DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The other day I heard a radio commercial open with this line: “Have your New Year’s Resolutions gotten the better of you?” I flipped off the stereo with disgust. They have not, I thought.

I guess most people make resolutions with no real intention of acting on them. I feel no sad, self-pitying camaraderie with such people, nor with vendors who appeal to radio listeners’ feelings of failure and disillusionment in order to market their products.

Our society conditions people to think of January as a new beginning. Why not take advantage of it? There’s not a person on this planet who wouldn’t like to make a change, to do more of some thing or less of some other thing. Sure, we could all make changes any day of the year. But why not make some now? You’ve probably been thinking about it anyway.

I make resolutions every year. I try to keep the list short — to pick two or three items I feel strongly about. I’m somewhat successful, although not as successful as I’d like; the big items usually get done and the minor ones get forgotten. Part of my problem, I now realize, is a lack of strategy. Simply wanting something isn’t enough to make it so. One also needs a plan. And more than that.

It was with these half-formed thoughts that I listened to an “e-seminar” by Anthony Robbins. The timing was ideal, for his topic was “New Year, new results.” During his intro he said the same thing I’ve been thinking:

There’s a unique aspect to the New Year. The New Year is completely artificial … [but] it gives us a chance to start fresh. We make it up in our heads because we could do this any day of our lives, but my view is, as long as we as a culture have this hypnosis that says, “it’s a new year, I’ve got a chance to start fresh, to make it the way I want it,” why not take advantage of that?

Why not, indeed?

The great thing about Robbins is that he always provides a plan of attack. As I wrote once before, you cannot follow his advice and fail to take action. This is so much better than beginning every resolution with “I really should do this…”

Robbins’ presentation (a 75-minute frenetic monologue) has been archived for playback over the Web. His seven-step process for “maximizing” this new year has been made available as a PDF document, a worksheet you can print and follow whether or not you spend the time listening to his speech.

I would link to it all from here, but I’m not sure whether this content was intended for free access to the world. On the other hand, the invitation appears to have gone out to everybody on the anthonyrobbins.com mailing list, from where it was no doubt forwarded widely. And anybody could have called in to listen to the seminar over the phone. As a compromise I’ll do this: if you’re interested, send me an email and I’ll send the access info to you.

The Chron has published a list of their Top 100 Wines of 2003.

Of particular interest are the three reds with single-digit prices. It seems to me that wine prices have climbed steadily for the past ten years, at least until Two Buck Chuck came along — but you won’t find Chuck on the list. It might only cost $2, but it is not a Top 100 wine. It’s merely drinkable, and then only if you’re so busy gloating over the low price that you forget to swallow.

Which is not to say that we haven’t put away a few bottles of Chuck ourselves…

I do wish they’d come up with some $5 Zinfandels though.

I’m still trying to catch up on last year’s digital images. Some of the photos needed surgery.

An ambient-light photo of a Lego cathedral presented an obvious need for color correction, but my typical approach (using Photoshop’s Curves) failed. The red channel was completely blown out, and the blue channel was horribly noisy. I could have prevented some of this damage by adjusting the camera’s white balance before making the exposure… but I guess it doesn’t matter, as I was able to fix it.

The “after” image is the result of two channel blends, which attempted to bring the red channel back into a usable state, and which attempted to reduce some of the distortion in the blue plate, followed by Curves. I think it worked pretty well. Certainly the cast is gone. For comparison, see this version in which curves were applied without first blending channels — notice that the red cast is still present.

(The cathedral pictured here was part of a Christian-themed Lego display we visited over the holidays. It included a near-life-sized Nativity scene and a miniature rendition of Bethlehem, complete with tiny Lego sheep.)

I ended up at this year’s Expo on opening day. My first impression was that the convention center was packed fuller than ever before, because within minutes of entering the space I was gridlocked, forced to stand still for probably 10 seconds — that’s a very long time when you’re on foot, trying to get somewhere — while some indecisive people in front of me put enough consecutive synapses together to step the hell out of the way.

But a lot of the companies I’d hoped to see were not in attendence. Subsequently I saw a report pegging the count of exhibitors at 50 or 75 less than last year. I can believe it.

As I did last year, I saved enough money on discounted software to pay for my entrance ticket, bridge toll, and parking. Spending money to save money is one of my favorite things. Saving software receipts for tax deductions is also one of my favorite things.

The neatest series of products wasn’t even designed for Macs. A company called Hoodman had a large booth displaying a collection of LCD shades for digital cameras (still and video). If you’ve ever been frustrated by an inability to see your camera’s LCD in the sunshine, check ‘em out.

One of the reps at the booth, who may well have been the company owner, pitched me on their new series of shades for Powerbooks. “I have one of those already,” I replied, “and to be honest I’m pretty disappointed with it. It just doesn’t fit.”

“Oh, here, take a new one,” he said, handing me a free replacement. “We recently redesigned them specifically for Powerbooks. This one will fit.” And so it does — it’s great. So I guess you can consider this a paid endorsement.

Any other companies who’d like to send me free gear in exchange for a mention in this space can consider themselves officially invited, especially including Apple, Nikon, and Ferrari.

The other fun part of the Expo happened at the DigiDesign corner of the Avid booth. A lone DigiDesign rep maintained a small crowd as he demonstrated ProTools and the various DigiDesign audio recording hardware. I’m an intermediate user of ProTools, so although that aspect of the demo wasn’t enlightening, seeing the Digi002 in action (with flying faders and extremely tight integration with ProTools) was impressive. Add DigiDesign to that list of vendors who are welcome to forward nonreturnable demo gear. Damn, maybe I shouldn’t have written nice things about them already.

As of today we are officially generating solar energy. PG&E installed our “time of use” meter, which effectively tracks the power we use, and when we use it. PG&E will send a monthly summary, but our next actual electric bill won’t arrive until our anniversary, one year from today. If we’ve sized our PV system correctly, the bill amount will be $0.

Weather and our own consumption habits will affect the balance, of course. Lately we’re thinking a lot about our consumption. Although it has always been true that leaving lights or appliances running unnecessarily would result in a higher electric bill, now I’m especially conscious. I feel like I’m in a contest to zero my annual bill. I’ll be replacing a few more incandescent bulbs with CFs this weekend.

The new meter is digital. It starts at 50,000 kWh, apparently because it’s easier to track negative consumption (that is, net energy production) if the counter doesn’t roll backwards past 0 kWh to 99,999.

The small triangle in the lower left quarter of the display points either right (as pictured) to indicate consumption, or left to indicate production. As was true with our array installation, the TOU meter went in during a rainstorm… resulting in a fairly dismal showing of all this technology. I’m looking forward to the summer, for its long clear days and thousands of watts of free energy.