Cuuuuuueeeeeernaaaaavaca!!!!!
This is for you Jason.
Turn up the volume.
EOS-10D
firmware update released today.
Sit back and get your smoke and drink on, concentrate on nothing, and
put it all into perspective.
Driving home from work, I stopped at Michael's (the craft store, not the
dude) for some photo frames. In the middle of the parking lot I turned and rush for the car to get the camera just as the evening sky exploded. I took a series of photos at low shutter speed handheld... mostly 1/20 or below. A local photographer that shoots
Hasselblad medium and large format exclusively approached me and we chatted... mostly about how she was pissed that she didn't have a camera with her.
The color and saturation of these photos is unaltered... this is exactly how the sky looked.
Nifty.
At lunch, Micah talked about a recent piece he wrote for publication. He emailed it over after we got back to the office, so I thought I'd post it here:
"The Nature of Choice
To begin, this topic is inspired by The Matrix Reloaded. I’ll keep the movie associations to a minimum, as the discussion hardly requires them. I just wanted to make known what started the chain of thought in me.
The aforementioned film deals with a number of questions regarding destiny, choice, purpose, causality, and etc., which have been touched on by various discussions and forums on the Internet. What I have not seen dealt with is the interweaving of these ideas. More specifically, I see all the others such as causality and destiny as supporting players of choice, at least for the human perception of choice. When a person begins to examine and become aware of his own thought patterns, that person takes note of his choices. Choice, it seems, is the ultimate expression of Imagination and Will, the creative forces. With each choice a new existence is carved out and the future made new. This line of thinking leads the Seeker to train his thought patterns to more closely coincide with his will, making choices that manifest those thoughts, bringing about a balance that leads to a more productive, healthy psyche that is then capable of further levels of awareness, training, and mastery. Beautiful, isn’t it? Here’s where we begin “tumbling down the rabbit hole.” Every choice we make is the result of a series of variables run through the thought methodology we have created throughout our lifetime. Sure, life experiences changes this, value systems change, age alters perception, etc. But each of these is a result of variable stimuli. So, given that someone could become aware of all involved stimuli over the course of a life and understand the basis of a person’s judgment process, it stands to reason that all choices are predictable, through a complex logical process. The sheer number of variables involved and the complexity of the process make it difficult to wrap your head around the concept, but nevertheless, it would seem that there is no true chaos or randomness. Every atom that moves or interacts with another, all energy that is exchanged, does so based on preexisting criteria. Destiny creates itself through choice. As physics has so graciously taught us, the universe is a complex mathematical system. Life is no different. It is part of the system and therefore predictable. I suppose from this standpoint the Merivingian from Reloaded was correct about causality, “We are slaves to it.” Cause and effect have been working their way through the laws of physics since the beginning of time. Welcome to a Matrix that needs no computers or evil machine lords to exist. It is not a prison for the mind, but the very basis of it. Destiny is not the antithesis of free will but both the parent and child of it. Ultimately all this rambling and analysis is irrelevant. In order to live, we have to focus our attention in a linear direction. Always moving forward. However, it is perhaps useful to study the system for predictability, providing practical power for success in life endeavors."
For what was a rather slow morning, this afternoon is shaping up to be full on. I'm busier than a three legged cat covering shit... busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest... busier than a cat trying to bury a turd on a frozen pond... busier than a handicapped space at the Special Olympics... a one-eyed man in a topless bar... busier than a Beirut bricklayer... busier than a one armed wallpaper hanger with the crabs... busier than a cranberry merchant in November... busier than a centipede at a toe countin' contest... busier than a feminist at a Southern Baptist prayer meeting... busier than a two-peckered goat... busier than a banana salesman at a monkey convention... busier than a stump tailed cow at fly time... busier than a blind hound dog in smokehouse... busier than a 3-year-old on a sugar high... busier than a Jenny Craig cop in a donut shop... busier than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs... ummm... yeah. Google rocks. Back to the grind.
I hate how vendors can be like gnats. Do they not understand English? If I say, "I'm not buying your product. Go away.", I probably mean that I'm not going to buy their product and they should go away. Bugging me incessantly is not helping to change my mind. I'm meeting Micah for lunch. Very cool. I haven't seen the dude in forever. He's back in town with a new job, so we have some catching up to do. I'm a starvin' Marvin right now. I could eat a large dog in Vietnam. This morning has been slow for me... which make the day drag on. I am all about getting the hell outta Dodge this afternoon. Well, it's not much different than any afternoon, but today just seeeeeeems like a day to not be at work. I want to go out to play.
11/11 is coming... think about it.
Greg sent me these "Beer Drinkers' Posters" this morning. I don't understand them because we all know...
"Beer ain't drinkin'!"
Unbelievable. I rode the bus this morning. People packed in like sardines in a can. Strange looks. Stranger smells. Baggage. Gossip. The smoothness of driving a car with no shocks down a dried caliche dust road after a season of heavy rain. If you grew up in south Texas, you know what I’m talking about. I have to push and pull the beginnings and endings of my work day to fit into the inadequate management style of my boss’s boss. If you are not sitting at your assigned desk where he can see you working, you can’t possibly be working. You can not successfully manage information technology professionals in this fashion. It will never work. If I’m working in the wee hours of the night over encrypted VPN from my home office… I’m working. If I’m in the datacenter troubleshooting application performance issues with my laptop over wireless LAN… I’m working. If I’m on my cell phone on the bus directing a conference call of 3 or 4 technicians across the country on a technical procedure… I’m working. If I’m coming back from lunch and run into one of the server admins and go over problems they have been having with backups… I’m working. I used to have Ricochet before they went under and could be anywhere in the Houston METRO area and connect to the corporate network via Internet VPN… guess what, if I’m eating dinner out in town and the network shits the bed and I flip oven the laptop and fix it… I’m working. He can not grasp this concept. You will be a little clock punchin’ bitch regardless. Another thing that is pissing me off about the current regime is their burning desire to turn us into a help desk. The top network engineers in the entire corporation are now opening trouble tickets for everything ala help desk style. You wipe your ass, you better have a trouble ticket. Enough about that. So we made it to Tuesday. Today is a big day for me. I have a lot of financial thorns to pull from my side. I need to square up with the IRS sharks and take care of a couple of loose ends that will bring me one step close to getting out of the rat race. I can’t take it anymore. I long for a simple life. Tuesdays are Golden Tee days. Beer and Golden Tee Golf at Blanco’s Bar and Grill. I’m not so sure if I’m going to partake today, but I probably will. I’m lovin’ this weather we are having. It finally feels like fall. It’s important to have the weather as an indicator down here because we certainly don’t have the turning of the leaves they get up north. Leaf Peepin’. That term always cracked me up when I lived in upstate New York, but the event was breathtaking. EL and I received this wedding gift from a few of her close friends from Minnesota that was an autographed copy of this photography book from the area she grew up. This photographer, over a period of years, kayaked around Lake Superior and photo-journalized the landscape throughout the seasons. He broke his photography into geographical sections and carefully shared the diversity of the region with everyone through the publishing of his book. For the second addition, he took all his original slides and had the professionally drum scanned so he could use the digital darkroom to enhance and correct… to better express. Much like Ansel did throughout his life. I’d like to be a little more like than guy and a little less like the drone with the bar coded serial number tattooed on my forehead trudging through life in a plastic hamster tube lining the floor of an overpaid executive’s office.
I finally got around to looking at why my comment notification wasn't working correctly. Yippie.
It's quiet this afternoon. I am ready to leave. They are discussing taking our datacenter to DR if this water leak repair goes haywire. This would likely mean a lot of work for me and my buds. Not a good thing. Alas, if only a phat job would fall from the heavens... or a winning lotto ticket. Speaking of, I bought a lotto ticket last week and never checked to see if I won anything. Hmm. Maybe I cashed in on five bucks or something and need to claim my riches!
Tick tock.
I pass by my old office this morning and it's raining inside. Seriously. Raining. A chillwater pipe busted in the ceiling that was feeding a few coolers in the datacenter and the ceiling started leaking huge amounts of water into the space below... which happened to be my old office. If I were still in there, all my shit would have been ruined... laptop, servers, paperwork, etc. Ruined. I guess there is a little good in everything.
This fur coat is
not exactly mink...
Shot yesterday at the most unimpressive Houston Nature Center over in the Memorial/Woodway section of town. I used the 550-EX with a Stoffen Omnibounce diffuser mounted on-camera and an EF 100mm f/2.8 macro USM @ f/16 (hence the falloff toward the left) and a Canon 500D dual element close-up diopter.
Cute little bugger, isn't he?
I wore a suit to work today. I'm not sure exactly why... just felt like it. I never wear suits. It should spark curiosity and draw snide comments from the peanut gallery. Fuck 'em. I really need some time away from here... someplace far, far away. Monday is rough because it brings that reality back and makes it slap you in the face. EL drove me to work, so that started my day off on the right foot. It's hard to stay smiling in here though. I just had a discussion with a guy here that recently caught the shutterbug... well, he's been reinfected anyway... he's been shooting off and on for 40 some-odd years. I was explaining how every sumbitch I have ever spoken to at Houston Camera Exchange has come off like a pompous elitist bastardo. I will go out of my way to pay more at one of their competitors than give those sorry fucktards my business. Period. I have tried on numerous occasions to go in and be a good customer, but despite any knowledge they nay have to share, their completely unprofessional and unbelievably inadequate customer service has sent me to the door in outrage. Every time I've priced a lens there, they've come out 10% or 15% higher then any of their competition in town... possibly justifiable if they backed it up with superior customer commitment, but no... they are simply losers that have forevermore lost my businesses. They deserve what they get IMHO. On the flipside, The Camera Co-Op on Shepherd (across the street from Davenport for those that navigate by alcohol) has always been competitively priced (for retail) and a joy to work with... kudos to those dudes. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmn... sluuuuuuurp... coooofffffffeeeeeeeeeee. Yep. It's a Monday morning must have.
