There are smurfs in my camera shop

Being a camera snob ain't easy. For example, I bought a circular polarizer at Glazer's last weekend. I bought the cheap one but wasn't satisfied with it when I got home, so I'll be trading it in for the expensive B+W version. It costs $100 more but I know I won't think twice about it. In photography, confidence in your gear comes above all.

As long as I'm planning a trip to the camera store, I thought I would check their web site for some other accessories I'm interested in buying, only to discover:

A) They don't have an item I want, and
B) The store is infested by smurfs (click the image for a larger view).


You'd think that as a camera store they could come up with better example products in the helpful text. Maybe "lens and filter", or "tripod and head". I'm going to walk in there this week and ask them for a smurf, just to prove the point. (Yes, I realize that this was probably the result of a web designer who likes smurfs but doesn't know cameras. Appriopriate feedback to the user is important, though in the context of web design I'll leave this in the hands of my lovely and talented wife to discourse.)

Flip the switch

No, I don't hate you. No, you didn't make me mad. No, no, no, it's not your fault at all. I haven't been writing because, well, let me explain.

First, I don't feel that writing a blog has a lot of value for me right now. Since I'm not standing on any particular soapbox, this blog has functioned mostly as a personal journal. That's well and good but I've become tired of writing about myself. I have considered shifting gears and using this or another blog to speak on topics more professional and less personal, but that's a new project with a different set of implications.

Second, the standard reason: I've been busy. Not wildly, where-did-my-free-time-go busy, just a shift in priorities that puts writing a journal at the bottom of my to-do list.

Those two very good reasons aside, I know that I occasionally get visitors here, so I'll give you a quick update on what's been occupying my time and why I even bothered to update this journal at all.

To start, I've got a new job. I'm still at Adobe, but after 12 years of experience in customer support I am now in the business of producing products instead of supporting them. I transferred to the After Effects Quality Engineering team. After Effects is an application that I know very very well, and I'm proud to be a member of a concentrated, highly regarded group that produces a widely used and highly regarded product. My role is more or less that of a software tester- as the software developers make changes to the code, I test the product to make sure it behaves correctly (doesn't give errors, or crash, pass gas, or talk on a cell phone in a movie theater). There's a few perks of being on a team like this, but I'll bore you with details some other day. It's a big change for me, and there are a lot of new things to learn. It's a good step for my career and frees me from the constraints in tech support that had been bothering me.

Actually, there's not much more to tell. The job is what has been keeping me busy lately. There have been some other activities- drove down to Portland a couple of times, my soccer team played in the division championship game, I bought some new camera accessories, petted the cats a lot, and struggled to keep my lemon tree alive after foolishly putting it outside the day before a massive Spring rainstorm. But I'm not gonna blab on all day about myself. Let's find something new to talk about.