(I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek lately… Yeah, OK – always.)

This is the penultimate photo for my 30days exercise, where I take a photo every day – for 30 days – of something that surrounds me naturally, meaning, I didn’t go on any specific photo walks or anything. This has been pure documentation and a test to see if I could stick with it. We’ll know tomorrow if I did.

See the whole thing on flickr.

I seem to be seeing a lot of chairs these days.

I think I have a few on my iPhone that I haven’t uploaded anywhere… also several variations of the above shots. That’s the way photography works.

I am normally thrilled when a Macheist bundle comes out, and have purchased several over the years. I typically find them good value and a fine showcase of some of the brightest applications out there.

But…
I’m giving it a miss this time, and I’ll tell you why.
The app is called Flow, and I strongly dislike their marketing strategy of trash-talking their target competition, the long-standing and respected application Transmit.

Are you still using Transmit, an app that dates all the way back to MacOS 8? Well, if so, then it’s time to make room for the new kid in town… Flow

and

And we’re not talking about a gimped editor…

I use Transmit, but I’m not attached to it in some fanatical way. It does what I need it to do and it does it well enough for me to keep on with it. Truth is, I use a fraction of its capabilities. I started using Transmit after being a die-hard Fetch user for years. I would change again if the right app came along, and maybe Flow is that application, but after reading their distasteful copy, I have no plans to put any cash their way. As for donating to charity through the purchase of a software bundle? I can donate directly to charity, and have (we donated to Haiti).

Two people I’m close to have posted about this rubbing them the wrong way as well, and I’ll let you check out their words on the matter here and here.

I’m surprised Macheist has allowed Flow’s low-class snarky marketing to remain. What a shame.

We had a removals company around yesterday to pack away more than half of our belongings into storage. This makes the move itself easier and gives us the floorspace to finish the packing here and begin the final clean and polish of the flat before we hand over the keys. We’ll be living with minimal furniture and out of a few boxes for several weeks, but it will be worth it in the end. After stepping around boxes, bruising shins and thighs, and watching dirt and mess build up for the past month, it is a pleasure to walk unobstructed through this home. Today, I’ll be able to properly vacuum for the first time in a month. I am thrilled!

I am exhausted this morning. This has been a tough couple of months. I’m coping with minimal St John’s Wort (only minimal due to my forgetfulness) but I hope to never test myself (or the St John’s) with such a trinity of big events again: starting a new business, moving house, husband having surgery. The business is going along alright, but could use more of my attention. The moving is going alright, but could be better organised. The husband is healing (after a worrying, unplanned overnight in the hospital), and he’s obviously most important, though it’s unfortunate that his surgery was scheduled to overlap with this already busy time for us. It’s just one of those things, you know, everything at once, when it rains it pours, yadda yadda. I’m not sleeping right, but Neil is better, we’re on schedule for the move, and my business is making sales. Soon, two of those items will fall away as completed and the business will be my main focus again. I’m looking forward to it. I can’t help but to feel that I’m coasting too much and not driving hard enough at everything. It makes me uncomfortable to ‘get by’ with a task. I’m managing the focus allocations, but the price is that I’m also doing no art, no writing, no anything else that makes me feel like more than a machine. It’ll pass. This is more a blog post of observation. Something I needed to get out and analyse for myself. I know we’re in the home-stretch on several things, and that life and its to-do list are always crowded, but I think I can’t be in the new house soon enough.

Perhaps it’s the need for change. The next rung, and my fingertips are just shy of reaching it today, but tomorrow they’ll be closer. There is always the temptation to wish for a Fast-Forward button during certain points in life, but I don’t think I’d ever use it, even if I could. Not being able to shoot to the tops of ladders is a good thing, even if it means feeling a little thinly spread and only adequate for now. I’ll do what I can in this space between rungs for now.

So, I vacuum. Then I take over the world.

Gonna probably need more coffee for that second one though… Could be a tall ladder.

I reckon these guys are gonna be a bitch to relocate to the new house…

One of the nearly 100 scans of vintage postcards I have released to my flickr pages. I used to work on a little site about postcards but haven’t done anything with it for ages. It featured vintage postcards and Hoods Photos of the World.
Browse the scans on flickr.

One of these days I’ll add more…

Yesterday was the first day I stopped to evaluate my growing involvement in the social media network. I got a political/religious invitation to a group I don’t support from someone I like. It’s a cause that I have never liked and it is a known trigger for actions ranging from arguments to much, much worse. Not going to go into it here, but I want to stay well away from it in my social life. There are plenty of causes I feel strongly about, but I only discuss them with people I know very well, and not online. Facebook makes the passionately pushy hard to avoid. Invitations to events and groups are intrusive and I delete/ignore a handful of them everyday. I strongly dislike the Facebook user interface and its clunkiness, and even more than that, I object to not being able to turn off invitations and events from individual users. I get blanket event invitations from people in the US on a range of their personal interests that I could never attend, and often, have zero interest. Facebook is now a management chore nearly as much as it is a way for me to keep in casual contact with friends and acquaintances, and to grow my business.

If I’m missing something in the control of Facebook – some setting or ritual involving daggers and candles – do let me know. But for now, Facebook is leaving me feeling a little uncomfortable. (As I knew it eventually would.)

An experimental photo using the button-size plastic lens of a disposable film camera plus my iPhone. Makes the harmless houses behind the flat look oddly menacing.
Or maybe it’s a truth lens…