All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
The mighty wizards of tech-wonder have restored my laptop to full power. I can once again perform miracles of tech-tacular blunder. And yesterday provided a fitting completion to my purgatorial labors. Now I can provide content (such as it is) to the site and its readers.
Now all I have to do is think of something interesting to pontificate about.
Hmmm.
Well, I better start thinking.
Life here in Dunwich has become complicated of late. I need to get a new PayPal account open for a project I’m working on. But now you HAVE to have a cell phone number to do that. Very aggravating. I attempted to get the cheapest plan (~$15/mo.) and the cheapest phone but now that combination has bitten me in the butt. The phone won’t do the things that the plan needs to make it work. I spent several hours on with technical support trying to get things working. They sent detailed but cryptic instructions for accomplishing this.
Some of these instructions were like some kind of athletic game show event. Turn on the phone, tap-hold an app, put it on the front screen, pull out the sim card, throw it in the air, catch it with the other hand, pat your head and rub your stomach, sacrifice a goat, say Beetlejuice three times and finally slam the phone into my forehead. And sadly it still didn’t work. But I’ve been accepted onto next season’s Survivor show. Apparently they think I’m willing to do anything.
Well, so be it. I’ll probably get a different phone or plan or both but it has allowed me to wallow in self-pity. I actually had a nightmare last night that was probably brought on by the angst I was feeling about my status as a technophobe. I dreamt I was designing and installing a pharmaceutical process train. And after it was completely done I could see that it would be a death trap for the operators. It would allow highly flammable solvent fumes to come in contact with electrical components that weren’t rated for the hazardous service.
And in the nightmare I was trying to convince management to decommission the equipment I was commissioning without ever using it. It was one of those dreams where it’s obvious there’s no escape but you have no choice but to keep looking for the way out. Maybe I should have blamed Putin’s Price Hike.
Well, anyway, somehow I have to resolve the great smart phone standoff and a whole list of other chores. I’ve got to sell some old lenses, plant some seedlings, get business advice from an expert, make some insurance decisions and figure out what to write about today. And that doesn’t include the fact that I have to catch up on the novel. The last few days I let things slip. Well really I’ve been trying to resolve a problem with the plot. I need to invent some new characters. And it has demotivated me. But I think I figured out what to do.
And it’s raining today. But it’s been a good few days on the site. On Saturday and Sunday I got linked by two aggregators and that accounted for five or six hundred extra readers those days. That was enjoyable. So there have been some wins and some losses. Okay. So, on with the parade! Maybe I’m the the Master of Ceremonies today or maybe I’m the guy with the broom and the trash can cleaning up after the elephants. Either way, I’m moving forward.
So, as I’ve alluded to recently, I’ve been playing host to one of my descendants recently and whenever he visits, he’s always shocked by how little progress I’ve made technologically since his last visit and in a spirit of charity he tries to modernize my approach to various everyday life circumstances.
For instance, he reminded me pointedly that my camera, the Sony A7 III, still had the original firmware version. But there were currently versions above revision 4. And he stressed the fact that one of those revisions included a major upgrade to eye autofocus and tracking autofocus capability. And since he is painfully aware of my legendary laziness, he begged me to actually perform the upgrade while he was watching, which I did.
Later when he attempted to run a YouTube video on the tv through a DVD player that had wi-fi, he was dismayed at the terrible bandwidth and asked if I had any other alternative devices. I explained that a year ago I bought a Roku device but it seemed as if I would need to pay for a monthly subscription so in my annoyance at being sucked in, I threw it into my tech scrap heap and forgot all about it. He assured me that the credit card registration was a harmless feint and I would not be charged for free applications like YouTube and other movie channels that had free services. He then dug it out, installed it and suddenly my wide screen tv became a new world of high-definition nature shows that he favors.
And the other day he asked me about my photo workflow. I use Capture One software to post-process my files and I had mentioned that the loading and backup time was becoming unmanageably long. So, we went through the system and identified that one of my settings had been accidentally changed and I was loading all my files to one folder that was now horrifyingly large.
I attempted to remedy the situation. I did successfully change the setting and now am no longer making the problem worse. Score one for me! But I then attempted to break the catalog into smaller pieces to speed up the processing time. That didn’t work out so well. Capture One has several categories of files. There are catalogs and sessions and folders and even other things that I’m not really sure I understand at all. I spent several hours chopping up the giant folder into my existing file system. Then I tried to point the thumbnail renderings to the new file system and that was a total failure. It wouldn’t locate the files for the thumbnails to work as needed, a crushing blow. An alternative would be to manually point the thumbnails to the individual files one by one. But since there are tens of thousands of files, I might not live long enough to accomplish this. Plan B is to spend several hours combining all the files back into one folder the way they were before I started changing it and then move the thumbnails and files together into separate folders. It’s sad to know just how inept I am with the software tools I work with. But an honest man must swallow the hard truth and try to do better. I have vowed, with Peter Thiel as my witness, that I will get my tech house in order. I will give a DAM (that’s digital image management) and get my millions of photo files under control. I will learn how to make my own plug-ins for my website. And I will spend the time to find the appropriate (and cheap) software I need to optimize my other digital occupations like fiction writing.
Of course, I won’t start today. We’re having a big get together and I have to help Camera Girl with the set-up and general chores. But soon! And from now on! The world will see a new photog!
Did that sound convincing?