1.00 oz East Kent Goldings 5.7%, first wort
    • 1.00 oz East Kent Goldings 5.7%, 60 min
    • 0.50 oz Fuggles 4.4%, 15 min
    • 0.50 oz Fugges 4.4%, 0 min

    Yeast

    • White Labs WLP002 English Ale Yeast
    • 1 L yeast starter with 75 gm of DME

    Mash

    • Infusion: 16 quarts at 170F
    • Mash out: 11 quarts at 200F
    • Sparge: 11.6 quarts at 170F

    — Steve

  • Trying to commit to riding to work

    OK, I’m the first to admit my timing is poor. We’re well into fall now and winter is fast approaching. Although the days are nice, the mornings are cold, and the sun sets earlier every day.

    An early October start

    Last week was the start. I made it 4 days that week, and the only day I didn’t ride was a day when I had an after-work commitment.

    It felt good, and the weather was so nice, especially in the afternoons. On most mornings I took my old Trek 610 road bike, but on Friday I took the fixed gear I converted from an old Schwinn World Sport instead. It’s such a lovely bike to ride; it’s smooth and quiet and the drivetrain has such a direct feel. The only problem is I’m not very graceful. I tend to fall off at stops. You could be kind and say I jump off instead but that would be going a bit far.

    This week I have been negligent[1] but I see nothing stopping me on the next two days, and I plan to ride both.

    Equipment for the cold

    The first thing I learned was that even when the day will be over 70 degrees, the October morning before the sun is over the horizon is too cold for bare fingers and ears.

    I have a nice thin wool cap I got for Christmas, and a quick twist of my helmet’s fitting dial makes up the size difference. My fingers were slightly more difficult. I ended up buying a pair of full-fingered gloves with an optional lobster claw cover. They’re just about warm enough for a 30-35 degree morning, and with the cover on they’re too warm for 50.

    Otherwise I can still easily ride in shorts as long as my torso is warm. A sweatshirt works fine.

    Recording speed and distance

    My bike computer died a while back, and I’ve been putting off replacing it. Eventually I decided that rather than go with a dedicated cycling unit I’d rather use a GPS so I can easily record tracklogs and see where I’ve been.

    My old GPS worked, but had a bike mount so terrible that I broke two within a year and spent the rest of the time with a cobbled-together monstrosity. I wasn’t going to stick with it. Instead I picked up a new Garmin eTrex 30 and two of its simpler, cheaper, and better bike mounts. I now have solid low-profile mounts on the stems of both my bikes and a GPS that when attached is a neutral color and relatively unobtrusive.

    The display is easy to read in sunlight, though a little hard to see in early morning light when the unit is still in “night mode”. I have full street maps and a detailed map of the Denver bike trail system loaded on the unit.

    Keeping it up

    Like every other time I’ve tried to do this, the hard part is establishing the habit. As long as there isn’t snow and ice on the trails I can ride all winter, but the strength of my willpower is uncertain. I could have weeks like this one, where I make excuses but get back on. Or it could be much worse, and I ride for 2-3 weeks before giving up entirely until the next time. Wish me luck.

    — Steve

    1. I had guests on Monday morning and after I saw them off I was in a hurry to get to work. On Tuesday I was running late for a call, and this morning it was cold and very windy. Weak, I know.↩︎

  • A Robust Porter for Christmas

    I spent a while thinking about what to brew for the holidays. I’m in a big debate with myself now on whether to drive back to Iowa for Christmas or to fly, and I’m leaning towards driving. If I do I want to bring a nice warming winter beer with me. A porter seemed like the right style for Christmas.

    I made this recipe up myself, based on the style notes for a robust porter and the grain and hops schedules for several porter kits. I took a little from several places and then on a whim swapped out a big chunk of the base malt for Maris Otter malt instead.

    Recipe

    Malt

    • 5.5 lbs Rahr 2-row
    • 5.5 lbs Maris Otter
    • 1.0 lbs Simpson’s medium crystal
    • 0.5 lbs Belgian Special B
    • 0.5 lbs Breiss 6-row chocolate

    Hops

    • 0.80 oz Willamette 7.5%, 60 min
    • 0.80 oz Cascade 8.0%, 30 min
    • 1.00 oz Mt Hood 5.7%, 10 min
    • 0.20 oz Willamette 7.5%, 10 min
    • 0.20 oz Cascade 8.0%, 10 min

    Yeast

    • Wyeast 1098 British Ale in a yeast starter

    Mash

    • Infusion: 23.4 quarts 169 F
    • Sparge: 11.5 quarts 170 F

    Yeast

    I made yeast starter on Saturday September 29. I used the standard starter guide: 700 mL of water, boiled, 1/2 cup dry malt extract, 15 minute boil, cool, and pitch. Swirled by hand a few times through the night. The yeast itself had a strong smell, I don’t know if that’s particular to Wyeast 1098. It was pretty flocculant, and I had a nice yeast layer on the bottom of the flask before starting the brew.

    Mashing

    I started the brew process around 9:30 am by preheating the mash tun with hot water and heating the mash water to 170 F.

    To keep my sparge volume below 12 quarts (a limitation of my available pots) I used a water to grain ratio of 1.80 qt/lb, with a target mash temperature of 152 F

    Mash-in was at 10:15 am. I waited 5 minutes for the temperature to stabilize, then took a reading. The temperature of the mash at the center of the tun was about 153-154 F. At the edge of the tun it was closer to 149 F. At 40 minutes the temperature was still at 152 F in the center of the mash tun. The temperature was above 150 F at the end of the hour long mash.

    I stirred the mash at 20 and 40 minutes, and at 60 minutes the mash was stirred again, allowed to settle, and then recirculated and drained starting at 11:30 am. I had to recirculate about 4 quarts of wort before it ran clear. I finished the sparge at 12:20 pm.

    Once that was complete I started the boil. The mash and sparge water calculations from iBrewMaster were good, and I had what appeared to be just the right amount of wort come out. I extracted a sample to measure the boil gravity.

    Boil

    The starting boil gravity was 1.056.

    Because I’m constantly worried about having too little beer at the end of the process I added a little water to the boil along the way to keep the volume up. I worried about diluting the final result, and in the end I did have about a quart more clean wort than I needed, but it doesn’t seem to have harmed anything. Assuming a 70% mash efficiency the calculator I used estimated an OG of around 1.060, but experience with my setup shows I either get higher efficiencies than that or my hydrometer is wrong.

    I ended up adding the remaining Willamette and Cascade hops at the 10 minute mark just to use them. They weren’t in the original plan but the packages were 1 ounce each. This may add another 4 or 5 IBUs to the beer, but it should still be within the style guidelines.

    Measurements and fermentation

    The measured original gravity was 1.066 at 78 F (1.067 at 68 F). That’s higher than expected. I think I get better yields from my system than my current set of calculators estimates. I’ll have to adjust my mash profiles. It might be prudent to check my hydrometer as well. If it’s reading high then the rest of my calculations are wrong.

    Style: Robust Porter
    Type: All Grain
    Boil Size: 6.73 Gal
    Batch Size: 5.00 Gal
    Calories: 210
    IBU’s: 47.59
    Color: 27.1 SRM

    Right now the calendar estimates this beer will be ready to drink in mid December, perfect for Christmas.

    — Steve

  • Keeping a journal

    Over the years I have tried repeatedly to keep a journal of my daily life. I may never be Samuel Pepys, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t value in capturing my thoughts, even though they never leave my possession.

    I used to consider this website a journal, and I guess in a way it still is. However, it is no longer a place for my unedited daily thoughts. I want to be more measured here instead.

    But I still feel a need for a place to hold those raw thoughts. I’ve tried several paper journals; for a while in Moleskine notebooks, later in Field Notes books. These worked, but had the distinct disadvantages of needing to be at hand, and needing a pen.

    The Moleskine was simply too large to expect to have on me at all times. The Field Notes were better, as they are the perfect size for a back pocket, but I still would forget them, and eventually the books themselves succumbed to the stress of living in my back pocket. Frankly I’m amazed my wallet survives.

    And though there was a real, visceral satisfaction of pulling out an actual, physical paper journal and writing down my thoughts while getting coffee, or a beer, in reality that was mostly posing: the thoughts were important, but the action was just as important.

    After my last set of Field Notes started to fall apart from constant carrying I stopped writing entirely for a while.

    Salvation, of a sort, came about a month ago when Day One released an update to their iOS and Mac OS X journaling app. I had heard of Day One before, but not actually considered its worth in my daily life.

    But even though I’d given up on carrying the Moleskine and a fancy pen, I hadn’t given up on journaling the day to day of my life. It is just too valuable to me to know what I was thinking in days, months, and years past.

    I’ve been using Day One for nearly a month, and have written at least one thing all but two days since I started. It is present on my iMac, iPhone, and iPad, and the reminders I have set mean I never am short of a notice to write something about my life down. Because it is almost entirely meant for me, there is no pressure about censorship or dishonestly. I am the audience, and I want to tell myself the truth.

    Because it is on my iPhone, it is with me everywhere I go, and is durable enough to stand up to daily abuse in my pockets. Truthfully it changes things to know my journal is always available and the only thing stopping me from writing is my own inhibition. If I can set that aside then I can capture my thoughts.

    I love being able to capture photos along with those thoughts, and I’m impressed by the elegance with which those photos are shown. iCloud synchronization of everything is a lovely bonus.

    My own workflow varies. Sometimes I write long entries on the Mac or iPad while sitting at a desk. Sometimes I’m on the go and I write shorter notes on my iPhone, and then I often include a picture taken with the iPhone camera. Often on iOS I capture text using Drafts at first, sending it off to Day One when my thoughts have been appropriately fleshed out.

    I’m writing this to invite any readers and friends who also use a Mac or iOS to purchase Day One and to start recording their own lives. It’s rewarding. You may not be as pretty or notable writing on your phone as in a lovely paper journal with a fancy Japanese pen, but you’ll be able to read it later. And in more than one place.

    My own next steps include transcribing my handwritten journals into Day One so they are preserved.

    Writing is never in vain, even if never shared.

    — Steve

  • Morning on Mount Evans

    I woke up very early this morning and drove up Mount Evans to watch the sun rise. I had the summit of mountain to myself for a while. I’m already feeling tired but it was worth it.

    — Steve

  • A longish bike ride

    I took my bike down to the south side of town today and got what I think is the longest bike ride of the year in. Of course, that’s only 32 miles. I haven’t even done a half century in about 5 years. I’ll have to do something about that.

    For now though, I’m just trying to get more riding done in general.

    I like riding that portion of the Cherry Creek Trail. It’s relatively quiet (though busier on a Saturday than weekdays) and the entire ride away from the trailhead is essentially uphill. It’s not steep, but you work a lot harder getting away than coming back. It means that if I’m starting to feel tired I don’t have to worry too much, because the ride home is mostly downhill.

    — Steve

  • A collection of old photos

    I’m an avid amateur photographer. I held out against digital photography for a long time after it was obvious to everyone else that it was the future. And although I long since gave in to the inevitable[1], I took thousands of photographs on film over the years.

    The Man at burning man

    Many were shared, in one form or another. Some I printed in the darkroom at Iowa State. Some I printed at home. Others were scanned and uploaded to the internet. For a while I was diligent about creating online photo galleries for each roll I developed.

    Bridge in central park in autumn

    A few weeks ago I bought a new domain name, retrofocus.co. I wasn’t sure why, but it sounded good. A day later I had the idea to share some of my old photographs.

    A view of the Rhine river from high up

    I have nearly 300 pictures selected and ready to publish, and I’m planning to publish one every day or two. I have more film that was never scanned, and I should be able to keep this up for a year or more.

    Give it a look.

    — Steve

    1. I can certainly get high quality photographs more easily and more consistently with my digital SLR, and I can make good prints. But some ineffable magic is missing. I can’t explain it.↩︎

  • Markup languages for writing

    When I started writing for the web several years ago, content management systems didn’t commonly include WYSIWYG editors. Typically I wrote posts in standard HTML, and the editors at best had automatic insertion of paragraph tags and javascript buttons to insert text styling cues such as bold and italics.

    I was never a fan of mixing HTML tags with my text while writing. I felt like they were too verbose and mostly got in the way of the writing process. But they were a necessary evil, so I lived with them.

    The first foray into structured markup

    Eventually I learned about two markup languages, Textile and Markdown, designed to make writing for the web a more natural process. They had many similarities, and both were cleaner than writing plain HTML. I spent a while looking over the documentation for both, and eventually settled on using Textile for my web writing. It seemed straightforward and I think I preferred the visual unambiguity of the language.

    I used Textile for a long time in my web writing, and got pretty used to it. Eventually though the editor in WordPress, my blogging platform at the time, became “good enough”, and I stopped writing in plain text and started trusting the CMS to handle things. For a long time after this I didn’t use any markup languages. Web writing was done in a WYSIWYG editor in WordPress, and notes were taken in unstructured plain text in Notational Velocity or in basic Microsoft Word documents.

    Coming back to text

    Over the last year or two, though, I’ve moved away from WordPress, reduced the amount of unstructured text I write, and become sick of MS Word. The proliferation of “distraction free” writing environments on Mac OS X and iOS caught my attention, and I started taking a lot of notes on my iPhone.

    It started to seem obvious that plain text files were the way to go, at least for the writing process itself. It reminded me of my days using LaTeX. A plain text file could be edited anywhere by almost any program, and could act as a sort of “source code” for the written word. It also seemed obvious that some kind of organizational structure for the text documents was needed.

    But unlike my first foray into this space, I no longer saw a choice between two viable candidates. I went straight to Markdown like it was the right answer all along.

    Choosing a language the second time around

    I’ve been thinking about why I chose Markdown over Textile, or reStructuredText or LaTeX for that matter. I think it came down to a few basics that added up to such a compelling choice that the decision seemed obvious.

    1. Simplicity of the syntax
    2. Readability of a formatted document
    3. Lack of a specific “intent” of the document’s final presentation format (HTML, PDF, etc) baked into the syntax
    4. Wide support in text editing environments
    5. Wide support for conversion

    LaTeX was my first real exposure to writing in structured plain text. It’s a good writing format which largely stays out of the way, but has always felt like its native output intent was the printed page (usually via a PDF). It also feels intended for complex and heavily referenced academic documents.

    Because of this a typical LaTeX document has a large preamble filled with document setup boilerplate code. LaTeX is fantastic for large reports, but never felt like the right format for shorter less formal documents. The right format for writing should have no required boilerplate to begin or end the document.

    reStructuredText is closer to the mark, but I felt like it was still a little too formal for writing. It seemed like more of a documentation writing format than I was looking for, and the plain text source never felt easy enough to read to me.

    Textile was the language I had used in the past, but in reviewing it now I realize that it was probably the wrong choice. While easy to read, it is very much a language intended for conversion to HTML. It uses HTML concepts for most of its tags, and mostly just simplifies the syntax to the point that there are not distracting HTML tags everywhere. Paragraphs are marked, where needed, by p.. Block quotes are marked by bq., and headings marked by h1. through h6.. A lot of the syntax therefore takes itself directly from standard HTML terms, just in a prettier format.

    I realize now though that I’m not “writing for the web”. The web is where these words are now, but the intent of the markup I use shouldn’t be “HTML”. It should be meaning-based, and read easily in the plain text it started in. Of all the markup languages I looked at Markdown is the most like basic writing, with the least amount of output intent built into the syntax. It doesn’t feel like HTML made pretty.

    What Markdown feels like to me is the type of writing I used on old school mailing lists. On the mailing lists everyone was expected to write in plain text, and basic conventions developed for marking up text with this limitation in mind. The markup wasn’t intended to be converted but read as-is. Markdown feels like these conventions, expanded to allow for conversion to other presentation formats. It’s easy to write and easy to read.

    In addition to the natural (by convention at least) feel of the language, Markdown has by far the widest support in text editors. Of course any text editor can work with the plain text, but basic syntax support like bold or centered headings, underlined, italicized, or bolded emphasis, lists that are indented like lists, and block quotes that look like block quotes enhance the writing process without getting in the way. Call it what-you-see-is-what-you-mean, to steal a phrase from the developers of LyX.

    I use it for writing, including this essay. I use it for formal notetaking, converting to HTML or other formats for display and sharing. I use it for quick, informal notes.

    Combined with the SmartyPants language extension for smart quotes and automatic generation of en- and em-dashes and ellipsis marks (included with many Markdown to HTML converters), Markdown allows me to write simple, easy to read plain text documents that can be converted into well-formed HTML by an automatic processor, but can also be easily written, read, and edited with a text editor.

    — Steve