seeing red

I spent Sunday night at Harbin, throwing my sleeping bag out under the stars. At dawn I drove into Middletown for a tasty breakfast... check out Buelah's Place, if you're ever there in the morning... and then made the 45-minute drive over to the Santa Rosa office.

One of my clients called not long after that to let me know that the project would slip a few days, the surveyors hadn't finished flagging the site boundaries yet. So much for my efficiently planned multi-project travel schedule. Suddenly I had a little more extra time than expected.

I'd had some discussions about a possible very quick lunchtime shoot right in Santa Rosa, but by now I knew that wasn't going to work either, at least not this time. She couldn't make it til a little later in the afternoon, and I couldn't wait that long, with a meeting set in Berkeley. No way was I going to delay long enough to encounter rush hour traffic. So we agreed to wait til next trip.

But things went smoothly after that. I brought some work with me to lunch, and hit a flow state, one of those times when the words come easily, complex multi-faceted projects fall into place and it's just so obvious what needs to be done to resolve those thorny issues; one of those times when the fingers can't keep up with the thought process and the page is soon full of jumbled notes and bullet points to implement in detail later. I didn't dare break the flow, I sat there and wrote for nearly two hours. But it was time to hit the road, before that traffic got nasty.

The meeting was quick and easy and I actually had time to take a few deep breaths before the evening photo shoot.

The area around the UC Berkeley campus north gate is pretty familiar. My colleague Adrianna once lived in the apartment building on the corner, and we often would grab lunch or coffee at one of the shops when I was in town. I'd also known various profs from the school over the years and had visited with some of them. One of my mentors, early in my career, had gotten her PhD at Berkeley, and I'd heard so many stories on those long nights in the lab or while hiking to study sites in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

I arrived five minutes early, and soon enough saw the bright red hair round the corner. Impossible to miss. Amy had brought some unique hand-made things to wear... I don't get to do arty fashion often enough, so that was fun. And then it turned out that we sort of work in different aspects of the same general field, so there was a ton to talk about. We wandered the campus, shooting in what to most would have seemed like random spots. But the backgrounds were carefully chosen. Despite her slight trepidation (which I didn't see until tonight), expressed in her own blog, she did well.

I haven't really had time to look closely at all the images yet, but from a skim there are some good choices to work with. I'll spend more time on it tomorrow, really go through the images and find the ones to take into post-production. It's nice to have good images, which we do, but that wouldn't have mattered. The conversation alone would have made it all worthwhile.

The delay is courtesy of Adobe. I'd downloaded a trial version of the most recent Photoshop release a while back, then ordered a permanent copy to replace my slightly out-of-date version. it took almost a week longer than it should have to arrive, so for several days I was back on the old version (after the trial period expired). Last night, tired and fresh out of the car after a five-hour drive, I tried to install the new version, which had arrived at last.

Guess what. The trial version "remembers" itself, so it's not possible to just enter the serial number from the new product. And the new copy can't be installed until the old one has been uninstalled. It's theoretically possible to just drag it to the trash (gotta love Macs) except that the numerous files are so scattered around the hard drive... miss one, and the software won't install. Messy.

If I'd trashed that .dmg file from the trial, I'd have been screwed. It might have taken hours to find and clean everything out manually. Fortunately I still had it, and was able to run uninstall (20 minutes), and then install the new copy (another 20 minutes).

As somebody said on the forum where I looked up the fix: "Adobe, this is unacceptable."

OK, a short break, then we can talk about Tuesday.