Writing Wrongs

So once again no contact from recruiters. This is getting old. I stayed home all day just in case. Crickets.

Up at 7:30. Finished processing the vacation photos and putting them on Flickr. Also put together a page of 94 calendar candidates and built a streaming slide show with it. At least two of the photos will be from San Diego. The cover will use this Pixel 3 image:


And this will be December:


Got a long overdue to-do item out of the way. Closed my Discover and Barclay card accounts. They both started charging way too much interest months ago, have not used them since.

Tivo activity was Long Lost Lives, PTI and the final Doctor Who episode. I would not be surprise  to hear Doctor Who is going away. Once again low budget sets, locations effects and videography killed it for me. The writing was slightly better but still not good. Directing was uneven. The plot was recycled, as was the villain. The chemistry between to Doctor and the three companions has deteriorated, partly due to the writers splitting the team in half for most of the episode. They haven't given Jodie a chance to be a proper Doctor, either. A full season and she is still struggling to remember things a proper Doctor would just pull out of the air. And a really tone deaf moral at the ending.

LLL almost had a newly found daughter refuse to meet her bio mom. But adopted mom made her change her mind and all was well.

Spent much time looking at Nissan's price calculator. And my IRA. Turns out I have enough liquid assets to transfer to my checking account the full price of the car plus the income tax hit, so I did. I already transferred from my brokerage to the bank enough for the lease downpayment. I'm thinking of buying for cash. But it's a big chunk of my nest egg. Dilemma. Will go to the dealership tomorrow (sales guy texted me) afternoon to work out the deal. Nissan Leaf SV with technology package. That's the mid-range version, with Nav, rear camera which I want and some other stuff I don't need. But no turn signal lights on the side mirrors. Bummer.

Plan A is to do the deal, drive the Ford home, empty it, return it to Ford, take my vanity plates, come back later by train to pick up the Leaf. Part of it depends on whether there is any penalty for paying off the balance.

Streamed for a couple of hours, not a lot of company but steady chatter.

Plans for tomorrow:
More Tivo
Nissan
Whatever


This one got a lot of votes on FB but needs more clean-up than my meager Photoshop skills can probably do.

County assessor's letter arrived today, looks like they are doubling my property tax. Boo. Hiss. Turns out they re-assess any time it is sold.

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Got to work just in time for what was billed as a hands-on demo of a very complicated video analyzer. It was nothing of the sort, partly thanks to the two bozoids from upstairs interrupting the sales engineering rep before he even showed his first slide.

It was a disjointed, scattershot presentation with a lot of interruptions. No actual hands-on, and the presenter talked so softly and with a thick accent it was mostly useless. His marketing rep (identified easily by her Apple laptop) spoke louder and more clearly, but it is apparent this is an amateur company and we are using their product strictly because of a low price point compared to the professionals.

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Finished my digital signal processing project and wrote it up. Customer description of the issue was wrong, much worse than the actual issue. In short, some versions of the product pretended to allow you to add a text crawl or overlays or change the resolution of the video on a trigger or a schedule, but when you looked at the output it wasn't there. But any pre-existing ones continued to work. Most of our customers don't change those after they put them in place.

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Got my nails done. Had to wait 10 minutes for the owner to get back from dialysis. Would rather have it done by her little sister, but she was booked. No time for lunch but a snack at the bakery a few doors down.

Back at work, not much to work on, so I researched telescopes, and ordered one which looks much better for photography than the one I have. Two main points" f/5 compared to f/12.1, eyepiece is at the top on the side, not at the bottom middle.  Also has a unique tripod built for scopes.

Meanwhile I need to organize all my lenses and put everything in the carrying bag, and think about putting it on eBay or Craig's list.

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Costco on the way home. Spent almost $150 and am pretty sure I'd have done better at Safeway. Prices at Costco are skyrocketing, but the requirement to buy in bulk remains.

Home, heated some canned dolmathes from the produce store and three pork buns from Costco. Watched two episodes of TMZ. I am soooo behind on my Tivo watching.

Took the second load out of the laundry, could only find 5 of 6 socks. These are my black socks for the show. #6 showed up on the floor as I was hanging up my shirts.

Email from baby sister, she will be here Saturday. We may have time to do lunch. Pissed because she is flying into SFO not SJC, and wants to go to the farmer's market, as if she will be able to bring anything back home with her. Original plan was a bike ride. Looking forward to seeing her & her husband, they are both acoustical engineers with lots of Navy experience, and I am eager to pick their brains about the search for the Malaysian airliner. Due to the nature of her work, we can't mention stuff like that in email, let alone FB.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Leave at 5
Show at 7:30

instead of waiting till I've had dinner. Yeah, stupid move. But I've had two large glasses of home made lime soda and one of lactose-free milk to hold me.

Long day at work, going through a section of test cases I wrote one-liner summaries for, hoping to be able to write the actual steps, but I need the hardware, which isn't due out for months. It's like being told the next model car will run on helium, and you have to write a test which measures how much oxygen is consumed. Until they build the car you don't know how to do that measurement.

At the end of the day Automation Guy gave me a project to work on, but I found two bugs and thought up a third, which he says he will fix by Monday.

Lunch was supposed to be at Sizzler, but between a bunch of new companies moving into the neighborhood and a new hotel opening up next door, and $2 off on the endless salad buffet, it was packed. And of course since it was after 1 pm most of the staff were on break and there was only one person at the register to handle a very long line. So I left, went to Coco's, beause I have not been able to go to BASFA meetings since rehearsals started. The NY steak is pretty thin, so medium is more like well done. And they had alleged vegetables. The chocolate cream pie made up for a lot of that.

After work was Costco, I had an Amex cash back check for $123 and spent $270. $50 of that was for a set of solar powered outdoor path lights, which have been on my list for months. Well, not 8, more like 4, but for that price, whatever.

Home, put the food away, remembered that tomorrow I'm taking the car in to have a new in-dash GPS/entertainment unit installed and they will probably need access to the trunk. So I emptied the trunk. It took about an hour. One of the reasons I bought the Corolla was for the big trunk, but I keep being too lazy to remove things I don't need in there.

Recovered in the recliner with the livingroom fan on, and Domino half on my lap and half on the arm rest, being a shedding machine. Watched some TV non-news. Fired up the PC and caught up on Facebook, updated Quicken, and scanned a bunch of photos from an album inherited from my mother's mother when mom passed away. One is an intriguing mystery - it's from, I think, my mother's cousin in London:

The right-hand side is the back of the photo.

I can't remember who Max was. Posted it on FB and tagged my sisters and UK cousins. One of them will set me straight, probably the Baltimore sister who Sees All and Knows All about family. That pin she is wearing may also be a clue. RAF?

Plans for tomorrow:
If I wake up in time, put the month's collected soda cans out for the homeowners' association monthly drive. 8 am.
10 am be at All Pro Audio to have the new in-dash unit installed.
Use my Clipper card to go to the mall. Hang out at the food court and play on my laptop
If they are done by 1, go to the Sunnyvale Players' set shop and help paint
Bad Movie Night at Bob & Sharon's. I'll bring along a bad movie DVD. 

For the first time in a while it's both before tomorrow and I'm mostly awake. No work. No rehearsals. Took it easy.

Got to the Contact conference in time for Seth Shostak's talk, which was very entertaining, about SETI's new theory that red dwarf stars are the best place to look for inhabitable earth-like planets. It made a lot of sense, except he didn't say anything about the effect on life that red sunlight might have. One good thing is he reminded me I need to make an effort to tune in to his podcast.

Next up was someone formerly at ILM now with the CA Academy of Sciences whose presentation a couple of years ago was exceptional, but this year he phoned it in, and showed boring snippets of fish-eye video which the CAAS uses in some of their environmental displays. Boring.

I ducked out a little early to drive to the office, grab a photo I wanted in the Contact art show, drive back and hang it with the rest of my display (there was plenty of room).


Before I left for the conference this morning I had printed a tag for it.

It was still lunch time, I walked a block to KFC and ate there.

Back to the hotel, there was supposed to be a panel with Larry Niven, but he didn't show and nobody even mentioned that he was supposed to have been there (it was pretty clear in the program, with a bio and everything). Boring panel about several artists, social scientists and real scientists coming up with visualizations of space aliens by basically looking at the science and pulling ideas out of their butts.

The next talk was almost as boring, a part-time anthropologist with horribly crude slides made from purloined web photos placed at random angles. Her assertion is that until we are all  

    Trustworthy,
    Loyal,
    Helpful,
    Friendly,
    Courteous,
    Kind,
    Obedient,
    Cheerful,
    Thrifty,
    Brave,
    Clean,
    and Reverent.

we will be unfit to welcome visitors from the stars. She rates the US as 4.something out of 10 in meeting her requirements. Frankly, it was more like 0.3 from what I can tell. I asked her why everyone has to meet these requirements when it's only the best of the best and some military jocks who will actually have First Contact and her answer was something like "can't we all just get along?"

I ducked out before the next speaker started, I wanted to read some more in the book I'd started on Kindle, which was by someone I sort of know and respect. It also gave me a chance top duck into the art display and see that it had been set up, with lots more than just my 10 photos. The book failed, and I made the mistake of going back into the presentation room while Ms. Global Warming was slogging through her doom and gloom scenarios. Bottom line, according to her, is we will all die in 2022. Most of her stuff was on ways to make coal burning power plants cleaner. No clue about nuclear. A couple of unworkable alternates (kites?). She needs to get a life.

The final talk of the day which I was very much looking forward to again was a no-show, I walked out a minute into the not at all interesting to me replacement.

Hung out in the art show with the art show director and one of the more impressive artists, and the guy whose book I had just failed. He does some pretty good drawings.

There was quite a crowd at the 5 pm art show reception, but a gaggle of people gathered in a traffic-blocking mass in front of my photos to pass around 3D-printed alien models. I think 2 people actually saw my stuff.

Went to Lowe's to get a replacement for the broken kitchen faucet aerator, also got a couple of self-watering planters for the drying-out vines hanging from the kitchen curtain rods, and a fuchsia to replace the hummingbird feeder outside.

Home, took care of that, made dinner, watched two episodes of TMZ, remembered not to feed the cat any treats no matter how much she yelled at me.

Have been going over my lines in my head, I think I know them all, mostly in order, and maybe also with blocking.

Plans for tomorrow:
Look at lines, especially for a couple of songs I am not a soloist in
3 pm-ish, back to the hotel and pick up my photos - there is nothing in the Sunday program I am interested in
7-ish, Sitzprobe at the theater. That's French for first time singing with the band. Probably will go till 10.

March Fools Day is the day in 1961 when JFK established the Peace Corps. I served in Thailand from March 1975 to July 1977. More on that later.

Today started with a trip to Fry's to get a replacement power brick for my laptop. I keep the original one in the laptop bag, and it still works, but usually I run it on battery, as God intended, and charge it from a spare power brick at home. That one died. I wanted a 60W Toshiba, but all the retail ones these days are 90W and above universal (they come with a set of plugs, one of which will match your laptop).

Fry's was on the way to the photo shoot. Miki, the model, is one of those women which prompt cries of outrage from the average and larger-than-they-want-to-be-but-it's-not-PV-to-admit-it women on LJ and FB and Twitter...ad nauseum of "nobody looks like that! These must be Photoshopped!" Here's Miki, the only photoshopping I did was to adjust the contrast level and maybe crop the background.
( Cut because I care )

I got some good shots, and since this one was lingerie and not nudes, They are all mostly work-safe. It wasn't a very good shoot compared to the last two, for a number of reasons. The host did several lighting setups, all of them were difficult to shoot in. I won't bore you with the details. The model kept changing poses and expressions faster than the lights could re-charge and she sucked at taking directions.

I won't be doing any shoots for at least another 2 weeks, what with rehearsals and Consonance con.

Home, processed the photos, had dinner, threw a load of laundry into the washer and drove to Foothill College to see their production of Little Shop. Nutshell review:
The girl trio was spectacular. They sounded like they had been singing together for years. I asked after the show, and they hadn't. The whole production was way over-choreographed. The guy playing my part lost his character a third of the way through - he went from somewhat believable NY Jewish shopkeeper to Red Skelton in two easy steps. He managed to get cut from one of the musical numbers and some of the choreography, and they slowed down the two numbers where he has tongue twisters. They had a large cast, our director has chosen to make one guy play many parts, which I think is stupid and a Big Mistake, this show had a different person for each part, which meant they had some serious vocal power as an ensemble chorus. The female lead was very good, the male lead was okay. The band was excellent, but the sound system wasn't. All the cast were miked, and whoever was on the audio board had it cranked up too high. Toward the end there was feedback. We also had some mikes being bumped backstage at the start. The set was good. Costumes were iffy, except for the stunning red sparkley dresses the trio wore at the end.

Home, here I am.

Plans for tomorrow:
Janice's 70th birthday party at noon at her condo's community center
Rehearsal at the theater. My first time on stage there in 14 years. Or backstage probably. I doubt if we will rehearse on the Little Princess set. Sunnyvale has a big dressing room/rehearsal room backstage.

Last night's project was a round tuit one. Took all the 500 slides from Costco out of their boxes (50 at a time) and put them back into their albums, this time attempting to put them in order of some sort. Discovered that about 100 (which are on the floor of the 3rd BR) were from my 1970s Peace Corps time. I knew there were some, I didn't realize how many. When I transferred them from the DVD, I remember sending many of them to my 1975-77 folder.

And I went through the 10 sets of scans, re-assigning them by location (Bali, Singapore, Malaysia, Phuket, Southern Thailand). Those are here (click).

This is one reason I went to Bali:


and this is the other:

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Today: Up and out in time, for a change. Domino barfed in the bedroom and pooped in the livingroom, so no treats for her for a while. Barf is from eating treats in vacuum mode. Poop is just plain unacceptable. Her litterbox is automatic, it should last two weeks with just her.

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Work started well, the demo I gave worked fine, Automation Guy was pleased. And now I see I am supposed to attend the weekly automation team meetings. Grrr.

Spent the day researching and actually finding video clips for testing Teletext. There are two kinds. One, mostly used in Germany, makes the whole screen into an ugly almost ASCII display- worse, really, looks like a bad bitmapped font. It usually is a news feed or a broadcaster's list of upcoming programs. The other, mostly used by the BBC, is ugly bitmapped subtitles. Both are carried in a hidden signal line on analog (similar to closed captions) which get converted into hidden packet streams on digital. All our box is supposed to do is pass those packets untouched and unharmed.

Lunchtime started at Costco, where I dropped off (and paid for) 462 slides to be scanned. I think this is the last of the 1989 vacation.

Home after work, just enough time to open the packages. One was the camera adapter tube for the telescope, the right diameter this time. I was able to fit a telescope lens inside and attach the camera. No time to try it, and it looks like rain all the rest of the week. Also received the rent bill. Down from last time. But the experiment of using a space heater is a FAIL. $25 more for juice than last month.

Off to the library, got there 10 minutes into the 90-minute tutorial on a 3D printing program called Sketchup. The presenter is a very good teacher, he did a great job of showing how to use the basics of the program, first 2D then 3D. It's about as feature-filled as PhotoShop, but it's free and looks it. Worth missing BASFA for.

Home by way of Lucky's, where I got everything on my list. Short list, just bananas, limes, TV dinners and Klondike bars. And enteric baby aspirin. Bleach and detergent should have been on the list so I got those too.  I also picked up a catnip toy for Domino. She ignored it.

Home, made dinner. Leftover fried chicken and a box of cheesed and baconed potato skinettes from Lucky's frozen foods section. Thin mint ice cream for dessert.

Watched some of the NFL Combine, but the commentators won't shut up, and they don't say anything useful. So those have been deleted from my Tivo list. Caught up on TMZ.

Changed the litterbox. Just in case.

Printed the rent check, but won't walk it over there till the 28th. Need my paycheck to cover it (paid a chunk of my London vacation charges this month).

Did my taxes from scratch. Somehow, when I imported from last year's return, TurboTax was trying to credit me for stock loss carry-overs which I am not due. That could have gotten ugly. Finished around midnight, e-filed and will be getting about a grand back from Messrs. Obama and Brown.

Plans for tomorrow
Work
Maybe come home and study lines.

It felt like it should be Friday all day. Big disappoint dept.: the Friday Bad Movie Night was moved to Saturday, and I am already triple booked. :-(

Nothing to talk about at work, except I got to attend an engineering planning meeting for one of the features of the next product I'll be helping with. Maybe.

I brought a small frozen meal for lunch, in an attempt to have lunch with all the folks who eat in the break room almost every day, but they don't talk to each other hardly at all, and there are ping pong balls flying and a gang playing doubles pool in the far corner making lots of noise. I think I'll resume going out for lunch.

Home by way of Costco, two projects to pick up. The 500 slides scanned to DVD were in, which was a surprise (I expected another week at least) and the posterboard photos for Contact 2014 were there as expected. I went with 11x14 except for one 16x20 of a breaching whale. Last time, 2 years ago, it was all 12x18 and 20x30 and there wasn't enough room for all of them. Also 11x14 cost $10 each as it is. Now I have to go online and buy a bunch of hangers for them. Stick-on plastic ones work fine.

Home, email said Avanquest finally updated CheckDesigner to work with Quicken 2014 (which I bought months ago). Tonight's adventure was putting that on the PC, and updating Quicken, then updating the laptop (it needed Norton and the latest 20 updates from Microsoft) and putting Quicken 2014 on that and downloading the online backup onto it. Laptop is in the bedroom now, hooked up to the charger. I usually run it on batteries as God intended.

Lots for Facebooking today.

On my way home I saw the moon, and it was heading for the sweet spot above the end of my driveway. It was too low to see when I got home, so I set an alarm for an hour, and interrupted my computerizing to mount the telescope on the tripod, install the right angle attachment and a lens, and went out and looked. The moon exactly filled the field of view, full moon , pretty bright. Next step was to try out the camera attachment, which didn't work as expected - the extension tube is the wrong size - but I was able to direct connect the camera. It wouldn't stay aimed, the weight of the camera kept pulling it up too high. But I managed to get a series of acceptable shots, after some Photoshop tweaking for brightness and sharpness. The final one at 1/2000 of a second was the best.

When I got the tripod inside and took off the scope, I saw that the mount could be moved a couple of inches to better balance it, which I did, but there was too much to do (500 slides to organize) and I want to take some pix when the moon is not full. And see if I can get some help at the SJAA on using a telescope lens and extension tube. Orion swore they sent me the right ones for my scope, I just don't know how it all fits together.

Watched some skeleton races, it's like luge except the racer is on her tummy. A much better arrangement, I think.
Plans for tomorrow:
Work
???

Slept better than usual, wanted to just stay in bed all day. But Domino was yowling at me in her scratchy "where are you?" "Feed me NOW" voice. She is perfectly capable of a kitty meow, but rarely uses it. Annoying.

Was out the door by 9, I think. Rain, blustery wind, dark skies. Like we had changed planets from last week. We don't need the rain. The mountains need snow, and all this wet stuff falling in the Bay and in the industrialized strip between SF and SJ is wasted. It would be more valuable bypassing us and falling on the Sierras where the reservoirs and river heads are. </rant>

Work started with boss pointing out that the 50+ test cases I entered in the database were all tagged the same way, and needed to be tagged with their sub-features. I had not sen the sub features because I expected them to start with the name of the feature, but they weren't. So that took a while.

After I finished that there was nothing much to do, so I emailed the team that I was running some errands and then having a later lunch. First errand was in the parking lot, updating the firmware for the in-dash unit. As advertised it took 11 minutes. I was hoping the update would allow the unit to read an SD card so I could upload the map info to it, but it didn't. However it did solve a problem I've had since May where the very fancy rear view camera acted like a dumb as a rock $15 model. Now it acts like the $150 model I bought - in addition to looking straight back, it now can show me approaching traffic in a split screen left and right, another view paints guides for parking in reverse and it can also look straight down for children's toys, children or terrorists. But I repeat myself.

Next errand was Costco where I paid $150 to have them scan the 500 slides I'd boxed last night. Boxes 1 and 10 are a mixture of slides I missed from the 1970s, the other boxes are from a trip made in 1989, which I hope has some significant views of intercropping in the south.
( more than you ever want to know about my role in that )

When I left Thailand I had not idea if the farmers had bought into the plan. I was only there for a year. That was 1977. When I returned in 1989, I was jazzed to see most of the south's young rubber fields looked like my slide show.

Next stop was UPS, dropping off the Linksys router. They never got back to me with an RMA, but it didn't cost much to ship back, and it also didn;t cost that much for the router, so if they don't give me a refund I'm not out that much. And I can challenge the charge on the credit card.

UPS HQ is right near my favorite Chinese soup place, Chef Lee's, and it was an ugly day made for a big bowl of soup. House Special Wor Won Ton. Chicken broth with bits of pork, beef, shrimp, bok choi, slices of other veggies. They make the best in the area. When I worked nearby I went there for lunch a lot, and they were always almost empty, but today it was packed at 2 pm. Good to see. Nice folks, good food. I've had other dishes there, but that soup is my fave.

Back to work, had a chat with a couple of support engineers about 4K video, and also chatted with Automation Guy who had some Americana questions.

My weekly report did not take long. I spent a lot of hours on projects, but they could be summarized in very few lines.

Thought about going to Mathilda Starbucks and getting gasoline after, but it was an awful rainy windy day and I felt like home would be a better choice.

Dinner while watching 2 week old Elementary which keeps getting better. Reheated the chicken satay and peanut sauce (mixed some extra yellow curry paste in & chunky PNB) but I forgot what a microwave does to that stuff and ended up with brown spicy pasty powdery stuff. Also threw 4 of the beef wellingtons into the nuke, and they were delicious.

Sliced up a banana and topped it with chocolate ice cream and sprinkles.

Domino got another 1/3 can of kitty crack, we have now changed to Ocean Whitefish & Tuna which she seems to like better than the salmon.

Online, looked up the problem I was having with the SD card, and found it had to be formatted FAT32. Did that, took it out to the car and it uploaded info about the map. Ran Garmin's update app against it, and was told the map is up to date. Bummer because even though it claims to be 2013, it was published in 2012 and the info on it is from 2010. I am constantly running into exits which aren't there, and it can't find half the places I am looking for. To make life more frustrating, the firmware update erased all my saved locations. There apparently was no way to back those up or restore them. Grrr. All the portable Garmins can do this, which is why I got this unit in the first place - only Kenwood uses Garmin.

My favorite photo meetup send email about a model I really wanted to shoot, but it's on the same day as a book convention I have a ticket for. Another shoot I was attracted to is Sunday, but I have tickets to a show. The morel they are shooting tomorrow is pug ugly, they bring her in because she does Goth things I am not interested in photographing.

Plans for tomorrow:
Maybe 10 am library talk on electric vehicles.
Chill

Amazing but true, everything I planned to do today were did.

Lowe's, bought a 5/8" drill bit. Home, drilled the hole in the door from the now-discarded industrial strength knocker from 1/4" to 5/8". Sort of. The drill bit didn't like the metal facing on the door, and made a somewhat triangular hole, so I had to finesse it with a file.
Installed a peep lens into the hole in the door.

Lunch was some small Safeway Select Asian beef thing.

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Photo shoot at 2 pm in a warehouse space tricked out into a workable studio space. This was a group shoot with one of my Meetups, the first one I have been to in a long time (tendinitis after the whale watching trips made it painful to hold the camera, and most of my favorite meetup groups had disappeared or gone downhill).

The host photog has lots of experience, lots of lighting equipment, and he runs the shoot in a friendly manner while still maintaining the rules. I stopped going to two groups because the host didn't enforce the "no shooting unless it's your turn" rule.

The model is drop-dead gorgeous. Redhead. It was a nude shoot, so I can say natural redhead. Which reminds me of a joke: ( Read more... ) She never ran out of poses, kept a sense of humor, and we were her 2nd 3-hour session but she was still energetic right to the end. Or at least till I left, which was at 4:50.

We did four sets:
Stripes Darkened room, black background and side panels, a special spotlight with a patterned slide projects stripes onto the model's body. There is enough light to focus, barely, but when the shutter is pushed, the light flashes. The model had a lot of fun moving around in ways which made interesting patterns. Kind of fun, but a waste of a beautiful model.
Box: Lights back on, white background, a white cube about 2 feet on a side in the center of the shooting area. The model took direction well, and she looks a lot better fully lit than striped.
Rope: Same background. A huge rope is suspended from the ceiling. We are talking the kind of rope which secures The Queen Mary to the dock. Model poses with the rope draped around her, hanging onto it as a counter-balance, but didn't have the biceps to climb it.
Ring: Same background, the rope is replaced by a Cirque-style metal ring large enough for the model to sit inside without hitting her head on the top. Lots of fun poses, and lots of laughs because she had no way to keep the ring from slowly spinning. She tried, but nothing worked. Finally the host and the model's companion helped, but it slowed things down waiting for the hand to leave the shot.

With 9 photographers, we didn't get a lot of shots, I only came out with about 140.

A couple of my favorite work-safe ones:
( Read more... )

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Ducked out at 5 to meet Janice a couple of miles up Lawrence for Starbucks. It's the largest one I know, it used to be a bank. And it's always packed. We had a good chat. Her current boyfriend has survived a year now. We decided to take light rail to see 1776 next weekend.

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Watermarked one photo from each set, and uploaded to the meetup page, and added a comment full of compliments to the host & model.

Plans for tomorrow:
Do some reading
Afternoon head for Murphy Ave and find a place to watch the ball game. The Seahawks meetup in MV already has 50 people saying they will be there, and that place only holds about 40 places where you can see the screen. 
Evening depends on who wins
 
   

Almost everyone I know had shifted from here and Dreamwidth to Facebook, but this is my journal, The Book of Face is merely my place to be clever and annoying.

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When I got to work, the sky was incredibly blue, not a cloud in it, and my brain fed me this quote:
"The sky so blue, the sun so bright, how could anything go wrong on a day like this?"
Followed by:
"Woof! Boom!"


The first line is the cue for the cast to start the title song for You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown, for which I played the title role in Astoria, OR in 1973. At the end of the intro, Snoopy yells "Woof!" and the cast echoes with "Boom!". I love that bit. Probably my favorite moment in all the shows I have been in. Partly because this is the first musical I was ever in. It was a total fluke. I didn't think I was a singer, all my theater had been comedy or drama plays, except for a musical which the Temple choir did when I was in grade school, while I was still a first soprano, so that doesn't really count.

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More adventures at work today, while I was trying to tune up the scripts on the machine which Automation Guy had allegedly reserved for me, someone else started running scripts with the same program, by automation. So Automation Guy says he can only lock a machine for 8 hours. So he found a machine not in the automation pool, but VNC does a strange thing with it - any time I hit a letter for which CTRL+ALT+letter is a command, it does the command. So I hit an F and it opens the search dialog box. U throws up the accessibility menu. And so on. Makes it useless to edit my scripts. So I edit them on my own PC, saved the a shared drive in the lab, and run them on the machine he assigned. But we can't do Monday's demo like that. And it's a royal PITA to write that way.

Lunchtime was Togo's, I asked if they still did the half-and-half: half a sandwich and half a bowl of soup. He said yes. But they don't. Instead I got half a small bowl of soup and a min-sandwich on a bun. Gag me. Next time I'll order a full one of each and take half the sandwich home.

Went there because it's the closest place I can get no-fee cash from an ATM which is near good places to eat.

Rivermark Safeway after work, which had the stupidest, most dangerous exit from the expressway and is a total clusterf*ck for parking. The lot is HUGE and turnover is constant, except the traffic patterns prevent people from getting in or out in anything resembling a timely manner. Medium-sized shopping this time to stock up on frozen dinners, ice cream, crackers and I forgot the cheese. Was able to log into their wi-fi and see what was extra cheap on my card, otherwise would have forgotten margarine.

Home, one huge box on the side steps, one large box by the livingroom door, one small box on the porch landing. All from Amazon. Go figure.

The huge box was a ceramic heater with electronic thermostat for the bedroom/master bathroom which are at the far end of the house, so by the time air from the furnace gets there it is not very warm.

Large box was candy. A 64-pack of Anton Berg booze-filled dark chocolate mini-bottles (a bedtime snack) and a 12-pack of Werther's sugar-free caramels. Good to wake up to.

And in the small box was a wireless doorbell, with two push buttons. The side door already has one which plays Winchester chimes, I was hoping that the buttons were on the same channel, but they are not. No problemo, JoseBee, there is an archway between the kitchen and piano room which the bell fits on perfectly and resonates through the house. The buttons program the sound, so I installed one by the kitchen door which cuckoos, and one by the livingroom door which plays a standard door bell sound. I was going to make it do a knocking sound, because there used to be a 1-ton knocker on that door which I recently removed because it is heavy and ugly and I'd rather have a peep hole there.

I have been buying entirely too much Stuff. En route still are 2 pairs of Levi's 550's, an 18-gallon storage tub on which to raise the night table, and a set of coat hooks to be mounted near or on the side door.

Did a load of laundry - put things in in the morning and into the dryer when I got home. This morning it occurred to me that my shower towel has been in use for a month. And I've been looking for a time to wash my Supersonics jacket. Some jeans and T-shirts also benefited.

The Big Games are on Sunday, so I'll go to Ardenwood on Saturday with my camera and telescope or just a long lens if I can't figure out how to mount the camera to the telescope. Monarch butterflies are in season. 

 Plans for tomorrow:
Work
1-on-1
????