moved analytics from one account to another meaning I just reset the counters but that’s not all bad is it I mean when they’re all flatlined where’s the harm I see that urchin come up in the world got all fancy and lardy I might just take you up on that offer looks I even got the ads right so it’s about time dave wheeled out the biscuits and we had a little chat about aggregation.
it sticks in your throat though no I mean it does stick in your throat. literally. never mind the bullets and graphs its all about my retirement so lets start now with the clickstreams and targets what’s that I don’t know but you’re in marketing I was I thought it would be as simple as just giving myself access but it seems I’m rather more clueless than I thought still hey what’s a midsized trench pedant cavorting with a beany stick anyway there’s more at stake than a cold snap.
what’s all this bernie ecclescake and max moselyshoals nonsense about I thought planks of wood and sports day debacles were the pinnacle of duh but we’re facing the prospect of all drivers having to buy their engines from argos for less than 17 quid and are not allowed to go to the toilet before a race or something. I’m sure I used to watch ayrton senna blasting round estoril with james hunt and murray walker falling over their own hyperbolics while I got through 20 marlboro and 12 packets of monster munch and I actually quite enjoyed it but now it seems that I have as much fun tuning into (or, god forbid, turning up to) a formula bun fight as I do getting the longest queue in tescos and getting out first. really. is there anything less exciting to do with a sunday afternoon than watch 23 year old billionaires practice their drive to the golf club yes I know its still actually dangerous and its actually still highly skilled and its actually a feat of human endurance and its actually a technological miracle but then so is trying to keep up with blog posting. and I can’t really tell which is less interesting.
the problem is they are equally compelling for a reason I can’t quite fathom and more or less constitute a waste of a couple hours of your life when you really should have been doing something more effective instead like a user interaction specification or clearing leaves from the garden but in the end you just quietly slip back to them like some horrible dark secret in the cupboard from a stephen king novel. which is why I’m writing this. about that. you see?
Having got my hands on my little Sony, I proceeded to take to the skies, both literally and metaphorically and probably also hypothetically and hyperbolically. one of the simple pleasures I was instantly afforded after adding 2 AA batteries and boarding a plane was the ability to settle into my window seat and stick my camera through the window at anything that moved, which was everything, once we got going.
I’m not particularly a creature of habit unless you count being hunched over a flat-panel screen for hours on end watching pixels change their luminosity as a result of reducing opacity by 1% increments but that first flight with a digital camera was the start of a compulsive pattern of behaviour that demands a certain set of criteria be fulfilled before a flight is considered successful from a photo-opportunity point of view, if that’s not a tautology in of itself. I simply can’t book a seat without:
it being a window seat
it being in front of the wing
my knowing the direction of the sun at the time of travel
in addition, when I’m sat in that seat I have to have the correct environment which needs to include
a clean window
which is in line with the seat
and a shirt without stripes.
Normally I can get the booking right using a combination of online booking, priority check-in, google earth and a compass or sexton or something, but the environment is usually less predictable. I’ll normally spend the 30 minutes before taxiing with a wet wipe and a packet of tissues and the arm of a fleece to get the window clean, regardless of what the person sat next to me is thinking, which is normally ‘can I move?’. if the window is slightly right-of-centre, I know I’m going to get a neck-ache, but maybe some nice shots of the wing. If it’s slightly left-of-centre, I’ll probably get a backache and a line down my face where it’s been pressed against the seat in front of me when the seat in front of me has been hyper-reclined into my lap. If it’s centrally aligned, bingo. The shirt without stripes thing I always forget, so I just spend the entire flight wrapped in a British Airways blanket which gives me a rash.
When you get it all right, then armed with a inconspicuous little point-and-shoot, you don’t really attract much attention, other than the blanket thing, oh, and the pathological window cleaning thing, so you’re free to capture until your memory stick throws a wobbler. the best times are take off, climbing, banking, and landing, but the actual flying bit in the middle is also good, so 13 hours later, I’ll land in San Francisco or Denver or somewhere, with a head permanently fixed at 90 degrees and a shoulder colder than is reasonably possible. But I’ll have 150 images of wings, mountains, clouds, airports, runways and iced-up windows, which will take me 200 hours to sort through and post-process of which I’ll take 1 and post it to flickr where nobody will notice except me. And it’ll be worth it.
after a considerable time monkeying around with manual SLRs, 35mm, APS, polaroids and other format film cameras I did what I usually do when I’m investing in new technology and spent about a year thinking about it, after which I spent about a year researching and reviewing it, by which time every decision I had made was obsolete, and so ended up in Dixons in Heathrow Airport on my way to California to make up globalization strategies and decided that right here, right now, is where I should fork out for a digital camera.
And fork out I did. I already knew that I would end up buying a Sony, following a long history with using their products without a hitch, and so I’d narrowed my choice down to about, well, 1 camera. It was the very spanky Sony Cybershot DSC-W1 which ticked all the right boxes for me, even though I didn’t know what all the boxes meant yet. As I approached the counter without my glasses on, I had no idea whether they had one and as I tripped over a wheelie suitcase belonging to a well-dressed Belgian I was losing the urge to part with wads of cash, but on closer inspection, dodging the attention of the staff, I saw it on the shelf, trying to peer out from between the Casios and Fujis and Canons.
“I want the Sony W1. Can I have one please?”. “Are you sure sir?”. “What do you mean, am I sure? I’ve spent a year being sure about it and now I just want to buy the damn thing”. “We’ve got the new Finepix”. “What?”. “The Finepix sir. And the new Ixus”. “Sony. W1. I want the Sony W1”. “Are you sure sir?”. “YES I’M SURE. GIVE IT“. “Ok sir, that’s two hundred and forty-nine pounds please”.
“What?”
Now then of course, 4 years later I can now buy my Sony Alpha 300 for about that much money, but at the time, it was worth it and for the next 3 and a half years it was the only camera I ever needed. My little Sony. And I still use it in a number of circumstances where a DSLR just isn’t right. Like when you want to stick a camera in people’s faces and run away quickly. Or you might be on the beach. Or you cant be bothered to carry a bag full of kit around. It was the best 249 quid I’d ever spent and it got me on the path to digital photography. No, hang on. I had a Sharp GX10 phone before the camera. I suppose that was my first digital camera, but if that poxy piece of hand-hardware qualifies as digital camera equipment then I’m a middle-aged fat balding old misery.
no. I don’t get it. I went on the network administration course and everything but I still can’t map one domain to another with all that A and CNAME stuff. I can’t even understand the help I read when I’m looking for help that I can’t even find because I don’t even know how to ask for it. well, that’s not strictly true. I can at least type “DNS CNAME map domain not redirect or forward my head hurts” into google and trawl through a million self-proclaimed experts with hello world paint shop pro banners who will proceed to enlighten me in such a way that they obviously understand what they’re talking about themselves but I still have no idea even after reading it a few time and mentally underlining the bits that look relevant so I can come back to them when I understand a bit more which I never do so it’s pointless. I do know now that if you’ve been in a marketing organization longer than you’ve been in a service organization you are officially too stupid to work things out for yourself anymore and the preferred method is to ask somebody who does know what they’re doing how much it will cost if they do it for you at which point they see from the way you’ve written and signed your email that you’re in marketing and so it’ll immediately cost double the number they first thought of. which, in this case, means I should have just got the domain through the service that can configure the DNS for me for free instead of buying it from my regular domain broker and then trying to use a control panel from 1994 to tweak IPs and stuff. and then waiting for a day to see that you’re in no better state than you were yesterday and you don’t have any idea why not. its a bit like playing mastermind with someone but walking between each other’s houses 15 miles apart between each move to see if you’ve learned anything.
let me just talk over you for a moment you’re not understanding what I’m saying there’s a time and a place for that placation but blow down a melon if that’s not right here now today we need to blart quite clearly lest we’re tripping over the outstretched tongues of tousled falcons with mouse trap retorts. it’s good that you’ve dropped to your knees and prostrate your miserable little pencil at the bison farm but what I need right here right now today is actionable clap magnets for genies. there’s no other way.
yesterday you thought it was a good idea to slip an organic pastureful of careening witch cattle unto the storage boxes. you’ll regret that later.
Its photo, as in photos, and opacity, like the opacity of layers in photoshop. You see what I did there. I put them together to suggest a kind of theme for what this blog is about. I see you’re not convinced. An actual fact, photopacity.com was available and I’d run out of ideas for 2 word combinations that suggested a theme of photography, photoshop and disk space. Or something like that.
I’ll start by saying that I’ve never used the sponge or the thing that looks like a pin. Is that dodge? Or burn? I mean, I’ve dodged and burned I think, I’ve just not done it using those tools. Since I first started using photoshop at version 2, which was a glorious port to the Solaris operating system running on what was probably a Sun Sparcstation 1+ or something, I’ve been making it up as I go along. Before layers, you learned pretty quickly that if you didn’t save backup copies of each file every 10 minutes, you might as well just bang your head against a wall at the beginning, to save time later. With layers and layer masks you soon learned that, after peeling your eyes of the screen following a 4-hour hand-trace of a goldfish with a 13 pixel soft brush, all your hand-traced masks are rubbish. By the time I get to grips with CS4, I’ll have learned about 30% of what CS3 can do. Which is 50% of what CS1 could do. And about 300% of what photoshop 2 could do. I think that means I’m using about 10% of photoshop functionality, but, as will hopefully become clear as I blart these incomprehensible gobbets of technobile, I think that’s all I need.
As for digital photography, I can safely say I have almost completely no idea what I’m doing, but I know how to point a camera in the right direction. I sometime take the lens cap off etc…
look at that. its a minor miracle that I’m not bothered by rampaging elephant bots trampling my fingers into the keyboard of phish where the dropped mangle of pirate bay galapagos mouse traps wait for silver surfing junglists to bomb out on the mysterious marketplace. it is confusing that you looked for that there but it came from there at twice the price where its all in the same place and look its even got the same name on it but its not the same is it know that so do you but she doesn’t I admit that’s confusing oh yes but you learn from that don’t you? man, those boots are 1981.
building a little wall with the effervescent support of the redmond auto plug whence I’ve loaded every application know to man and logged in via vpn to be told that if you really want to update the last 47 bits in the remote pinball wizard manager then everything must change and now its your fault you asked us to do this it doesn’t matter that its not related to anything I can’t change a light bulb without going out the front door and coming back in again that’s just the way it is look at my big pointy stick I’ll poke you with it every minute. in the eye.
is there anything more annoying that getting a crackle in your socket the day after warranty? I don’t think so.
crashing ungainly into the enemy were it but a slip of the brittle then we’d never have another country. sat brooding when you didn’t ask the question you mention but recount a day when there was too much to say between the fingers of concensus to crash on the beach like a soon to be exploded whale you can’t walk around it you can’t get inside it you can’t grok it so here’s what we’ll do I’ve changed the label nobody will notice. oh.
just past twitchy you succumb to a numb vacant stare into which a folded envelope creeps, winking vegetables. there’s just not enough time in the day is there? apparently not see you later if you want to yes I will. I did html. it had macros in it. I took it back and the man said because I’d got it from a book I was ineligible. it took me so long to spell it that he slipped out the back and slapped a fish with the evening news.
