Category: Generic

Hey, Screw You Ticketmaster

I’m going to a concert next week. Triumph. I saw them in 1986. It was my first concert. My Uncle Johnny took me. I was 15. Now here we are 40 years later and out of nowhere the band announced a 50th anniversary tour and I got me a ticket. Uncle Johnny is no longer with us, but he’ll be going to the show with me in spirit, I am sure.

That’s not the story with this post though. Not directly at least. No, the point is that ticketmaster is an asshole and I want them to fuck right off.

Over the last week they have been sending me emails reminding me that I have a ticket to a conert. As if I would have forgotten, you know? Not bloody likely. Today though, they put a new spin on the spam. Today’s email reminded me that if I wanted to sell my ticket I can do so through their reseller option. 

Ah… no thank you, fuckwads. I do not want to sell the ticket to the show that I have been waiting 40 years for. Fuck you right the fuck off. To borrow a line or two from The Book of Mormon, fuck ticketmaster right in the eye and then fuck ticketmaster right in the other eye.

Blah, Again

Yesterday was a tough day. Today has been tougher. I need (another) vacation. That’s a common theme around here.

I don’t have to work in the office tomorrow. That’s nice. Maybe if I get up early enough I’ll have some time to work on those two new songs I wrote on Sunday. They both need two tracks of vocals and at least one track of lead guitar. Maybe I can get some of that done tomorrow and then the rest on Friday. We’ll see.

The last two work days (including today, which is down to the final 36 minutes) have been insanely, absurdly, busy. I haven’t had a minute to catch my breath. It’s frustrating. I’ll be heading home soon for the day. Hopefully I won’t have a repeat of last night’s commute. There was an accident on route 495. Google Maps detoured me around it, but it also detoured 1000000 other commuters and it resulted in a monster traffic jam on a side street. It cost me more than half an hour of my life.

On unrelated commute news, I had to stop at a rest area on route 128 today in order to get gas. My tank was almost empty. I had enough gas to get me the rest of the way to work, but not enough to get my home afterward. As I was pumping gas, I saw something I’d never seen before. I saw a tractor trailer truck… do a donut. Sort of. He pulled out of a parking spot. He should have turned right and gotten onto the highway. He didn’t. He turned left… and kept turning left… he did a full 360 degree turn. Effectively he did a donut, but a donut in slow motion. He also blocked the ramp onto the highway and had 3–4 cars stuck waiting for him to get his dumb ass out of the way. It was a very weird thing.

Okay. I have 31 minutes left in my work day. Time to hit publish and squeeze in some more work. Thanks for reading my pointless, useless, bullshit. I appreciate the effort. I’ll try to write something more interesting tomorrow.

Blah

Memorial Day Weekend: Three days of rain and gloom and cold.

The Tuesday after Memorial Day Weekend: Blue skies, sun, 80 degrees.

Mutha puss bucket.

It was a good weekend otherwise. We tried to have a cookout but had a cook-in instead. I was hoping my step son would be able to join us but he was too busy. My step daughter was away for the start of it but she came home Sunday afternoon. That was nice. 

I didn’t go out to take pictures or anything, not just because of the shit weather. I was also feeling too lazy. I sort of made up for it, in the creativity department, on Monday though. I wrote two songs. The demos aren’t finished, but everything is written for both of them. My finger tips are still burning from recording the rhythm guitars. The strings on my ES-335 felt like rusty razor blades. It was fun.

We found out today we’re going to have a little bit of work done on the house that is going to require me to do a HUGE amount of work in the cellar to prepare for it. It’s not for a couple of weeks but I am already feeling overwhelmed by the very thought of it. It’s an important project that will lead to an even more important project a few months down the road, but for now… fuck me.

I’m going to a concert next week. Expect me to be super psyched about it in the coming days. That’s a little blog spoiler for you.

Nothing much else to write about today. I had to commute to the office today and I’m about 20 minutes away from my commute home. I’m in the office again tomorrow. Hopefully the commute is better tomorrow, but I doubt it. Whatever.

Okay, I’m clicking publish now.

Three Day Weekend

Memorial Day Weekend has arrived. It’s a three day weekend. We are in New England though so it is likely to be rainy and cold the whole time. Yippee.

We are having a cookout on Sunday. Well… a cookin, I think. It’s supposed to rain. What can you do, right?

Other than that… I don’t think I have any any plans at all. I have to get some blood work done. I could do that. 

It’s the unofficial start of summer. I hope the temperatures stay above freezing.

Almost Baby Yoda Time

I’ve had a ball buster of a day today. It started shortly after I got out of bed and it just kicked my ass over and over again all day long. The biggest insult was the 30–40 minutes or so when our whole neighborhood lost power. It was right before lunch so it didn’t screw up anything for anyone other than me, but still… thanks.

Hopefully it will all seem worth it shortly after I leave work tonight. That’s because my wife and my step daughter and I are all going to the movies to see Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu.

That’s right, folks. Tonight we’re getting us some quality Baby Yoda time and I gotta say, I really need it. 

Don’t ask me to review the movie though. I cannot be objective about anything Star Wars related. As soon as the flick starts playing in the theater I am going to revert to my six year old self, watching the original movie in the theater in 1977 and I am going to love it just as much as I loved that first movie, and every movie and TV series and book and comic and video game that has come since. It’s part of who I am. My very DNA includes that Galaxy Far, Far Away.

A new Star Wars movie… tonight… it makes my crappy day worthwhile. I can’t wait.

Force the Issue

Yesterday I wrote a post complaining about how long it takes a package of film to get from my house in Massachusetts to the development lab in California. I wrote the post on Monday, fully expecting that my package would not arrive at its destination until Friday.

Shortly after publishing the post I got an email saying my package had arrived. Really? So quickly? Amazing! Did my writing about the situation somehow affect the outcome? Did my post somehow warp space and time to allow the package to arrive right at that moment? Who knows.

Now here we are, a day later, and I am waiting for the lab to tell me the photos have been developed and scanned and uploaded to my account. I’m waiting… patiently… impatiently. It’s only 2:17pm in California right now but I’m thinking… I’m wondering… I’m pondering…

If my post somehow altered space and time yesterday… would posting again today have a similar result? If I write about it again, will the outcome I am hoping for come to pass shortly after I click publish?

Let’s find out!

Might Change My Workflow

This is another in an endless line of posts about getting photographic film developed. As usual the main theme is that I am an impatient asshole. Consider yourselves warned.

When I first started mailing film off to a development lab I was sending it to a place in New Hampshire. The lab is close enough that I could probably drive to it and drop it off in person. It’s a little too far to do as a spur of the moment, off the cuff kinda drive, but it was close. When I dropped the package in the mail it was usually at its destination the next business day.

Then I changed labs. Instead of shipping to New Hampshire I was shipping to San Clemente, CA. All the way across the country. The service was a little cheaper, and to my very ignorant untrained eyes the end result looked a teeny tiny hair’s width better. Was it actually better? I don’t have a clue. The question was, does the slightly lower cost offset the extra 4–5 days of travel time to get the package of film to its laboratory destination? At first I thought yes. Now?

My plan for this summer is to shoot film once a month. Last year I was trying to go out and take pictures of stuff any time the sun was out in the early morning on the weekend. It got the point where I was sneaking out of the house 2–3 days each week. That was silly. This year I am going to blitz for one weekend, weather permitting, each month and that will be it. This month had an extra day because I needed to test drive my new camera, but outside of that I plan to stick to once a month.

Next month I think I am going to go back to the lab in New Hampshire. Hell, I might even drive there. Probably not, but if I can find some excuse I might. At the very least I will compare prices between the two labs directly and if it’s even remotely similar I am going to go with the faster shipping turn around time with the closer to home service. 

I dropped four rolls of film in the mail on Saturday. I don’t expect them to get to California until Friday. I am generally a patient person and that wait should not bother me… but in this case I am completely impatient and it does bother me.

Damn it, I am such a freakin’ nerd.

Thanks, DX Code

…and now we wait… again.

I got up early this morning and took my new eBay purchased camera out to finish its test roll… and then I loaded a second test roll.

I went to Methuen, MA’s little downtown area and snapped a few pics and I went to the Spicket Falls dam and took a few pics. That was all it took to finish off the roll of Kodak ColorPlus 200 that was already in the camera.

I loaded a second roll because the camera came with two lenses and I figured I’d shoot one test roll with each lens. So I switched from the 70–210mm to the nifty 50mm, drove to Walnut Grove cemetery and then crossed the street and took a walk down the Methuen Rail Trail. That killed off the second roll.

When I got home I put in an order at The Darkroom for those two rolls along with two additional rolls that I finished a couple of weeks ago. One 35mm and one 120. I just dropped them all off at the post office. Now, as previously stated, we wait to see how things look. The new camera definitely seems to be working from a functional standpoint. Now I just need to find out if it is riddled with light leaks or not. Does the shutter actually work? Who knows. We’ll find out when I get the scans back from the lab.

I had a moment though… a sort of, oh my christ you suck moment. I had just rewound the second roll of film. That was when I realized I never set the ISO on the camera. The first roll was ISO 200. The second was Kentmere 400… ISO 400… I never changed it. Shit. My second test roll is going to have all sorts of incorrect exposure.

Knowing it was miles too late (sorry for mixing units, my Physics teachers would be so disappointed in me) I pressed the ISO button and was wicked psyched to see that it was set at 400! I forgot, this new camera is fancy. It reads the DX code on the film cartridge and sets the ISO appropriately. I didn’t need to reset the value, the camera did it for me. I could have overridden the camera setting, but I wouldn’t have done that. I wanted it set at box speed and it was. Thanks, new camera!

But for now though… we wait.