Unremarkable Entry Title
6/27/2
If I�m sitting at my desk in my office, I can see out the window and see a little sliver of sky. What covers 90% of my view is a corrugated steel storage building. It�s not totally featureless though, not only is the steel stamped with a fake wood grain and painted off-white, there is also an exterior light within my view.
To see some grass or other greenery, I have to stand above my desk, my big desk, not the drafting table with my computer on it, and lean forward. By doing so, and looking to the right, I can see grass.
And not only grass today, I can see my car parked on the grass.
So, considering that the parking lot is on the other side of the building and, if the stupid storage shed wasn�t there, I�d be facing an 8 acre field, what is my car doing back here?
Contractors are painting a big ol� structure to the south. The wind is from the southwest today, so we�re hiding our cars from it. Others have merely pulled their car around behind the building on the east side, but, despite the lousy �partial repaint� jobs on my car, I�m hiding it fully behind the building.
I might take a picture of it as I�m testing the Jamcam out.
I took some pictures of a twisted up semi that�s sitting in a gravel lot near the brick storage yard I pass on the way home. It seems that very weathered light grey brick is all the rage these days. I�m still figuring out the camera. I think I know something that I did which is harming the picture quality too.
When I was looking at the settings for the camera, or the offloading of the camera as I suspect but the manual denies, it had a slider called �Sharpening.� Now, I don�t want the pictures I take messed with at all. I want to see exactly what the CCD records. No cheesy sharpening filter, or at least not applied in a massive generalization.
We all know how bad sharpened cat whiskers look. And digital cameras are all about taking pictures of your cats. How else am I supposed to have 200+ pictures of my cats? I�m not wasting real film on them.
But, as the slider for sharpening was in the middle, I slid it all the way to the left. Alas, I think this added a smoothing, or technically a blur filter, to the images. Since I�ve cleared the memory from the camera, I now have smoothy pictures rather than normal. Good thing it wasn�t like a UFO or something, or no one would believe me.
Actually, if I saw a UFO, even I wouldn�t believe me. Well, that�s not totally true. If I saw a big silver flying disk in the sky, I�d assume it was Redstone Arsenal doing the work o� the people. Same with a big silver cigar, but I�d also mock it�s phallicness.
Now, by definition, if I saw a UFO, an unidentified flying object, I�d say, �What the heck is that?�
And we all know that all the best UFO footage happens over the skyline of Mexico City in Adobe Photoshop. Alabama just gets freakish cattle mutilations. And, now that the Apache helicopter program moved down from St. Louis, we have the occasional unmarked black helicopter, but whoopdi-freakin�-doo.
I was Snipey Sniperton yesterday [yes, yes, from Snipesville, Snipeabama]. I took a 32mb MMC format datacard away from some lil� droog. He had it for the last 20 minutes of the auction. Well, the last 20 minutes minus the 10 final seconds that I had it. [bwah ha]. $16.50 with $4 shipping. I�ve already paid them online and they�ve already shipped it. Four bucks is a bit much for something the size of a postage stamp which weights less than 5 grams.
So, total for the new digital camera, which granted has it�s limitations, is $17.99 for the camera and now $16.50 for enough memory to let me take 128 640x480 images at a time. That�s $35ish so far. To top it all off, I�ll get a 9v NiMH battery for $9 at Target and the $10 charger, but not this week. In fact, despite what the lil� chillins have said about the Jamcam, it doesn�t eat batteries at all. It just doesn�t turn itself off automatically.
I�ve seen one taken apart on the internet. They could have made this thing the size of a cassette tape. In fact, if they had made it exactly the size of one, that would be really cool since they you could put it in a cassette case for storage so it didn�t get scratched.
Blah blah blah�My material possessions this�My material possessions that.
The Cosmos tours catalog came yesterday. Aisai, very excited, asked if we could open another account at the bank [credit union really, I�m no stooge] and chuck about $100 a pay period in it for the 2003 vacation that I�ve already been planning.
For traveling to Europe, I really want to make sure my tour goes to Venice and Paris. Aisai wants to do �Italy at Leisure� which I can understand also. There is also a great Indonesian tour, 11 days, with an optional 3 day Angkor extension. The tour itself is only 799 plus air each, but adding that Angkor bit ads another $400.
I�m hoping for Europe in the early fall 2003. September 2003 is our 12 year anniversary, and October 2003�
Crap, I�ll be 35!
[Note to self: Get that Miata quick!]