Pete and I are not wimps, but last Thursday we nearly succumbed for opposite reasons.
I have a reputation amongst friends and acquaintances, (albeit those who rarely flirt with tech), for being an accomplished technocrat. The truth is that I have a love-hate relationship with gadgetry and waste endless time bumbling along trying to make things work based on a thin layer of knowledge. I often achieve the result, but in more time than NASA took to get a man on the moon, when a paid up member of Club Technocrat wouldn’t even have seen a problem.
Pete has elected to travel along the bypass of tech. When I re-met him after a forty year hiatus he usually had his mobile switched off ..."saving the battery", so I could rarely contact him. Well, we got over that and progressed to texting and other "advanced" functions, BUT he has now upgraded to a smartphone - oh dear!
Thursday was dreish as the Scots say. An hour or so of our walking morning was spent at my house fiddling with the Xperia and looking glassy eyed at the on-line manual - how much does a guy get paid for inventing those names? By then we had mastered how to make a call, but cabin fever set in, and we deluded ourselves that dreish had gone back north over the border. We departed for two local geocaches close to Fairy Steps, a geological semi-impasse on The Limestone Link.
Pete is not a geocacher, so I was pleased when he made the first find - that helps to encourage those, who I suspect, feel a bit embarrassed and uncertain about the value of ferreting around the countryside for plastic boxes. The second geocache had a contradicting two part clue and we aborted - a dnf (did not find) will be registered, yes, geocaching is, like tech, riddled with jargon.
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| Fairy Steps - pics taken circa Christmas 2006 |
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Reasons for motivation are difficult to interpret, especially for the one who is motivated. I’ve started another Photoshop painting of a rusty old barn - Here is my w.i.p.
And just when you have mastered the tech they go and change it. (I know i shouldn’t start a sentence with and) ( or brackets). Oh well.
ReplyDeletePhotoshop painting...interesting....from scratch or with photo as a template?
ReplyDeleteHi Alan - I hope you are progressing well. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with the "And", but I agree with you about the brackets - they serve no purpose.
ReplyDeleteMike M - I usually start from a photo. I then put a white filled layer on top and reduce opacity until I can just see the photo and then draw the basic outlines. The basic lines for the wall attached to the left of the barn can be seen. After that I bring opacity back to 100% and continue only using a printed off copy of the photo for visual reference.
I will put some copies of previous efforts onto a Dropbox link when I have time.
Years since I've been up to Fairy Steps limestone area, magic small escarpments.
ReplyDeleteWho's that fairy stuck in situ?
Sir Hugh: Those fairy steps look tempting but I would suspect pixies if they were down here on Dartmoor.
ReplyDeleteAlan: Personally I love brackets (like a little smile in the middle of your text).
Blonde Two - I've never seen fairies up there. I think they have been frightened away by the red backed frumious Bandersnatch whiffling through the limestone crack.
ReplyDeleteSee my comments on my next post re punctuation.