So here’s the part where I whine a bit about the process of building yesterday’s entry.  I shall do this by delineating for you the steps involved in creating your own photoblog, the old-fashioned way:

1.  Take random pictures of your cats, in order to finish the roll of film that’s been lingering around the house for a month or so.

2.  Take that roll of film, along with six others dating back as far as Christmas 2002,* to your friendly neighborhood drugstore for processing.

3.  Request single prints and photo CDs.  Get told, incorrectly, that it will actually be cheaper to get double prints and photo CDs.  Fail to see the overhead price list which would have given you the correct information.

4.  Agree to return at 2 pm the next day to pick up the results.

5.  Return at 3.30 pm, just to be safe, and still find yourself standing around for forty minutes waiting for the last roll to be finished.

6.  Discover, upon paying for the prints, that prints is all you’ve got on six of seven rolls; fortunately, the last one does have the CD with it, and it’s the one you most want.  Request a second time the photo CDs for the other six rolls, and graciously accept a ten percent discount on those CDs.

7.  Take the prints and CD home; pop the CD in the iMac; import the images into iPhoto.

8.  Export the images you want to use as JPEGs.  Find yourself a bit taken aback by their initial size.

9.  Fire up GraphicConverter and scale, crop, scale, crop, and scale.  Save reasonably-sized images and appropriate thumbnails.

10.  Upload images and thumbnails.

11.  Scour the web for a decent bit of javascript that will create a pop-up window for your images.

12.  Create your entry, complete with inline thumbnails and pop-up images.

13.  Tinker with your CSS for three hours trying to work out the kinks.

The good news is that two of the last three steps will not be necessary in future iterations.  But the process is still a good six steps too long.

Not to mention that the cost of the prints and CDs would have gotten me a good quarter of the way to a decent digital camera.

So, at last:  as both a cost-cutting and a time-saving measure, I must go digital.  I’ve resisted for years, only because prices kept coming down and pixels kept going up so fast that I never found the right moment to take the plunge.  (Also because I’m stubborn:  I think I bought the last 35mm point-and-shoot sold in the U.S., and I was determined to use it.)

What I need now is advice.  I want to maximize pixellage, storage, and ease-of-use, and minimize cost and aggravation.  What do you have?  How do you like it?  What do you covet?  Why?

—–

*This is not an exaggeration, and is indeed the reason why I should never have been allowed near a film-based camera.  But I got to spend last night reliving happy memories of 2003’s trips to Amsterdam, Prague, and London, and to see evidence that I really did lose 20 pounds last year.

Jake wrote me a while back to suggest that my condo-in-process might provide a useful opportunity for some photoblogging. Of course, as I’ll no doubt discuss at great length at a future moment, such a photoblog is a bit complicated by my technological circumstances (see above blog title for a hint), but I’ve nonetheless striven mightily, and can thus present to you the first edition of what (I hope) will be a weekly feature hereabouts: Monday Morning Condo Blogging.

Today’s images date from June 26, and show the possible* future exterior of my building. The building shown is the first one you come to upon entering the complex, which was nearing completion when I took the pictures; my building will be the fifth. My unit is on the third floor, on the northern end of the building.

The unit’s entrance is on the ground floor; the exteriors attempt to mimic a kind of urban-industrial look, but do so in typical Los Angeles po-mo style.

The living area is on the east side of the building; there’s a great balcony on the north-east corner, between the living and dining areas.

The ceilings of the third-floor unit are 12 feet high, and the windows are about 8 feet high. They run on three sides of the apartment. And apparently, there are 30 of them.

There’s only one unit below mine, which takes up all of the second and a good bit of the ground floor. The second-floor units have an extra room, but the ceilings are a mere 10 feet high. And the windows a mere 6. And they have me walking around upstairs.

There’s a second, smaller balcony off the master bedroom, on the north-west corner.

Coming next week: images of my actual building-in-progress.

—–

*I am under strict instructions by the builder not to take anything about this model as a “promise.” Substitutions may be made! Changes may be wrought! They may not be able to help it!

The good news:  I found out this evening that I’ve got the Olympics in high-definition.

The bad news?  I’ve got the Olympics.  In high-definition.  24 hours a day.  For two weeks.

And I’ve got exactly the same two weeks to finish getting ready for the fall semester.

I cannot explain it.

Not only that, I cannot imagine a reasonable explanation.

But for the last twenty-four hours, I have been plagued by an endless loop of Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy.”

Ordinarily, I can trace such an earworm to a recent retail experience, or to a television commercial, or to the too-loud stereo of a passing car.  But I simply cannot conceive of a scenario in which I would have heard any piece of this song yesterday.

I have, at times, had earworms triggered by odd phrases that somehow mirror phrases in lyrics, that then result in the automatic replay of the song.  In fact, I had an example of this that plagued me just last week, which I’m now afraid to think hard enough about even to remember its circumstances, lest I dredge it back up again.

As it is, I’ve got one surefire cure for the earworm—one mental chorus of “Lonesome Loser” always does the trick for me—but I haven’t deployed it yet, because I’m still hoping to trace this one back to its Patient Zero.

So, help me:  is there any reason—an odd commercial, a movie soundtrack, an unforeseen return to the adult-contemporary playlists—that you can imagine my encountering this song?

Julia Child, the woman who single-handedly saved American cuisine, died yesterday at age 91.

I suddenly need to go home, open my cookbooks, break out the sherry, and make something fabulous.

For my ability to do so—and for my ability to find food worth eating even in the furthest outposts of this country—I thank her.

Updates to the blogroll, at left; probably no further updates today, as I attempt to rectify the not-working situation noted yesterday.  The fall looms.

More soon.

There’s been a repeated refrain in my posts this summer:  not-working, something I’ve been doing a lot of for the last two and a half months.  I’ve been pondering this state of stasis for a while, trying to figure out what to make of it, and when I imagine myself moving forward again.

None of this is to say that I haven’t gotten anything done—I’ve been working quite hard on the anthology project, and there’s that little condo-buying thing—but I’ve made pretty much zero progress on anything that I would think of as “my work” this summer.  It’s taken a huge quantity of mental energy simply not to get freaked out by that, to remember that I’m actually not required to stay on the treadmill now, that what work I accomplish from here on out has to be driven by my own desire to get the work done, and not by terror at the consequences of not-doing it.

I’ve been thinking about my anxiety level surrounding not-working more and more, as the summer draws to a close, and was just yesterday imagining a post that would take on the question of not-working, attempting to think through why we in the academy have the public image of working very little (”you’re only in the classroom six to ten hours a week; seems pretty easy to me”) while we in fact too often find it impossible to stop working, such that actually stopping work produces this kind of self-reflexive need to interrogate the reasons for the not-working.  And then I read Liz’s post from yesterday, in which she briefly accounts for her own not-working:

This summer I’ve spent a lot of time on my emotional well-being (through the recovery process, and healing time with my family) and my physical well-being (through the resumption of regular exercise, and a return to anti-depressants). What’s suffered has been my intellectual well-being, as evidence by my lack of attention to blogging (my intellectual gym, really) and other scholarly activities. As the new school year approaches, it’s time to shake off the summer doldrums and shift my brain into a higher gear…hopefully without losing any of the ground I’ve gained in other areas of my life.

As I said in Liz’s comments, I’m in a very similar place, if for slightly different reasons.  This past academic year was quite rough:  my tenure review went very well, but it was still a tenure review; the spring semester around here was a personal and professional misery; the manuscript still lingers.  I ended the term more than a little burned out, and that translated into a mild depression through much of the early summer, one that made work all but impossible.  In attempting to recover, I found that I needed, more than anything else, to focus on my life this summer, not my work.  And so I have, and I’m pleased to have done so.

But it’s hard not to feel the niggling worry, still, that I’ve wasted time, that I should, as always, have done more.  I worry, too, that stasis can turn into paralysis—that having stopped, it’ll be hard to get started again.

Spent most of the day yesterday with R., as he negotiated the semi-treacherous waters of new-car purchasing.  The genius part of his purchase was that the car isn’t new, per se; it’s a 2003, but it’s only got 4000 miles on it, having spent the first year of its life in what amounts to a traveling car beauty pageant.  It’s gorgeous, it’s fast, it’s fully loaded, and it’s already taken that drive-it-off-the-lot-and-lose-$5000-in-value hit.

The car—I’m already beginning to think of her as the Valkyrie—is seriously a feat of engineering.  These guys have thought of everything.  Except one thing:  how to set the clock.

She comes with a slew of manuals:  the full-on owner’s manual; the quick guide; the service and warranty manual; the stereo manual; the car care manual (i.e., how to wash it).  The clock resides on the stereo display, so the first assumption is that the stereo manual will have said information.  Look in the index for “clock”; nothing.  Look in the index for “time”; nothing.  Look in the index for “setting,” as in “setting the clock,” and bingo:

See car owner’s manual.

Hmm.  Check the owner’s manual.  Look in the index for “setting”; nothing.  Look in the index for “clock, setting the,” and bingo:

See radio or onboard computer guide.

We’re at a loss.  The clock may well be wrong until Daylight Savings Time ends.

In fact, I may now know why the clock wasn’t reset when Daylight Savings Time started.

Courtesy of our friends at MoveOn.Org comes an updated version of Apple’s Switch campaign:  a series of ads directed and edited by Errol Morris (Fog of War) presenting registered Republicans and others who voted for Bush in 2000, all of whom intend to vote for Kerry in November.  Some of the ads are better than others, but many are quite moving.  Take a look, rate the ads, and help choose the one(s?) MoveOn will air during the RNC.

Because now, instead of having to set up an escape route with a friend, it can be automated (Salon.com; subscription or ad-viewing required):

With both Cingular’s Escape-A-Date and Virgin Mobile’s Rescue Ring service, a customer can arrange to be called at a set time, using the cell keypad.

When the cell rings, one of Cingular’s eight “emergency” messages says: “Hey, this is your Escape-A-Date call. If you’re looking for an excuse, I got it. Just repeat after me, and you’ll be on your way! ‘Not again! Why does that always happen to you? … All right, I’ll be right there.’ Now tell ‘em that your roommate got locked out, and you have to go let them in. Good luck!”

And bingo, the bad date is history.

My favorite part of the service is that the excuses are dreamed up by “five people with doctorates in linguistics.” Who says there are no alternative-career opportunities for PhDs?