what a day
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Sometimes, Friday just adds nothing to what you can get done in a week. Today was one such Friday.
I've spent the week on product photography, a job with seemingly no end as there's always room for improvement. Today I wanted to go to Tokyu Hands in Shibuya to pick up a piece of glass as I wanted to try a glass surface on which to shoot our engagement rings.
I got there before 09:30, and naturally it wasn't open until 10:00. So by the time I'd waited for the store to open (luckily, I'd brought a book) and then had picked out what I wanted, and then managed to pick up a couple of other items at a nearby electronics store, I'd burned off more than an hour.
Adding to this was that I'd meant to get to the bank but simply walked by it instead of going in, causing me to have to double back at the end of the round of shopping. Rrrrr!
Then it was back home and time to wade through various emails and phone calls. Finally at around 13:00 I was set to get down to business, and the first order of the day was to add a third flash unit to the mix. Naturally, I was one AA battery short.
Remembering a very old flashlight that had been tucked away in the closet for years, I went and fetched the batteries from that. Unscrewing the thing, I dumped the Duracell AA's (so old that they were clearly from Canada, meaning that they were at least four years old) into my hand and .. battery acid got on my palm, shirt, and the flash unit. One or both of the batteries had long since leaked.
Scrambling to get the shirt clean, I tossed the batteries and frazzled little flashlight in the garbage. Then I realized that I'd need new batteries, so it was time to get back out onto the street.
I went to the DPE where I get my film processed. Sure enough, they had some decent rechargeables. OK, back home and finish up the setup.
It turns out that the glass pane idea is a non-starter. Way too many reflections, both surficial and internal. Can't be used.
Also, it turns out that one of the electronic widgets I'd picked up was an extension male-to-female PC cable, not a female-to-female cable. I couldn't use it with the adapter, so the third flash couldn't be added to the mix. Rrrrr!
I managed to limp through a new round of photo experiments with just the two flash units. So then it's time to work on the images in software again. And what do I find? Half the images I'd just taken have vanished from the SD card. And what's more, the mouse on my Mac isn't behaving properly, and everything's constantly scrolling to the right.
So much for the $20 I spent on the third party driver that was supposed to fix that. And thanks, Apple, for making it necessary to fork out for third party USB support. Didn't you guys invent USB? Shouldn't your OS be better at it by now? Rrrrr!