My Quiet Life

doodle me this

Filed under:doodles, i-am-a-professional-artist, misc— Chris @ 8:52 am

In the course of cleaning out my desk at our old office (we moved to our new office last week), I had to go through roughly three years of old crap — meeting notes. Turns out I doodle a lot. In a startling confluence of cosmic coincidence, I also got my scanner working last night, so I scanned the better (”better”) ones in. Behold the majesty:

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updates

Filed under:film, holga, ilford, kodak, misc, photography, scanner, yashica— Chris @ 9:35 pm

My dallying with film continues unabated. The above shot was the only worthwhile result from 2 rolls of Kodak Portra 400UC that I ran through a Holga 120S that I borrowed from a friend. The Holga didn’t have the framing bracket on the first roll, but I shot on the 16 exposure setting, resulting in the overlap from frame to frame. When I had it developed, I had them scan it, and they made a pass at scanning frames from that roll, resulting in this, which was nice. But, I cut the film original and re-scanned it and got a nicer scan with more artsy overlap goodness. I like the result a lot, although I have mixed feelings about its conception. I don’t consider it to be indicative of any particular skills that I have. Holgas really are the original point-n-shoot, after all, having no manual controls … whatsoever. But hey, I’ll take it. I’m still getting the hang of using my scanner — I am gonna try my hand at scanning some more once I finish plowing through a roll of cheap Kodak color film in my Yashica, and some B&W Ilford 120 125 film in my Seagull. All in all, it’s been fun playing with film, but I’m still not convinced it’s worth it, much less making the leap to developing at home.

Speaking of my scanner, I went a little nuts this weekend and scanned some stuff.

Promo shots of my band from high school. These were probably taken in ‘97 or ‘98, I’m not sure. Pretty sure I came straight from work at the Andrew Johnson tower, hence the black slacks and white t-shirt. Stylin’.
Pics from my first visit to Boston U. Good ol’ college.
Pictures from my high school senior trip — a day cruise to the Bahamas. Despite being a relatively awesome day cruise to a beautiful carribean island, I somehow managed to only take pictures on the bus and in a convenience store. Ah well.

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power of apology

Filed under:misc— Chris @ 11:06 am

One thing I’ve learned over the last couple of years is the power of apology — in personal circumstances, but in the business world in particular, as well. Obviously an apology is the ultimate form of empathy. It conveys your commiseration with and understanding of someone’s position, and it can go a long way towards instantly shifting the tone of a conversation from confrontational to cooperative. So, it’s powerful in that sense, but it’s also powerful in a dangerous way. Because of this power, the tendency to leap to “I’m sorry” is very strong. But the problem is that the phrasing of “I’m sorry” carries an implication of guilt. You might be saying “I’m sorry” as in “I’m sorry that this is happening to you”, but what the other person hears is “I’m sorry that this is my fault”.

I’ve been in situations where I merely intended to express my condolences and found myself, via the inaccuracy of the english language, admitting culpability. Oops. It’s been an invaluable lesson for me to learn to express commiseration without accepting blame for a situation.

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rain

Filed under:misc— Chris @ 10:27 am

A rainy morning is bad enough as it is. It’s 7AM, dark and gloomy. You don’t want to leave the warmth of your bed. Now, imagine you’ve had pile drivers and dynamite drilling as an alarm clock for the past 2 months, and suddenly, due to the rain, they all just stop, and all you can hear is the sound of the rain on the windows.

Getting out of bed this morning was a truly herculean endeavor.

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update

Filed under:misc— Chris @ 10:13 pm

My trips to the grocery store are getting embarrassingly short-sighted. Here’s what I got tonight:

Toilet paper
Club soda
A sirloin steak as big as my head
Asparagus
One 10lb Pork loin

Yes, 10 pounds. I figure I can either take it somewhere to stuff it and spark a dinner party (i’ve had dates like that — though, usually reverse order), or I can just slice it up into chops and freeze it. Tonight’s dinner: sirloin. Tomorrow? asparagus. Wednesday? uhh.. toilet paper?

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things

Filed under:homeless, misc, nashville, NHPP, tara-cole— Chris @ 12:22 am

Things I’ve been meaning to blog about but haven’t but I am now okay?:

I went to the NHPP-sponsored vigil and memorial for Tara Cole, who was murdered at riverfront park (her home) a year ago. It was sad. I thought it was especially poignant to be standing there at this vigil, with the NHPP campaigning for affordable housing, in the shadow of the $250,000 monstrosity across the river. On a related note, some interesting info from the NHPP:

In the two years prior to Tara Cole’s Killing there were several documented incidents of non-homeless individuals who self-confessed to trying to run over homeless people because they are “lazy and shiftless”, and another who lit a homeless man on fire after leaving a bar. In the last several months there have been several accounts of young people attacking homeless people for fun. At the same time, the Downtown Partnership (business association) and Urban Residents Association (downtown residents) have worked closely with police that has led to a zero tolerance campaign arresting over 80 additional homeless people in the last 4 weeks.

And then there’s this:

On the June 13th, 2007 the Metro Police launched the Quality of Life Initiative. It involves undercover officers downtown and along the West End corridor targeting individuals identified as panhandling (not illegal), trespassing, vagrancy, public intoxication and other activities typical of low-income individuals and homeless people struggling to survive as well as many non-homeless Titans fans J. Data shows that officers have arrested 91 unique homeless persons 113 times while working the initiative through Friday, Aug. 3. In their history in Davidson County, these 91 individuals have been arrested 4,397 times on 6,860 charges, and spent a total of 21,339 days in jail since March of 2000. Using a jail cost estimate of $55/day, this adds up to $1.2 million (which is only the Sheriff’s portion of the expense). When reviewing the 4,397 arrests, 2,117 resulted in a conviction.
I could listen to Say Something by James literally over and over. Until the MP3 wears out. Which can happen, you know.
I am going up to North Carolina in September for a friend’s wedding (to which I was invited partially to take pictures in exchange for free food, booze, and bridesmaids). I am hoping to extend it into a week or so of vacation and/or working remotely. I am going to drive the Miata and meander through the mountains, and wind up at Aaron’s, and the BEACH.
I got a cheap RF remote for my camera, but I haven’t been able to do anything good with it. It’s a little hazy around here lately for star trails. It was only $20 on ebay, though. Let’s hear it for cut-rate Chinese knock-off electronics! I think my building manager thinks I’m a drug dealer, though, because I keep getting discreet packages from Hong Kong.

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picture

Filed under:misc— Chris @ 12:36 pm

The maintenance guy at my building just told me he read about a picture I took of the mayor somewhere, but doesn’t remember where. He thought it might be the City Paper. Anyone have any idea what he might be talking about?

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hot tip

Filed under:misc— Chris @ 5:53 pm

Harris Teeter on hillsboro currently has huge bags of the biggest cherries I’ve ever seen for $2.99.

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australia

Filed under:achewood, australia, misc, ray-smuckles— Chris @ 9:21 pm

I’m thinkin’ bout goin’ to Australia for a spell..

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hot sex

Filed under:access-logs, misc— Chris @ 1:49 pm

Today’s best access log entry (yes i sit around watching my access logs):

1.2.3.4 - - [11/Jul/2007:13:42:07 -0500] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 9913 “http://gracelessinlove.wordpress.com/tag/hot-sex/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)”

Whatever happened to “a lady never kisses and tells”? Geez, never boink a blogger. *

* Disclaimer: Grace and I have not actually boinked.

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My Quiet Life

June 10, 2008

doodle me this

April 1, 2008

updates

November 2, 2007

power of apology

October 16, 2007

rain

August 27, 2007

update

August 21, 2007

things

July 31, 2007

picture

July 29, 2007

hot tip

July 12, 2007

australia

July 11, 2007

hot sex

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