Journal/Blog

Trying to get back in the groove

I fell off the train...
I was doing so well, then lost my motivation, trying to find it again.
My back has been complaining. I had to lift my dog when I had her put down. She was 70+ pounds and I'm not supposed to lift over 10...
I always pay for it when I do things like that...so muscle relaxers and percocet...which always destroys my motivation for several days. I'm trying to get back on the train but I'm starting to try to organize the clutter I have upstairs and that will involve moving some things around...and of course, not all of them are lightweight. It may be a few days until I work my way back out of this funk...but I always do.

I changed internet providers today. I switched from Spectrum to Metronet. I've been satisfied with Spectrum but I wasn't happy with the upload speeds. I uploaded the resulting files from all the slide scanning I did to Dropbox for my friend and it was over 40 minutes...I had a 1gb downlink (I never got over 900mb) which was good but the uplink was only 40mb. Now, I have 2gb up and down. And no data caps.

Of course, I rarely ever have any need for speeds like this, I started out with a 300 baud acoustic coupled modem in the early 80's. I did a ton of programming courses with that and there wasn't anything faster so it wasn't an issue. The school I was going to had several different programming courses going on but only a small number of terminals in their computer lab. If you were able to sit at home and use a modem, you could write your programs, upload them and let the remote system do the compile and run. I was the only one in my class that always had my programs done. One other guy was also using a modem but apparently didn't grasp the logic as well as I did. I've never been accused of being logical (odd since I'm logical when I do electronics troubleshooting) but I was able to get through my assignments, except for C. I never did get a handle on pointers and pointers to pointers...I think perhaps now I could but I have no need to, no interest in programming and the bulk of programming languages now are based on the OOPS concept, object oriented programming so the use of C is a rarity. Now it would be C++ but as I said, no longer any interest and I still have too many things I'm interested in so I don't really have time to pursue software development.

I'm currently focused on using Photoshop and Lightroom. I've rekindled an interest in photo restoration and now have several updated books of which I had older editions years ago. Unfortunately, image editing software is updating at an extremely fast pace so even if a book comes out today, it's at least 18 months behind what the current software is able to do. What used to take several steps can now be fully automatic or only need 1 or 2 steps. The hard part is in the books and working through examples is figuring out to do the same older steps from the publication. It does require one to become more intimate with the software though...and I hope I can become proficient in both Photoshop and Lightroom. They are complementary applications and it is beneficial to have a through understanding of both. Some of these folks have been using Photoshop since day one (early 90s) so they have a tremendous advantage in their skill levels. They started when things were much simpler, much like computers. I had my first computer in 1980 and things were tremendously much simpler than they are today. I'm very thankful I'm not just starting to get involved with computers today.

I think this is it for today. I want to go watch some videos on Photoshop. I hope that if I keep going over and over things that more of it will stick in my brain. Learning is not nearly as easy as it was 50 years ago. I do keep trying though.

Tim