Michael R. Barrick's blog

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Today is Chinese New Year's day today, and it's happy shoe day for me. On January 3rd I ordered a pair of classic winklepickers from The Gothic Shoe Company of Essex, England, and they arrived today. These are hand-made shoes so the five weeks for delivery is not just the shipping from the UK to this, the western fringe of the old Empire, but the time to make them to order. Because they are made to order they will do custom work, but for a first order I chose to go with an "off the rack" and simple style.

I shot an event at work yesterday and just now was feeling kind of guilty about the number of pictures that I was happy with–"only" thirty. So right now I am reminding myself of the days when shooting was done in batches of 24 or 36 and I felt lucky if there were 3 or 4 "keepers" per roll. Getting 30 decent photos of an event is enough. Why do I feel compelled to produce hundreds of photos every time I shoot, especially when all I really need is one or two really good ones? Guh.

It bugs me when Chinese New Year is called "Lunar New Year" (as the City of Vancouver is wont to do). Areas with large populations of Chinese ex-pats follow lock-step with the timing as it applies to the Chinese time zone, so calling it "Chinese New Year" is wholly appropriate. In the smattering of countries that officially use the exact mechanism of Chinese calendar outside of China occasionally the day for the beginning of the year is different because local time causes the first new moon after the winter solstice to fall on a different day.

Once again I dabbled into the insufferable realm of actually thinking I could get what I asked for from one of the giant telecoms. 

I have an old phablet that I use strictly as a tablet. I don't want or need a phone, but there are no true tablets that meet the "fits in my coat pocket" criteria that makes the device something useful I can carry around all the time. I've been using it for several years now without a valid SIM card, just using WiFi. 

So a well-meaning friend shared a post from one of those "kemikuls r bad / big-pharma keeps us sick for profit / magical diluted fairy water cures cancer" type pages, which in turn was a link from a similarly themed website. The link was to an article titled "3-Ingredient Natural Grout and Tile Cleaner – keeps tiles spotless & grime-free without chemicals" and was presented on the page along with this caption: