im in ur tully’s
hauntin ur afterparties
#4845 – i shoot better than the man with no name
more photos from heartland havoc are currently uploading to flickr.
damn am i good, or am i GOOD! i think i prefer the shots i took on day 2 without the flash better than the ones i took on days 1 and 3 with the flash. the ones i got from this weekend’s bout with the flash aren’t bad, but natural lighting looks better and beats out flash-induced artificial lighting any day. unless you’re shooting at skateland where its natural lighting is no light whatsoever, then you have to use the flash (which for some reason likes to induce red-eye, but that might be the diffuser’s fault… i asked epmd if he had any red-eye issues before and he said no, but this is the first time he’s working with the omnibounce so he’ll see how it works out. that’s going to take some time to edit… i’m normally lazy about it, but now i’m trying to work it a bit more professionally and maintain at least a modicum of a standard). anyway, tomorrow’s plan is to finish getting the heartland havoc photos up and hopefully get this past weekend’s photos edited and up as well.
i think once that’s all done then i’ll have to look through them a bit more critically and pick out some winners to add to my roller derby “project” and clear out some that i think don’t jive as well. like i said, standards!
now if i only had a faster computer and a nicer camera! this one is slow and pokey and barely edits photos, and my camera-skills could be so much better with equipment that’s suited for sporting events. like a 1D mark III! or even a 40D, i’d settle for that.
#4844 – msa3k
i was going to put on an mst3k dvd i got from the digital archive project on the mst3k newsgroup, and figured i’d make up an away message for the occasion. i think i might have gotten a little carried away…
#4843 – ow, my ass! oh, accursed bruises!
today we had assessments (or maybe that should be “ass-essments”) for harm city homicide to see what things folks need to improve on. it was in rockville at this sportsplex place with sport-court floors and fun stuff like that.
well, first i actually stopped at the navy federal credit union branch on rockville pike along the way so i could grab some cash for paying the rest of my dues and the $10 we needed to rent the court. it was pretty weird — i went in expecting to find tellers behind glass windows (like any normal bank), but this place had “remote tellers” and this girl that worked there had to show me what to do. they’ve got these things that look like phone booths, and you push a button that says “call teller” and the teller pops up on a video screen in front of you. you pick up the handset at the booth and talk to them, and if they need you to send anything over (i had to send over my photo id) they have one of those pneumatic tubes that sends stuff from place to place. they asked for my access number and whether i wanted to withdraw from my checking or savings and how much i wanted, had me send over my photo id, and they put the money and my license back into the pneumatic tube and sent it back to me. didn’t need to fill out any withdraw slips or anything like that. i almost started wondering if the teller was even in the building since i was looking at her on a screen and she was looking back at me through a video camera, but then i remembered that they were sending stuff to me via the pneumatic tube.
i think i did well enough for the assessments. usual stuff — can you do falls? can you weave around cones? can you do the snake drill? can you jump? stuff like that. then we did a scrimmage. in addition to harm city homicide, mibbs breaking ribs was there as the coach, as well as essie ecks, penaltyna and fightscrime to help out and skate. mickey i’m-so-fine, a ref formerly from dc, was there as well to help ref; he’s going to be skating with harm city homicide soon too. the first jam we did had me as the jammer for my team and everybody was pretty crazy — lots of pushing and shoving and elbowing and stuff that’d get you put in the penalty box. i wasn’t sure if we were having jammer refs or not so i didn’t know what exactly was going on and just tried to skate through the pack and around the track, but at one point as i was getting into a turn my skates just slipped out from underneath me and i landed on my right ass-cheek. that hurt like a, well, a pain in the ass… i had to sit out a few jams after that. i don’t know what happened but i just suddenly lost traction completely and don’t know if my wheels just lost their grip or if i slipped on something (carpe damage said later that he saw a puddle of water over there, so maybe i hit that?). later after my ass was feeling less sore i got back into two or three more jams as a blocker, and i think i prefer blocking more. in the last jam, though, i was rubbing shoulders with textureslut around a turn (i think she was trying to force me out and off the track) when i came crashing down again flat on my back, but this time on my left ass-cheek and this one hurt even more. YOW. if both of these ass-landings develop into bruises, at least i’ll have a matching set!
we took a few individual photos of the skaters there today so we can send them to pioneer valley to include in the program for september 8 — check ’em out! we’ll probably try to get some other, better ones for the october bout, and hopefully in something that resembles a uniform!
#4842 – spree
well, i just did a cleaning job on my room, the sort that you only get in the mood to do when it’s somewhere between 11 pm and 2 am… you know, the “holy crap this is a mess when did it get this bad i must fix it right now” clean. i wasn’t really in that “holy crap” phase, but it was annoying to see these piles of clutter that i kept putting off cleaning up. that, and roxy kept wanting to go into my closet and i had to keep my door closed so she wouldn’t jump in the back behind some boxes and bushels and my negative enlarger for photo developing where she could never be reached. now about 3/4 of the room looks much better! i found two yo-yos and a bunch of beer-cozies during my clean, so now if you come to my place i’ve got enough cozies to keep everybody’s cans cool. i’ve still got a pile of some boxes and bags next to my bed, and there’s a bunch of crap and dust on my computer desk i want to get rid of, but it’s good enough for now.
we were originally going to do harm city homicide group / individual photos tonight for the pioneer valley bout in september, but a lot of folks couldn’t make it, and most of the folks that could wanted to go to open-skate. dad sent me a text at work that he, feisty_fitz and anne were going to go to the orioles game tonight and would i be interested in going, so i postponed the photography until saturday morning and went to the game. cynicalscribe tried to get me to stick to doing the photography today by saying “bro’s before o’s”, though, bahahahaha… some homeless guy came up to us while we were leaving the game and said “can i ask a question?” – it sounds bad, but it made me want to reply with “you just did!”
the other day i mentioned some b.s. at work — it’s mostly about the way the emails sent to customers are audited (they pick 6 emails per month per person at random to audit). if you wrote something like this (not an exact quote, but it gets the gist across):
We are interested in continuing to provide secured access to your agency’s account. Should you desire a change to your authorized point-of-contact listing then please forward the following information for the new point-of-contact directly to the Federal Implementations Team at VZWFederal.Implementations@VerizonWireless.com:
– Name
– Job title
– Billing address
– Contact number
– Fax number
– Email address
Please ensure that your agency’s account profile #123456 is referenced in your correspondence.
instead of something like this:
We are interested in continuing to provide secured access to your agency’s account. Should you desire a change to your authorized point-of-contact listing then please forward the following information for the new point-of-contact directly to the Federal Implementations Team at VZWFederal.Implementations@VerizonWireless.com:
– Name
– Job title
– Billing address
– Contact number
– Fax number
– Email address
Please ensure that your agency’s account profile #123456 is referenced in your correspondence.
…what would you say would happen to your quality audit for that email? a 10% reduction in your score. i’m serious — that was marked as a “spacing error” (which they usually reserve for doubled spaces between words or sentences). what really gets me is that the template in our emails is missing almost all of the information that the customer needs to send us, so i modified the template and added the necessary information, and they mark me down because i didn’t have two carriage returns in there. if that ain’t some nitpicky bullshit i don’t know what is, especially since i see some of the other emails that get sent out by people on my team and it seriously makes me embarrassed and ashamed that we’re sending these emails out to the customers. it actually makes me want to start looking again for other jobs.
(also, there’s still that ticket i have to sunday’s baseball game with my office if anybody’s interested — bullpen picnic at noon and the game starts at 1:35! you have to promise to be rowdy with me since i want to be ridiculous in front of my coworkers, haha)
meme with my answers to questions will come up probably tomorrow… it’s time to get my ‘z’ on now.