Jerm’s Insanity

What follows is an art piece i’m calling “My nana’s chocolate bunny”

I hope you enjoy

Ice

Lemon

fin.

No, I’m not so deluded to think that my writing ability warrants any sort of award comveted by anyone not into self-deprecation, but i do have other skillz. I can only be speaking, of course, about photography.

Now i realize that anyone who knows me and has seen any of my photographic works might be more skeptical about my photographic abilities than my writing, however i implore thee to hear me out. If, by the end of this blog entry, not as convinced of my photographic accumen as i am, i ask that you please keep it to yourself. Barring that, at least speak up about it.

One needs only to check the picture banner at Undercanopy.com to see that i have somewhat more than a mere modicum of photo prowess.

Ah ha! see? Nevermind that they were taken off of video, they’re stills now. The problem with wideo captuting is that the resolution is quite horrendous — a mere .3 megapizel or so. My probm wil true still has always been that i suck at them, and the problem with improving has always been the effort, cost, and lack of immediate feedback of film.

Well kids, Jerm has just procured himeself a fancy-schmancy new digital camera. It’s small enough to take most anywhere, quality enough to make a decent print, and is capable of taking 300+ pictures on a single memory card with a single battery charge. It’s only 4 MegaPixels (unlike the 6 of the next model up or the 6.3 of the Digital Rebel, but it’s also the height and with of a credit card and 0.9 inches thick. I didn’t want having my camera with me to be a chore or a pain in the ass, so i went small. One day i’ll probably get a higher-quality camera, but this is good for now. It gets me away from film in a rather nice form-factor. It was also a hell of a lot cheaper than a digi-rebel.

This is one of the first pictures taken with the new camera. I call it “Death of a PC”. It wasn’t mine, nor was it my doing, but it was done with the bare hands of a very angry person. Scary ‘eh?

A friend recently confided in me that they had a massage that was, um, less than pleasurable. I feel alright speaking of this as they not so much confided it to me but accounced it to the whole world. Others chimed in with similar experiences and a growing general fear of the practice i thought it necessary to quell this insurgence of defamation of a practice that can be quite extraordinary in the right hands.

Yeah, you bet your ass that pun was intended.

Having throughout my life been a willing participant in both the giving and receiving of various types of massage, I thought myself at least moderately qualified to rattle on about the whats and hows of professional massage. Plus it’s my blog, damnit.

The first question one should ask is what type of massage they’re practicing. Swedish massage is generally the type of ‘feel good’ massage that most of us hope for when placing ourselves in someone else’s hands. Shiatsu is more like acupressure, but still feels quite good and should not actually be painful.

Theraputic massage, however, is another ballgame. This is the sort of Hellraiser-inspired thing that you speak of. A good friend of mine is a physical therapist and this is the sort of thing she practiced on me for years. Fortunately, being on rather familiar terms it wasn’t considered terribly rude to gnash my teeth and curse the next 10 generations of her family in a manner that would make a biker gang ask me to watch my language.

She knew what she was doing, though, and long-term it really did help. When i wanted a proper ‘feel good’ massage, though, i went to one of her coworkers who was a licensed massage therapist who delivered more of what you would expect form a day at the spa.

It really is a good idea to know what you’re getting in to before sitting down, lying down, or what have you. On the other hand, shame on all of you for not speaking up about the pain. Shame on the masseuse for not disclaimering, “let me know if this hurts,’ but damn, people…. speak up! Inflicting pain on people, unless that’s what they expect, is not a way to get customers back and any Massage American with a brain will back off if you let them know it’s too hard. If you don’t tell them it hurts, they probably don’t know, so speak up!

Now, my PT moved away and i can’t afford her friend. help!

For most of the past year i’ve been existing without any meaningful sort of internet access. Indeed, for several months of that i was existing without even a proper computer, my nomadity lending instead to lesser forms of computing. For the first few months i was at the mercy of a dodgy notebook, and the remaining at the mercy of an even dodgier wireless connection

I needn’t tell even the daftest of pseudo-geeks that these things made it quite difficult and even more frustrating to try and get any real work done. Equally challenging was trying to stay adequately up-to-date with the tech world, a daunting task even for an independantly wealthy reclusive speed-reader with a ds3 to his livingroom. Suffice to day, i was no longer the super-heroi techie of yore.

Fast forward to now. My tan is fading, muscle mass dwindling and my consumption of caffinated beverages would make a Wet Planet lab rat wince.

In the last month and a half i’ve migrated 4 webservers, built a custom SCSI-RAID system, responded to 3 server outtages, built a web-usge reporting system for my own hosting box, excelled at Every-Extend, converted to Thunderbird, build a website, upkept another, won 3 games of internet chess, rebuilt 4 home PCs, broken 1, done 4 linux installs, started this year’s video project and caught up on slashdot. Oh yeah, and started a blog…. 3 times….. with different software, and integrated it into my site.

These are just my geeky endeavours, and only those off the top of my head. I’ve also managed to catch a few movies, make a bunch of skydives and manage to not completely alientate my girlfriend (i know.. i know… girlfriend = -100 geek points).

If all of this, however,still doesn’t qualify to return me to at least mega-geek status, consifer that i just drilled holes in the bottom of my computer tower to mount a harddrive standing on its side, as i’m out of space….. yes, it’s SATA, is that goodd enough?

woot