A 30 and two 40s. I realized I’m not used to drawing body hair, or dealing with the darkening effects of hair that does not imply structure. Good, I was worried that drawing was getting too easy.
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Anybody want to hazard a guess what this is, what it means, and why it makes me happy?
Feast your eyes. This is around 5 hours work, I’m guessing. A constellation of barely-visible dots, marking key points of intersection, checked and cross-checked and re-cross-checked. This is how they begin. It is very slow work. Again, I start out intending to just do legs (which I did in the gestures and the 10-minute, not shown), and end up getting re-tempted back to the whole figure. Basically, there were a couple of good starts here, which could potentially have become nice pieces if I had 40 hours to work on them instead of 40 minutes.
I bought MYOB in 2002 (or so) to do my accounting with. I still use it, but I never upgraded from the original version because right after I bought it, MYOB Inc. put in the most draconian copy protection I have yet encountered. Where most big-ticket software requires you to enter an activation code when you install it, MYOB didn’t stop there: periodically, at unannounced intervals, it would “phone home” to the mothership to double-check … uh, something … and if it didn’t get the answer it expected, for whatever reason, it would take some unspecified action to begin to lock down your access to your own data. Many people seemed to think this was OK. I didn’t. I boycotted. I don’t know… quaint old-fashioned notions that once I pay for something, it should actually be mine. That buying software that is engineered to fail is like buying a car with a bomb embedded in the engine, to be detonated if the manufacturer deems it necessary. Anyway, I was unable to find a replacement for MYOB that would do what I needed, so I manually moved my old version forward from machine to machine and luckily it has kept working. The good news, though, is that MYOB just sold off the software to Acclivity, and one of the first things these people did was yank that crap out and go back to normal, install-time activation, the once-off proof-of-ownership process that it should be, and that most other systems use. http://acclivity.tumblr.com/post/372523580/stick-with-the-standards So: a spectactular flying middle finger to the previous MYOB owners, and a (cautious) welcome to the new one. I look forward to upgrading for the first time in 8 years. I just spent $100 on something that everybody I asked assured me that I didn’t need.
I noticed recently that when photographing the third of three drawings all done on the same blue paper with the same black and white charcoal, and photographed under the same light, that I nonetheless had three images that looked nothing like each other; very different shades of blue on each, and they didn’t have any of the coherence that I wanted them to, as they’re drawings in a series. I needed a way to calibrate the images to each other. You can do a great deal of this by shooting a white balance card in the image, then using color correction in software to calibrate your white to the card, and the image will adjust. This was actually a good torture test for the new device: could it fix the colors in a snapshot taken in poor light by the low-quality built-in camera in my macbook pro? Well, nothing could totally fix that, but it sure made a hell of an improvement. Here’s the deal, though: I’m still leaning towards Aperture in my Aperture-vs-Lightroom internal debate. (Note to Adobe: I wouldn’t be having this debate at all if you allowed an upgrade path from student versions of your software; I bought Lightroom 1 in school and would happily upgrade it to 3 if you had an upgrade path, but you don’t, so since I would have to buy it new at full price as if I had never bought it before, I’m starting from zero now and have no particular incentive to stay with you over your competitors.) I do like Aperture’s face recognition stuff, and its support for GPS geotagging, and the fact that it will also handle the videos off my camera; Lightroom doesn’t do any of that. But, unfortunately, only Lightroom really works with the ColorChecker Passport (so far), in a way that fully utilizes the color squares to calculate very correct profiles for image correction. Aperture can pretty much only use the white balance squares. So I am paying a lot of money for a device I can only partially use (until and unless an Aperture plug-in appears, which I am hopeful will happen one day). Nonetheless, I shelled out the big bucks for this one rather than getting a cheap white-balance card for a few reasons: 1. Despite the fact that X-rite urges you to throw away your hideously expensive X-rite products every two years and buy fresh replacements, I am planning to use this thing for a very long time; Mostly, though, it has already helped me to re-shoot and correct the photos of the three drawings, and they look much better. I probably could have done this just as well with a cheap gray card, but I do still feel good about the purchase, and even if I never get any of the use from its other Adobe-specific features (for now), I feel good about its durability and portability. I’m out a hundred bucks, but I’m going to be canceling my cable TV soon anyway, and that’ll cover that in less than a month.
This is actually about 1/20 of a larger image. Auto focus, everything auto, not tweaked at all. It has completely changed the way I think about what’s possible in photography. OK, it was $1000, but I think it was among the best $1000 I’ve ever spent. I’ve figured out the rules for NBC’s Olympic broadcasts. Simple, really. Basically, it’s:
That pretty much covers it.
This was once the holy grail of a child collector, who couldn’t afford much more than face value for coins anyway. I used to go down to the bank, in the mid-70s, and buy rolls of pennies to go through, looking for “wheaties.” I still have all of the ones I found. I even found a few Indian heads, although those were extremely rare even then, and I haven’t seen one since. Anyway, this dime is a common date and barely in “very good” condition, worth less than a dollar; as little as 12ยข depending on where you look. I’m not retiring on it. But after 60+ years of traveling from drawer to pocket, I found it and it’s going into my childhood collection, which I still have. Utterly meaningless, except that it made me happy. One of the websites I administer recently had a database failure that knocked the site offline for 12 hours. It was at one of the big, cheap hosting ISPs, where things work fine when they work fine, but problems are unpredictable and slow to be fixed when they occur, particularly at night. Since I do not actually administer the parts that were broken, and am limited to the small set of oink-and-click tasks that can be accomplished through their control panel interface, all I could do was report it as a critical failure that needed urgent attention. I awaited, and expected, urgent action. The site was down for 12 hours with no response before it came back up, and along the way, I saw that the support ticket had been downgraded from “high,” as I submitted it, to “medium” priority. So. A 12-hour primary systems failure on a site with thousands of daily users is “medium” priority. You get what you pay for, I guess. What do you expect for $7/month? I guess I find myself in angry-old-man-waving-cane-at-kids mode when I say this, but I still have to: this kind of shit doesn’t happen on MY servers. I take system administration seriously. If a site is down, you drop everything and get it running again, fast. It is not OK for a site to be offline for 12 hours. It’s not OK for a site to be offline for 12 minutes. You don’t get 1500 days of uptime on primary servers with this kind of slack-jawed mentality. Just amazing. /rant off. |
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