Monthly Archive for November, 2007

Yessss!!111, Wait. What?

So, one of my pictures was published in the aforementioned Jackson24 book, and to my surprise, it was the one I had linked to in my previous post. However, they black-and-white-ified it, and in my personal opinion, made it look pretty bad (not to mention that it’s also printed across the inner-spine!). What really amazed me, is that they didn’t pick one of the other two pictures that actually had people in them; I even converted one into black and white for them! You’ll have to excuse me if I’m a little proud of the pictures I submitted to them, for I am. I realize that they are not “The Best Photographs Ever Captured,” but I also know enough about photography now to judge work that is outstanding, good, and poor. If quality was a deciding factor in choosing the pictures that were printed, I’d like to see the reasoning behind some of the photos I saw tonight.

I am human, and I am malcontent. There are some really decent photographs in the book though and I would encourage anyone who lives in Jackson, and likes photography, to grab a copy of it. I do however, wish this town had more of an interest in the arts, and encouraged its residents in their creativity.

I did notice, while flipping through the list of photographers in the back of the book, that several people (presumably staff members) had quite a few more photographs published than the “three per person” rule that us regular (sub-par?) citizens were held to. While I can’t say I’d blame them for taking this opportunity for self-promotion, I think they should have stuck to the rules themselves. There were more than enough good pictures that could have made it into the book in place of the six or twelve extra pictures of theirs that they deemed more important (like my other two. :) )

In other news, all of the submissions (close to 1,000) are on a DVD that is being bundled with the book, so hopefully someone will spot the others of mine that have been discarded, acknowledge my genius, and give me vasts sums of money.

To the people that submitted photographs and actually had them all printed, I congratulate you. To those of you who missed the book but are on the DVD, keep taking pictures, strive for improvement, and never give up.

He cooks, he cleans…

Fixes websites, upgrades blogs and installs forums, fixes computers, writes crappy prose, writes crappy code and when he has some free time, takes some pictures. The last item being the real reason I wrote this post. I just got a call from the Jackson Citizen Patriot (our local newspaper) regarding the pictures that I submitted for the book they are compiling about my little town of Jackson Michigan. Now when I get excited, I have a tendency to not hear things correctly, or either hear things correctly and then doubt that they are true; but there is a release party for the book Jackson24 this Tuesday at the newspaper’s office, and I want to believe that I was told my pictures made it into the book. You can see one of the pictures here, and I might upload the other two once the book is released. For any of my friends outside of Jackson, just leave a comment if you’d like to see the others. I plan on attending this party, even though I’ll have to leave work an hour early; I’d like to meet some of the other photographers, and have a chance to sign autographs, :P kidding of course. I’ll let everyone know how the party goes, and I’ll be sure to confirm whether or not my pictures are in the book; because, aren’t you all dying to say that you know a famous photographer?

The title of this post is a lie. In my defense though, I can follow cooking directions, and I like to think of my living area in terms of ‘organized chaos.’

Fighting the good fight

I’ve decided to start the “Coalition for the abolition of the terms: jump drive, pen drive, thumb drive and all other variants when referring to a USB Flash Drive.” Those other terms really bug me and they need to go away as soon as possible. Seriously, what the hell is a “jump drive”? Are you jumping on it? Is it jumping on you? Are you storing one gigabyte worth of jumps on it? By inserting it into your anus, does it give you the ability to actually perform a “Jump Drive?” I do not even care if “jump drive” is someone’s brand name or registered trademark for their particular type of USB Flash Drive, it’s silly, stupid and not trendy or cool in the slightest. In closing, I recommend that you publicly humiliate anyone who uses any of the now abolished terms–bonus points if you get this on video. After the public humiliation, kindly remind them that they are in fact referring to a USB Flash Drive, as it is a, “flash memory storage device, integrated with a universal serial bus connector.” Then, you may give them permission to publicly humiliate anyone else who commits what we shall now refer to as “the great sin”, and thus, this movement shall spread like wildfire, because as we all know, everyone likes to publicly humiliate the ignorant.

I need a name…

For an application that I’m creating with a couple of guys from work. It’s going to be a help desk application geared for the IT world, but hopefully flexible enough to be used in other industries that would need software of that type. I’d like to avoid both the words “help” and “desk”, unless they can be cleverly used in some kind of acronym. In case you care, the software will be web-based, open source, built with php, mysql, javascript, xhtml, css, xml and probably somewhat awesome. If anyone would like to help, just let me know; none of those involved so far are expert programmers, web designers, graphical artists, or documentation writers, so we are not looking for someone with “mad skillz”, just people who would like to help out and have fun. More on this, some other time.

This, in a way, is me making up for not being able to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. I have also resolved to do some planning, brainstorming and outlining for a new novel that I hope to actually write at some point in my lifetime–that time is not now. So, instead of writing 1,667 words every day this month, I will spend at least thirty minutes drafting a new story. Yes, you should expect awesomeness.

I played Guitar Hero III today for the Wii, and I now have to have it, as well as my own Wii with which to play it on.