I picked up four rolls of 620 film from the developer this afternoon. Three of the rolls are from Ireland, and one is a leftover roll from two years ago that sat in the camera until I opened the back without checking, and exposed three of the frames. Our regular developer disappeared sometime in the last two years without a trace, so we had them done at a different lab which won’t print contact sheets for large-format film. I’ve looked at them through a lightbox, and they look very pretty. I’d scan them and post them here, but HP decided to make their slide adapter fit only 35mm film, so I have to wait until I get home to use the 5-year-old UMAX scanner in the basement. Sorry, folks.

It’s funny to see pictures from the old roll—I’d loaded three different cameras with film to see which one took the cleanest pictures (the Duaflex II, hands-down) but forgotten about the final roll. It starts with two blurry shots of Geneva on Jen’s apartment deck. Apparently this camera’s lens is designed for landscape-style photography and not detailed closeup shots, which is unfortunate, because she’s really cute. Blurry, but cute. The next shot is (I think) of Lakewood Avenue during a snowstorm. Or, it could be taken during a very, vey sunny day. I can’t really tell. The road is almost black, as is the sky, and the trees are bare. What a lovely subject for a picture! (What the hell was I thinking?) After that is a shot of my back porch, with some very small plants, before I put up the wood walls. It’s amazing how ghetto the place looked before stuff actually started growing back there. (I thought it would be one of the main selling points for the house until two dumb chicks stopped to look at the house, and one said to the other, within earshot, “OOH, a backyard! You could knock that wall down and put in a parking pad! That would be great!” Memo to you, Dumb Chick: Shut your hole. I didn’t take your offer, and it was higher than the other one.) The next shot is of the Scout parked in front of the house, looking south down Lakewood Ave. Again: Ghetto. Like, West Virginia Backwoods Ghetto. Here’s a picture of my broke-down truck. Directly following that is a picture of the tree outside my front door (I must have been feling arty that day.) The final three shots are of the Pagoda in Patterson Park, taken during a walk with Jen in the springtime. These are actually kind of interesting, because they’re shots of something interesting. Unfortunately, the third one was obliterated when I opened the back of the camera.

So, don’t fear, dear readers: I’ll scan the negs this weekend and post the best ones for your perusal. There are some good ones in there. Seriously.

I signed up for a Netflix account this afternoon. I’m going to make this here Internet work for me, dammit.

Fuck you.

idiot king – Duh.

cash is king logo – This one I don’t get.

squirrel movable pvc garden – Right, I can see that, I guess…

frigidaire air conditioner annoying beep – Heh, I don’t remember writing about all these together, but it makes sense…

idiot – Again, duh

diy casette adapter – I don’t remember writing about this either…

soul coughing idiot king – Once more, with feeling: DUH

kill the wabbit metallica – Ha ha

disposable digital video camera – Must have been on the linkblog

blisters tickling itch – Eeeeeewww.

I guess I should be happy it’s not pr0n search terms or sales links or other crap like that, but I’m not writing about any of those things, either.

Good news from the wilderness: There’s a G3 tower in baltimore for sale for $100, which should be an acceptable stopgap measure for the expensive dying G4 until I can afford a Mini or something better.

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Jen and I finally pulled the trigger last night and drove to the local Select Comfort store, and bought (well, charged) one of those “sleep number” beds. Hopefully, it’ll be here in four or five days, and we’ll report back to you on our “sleep number”, like you really give a shit what that is.

* * *

Finally, in the interest of turning our credit cards into slags of smoking plastic, I’m going to be picking up an air conditioner this week (probably tonight) to cool the office down so that we might actually be able to work in there. Coming back to Baltimore from a week of good Irish weather has been rough.

I had the misfortune of test-driving a wireless Bluetooth mouse this morning, and the experience left me huddled under the desk, twitching. Ok, maybe not that bad. Ever shared a cellphone conversation with somebody on the West Coast where each of you is continually talking over the other person? The lag time is just enough that the ordinary human pause-before-speaking is offset so that you’re both starting a sentence at the same time?

That would be a wireless mouse. I’m enough of a tactile being that any lagtime between my hand and the tool I’m working on is absolutely infuriating; Wacom tablets, some new-fangled laser mouses, and old graphics-intensive operating systems (OSX 10.1.X comes to mind) all tend to drive me crazy. Coming from a drawing/illustration/contracting background, I like precise control over the mouse. Anything slower or sloppier just doesn’t cut it.

This mouse was slow and imprecise—adjustments of a pixel or two were next to impossible, which is unacceptable for my profession. I’ll stick with my Pro Mouse, thank you very much.

Thankfully, there were no geeks outside with lightsabers or stormtrooper uniforms. Episode III was pretty killer, if not a little wooden here and there. Lucas took a step back from the cutesy ‘little CGI creatures doing funny shit’ tone of the first two. Lots of boom-boom, saber fights, dark portents of doom, and some more ass-kickin’ Yoda. I wouldn’t be disappointed to buy a ticket to this flick, and I’ll see it again in the theater.

[minor spoilers ahead]

5-20: Having a day to reflect on the experience, I’d have to agree with pretty much everything Kottke said. I wanted Yoda to kick the Emperor’s ass. I wanted for Anakin to renounce the Dark Side, and for Mace Windu to kill Palpatine, but I knew it wouldn’t happen. Some of the images that stuck in my head were ones I didn’t think we’d see from Lucas—Anakin’s end by the lake of fire, several thrilling lightsaber duels, and the sight of a young Chewbacca keeping an eye on Yoda. Surprisingly, the set-piece space battle that begins the movie was the only one, and it wasn’t all that memorable.

Finally, I have to say that there’s something intangibly more real about the old-skool plastic model approach to filming spaceships. While it’s infinitely easier to create everything in CG, there was something missing from the thousands of little pixellated blobs zipping around in each frame. I think back to the stunning tracking shots of the Millenium Falcon dodging asteroids in Empire, and of the skill and care taken to line up each shot. The cameramen cared about getting it right, because they had to make a ten-foot plastic model look huge and alive. I miss those days, but I have to just let it go.

In my pocket, next to my Sam’s Club card, $5 bill and assorted reciepts, is a ticket to Episode III at noon tomorrow, paid for by my company, who is letting a good majority of us go see the premiere.

I’m a pretty lucky guy.

Friday night, Jen and I walked out of the Cingular store in the Columbia mall with two shiny new cellphones. To give you a brief recap: My phone, a five-year-old Motorola, had about fifteen minutes of talk time left on its $25 crap-ass batteries, which meant I had to carry the power cord with me wherever I went. Friday morning, I was in the middle of an important call on my way to work. As I pulled off the exit near my office, the annoying BEEP of the “batteries are dying” alert started punctuating the conversation at one-minute intervals. I found myself running through the parking lot, up three flights of stairs, and to my desk to plug the damn thing in just as the signal was fading….luckily, I made it. This phone features a useless black LED screen, a UI one step above DOS, and a busted earphone jack (don’t ask me…I don’t know). Jen’s phone, the standard free Nokia they offered four years ago, was several steps above my phone, but she was averaging about twenty minutes of talk time before it died, which meant we had to use our phones strategically.

After about five minutes of browsing the various models, we decided on the 551, as it had Bluetooth for the cheapest price. The guy behind the counter rang us out, and we returned home to spend the rest of Friday evening drinking beer and playing with our phones (oh, how romantic.) We sent pictures to each other. We called each other. We programmed ourselves in as Rockstar One and Rockstar Two. We quickly learned that the phones have a vibrate function, a personal voice note function, a speakerphone, and about seventy-five other things we haven’t gotten to yet. Apparently, with the media plan Cingular offers, you can browse the internets and send AIM messages on the teeny keypad to your other geek friends. Me, I’ll just be happy when my Powerbook talks to my phone automatically to update my contact list, and I don’t have to run the Boston Marathon to make it to the next electrical outlet.

I still have to figure out how to turn off the hateful, irritating default ringtone, though.