Friday, May 29, 2009

In Which I Consume


I was a little disappointed to find out that the 6400 dpi scans were kinda fuzzy when viewed at full size... These images are ten inches square, by the way.


And the amount of visual data they contain is amazing.


The tarnish, the dust, the irregularities of the casting... Honestly, this scanner isn't far from being a digital microscope.


And the initial scan only took a couple of minutes. I've got to say, I really like the new scanner.

Well, yesterday I was doing some work on Swill. (We've got some exciting developments on that front that I'll be writing about soon.) For a variety of reasons, it strongly behooves me to get Swill finished pronto, hopefully in the next couple of weeks.

I've recently complained about my scanner; well, I realized that since scanning the inkblots for a print was taking me half a work day or even longer, I was dealing with a real bottleneck. So yesterday I ventured out and purchased a new scanner, an Epson V500.

It is a freaking monster; it has more than five times the resolution of my old scanner and is fast as hell. I'm already thinking about all kinds of crazy uses for it -- and I'm going to be buying a couple of pieces of glass so that when I scan things like metal and stone I'll be able to avoid scratching the plate.

I made another purchase as well. As mentioned before, I've hit a stage in my life where I need to dress like a grownup every so often. The sportscoat I picked up from the thrift shop didn't cut the mustard -- it didn't fit and it made me look... I'm tempted to say like a plainclothes cop or a substitute teacher but that isn't fair to either of those groups of people. They all dress better than I do.

I'd mentioned this to a friend. Last week he gave me a phone call and told me about a sale on men's clothes I should check out. So yesterday I convinced the missus to check it out with me. (When I bought my last outfit the missus rent her garments in woe and cried, "Why did I let you buy clothes by yourself?")

We found a very nice charcoal gray number with tasteful pinstripes. Comfortable and quite square -- which is what I wanted. It cost forty bucks; I hate to spend money on clothes but it was marked down from eighty.

Actually, that wasn't true. When the clerk rang it up, it turns out that the original price was three hundred fucking dollars. I bought a three hundred dollar sports coat for forty bucks -- turns out that since I hit up the sale so late they'd slapped another sale down on top of the first.

The missus pointed out that there's a corolary to the fact that I'm hard to fit -- the stuff that does fit me is gonna be hard to sell to anyone else. Sweet!

2 comments:

Weapon of Mass Imagination said...

As a substitute teacher no offense taken ;)

My work clothes make me look like a Andy Warhol wannabe. I'm a very NOT pop culture oriented person though, so I always feel funny in these clothes.

Sean Craven said...

Heh. I once described myself as dressing like a field geologist and got a serious dressing down from a pal who apparently knew a field geologist who was a regular Beau Brummel. But there are worse things than cops, substitute teachers, and field geologists...

When I first moved in with the missus, she insisted I abandon my preferred haircut (actually, my number two choice -- number one was a Taxi Driver, but that ain't good when you're looking for work) because it "makes you look like a convict."

In terms of the culture of our salad days, she's a hippy and I'm a punk, so these conflicts occur.

Anyway. To teach her a lesson, I decided to just let my hair and beard grow. "Okay, hippy, you want long hair? I'll give you long hair."

My hair is fine, oily, and I have fractal cowlicks. My scalp looks like someone stirred it with a chopstick. One little follicle vortex spinning off other littler follicle vortices... The results were appalling.

After about eight months of this she caved and decided that my buzz cut was the only acceptable approach.

When my sister saw the ID photo that had been taken well into this process, she pointed at it and said one word:

"Dungeonmaster!"