I don’t like Mondays and I don’t really know why. I mean, if I had to get up and actually go to work it would signify the start to another long, dreary workweek and I could understand. But I don’t work for anyone other than myself and even that seems to be only on my own schedule of sorts.

I get up at 7am but don’t really get going until about 2pm. From then I run strong until about midnight. If I make it to bed before then, my 7am wakeup is automatic. If I miss my 12 am curfew, I can’t get out of bed until about 9am or so. That shifts my whole cadence forward and every third or fourth day I have to correct my internal clock.

That means doing absolutely nothing for a whole day. Just taking it at a snail’s pace, then going to bed about 10 or 11 and getting up at 7am, reset and ready to get going at 2pm.

So in reality, Monday shouldn’t really make much difference to me than any other day of the week… but it does.

If I’d just retired, it would be easy to write it off as conditioning. You know, the Pavlov’s dog thingy. But I haven’t had to work the Monday thru Friday routine for almost 35 years. The only bad thing about not having to officially confront Mondays for that long is that Fridays hold no lure for me, either.

Apart from looking at Fridays as the gateway to my weekend furlough, Fridays are the same as Mondays. And Wednesday’s aren’t hump day for me either.

It’s not as good as it sounds. Consider this:

I’m just as likely to be working on Saturday at 6pm as on Monday at 2pm or 4am. Just doesn’t matter. I work when I feel most productive… or is it just when the mood strikes? Dunno. The line’s become blurred over the last 3+ decades.

Am I just lazy? I don’t think so but then I’ve never met a lazy man who thought he was. But I am productive. Maybe not as productive as I’d like to be but certainly almost as productive as someone who has a job.

I remember the work sector. Nobody really works, at least not on a continuous basis. Now I’m not counting the time spent there because most of that time is not really working.

Sure, there may be spurts of productivity but most just find a groove and plod along a path of least resistance. Even when faced with a real project, seldom does it progress without continual intermissions.

Most everybody in the workaday world just kind of strings their weekdays and projects together with coffee breaks, trips to the restroom, non-work related conversation with their co-workers, even several calls home to ask if the daily mail came yet. And all that was way before the internet.

Now checking your email addresses, text messaging, surfing the net, playing games with your opponent in the next cubicle and more, have been added to fill your daily “work” routine.

The way I got it figured, most “workers” really might work only 3 or less real hours each workday. Some view their workweek as a sort of social club, only occasionally interrupted by actually having to do something.

And then there are those who know only enough about their job as how to keep it. They’re the real workers. Constantly campaigning for favor, hoping either their good looks, charming personality or just plain ass-kissing will get them by. And it usually does.

That pisses off the rest of the “workers” when they see someone working so hard.

Sometimes I ask myself. Wouldn’t it be easier just to get a job? But then I’d have to get up every Monday morning to go to work. And gosh, I hate Mondays.

OK. I have to cut this short ’cause it’s nearing 2pm and I have to get ready for work.

Here’s my Doodle-O’Dah-Day. It’s called “Manatees In Love” a submission I made to the “Horny Manatee” site made famous by talk show host Conan O’Brien.

It wasn’t accepted, btw. NBC censors? Maybe they know I’m not a Conan fan. Oh well, anybody at NGC interested?

C’ya!

Ever backup a partition full of files to removable media. Password protect it, then eliminate it from your hard drive to try and be… oh, so organized? You feel so professional and on top of it all, don’t you?

But several months later (or years in my case) you need something from that precious, invaluable backup. Trying to open it you can no longer remember what password you used. You try every alphanumeric combination familiar or imaginable but just can’t open those damn, crunched files. It’s a kind of madness that will consume you.

Think writing it down will help? Oh, you’re so smug. I guarantee even if you wrote the password on every wall in your home, your house would burn to the ground the very moment before you needed it.

Or you could be like a friend of mine who surreptitiously wrote all his important passwords on one wall of his home. He came home one day to find his wife and kids had repainted the entire area to surprise him. That, they certainly did. (They’re divorced now.)

No, you can’t escape it. Everyone who’s ever tried password protecting their backup files has experienced this same gut-wrenching, mind numbing agony. The only consolation you might have is knowing you’re not the only one to have ever done this but it doesn’t help much.

Eventually you resign yourself to never being able to access the locked files again. This save goes to your brain reasoning, “If I didn’t need it, use it or look for it over the last (fill in your own timeframe) it probably wasn’t that important in the first place. Screw it.”

See? The mind is an amazingly powerful, rationalization tool. This does not save you, however, if you’re locked out of your prized photos, legal papers, tax returns or your plans for the next great invention, surely to revolutionize the world and make you a bazillion dollars.

No. Password protecting important files is pointless and futile. You have sensitive files you want to keep “safe” but forget the password, making them as useless to you as anyone else. Do yourself a favor and just delete them from your hard drive to start with. Save yourself the future aggravation.

Password protection is only as strong as it’s weakest link. In that case, that would be me.

Therefore…

Zycosis #5: The importance of using a password to protect anything is directly proportionate to how difficult remembering it will be.

And…

Zycosis #6: The more urgent the need to access any file, directly increases the odds against unlocking it, exponentially.

That said, here’s my Doodle-O’Da-Day.

Ever see a 2-legged dog? No wonder he’s so mean.

Or maybe he just lost his password.

C’ya!

Last post I talked a little about hard drives and how expensive they used to be. Today, it’s easy to find 250, 300, 400 even 500+ gig drives for about 33 cents a gig. There’s very little excuse for anyone not to have at least a 120 gig drive anymore.

But even with all the cheap, mass storage choices around, there exists a dark downside. All this newfound mega space costs you in ways not readily apparent. Here are some things to ponder:

Zycosis #1: The more space you have, the more stuff you save. (Easily substitute the word “junk” or “crap” to bring more reality to this statement.) I save everything. Copies of copies and sometimes even copies of those. All saved to appease my OCD about deleting anything “really important” or worse, my never ending confusion over which version is the one more current.

Sometimes I’m reduced to file size comparison ’cause I’ve learned you can’t count on dates with multiple files on multiple partitions, especially when you didn’t name each successive file in its proper order or worse, because you were saving to a different partition, used the same name for multiple versions -Aaaargggh! Or should I say, “duh!”?

Zycosis #2: The larger the hard drive x the number of hard drives equates to the more often you’ll find yourself running (1) scandisk (2) format (3) defrag operations. Not to mention how having humongous hard drives makes a routine virus or adware scan almost unbearable. Put down the razor blade and go out for a cup of coffee AND a beer.

Zycosis #3: Bazillions of bytes spread over Gazillions of bytes only leads to one thing – eventual confusion. Unless you have some sort of organizational super gene to allow you to keep everything so neat and orderly, you’ll eventually find yourself overwhelmed and more than a little bewildered.

Oh, you may start out with great intentions. Once you get that new mega drive, it’s gonna help you organize all the crap on your existing drives ’cause now you’ll have the space you need to start over and set it all up right…yada, yada, yada. Trust me. Sooner or later, you’re gonna be in the same place you are now, which leads me to my next point.

Zycosis #4: The cheaper the mega drive, the more of ’em you’ll have in your system. Don’t think so? Once you install that first mega drive you might think no one could ever fill such a cavernous space. After all you got by for years with that 20 gig drive, didn’t you? This 250 gigger should take you so far into the future that hypertensive optical bubbles will be your next storage medium.

Ahh… but think again. Those insidious little platter bastards have a way of multiplying. Kind of like using drugs. Once you get hooked you’ll find yourself adding more mega-drives, bigger cases, IDE extenders, 1200 watt power supplies and more just to support your mega-storage habit. Every penny you have will go towards more and more storage. Like a slathering addict, your only hope is for a family intervention and even that may not save you.

After every new drive installation I tell myself, no more. Then that same weekend I see a 600 gig unit on sale for $29 and I gotta get it. Hell, get two. They’re cheap. On and on it goes.

I have all my internal spaces filled with hard drives, even have one velcro’d to the bottom of my case and still bought USB external drive enclosures to add more. They sit right on top of my SCSI Raid array.

I can’t wait for the multi-terrabyte drives to come down in price. Then I’ll finally be able to consolidate all my data onto one or two multi-t drives, maybe three if there’s a rebate.

Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. Then think of all the space I’ll have freed up in my case and on my desktop. Yeah! That’s it. Ha ha ha ha ….

Absolutely pathetic.

And delusional.

I’m going to bed. In the morning it’ll all seem OK. ……. I hope.

Next post: I rant about file compression and passwords.

OK. Here’s my Doodle-O’Da-Day to plead my case:

C’ya!

Friday has come at last, the week gone by can kiss my ….! Well, you get the idea.

Had lunch with a friend of mine today and we discussed the value of a blog. I commented that it seems like a lot of extra work to fit in each day. He countered with the long term advantages in keeping one up.

I told him this was like making daily diary entries and I’m not a diary-type kind of guy. He explained how a blog might attract people to visit it regularly and when that happens, it can be used as a source of revenue.

Now it all sounds good and I’m sure, just like Ebay, there’s any number of folks who’ll testify to how much their financial situation has improved since starting a blog. But me? I’m skeptical. Seems like if I wanted to sell something, I’d just arrange to do it from the start. Not like, suck people into reading your daily meanderings in hope of finding kindred spirits jus’ so you can sell ’em something.

But then again, I’m a little slow on the uptake. I’m the guy who questioned the need for hard drives when single sided floppies worked just fine. I think my words at the time were, “Why would I want to spend all that money on the same thing my floppy disks will do?” I guess speed wasn’t a main concern of mine (that should tell you somethin’ right there.)

In fact, I was probably the last person in the known free world to buy a hard drive. To my defense, hard drives back then were counted in megabytes of storage, not gigabytes and sold for a thousand dollars or more. I c(w)ouldn’t bring myself to justify the cost.

As an example, my first non-linear editing system had 9 gigabyte SCSI drives costing $1,700 apiece (I got a discount ’cause I needed 4 of ’em.) Ah, … the good ol’ days? I think not.

Now with almost a terabyte (sounds like some sort of flying reptile, doesn’t it?) on my home computer, I can’t imagine how I could’ve been so stupi… er, naive.

Don’t know where I’m going with all this… oh yeah, my old geezer stories again.

On to something current. It’s still hot here in the M’west with the humidity making it something akin to like breathing water. No kidding. The humidity is so bad (how bad is it?) you can actually see it hanging in the air, murkily filtering your view of anything further than 20 feet away. If I wanted to live in a fish aquarium, I’d have asked for gills.

Well, that’s it for me. The weekend’s here, just replaced my headlight on my bike and I’m going out there to ride and sweat. Soak up sum o’ dat humi-di-tee! Wishes to all for a safe, fun weekend and here’s my Doodle-o-da-day!

C’ya!

As I was writing my “About me” I couldn’t help remember some of the technology we had back in the late 80’s. Surprisingly, there were products back then we still haven’t seen today. They made only a brief appearance, then disappeared.

One was a Sony Mavica digital still camera that used mini-floppies (2″x2″.) It only recorded in NTSC resolution (752 x 480) but was a great product for its time. Back then color inkjets were around a $1,000, used only special coated paper and still didn’t offer very good output, so you mostly viewed the pictures on your TV anyway.

Also, we had a Panasonic digital camera which I preferred over the Sony, because it had the unique ability to record motion at 15 frames a second. This was great because we displayed the individual frames on the Amiga, creating rotoscopic animations. That is the art of painting over real imagery to give your animations lifelike movement. Some pretty amazing animations were created with this technique. I’ll try and find some of them and post them here.

The other technology was never released but I saw finished products for it from my stint as a technical artist at IBM. Rewritable optical drives – in 1985! Using phase-change dye technology, there were 3 different methods to accomplish this. These weren’t prototypes, mind you, they were Mitsubishi drive mechanisms hiding inside IBM cases. And they weren’t huge boxes but something that fit nicely on a desktop. Makes you wonder why it took s-o-o-o long for rewritable drives to come to America.

Anyway, that was then, this is now. Now we have high def DV camcorders with no moving parts, greta digital cameras, rewritable drives selling for under $30 and a whole host of wonderful and amazing things at very reasonable prices. How cool is that?

It’s funny. As I write this I keep thinking how some people will think of me as just an old codger, fondly reminiscing about the old times and how great they were. Wake up! They were pretty cool but it wasn’t that long ago! And I much prefer today’s toys over those and can’t wait to for more!

OK, OK. Now I gotta get busy doing some work. Here’s my doodle for today.

C’ya!

I know I’m starting late. New to this blogging thing, I admit to putting it off as I’m a bit technically overwhelmed at this point. Odd that, I’ve been involved in computers since 1986 or ’87 (so long ago, I forgot.)

My computer journey started with a great little system called the Amiga (so named in Spanish meaning “girl friend.”) And as it turned out, aptly named, because it figuratively became sort of my mistress for the next 10 or 12 years, spending day and night learning as much as I could about this new, promising technology.

The Amiga let me digitize stereo audio, color photographs, even create animation as easily as composing letters and building spreadsheets. Not so great a feat today but this was in the mid-80’s. Macintosh had only a 9″ black and white screen and the PC was nothing more than a deaf mute. Truth is, I would’ve probably gotten a Mac but with only one model available and a steep cost of $3,000 (power cord not included) it forced me to look elsewhere. Lucky for me, because I discovered the recently released Amiga.

Sidenote>> The Amiga 1000, which was the first model and soon followed by the A500, had a Motorola 68000 CPU running at a blazing 7.62 Mhz (same as the Mac) and featured stereo sound output, 4,096 glorious colors on-screen, separate custom graphic, sound and animation chipsets and a true multi-tasking Operating System that fit nicely on a single sided floppy disk. There were no consumer hard drives at the time, not even for the Mac. (My, how far we’ve come.) Price for all this amazing computing power? $995 Suggested Retail and it came WITH a power cord.<<

And along the way built several businesses using it and launched a teaching career to boot! There were Amiga haters, most all of them Mac users (jealousy?) but the PC camp just didn’t have anything to say, literally. After all, their PC’s cost many times more than even the singular Mac offering and all they had was mute DOS running on a green or amber screen.

So yes, I loved my Amiga. Still do. In fact, I have an Amiga 1200 set up in the corner of my office in spite of several other killer PC’s and even a couple outdated Macs.

But enough about all that. After all you didn’t come to hear about obsolete computers, did you? I didn’t think so.

This blog will be about anything and everything from my rants and raves to musings. Nothing is off limits or off topic.

Since I draw, I’m going to add a new doodle at least once every day. Maybe it’ll reflect my mood, maybe it’ll be just whimsical and mean absolutely nothing at all.

Either way, check back to see what my creation of the day is and if you’d like, leave a comment about anything you wish. I’m as interested in hearing from and about you as I hope you are about me. At least I think that’s the way this blog thing is supposed to work, right?

OK. That’s it for now. Oh, here’s today’s doodle. Kinda reminds me of Ray Morano’s brother on “Everybody Loves Raymond” a little, but this guy’s fatter.

C’ya!