BaLtiMoRe RoLL

VieWinG PDfS

I did it! I fixed my PDF problem.

For a while, whenever I tried to open a PDF, Adobe Acrobat Reader would start, but then it would just hang there forever.

I had basically just given up, but then today I accidentally clicked on a PDF file online (or well, the clicking wasn't an accident, but I forgot to check first to make sure it wasn't a PDF because if I'd noticed that, then I would have known not to click it). Anyway, it launched Adobe Acrobat, crashing my browser and severely slowing down the computer.

I forced Adobe to end, and as it was closing I caught a glimpse of an error window saying something about "font capture". So I googled "troubleshoot adobe font capture", found this article by someone who'd fixed exactly the same problem I was having after he happened to come across this support document at Adobe. The problem is that it tries to load up all the Temp files on your system, and for some reason, the Temp files never disappear, they just accumulate. They don't sound very Temp to me... And I have no idea what this has to do with Font Capture except that maybe that's as far as Adobe ever gets when it tries to load up? Who knows.

Anyway, deleting all my temp files completely fixed the problem. Except that from home I was only able to download the free reader from the web and not the full Adobe Acrobat professional, but I'll get that from school at some point. For now though, I can finally access all the PDFs stored on this computer. It's so, so nice.

It's kind of funny, though, how I arrived at the fix. For all my googling earlier trying to troubleshoot the problem and our IT guy also trying to figure it out, we couldn't find the problem. But then I just happen to notice something about "font capture" which isn't actually the problem I'm having, but it leads me to a page that leads me to another page. I guess that's the nature of research, but I'm left with this feeling that it was just fortuitous luck that got me to this point and that I will continue to have no idea how to fix these sorts of problems in the future... At least now if any of you ever have this problem, you'll have a possible solution at your fingertips.

DC AfTeRNooN

Sadly, the poor condition of this flag corresponded to DC United's play today in the Conference Semifinals against the Chicago Fire. The Fire scored their first goal on DC just as we stepped into our (free) mezzanine seats, and then proceeded to score three more before the game was over. We'd hoped for a relatively high scoring game, but this wasn't exactly how we'd hoped it would go!

I did get to see the game from a new perspective though. Our seats were in the mezzanine, right behind/overhead one of the goals. From there, I got a chance to appreciate passing strategy more than I normally can when I watch games closer to field level and from the side.

But it did take me a while to get used to the perspective, since the side closest to us looked about half the size of the side farther away.(Kind of like how those monstruous beds in mansions always look so small, but it's just because of the giant height of the canopy and your perspective from the other side of the room behind the velvet rope. Hm, was that reference lost on people whose mothers did not drag them to the Newport mansions in Rhode Island?)

Anyway, I had trouble figuring out where the ball was going to come down or how close people really were to each other, and in fact, half the time I couldn't even really see the field. This was my view:

Supposedly the other (taller) people I was with could see almost the whole goal whenever they stood up, but I only managed to see the top edge of the goal. I'm telling you, the world is an entirely different place for the short people.

Anyway, it was still fun to go. I actually do like watching soccer, unlike baseball, football, or the most boring sport ever, basketball.

And no, I'm not saying I had fun, just because I had sushi, because it turns out we couldn't find any (good) sushi restaurants that were open for lunch in DC. So instead we went to Cubano's in Silver Spring. I thought it was pretty good, but I only ordered side dishes (yucca with garlic sauce, fried sweet plantains, and a bowl of soup). The others weren't blown away by their dishes (ropa vieja, lechon, and creamy plantain soup), but we all agreed that the atmosphere was much better than the too-cheesy-for-my-taste Babalu Grill at Power Plant Live.

On the way home, we passed by a long entourage of cars with flashing lights heading into DC on 295, and we speculated that it was Rosa Parks' remains being brought into the city. We momentarily breathed in that little bit of history, but then we dismissed it as merely a coincidence. But I just checked it out online, and it looks like the timing and route was right, so it easily could have been her.

...................................

"I only knew that as I was being arrested at the beginning, that it would be the very last time that I would ever ride in humiliation of this kind and segregation and being arrested for just wanting to go home and wanting to be comfortable, to be treated as any passenger should." - Rosa Parks

SaTurDay EveNinG

CozY At HomE

I am so cozy today. I'm wearing the brown corduroys I didn't wear to my job "interview" on Thursday, and a giant dark blue cardigan wool sweater that J bought in Belgium and promptly shrunk in the dryer. (It looked really cute on him, so it's a shame he can't wear it. Even shrunken, it's too big on me, but I do love wearing it around the house.)

I'm at my desk, attempting to do work, while my kitties sleep nearby. I'm drinking spiced apple cider, and the heat has just come on. J has been watching football in the other room, and while I really don't care about football myself, I grew up with it on in the house, so this makes me feel right at home.

I am loving this fall weather.

Oh, and we get an extra hour of sleep tonight because of Daylight Savings Time! (As if I don't take that extra hour every single day anyway...)

SocCer And SuShi

Tomorrow I have free tickets to the DC United semifinals game against the Chicago Fire. (Will Freddy Adu be playing? I have no idea. Let me check... Ah yes, it sounds like it.)

Whenever we go to soccer games in DC, we also go to Sushi Taro, but unfortunately it is closed on Sundays. So we'll have to go somewhere else. In order to save money, we might not have gone for sushi at all, but now that we've got free tickets to the game, we're feeling a little less tight. Plus, the two people coming with us, SFB and MS, are as sushi addicted as I am and a sushi lunch could even be the reason they are coming to the game tomorrow.

SpAre ChAnGe

I've had some photos up at three microstock agencies for about a week now, and you want to know how much money I've made? $3.53. That's not even enough for a sushi roll.

At this rate, if I don't add any more photos and continued to sell the ones that are up there at the same rate as this past week (and yes, I know one week is a ridiculously small sample size), then I'd make $169.44 in one year. And that's not even enough for a small camera. (Though it would be a nice amount of sushi.)

Actually, I'm sure those numbers won't hold. I only have 33 photos at two sites and 13 photos at another, and they haven't even all been up for a full week. And a fourth agency has "accepted me", but hasn't yet reviewed the photos I've sent them. So it's really too soon to tell. But I like to project anyway.

SortA LikE GrouNdHoG DaY

• When I reached the deli counter at the train station to order my breakfast, I found that someone before me had left his bags and disappeared completely.
• When I reached the ticket counter to buy my train tickets, I found that someone before me had left his wallet and disappeared completely.

I probably could have made some money today if I didn't have a conscience. :)

• When I was drying my hands in the train station restroom, the woman next to me complained about the hand dryers, saying she wished they just had towels. I nodded and smiled as I held my hands under the only slightly warm breeze coming out of the dryer.
• Later in the afternoon, in the same train station restroom, a woman next to me complained about the hand dryers, saying she wished they just had towels. I nodded and smiled again.

It's true. The hand dryers really didn't work very well.

Now as for my meeting today, it went very well. I'm still stressed about money, because it doesn't look like they have anything to offer me at the moment. But fortunately, they are very willing to sponsor me on a grant proposal, and to spend quite a bit of time talking about it. They actually proposed I come back a couple more times this month to hash the ideas out fully.

In fact, today we spent four hours discussing possible projects for next year. By the end I was dizzy with exhaustion, hunger, and mental fatigue. Back at the train station, before heading home, I picked up some southern food: macaroni and cheese, and collard greens. (I'm sure people on the train didn't appreciate my dinner, but I felt a million times better.)

I'm too tired to write a coherent post (obviously), so here are the remaining highlights:

Most amusing moment: When I called one of the professors to say I would be arriving at the local train station, she asked me, "How will I recognize you? Do you have green hair or something?" Never mind that I've met her several times before. I told her I was wearing a bright pink shirt, and she replied, "Okay, well, I'll be waiting for you with a golden chariot!" Um, okay. :)

Second most amusing moment: When I had to call this same professor in the morning to tell her my train was delayed by half an hour, I said who I was and she squawked, "Who?" I repeated my name, and she said, "Oh right." Then I had to call her back to tell her the train was so delayed that I was getting on a different train all together. When I called, I said I who I was and she squawked again, "Who?!" (Maybe this moment belongs at the top of the post in my Groundhog Day moments.)

Most uncomfortable moment: When we moved from the kitchen to go talk in an upstairs room and I discovered that my fly had come unzipped and I not so subtlely zipped it back up. (I couldn't decide whether to figure out a way to turn around without that being weird, so I tried to move quickly and hope they were distracted enough with finding a chair to sit in that they wouldn't notice. I blame all of you for recommending that I wear this particular pair of pants.)

Second most uncomfortable moment: At the train station waiting for the local train, there was only one other person on the platform who immediately started asking me questions about where I was headed. He might just have been trying to be friendly, but it seemed unnecessary, so I quickly decided I needed to go find a bathroom. The train wasn't coming for almost half an hour and I didn't particularly feel like seeing where this guy's line of questioning was going.

And finally...

Most money saved moment: The Amtrak conductor never asked for my $57 one-way ticket, leaving me with a completely reusable ticket.

BUSY!

Hm, I find myself very busy lately. And with big things to think about.

So instead, I'm going to focus on something that is probably not very important at all... what to wear.

I'm making a trip on Thursday out to talk with the people I want to work with next year. They are being super friendly and casual about this, and have arranged for me to take a train where they will pick me up and bring me to one of the professor's homes.

Given the setting, and the fact that academia is already super casual, which of the following do you think I should wear: brown corduroy pants or dark grey slacks? Both are relatively nice, though the grey pants are dressier. And both are very comfortable. I'm thinking the grey slacks. I won't be overdressed, will I?

I could even wear jeans, but I figure that since I have nice but casual pants, I might as well put in the effort. Plus, I do believe that people judge you by how put together you look and I can use all the surface help I can get to mask the underlying flakiness.

EaTing

Every now and then I forget to eat. I guess that's probably normal. I think about eating, but somehow I never quite get around to it.

That was today. J came home from school around 6 and it occurred to me that I hadn't even had breakfast. So my first and only meal of the day was sag paneer, straight out of a Trader Joe's box and spooned atop some smoky (ok, burned) basmati rice. (I burned the rice, not J.)

It just occurred to me that it was a really weird, and not very good, food day.

What I'm really craving right now is some mulled cider. The weather is perfect for it. But I don't have any mulling spices.

I do have cider though. It will have to do for now.

NoT aS AnXiouS As I SouND

I am irritable when things don't work and I don't know how to fix them. Like how I can't open PDFs. I've uninstalled and reinstalled Adobe Acrobat but it still won't work. Our departmental IT guy couldn't figure out it either, and his solution was to set up a second account on this computer because if I'm logged in as a different user it all works fine. So I could just start using that account, but I am so sick of switching computers (I am using the lab computer right now) and having to start all over with customizing things like macros and taskbar shortcuts and things, so I am resisting switching my login. (Yes, I could import my desktop settings to the new user account, but I don't know what the problem is with loading up PDFs and I worry that I will be transferring that problem to the new account.) So every time I want to look at a PDF I have to close the thousand windows I have open, log out, log back in as the other user (for some reason, I don't have the option to "switch user"), look at the PDF, and then hopefully remember everything I need to from the document since I don't want to waste paper and ink printing out every PDF here at home. This is quite a pain.

I'm also annoyed, in a sense, because I can't post anything to my photoblog. Something is messed up with the permissions. As in, I don't have permission to post anything. :( But I have free hosting, so I'm trying to be patient. And anyway, it's not like I have people banging down my proverbial door, waiting for my next upload.

I am also anxious about meeting with these professors about writing this grant, not because I'm worried about the meeting itself, but because I don't know when it's happening. One of them emailed me to say that we should meet soon, and he suggested this Monday (yes, that's today). I wrote back to say that would be great, and I've been waiting to hear back from him to confirm and set a time, but he hasn't responded. I assume it's because there are two of them who need to coordinate and one of them was out of town for a conference at the end of last week. So I don't think anything's wrong. I'm just feeling on edge because I don't know when this meeting will take place.

Fortunately, it does give me more time to work out my ideas for what should go in this grant proposal. I've been doing lots of research and finding articles that I really should have known about with results on the very things I might otherwise have proposed studying myself. (Some of these are more recent articles that weren't published when I looked up this stuff a while ago.) Anyway, boring stuff to all of you, I'm sure. But I'm really looking forward to writing this proposal. This is exactly what I love about academia, that you get paid to study exactly what fascinates you. (Well, obviously, it depends on whether or not you get the funding, but still, it's the general idea.)

In the meantime, there's a job that I probably should apply for... I'm quite sure my advisor will tell me not to since she doesn't even want me to spend the time writing this grant proposal right now. The application deadline is about a month away. And to be honest, I think it's highly unlikely I would get the job. So it would be time spent doing it for the experience of applying, and the slim possibility of an interview, and the even slimmer and remoter possibility of getting the job, all when I'm trying to finish my dissertation, write a paper to submit to a journal, and write a grant application for a job next year. What to do...

I know I've described myself as irritable, annoyed, and anxious today, and yes, there's some of that, but I'm actually not feeling as wound up as I sound. I'm feeling sort of motivated and hopeful about stuff, as evidenced by the fact that I am even able to write about it here. (It's when I don't write about things here that you know I'm worked up about them.)

I would like to get out of the house though. Unfortunately, I can't think of a good place to go. There's my windowless office at school, where I would sit alone surrounded by a very messy desk that would call out to me to clean it. There are various coffee shops in my neighborhood, but I've just had a cup of coffee and I don't really want to purchase anything for the privilege of sitting somewhere. There's the library, but I'm not sure they'd let me in. (My status at the university this semester is non-resident, which means I don't actually have access to the physical library, just the online one.) Again, what to do... :)

Maybe I'll just stop thinking about it and get back to work here at my lovely desk at home. Perhaps one of the kitties will jump up on my lap and I'll be reminded why it's nice to work from home.

StoCK PhOtoS

As you all know, I'm kind of camera obsessed. I take my camera with me almost everywhere I go and I take pictures of absolutely everything. When my own camera was out for repair at the beginning of the year, I borrowed a camera from school. Coincidentally, my first name even rhymes with camera.

So what happens with all the photos I take? Well, for over a year I've been posting them to my not-so-secret photoblog. And I have also tried to sell them at street fairs, but the cost of printing and matting them along with whatever fees there are for the space at the fair means that it's difficult to do more than break even. (I never actually calculated this, but I suspect that at least half of what I made came from pitying bloggers who stopped by our booth.)

But mostly, the photos I've taken just sit on my hard drive. Oh wait, not really. :) My hard drive was fried long ago. (Remember that?) So actually the photos sit on CDs and DVDs in a little case on my desk.

It would be nice to earn a little money from my addiction, if only to fuel (and fund) it further.

I had been thinking about getting into stock photography at some point, but for a long time I didn't feel like I had enough knowledge about photography (and in particular, about digital photography). On top of it, you need LOTS of photos to submit to an agency and apparently they're supposed to be good or something. Looking back through my old photos, even I can see that they're not really that good. Photos I took a year ago are blown out, or they're noisy, or they have JPG artifacts because I didn't yet know about shooting in RAW. And they're definitely not stock oriented. (Trust me, stock agencies do not need another amateurish macro shot of a flower with a bee on it.) Plus, whenever I use the macro function on my camera, I only get 5 MP photos, which are too small by most stock agency standards.

But then I learned about microstock agencies, which generally sell smaller size photos from much more amateur photographers. Of course, they sell these photos at MUCH MUCH lower prices than traditional stock agencies. And when I say much lower, I mean, practically free. Major stock companies may sell a photo for $400, while a smaller stock company may sell a photo for $150, and the microstock companies sell photos for $1. Yes, one measley little dollar. And of that dollar, the photographer only makes between $.20 and $.50 depending on the agency.

Sounds horrible, doesn't it? When I first heard about these agencies, I thought they were as evil as evil goes. Paying photographers pennies while stealing business from the larger stock companies.

As you can probably tell given the length of this post, I've had a change of heart. I talked with my friend ViSuaLLyMiNDeD about her experience with these microstock agencies. She didn't convince me that it was the best way to make money. In fact, a while ago she wrote that she'd only made about $240 with 300 photos in her portfolios across five difference agencies.

But I thought that microstock might not be a bad way to learn about stock photography, see what sells, put my old photos to use, and possibly make a little money along the way. Also, you only need to submit 3 to 20 photos, depending on the agency, not 300 photos.

And so I have started submitting photos to these microstock agencies. I just pulled out my CDs of photos, started with the oldest ones, and pulled the first 20 that I thought were decent. I didn't want to put any more effort into it than that, since the experiment was to see whether my old photos were good enough to sell, not whether I could produce good photos right now. And in fact, since I'm pretty busy right now, I'm not going to spend much time shooting anything new. I'm going to see how far I can get with my old photos.

Well, so far I've gotten accepted to 3 out of 4 agencies (I'm still waiting to hear from the fourth). Two agencies have accepted 85-90% of the images I've sent them, giving me 9 photos at one agency and 22 photos at the other. In the two days they've been up on the site, nothing has sold yet. Another agency accepted only 30% of the photos I sent them, leaving me only 6 photos showing on their site, but one photo has already sold twice in the past two days, netting me, yep, one dollar. (It's this photo that Anonymous Coworker has hanging in his dining room.)

The reasons for the rejections vary from "Image is not RF stock oriented or its sales potential is too low at this stage" (I totally agreed with them) to "Poor framing, cropping, composition or snapshot" (I suppose it's a matter of personal opinion). Only one photo was actually rejected from one agency because of quality on the grounds of "distorted pixels, image was interpolated, poorly scanned, upsampled or JPG was not saved at the highest quality" and I wonder if they were actually looking at the photo I sent them because it was not scanned, upsampled, or saved at a lower quality. In fact, the martini glass photo was upsampled (because I was playing around with upsampling and I forgot to send them the original version), but they accepted it and it's sold twice. So who knows. The photo they rejected was a picture of a gravestone, and maybe they thought it was too obvious to point out to me that no one wants to buy pictures about death. :)

Anyway, I guess I could make more money if I put a little more effort into this, by shooting new and better photos that are actually targeted to be stock photos. But we'll see. Right now I really don't have the time, and I just wanted to get this set up and see how it goes. If I magically become rich overnight, I'll certainly let you all know. But I'm not spending the money just yet.

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Where have I been the past few days?

• Parked in front of my computer, dissertating. I don't really feel like getting into the details, but suffice to say that I'm simultaneously experiencing setbacks, while at the same time getting lots done. I promise I will finish this thing one day. Hopefully soon. Though not as soon as I'd hoped. Still, soon. This semester.
• Preparing to meet with my prospective employers (hopefully) next week to talk about writing a grant. I also don't particularly feel like getting into the details of this right now, but basically I'm having some disagreements with my advisor as to whether I should be spending the time making sure I have an income at some point next year. I say yes, she thinks no. (Obviously there's more behind this, and I don't really feel like getting into it right now.) Anyway, I at least want to meet with them and talk about ideas.
• Laying on the couch, head in my hands, leaning up against J as he tries to do work on his laptop. (He is very sweet and lets me fall asleep against him like this.) My dreaded monthly headaches continue, perfectly on schedule. I have learned to assume that I will be going to bed early on those Wednesday nights.
• Wanting to get out and take some photos of autumn foliage, but it's been raining out and the leaves haven't exactly turned yet. I must be patient...

Of courserous, can't you?

Look at this, my first internet quiz posted online on my blog. A meme, even.

I saw this over on Jennetic's blog and I was curious about what kinds of questions she'd answered to get the detailed results that she did. I wondered if I tried it, would I also be told that I would "never break a commitment" and yet that "you think of marriage as something that will confine you"? Or would they be so insightful as to give me completely different results?

I clicked through to the quiz, prepared to answer direct questions about my views on life and love.

Instead, I found myself answering questions about animals. In fact, after three questions, I scrolled back up to the top of the page to make sure I was doing the right quiz.

So I answered the best I could. The first question made me think too hard: "The end of the world is near, and you have the power to save only one kind of animal. What do you save?" I thought to myself, well, if the world is ending, then what good will it do to save any of them? Will I in fact be condemning this poor animal to an even more tortured death as the world finally reaches its end? Or is this question implying that I will somehow survive and so I get to pick one animal to be with me. (You see why I hardly take internet quizzes? They make my head hurt.) Given the choice of a sheep, a rabbit, a deer, or a horse, I picked the horse. I figured that if I had to outrun volcanos and earthquakes, the horse would be my best bet. And if I somehow survived the ending of the world (but where would I live?), then the horse would be most likely to fulfill my needs of companionship. Horses are smart, right? Plus, they live a long time.

Moving on, I came to this question: "You did something wrong. God punishes you by turning you into an animal of your choice. You decide to become a..." Now I know you're all thinking I would choose to be a cat, but nope, I actually picked dog. I guess I just want to be liked. Plus, I figured I could best communicate from within a dog's experience and people respond to that, whereas cats simply whine from the hallway to get you to come pet them and then they run and hide under the bed.

A couple of questions later, I was asked this: "If you someday met an animal that could speak in human language, you would want that animal to be a..." Well, that's easy, I had almost the same choices as in the first question (horse, sheep, rabbit, or bird). Like I said, I think horses are smart, so I picked horse. I'd love to talk to a horse.

Finally, I reached this question: "If you could be an animal for 5 minutes, which one you would like to be?" And again, I bypassed the cat experience, but this time I also decided to pass on the horse. In spite of my fear of flying, I've always been a bit jealous of birds because they get to travel so far and they get to see the world from the sky. I doubt a pigeon could get very far in five minutes, but that would certainly be a very different experience than what I'm used to. So a pigeon I would be.

Based on those responses, I got these results:

The Keys to Your Heart

You are attracted to those who are unbridled, untrammeled, and free. In love, you feel the most alive when your lover is creative and never lets you feel bored. You'd like to your lover to think you are loyal and faithful... that you'll never change. You would be forced to break up with someone who was emotional, moody, and difficult to please. Your ideal relationship is open. Both of you can talk about everything... no secrets. Your risk of cheating is zero. You care about society and morality. You would never break a commitment. You think of marriage as something precious. You'll treasure marriage and treat it as sacred. In this moment, you think of love as commitment. Love only works when both people are totally devoted.

What Are The Keys To Your Heart?

Just as when I read my horoscope, I was immediately struck with the feeling that they had me pegged completely. I carefully ignored the things that didn't seem quite right, like this: "You would be forced to break up with someone who was emotional, moody, and difficult to please." (Would I even date someone like this?) And I focused on the things I liked, like this: "You think of marriage as something precious. You'll treasure marriage and treat it as sacred." (This totally warmed my heart).

I have to say, I don't think I really learned all that much from the results of this quiz. But taking the quiz was lots of fun, and maybe I even learned something about myself from that. And now you have too. Next time you see me, I'll be the pigeon on the sidewalk talking to the horse.