Aaron and I went to see MC Frontalot and his nerdcore friends at Howard’s in BG on 6 November 2008. Right up front. Awesome show.
I also took some video from our front-row vantage point, and Aaron posted a review of the show on his blog at schnuth.com.
I realized before I went out to the Fulton County Fair out in Wauseon that I hadn’t used my Lomo LC-A in a good three years, since the Bob Mould show in Detroit back in October ’05. So, I loaded up with two cameras for the fair: the digital point-and-shoot, for pics to post online ASAP; and the Lomo, for artsy, low-light pics of carnival rides.
I took a whole roll of hopefully-artsy photos of people and rides and buildings, trying to recapture the look and feel of my old Wood County Fair pics from back in 2002. Burned through the whole roll, sent it off to Snapfish, and awaited my scans and photos.
Alas, it appears I should have tested the camera first. The shutter isn’t firing. I got back not a roll of artsy photos, but a replacement roll of film.
So, after the disappointing performance of the XA at the Matthew Sweet show, I decided to look into fixing my Lomo. See, the Lomo is fully automatic, while the XA is aperture-priority, so the Lomo actually might have performed better in those conditions. Anyway, I Googled “lomo shutter repair,” and found a site I’d actually used the last time I had to repair the Lomo (again, three years ago), which reminded me that maybe I just need to get some new batteries. *facepalm*
But. If it’s not just the batteries…
Maybe I should look for a new Lomo.
Checked on lomography.com: $250. Heck, no. Checked on eBay: $150-ish. Not entirely OK with spending that much, either. I mean, it does make unique pictures, but I only use it a few times a year, if that.
I’m hoping that it’s the batteries.
This candle will soon be going up on my Etsy store, assuming I don’t sell it to someone at work first.
I’m planning to do a bit of a holiday sales push on the candles, reminding all my friends and former co-workers that my candles are perfect Christmahanukwanzakah gifts. I can’t really do discounts, since the whole point is to actually break even on this hobby of mine… but I have been known to cut deals on gift basket sets.
I’ve gotten some sample scents from my newest supplier, and have been highly disappointed to find that their Cranberry scent smells like port-o-john, and their regular Basil scent smells like Seabreeze astringent. From what I can tell so far, though, their Eggnog and Christmas Pine and Candy Corn and Caramel Apple and Fresh Basil are double-plus awesome. We’ll see for sure when I make test candles out of them.
Think of me when you get your Secret Santa going on at the office, and suddenly need a selection of anyone-will-like-this gifts! (The four-ounce candle in the picture is $4 plus shipping, if you’re interested..)
I think I want to pick up drawing again, just so I can make ad-hoc webcomics of funny things that happen to me, or things that Aaron says. I mean, some things are just funnier visually.
Case in point — and I probably shouldn’t even blog this until I have a three-panel comic to go with it, but I will anyway: Aaron and I were standing on the floor before the Matthew Sweet show at the Beachland Ballroom, chatting and being bored until the opener came on. So, I pulled out my cell phone and updated the world about how we’d just eaten Vietnamese with Aaron’s cousin, and were now waiting for the show to start.
“You know,” I told Aaron, “since I haven’t been able to tweet from work, my blog has really gone down the shitter.” It’s true: when I would tweet six times a day from work, I’d feel obligated to put some “real” content on my blog on a daily basis. Lately, though, I haven’t, and content has gone, as I said, down the shitter.
Aaron looked at me and said, “The Twitter Shitter?”
Immediately, in my mind, I had the flash of a three panel comic detailing our exchange, ending up with a great font-perfect parody of a Twitter Shitter, with appropriate and obvious signage.
This isn’t the only time I’ve thought that, man, I should really draw this and put it online in a comic/flash animation. If only I could *really* draw.
My plan had been to get a move-on with migrating my blog to my other server tonight. I’m planning an entire redesign, and am finally ready to sit down and do it.
My hosting provider had other plans.
Turns out that, somehow, I didn’t get the Past Due Notice that I’m *sure* they must have sent before charging me a late fee. So, when I tried every possible password combination to log into my Cpanel and nothing worked, I decided to log into the Members section of their site, where I discovered that my account had been suspended. I promptly PayPal-ed them my annual $85 for 5GB of webspace (plus a $9 late fee), then contacted Billing (via a support ticket, since they had no e-mail or other contact form on their site) to confirm that my payment had been received and that my account would be un-suspended.
To their credit, they responded within an hour and reactivated my account — while I was writing this blog entry, in fact. I was seriously considering whether I wanted to continue my business relationship with a company that doesn’t seem to notify its customers before suspending their accounts… but this is the first real issue I’ve had with them (besides their initial data entry error in calling me “Dina”), so I’m willing to stick with them for another year. After all, dianaschnuth.com has been hosted there for the past three years with no major snafus.
I hadn’t been planning to go off on my web hosting provider, though. I’d been planning to detail my project plan for the next couple of months.
November, as usual, is National Novel Writing Month. I’ve never “won,” meaning I’ve never successfully completed a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. I’ve never finished a 50,000-word novel at all. I have three unfinished novels, though: the first, started in 1999 (I think) and clocking in at 19,400 words, I haven’t touched since 2004, according to Windows. The second was my first real attempt at NaNoWriMo, back in 2005 — between my NaNo wordcount and subsequent additions, it’s up to 16,000 words, and hasn’t been touched (besides the story bible) since late 2006. The third was last year’s half-hearted attempt at NaNo, which only made it to 10,000 words, despite being a plot idea I’m particularly fond of.
I’m going to pick one of these to write on this November. Since I haven’t successfully completed NaNoWriMo with 50,000 words in 30 days, I’m not going to be invoking the Zokutou Clause by finishing a previous work and still claiming to be officially participating. See, the rules clearly state that all actual writing must be done within the month of November (of the current year) in order to qualify. So, technically, I’m not planning to do NaNo this year. I am, however, planning to devote much of my November to writing.
Which means I need to get my blog redesigned (or well on its way) in the next 2½ weeks. And then decide which story I want to finish this November.
Oh, yeah, and after that? I should really update my portfolio and resume.
