HIT THE ROAD, JACK

Originally published on February 12, 1997

Susanne was a pretentious whiny mess, but I tell you what, Jack always finds a way to look really stupid and callous in the way he treats his relationships. But then again, this is me talking, and after 40 years of loving everybody with a howdy doo I now seem to find everybody a miserable waste of life force, especially those who go by the name of friend. Kerouac debatably wrote the first great modern friendship story. I must be writing the story of what a gross clusterfuck friendship can really turn out to be...

Sorry Jack didn't work out. He simply doesn't care beyond the next energy burst. He's always just an upbeat away from another potential friend, that easy touch. Having nothing and doing nothing seems to present him with that advantage. I think Jesus said something to that effect. But Jack rides the great dragon of lies. He tells an outrageous lie when a simple truth would get him closer to his mark than the fiction ever could, but, hey, that's Jack's security blanket it seems. Lie until it hurts, and then make up new ones. I've known him a decade now, and oh well...

Been working with Photoshop Actions batching routines today. WOW! What a wonderful feature. I can convert whole folders of say, a hundred TIFF grayscale graphics into JPGs, add a tint, resize, blur to smooth out edges, and save at a certain resolution, ALL BY FIRST HAVING PHOTOSHOP RECORD MY ACTIONS DURING ONE, and then executing for all the others. To watch one's computer open up files, add tints, resize, save into specified folder, close, and then open the next one is simply what power computing is all about!!! Then I simply grab that folder, and drop it onto a namechanging shareware program I recently picked up and it will standardize all the filenames—operations that I used to spend hours, days, even weeks hardclicking now accomplished in minutes. Sweet Macintosh!

GT