Caring About The Workers

Last week, I used a tow strap (I keep it in my truck bag in the back of my truck) and my big Chevy Tahoe to pull a UPS truck out of a ditch. You know, the standard UPS package car – big, brown, GMC service chassis with a Grumman aluminum body with dual rear wheels. I know GMC makes 4×4 drive-trains for those things; they’re not that much more expensive, either. I would sort of expect that each UPS motor-pool would have a couple 4×4 and the rest rigged for highway driving.

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A Guest In the Forge! – 1

A friend of mine told me that she had a friend who said he’d kill for a chance to make a damascus knife. I was in an expansive mood, and said, “well, he could come up for a couple days and I’ll walk him through it.” That’s how that happened. Fortunately, Maat is a cool guy, young and energetic, and he made it up here right before the ice set in on my driveway.

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Hmmm… A Slow-Moving Freeze

My furnace died last friday, and the tech came out, replaced a bunch of filters and the jet, bled some gunky-looking oil out of the line, and everything was fine. As he was leaving he said, “I’m going to put a call in for a fuel drop because your tank is at about 1/10.”

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Generalizing Behavior Between Species – Part 1

Observe the dog; it enjoys bacon. We might be able to conclude that a wolf would enjoy bacon, too. But “might” is the key word, there – can we really? I’d say it’s highly likely, but that’s based on my knowing other things already about wolves and dogs – namely that they are omnivores.

Why, then, might I run a complex and abusive experiment to determine if dogs like bacon? That would be a waste of time, right?

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A Short Note on Product Photography

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.

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