So this will be the last public DT Log WordPress post.

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Some of the things I have learned after two years working in a photo lab:

Studio portraits are unnecessary. – The most stress of this job is trying to convince customers that we as a lab need permission from the photographers to reprint their works. But with a few exceptions, the quality of studio portraiture is very poor. Even when it does pass muster with lighting, clarity, composition, I still find most shots to be sterile, unimaginative and not worth the money. Often, I find candid snapshots more charming and better suited for wall placement.

Some people’s fear of technology cost them hundreds of dollars each year. – I started this job thinking that there was still a use for film in most cases, but now I have come to the conclusion that digital saves a ton of money. To process 27 pictures on film, you have to buy a Single Use Camera for $4-8 and then process in one hour for about $8 if you want just singles. Multiply this by 20 to 30 per year from our frequent shutterbugs and that can be upwards of $200. A simple investment of a Fuji bundle for just $90 and then printing 100 pictures for 15 cents apiece (not including pictures you couldn’t otherwise delete on film), and the savings would be within reach very quickly. Alas, technophobia not just abounds in the baby boomers and up, but a lot of Gen Xers as well.

The Polaroid brand has been run into the ground, and Kodak is headed that way too. – With Tom Petters being found guilty this past week of his company’s Ponzi scheme, Polaroid’s future is very much up in the air. They don’t produce Instamatic film anymore, and their product output is abysmal. Polaroid digital cameras have the worst quality of any national brand, and they break very easily. Once solid in reputation, Kodak is having trouble because of lot of their past business has been selling film. They posted a $137 million loss in 4Q 2008, and started whittling away at their workers due to “plunging sales of both digital and film-based photography products.” Despite friendly yellow boxes and decades-long brand loyalty, their products aren’t very good anymore, and customers are starting to bypass them in favor of Samsung, Sony and Canon.

There is no down time, ever. – Since this is my first experience with retail, there is always something to do. Always. Where once I had a job where I could listen to the radio and leisurely key in office supply orders, this is absolutely, mentally and physically, the hardest job I’ve had to do in my life. And appropriately enough, I don’t make even close the amount of money I did when I was in data entry. Of course the rent in Minnesota is much, much cheaper than California, but it doesn’t feel like an equitable trade-off.

Self-service photo kiosks are designed to be “user-friendly,” but those designers couldn’t possibly know what that means. – Programmers overestimate the ability of the average customer to use their machines. Instead of simplicity, the kiosks are filled with all kinds of confusing twists and turns under a mission of upselling and offering as many choices as possible. So unlike In-N-Out Burger menus, the complexity of the touch-screen options actually mean we lab workers are spending more time walking our customers through orders. We’re not supposed to “order for them,” so guiding the average first-time user (and there are hundred of them each month), means we fall behind in our other lab duties.

The one-hour photo is the wackiest place in any store, so naturally I fit in. – Photo is the landing place for quirky personalities due to the intense interaction with machines and customers. On one hand, the routine is very right-brained, and you follow a rigid to-do list that is more science than art. Once aforementioned customers have problems on the kiosks, we must do a mental 180 and teach using our left brains. Couple that with the physical stress of being on our feet all day, we are exhausted by day’s end. So gregariousness, joking around and loud, amusing proclamations are the hallmark of the ideal photo worker’s personality. And since we know the names of our customers, those wacky customers often congregate and join in the absurdity. I suggest if you ever wanted free entertainment, go to your nearest discount or grocery store on a busy day and watch the lab work.

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Hope this was an entertaining one year-point-three-three of DT Log on WordPress.

See everybody on the other side of the decade on FA.

A: To experience what it was like to live in the past.

Same thing with programming C-64 games, they’re like archaeologist engineers working with sticks, stones and mud.

Creating Guitar Hero for the Commodore is quite impressive:

(source: Toni Westbrook via Fark)

Mark Ness, one of two people to successfully highpoint all the counties in the state of Minnesota, called Crow Wing County’s summit “one of the most remote in the state.”  He is very right about that.  There is virtually no chance of driving right up to it.  The way to claim the high point is to trudge through the woods and sidestep the swamps.

It was daunting for my first county highpoint, but I had to do it, since Crow Wing is my home county.

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So with Mark’s text directions, a contour map, a Garmin eTrex GPS, water and my new Fuji A1500 camera, I set off from Pequot Lakes and went north on SR-371 for 2.2 miles, then right on County Road 16 for 12.9 miles through Ideal Township.

Then it was a left on County Road 66 for another 3 miles, and then right on County Road 1 for 3.6 more.  Then I came upon the intersection of County 1 and Kego Lake Road:

I pretty much followed Mark’s directions through the open gate at the end of Kego Lake Road, to the Wolf Lake Trail, which indicated to me that the section where this highpoint lies is under County jurisdiction:

It’s a wildlife management area.

Looking for the “second open gate” two miles into the Wolf Lake Trail, I completely overshot the trailhead, and had to double back to get within .6 miles of the waypoint.  I thought I found the “walking trail” from Mark’s description, but in reality I was considerably east of it.  I began to have suspicions that my GPS wasn’t completely accurate.  I began to trailblaze through the woods, north-north-east, conscious of the swamp to my east.

Evidence of beaver activity:

Even in the wild, animal sub-contractors will leave you with an unfinished project!

I skirted this swamp around its north edge, aware of the buzzing of many, many bees, on many, many dandelions, and I climbed a grade eastward, up 20 feet in elevation, searching for the next clearing.  I emerged on the south side of another swamp and identified higher contours.  (I did step in the swamp a couple of times; this was a learning experience.)

I navigated through downed trees, bushes, rocks, rarely setting foot on solid ground, all the way up to the highpoint, zigging and zagging, breaking down branches and bullrushing through bee-covered dandelions.

This was the first contour:

As I ascended, I saw that the mound was a horseshoe, just as it appears on the contour map, and that the highest ground was to the southeast, but the best way to move towards it to go northeast, and then back south, continuing over the rough wood, buzzing stingers and white flowers.

The summit, 1490 feet, on approach:

I traipsed all over the mound, trying to pinpoint the absolute highpoint, but did not find it. Like Mark Ness reported, it is a fairly well-defined, rounded top.  I also couldn’t find his six-stone marker due to the overgrowth.

I also had a problem with the GPS.  Although it was telling me I was at elevation 1490 feet, it reported the waypoint was .4 miles northeast, giving me some doubt I reached the county highpoint.

The elevation and compass on the GPS fluctuated rapidly, even standing still. I recorded my ascent video.

[The video is in avi format, which I haven't figured out how to post.]

After I recorded the video, I followed the horseshoe back around, so as to not descend steeply. I decided not to rely on the GPS anymore (and I forgot to record the waypoint for where I parked) and headed south, punching through the dense woods for about .3 miles, and then I found the footpath Mark Ness referred to in his log. Well, maybe it wasn’t. It looked like a vehicle trail. I followed it west, then it turned south, its path blocked by brush set up by Crow Wing County to rehab the trail. A little ways south, I emerged from the woods on Wolf Lake Trail, about a half mile east of where I parked.

This is where I should have started:

Could this be the future new Lego video game from Traveler’s Tales?

Image source: Flickr

In his book The Shadow Presidents, author Michael Medved relates the extreme disappointment of H. R. Haldeman over his failure to implement his plan to link up all the homes in America by coaxial cable.  In Haldeman’s words, “There would be two-way communication.  Through computer, you could use your television set to order up whatever you wanted.  The morning paper, entertainment services, shopping services, coverage of sporting events and public events… just as Eisenhower linked up the nation’s cities by highways so that you could get there, the Nixon legacy would have linked them by cable communications, so you wouldn’t have to go there.”  One can almost see the dreamy eyes of Nixon and Haldeman as they sat around discussing a plan that would eliminate the need for newspapers, seemingly oblivious to its Big Brother aspects.  Fortunately the Watergate scandal inteverened, and Nixon was forced to resign before “The Wired Nation” could be hooked up.

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A very prescient article, because it seems like Haldeman’s plan to wire up the nation has come to fruition.

It comes from author David Wallechinsky’s list 6 OUTRAGEOUS PLANS THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN.  And while Wallechinsky laments the “Big Brother aspects” of such a technology, he couldn’t foresee the ability of users to be able to communicate freely with one another while the rest of the media becomes consolidated into a huge corporatocracy.

To think we could have had something like Fark 20 years earlier.

Each of us… each of us.

EACH OF US!

I’ve seen John Hughes’s movie at least 25 times [it was one of my sister's VCR tapes on heavy rotation], and yet the subtly of this escaped me.  The point of the entire movie.  What happened?  Did I see it when I was too young and then I only paid attention to the off-color jokes upon repeated viewings?  Did I just zone out as soon as Simple Minds’s “Don’t You Forget About Me” started playing behind John Bender’s triumphant fist-pump under the football crossbar?

A great, great screenwriter… John Hughes… disarming us with laugh-out-loud humor, and then reeling us in like a guffawing big-mouth trout to absorb the drama underneath.  Someone who was an example for me as I tried in the mid-90s to be as prolific as I could putting stage direction and dialogue to page on my Commodore 128.

He holds the record for fastest time writing a screenplay: 2 days for Weird Science.

Two days!  120 pages?!  Most writers only crank out 2-3 pages a day if they work 8 hours at it.  I can imagine John at his typewriter, right next to a percolating Mr. Coffee.  Pounding away for hours and hours and coming up with the funniest lines in movie history, establishing the smart-ass teenager movie as a genre, letting the caffeine help transcribe the movie in his head.

I finished my first screenplay in 8 days back in 1994 – Night on the Edge.  I thought to myself… wow, this is great.  I can do one of these a month!  So many ideas!  I’ll have a stack of scripts by the end of the year!

Well, that proved to be an exception.  As a matter of fact, the most recent script I completed took 12 years!

I don’t think I could have matched the frenzy of completing The Breakfast Club in 3 days, or the week spent on the first draft of Mr. Mom.  His scripts, all comedies poked with sentiment, and done the right way – National Lampoon’s Vacation, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink,

and my favorite Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, where the most lasting moment is when Cameron closely examines the famous pointilist painting by Georges Serrault,  A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte: it is an illusion made up of millions of dots.

John Hughes gave spirit, humor and intelligence to his teenage characters, and it is sad that he should die at the young age of 59 – influencing some great screenwriter-directors like Judd Apatow and Kevin Smith, (me too, maybe, someday?)  With the whirlwind of my life as a teenager, I probably figured out way too late [into my 30s!] that I was a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal.

What a tagline… “THE CLUB THAT BEATS THE STREETS.”

I wonder how many people O.J. has beaten on the street with a club.

Imagine, calling your business insurance company, and having to explain the basis of your claim:

… can a rampaging deer cause thousands of dollars in damage to an office building.

Source:  Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Sunday June 7, 2009

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The Verndale, Minnesota Police Department has an interesting report to “blotter”:

Source: Brainerd Dispatch, Sunday June 7, 2009.