One thing I hate doing is digging post-holes. There is always a rock or something in exactly the wrong spot and by the time you’ve dug a foot or two down you know that: 1) you’re 1/3 of the way there 2) you’re at the effective limit of your tools.
Operation Overreach is something I have not posted about before. I think some part of my subconscious was telling me “this is going to be more bigger than you think” and I was hesitating to get into it.
Marketing is an inherently dishonest profession, in my opinion; its purpose is to misrepresent and manipulate. The other day I was at the surviving local hardware store, and ran across a piece of marketing from my distant past.
One of my many secret vices is NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me! [Read more…]
There are a bunch of videos of this on youtube; they started showing up in my feed around the time when I was hunting for wire rope for damascus-making.
Water and computers mix notoriously badly; that’s why shower faucets tend to be purely mechanical designs. Imagine my puzzlement when I got to my hotel in Stuttgart and discovered that someone had, obviously, spent a great deal of money and effort to make the bathroom shower more complicated than it needs to be.
The overall process of knife-making seems to be pretty standard. Weld, shape, grind, quench, grind, polish, do the handle.
Product photography is a really difficult thing to pull off well. You need drama and depth, but clarity as well. Your images are almost always highly constructed, but they need to look natural and spontaneous. They need to show a sense of the scale of the object, which means you need other things in the picture that convey scale without distracting. I used to have a whole shelf of books, which I practically memorized, about problem-solving different types of product photos.
Once upon a time, there were two demons talking. One of them looked at the other and said, “whoah, you’ve got the ‘made the damned suffer’ award, how did you earn that?” The other demon replied, “I made the integral bolster knife popular, and the overall suffering in the knife-maker community went off the charts.”
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is not a book I have read. Naturally, parts of it have leaked into my consciousness from various sources – it’s a remarkably pervasive fountain of memes.