2001-02-20 - 04:48 p.m.

Obsession

I have a fundamentally obsessive personality.

I like to do one thing at a time, finish the thing, and then move on to another thing. Stopping the thing before I finish irritates me. Ideally each thing ought to be finished in such a final and incontrovertable way that it will never even cross my mind again.

Obviously that standard is unrealistic, but it explains most of the weird things I do. Most recently I've been farting around with Photoshop, and my unnecessary persistence therein gave me the idea for this entry.

Marc paints minis commercially. He wanted to get some pictures of his work on-line, and since I have a swanky digital camera, he asked me to help out. Once we got started, he basically wanted to line 'em up, take their pictures, and go. (He probably wanted that because it was after 1:30am.) I wanted to sit there and monkey with the lights, the exposure settings, the backdrop, and whatever else we could twiddle. The histogram wasn't looking good, I wasn't sure that I was getting the focus quite right, and whatever else I could think of. In the end neither of us was satisfied- we were there until 2:30 and the pictures weren't quite right. The histogram really didn't look good.

So over the weekend I was a total Photoshop slut, trying all sorts of tricks to beat the image levels into submission. After that, I had to try to fix the backdrop. Fixing the backdrop screwed with the levels. Eek! Eventually I got it... then I started working on ImageReady's rollover support. Feh. Now that I have solved the Photoshop problems, I'm about to start learning to use Campaign Cartographer II.

Before Photoshop, my big thing was the two database projects I worked on. One of them was useful but not crucial. The other was frivolous. But I worked on them with somewhat more vigor than I apply to my more important work. After all, my current job involves endless chasing after people hoping they'll cooperate, while these side projects involved solveable problems. You can see which one interested me more.

I'd feel bad about that, but it's all part of the tradeoff. I got into the computer trade in the first place because I was obsessed with doing cool stuff on the Mac IIsi that my parents bought me for school. Eventually I knew enough about Macs to get a job at 4-HELP at Umich, and it was all downhill from there. I worked a lot of really late nights to get my skills up to spec. Even today, when an actual problem comes across my desk, I pounce on it like Alix on a baby squirrel. So I don't feel *real* bad about occassionally focusing on trivial stuff. I just wish they'd make the nontrivial stuff more rewarding to work on.

Also, I want a personal jet and $1.5 million a year. If you're going to make implausible demands, don't sell them short.

Previous entry: Why I Hate Diane Feinstein

Next entry: My Central Kicks in Literature