Two pints, a chicken parma, a day in the sun taking photos, and a public holiday tomorrow. Life is good, and I’m whacked.
I’m literally gobsmacked. I just grabbed Picasa, and it’s without a doubt simultaneously the most lightweight and functional photo organiser I’ve ever used. I’ve played with Adobe Elements and Adobe Photoshop Album before, but both had the same problems most album-type software do - they’re too heavyweight, and they lock you into their method of organisation. All well and good, but I’ve changed platforms too many times and lost too much information each time to warrant the time investment in learning their system and typing everything in.
For a 3 meg download, it’s amazing what it’ll do. You can scroll through your entire list of photos in thumbnail format using a quite ingenious directional scroll-bar (you need to see it to understand) while seeing them all in thumbnail mode, or view them full-screen in timeline or album slideshow mode. And, it recognises when you’ve inserted flash media or connected your camera and automatically downloads everything for you.
You can also input photo metadata (think captions or tags) using the ITPC standard. In English, expect everything else to support it within 6 months, so your captions move with your photos. It supports single click contract / brightness adjustments (which work surprisingly well), as well as EXIF manipulation for the hardcore. I kid you not - it took me half an hour to reorient all my portrait photos for the last two years so they’re oriented correctly. It was so fast, I was actually starting feel ill because of the speed the screen was changing.
It burns, it backs up over a network, and it monitors folders for new photos. What’s not to like?
All it needs now is an automatic web export option (you can export, you just need to play with the settings) and it’d be close to perfect. Google is getting so good it’s downright frightening.
More small updates - gallery is up, and there’s no longer a need to directly copy images across. It’s surprising how long it actually takes to set everything up satisfactorily. I’m still definitely not impressed with the stylesheet, but I think it’ll take more time than I’ve got at the moment to fix. So, it stays as is.
We went to the rainforest today. A long drive - the scenic route, so to speak. All up, about six hours of driving. It was fun, but it’s probably easier to let the pictures speak for themselves:
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Taking photos is always nice. I think it stimulates a largely dead area of my psyche - the honest to god creative part. We all exercise creativity of a form at work, but I think there’s a massive gap between what’s creative in a work sense and what’s creative in spiritual / artistic sense. It’s kind-of sad to reflect back on what one’s done over the last ten years and to realise that very little has been creative in an artistic sense. It’s like living in monochrome. Realising it is confronting, but enlighening.
I think the difference between work and art is the same as the difference between synthesis and creativity (for a given meaning of synthesis and creativity). They’re not quite the right words, but they’ll do for a Sunday night reflection. One is low risk (in a personal exposure and likelihood of failure senses) with a high probability of success, the other high risk and completely orthogonal to success.
Synthesis is all about standing on the shoulders of others and making the ‘value-add’ - it’s about reuse and extension. Creativity is about doing something differently for the sheer joy of it and not worrying about the consequences. I think it’s about revelling in the exploration of creation without worrying about where you’re going to end up. It’s all about the route taken, not the destination. Synthesis is always clouded by a constant concern about whether or not it’s going to achieve the outcome.
True creativity isn’t normally appreciated or encouraged at work, as true creativity is both highly personal and bears no requirement for productivity or efficiency. I think you impart a little bit of yourself in everything truly creative. When asked for a application that delivers certain business functionality, there’s little room to come back and say “mu” and expect a positive reaction. Or, to return with an abstract sketch of a pony riding across a lunar landscape with a dog on its back.
I’m sure it’d engender a creative response though.
Synthesis is well suited to commerce - the process actively encourages optimisation and refinement. It’s almost like the scientific process in that sense - if followed correctly and long enough, success is (almost) guaranteed. Creativity is more like chaos - sometimes it hits, sometimes it misses.
Of course, where does that leave most writers, artists, and the like? I think people like Stephen King don’t write for pleasure and pain of writing - I think they’ve done it for so long and so frequently that they no longer concern themselves with creation. Writing has become a form of synthesis for them, no different to banging out 10,000 lines of Perl or developing a tried and true marketing campaign. Every now and then though, they can’t resist falling back into their old ways. For Stephen King, I think his release was the Dark Tower series. I think on some level he knew he was locked in a circle of soul-sucking synthesis, and books like The Dark Tower series gave him an out.
I think that others, like Douglas Adams, never lost sight of creativity. Every new piece by them was an exploration in its own right. Not all were necessarily good, but all were unique in their own way. Neal Stephenson is another interesting one - I think his connection with creativity comes through the discovery process he goes through with each new novel. I get the feeling, reading his books, that his interest lies in researching and communicating. I also get the feeling, though, that his creativity has been declining since his earlier works. He’s become too familiar with writing. I still love his books though.
Writers like Robert Jordan are so deep in a rut, I swear they’ve gotten confused and think they can dig themselves out of it. The Wheel of Time has become the poster child for synthesis - quite well written in a technical sense, filled with character and plot development, and infuriatingly boring. He’s lost the spark that originally led him to the series, and I think it shows.
As much as it pains me to say it, I think Terry Pratchett is a master of synthesis. I love his writing, his characters, and his humour, but I think he’s firmly in the synthesis camp. Not formulaic (especially not in terms of plot), but getting close.
Not surprisingly, when I read over what I’ve just written, there’s a pretty strong theme coming through. I think most blockbuster writers adopt some form of synthesis - that’s exactly why they’re successful . Creative writers are sometimes successful, but they’re frequently one-hit wonders. One-hit wonders of mind-numbing brilliance, quite frequently, but still one-hit wonders. I wonder whether that’s because they wrote in a state of brilliance, whether they only had the one book in them, or whether they created for the sake of creation, and when they were done, they were finished with that concept and / or style and had to move on. I think it could be the third.
So, enough blather. It all comes back to how difficult I find it to frame my thoughts properly. Ask for a strategy, I’ll whip one together in a day. A marketing plan, a block of application code, some web programming, an economic analysis, some econometric modelling, or some feasibility analysis? Not a problem - I’ll get it done within a week.
Ask me to explain myself and my thoughts?
Duuuhhhh ……
Writing is difficult. Much harder than I remember it. I guess I’m hoping that this whole process will reignite the creative portions of my mind. In many, many ways I miss them. I don’t think I’ve done anything properly creative (or reflective) since high-school. It probably had a lot to do with being an inwards-focused bag of hormones back then, but still - at least I was using my whole brain.
Enough for tonight. Bed calls.
The world is a weird and wonderful place. Get this:
Not bad - not something I’d be able to knock over lunch, but definitely impressive from in terms of sheer gluttony. Can we say Roman Empire?
I mean seriously - the damn thing is bigger than his head!!! He can’t get his mouth around it - look at how large a bite he’s taking, and then look at how many bites he’s still got to go! It’s made with:
- 2 kilos (!) of meat
- two whole onions
- two tomatoes
- a half a head of lettuce
- 3 pickles
- a really big bun
Of course, what’s a burger without condiments? For a taste sensation, add:
- a cup (!) of mayonnaise
- a cup of ketchup
- a cup of mustard
- a cup of relish
- a cup of peppers
Of course, if that isn’t enough, add:
- half a kilo (!) of cheese
All up, about 2 kilos of meat and 3 kilos of “fixins”. The thing is such a beast, it takes 45 minutes to cook. They don’t mention it, but I’m sure they offer a side dish of a kilo of fries and a four litre milkshake. Of course, for the “lesser men” among us, you’re free to go for the 1 kilo “Challenger” or the 1.5 kilo “Baby Boy”.
Now, this boggles me on many levels. Many, many levels. First of all, how the hell do you fit that into your stomach? Keeping things in perspective, that’s roughly the weight of one of my dogs. On a heavy meat night, I’ll eat around 300 grams of meat. A good steak is 500, and at that level, I’m serious struggling. how the hell do you eat 2 kilos of meat in one sitting?
Of course, there’s a reward for finishing it in under three hours. You get a t-shirt, a poster, a certificate (for that job you’ve always dreamed of applying for, of course), and your tab’s on the house. You don’t have to pay the … get this … $23.95 US.
$23.95 for half a kilo of cheese, 2 kilos of meat, bread, 2 kilos of veggies, somewhere around 500 grams of pure fat and sugar, as well as labour and overheads. If that weren’t enough, the story gets better. Seriously. Bad man Eric “Badlands” Booker tried to beat the 3 hour window, but couldn’t.
Once wasn’t enough, so he tried twice more. On the third, he finally finished it after 3 hours. He’s a world champion hot dog eater, so you know if he can’t do it, it’s got to be pretty tough. We’ll revist that one though.
Finally though, the challenge fell this month. By a 19 year old college student - a 100 pound (45 kilos) girl. Check that again - a 19 year old, 45 kilo girl.
She ate over 10% of her bodyweight in one sitting. And, she did it in under three hours!! I can’t help but think how the hell did she manage to fit all that in, but also how the hell is she going to get it all out again?! We’re talking somewhere around 3-5 kilos of waste, all likely to be coming out in the next day or two. I feel bloated after I’ve eaten a Big Mac - I can’t even begin to imagine how she’d be feeling.
Think it’s bullshit? Check this.
But, back to bad man Eric “Badlands” Booker. Apparently there’s an entire international sporting competition involving eating hot dogs. I always knew about the fair competitons (who hasn’t seen Stand By Me?), but apparently there’s actually a rolling circuit and celebrity status awaiting for those who can most effectively eat hot dogs. Probably groupies too - at this point, I’m about ready to believe anything. Bad man Booker has been cruising the circuit for quite a few years now, and has a pretty impressive resume (currently ranked 4th in the world):
- eating 25 dozen oysters in 10 minuntes (coming second to Sonya Thomas, who ate 36 dozen)
- a kilo of chocolate candy in 6 minutes
- 3 onions in one minue
- 49 glazed donuts in 8 minutes.
If you want to know more, check out his site. Or, even better, check out the Glutton Bowl and have a look over the contenders at the International Federation of Competitive Eating. But, he pales in comparison to Takeru Kobayashi.
Takeru, also know as “The Tsunami”, holds the current leader status by eating 53 and 1/2 hot dogs. 53 and 1/2 hot dogs in 12 minutes. That’s roughly one every 13 seconds. I can visualise the first. The second would be getting a little difficult. The third would be pushing it. The next two would be painful. And, at that point, you’re about 10% of the way through.
Scary. The world is a weird and wonderful place. I couldn’t make this shit up.
Update:
Just found the competitive speed eating record sheet. Highlights include:
- 800 grams of butter in 5 minutes
- 167 chicken wings in 32 minutes
- 1.5 gallons of chili in 10 minutes
- 3.6 kilos of mayonnaise in 8 minutes
Just remember kids, don’t try this at home.
CSS is … interesting. I need a printer - electronic pages are all well and good, but I’d kill for some paper at the moment. And a book. And a reference.
And some deskspace, while we’re wishing.