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Tag: reports

What a funny little book.

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A mixture of Lord of the Flies, Swiss Family Robinson, and a pulp romance novel. Very of it’s time (1964). Though far less xenophobic/racist/classist than one might expect. Nice and short too. Action packed in a believable way. Sad. Touching. Moving even.

I do not remember buying this book, and the mech like machine on the front is very misleading, but still a solid read. I also loved that it came in under 300 pages.

I’m about to jump into book #3, called ‘Star Dragon’ by Mike Brotherton. It’s a little longer at 352 pages but I hope not to get bogged down by it, and that it reads easily, and is enjoyable. It came from my TBR pile, of which I still have many others if this one doesn’t grab me in the first 40-100 pages, or if it goes hard in the paint for either physics or math jargon. Both bore me, and will end up killing my enthusiasm for the book.

That’s all for today. I need to complete my first draft of my latest report today, and it looks like it’ll be close to 100 pages. So I need to knuckle down and get it done. Ciao Bella!

Ooh they do take lovely photos though, don’t they.

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I get subcontracted to produce marketing reports on the semi regular (when Covid isn’t being super shitty) and one of the external clients produces some of the most consistently amazing photos that I get to see. I don’t go to these events, but after reviewing the photo sets, oh boy, sometimes it feels like I went. The colours and composition is just fantastic. I tell you, paying a good photographer real money to capture your event is worth its weight in visual gold. You could live off of these photos for weeks if not months, building social media engagement, advertising, internal intranet posts, newsletters and what not. Don’t skimp. Just because most folks can afford an SLR now, doesn’t mean they know how to frame up a shot or get the best out of the available lighting. It makes a real difference when I get photography from a paid professional, vs a bunch of volunteers snapping random shots, that are blurry, poorly composed, or the lighting is flat, too dark, to bright. I can only do so much to remedy that on my end. But these bad mamma jammas are legit. Can’t show none of it to anybody but the client, but woah buddy, you’d like these pictures of the events.

The same thing applies to product photography. Get your shit infront of a professional, don’t try to do it yourself. Or failing a real photographer get the best 3D model/rendering you can afford. Will beat a cell phone image any day of the week. But I digress.

Hot one today. My friend who works in weather forecasting says we have potential for tornadoes in southern Ontario again, today. As well as a wind storm front passing through here tomorrow. Going to be a wild couple of days around here. Hopefully not another Derecho. Because that shit tore through our farm property and did six figures worth of damage is not more. Yikes.

Getting very close to final assembly and glue up of my small multi purpose table. I have a slight issue to fix with the shelf, but otherwise should be good to move forward and complete it sooner rather than later. I also stripped my ninja turtle sculpt back down to the armature. I hated the pose, and then a bunch of stuff was miss proportioned, so as I have no dead line nor client in mind, I took it back down to bare wire, and reposed the armature. Had to drill out new holes, but I’m ok with that. I may add water or sewer features to the base to hide the extra unused holes. A chance for some mixed media materials to be incorporated. Fun times!

I figure I will wait until my turtle is done before I do any painting. My Ogre is baked and based. Ready and waiting on my turtle to get done. Ciao Bella!

How do you solve a problem like 51?

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But not centimeters of snow! Thankfully. We did not get the one foot of snow that was potentially forecasted, although more snow is coming later on today. My back thanks you! Four inches is manageable every couple of hours.

Speaking of puns, I added at least one visual pun into my latest report. Made me laugh, I wonder if anyone else will clue in to it. Fun tip, having worked so hard Monday through Wednesday, plus some light work this previous weekend I now get to enjoy a lighter day – Go Me! Much appreciated by my brain, wrists and sense of musical whimsy. I did bust out some music yesterday as I was nearing the end of laying out my first draft.

It’s funny as a kid, youth, teen, early twenties I could not work in silence, I had to have music on, but after working for many years in open office spaces, I’ve come to love working quietly. I can on occasion, if I don’t have to pay attention to critical elements, listen to loud music and sing along as I work. Mainly doing pie charts, and bar graphs, and scatter graphs though. Not the table portion. A mixture of Motorhead, The Beatles and The Blue Stones, followed up by Wolfmother and Status Quo. That’s my go to musical line up these days. Hood and loud too. Which is fine because I work from home, and don’t live on top of my neighbours. I guess I’d have to invest in some seriously high quality head phones if I ever go back to working on site when Freelancing, or go back to an in-house design position. I like the zero commute time too much though. Chasing dollar bills has always ended badly for me. I guess if the work/industry is amazing I could potentially do it again. But coming from large market alcoholic beverages with massive start of the year marketing meetings with air travel, fancy hotels, meetings in swanky spaces, free drinks, great food, famous guest speakers and late night parties for days on end, you’d be hard pressed to improve on the type of perks I’ve known over 16 years affiliated with that industry. Work hard and play even harder was a common refrain amongst the C-Suite types.

Yeah – so. Still writing a bit every single day, and haven’t forgotten about my short story series. I’m working through some character moments in my head before I write out anything. I am trying to get these last six or so chapters to land properly. Going to require some footwork on my end. I’ll keep you posted.