The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 329): Lunch And Errands

I made #1GF! breakfast and then went out to lunch after showing the progress on the house to a couple of her friends. After lunch #1GF! and I drove around town with nowhere to go, and I got a good talking to because my attitude was low for no good reason. Sometimes, you need people you trust to snap you out of things by telling you what’s what. We went to the local home store to look at paint, and then came home to watch The Dewey Cox Story, which surprisingly, sucked badly enough that it got shut off before the halfway point.

Monday (Day 330): Drowning By Dumbness In Foodness

After #1GF! left, I watched How It’s Made all morning. After four or five episodes, I found myself aggravated because I hadn’t learned a damned thing. Everything they show is made by machine, so if you asked me to explain how any of the items on any of the shows were made, I couldn’t tell you beyond, “a bunch of junk goes into a machine and stuff comes out”. Because the machine is usually a huge black box in the process, it seems like you’re learning something, but you’re not. What I really would like is if the show was called How To Make Things instead of How Things Are Made.

The rest of the day was spent writing my hybrid vs. non-hybrid car comparison, which had unexpected results. I thought that hybrids were bought to save money on gas, but I guess not. I drowned my disappointment in one of my favorite dinners that is made up of leeks, apple-smoked bacon, parsley, pasta, parmesan cheese, and eggs. One day, I will post the recipe because it’s one of the few recipes that I have successfully cooked from Bon Apetit, and it’s just too awesome not to share.

Tuesday (Day 331): Learning to Ruin Women’s Self-Esteem

I got on the PC early to gather more stats for my hybrid article in between making calls to the contractor and kitchen people. When I ran out of steam writing, I tried to improve my skills at photo retouching by attempting small things like changing weight, hair, and eye color of a photograph of a plus sized model I found on the web. I wanted to know how the magazine people craft their lies, and that seemed like a good place to start. Most of the time was spent figuring out how to do things when I should’ve been scouring Google for tutorials. It’s not like photoshopping is a new art.

I was lucky enough to notice the time and get a couple of quiches ready just in time for #1GF! to get home. I think one was sausage, spinach and garlic, and the other was sausage, peppers, and onions. They weren’t the best that I’ve made but they did the trick. You’d think that having dinner timed perfectly would be something I’d be able to do after so many months off, but I’m still a computer guy. Sit me in front of a PC, and the possibilities open up and the real world fades into the background.

Wednesday (Day 332): Cleaning, Fixing, And Sorting

Before I even got in the shower, I had swapped out my old Zone Alarm firewall for Comodo Pro and fixed our DVR’s scheduling issue. Because GBPVR (our DVR software) is free, you have to use open-source schedulers to get your TV schedule information. Last November one of the main schedulers closed up shop and we had to switch over to a manual Perl-based solution to get it working again. We got used to the process and never checked to see if the issue was resolved. We’ll see in the coming weeks, but our TV schedule should be automated once again.

Because I was on a roll, I sifted through my old books and games to try to figure out what I could get rid of and how I could get rid of it. I checked Amazon, e-bay, and Craigslist, but they all seem like they’re a lot of trouble to go through to make some small cash for leftover stuff. Maybe I’ll just donate it all to a charity rather than deal with it. If I only had a yard to have a yard sale in…

Once #1GF! got off to work, I finished my hybrid article, wrote half of the final FineTune Friday post ever, rewrote a Perl script that wasn’t mining the web to my satisfaction, and continued my attempt at photo retouching. It really was a great day because there were a lot of minor wins, and once #1GF! got home, we had enough leftovers to avoid cooking dinner.

Thursday (Day 333): Family Support

After answering a few technical e-mails and downloading some new GIMP brushes to play with, I spent a fair amount of time looking up information to answer some of the questions people had about my hybrid vs. non-hybrid post. I probably spent more time than I should’ve, but I really felt like it was something that I should do.

Around noon, #1GF! came home due to a family emergency, and we went over to her Mom’s house. We picked up subs and coffee, but plans kept changing, so we ended up sitting around her Mom’s house for the day.

I read Bon Apetit simply to pick apart the ads, and What Color Is Your Parachute to pick apart my life. While I sat on the couch and read, I found a Roberto Coin ad that featured a girl laying on her back with a low cut dress (pic here). It would have been just like any other ad except for the prominent Youth AIDS logo at the bottom. Maybe I’m getting old, but it seemed inappropriate to use sex to sell things on the same page with a logo that deals with a potentially deadly sexually transmitted disease.

I wasn’t being particularly entertaining, so #1GF! and her Mom decided to play Uno. Thanks to cheating, name calling, and a fair amount of hollering, I will now be sure to carry a pack of Uno cards whenever they’re supposed to see each other. I kept having to stand up and find out what was going on thanks to the noise level, and I have never been so amused watching two people play cards.

Thankfully, everything with the emergency worked out ok, so we ordered a pizza and picked it up before 8 PM. We order the same thing every week, so the woman at the shop pretty much knows what I’m coming in for. She asks what I’m getting more as a confirmation than a question. I spent the rest of the night finishing up my FTF post while #1GF! dozed on the couch.

Friday (Day 334): Copying Ads

I made some calls in the morning, but most of the day was spent trying to copy advertisements that I had ripped out of magazines to learn how they’re made. I couldn’t get them to look exactly like the ads because I didn’t have the right textures, but it didn’t bother me because I learned a few things along the way.

One was this: Don’t use a screwdriver to pound nails. Inkscape is a drawing tool. GIMP is an editing tool. Draw in Inkscape, and edit in the GIMP. When you try to make the programs into something they’re not, you’ll just end up frustrated.

The other is: Sometimes, things look better with a little bling.

I seriously spent the whole day just learning how to do things in GIMP and Inkscape, and when I needed a break, I would go over to Finetune and work on a classic country playlist that I’ve been trying to put together for a while. I have to say that this was a really enjoyable day.

Saturday (Day 335): Wrestlers(?) And Sketchup

In the morning, we went out to find some granite, making it to three warehouses before noon. Unfortunately, we struck out, with one warehouse not even carrying the type of stone we were looking for. The warehouses close up by noon, so we headed over to Newcomb Farms for lunch. #1GF! drove to a breakfast place that she swore used to be Newcomb Farms, but I wasn’t buying anything off of the malarkey truck that morning.

Because I had been there just last week, I knew that Newcomb was across the street from a landscaping company, and unless everyone had suddenly decided to put bars on their windows overnight, we were not at the right place. I made her turn around and take me to the real Newcomb Farms. The place was unusually packed for 2PM, and there was a guy in there with such a cartoonish mustache, goatee and eyebrow combination that I thought he had to be a famous wrestler or something. I never asked, but the facts that he used his eyebrows as an extension of his facial hair and drove off with another giant guy in a BMW 740, say my fame hunch was right.

After eating breakfast for lunch (always fun), we went home and #1GF! picked out paint colors on the web while I ripped ads out of magazines to use as graphic design inspiration. I made the mistake of saying, “Why don’t I just load the Google Sketchup model of our house and you can paint it any color you want.” When #GF! agreed, I realized that I only had planning stage versions of the house, and didn’t actually have a model of the way the house really is.

After spending an hour trying to modify some of my old models, I scrapped what I had, and built the house from scratch. I completely lost track of time and ended up finishing around 9 PM with a solid model to show #1GF!. By the time she was done playing with the colors, it was around midnight and we were no closer to a solution than when we started. We did have a fairly neat model, though, which I took as a consolation prize.

What I Learned

• GIMP for editing, Inkscape for drawing.
• How Things Are Made is a waste of my time when the product is machine made.
• There is some good graphic design practice and inspiration in the pages of even the crappiest magazines.
• When a graphic designer makes bubbles and the shine on a few of the bubbles is opposite of the rest, it drives me crazy. A group of bubbles will reflect from a light source uniformly. Single bubbles don’t have the ability to resist light sources that are affecting their peers.
• I’m finding that there is a lot of inspiration in the everyday world if you attempt to deconstruct a scene into it’s parts for the purpose of reproducing it graphically. Things that I don’t typically notice, such as rusty sheet metal or simple concrete, can have me staring at them for several minutes. I realized that I must look as if there were something wrong with me when staring at a piece of concrete, but I’m not crazy or on drugs. My brain is simply hard at work.
• #1GF! and her mom play the funniest game of Uno that I’ve ever seen.
• Learned more about photo manipulation of people with the GIMP.

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