My little digital camera, a two+ year-old Canon A40, is pretty easy to take macro shots with even for a duffer like me, and they don't come out half-bad for a two mega-pixel camera. It's only the lighting that's a bitch. I can't believe I'm thinking of jury-rigging up some kind of reflector for this little project...
I'm trying to put together a web comic. I don't know if it will be a regular thing, or what, but I have at least a double-handful of strips that I know I want to do. The first one is a photo-based one, a tribute to Irregular Webcomic since it was the strip the finally convinced me that I could probably do something even with my limited drawing skills.
So I've been jotting down ideas, and assembling the things I needed to do the photographs, and taking some test shots...and I finally did all the panels for the first strip tonight. Over and over. God I can be finicky. And it doesn't even look that great. Lighting tiny little toys is a bitch. But I finally got something roughly acceptable...
...and then I hit the Photoshop wall. I don't even have the full-fledged version, but a just the basics one that came with my graphics tablet, and there's an actual learning curve. I can't remember the last time I dealt with a program where getting halfway decent results required learning anything. [Yes, I can, it was emacs, and in the end it wasn't really worth it, 'cause as soon as I started using Eclipse most of the time I started losing my emacs chops.] Programming languages, yes, but programs are something that I mostly muddle through. If it isn't obvious how to do something in most of the programs I use, it's something that I probably don't ever want to do. It's not that Photoshop is that bad, or frustrating, it's just that after fiddling around for an hour or so it's obvious that the even the basic things that I want to do with it are going to take some work to learn how to do, and learning its whole layering paradigm. And I was really hoping that the pictures would be the hardest bit. Nutbunnies.
I did nothing this year. No visiting of the relativos. All my friends out of town. I laid in some pate, crackers, prosciutto, and fuji apples and just kind of grazed, while playing City of Heroes and drinking San Pellegrino fizzy water. Didn't venture out at all, didn't turn on the TV or read news.google.com The world spun on regardless. It was kind of relaxing.
I'm corresponding with a woman, call her jk, that my dad "introduced" me to in one of his typical long, rambling, confusing voice-mail messages. At first I thought he was telling me about someone he was dating--which wasn't at all cleared up by his voice-mail post-script attempting to straighten out the first message which after the fact he apparently decided might lead me to conclude he was getting a mail-order bride. Plus he had the email address wrong. If I ever get as weird as my dad, will I even know it? I hope my friends tell me.
Anyway, what he was actually trying to do was to get me to write to jk, because we have a lot in common: jazz, sf, rpgs (MUDding in her case). We're about the same age (she's a little younger), and she's divorced. Is my dad trying to set me up? Does she just want to make new friends? I haven't a clue. He apparently talked with her about me, and she either wanted him to introduce her or at least went along with the idea.
So we've exchanged a few emails, and we do indeed have a bunch in common, and similar tastes in things that I didn't know we had in common (such as animated movies). I kind of wish I knew whether she was in the market for a relationship, so to speak. I don't know whether I'd prefer the answer to be yes or no, but it worries me a little how my dad might have presented this to her without clearly communicating it to me. I could ask him for clarification, I suppose, but since he's a) garrulous and b) apparently associates with her relatively frequently (neighbors?) I'm hesitant.
We have an ice machine in the coffee room at work, which hasn't worked in almost exactly a year. It crouches there, taking up counter space that could be better used for almost anything. I figure that it's just part of the cost-cutting measures we've taken, such as cutting the numbers of flavors of coffee available in half so that you can now have French Roast Decaf but not French Roast. "Repair or replace the ice machine? Let them drink lukewarm tap water." And yet, every once in a while, I see a guy in denim coveralls with a toolbox in the coffee room, messing with the machine. Why? If it's somebody's responsibility, why don't they fix it? If it's not, why do anything at all? Is there some arcane maintenance contract that requires them to send someone out every n months, but doesn't require anything ever be resolved?