GYST: Get Your Stuff Together
The Design Guy blog is a personal project featuring articles on design, Photoshop, creativity, photography, tech, tips, how-to’s, and life. I add to this journal as the mood takes me, whimsically. Enjoy.
A much loved community matriarch died in 2013. Mourned by many, that community came together to arrange an annual charity fundraiser in her honour. I have photographed that event every year.
This year sees the fifth Peewee Memorial event. I wanted to mark it with something special.
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My recent journey to the US for cheap gas didn’t discourage me, despite the 2-hour round trip. The minor issues I faced then, I learned from. I would not make those errors twice, I said. And I didn’t.
I originally figured the round trip should take an hour. My tank was again empty, and my local gas stations are now averaging $1.25 per litre. Now was the time to put that estimate to the test.
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Being the proud possessor of a freshly minted Canadian passport opens the door to a lot of possibilities. Not least of which is the chance to hop over and take advantage of the cross border differences between New York State and Ontario fuel pricing.
As I type, one litre of fuel costs CAD $1.23 at my local outlets. Across the border, it’s USD $2.50 per US gallon. My tank holds 18.5 US gallons, or 70 litres. Napkin conversion math says I could fill my tank for $86, or nip over and fill it for $67. Saving $21. That’s almost a third off. A free lunch. A no-brainer.
Or so you would think. Read more
To add an extra dimension (literally) to my photographic skill set I recently invested in a drone. Being able to place a camera in the sky exactly where and exactly when I want it, is priceless. It’s an airborne tripod.
Read moreI have been an iPhone owner for several years. During those years I have replaced the wired headphones, on average, every three months. Which, apart from being a hidden expense of ownership is also annoying. The phones are great, don’t get me wrong, but things seem to happen to them with a depressing frequency that you could almost set your Apple watch by.
Reasons vary. It is usually wear and tear, or more accurately heavy use. I never take them out. As a result, cables wear and odd behaviour emerges – only one ear bud will work, or the mic stops working. Sometimes the phone starts or rewinds audiobooks. Sometimes it opens apps or sends emails and text messages because Siri thought you were talking to her, when you were in fact yelling playfully imaginative invective at the driver that just cut you off… that can take some explaining. I hear.
I used to author blogs. A lot of blogs. Several times a day I would research, write, and then post articles on a range of subjects as diverse as mental health, hardware, software, and security, for a group of companies based in New York. ‘Thought Leadership’ in action. I would push SEO optimised content out on schedule across all available channels, and measure the metrics so I could report back to those I was writing for. Fun stuff, for the most part. Highly challenging and highly rewarding in equal measure.
That changed a couple or three years ago, for a variety of reasons I won’t bore you with here. My productivity dropped. Off the map. I have redirected myself into other channels. Simply, been too busy with other challenges: I run a host of training platforms, manage servers and Sharepoint document repositories, and keep things ticking over for a dozen web sites with thousands of user accounts. Busy times. Since that change of pace I write blogs infrequently.
Blogging has become a personal activity rather than a commercial one, and almost dried up completely. In many ways I was and am glad of the respite. I have nobody to answer to. No deliverables to meet. No stats to analyze. No metrics to report. The constantly hungry beast that is corporate social media no longer needs to be fed. Well, at least, not by me. And I can use the Oxford comma to my heart’s content which gives me more joy than you can imagine. Neither the AP nor Chicago Style Guides now dictate my output. Which means I am free to spell optimise the way the English language intended it, with an ‘s’, and ignore that red underline with a smile.
I took a sabbatical. And it was fun.
I’m now feeling the need to express myself again, this time purely for myself. I have opinions, insights, knowledge and fun things running around my head, and a new-found hankering to share them.
Perhaps it’s the warmer weather. Perhaps it’s Spring Fever. Perhaps I just want to do something. Whatever combination of reasons are responsible, they have conspired and combined to drive me to the point of finally picking up paper and pen (monitor and keyboard?) again to write blogs.
So here I am.
Time to write. The void shall be filled. Onward.
I want to share a success story. A story of how a dedicated training portal created for one valued client has taken off. Like a rocket. You may want to grab a coffee. This is a long one.
Actually, make that a double-double. Let me explain.
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Adobe are running a contest right now to celebrate the release of two new fonts derived from the archives of the Bauhaus school of design, a powerhouse of contemporary and modernist styles from its founding in 1919 to an untimely closure in 1933 due to pressure from the growing Nazi regime under then Chancellor Hitler. The story of Bauhaus is one I can recommend taking the time to learn. But it’s not THIS story.
At a loose end yesterday, I decided to throw my own entry into the ring for this contest. The #AdobeHiddenTreasures #contest (yes, I dropped in the required hashtags. Deal.) challenges entrants to use one or both of the new fonts to create a logo. That’s it. Once created, share it on social media with the tags previously mentioned, and sit back. This, I have done.
A few years ago, a fine woman died. That’s how this annual shindig all began.
Pierrete, affectionately known as Peewee, was a central part of her group. Every year since her death, her friends and family have celebrated her life with a Memorial Ride fundraiser in her name. Every year, I shoot the event for free. It’s my way of contributing. I knew her too. Read more
It isn’t always about the money. Sometimes, a project is worth doing just for the fun of it.
Such a project came my way recently when my colleagues decided to form a ball hockey team. They registered, paid up, and were ready to rock and roll in the Niagara region Ball Hockey D league. A mixed group of seasoned ice hockey guys and total novices, they had never played together before as a team. Without skates. Shoot, some had never played before, period. In hindsight, this was never likely to end well. Read more