Milestone

In January when I bought my new camera and started posting to flickr on a more regular basis I made a goal of a thousand total views a week or 50,000 for the year. Yesterday I hit that number. I got there with more than a little help from our Lion friends from the San Francisco Zoo. My first Lion Sex picture also hit a milestone yesterday being my first picture to get to 5,000 views. 

It's a simple truth that having my pictures looked at makes me happy. Though as I've been working on some different photo shoots lately I've been wondering how much of what I do is tailored toward getting a few more views. I contribute to award and rating groups and I'm never sure how much influence their views or lack of response changes what I do to my pictures and what I choose to share. I've been having fun with color lately but this morning I realized that as colorful as the Italian Parade was what I really wanted to do was print these shots in black and white. I guess I'm still trying to figure out what my own palette looks like and sometimes I worry about letting other people's opinions take me away from the directions I want to be. Where does my ego run off to when I start creating?

So this is Christmas

I'm up and down today. On the one hand I'm happy to be out of the store for a whole day, on the other I'm feeling that all alone on the holiday thing. I went out to breakfast this morning at the Persimmon Cafe. I have eaten at least one meal every Christmas since I moved to the city there. That was an up. I did my journal on my phone while waiting for the food to arrive. Then I read the Talk of the Town and the beginning of a story in the new New Yorker. The story was called Alma and the first paragraph smacked me so hard I was afraid to read the rest of the story in case it was a let down. 

As usual my end of year processes are including updating how I do things on my computer. This last month I've been working on finding a good GTD solution. I was all but typing in the debit card number for OmniFocus when I realized that it I wasn't going to be able to utilize to the fullest any task list that I couldn't use on my phone. I like not having to take anything but my phone out and about with me most of the time. I need something that will work on both my desktop and my iPhone. I thought that Easy Task was the solution and it might have been if it hadn't turned out to be the single buggiest piece of software I've ever paid for. $20 down the toilet. Even if it didn't freak out all the time the online site won't update if you complete a project on your phone. That isn't a bug, that's a feature. Thanks but no thanks. 

So, against my internal misgivings I turned to Web 2.0. For the most part I like applications to be in my applications folder and data stored exactly where I tell it to be stored, but the more I use some of these services the more I like the way they are always up to date and always available. I checked out a number of programs, most only took a glance to show me that they were not what I wanted to be looking at everyday to tell me what to do. The three contenders ended up being Remember the Milk, Nozbe, and Vitalist. I really have nothing bad to say about any of the three. In fact even though I went with Vitalist I was very impressed with Remember the Milk. And it has a pretty cool cow favicon. (I've got a bit of a thing for good favicons.) The bottom line was that I've decided to go with Vitalist. I haven't given them any money and I'm not all that happy about paying them $5 or $10 a month for as long as they want to only charge me $5 or $10 a month but the solution is elegant and works exactly how I want it to either on my iPhone or in my desktop browser. 

This was an easier decision because for the past two weeks I've been looking at purchasing a personal finance program. Ending up using a website to track my money was the real leap of trust for online applications. Once I uploaded my checking account registers for the last year onto Wesabe there was no looking back. 

The third new service is actually a blogging platform that has been out for a year but is new to me. That is the blogs from tumblr. Not to panic. I'm not ending this site. This is still where I'm going to write my daily takes on life. I have, however started a parallel blog on tumblr. Here is a nice little blurb on Lifehacker about tumblelogs. So make a bookmark for a new site from me. 

lacadaz on tumblr

The tumblr blog will always have a link back to the latest postings here as well as more little bits of the the net that I come across in my surfing. I'm going to try to keep up with the originality of this site, using it only for my own work and not so much for links and net-minutia. As usual we'll see how it goes but I like the idea of having something that I can just dump whatever strikes my fancy. I've got my flickr, digg and this blog feeding into it as well so it should be a pretty good aggregator of my web life. Check it out if you like and Merry Christmas. 

Active Week for Me

I haven't written much this week. Not here, not on my other blog, not in my journal. But this is not a sign of retreat. I have been staying active and creative. My rule of doing something creative or something to support my creativity every day has stayed in place. I have managed to finish the banners for both my sites, edit and post more photos of the parade, finish the organization of all my pictures in Aperture, go brush crazy in photoshop and make some serious hardware upgrades to my computer. I doubled the memory and hard drive space on my laptop. I now have 3GB in my MacBook and it is faster than ever. I switch between Photoshop and Aperture to edit my pictures effortlessly. For the more technically enclined of you I can say that all week I've only had 23 page outs and none in the last 3 days. That's worth a woot!

I also managed to have a bit of a social life. Karen and Brad were in town for a couple of nights and I spent Wednesday afternoon and evening with them. I hadn't seen them since their move to Hawaii so there was much catching up to do. I also learned more than I knew was possible about Hawaii social structure and the political structure of the Lutheran Church.

I have to get my butt to work right now but I will try to catch up with this weeks events here soon.

The Visual Arts

I haven't been writing very much this past week. I even missed two days in my daily pages breaking a two week streak (my longest in a year). But I have stayed busy with creative projects. I continue to work on my Photoshop skills and I have put considerable time into organizing my photo collection on Aperture. I finally have a work-flow down for photography. Hooray!

Tuesday was a pretty tough day at work. I found out that my boss was supposed to fire me. He's managed to stop that but I'm going to be forced out of my store. That made me pretty sad as it had nothing to do with my performance simply my ability to play politics. So I came home Tuesday night with a song from the Muzak going through my head. I downloaded it and ended up playing it all night while messing around with the lyrics in photoshop. That's this picture. The song is "We Will Become Silhouettes" by The Postal Service.

I'm not suggesting any sort of cosmic attachment to the music or lyrics or my interpretation of them. It was, however, a nice piece of art therapy I engaged in. It makes me happy to think that I was able to create something while in a depressed state. This is a big step for me. Catatonic has been a more useful word when describing me when I'm low. I've always liked the concept of catharsis a whole lot more. We'll try that again tonight. Ten years ago today I was getting married.

Yesterday Was a Good Day

I've begun to take stock of my days by asking myself "What did I create?" and "What did I do to impact my own future?" I am especially critical of my days off from work. The old, "You had all this time to yourself why didn't you create a masterpiece?" issue. I'm trying to through a whatever into the masterpiece part and concentrate on the create part. Yesterday I wrote in my personal journal, I posted on a couple of things on my blogs, and I made a doodle that I don't actually hate. Good day.

On the "Impact of Future Days" front there was more. They were small but they will make my life better in the days to come. I bought the metal strip in the picture and it's accompaning magnets. I've been thinking about this for quite awhile and now that I've done it I'm very glad I did. I bought some new pens and I'm hoping that I can use that space to inspire myself a little bit more. The strip is on the bookcase that sits right next to my writing desk. I can touch it from here.

Other things that will impact beyond today include determining that Yahoo Pipes is not for me, cleaning up my RSS feeds, and the discovery of Klaus Schulze thanks to Jeff. I've been playing him pretty much exclusively since he stopped by last night. I think you will see that name more often on my recently played list. But the big one is that I've started copying my handwritten journals onto my mac. One of the changes that I finished in the last week was the transferring of my computer journals onto a new program, MacJournal. MacJournal has this thing I love. It's a calender that highlights all the days that there are entries for. It fills me with an irrational level of accomplishment to see those days highlighted. And I want credit for everything I've written. So I started copying old entries, at least one a day. If I keep it up (a big if history tells us) I should be done in about a year. I'll keep you posted. For now I will simply leave you with a small quote from what I copied this morning which is from a dream I had in September 2005.

I just woke from the strangest dream. I changed my commute. It was the middle of the night and I was getting home from the city by means of street luge. Except I don’t think I actually had a luge. I think I was just lying in the gutter flat on my back wearing a brown coat.

Believe it or not it goes on. And gets weirder. Whatever, yesterday was a good day. I didn't get my laundry done but it was still a good productive day.