Mid-month Update

Microstock has not been good to me this month. I have had a total of two sales for a total of 50 cents. Pitiful. True, I haven't uploaded anything in a month, but still, that's awful.
Things are looking up on the job front. I had two interviews last week and another one scheduled for next Monday. Hopefully, something comes of it. All three of them will be significant pay cuts from my previous job, but better than unemployment. I'll have to make up the difference some other way. I wish it could be through photography, but that's not happening.
Here's another HDR picture from my parents' backyard. Numerous dust spots showed up. I'm talking about 20 or more. If I ever get the cash for a new camera, it has to have sensor cleaning.

Book List

Recently, I've finished a few more books as I'm trying to cut back on TV and read more.
Finally finished listening to His Excellency. Good for getting to know more about the personality of George Washington, but the author seemed to gloss over the Revolutionary War.
Also read another book from that time period called, Financial Founding Fathers. After reading those two books and having read Alexander Hamilton a few years ago, I'm getting the impression that Thomas Jefferson was not exactly an honorable man. He would do well in today's politics.
Wanting to bolster my grammar skills, I also read Sleeping Dogs Don't Lay. Hopefully it shows up in my writing.
Currently, I'm reading The Steel Wave, a historical novel about World War II based on interviews with veterans. The author and his father had also written books in the same way about the Civil War. His father wrote the best of the three called Killer Angels.

Microstock

Thngs have picked up a little bit with my sales. Shutterstock had my best month since last September, but it's far from best month ever. It helped that I uploaded a ton of new phots this month, though only a few of them sold. The sales came from older photos, some that had rarely been downloaded before. I'm just short of another payout. Now I'll have to wait until August, assuming that I can sell five dollars worth this month.
Dreamstime was the big earner this month and by far the best ever for that agency.
I had a measly two downloads at 123RF.

Unintended Pun

Me: In Twilight, you know if they are hitting the ball so hard that they have to play in thunderstorms to mask the sound, the bat is going to break.
Wife: Not if they are using special vampire bats.
Me: Har, har. Vampire bats.
Wife (realizing what she had said): Oh, yeah. Vampire bats.

Fluid Pricing

I just read an article where it talked about how Coca-Cola tried to implement thermometer-loaded vending machines that would charge more for a cold drink as the temperature rose. Seems like a smart idea in theory, increasing the price point as the demand curve shifts right, which works great for an inelastic prodcut. I would hate it though as a customer. When you go to a vending machine, you expect certain prices and you expect them to remain stable, especially if it's a machine you frequent often. You don't want to think you have just enough change to get a drink and then find it's not enough. Problems might arise with the technology itself; where's the thermometer located in the machine and where is the machine itself located. These could determine if the temperature is accurate. Sales would be lost if the machine was charging a high price because it thought the temperature rose to 110 when really it's only 85 all because the machine was placed in direct sun next to other heat-emitting equipment or a reflective surface.

Someone was kind enough to give me a legal copy of the full version of Photomatix software, so now I can do HDR. I like HDR when it looks close to real. Sometimes people go overboard with it.
Here's is an HDR attempt from a hike in Southern Utah.

Here are the source photos.

Lost Finale

So, the only reason that Locke thought he had to die, and told Ben that he had to die, was because Impostor Locke told Richard to tell Locke that he had to die, so that he could come back as his replacement. But the impostor knew everything about Locke and the exact time and place to meet the wounded, time-traveling Locke, and knew that the door was from the hatch where Locke and Ben first met. So the impostor is not only ageless, but also omniscient like Jacob. And since Jacob is all-knowing, and recognized the impostor right away, he had to know that Ben was going to kill him and let it happen anyway, kind of like Obi-wan. In fact he egged Ben on with his response to Ben about why he never got to see him.
Jacob knew where to find all of the future island inhabitants right at a moment of great conflict and help them out a little, maybe thereby selecting them as the future inhabitants, except he didn't see Hurley and Sayid until after they had come back from the island. Did he also go see the other future crash survivors like Charlie? He also went to that Bosnian or Croatian woman in the hospital and told her he needed her help, so I'm guessing he knew that his old buddy was coming back to the island.
What's the loophole? I'm guessing it is that only a leader or former leader could kill Jacob. So by pretending to be Locke, he was now the leader or maybe he just needed Ben since he was a deposed leader. And if the impostor is the same guy from the 1700's or 1800's at the beginning of the show, shouldn't he have known that Jacob lived at the statue?
When Ben was in the temple and the island took the form of Alex and told him not to kill Locke and to do what he said, the island had to have known that it wasn't the real Locke, so maybe the island was for getting rid of Jacob as well.
In the training videos, the scientist guy had a fake arm in some of the videos, so now we know how he lost his arm. But that would mean that despite blowing up the nuke, everything goes on as before, I guess. Also, if originally they had hit the pocket and caused the problem, how were they able to ever build the Swan on top of it?

Burnt Garlic or Cigarettes

My wife was cooking in the wok yesterday and burned some garlic which produced a nostalgic smell of my time in Slovenia. It reminded me of the hallways of the many apartment buildings we visited. I had always associated that smell as a combination of old cigarette smoke, but maybe they just cooked a lot of garlic. Actually, it probably was a combination of the foods, the smoke and unventilated old concrete hallways.
You could always tell where the heavy smokers lived because the doors would have yellow edges where the smoke would escape. Sometimes the smokers had yellow hair right above their foreheads because they would only wash their hair once a week and the smoke would stain their hair.