Dear God, like I needed anything else to waste time with. . . . but someone on IB linked to SuDoKu, and it sounded interesting, and it totally is. Well, if you like weird little logic puzzles.  Apparently out there in the great beyond, they print these in the paper!  I’ve never really been into crosswords, but I do like the Jumble and Scrabble games (and will race Andy on Jumble if given the opportunity, we are both really quick at that type of thing so it’s always like "Dirge! Fetish! Loins!" and then we struggle with the punnery a little more, simply because it’s never really funny.)  Anyway. Highly amusing little puzzle.  I’ve been using it with the help option at times, completing a bunch of squares and/or lines and checking my work, which has led to lots of wondering how different personalities would try to solve the puzzle. Are there people working within the cubes only? Or in lines? Anyway, it’s pretty neat.

In iBook news, I really noticed a difference in the new iBook (G4, 1.33mhz, 512mb RAM) compared to the old (G3, 500 MHZ, 320 RAM) when I was uploading images to iPhoto and subsequently batch processing them in PSE3.  I had 222 pics (I never reformatted after I downloaded my NYC pics, plus all the others I’ve taken this summer) and what would have taken a good half hour to do, took less than 10 minutes, tops.  I had the images up in maybe 5-7 minutes? And the batch processing was painless, I would say 3-4 minutes from choosing the images and setting up the new folder to completion of 10 pics.  Very cool. It makes me want to empty my card more frequently, and do some more with PSE3.  I mostly use Elements for batch processing and basic editing (cropping, adjusting color, etc) because it was such a memory hog — it often took 2 or 3 tries to even get it to OPEN.  Now that I have MORE MEMORY, it’s much easier, and much more tempting.

Also, I just did a massive organization of our product manuals and warranty cards and such.  We’ve been stashing them ALL in a drawer in the kitchen, and I just organized them by room: Kitchen, Living Room, Basement, Upstairs, and Garage.  Each stash was put in it’s own ziploc bag and labeled, and tossed back in the manual-drawer. Very proud of that.  ANyway, while I was doing that, I came across all the info for my camera, and it included, holy hell, a remote!  I have been DYING to do long exposures and practice with that, but the shutter button doesn’t have threads for an old-school shutter release cable, and with long exposures, the tiniest motion fucks it up.  I took the remote and camera out and did a few test shots in the dark, and it looks so cool! I need to dig up my tripod and hit the streets.  Very exciting.