Opening Post

Hmm, the thing about serendipitious thoughts is that sometimes by the time you get to writing them down they are quite lost in the complicated pathways of the mind. Running through a bunch of hoops before writing them down certainly does not help.

In any case, this is a beginning, and more will come later. Movie reviews, bits of life, and thoughts on the state of the world. Once I get my photos sorted out and up on the web someplace there will likely be links to those as well.

One of the problems with liking to see movies in the theater is that the same trailers come with more than one movie, and if you happen to like a movie enough to see it more than once it's a sure thing to see the EXACT same set of trailers every time. See the same trailer enough times and it is possible to lose interest in seeing a movie that probably would be enjoyable. Less likely to happen with something you can't wait to see, but if it's marginal at all it's a big risk that obviously the marketing department did not bother to consider.

I probably should say a bit about me, since this is the beginning and you, the reader obviously don't know me yet. Question is, which bit to cover. Hmm. I do tech support via phone and web, and deal with all sorts of reasonable and unreasonable people. I've been doing it rather longer than I anticipated when I started, and I am getting rather tired of the unreasonable side of it, both from those seeking help and those nitpicky people we're providing the support for. Good customer service is good customer service, and when you market your product to people who are less than skilled, it takes longer to help them, and you have a choice between spending the time to help them and getting a reputation of a place with poor support. Ok, rant over.

I like writing, and haven't done enough of it recently, mostly due to the above unreasonable aspects draining creative energy at a horrendous rate, but I've been slowly jumpstarting the desire again, and it's becoming fun again. I've also finally started to wade through the technical aspects of photography to figure out why my nicely composed images were not turning out ok, and that has been a lot of fun also. The digital camera helped a lot with that. Having the freedom to just snap away and have many of them turn out ok automatically was a big improvement, but learning how to adjust the settings and choose different effects was even better.

As a side note, if you are using a digital camera with RAW file capability, use it. I didn't when I first got the camera, and there are a number of personally important images I'd love to have had the ability to clean up in the ways that format allows. Even if you don't have Photoshop or one of the other programs that allow easy manipulation of the RAW format, if you get one down the road it is amazing how much easier it is to fix certain things or interpret images in more than one way.

Anyway, enough for now, things to do and so forth.