I love Craigslist. That Beseler on the right (45MXT with Dichro 45S Head) showed up over the weekend. Came with boards, lenses, timer, and some odds and ends - for a song. The same setup would run about $4,000 new. Thank you everyone for giving up wet printing so that I can have nice things, inexpensively. Spent some time printing with it tonight and it works great.

The Omega on the left is also terrific. However, it’s been moved to the secondary position for printing from 35mm negatives and contact sheets.

I watch a lot of very bad films. Deliberately. I get a kick out of terrible popcorn movies, exploitation films, cult favorites, and so on. Most of the time it’s just mindless fun and I know what I’m in for; and I accept it.

Revolver (2005) was different. Revolver may be the worst movie I have ever seen; and not in a good way. It’s Guy Ritchie and I expected fast, quick-witted grindhouse fun. Ritchie directing an adaptation written by Luc Besson should have some potential, right? Whatever potential was there got lost in the incomprehensible mess of the third act.

Were we really not supposed to guess the ending? I thought it was assumed we all knew, but when the “reveal” came I just sat there, dumbfounded. I knew I’d just been robbed of the past two hours. This movie made me angry.

One line did stick with me, “… we’re just monkeys wrapped in suits, begging for the approval of others.”

Will Ferrell is terrific in Everything Must Go. It’s nice to see him take on a more dramatic, nearly dead-pan role as Nick Halsey, a recovering alcoholic who quickly becomes jobless, wifeless, and homeless.

My sporadic minimalist tendencies helped me enjoy watching Nick first struggle with, then shed everything he owned. I suddenly feel like grabbing a six-pack of PBR and having a yard sale.

If you’re at all fascinated by the discussions around “truth” in photography, I can heartily recommend ”Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography” (Amazon link) by my favorite documentary filmmaker, Errol Morris.

Morris looks at a number of documentary photographs and investigates their history, controversy, and what they tell us. Or what we think they tell us.

I found it to be totally fascinating.

I don’t enjoy comic books, but movies based on comic books can be fun. Thor was not one of those movies. Way too much time was spent showing me how awesome CGI scenes can be. Asgard was crazily overwrought. I’ll need to watch Metropolis again to cleanse my palate. The bad guy was a pussy with a remote controlled giant robot. I was embarrassed by how Natalie Portman ogled and stammered every time Thor was within pheromone range.

The biggest surprise was Chris Hemsworth, who I found to do a decent job of playing the meat-headed doofus with a hammer. I spent much of the movie amazed by how much Keira Knightley looks like Natalie Portman. Imagine my embarrassment when the credits rolled.

Overall, Thor does what I’d guess it set out to do, but I wish it hadn’t.

Years ago I used a terrific little calendar utility called ”Remember?”. Remember? began life in 1988 (not a typo) as a “Desk Accessory” way back when there were such things. It has been regularly updated by its author, Dave Warker, and recently made it to Lion.

[Remember?] reminds you about important events in your life when you start up your Mac and while you work. Features flexible specification for repeating events, extensive control over appearance and minimal memory requirements.

In yet another fit of nostalgia I installed Remember? and started entering events. Now I can’t stop. Remember? thinks like I do. When that happens I can ignore a great many shortcomings, such as…

• Aging interface. Some will scoff at Remember?’s basic and aging UI. I like to think of it as retro.
• No sync. It would terrific if Remember? could sync easily with iCal, if only to get alerts on my iPhone. There is a script that comes with Remember? that will export events to iCal, but it’s one-way and repeated imports cause too much duplicate event trouble.

I have a profound dislike of iCal and Google Calendars, so none of these cause me too much grief.

With tools like Fantastical available, there may not seem to be a need for something like Remember?, but Remember?’s unique way of dealing with recording and displaying events make it worth a look. I kind of love it.

Keeping an office productive and on-task requires some serious old-school processes. I assume everyone is on board. Memo sent.

While I’ve got access to the incredible Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 superlens I thought I’d take quick interior snap of where I live much of the time.

Anyone interested in a nice drum scanner? (lower left)

52 Tiger:

“Today I visited someone with over 1,800 messages in her email inbox. They weren’t unread. The messages were being stored there. It took her 12 minutes to find the message she wanted to show me. Twelve minutes.

[snip]

Again, Entourage is not a filing cabinet. Leaving your messages in email is like leaving your groceries in the paper bags from Stop & Shop. “

Man, I so agree with that. Except it’s wrong. A filing cabinet is exactly what email is. I’ve seen it.

I know folks who always live with 1800 messages in their inbox. I used to make fun of them. Then they’d repeatedly find things faster and more easily than I did.

Act accordingly (WRITE DOWN the action, move to cold storage, throw away)

I’m laughed at for suggesting things like that. The usual response is something like, “Why would I write it down or file it somewhere else when I already have it right where I can find it?” I’m sure there’s a good answer to that, but I don’t know what it is.

Me, with my System(s) and GTD and Mind-Like-Water and superior tone, would dig through properly referenced and archived messages looking for whatever. Meanwhile, just as I’d begin to break out in a sweat, they’d open their email program, quickly and deftly plucking just the right message from that vast impenetrable pile of crap all “filed” away randomly in their inbox.

Who am I to tell them how to file things?

In 1983, I worked for almost exactly one year at the Burger King on Michigan St. here in Grand Rapids. That particular restaurant is no longer there. It was evicted by the encroaching “Medical Mile.”

When judged by the following criteria, working the drive-thru window at Burger King was the best job I ever had…

• Girls
• Parties
• Goofing off
• Handling hot grease

I was attending college full-time then, so I worked the late-night shift. That meant dealing with the weekend “bar rush” starting at about 1:30am. We’d have cars backed up all the way around the building and out into the street. In those days, drinking and driving wasn’t quite so frowned upon, and folks took advantage of it. Made for lots of fights, accidents, people passed out at the speaker, nudity, you name it. I had a ball.

So many great memories, and I still have the paper hat.