chatter

Ok, I suppose I should ask first if I am a geek because I have my own logo LOL

A long time ago I bought some ink jet window decals. I just found them so I decided to try them and printed my logo on a page. Put it on my car, why not?

This week has been up and down with stupid techinical difficulties that were putting me at the edge of panic.

The two big projects that have been killing me lately were still giving me trouble in some shape or another. I spent a lot of time troubleshooting this week.

I finished CARE up for the next review on Tuesday but not before some files that were fine before started giving me problems in the way of internal software errors. I eventually got it worked out but not before eating up lots of time.

Then on Wednesday the job that gave me anxiety last week needed more tweeking. At one point I was working on two computers at the same time to do both gigs.

Somewhere along the line my Flash file for this job that HAD to be finished went corrupt. I didn’t know for awhile because I could access the file fine but couldn’t publish it. I spent valuable time (over 2 hours) trying to either recreate or troubleshoot things before I could do the actual changes. I was proud I was able to figure out the problem but now I was in a major time crunch. I had to finish this Wednesday end of day. I did but yikes.

Thursday and Friday I was in training on Apple’s Motion. I have tried to sign up for this darn class several times but in those cases I was the only one who signed up so they canceled. John at work signed up and was facing the same fate so I signed up. There was another guy at Loyola who signed up as well.

This class was over by Ohare. The instructions on their site to get to them proved to be the worst directions. While I found the place, it took nearly 2 hours to get there and they had me going around in circles. The next day I looked it up on Google and shaved at least 20 minutes off my time. I actually got there 30 minutes earlier today but I think the TriState wasn’t as congested as it was yesterday.

Anyway the class kind of sucked. I learned a lot but that was mainly because it was a cool software with lots of things to learn but the instructor wasn’t really prepared, he just went through the book page by page.

We were suppose to get books to go along as well but they sent version 1 and we needed version 3.

On top of that the computers they had sucked and 3 of us (John escaped) had crashes that sometimes took the file with them. Really gave me the impression that Motion was an unstable software and I don’t think it is. I don’t think the iMacs they used were up to the task. Ok, crashing I can take but in 2 cases it totally deleted my file with it. Eek.

Back to anxiety. While I was in class today my cell phone went off. It was the boss. If he is calling me it can’t be good. I worried about the job I barely finished up before I left.

Nope it is CARE. They have a list of changes and the time crunch is on. The boss was worried that I might not have enough time on Monday to do them and get them out by Wednesday.

Just like last week with the other job, most of the changes are easy, minor but there are 2 big ones that I can’t forecast that I can fix in time. Even though both jobs are completely different (last weeks was a animated Flash booth display and this one is an authored DVD interactive game and video) I am taken by how similar the situation is.

I spent the rest of the class (and the night for that matter) fretting that I wasn’t going to be able to fix the two biggies.

My philosophy has always been not to fret and worry until absolutely necessary. For some reason I can’t seem to follow it.

I am not a drinker… at all! RAW is in Indiana and Hollace is in bed so tonight I thought I would finish off the *box* of wine that has been sitting around since Sherry was here for Ravinia (btw, Sherry was suppose to come up this weekend but canceled on me). I choked down a full glass of the Chardoney quickly. I was going for effect to take the anxiety edge off.

I guess it is working. I am stumbling around in this blog post LOL.

Blah, blah, blah, I am done rambling on. I have purged. Good night.

Besides printing updated photo business cards, I have also “published” a photo book of my county fair holga photos at Blurb.com, ordered some enlargements at mpix.com to submit at the College of Lake County juried art show (doubt I have a chance but what the heck, I am going for it anyway), ordered 5 free 8×10 photos at whcc.com as part of their free test print offer when you open an account from them.

This weekend I have been retouching old photos of RAW’s family that I scanned in a year or so ago. I plan on putting them on the digital frame I got Dorothy for her birthday. I also need to retouch mom’s large photo of her grandparents, get it printed and framed. I have been sitting on that one for a while.

I also plan on scanning a bunch of childhood photos of mine and put in these hanging frames I got from Ikea awhile back.

Keeping busy with photo projects of photos already taken.

Years ago I bought some Avery return address labels. 80 labels to a sheet for a package of 2000 labels.

The only template Avery had for them was in Word which was unacceptable for me. I needed Photoshop templates.

I could never get the template right and was highly frustrated that I eventually gave up.

This weekend I printed out new photo business cards and ran out so I was looking on Avery’s site when I noticed they don’t appartently make the cards I used and already made a successful Photoshop template of anymore.

While there I noticed they had Photoshop templates of a bunch of their products. I found and downloaded the 80 to a page return address labels. I get my package of return labels out and notice I have only one sheet left. I excitedly print my labels but wouldn’t ya know it I messed it up somehow. Hmm, should I take a chance and order these at the risk of another 2000 labels of waste? I then find 2 more sheets.

I try one sheet and sure enough the template is good only it is 5 pixels too low and I forgot to turn off the template boarder. I then put in my last sheet and try one more time.

Finally after 25 sheets, I finally have a perfect set of 80 return address labels!

Needless to say, I ordered some more.

I knew the amount of changes to yesterday’s job was doable by the end of the day but there were a couple of variables that I wasn’t sure about. I got an email from the manager who was in charge of the project asking me to stay as long as it took to finish it today.

The two hurdles I was facing went smoothly and by 4:00 quitting time I was done. Everyone was pleased how it turned out and I walked out (on time) feeling pretty good and quite opposite as I was last night.

Then I came home to my package from Archie McPhees. First, they sent my stuff in a box that use to have frozen seafood. RAW seen the box and had to open it the case it was a frozen seafood LOL. My free gifts were two packs of “Super Genius” gum and some recipe cards from 1973

And now to my order….

paparazzi

and some ants

and for Hollace (which we made her try and guess, of course she couldn’t….

actually the second thing she guessed was a pickle but then again pickles are her thing (not to eat but to blurt out of context because she finds it funny)

She was thrilled to say the least.

All this week I have been working on a fairly involved rush project. Tomorrow is the due date. Right before I left for the day today I got the list of changes and such. Nothing I didn’t expect really but for some reason I felt ganged up on and keep having flashes of anxiety all night. I just got to keep telling myself that it is ok, I can do it and get it done. I guess I should look at the calendar and see if that time of month is coming close.

Up until June’s email outage, I have had stable email with my domain name addresses for 10 years.

While I pay my bills online through my bank, I have always been old fashioned when it comes to paper bills. I wanted them sent to me.

A few months ago I finally decided to have the electric company stop sending me paper. I figured if my internet was down, I could go anywhere and check my mail and pay the bill if it showed up in my email box so I thought what the heck, lets go paperless with the electric bill.

I decided that and set it a week before my bad email outage in June.

I now don’t get any notice that an electric bill is due, no paper, no email even though my email is fine now. Obviously my email address is tagged over there as not working.

Thank goodness to Quicken which lets me know the bill should be due so I have never been late.

I just changed the email to my gmail one. I have yet to see any notification that the change took place. Oh just give me the paper snail version back goll darn it. Now how to set it?

Because of that outage I also lost my weekly pay-per-view email from DirecTV and I can’t apparently fix that to email me anywhere else either.

I just updated my WordPress (the engine of this blog) and I want to see if all is well.

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Having a laid back Saturday here. I started putting more stuff back in the kitchen. Yesterday RAW was driving me crazy because he wouldn’t stop doing stuff in the kitchen and was putting things away himself (in wrong places) because there wasn’t any other kitchen thing he could do right then. I found out later that he was feeling guilty because he didn’t do anything during the day.

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Hollace is really into brushing her hair these days. It looks like the rag-a-muffin days are over. She loves how soft her hair gets after brushing. Finally! Even she says “I thought I would never see the day…” LOL.

I told her if she takes care of it, she can grow it as long as she wants. We would get it cut pretty regularily because brushing out the massive tangles were such a chore.

She started 4th grade this week. So far so good.

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I am still obsessed with Flight of Concords

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Even though only a small amount of people read this or see my photoblog, I feel grateful that I can communicate this way. I was very frustrated when I was having blog and email problems. I went through electronic communication withdrawls.

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I am happy to see that my little Flickr photos are now showing in the top banner. I guess I can thank this WP upgrade for that because I could not get it to work before for some reason.

After having a long dry spell as far as photography goes, I hit a couple places that generated hundreds of new photos.

The first was in Michigan at the fruit stands. I was going nuts there. Everything was so photographic. I think after 120 photos, 60 were Flickr worthy and 30 of those were photoblog worthy.

Here is my set so far on Flickr

Before that was the Lake County fair. Every year I try to photograph the fair a different way. The first year was night photography. The next year was using the ultra wide angle. Last year I brought the Lens Baby. This year I brough the toy cameras. I got my film back and got them all scanned in. I think I got a lot of good ones. I will start uploading those as soon as I get through all the fruit stand photos.

Last weekend I had a photo shoot with Hollace’s last year teacher. She wanted me to photograph her dog. I took about 150 shots of Pax. I boiled that down to 45 shots that I then got down to my favorite 8.

Also last weekend I couldn’t resist the Utata weekend project….Spam, as in canned meat. I for some reason bought a can of the stuff out of the blue the week before. I had fun trying to do something interesting with Spam.

Here are a few of my fave shots from there

And finally, today was the CN all employee fun day. We went to a Milwaukee Braves baseball game. Last year when we went to the horse track, I failed to even bring my camera. This year I wasn’t going to make that mistake. That said, I don’t think I really got anything I was excited about.

Took a 4 day weekend and went camping up in Michigan, well not too far up. Actually it was the south western corner, between St. Joseph and South Haven in a town near Coloma. We were on a quest to pick peaches. Really that is RAWs thing since I don’t eat peaches.

The weather was nearly perfect. It could be a few degrees warmers but heck it could of been a lot worse for August.

We stopped at the fruit stand that has the U-pick and I was in “catchy color” heaven. I was so excited to get out of the truck and start photographing that I forgot to keep the door open so Hollace could get out. A very colorful fresh place.

There was a cute little swimming pond and a lot of sand. My ankles couldn’t take all the dune hiking Hollace wanted to do.

Met a family from near here that was tent camping with small children. I think they got too cold Friday night cause I caught them leaving Saturday night. They blamed it on their 5 year old daughter being crabby but I think it was really the prospect of sleeping in tents in the cold again. I doubt they packed to stay warm since it was August after all.

On Saturday we went to the U-pick for the peaches. They loaded us all on a hayride and drove us all around to get to the peach trees. We filled two baskets full of peaches.

The park was just a hop and a skip to Lake Michigan. We stopped by a road side parking place to the beach where we walked a long way in deep sand to the lake. The waves were pretty choppy and the sun wasn’t out so it was cold. Definitely not swimming weather. Found out later there was shore warnings for rip tides. As we walked back up that sandy hill, the sun came out and the temp went up dramatically.

All in all, it was a really good time and a nice get away.

Getting home was a pain because we ran into road construction that kept us in traffic an additional 45 minutes of our normally 3 hour drive.