How are you ringing in the New Year tonight?
I'm working. Or,l more precisely, I'm taking this photo with real fireworks rather than photoshopped-in white dots:
I'm thrilled, not just because it's a totally awesome book for anyone who plays poker seriously and wants to improve their game, but because I'm thanked in the acknowledgments.
Me. Me who can't remember a bloody thing that she learned about math from high school calculus forward. Who opens the book and stares at a random page and wonders what in the hell all those goofy little symbols mean. Me who was the first person to try to borrow money from Bill after he won his first bracelet at the World Series of Poker this year. (OK, it was only a quarter, and I only did it because I was astonished that none of the railbirds had hit him up for a loan yet.)
Me who contributed a very tiny amount of data that the authors might have used in the book, or at least used to confirm that their theories were correct about something.
If you care about poker, you must own this book.
Show us something from the 80's.
Be afraid.
If I'd stuck around, today would have been my 22nd wedding anniversary. I've been trying to wrap my brain around it, and I just can't make it work. My wedding was over half my life ago. I'm sure I have several friends who have no idea that I was ever married, or that I wasn't born with the name Beadles. Yes, I took his name when I got married... that's what people did in the midwest in the 80s. And when we got divorced, I was too lazy to change it.
Yes, I was stupid young.
Yes, that really is me.
Yes, you have to pay the bet you just lost.
Like most of the people I know, I have a google alert set up on my name. Technology is great... I can kiboze the whole bloody net, and I barely have to lift a finger.
From time to time, the blog http://uxx1baby.blogspot.com/ triggers my google alert. It looks like a spam blog, but I can't figure out quite how or why... it doesn't seem to have any malicioius code, links to anything, ads, commercial text, nothing. And yet, it must make sense to someone.
Clues, anyone?
This guy was in the batch that I shot last night, but I hadn't looked at it yet. I'm getting better at looking at the raw images and knowing which ones are going to turn out good when they're finished, but I'm sure I'm overlooking a lot of gems. This one was a bit underexposed and flat, and it wasn't until I pulled it into the raw processor and started moving sliders around that it jumped out at me.
Someone on Flickr thought the little white spots were water droplets. They aren't-- they're pollen. The whole image is probably around half an inch high.
Now I have this overwhelming urge to go to the florist and buy one of everything.
What were your top 5 TV shows of 2006?
- The off button
- The off button
- The off button
- The off button
- The off button
I got a set of extension tubes recently, so I've been playing with macrophotography again. This is one of my experiments from tonight. You can't really tell from looking at the picture, but that segment of flower is probably on the order of half an inch tall.
I love digital because the feedback loop is really tight. I can make half a dozen mistakes, feed everything into Photoshop, figure out where I was st00pid, and then do it all over again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Last night I figured out that my camera was dusty as all fsck, my lighting was crappy, and I needed to work on composition. Tonight I learned that a single cat hair on a flower looks like a ginormous ugly worm, but I think my lighting got better and I got most of the dust off of my sensor.
This afternoon I checked Yahoo weather to see what was up for the next day or two. Much to my surprise, there was a severe weather alert for Oakland.
"Severe weather? It's gorgeous! What's up with that?" I clicked.
There's a frost warning.
I grew up in a city that routinely got several inches of snow dumped on it, and where ice storms were infrequent but impressive. Now I live in a place where the possibility of frost constitutes severe weather.
I win.
I completely sympathize! I played bass and then cell for three years in my high school's orchestra. We played the Canon in D every single year, and after the first 15 minues the first year, it was dreadfully dull. When he said, "eight bars repeated 54 times", I already knew those numbers-- they're embedded in my brain for eternity. Of course, he didn't mention the crescendo that's somewhere in the middle. I used to live for that crescendo.
One time, I staged a protest! When we started playing Pachelbel, I got all the bass, cello, and viola players to turn their stands so that they faced the conductor. I was such a rebel. Most amusingly, one of the cello players couldn't do it without seeing the music. After years of playing those same eight notes over and over and over and over, she still needed the music.
Around mid-afternoon I looked outside and thought there was a possibility of having an interesting sunset, so I did what any aspiring photographer would do-- I tossed the camera in the car and headed for a spot with a view.
I was pretty wrong about the sunset, but I did manage to catch this image. I can't decide whether I like it or I hate it, but it's the only thing worth looking at in the whole batch.
While I was out there, some TV news guy was on the island to record a segment. I listened long enough to learn that there would be 18-foot swells on the coast through tonight, then snapped a picture and headed out.
Shooting digital makes you lazy. It's really easy to just point the camera in a general direction and take a whole bunch of similar shots wherein you zoom in and out and move the camera around, but don't really think about what you're diong. Yoiu took twenty shots and nineteen suck? No prob. I find myself doing this a lot, as evidenced by a ton of pictures that I took while I was driving up the coast.
New promise to self: I'm going to stop taking pictures that I know are crappy. That will make me think about each shot before I take it.
Starting tomorrow.
