Day 1066

I picked up some more memory cards for this weekend's photo shoot. I continue to be amazed at how cheap flash memory has become in recent years. The SDHC cards I got today were half the price of some I'd purchased just a few years ago. I remember seeing a picture recently of a 5GB hard drive from 1955 being loaded on-board a cargo aircraft. The drive was as big as a refrigerator and had to be lifted into the airplane with a forklift. The little 32GB memory card I got today was as small as my thumbnail and only cost $16. If everything improved at this rate, I might be driving around in a brand new $400 Land Rover.

There is a downside to Moore's Law and the progress it brings however. Even though technology continues to get faster and cheaper, you still need to replace everything every two to three years. An old guitar may go up in value, but an old computer is just a fancy doorstop.

The current stock market free-fall is totally depressing. After some nice gains earlier in the year, most of my positions are at their lows of the year. Not only is the market going lower, it's still totally unpredictable. You can't just short everything when the market goes down these days. It's just too volatile. The whole thing drives me nuts. Is there good news just over the horizon? I'm not so sure. The Greeks and the Spaniards are rioting in the streets. The Israelis and the Arabs are about to go to war again. Our top spy has been caught with his pants down. And taxes are about to go up.

At least the sunsets are pretty. Some of you may remember that I got all excited several months ago when I discovered that the new Instacanvas website provided me with an easy way to sell some of these sunset pictures. Have I actually sold any? Well, no. It turns out that the Instacanvas business model was to sell prints to the photographers who actually took the pictures. I guess they are kind of an online vanity press for photographers. The last thing I need are more prints of my own pictures. I was kind of hoping you guys would buy them.

Dot is acting like she wants to throw up. I've taken her outside twice and she does nothing. I sure wish dogs could talk. If she could talk, I'm sure she'd join me in saying "at least it's Friday tomorrow."

Honey is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 970

I'm trying to eat more fruit. I've acquired a taste for mangoes lately and thought I'd buy a few while I was at the grocery store. Instead of doing the sensible thing and buying whole mangoes, I got a box of mangoes that had already been sliced. "How do you tell if these are any good," a guy next to me asked. "These look good," I said. "They're all nice and yellow." Shows what I know about picking fruit. When I got the mangoes home, they were as hard as raw carrots. I guess they weren't ripe yet, because they sure didn't taste like the exotic looking peaches I thought I was buying. This is the problem with buying fruit. I can never tell when fruits and vegetables are ripe. It's much easier to buy cheese, or frozen pizza, or chocolate.  Janet will probably come home with a nice ripe mango and ask me why I bought these.

I didn't get nearly as much done as I thought I would today. I get easily sidetracked by trivial things and this morning when I turned on the computer, I noticed that the favicon on my website was gone. Favicons are those little 16x16 pixel square images you see on the menu bar when you bookmark a website in a browser. It doesn't even matter whether your website has a favicon or not, but I was determined to figure out where mine went. I looked at the HTML code. I tried uploading a new favicon icon to the server. I looked on Google for alternate ways to code the favicon script. Nothing worked. I finally decided that my ISP must have just turned off favicon support on the Apache web server. I put my little favicon icon on a different server that I had access to and referenced the URL back to my landing page. Everything works now. Time spent on this worthless endeavor: three hours.

I also opened up a Pinterest account and began pinning all my Instagram pictures. I never really liked Pinterest before, but when I discovered how easy it was to take the pictures that are for sale in my InstaCanvas Gallery and pin them on a Pinterest board, I was all in. I've got so many apps connected to other apps now that I never know what's going to turn up on Facebook or Twitter. I still write the blog by hand each and every evening, but everything else you see online is more or less automated.

I think the dogs are going to get a bath tomorrow. They've gotten themselves so dirty that they feel sticky when you pet them. Dash is the dirtiest. I have a feeling that a few of his spots are just dirt and are going to wash off when he gets his bath tomorrow. We'll go to the dog park first. Giving dog a bath before you take them to a dog park would be pointless.

Hannah is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 969

Yay! My InstaCanvas Gallery is open now. Please go and take a look when you've got a minute. Practically every Instagram picture I've ever taken is up on the site. I don't know if I'll ever make a dime from this venture, but I certainly like the idea. Instead of selling high resolution JPEG files to other professional graphic designers, this place is selling reasonably priced mounted canvas prints that anyone could use to brighten up a kitchen or bedroom wall. If it's pretty and bright, it just might sell! It was brilliant of these guys to print the Instagram photos on canvas too, because canvas isn't a very high resolution medium anyway. It's perfect for low quality Instagram prints that originate from a cell phone. I really like the fact that you can sell any image you want. There's no nitpicking evaluation team over in Sweden or Canada continually rejecting your images because they are out of focus or contain too many artifacts. Hey, I may order some of these canvas prints myself, which is probably exactly what the Instacanvas people want me to do.

I thought I might have found a new breakfast restaurant this morning, but as I was walking toward the front door, I saw a little hand written sign that said No credit cards accepted. Cash or personal check only. Oops. I turned around and got back in my car. I haven't carried any cash with me for years. I have a feeling that I won't even carry credit cards soon enough. I'll probably be among the first people to start using those new apps where you just wave your phone at the cash register to pay for something. I just don't understand people who carry big wads of cash around in their wallet. It's inconvenient. It attracts the wrong kind of attention. And if you're like me, you eventually wind up losing it. Credit cards are much tidier. I have a complete record of everything I spend and there is only one bill to pay every month. My theory is that a lot of those people with wads of cash in their wallets don't like paying taxes. At tax time they just say "What cash?" and claim that it never even existed.

At any rate, I ended up going back to one of my regular neighborhood restaurants. Sitting several tables away from me was an older gentleman wearing a crisp white dress shirt, starched blue jeans with precisely ironed creases and a highly polished pair of cowboy boots. He looked quite distinguished in his own way. If the customers in that restaurant wanted to tell me something, I'd certainly listen to this gentleman first. Most of the other men were wearing ball caps, running shoes, and rumpled looking golf shirts. I certainly wasn't exhibiting any sartorial splendor myself, but maybe I ought to try a little harder. I still don't venture far beyond my Steve Jobs look, wearing a black t-shirt and jeans everywhere except weddings and funerals.

As I was driving home from breakfast, I noticed on the odometer that I'd only driven 15 miles this week. Jeez, I walked the dogs more than 15 miles this week. It wasn't that long ago that I was driving up to 500 miles a week. There just isn't a need anymore. I remember reading an article recently that said auto sales to young adults were down almost 20% this year because young people increasingly prefer their iPhones, 4G connections, and other high-tech gadgets to cars. Maybe something similar is starting to happen with the rest of the population as well. There just isn't much need to actually go anywhere these days. FedEx and UPS deliver what I need to the frond door. All my business is conducted over the Internet. It's a lot more convenient to talk with people I know on Facebook than to actually drive somewhere to meet them. You wonder where all this is going to lead. I certainly never thought I'd lead an active, busy life while only driving 15 miles a week.

J-Lo is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 967

Do you know what you get after an August rain in Texas? You get steam. After an unexpected downpour this morning, I climbed up on the roof to remove the water and was greeted by clouds of steam rising from the rapidly evaporating water. I guess I should thank the sun for helping me get the water off the roof, because it wasn't all that long before the roof was completely dry again. Although I usually dread rain, today's shower was welcome. The grass and shrubs in the yard got some much needed attention. The areas on the roof that I patched last month appeared to hold and there were no discernible leaks. Since the rain came without the usual thunder and lightning, Dot and Dash weren't even all that upset. Although today's shower was welcome relief, it's going to take more than a single day of rain to turn things green again. It's still very hot and dry.

I saw this new website called Instacanvas this morning that claimed it could take all your Instagram pictures and turn them into large frameable canvases that you could sell online. Cool! Since passive income is the holy grail of most bloggers, I immediately requested to join this site. They couldn't have made it more complicated to set up a gallery if they tried. First, you had to send a message to your Facebook friends and ask them to request to see your gallery of photos.  Then you had to do the same thing on Twitter. Finally, you had to take a photo of their invitation to join and upload it to Instagram. Phew! Suddenly this whole thing wasn't nearly as interesting. Something this complicated will probably never work. I'm still hoping to set up a gallery on this site though. I take a ton of Instagram pictures and I never expected that any of them would earn me a dime of income. If it turns out that a few people actually want to buy prints of these pictures, that would be great.

This morning's rain cooled things down by at least fifteen degrees, so I was hoping that dog training class would be pleasant tonight. No such luck. The temperature was cooler, but there was absolutely no wind and the air was so humid and muggy you could cut it with a knife. Once again, the dogs thought we were crazy for taking them out of a nice air conditioned house for something like this.

I'm still fascinated by the new pictures coming from the Curiosity rover. Did you see the picture of Curiosity floating to the surface of Mars at the end of its parachute that was taken by another satalite orbiting the planet? Amazing! They say that if this picture was snapped even one second later, it wouldn't have captured anything. I used to love astronomy when I was in high school. I never was good at physics and math though. That's probably why I ended up in advertising. You don't have to be good at math to excel in advertising. Truthfully, you don't really have to be good at anything.

Lilly is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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