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| Happy New Year from Threshold! |
Showing posts with label new year. Show all posts
Showing posts with label new year. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 01, 2014
Tuesday, January 01, 2013
An Auspicious Beginning?
It’s 2013 – a brand new year, offering the promise of endless new possibilities, a chance to start fresh, to learn and grow, and to make tomorrow different from yesterday!
As if.
I actually went ahead and set the tone for the year very early on.
At around 1 AM on my way upstairs I decided to pause to check my phone to see if I’d gotten any texts (No), and after I set the phone back down on its wireless charger, I turned to head up the stairs, and in the process – as I’ve done so many times – I caught my pant leg on the corner of one of the metal dividers separating the vinyl flooring from the carpet by the front door. Despite my best efforts, the dividers will not stay put, as whoever installed them didn’t really take adequate steps to secure them to the concrete underneath and the – bent – nails holding them in place keep popping loose.
This time was worse than any of the others, however, as I got quite a bit further than usual before realizing that my pant leg was caught, and so the divider got yanked almost completely loose, and ended up even more bent than it already was. I’d heard one of the nails get sent skittering across the vinyl, so, after getting my pant leg loose, I reached over to turn on the light switch, at which point the bulb in the lamp flared brilliantly for the briefest of moments, then burned out with a loud pop.
I stood there in the dark, not wanting to take a step because I knew that if I did my foot would, unerringly and without fail, find the missing nail, and I thought, “Yep, a brand new year, full of endless possibilities.”
Sunday, January 01, 2012
New Year, Same Jon
As is always the case when I take off the last part of the year from work – there’s really no reason to be there, as there’s nothing going on, and the place is a ghost town – I had a checklist of tasks I wanted to accomplish during my largely-uninterrupted time at home.
(As an aside, when I’m at work, my life seemingly revolves around checklists to an ever-increasing extent, and when I’m away from work, I don’t seem to be able to escape them.)
This is probably as close as I get to making resolutions.
So how did I do?
Ehh, better than I did last year, I think.
Things I accomplished:
Thoroughly cleaning the house
Drawing my annual holiday images for Threshold
Maintaining a regular workout routine
Sleeping
At least starting on fulfilling the art request I got from Jamie
Bagging and boarding the comics I’ve accumulated since the last time I bagged and boarded
Things I partially accomplished:
Rearranging/organizing the house
Things I didn’t even start on:
Editing and revising my 2009 and 2011 NaNoWriMo novels
Organizing my comics
Becoming independently wealthy
Gaining super powers
Getting back into a regular blogging groove, with meaningful and insightful posts
Quitting smoking, or at least fully moving to the electronic cigarettes
Making some additional updates/changes to heroicportraits.com
Getting a long overdue oil change
So, yeah, not really great, but probably better than previous years.
Ultimately, I may have been a bit too ambitious. I mean, organizing my comics? That’s probably completely outside the realm of possibility.
Some of the things on my list I didn’t accomplish simply because I lacked resources. For example, I couldn’t find a radioactive spider anywhere (though I did find several dead, presumably non-radioactive ones in the course of cleaning the house), and the rearranging/organizing of the house was kind of dependent on having an easy way to dispose of some of the…stuff that’s just cluttering up the place, like all of the things in my Closet of Forgotten Technology, which will need to be hauled to some sort of electronics recycling facility.
Conversely, while there’s stuff I need to get rid of, there’s also stuff I need to acquire in order to rearrange things. For example, I really need a new desk for my office (though, of course, that also means getting rid of my old desk), and I need some new shelving and storage, but until tax/bonus time rolls around, my budget is rather constrained.
Then there are – as is the story of my life – the mistakes I’ve made in the past that come back to haunt me. As a for instance, I probably should have set up my office in the larger guest bedroom, but now, with the way things arranged, it would be difficult to completely shuffle things around.
Beyond that, there’s the fact that I have longer-term plans for how I want the house arranged, which actually involve some amount of construction and renovation, and my short-term plans for rearranging things would actually interfere with those plans, so I found myself at a bit of an impasse.
Also, I’m lazy.
2012: The End?
I'll bet the Mayans didn't predict this:
Happy New Year from Threshold!
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| They say the end is near. I wish. |
Saturday, January 01, 2011
Friday, January 01, 2010
With An Hour To Spare
Hey, Olivia Munn, thanks for reminding us that we've just put another year behind us!
Happy New Year from Threshold!
Facing The New Year
Normally I would post a New Year-related picture (for example), but I didn't get around to getting one done. Or even starting on one.
(I still may do so before the first day of 2010 is over, though)
The reason I didn't get around to drawing anything is that for the past two days I've done little more than obsessively engage in face-tagging.
As you can imagine, I have a lot of pictures on my hard drive(s), and (pointlessly) acquiring even more pictures is what I normally spend a good deal of my time doing.
Ostensibly the purpoose of acquiring all of these pictures is to use them as references for drawing, but if I lived to be a thousand years old and spent all of the time in my remaining years drawing I'd never even come close to using all of them for that purpose.
Still, it gives me something to do, and the point is that, as mentioned, I have a lot of pictures. Gigabytes worth, and that's not counting the ones I've moved off to CD and DVDs over the years.
To try to keep them all organized and searchable, I use a free program from Google called Picasa.
It has a lot of features I like, such as thumbnail views and batch renaming, and I've been using it for years.
The most recent version has a new feature that allows you to tag photos based on face-recognition. Essentially it scans through all of your photos and then tries to identify unique faces and group them together. Once that's accomplished, you can tag the photos with a name.
Up until the other day I hadn't really messed with it, just letting it quietly do its thing in the background , but when I noticed that it was about 55% of the way through scanning, I decided to check it out.
...
For whatever reason, the process of tagging faces - and trying to force the somewhat mediocre recognition software to do a better job of recognizing specific people ("How many times do I have to tell you that Scarlett Johansson and Jessica Simpson aren't the same person?!!!") - is utterly addictive.
I spent pretty much the entire day tagging faces yesterday, and probably would have spent the entire night doing so as well if I hadn't had to take a break from it to head down to Scott and Stacy's.
And I'm still nowhwere near finished.
It doesn't help that the recognition and tagging process totally chokes Picasa and that it will lock up if you try to do anything else with it(like renaming a photo), leading to having to force it to shut down, which in turn makes it lose any work it did after a certain point.
I'm going to try very hard to do something other than tag faces today, but I can't say much for my chances for success.
Back in the summer of 1995, shortly after my wife and I splt up, I spent a lot of time playing the game Doom. For those of you not in the know, Doom was what was called a "first person shooter," which is to say that it's a game in which the action takes place from your perspective - all you see of the character you're playing as is his gun and/or fists - and you basically just walk along shooting everything that moves.
I found it to be kind of therapeutic at the time, but in the game you spend a lot of time walking through maze-like corridors, seeing nothing but the walls around you, but I played the game so much that whenever I closed my eyes I was seeing long, dark, winding hallways.
Similarly, when I close my eyes now all I see is an endless parade of faces.
So maybe I should take a little break from the tagging.
In any case, as mentioned, yesterday evening found me headed down to Scott and Stacy's for dinner and a (terrible) movie. I'd brought along several Riff Trax and MST3K options - all of them horrible - but the consensus was that we (Jamie and Casey were also there) should watch The Star Wars Holiday Special.
Ugh.
It was my third time watching it, and even with the great Riffs, it's still painful. I think it almost broke Jamie.
If you want to know our pain , the entire thing has been posted on YouTube. It doesn't feature the Riff Trax crew, however, so I'm not sure I can recommed watching it - actually, I know I can't recommend it - or at least not the entire thing, as it's possible that doing so could be fatal. Still, it's worth checking out a few random minutes just to see how truly awful it is.
In any case, Happy New Year.
(I still may do so before the first day of 2010 is over, though)
The reason I didn't get around to drawing anything is that for the past two days I've done little more than obsessively engage in face-tagging.
As you can imagine, I have a lot of pictures on my hard drive(s), and (pointlessly) acquiring even more pictures is what I normally spend a good deal of my time doing.
Ostensibly the purpoose of acquiring all of these pictures is to use them as references for drawing, but if I lived to be a thousand years old and spent all of the time in my remaining years drawing I'd never even come close to using all of them for that purpose.
Still, it gives me something to do, and the point is that, as mentioned, I have a lot of pictures. Gigabytes worth, and that's not counting the ones I've moved off to CD and DVDs over the years.
To try to keep them all organized and searchable, I use a free program from Google called Picasa.
It has a lot of features I like, such as thumbnail views and batch renaming, and I've been using it for years.
The most recent version has a new feature that allows you to tag photos based on face-recognition. Essentially it scans through all of your photos and then tries to identify unique faces and group them together. Once that's accomplished, you can tag the photos with a name.
Up until the other day I hadn't really messed with it, just letting it quietly do its thing in the background , but when I noticed that it was about 55% of the way through scanning, I decided to check it out.
...
For whatever reason, the process of tagging faces - and trying to force the somewhat mediocre recognition software to do a better job of recognizing specific people ("How many times do I have to tell you that Scarlett Johansson and Jessica Simpson aren't the same person?!!!") - is utterly addictive.
I spent pretty much the entire day tagging faces yesterday, and probably would have spent the entire night doing so as well if I hadn't had to take a break from it to head down to Scott and Stacy's.
And I'm still nowhwere near finished.
It doesn't help that the recognition and tagging process totally chokes Picasa and that it will lock up if you try to do anything else with it(like renaming a photo), leading to having to force it to shut down, which in turn makes it lose any work it did after a certain point.
I'm going to try very hard to do something other than tag faces today, but I can't say much for my chances for success.
Back in the summer of 1995, shortly after my wife and I splt up, I spent a lot of time playing the game Doom. For those of you not in the know, Doom was what was called a "first person shooter," which is to say that it's a game in which the action takes place from your perspective - all you see of the character you're playing as is his gun and/or fists - and you basically just walk along shooting everything that moves.
I found it to be kind of therapeutic at the time, but in the game you spend a lot of time walking through maze-like corridors, seeing nothing but the walls around you, but I played the game so much that whenever I closed my eyes I was seeing long, dark, winding hallways.
Similarly, when I close my eyes now all I see is an endless parade of faces.
So maybe I should take a little break from the tagging.
In any case, as mentioned, yesterday evening found me headed down to Scott and Stacy's for dinner and a (terrible) movie. I'd brought along several Riff Trax and MST3K options - all of them horrible - but the consensus was that we (Jamie and Casey were also there) should watch The Star Wars Holiday Special.
Ugh.
It was my third time watching it, and even with the great Riffs, it's still painful. I think it almost broke Jamie.
If you want to know our pain , the entire thing has been posted on YouTube. It doesn't feature the Riff Trax crew, however, so I'm not sure I can recommed watching it - actually, I know I can't recommend it - or at least not the entire thing, as it's possible that doing so could be fatal. Still, it's worth checking out a few random minutes just to see how truly awful it is.
In any case, Happy New Year.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
New(?) Year
So the new year is well and truly upon us, a chance for new beginnings and fresh starts, a time to reflect upon the lessons of the previous year even as we look forward to the new lessons that lie ahead.
Or, you know, to just keep doing what we’ve been doing.
I’m not one for making resolutions, and, honestly, I’m more likely to just keep doing what I’ve been doing, so while there are some new beginnings and fresh starts ahead for me, I don’t foresee any astounding changes waiting for me in 2008.
There will be more money waiting for me, which is clearly a good thing, and what looks to be a more interesting and fulfilling job that will be providing said money, which is also a good thing.
But working five days a week? That I’m not looking forward to.
I suppose the inevitable question of “Jon, what did you do for New Years?” arises, or at least I’m saying, for rhetorical purposes, that it arises, and my answer to the question is, unsurprisingly, “Not much.”
I’d gone grocery shopping the morning of New Year’s Eve and had bought some sort of cheap steak that I wasn’t sure what to do with, so I opted to make Swiss Steak. It turned out okay, though the gravy was a bit bland. Apart from that, I parked my ass on the couch and watched HGTV for a few hours. The parking my ass on the couch part was the result of me not wanting to head back upstairs to the office to work on the Katherine Heigl picture. By that point I’d finished pretty much everything except the hair. Hair, as most regular readers know, is sort of my nemesis when it comes to drawing, and the hair in this particular image was especially challenging. I think the end result of my slapdash attempt at rendering the complex do turned out okay, but it’s got nothing on the real deal, but if I’d tried to render a perfect copy of the original, I’d probably have ended up working on it all through 2008, so, as I usually, I settled for what I could manage.
Working on the picture carried me through the end of 2007 and into the beginning of 2008.
Now I’m certain that there are worse ways to spend your New Year’s Eve than putting the finishing touches on a rendering of Katherine Heigl’s side boob, but I’m not certain that there are any ways that are sadder or more pathetic.
Still, “sad and pathetic” was an appropriate note on which to end one year and begin the next for me, so it all works out in the end, I guess.
Yesterday was even less active. I called my mom, and then later she called me so that I could talk to my nephew Todd, who’d been staying with her, before his mom picked him up.
In the evening I followed this chicken recipe I found online and learned, once again, that it doesn’t pay for me to try to fry breaded chicken, as in the process of removing it from the oil I always end up ripping the breading off.
And that was the exciting way in which I kicked off the new year.
Or, you know, to just keep doing what we’ve been doing.
I’m not one for making resolutions, and, honestly, I’m more likely to just keep doing what I’ve been doing, so while there are some new beginnings and fresh starts ahead for me, I don’t foresee any astounding changes waiting for me in 2008.
There will be more money waiting for me, which is clearly a good thing, and what looks to be a more interesting and fulfilling job that will be providing said money, which is also a good thing.
But working five days a week? That I’m not looking forward to.
I suppose the inevitable question of “Jon, what did you do for New Years?” arises, or at least I’m saying, for rhetorical purposes, that it arises, and my answer to the question is, unsurprisingly, “Not much.”
I’d gone grocery shopping the morning of New Year’s Eve and had bought some sort of cheap steak that I wasn’t sure what to do with, so I opted to make Swiss Steak. It turned out okay, though the gravy was a bit bland. Apart from that, I parked my ass on the couch and watched HGTV for a few hours. The parking my ass on the couch part was the result of me not wanting to head back upstairs to the office to work on the Katherine Heigl picture. By that point I’d finished pretty much everything except the hair. Hair, as most regular readers know, is sort of my nemesis when it comes to drawing, and the hair in this particular image was especially challenging. I think the end result of my slapdash attempt at rendering the complex do turned out okay, but it’s got nothing on the real deal, but if I’d tried to render a perfect copy of the original, I’d probably have ended up working on it all through 2008, so, as I usually, I settled for what I could manage.
Working on the picture carried me through the end of 2007 and into the beginning of 2008.
Now I’m certain that there are worse ways to spend your New Year’s Eve than putting the finishing touches on a rendering of Katherine Heigl’s side boob, but I’m not certain that there are any ways that are sadder or more pathetic.
Still, “sad and pathetic” was an appropriate note on which to end one year and begin the next for me, so it all works out in the end, I guess.
Yesterday was even less active. I called my mom, and then later she called me so that I could talk to my nephew Todd, who’d been staying with her, before his mom picked him up.
In the evening I followed this chicken recipe I found online and learned, once again, that it doesn’t pay for me to try to fry breaded chicken, as in the process of removing it from the oil I always end up ripping the breading off.
And that was the exciting way in which I kicked off the new year.
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Happy New Year From Threshold!
By most anyone's standard, 2007 was a very good year for actress Katherine Heigl (at least professionally; for all I know her personal life is a shambles, but that's not the point), so I thought it would be appropriate for us to join her as she turns her lovely back on the year that was - however reluctantly - to face the year ahead. I hope 2008 is a good year for her, and for all of you.
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