What Fresh Hell is This? | Life on the Left Coast

No, this blog post title does not refer to recent earthquakes, refugee nightmares or the current federal election campaign, although all of those would qualify for sure. Nor do I refer to the jawdropping news that National Geographic Magazine has been purchased by Fox Media. And not even the revelation that Volkswagon deliberately and fraudulently installed software on 11 million Volkswagon diesel cars that would recognize when the vehicle was undergoing emission testing and would show low emissions during the test and would revert to high performance mode when driven normally. In reality these vehicles were emitting 40x the regulated amount of nitrogen oxide through their tailpipes into the air we breathe. By deliberately falsifying emission testing results (and getting caught) not only did they lie to everybody and illegally cause further air pollution, they have wrecked the diesel car market in North America AND have no doubt destroyed any resale value OUR own Volkswagon diesel station wagon may have had.

No, I refer instead to one of my less than exciting latest projects, the conversion of my photography software. My own private software hell on earth.

I had written earlier of Apple’s decision to discontinue support of its Aperture photo managing and editing software that I have been using happily for a number of years, so I won’t go into what a bunch of disappointing scumbags there are. Hey, one has to move on, no? So this summer I downloaded some free trials of other possible photo software, to take them for a test drive to decide what I’ll use to replace Aperture. Some are going in the same direction as Apple is – a focus on what I call “sync sync sync, share share share”. Those are off the short list. I don’t sync (let’s call a cloud a spade, shall we – storing your stuff on some corporation’s computer, somewhere, someplace). And I don’t do social media (too noisy) so the built in ‘ease’ of uploading photos here and there leaves me cold. That’s not what I want. No, what I need is something robust to manage workflow, store lots and lots of photos in some kind of database, and manipulate and edit images.

I finally chose Lightroom. So now all there is to do is…learn how to use it. At the same time, I made the possibly dubious decision to upgrade my 5 year old MacBook Pro, which at a 75 cent dollar was painful enough even before making the transition. May as well have all my misery at once. Why spread it out.

Except – it is spread out. For many weeks now, I’ve been learning the software and transitioning computers – on and off, mostly off. I hate doing this and I’m well out of the habit of doing anything I don’t want to. Meanwhile I feel the loss and the lack of my photography, images in different programs, on different computers, everything feeling in limbo. The whole file system has become a dog’s breakfast, and it’s hard to be creative when the bits and bytes have run amok.

So instead of just buckling down and getting it done, I have this past week particularly, become a master of procrastination. I said to myself “Self, this is the week to get on with it!” And Self replied, “Screw you, I don’t want to” and went on to read magazines on the iPad (free through the library), spend an entire morning watching videos on Laughing Squid, cook up big pots of Vij’s lamb curry and Ottolenghi’s barley risotto, spend a day in Nanaimo browsing art exhibits, used book- and used CD- stores, watch Perry Mason, read Lawrence Block mysteries, lie on the couch watching YouTube videos, draw, putter in the garden during rain shower breaks, pretend to clean up The Bunkie/Studio, write blog posts…

The thing about procrastination is that it doesn’t work, at least in this case it doesn’t. This is not going to go away by avoiding it. So I think I’ll have to take the advice of Winston Churchill, that master of the soundbite…