Yes, huge upsurge in the number of pictures. I’m deleting around half and in the process I noticed something obvious. A lack of talent. What I mean is I assumed pro photographers had an “eye” for what made good composition. Well, I can now do much the same by taking ten photos and finding which one came out the best.
Here are some typical photos with the new mini-camera. The common point is that they are all part of a series and you would not be impressed if you saw the entire set. Oh, the doggie mannequins are fantastic. It was busy, but Ruth took a moment to shoot her first digital pictures. She still can’t get over the lack of film in the camera.
[Author's note 2018: this photo is from the 2006 report where Trump says he hopes the real estate market would crash. Two years later, it did.]
I was there four hours, and I hope she realizes that it was a better deal to take my $99 network install offer. As it was, it cost $125 plus parts. Ah, but the Bellsouth guy was out there and we exchanged a ton of information. My word, he only makes $18 per hour. It turns out the DSL synch problem was one of the lines that worked on the fax machine was also rigged to work with the main number. I plugged out each line and only checked for one dial tone, as I am still unfamiliar with this kind of DSL troubleshooting. Oh, I now have the local ANI numbers, but I’m not telling you what they are.
ANI is the sequence of digits you dial on a phone to get the robot to tell you what number you are calling from. Works great for getting unlisted numbers or finding an unused line left in service when the last people moved out. (I once had service for three years before they found out, and that is only because a neighbor asked to borrow the phone and failed to say it was a toll call.) ANI is “Automatic Number Identifier”.
Toward day’s end, we got the DSL working. It is still an office and I had to scold Ruth several times for getting too busy to follow what I was doing. The idea is to learn the things for herself, not to have me do it. She cannot afford to pay me a thousand dollars a week to answer her email and put ribbons in her fax machine, no matter how badly these menial items are required. Mind you, I question whether hiring somebody at $400 per week, around the average here for this work, is in any way a savings. I’ve seen what you get for that price around town.
I think what is in order is taking my tool kit over there in the car and spending a day organizing the office cubicle. For instance, the scanner will require a shelf installed. Hang on while I go plug in the drill. Back. I’ll get her some of those desk gizmos with all the slots to hold the paperwork. Her entire operation suffers from lack of a little bit of handyman attention over a long period of years. Oh, I finally had to charge her for an hour of my home time so she is aware that many of the things she needs have to be done offsite, like change that Letterman DVD to CD.
The JLo Fashion Week people never did get back. One useless twit by the name of Aba Kwawu from Washington said he would keep her “posted”. I sent him an email asking if he would keep her posted now, being that the show ends tomorrow. Let’s hear it for Aba. I finally got through to Sale (say “Sally”, short for Alexander) after finding a load of disconnected email addresses on the fashion show site. Strange indeed, is how I am relied on to burn through to these people, yet I am not the one in the fashion industry.
Also, the factory in Indonesia is having trouble visualizing a box. It is a clear plastic box five inches square and four inches deep for both shipping and displaying the hairpieces. They actually emailed back and asked us to build a sample. That, after I had sent them the written specs and a picture.
I informed them to [either] acquire the box locally or drop it from the formula, but no way we were paying $100 to fly plastic across the Pacific just so they could see what a box looks like. Only once before did I do business with a factory that got bent out of shape when I suggested they ought to know what kind of box they should put things in, and that was in Canada. Don’t these foreigners know what a box is? I’ve eliminated the possibility that they are playing dumb California-style, trying to crank up the price by pretending what you need is a custom order when in fact they have a warehouse-load they haven’t been able to flog for a year.
Between dog hairpieces and bookkeeping for authors, I’m making decent money. Enough to go out and buy a digital camera. I’ll review it later, but it is also a voice recorder, camera and MP3 player. The instructions are American, a big plus, but badly written, a big minus. For example, the instructions say press the OK button. I went over the camcorder in quite some detail as there was no such button. Turns out to be a depressible spinwheel which they didn’t mention. Bad news, I was able to get a “memory full” message after less than five minutes. For now, the best thing I’ll say is it passed the idiot test. That is where I rip open the package, put in the batteries and see if it works as advertised.
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