Monochromatic Outlook

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Steven M Scotten

When you focus upon a star…

I took the binoculars out into the yard tonight for some planetary observation. Following my father’s advice [https://splicer.com/2012/05/08/venerean-phases/#comment-2616], I focused the binoculars on a star before looking at Venus and despite the difficulty getting the image to stay still I could make

What's the price of a signature?

Last night I made a late night run to the grocery store and was surprised to see a woman with a clipboard by the front entrance asking people coming in and out to sign some form of petition. It’s not uncommon to see this at Safeway; the entrance is

Venerean phases

Venus has been very bright in the evening sky lately, as you may have already noticed. A friend of mine [http://erikmiller.members.sonic.net/blog/] was playing with an astronomy program on his iPod Touch while we were walking the other evening and asked what «that bright star» was.

Getting things started

Getting things started

For years I’ve been a fan of the first suggested practice in Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way [[amazon 1585421464 detailpageurl]] program: morning pages. The suggestion is to do three pages of automatic writing (writing without stopping to think) the very first thing every morning. I’ve gone through

Where to live

Here’s my recommended where-to-live list from http://www.FindYourSpot.com [http://www.findyourspot.com/]‘s quiz. Some surprises, others not surprising at all. The questionnaire was thorough without being tedious. My compliments to the developers of the site. I’m very curious about the business model, but that’s

Photoshop scratch, system swap, and solid state

The first rule of Photoshop club is: don’t let Photoshop use the system disk as a scratch disk. It’s a good rule of thumb and it has helped many people get much better performance from their Photoshop systems. It’s helped even more people think they were getting

What bowl?

A few days ago on my way out of the bank after making a deposit for a client (not the sort of thing I usually do, but if it helps the checks clear it’s time well spent) the branch manager (an overly friendly man, but that’s preferable to