Project 365 Notebook

I have finished the software side of the site that will be the online equivalent of my physical Project 365 notebook.

http://project365.livecurt.net

There is still some info missing from the pages, but all of the images are present and the structure is as close to matching the physical notebook as it can possibly be.

P365: Day 48

Day 48
It has been raining for days and I really can not come up with many more creative ideas for photos that are not outside. I miss being outdoors with the camera and the weather at present is really starting to depress me.

Buttermilk Concerns

A few months ago (sometime in the spring) I was forced to get buttermilk in a plastic container. I didn’t really like the idea much because if there was no paper to the container, what would keep the bacteria alive? Well… I’m guessing that in the absence of paper, they feed on the milk itself, since it has been nearly 6 months since the expiration date and there has still been no spoilage or molding of the milk. A few months ago I noticed that when I tried to use the buttermilk (I use it only occasionally) that it had separated and I was getting out something that looked like 2% milk, and also something that looked like cottage cheese. That annoyed me about the plastic container and I decided that I would never use another one. Today I used more buttermilk (in making corn bread) and I decided to gently swirl the carton and sort of “fold” the curds and whey back together. It seemed to work out nicely as I had nice thick milk, almost like a yogurt, to work with. I smelled the milk, it was still fresh, quite a pleasant surprise because if I had the milk in the cardboard container, it would likely smell like the refrigerator, which in case you haven’t heard, is not exactly good eats.

So now I am faced with a dilemma, to get more buttermilk that is in cardboard and not have to worry about the container causing separation, or go with plastic and have buttermilk that I know will never truly go bad? I am having a hard time deciding and have a hard time discussing it with people, especially people who eat what I cook, as it tends to gross them out to think about the fact that I use buttermilk that is so old. I guess they don’t get the concept of aging. Buttermilk to me does not have the real buttermilk taste until it has been out of date by at least a few weeks. It tastes… dead.

Life Sucks When You Are Unaccomplished

Like sucks when you are unaccomplished. I have for a long time been easily depressed by my own inadequacies when compared to other people, at some point recently I got over that and am no longer worried about how I compare to other people, because if I spend all of my time trying to develop into the type of person that I happen to be focused on at any particular moment, I will never develop into my own person. I take to jealousy easily still, but I try to not let it bother me too much. My concerns at the moment are related to the fact that I feel unaccomplished by my own standards. I feel that I should have accepted a passion in life at this point and that I should be running toward it, but it seems that as soon as I open myself up to let one of these passions in to be “the one” I begin to experience self-doubt and have anxiety over the idea and find numerous reasons for why that particular passion isn’t valid in my life. I love photography and I desperately wish to pursue it as a career, but yet I am working on a degree in Psychology. Why is this? Shouldn’t I be in a degree track for Art, or perhaps even Journalism? Or do I follow Psychology for another reason? Will learning to understand people help me become a better photographer? I can’t say for sure, but I am going with the degree because it feels right and I should really finish off this whole degree thing so I can move on to bigger things. My difficulty comes from my inability to function completely independently, but yet my resistance to following any type of leadership blindly. In my life I have acquired a lot of knowledge, some of it contradictory to itself, but all of it relevant to a successful life. I have experience in computer science, arts, psychology and a number of other areas, why can I not figure out what works best for me? I hate this feeling that I should constantly be changing things. I want to set out on one course in life and make it work. I want to be a photographer and I want to finish my psychology degree. That is who I want to be. There are other traits I wish to have, but none relevant to the central goal.

I’m not sure I entirely understand this post myself, but I feel like I need clarity in my life. I have a direction I want to go, I have focus for it, but I feel like I am lacking a compass to find the direction I wish to point. Perhaps the answer is in more education? Perhaps not.

Not Going to Take It Anymore

For a while now I have used Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client. I was happy with it, and then my friend urged me to try the betas of version 3, cause it was so much better. That may have been true for version 3, beta 3, but now I find myself hating beta 4. Apparently I have done something uber wrong with my configuration, because every five minutes I turn around and the damn thing is trying to index, or make my mail available offline. Those are not things that I want. I have turned the features off numerous times, but somehow they keep coming back, so thus the name of the post, I’m not going to take it anymore. I will probably end up regretting it, but I am switching to Microsoft Outlook 2007 for now. I say “for now” because I do not think it will be a long-term replacement. It’s sort of like when I was playing with Alpine/Pine, it was just to be different for a little while, so that I can actually appreciate the fact that there really are no good mail clients in the world and that I should just pick the one that annoys me the least, which is Thunderbird. It sucks and is slow, and tries to think too much, but at least it has a UI. That being said, I really much escape from Mozilla’s Thunderbird product before I begin waking up every morning and dreading the concept of checking mail because I hate my client. Worst part of it is, in my present situation, every time I have a problem with my client I get yelled at because it has to be something that I did wrong. There can’t possibly be anything wrong with a Mozilla product, not even in beta, so I must be the complete moron who has managed to break such a strong piece of software. I don’t take that shit for any product, no matter who writes it.

P365: Day 45

Day 45
This is part of a tree that fell many months ago during a thunderstorm. It most likely was struck my lightning (since this is the trunk and the rest of it was about 20ft away). I thought the striations of the wood, caused by the quick breaking is very interesting. I had not considered photoing it until today.

P365: Day 44

Day 44
Portrait of David. If you can’t find any other willing subjects and you are lost on ideas, go for a portrait, of your nearest inanimate gifted male.