• 22 January 2009 07:31am: There exists a person named Kevin Howard. This amuses me.
• 22 January 2009 07:42am: Ira Glass is sounding increasingly desperate for donations :( hope they don't axe the podcast.
• 22 January 2009 11:58am: The universe still works... even when you forget to notice. And other trite observations by yours truly.
• 22 January 2009 09:05pm: Wonderful. RAW files from a Nikon D700 are unsupported under CS2.
• Yesterday at 08:53am: My Australian hosting provider proves yet again that they suck. If there were alternatives.
• Yesterday at 10:21am: Layoffs at The Company once again makes me nervous for my friends, and glad I'm not there any more.
• Yesterday at 10:57am: While looking at the graveyard through my viewfinder and waiting for my tea to cool, a coworker told me a ghost story.
• Today at 11:13am: Camera running low on battery juice. This wouldn't happen on a mechanical camera.
• Today at 02:28pm: High is only thirtynine today. Happily I am in an air con restaurant.

twitter.com/plicease

For me, perl started out as this programming language that I didn't like because schallee liked it. I had a boss in my summer-job days who liked perl though, so I was forced to use it long enough to realize its power, and now I sometimes joke that English is a second language to my first language: perl (yes, I am a computer dork).

TWiki was introduced to me as this web application that I had to get working ASAP on doublethink, because they fired the only person in The Company who knew how to keep it running. At first I didn't want to use it any more than required to in order to get the job done. Now it is an integral part of the way that I plan and keep track of tasks, and bits of information which needs to be taken care of. I can't imagine living without it, frankly.

(incidentally, TWiki is written in perl, so these things that we don't like at first but come to like tend to build on each other)

There are a lot of things like this, but now that I am looking for work I am actually thankful that I got stuck with TWiki in my last year or so at The Company, because it gives me something concrete to talk about when people ask me certain kind of IT related questions now that I am looking for a job. It really was a good experience, though it didn't seem like it at the time.

Now I am seeing other things that I'm supposed to know that I am sure I will be extremely resistant to adding to my tool set, mainly because they will be some amount of work to learn and (ironically) they aren't perl or TWiki or one of the many other technologies that I already know. Which ones will I later be glad that I know?

I put Photoshop, along with dark room experience and studio lighting on my resumé in part because I had some of that kind of experience, but mostly just for fun, because I couldn't imagine possibly ever using that in my job (which is a pity). Today I actually gave my resumé to someone and he was like "oh, they would actually like someone who knows a little photoshop in addition to all this computer stuff."

Meet Chaco the newest member of the family. It's the new Mac mini with an Intel Core Duo processor. I like the remote, it's a nice touch. There are only six buttons on it, as per typical Apple design principles, but to skip through songs in iTunes or to play a DVD you really don't need any more than that. I don't like the fact that most vendors aren't shipping native Intel or Mac OS X Universal binaries yet. The emulation for PowerPC is quite good, I've had not problem at all running older PowerPC binaries, but it is super slow. The Mozilla Foundation isn't shipping universal binaries of Firefox or Thunderbird yet, (wtf?) and I don't like Camino, so I spent a few hours last night compiling Firefox as an native Intel binary. I can forget about running Photoshop on it though. Until they start selling more powerful macs with Intel and Adobe releases a native Intel version I will be utilizing my G5 a great deal.

Well, my little trip down to New Jersey on Sunday was great. I visited my friend, and fellow camera geek e. I showed her all the most important things about PhotoShop that I learned from the Color Digital class that I took this summer. We went pretty fast, but I think she picked up enough for it to be useful for her. At the very end, I watched her work on this photograph:

Photograph By e

She took it while she had been in Israel this year, and I think it's a very good photograph and it gives me a warm fuzzy because she did the color and contrast adjustments using the techniques that I had showed her.

I was going to make a print of this so that I could put it up somewhere, but I asked for her permission first, since I would want anyone to check with me before reproducing one of my photographs or putting them up on the web or anything like that, but she said I could do anything I wanted with it so here it is.

Ever have a whole bunch of things that you need to get done, but you get psychologically road blocked by one of them? The completion of the one does not really bar you from completing the others, but for some reason you can't wrap your mind around the others until you get it taken care of? Well, that is sort of how I felt this morning. No longer!

At lunch today I used the $8 coupon at the cafeteria that The Management gave everyone in our department as a "thanks." I got the most expensive item I could find to make sure that the total was at least $8. Total cost to me: $0.55. Feeling that I have milked The Company for as much as I possibly could: Priceless.

On the way out I snarked a slice of apple pie. They were giving them away to celebrate our strategic alliance with Apple Computers. A friend of mine worked on the resisters in the new G5 computers! This is among the many reasons that I would love to have a G5. Given my current economic realities, that is going to have to wait.

Today was Sock Khim's last day. She is headed back to Singapore which I have confirmed through Internet research is indeed both a city and a state. In broken but very understandable English she wrote us all a sweet farewell note that left me, and I think everyone else with a warm fuzzy feeling. She included a personal note for everyone. Mine was something like "Graham you always take great pictures." Such wonderful sentiment; I think all of us HVOCers are going to miss her. She also gave me some candy from back home which she said she could get more for me if I liked it.

Is That a Chicken?

I love things like this, I mean... I have no idea what it is, although I am pretty sure that is a chicken on the label. Can you imagine marketing a candy in America or Australia with the picture of a chicken? I wonder how the chicken is related to the edible substance contained within.

Sock Khim reminded me that I have this interest in photography which I have failed rather miserably to enjoy recently. So I IMed my friend e to see if we could get together and be camera geeks on Sunday. I'm going to drive down to Jersey and show her how to do color correction in Photoshop and she's going to going to show me her new scanner. I hope eventually to be able to afford a nice film scanner and I think the type she has would be a good candidate.

Meanwhile I have to start thinking about the future.

I have finally gotten around to posting on-line portfolios for two recent projects.

New York City	Decay

Please take a look at them and tell me what you think. Last year I took mostly black and white, this year I have seem to have been focusing on color. Unlike my B&W NYC shots, these NYC photos are not really street photography... they were actually a creative interpretation of a landscape assignment I had for Color1. Most of them anyway, I threw a couple more in there after taking the class. The rust shots are all digital... totally experimental. I enjoyed playing with the colors in Photoshop. For you purists, I didn't introduce any colors that were not already there, I just adjusted the RGB curve, contrast and saturation to make them more vibrant.

I dunno why I even am writing this. I don't have time to do this shit no more.

There have been busier people in the history of everything, but probably not my special combination of laziness, business and unfulfilled expectations.

Class is going well, despite the the fact that apparently no one in the class has ever used a computer before in their lives. I know I know... not everyone uses a computer for a living. Lucky bastards.

Oh... but it is going well for the most part. I removed the power cabls from this photograph:

What else? Hiking tomorrow. Farewell to another friend on Friday. Homework over the weekend. Oh yeah and work too.