Runnin' With The Devil

Last year I decided to focus on reading.  I set a goal of 75 books to be read in the year, and managed to get something like 82 completed.

This year, instead of spending my extra time reading, I guess I'm going to focus on my writing. More specifically not neglecting my spaces on the Blog-o-Sphere. Even more specifically, this one.

I sent myself a list last night of some things to write about this year, and have been doing some work catching up on my various photo posts from the last several years. This (yesterday at this point, I guess) morning I even went out with a camera from my eBay box of "as is" cameras, which is a post I need to find and get over here, but I digress.

Went out with my Nikon N70 and the universal Vivitar 135mm lens that I picked up a couple of years ago.  I'm pretty sure I overexposed about half the roll, but not by much. Hopefully I can correct them while scanning.

It always amuses me how it is so hard for me to use a full roll (36 exposures) of film over a 15 minute walk, but if I have a digital camera, I will end up with hundreds of pictures.

Anyway, I did get some of my photo stuff sorted out, I need to get the posts into the correct places and find the post about the camera box and get that in the right place as well.

I'm entertained by this project, and I hope to keep up the momentum I have had going this week so far. 

• Current Location: I Took It To The House
• Current Mood: lethargic
• Current Music: Silence

 

Wake Me Up When September Ends

 Okay, so I have about half of February of 2003 migrated to this space now.  All I can say is what was I thinking?

 Also, reading through my life in those days, I cannot help but wonder whatever happened to my friend who I tend to refer to in this space as "kcandthesunshineband". Wherever you are, KC, I hope you're doing well! 

I Think It's Time To Go Now

While scrolling through the very distant past of this blog, I discovered that years I previously thought were complete are actually incomplete.

It looks like everything between January 28 30 and May 16 April 26 are missing. Sorry, I just posted a couple of entries from 2003 so as to make it something like an even 20 entries that are missing.

This makes me wonder if I actually managed to snag everything from my old Diaryland site or if I missed something somewhere.

Actually, I know that I missed something. I have a link on one of the old entries that is supposed to go to a post there, but doesn't and I added a note in 2017 that I have no idea what it was supposed to say.  I guess I should probably work toward getting that restored so I can verify that I didn't miss anything.

Now for a LiveJournal throwback:

• Current Location: That place I call Home
• Current Mood: contemplative
• Current Music: Hotel California ~ The Eagles

 

Who Ya Gonna Call?

I guess I'll be a little more motivated to keep up with this one way dialogue.

I am pretty sure I have everything from 2023 through now from WordPress on here now.  I have other things from other places that still need to go up here, and I have rough outlines of things living either on paper or in my head that I need to expand upon (2025 goodreads year in review, I'm looking at you) that I need to still get up here as well.

It would be a little easier if I felt like I had more time to do any work though. 

If There's Something Strange In Your Neighborhood

Yesterday was kind of a weird day, I'm not going to lie.

I was adding something that I wrote elsewhere to this in it's proper place, and discovered that people somewhere are actually reading this thing for some reason?  

I don't know how I feel about that. Obviously, I'm putting it out there into the wild world of the internet so I'm not allowed to be annoyed or disappointed or anything, I'm just slightly curious about how people stumble across my little corner of the virtual world.

Word of mouth isn't the answer.  I said something to one person about it in the last, what? Ten years? That was something like two weeks ago (If you are one of the people reading this, feel free to let me know next time I talk to you!), and I wasn't exactly specific on how to find it.  All I said was that the title has been Every Which Way But Lucid for at least the last ten years.

This is an extremely roundabout way of saying HELLO WHOEVER YOU ARE! Feel free to drop an email or comment or something, I'd love to know something about my (presumed) audience. 

I'm A Poor Hawaiian Boy

All I have to say is that the pineapple is lying to you.

Pack Up My Belongings, I've Got To Get Away

 So about 20 years ago, I was trying to get things figured out for moving.  I was going to a place where I didn't have a great deal of personal space to work with and no internet access in any way, shape or form.  It was also almost an hour away from where I worked, so things were weird there too.

I only spent about a week living there before I packed up my stuff, again, and came back somewhere closer.

I'm entertained to note that the computer I was attempting to put together at the time, for the reason I was trying to put it together, wasn't easily done in those days, but now it is a way of life. Especially for me.

My aim was to downsize a desktop to a laptop footprint and use a USB hard drive as a permanent, high-speed storage addition. In those days, anything that I could get my hands on would not have come with a reasonable number of USB ports, and USB 2.0 was a maybe.  External hard drive? Hah!

I did end up building one out of a USB CD-ROM enclosure at some point shortly thereafter. It looked like a mess, but it did the job well enough.

I did eventually get a laptop for pretty cheap that could run what I needed it to run, but by then I was a little more established with life.

These days I have a few things going on that weren't a thing previously.

I spent several years running my home network data off an old Dell rack server (Which I don't appear to have ever mentioned anywhere here), and an HP network switch that were given to me.  I had to do a little updating on the server to get everything set up the way I wanted to, but it worked.  

Here is where things get relevant:

Once I moved into a smaller house, that didn't have someplace I could run a giant server and switch, I had to figure something else out.

I am now running everything that was previously on the server, which ONLY (I know, I know) ~6TB of storage space to a 8TB USB hard drive plugged into my primary desktop PC.

I could, however, run it off a laptop these days, because they are now powerful enough to stream high quality video and audio in the background and not suffer from too much in the way of performance issues.

It's crazy what twenty years can do. 

I'm Back In The U.S.S.R

 So I finally developed the pictures that I took with the Exakta.

More accurately, it is an Exakta VX IIa with a Carl Zeiss Jena Biotar 2/58 lens:

 The camera and lens were both pretty filthy, but after a decent cleaning, they didn't come out too bad.  Anyway, here are some of the pictures I took:

 

Given what the USSR had to say on the subject of religion, I found it both ironic and satisfying to use my first roll of film on one of these cameras at a Catholic Church.

There Ain't No Cure For The Summertime Blues

 Pictures.  I can actually place pictures in this space now, without paying for the ability to so.  Pity this wasn't a thing twenty years ago, since it caused me to migrate to a different platform.

I spent so much time not posting images to either of my LJ blogs, that I cannot bring myself to ruin the text-based world that I created here.

These posts will be (mostly) cross-posted on the blog that I migrated to, but I will not be bringing those over to this space.

And Bring Him To The Ground

This afternoon I went to an orchard for...Reasons.

Things got interesting when I realized that my D3500 only had something like 15% battery life left and my Nikon FE only had a single roll of film. By interesting, I mean fantastic.  I find limits to be amazing for getting careful pictures.

Here are some of the highlights from the D3500:

 As for the film, I had my Nikon FE with the Nikkor 50mm lens.  Here are some of the highlights from the roll of film:

By "highlights" I mean every picture that doesn't have people in them, because there isn't a single dud on this roll. I really like this camera.  As for the developing, I took care of that myself. No more sending them out!

• Current Location: Home, Home again.
• Current Mood: exhausted
• Current Music: Another One Bites The Dust ~ Queen + Paul Rodgers