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Tuesday’s Gray

Mostly because nothing of significance happens and it’s all just a wall of a gray woosh.

Job – spent some pretty productive hours and learned a thing or two about one of the major technology companies. Can’t say what, can’t say who, but I am flabbergasted. Pushed some buttons, pushed some people. Interesting how some shit’s coming around and around.

Guess that’s why I can’t just up and start writing stuff every day about every day. On one hand I am busy doing things, on the other hand – some (most) of it is boring, some of it is under NDA, and some just my private shit that is so not interesting…

Stargate Atlantis – as I moved to fifth season in my re-watch, I had an idea. Wraith are just next iteration of predatory vegetarians. We have vegans and vegetarians who don’t eat meat, fish, eggs, whatnot. Then we have some who only consume sunlight. Obviously they die out rather quickly because their bodies aren’t equipped with necessary mechanisms to consume sunlight as energy. That’s basically what Wraith have – a mechanism to consume a “life force” (energy) but not from the Sun – this would have made them true vegetarians, but from other life forms. And this is exactly what makes them predatory.

Home IT – my desktop started staggering today, which is pretty fucking unexpected. So I went straight into Task Manager… and holy crap – I’ve got Chrome eating up 30% of CPU time and about 4GB of RAM for six tabs. While Firefox sits at 15% with 3GB of RAM running twice that many tabs open, half of them – Gmail and Outlook email accounts, which is pretty heavy. As a first approximation experiment – kicked the Chrome off and loaded same tabs in Firefox Developer, just to keep the two browser picture. Both CPU and RAM consumption immediately dropped. I’ll run similar test tomorrow with MS Edge, but it kind of doesn’t make sense as they’re moving to Chromium anyway. Still, pretty indicative how shitty the Chrome have become – practically an IE 6.0 all over again.

Practical idea – instead of Patreon, OnlyFans and other crap – just run the Amazon wish list. You like my work – buy me something I need to continue doing my work. Speaking of work – today’s Instagram picture.

Uncensored
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Sh*t, It’s Monday Again

Okay, so daily thing isn’t really working out yet. But at least it’s a weekly thing, so there’s that.

Job – last week was busy. Went for quarterly business review with one of the BUs, prepared the new deck for account managers, revised some stuff, did the sales pipeline. Waiting for feedback on my BU visit, apparently, I am so far from good graces I ought to start looking again. On the other hand – got some good stuff done, someone got a new idea into my head. So things are in motion. Also, I’ve been a good boy and filed away all my expenses in Concur in less than a month. That never happened to me before. One of the feedbacks I so painfully crafted was marked as “Very Useful”. Have no idea what it means to me.

Got a certificate for my product management training I had attended 2 weeks ago. I passed, but the level wasn’t high enough to go into being an instructor. Oh, well, something else will come along. In the meantime I’ve got a five-second satisfaction ping by updating my Linkedin.

Public – got to serve on jury duty today. Unlike last time I was asked to participate in juror selection but it looked like the lawyers had some issues with my impartiality. Honestly, I had those issues too, so they let me free. Which means free for the next 8 years or so.

Photography – trying to work through the backlog of images. For some weird reason, I want to shoot more, but I don’t want to edit. It’s weird because I used to enjoy editing as much as shooting, but now – this. Weird. But I am still chugging along, although at a miserable pace. Hopefully, I’ll be done by this summer. The good news is that I got published on a cover – again! Awesome news!

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Did Somebody Say – Monday?

Okay, my hands hurt, so this ought to be quick.

The heater in my apartment doesn’t heat shit, so I spent the day today in thick sweatpants and a hoodie. Got out of the house for 10 minutes and got frostbite on the back of my hands. It’s only 10F but with the added wind it gets brutal.

Wrapped up most of the work stuff by around 3 PM and had a little breather. Booked a hotel for tomorrow. Even participated in some friendly company chat. I’ve been a good boy.

Watched some Eddie Izzard while making me lunch. I’ve heard of him many times, finally got around to actually being able to pay attention. Wish I had seen his acts sooner – pure gold.

Cleaned up a few more accounts with old passwords, expired passwords, etc. Keep finding shit that’s been obsolete for years. As of now I am at 700 odd saved logins. I barely use 50, so got much cleanup to do.

Speaking of clean up – edited a few photos from my last session, mostly rope stuff. I need me a rope bunny, this shit is addictive and I can’t get enough of it. Ordered some more jute hemp rope – some for practice and some thicker for photography. Should look good. Better than this:

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A Week Wooshed

Obviously, the whole week just wooshed by without me writing a single line. Damn!

A recap.

Monday – lots of work in preparation for a trip. Tuesday – even more work, in preparation for a trip. Half a day working and trying to get into a damn car to drive. As I have arrived – went to eat some Chick-Fil-As and visit a local Home Depot. Got me three poles, extremely rough rope and a splinter in the palm. Then worked until 1 AM to cover everything I won’t be able to do in the next three days.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday – studying, eating, studying, eating, studying with the test at the end. I forgot how to even do that. So my brain is overtaxed as it is – and it turns out I have to work on a weekend. So essentially, I am lucky that casting call didn’t pan out and no one responded – I hardly had any time for that.

Of course this had to be a week someone dumped a 400GB of passwords from pretty much everywhere and I had to spend several hours pouring over most of the accounts I care about resetting passwords.

Aside from many sites not existing anymore, the fun part are the websites that don’t allow you to reset passwords for one reason or another. Case in point – Apple, that requires you to own an Apple device to reset an old password. Nice try, Apple, but no.

Another thing is, apparently, MySpace still exists. I indulged in a pleasure of deleting my account there. Felt really good.

The 500 GB harddrive from my secondary workstation has finally died, so I pulled a couple of 500 GB drives from my “spare” drawer only to find out they used to be parts of Miscrosoft’s StorageSpaces and I never had a chance to reset them. Took care of it, now I can waste them away. The dead 500 went into garbage.

Inherited a GSM-friendly LG G5 that cost me $30 to unlock. Have no idea why I would need it, but whatever. You never know. Setting it up for the secondary Instagram account – it would be interesting to see how to grow a social media account in 2019.

Speaking of Instagram and pictures that cannot go there…

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Friday? Is It Friday Already?

Written Friday, January 11

Missed the Thursday update. Stargate Atlantis and Fallout 3. Need to take my mind off of things.

Did a few calls on Thursday, went interesting enough. Apparently my demo game is so on point, even my boss had nothing to complain about. Now I need to get on reacting faster to the stuff “they want” right there on the call. Yeah, enterprise sales isn’t my forte… yet 🙂

One more Thursday realization – I need to get back to editing photos soon, otherwise I will drown myself in unedited shoots again. Start with at least those I am really excited about and work my way through. Maybe use my time away next week – won’t be able to play games, so I could edit the shit out of it.

Also – 24 years since I came to US. Happy anniversary and all that.

Friday was just like Thursday, only I have finally made it to the gym. And was working until 9 PM. And my boss decided to send his chunk of updates right after midnight.

Written Saturday, January 12

And just like that – I miss posting this at the end of the day. Was so immersed in reading crap all over the internet (but mostly reddit) that I fell asleep and forgot I wanted to post it. Good job.

Outcome of the first day at the gym after holidays and being sick for a week is my back hurts from doing abs. Yep, not from weight lifting – from doing fucking abs. I’ll take it easy for the next few days now, but at least I am going back at it.

Easy morning, bacon, eggs (omelet, actually) and some easy reading. Some people on the Instagram were actually very nice to me yesterday and today. Felt really good about it too. Will have to make some adjustments to the plan I had for next week. I’ll have to set it up today and tomorrow, although it depends on whether I get around to edit more pictures or not. I feel lazy today.

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This was slow? Really?

Thought this would be a slow Wednesday. Fuck that shit.

Started working at 8:30 AM – questions, back and forth, send me this, answer me that. Tons of emails, calls, meetings. I love marketing that has month-long sprints. You know who else likes one-month sprints? Archeologists. Shit ain’t going anywhere from six feet under. While I was at it – fixed my sales pipeline spreadsheet. Turned out I fucked up the column number in the macro and one of the most important tabs wasn’t updating. And as always – nothing is good enough. Seems like everyone’s waking up by end of January. “We’ll update in a couple of weeks”. Which is what I thought they’d do, but hey – who cares, right?

Added myself to a some of PA model/photographer groups but they’ve been slow with approvals, so I only got three or four so far. Will post the casting call tomorrow – if I ever get to that. At least one responded to my MM casting, so that should be fun, I guess.

Did some research to see if I can afford to upgrade my 5-year-old video card. There are some good choices between $170 and $270 on Nweegg, so I’ll just wait until President’s Day to see if any of that will be on sale. That Sapphire NITRO+ RX 590 with 8GB sure looks tempting. Too bad there’s almost nothing interesting from nVidia in this range, so I’ll have to stick to Radeon.

Decided to do a little research, to see if I can justify buying a new video card for anything I do on my desktop. Found this comparison, courtesy of Puget Systems (they sell computer systems tailored for Photoshop performance). Not sure how honest these guys are, but here’s an interesting observation.

The lowest scoring video card on this chart – we’re not considering SoC Intel thingy – GTX 1060 6GB costs approximately $215 on Newegg. The highest scoring RTX 2080 Ti 11GB costs about $1300. The $1000 difference buys you about 10% performance increase. Funny how things turn out sometimes.

Photoshop CC GPU Comparison
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Totally Not Depressing Tuesday

I need to start coming up with less creative titles for my posts. Really.

The morning started with work, then more work, then even more work. Figured out this, talked to that, did a few phone calls, yada yada yada. Really, most of the day was just work, then slight driving here and there, then work again.

Registered for training next week – it would be cool to hear the real people talk about real product management. Not that I use any of that in my current line of work, but a good brush up on skills never hurts. And I will be in Pennsylvania for 3 days, so might as well have some fun there.

Which reminds me – I need to post a bunch of casting calls for PA. Knowing how shit usually goes down I’d be lucky if I get at least one photo shoot out of the 3 nights I’ll be spending there. Not that I would mind just spacing out for 3 evenings, but I’d rather stay productive. Also, the place has a fitness center, if it’s at least half-way working it would be nice. Yogurt and free weights, here I come.

Watched SGA: Vengeance today. Every time I rewatch this episode I can’t help but notice it’s the same place where half of the underground episodes were shot – SG-1, SGA, and even SGU. Also, Sheppard’s team really looked stupid in this episode – every time the plot required one of them just suddenly ventured into one of the rooms with steel doors. Just because. Without alerting or even prompting the rest. I mean – I am not a military person, but even I would have said something.

And to wrap it up – another image that’s not social media acceptable

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Monday With The Case of Mondays

Woke up early and tried to do some work in between coffee, Reddit and other shit. Didn’t finish much because distraction and procrastination. Need to cut this out, takes too much time and makes me feel tired constantly.

Got my ass chewed up again for not selling. As if my job is sales. I mean – on some higher plane of existence it is, but what about other 90% of the stuff I am supposedly qualified for. On the other hand, I should really be pushing these guys, because why not? I don’t feel much sympathy for anyone there, really, so why not. Called a few people, sent some emails, got some more useful stuff done. These ass-chewings are more demoralizing than the “scat work” I got to be doing.

Set up the Instagram schedule for this week. Will try to rethink the strategy and instead of cutting it to 3 images per week on the same concept/shoot/whatever it will be 6 images per week of the same shoot/concept/whatever. I am thinking – I am at 295 images for 2018 as of right now, only 45 of them are from the event, which leaves me with 250 total, out of which I probably posted about a third. Should suffice me for another couple of months while I will catch up on old stuff (I estimate another 50 images at least – from 12 shoots I still need to edit) and start setting up new shoots. And I can repost the old stuff easily – actually should be doing this with the stories now.

The model I’ve sent the images to yesterday has dumped half of them out to her Instagram in one day – I think as an album. I am not sure how this works, but she’s got a decent following and about 150 – 180 likes per image. I’ve got nothing, even though she credited me properly. Lesson learned – Instagram credit means shit.

Some dude on FB is setting up a new magazine for boudoir photographers. I promised a write-up about being a male boudoir photographer, but got swamped with work stuff and hadn’t had a chance to make it happen today. Was hoping to get it done at night, but this will have to wait until tomorrow now. Quite honestly, I am very doubtful the dude will survive through putting first three issues together, but we’ll see. It’s always good to have someone else do your marketing anyway.

Watched SGA:Submersion tonight. Basically similar concept as in The Return, Part 2 – first the audience are led to believe something bad is unfolding, then we “roll back” and see that it’s an elaborate (to a degree) subversion plan. I don’t remember this or SG-1 show pulling this trope ever again, which is a good thing because it gets old and a bad thing, because it’s yet another twist in a short, 43-minute episode.

As I am writing this I am contemplating the idea of adding one of the images I cannot put on social media to these posts. Fuck, why even make them if I cannot share them?

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Junk Food Sunday

Okay, I actually did something productive today – in addition to buying junk food and eating it all by myself.

Started the day by reading Reddit – at least there are more fresh topics than in Russian FB groups. I am pretty sure people enjoy those 3 topics immensely and I would have too – if I had more time and less intellect, but I just can’t go over same 3 topics over and over and over. Seriously, I understand how they are being used just as a conversation starters, but really…

Got that stupid idea into my head about figuring out what’s a Reddit bot and how one would go about building one.

Tried to dissuade myself from spending any time on the bot – my thought was that it’s probably some sort of Python script that needs to talk to reddit’s API and blah-blah-blah. Spent almost an hour making bacon for breakfast and thinking up all the crazy use cases for a bot. Turkey bacon is awesome.

Checked with the model that I had sent 20 edited pictures yesterday instead of 15 she was asking for. She was pretty good about me being an asshole of a photographer and delivering images from the August shoot all the way in January. I did apologize, of course, but still – I shouldn’t have sat on these for so long. Got a good 20 images from that shoot, and she seems to be happy – even remembered she promised to pay for them. Which is always welcome.

And of course, I gave in to temptation and went to figure out the Reddit bot thingy. I was right about API and of course, someone has already put together a sample bot script in Python. I’ve decided that I am extremely lazy and don’t want to look up the code in other languages, I set up Python on my desktop, googled a couple of Python things I never knew (hey, I am not a developer) and went to have a lot of fun with BDSMpersonals subreddit.

While driving around during a second part of the day, decided to start reading Stargate books (a.k.a. Stargate Novels) – officially sanctioned fanfiction set in Stargate universe. I’ve finished the SG-1 book a couple of days ago and decided to switch it up a little and go for Stargate Atlantis. I am on a fence for now. It isn’t first-class literature, but it’s better than some of the official Star Wars drek I ended up reading at some point.

Finally ended up home and re-watched a couple of episodes of Stargate Atlantis – The Ark and Sunday. It’s a part of my rewatch anyway and this time around I went all in with books too. That’s where the junk food came in – I haven’t eaten Pringles in 6 months and I just had to eat two cans of that shit with ginger ale.

Next couple of hours were all about cleaning this blog and making the entries. Good day to start as any. Also, /r/ListenToThis is not half as bad as I thought.

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Daily Log Started

I have read somewhere that it’s healthy and productive to do a daily log. Basically, just write down whatever the hell happened throughout the day. I was debating if I should do this privately or publicly. I figured – I want to do this publicly. It’s a content, I get to put my own shit out there and who knows – maybe someone else will, eventually, get a laugh from it. BTW, comments will be disabled, but if you feel like you can relate and want to talk – contact me. It’s 2019, figure it out.

Separating this from the actual entry, because it’s not.