July 25, 2010 - Breakfast

It's a pleasure to have the new camera, and even more the RAW processor software that lets me manipulate the pixels as the camera sees them, without the interleaving of JPEG compression. There is so much information that was hidden before, and now I get to see more than I used to. Of course, the new, close look, the many pixels, reveals horrors: dust on the floor in sharp relief, pores like moon craters, surfaces impregnated with cat hair, yellow teeth. Eventually I'll learn to make things pretty but for right now each hair on my weekend's-worth of beard growth is clear, sometimes gray, and fringed with sensor dust, so that I seem to be farming facial pinworms.

This is a problem with every new technology--there was concern with high-def television, for example, which revealed celebrity skin to be less smooth than we expected. Cell phones reveal us to be lonely, scared creatures, always pecking and talking; early video games were correlated to the obsessive tendencies of adolescence.

Given a new drug we spend our time high. Some people never get over that original pleasure; they text-message until their thumbs bleed, or purchase cameras with greater sensors and infinite pixels; others become chemists, learning to hack at the intricacies of the system; most of us, of course, get only a certain amount of pleasure out of a thing and worry about spending too much for it, whether time or money. I am certainly of the compulsive variety, a shift-reload kind of guy, although I've learned that when I'm fussing and infinitely modifying config files it's because I lack for projects, and should go look for one.

Weight: 306.5 lbs