I’m not sure what it is exactly about December but to me it always seems like it’s on the cusp of break up time. Most people would think the opposite; maybe because Holidays bring a togetherness and so forth. I think it’s because right around that time you need to buy the person a Christmas gift you realize you don’t really want to spend money on them and maybe things aren’t as magical as they were when August hit and you had spent two months holding hands on the beach.

January to February can be tricky. If you’re seeking your perfect partner at this time just realize you’re likely a rebound and won’t make it past the big April dumping phase. Of course all those people meeting in April could be considered rebounders as well but it’s a whole new ball game here.

January sucks. It’s cold, miserable and grey. You’ll be doing everything right and if you’re a December rebound you’ll be lucky to make it to February 14th, if you do you’re surely dead in the water by mid April. My vast fictitious studies have shown that Valentines day has a Mini Christmas like effect that causes breakups for relationships that were never very serious. This is usually the ones that had recently started. Hello Rebounds your time has come.

May is when it really starts to heat up again though. Now that all the crappy months are behind us we venture out into the world again and realize: “holy shit my boyfriend/girlfriend is really boring compared to all these other people having fun with their lives!” We tend to ignore the fact that everyone has been inside hating on cold weather for the last 6 months. Also the temperature goes up, clothes start flying off and that person you’ve been lugging around since last summer, if you made it that far, is starting to stagnate in their looks.

No of course you’re not shallow like that, you’d never leave someone just because you found someone hotter. You’ll just find random things wrong with them until you work up enough reasons why it needs to be over. Being a May/June rebound is okay. With fantastic weather and a million events you can attend with your new partner it will be awhile before the other person catches on that the only reason you guys started seeing each other was because you were sorta hot and they needed a summer fling.

By mid June through the beginning of July you’d have to be horribly disfigured or a recluse to not find someone if you were trying. For the last two months the singles pool has been watching everyone else fall in love and really wants to play too. They’ve been third wheel more times than they want to think about and are just about ready to settle for anything coming by. Plus it’s really hot out and make believe research shows that makes people mildly retarded.

So here we are now approaching the current date. The cold death months. Two things happen in the next few weeks. Mass breakups and stick togethers. However this giant break up session does not bring on a new single market right away. The people who met in the beginning of summer may decide that they want this magic to continue and will stick it out, until Christmas time.

It appears that the single market does not start up again because we’ve had all the fun we needed for awhile in the summer and just want to spend the winter dicking around on the couch watching this season’s hottest new fall line up. The partial boost we see circling back up to december is you couch potatoes, having been lonely since August when you and your sweet pea went separate ways, want to reinvigorate.

Here and there you’ll find exceptions to the rule and also remember this applies only to the Midwest. I’m sure in places where it’s hot all year long and everyone has a billion dollars (Miami) it’s mating season forever. Just a big dark red circle of lust. You can try and prove me wrong in the coming months and attempt to find your soul mate during October but they’re probably too busy watching the latest episode of How I Met Your Mother to even notice you.

Others

The root of all choice problems can be identified with Subway. It’s their pointless and tedious sandwich creation system that has turned me into sounding like someone out of Ninteen Eighty-Four. Here’s what I’m talking about:

Ben: Hello Kind Sir, I would love to try your new Southwest Breakfast Sandwich that I have seen on my television. It looks positively delightful!

Subway Guy: Okay, what bread will you be having with this sandwich?

Wait, let’s pause for a second. Already the problem begins. What do you mean “what bread”? I want the bread on saw on TV. Why am I being asked this question? I suppose it’s semi legit since people are rather particular about their bread so we’ll go on.

Ben: I don’t know what options I have, how about just the one shown in the picture behind you.

Subway Guy: Okay, we will be having many kinds of bread… (proceed to rattle off 40,000 varieties of bread I didn’t even know were in existence)

Ben: That’s great, can I please have the bread in the picture behind you?

Subway Guy: Okay.

…

Subway Guy: What would you like to be having with this?

Ben: Umm, whatever comes on a Southwest Breakfast sandwich would be perfect please.

Subway Guy: Do you want peppers?

Ben: Is it supposed to have them!?

Subway Guy: You can put peppers on the sandwich.

Ben: Can you please just make this sandwich look like the sign behind you and what I’ve seen on TV?

Subway Guy: Would you be liking me to put onions on your sandwich?

Look subway, if I wanted to order my own sandwich from scratch I’d sit at home and probably make it myself. What is the point of naming any kind of sandwich if it’s not made from a specific list of ingredients? In the given situation I could say the name of almost any sandwich and walk out with a completely different one given my options.

Here’s subway’s real menu. Meatball, Philly Cheese Steak, A Sandwich, A Breakfast Sandwich.

Why complicate things by making me think you’re making me some kind of specially crafted sandwich if really the only thing I’m going to choose is what stupid meat I want on there.

Idea for Subway: Make your sandwiches to the recipe unless otherwise requested. For people who are not me and would like to customize their experience down to the leaf of lettuce continue to sell your most popular item “Sandwich.” Do not proceed to ask me how I would like my Buffalo Chicken sub created. I’m not a sandwich artist; I do not know. I would just like what I’ve seen on TV! Please understand because I’m a simple man.

Many people say they want choice but they really only think they do. If your choices are limited but the options are pretty good most people are happy. Want to argue that with me? Then answer this, do you own an iPhone yet?

Others

I didn’t ever expect them to write me back because who actually buys stamps these days when all your bills are paid online? Though I sort of expected some type of acknowledgment that I’ve mailed them. I thought “If I like getting stuff in the mail who wouldn’t?” At first I was a little bit worried because my boss had said “You’re going to what? No I don’t think they still sell stamps downstairs… Plus I’d think if any of my friends did that they would be weird.” At that time I just summed it up to jealousy that I wouldn’t  be writing him and he’d just be stuck receiving free magazines at work from all the tech conferences he attended. Sucker.

I sent quite a number of letters. Most pointless, all handwritten, but took the painstaking time to do it anyway. I only received feedback about my letters once and it was along the lines of:

Friend: Dude, did you send me a letter?
Ben: Yeah, while I was in Nashville at the airport waiting for my plane.
Friend: Did you have a little kid write it?
Ben: No, I wrote it myself.
Friend: Wow your handwriting is complete shit.

Ambition to write new friends is now effectively Zero. I’m fully aware my handwriting is bad. It’s a drunken version of JinkyA font in a land where capitalization DoEsn’T HaVe MeaNinG. On top of writing like an ESL first grade drop out it takes me about fifty-nine thousand seven hundred and forty-seven times longer to scribble out nonsense by hand than anyone else on this Earth. I’m the DSL of written word, the Slowskis would adopt me.

If you are one of my friends who did not receive a letter and are sitting there a little “wtf” right now, well, I’m sorry. I was getting around to you eventually but now it may be never. Since I’ve disclosed my dark mail sending secret I no longer really want to do it. All the fun is ruined because the fun never really came in the first place. This has potential to be a bigger failure then when I finally attempt to solo N’Sync’s Bye Bye Bye at Karaoke; dance movies included.

Others

The whole stolen iPhone prototype story, not boring. The whole thing can be summed up like this: Apple employee gets his phone stolen, it looks different than other iPhones, was locked so no one has any idea how it runs. Excuse me while I change my pants because that is absolutely riveting. Yet Gizmodo ran with that garbage for days and any site that wasn’t Gizmodo just talked about their iPhone discovery. As far as I can tell in the world of Technology the only other thing that happened this week was Facebook had some privacy control changes for the 800th time in the last 30 days.

4 out of 7 Articles are Apple Related

Stop being so lazy, find some real news.

Others

Missing Photos

I’ll keep this short. It might not ever happen to you, probably because you don’t use Adobe Lightroom. Recently I had to reformat and do a reinstall because I was clinging to the Windows 7 Beta for dear life never wanting to have to redo everything all over again. Unfortunately having the computer reset rather randomly every two hours or so got to be a little too much. After restoring all my files and checking to make sure my Library was all there life was good.

Today I fired up Lightroom to try and sort through the pile of trash known as My Photos and was presented with the above screen. It’s actually happened to me once before, the first time lent me to wasting two hours of my life dicking around on the internet not finding a solution. I backed up my library, restored it, repaired the catalog, reverted to an old version, nothing worked. Ultimately I was like “Hey what happens if I go back to Lightroom 2.4?” Well that worked.

So once again here I was presented with the missing photos that are actually there. I refuse to give into the 2.4 downgrade this time around. I mean, I know there are a hundredmillionkajillion other people using the proper version of Lightroom, so damn it, I will too. I tried my luck at Google again and finally came across something that helped. Thing is, shortly after redoing my computer, and verifying the photos in Lightroom I noticed the color profile for my monitor was off. Not enjoying a yellow tinged photo I picked a new profile to work under. Well apparently LR isn’t a big fan of WCS Device Profiles.

The fix is as simple as picking, or creating, a new ICC Profile and restarting Lightroom after applying it. Seems rather stupid Adobe couldn’t have thought of some type of warning system to tell me it’s not compatible rather than letting me guess at the problems but there you have it. Don’t use WCS profiles with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.

Others

Back when I first moved to Des Plaines in 2007 I started ordering groceries from PeaPod.com. It’s really not that much more expensive and I really think I should start doing it again. The produce is really nice. I started going back to the store again mainly because I wasn’t sure how to tip the delivery guy. Every time he would arrive I would have extreme anxiety about what was the right amount to tip; was I even supposed to tip? I was paying for delivery after all…

Tip or not the delivery man would always walk into my apartment set down the groceries and that’s when the gears started turning. I’d go to the web site and substitute my regular order of food consumables for 40 boxes of Trojan Condoms, 4 cases of beer and another 2 cases of water (just to make him do multiple trips back and forth to the truck).

Since the delivery times are fairly tight I would also arrange for half naked girls to be sprawled around the apartment. Hopefully they’d look all strung out. Upon entering my sanctuary I’d  instruct the delivery man to put my beer cases “over there with the other ones” which would just be a collection of the same beer with visible dust on the box because I obviously was not drinking any of it. Perhaps during this entire sequence of events I’d be dressed like a pirate or ninja, something bazaar. Answer the door as a Furry?

In a way I’d feel a little bad for the awkward situation I might be creating for this Peapod man. I do believe though that he wouldn’t realize it was a gag and just have a “crazy story” to share with his friends. It’s a win/win because I’d also have a possibly hilariously uncomfortable video from recording the whole thing.

eBay-Paypal-FaceBook
This one is easy and perfect. Go on eBay and sell some stuff, whatever you want, whatever you think a girl might purchase. College books would probably be a good bet. For maximum creeping and minimal investment you can buy used books and just turn around immediately and sell them. Chicks are into a lot of psychology and marketing, I’d start there.

Once your item is purchased and paid for with Paypal you will have that person’s name, address, email address and possibly even phone number. Use that information to look them up on Facebook.

Recent studies show that girls on Facebook actually really enjoy being personally contacted by people they would only consider vendors and being complimented on their looks. It doesn’t matter how many miles apart you and said female are make sure you unveil all your ideas behind relationships, marriage and your favorite scenes in Star Wars. Love knows no boundaries.

If it’s starting to seem like she’s not really digging this contact you’re not out of luck yet. Accidentally put some bank receipts showing your incredibly high checking account balance, because you have nowhere to go and spend it on, inside the front cover of the book. Once she gets the book and realizes you’re loaded things will surely turn around.

Between this and Craigslist I’d say it’s how I’ve met 95% of the girls I’ve dated.

Start a FlickR Account
Maybe you weren’t aware but there is a world of people just like you out there who have an extreme fetish for women’s ankles and perfect elbows. So what next? I wish I could take all the credit for the genius in this idea but unfortunately  I stole this master plan from some other freaky dude who left comments on a picture for me once.

First create a FlickR account if you don’t have one already. Use an alias that is similar to what your interests are in my pretend scenario I’ll use the name “AnkleBoi69″. Make sure if you post any photos to mark them private, this way when people visit your page they won’t know what you’re actually uploading. Type in your favorite fetish words into Flickr’s group finder join the groups that might interest you.

Next comes the more difficult part. You’ll need to scour FlickR for people who aren’t already posting photos in your group and can relate to your interests. Once you’ve found these photos make sure to comment on the “sexy ankels” or “beautiful thumbs” whatever does it for you. If you’re the admin of a fetish FlickR group, invite them to share their photo there. When the person clicks on your name to find out more about you they won’t see any photos but they’ll get a glimpse at all the really sweet groups you belong to.

Post Stalk on Facebook
After you’ve friended a bunch of people you barely know on Facebook make sure you religiously hit F5 and look for their posts. The second something new comes out, comment on how hot the girl looks, or how awesome her post was. Do this for every post, if they don’t respond, do it more.

Write on their wall like you guys are old chaps, talk about things that happened three years ago the one time you met them like it was yesterday; “LOL remember when Jack spilled the beer on himself LOL THAT WAS SO FUNNY!” Talk about how you guys need to catch up on old times, constantly.

So next month a date has been set for our next trip. If you aren’t already aware James and I have created a Random Trip travel type thing… let’s call it a game. During our travels we perform a variety of tasks. Last time we came up with them, this time we’d like everyone else to, then vote on the best ones. Please avoid getting us arrested for any felonies with your genius.

Each idea can be performed by both James or Myself and everyone will be able to vote on who did it better; we’re real good about documenting the scenes with photo/video.

Due to not finding a better way to integrate this you’ll just have to use this link to vote and submit new ideas.

Seeing as how I didn’t get much in the way of “Thank you Ben you’re the best!” after my last photography related write up I figured it must just be because you didn’t have the camera yet. I’d say at least three to four times a year someone asks me “Hey, I need a good camera, you take nice photos what should I buy?” Because of this I’ve felt the need to first clarify a few things about digital cameras for you then maybe give you some sweet knowledge you can use to make your own purchasing decision some day.

X Optical Zoom
Thankfully a lot of people out there have learned that digital zoom is worthless, degrades photos and overall just a gimmick. Actually it seems like that’s one of the only things people know because they constantly feel they need to give me that tidbit from their photo knowledge arsenal “Yeah Digital Zoom is doesn’t do anything!” Well booyah, I guess. While Optical Zoom (meaning the lens is moving in and out) is “real zoom” and truly what should be helping drive your decision, the numbers manufactures like to assign to it mean nothing. Just because one camera says it has 5X optical zoom and another says 10X does not mean that the higher number is significantly better some how.

Thing is, X, is a variable – it could really be anything. Zoom is measured in millimeters and what something like “6X” means is six times the widest mm range. Camera makers obviously thought it was far too technical, and rightfully so, to tell you the real specs of a lens. I guess they figured if they said, “It goes six times further in from when you’re zoomed all the way out” you’d get the idea. It works too, when you’re buying things in person. Problem I see though is everyone wants to buy cameras online and they see these X numbers and assume bigger is better but take this scenario for instance…

Your goal is distance, you’re really into birds and have learned they’re not fond of you getting near them. You see two cameras, one is 5X and the other 7X. Under further inspection though you find out the base mm of the 5X is 30mm and the 7X is 20mm. Meaning the 7X goes 20-140mm and the 5X does 30-150mm. The 7x is wider, it’s not further. The shorter the mm number the wider the lens, the bigger the number the more “zoom” you get.

Though not always, you can typically find the real millimeter rating for a point and shoot camera. You don’t have to understand what it means just how it compares to the other camera you’re looking at.

Megapixels
Luckily more and more people are starting to realize that this number does not matter. I feel like I need to cover this a little more anyway though. For those that don’t already know: Megapixels = Size of the Photo not: Megapixels = Quality of the photo. In fact, many point and shoots try to cram too many pixels on their small sensors and it actually makes their photos look worse in full size. It has a very similar effect that you get from digital zoom which we already know sucks. You end up having to shrink the size of your photo so that it looks good when the pixels become compressed. If you’re going to do that, what was the point of that number being high to begin with?

In a recent survey I made up for the sake of writing this 95% of people do not crop their photos. They take a picture, load it on their computer and if the photo is lucky enough maybe they click the “enhance” option in iPhoto before uploading it to Facebook for their friends to see. Sometimes they print them, 4×6 at Walgreens. 2.1MP cameras have been printing wonderful 4×6 photos for years, but for the sake of safety let’s just say anything over 5MP is a safe buy.

Someone is saying right now “I crop all my photos, fu” Well then I’d have to respond with “You’re stupid and obviously your camera doesn’t zoom far enough.” Because that’s the reality. Cropping photos is few and far between. You might do it because Jessica is like totally a huge bitch and we’re not even friends on Facebook anymore and she’s like standing like right next to me in this photo I want to use for my profile picture without her in there. Or maybe some guy is exposing himself just to the left of your group family shot outside Old Country Buffet, whatever the reason you’ll likely still be okay… even if your megapixel count isn’t giant.

Digital SLR
So many people would be better off if they just stuck to buying point and shoot cameras. They go out, buy this SLR camera for $500-800 dollars, it comes with a standard kit lens and they feel like now they’ll finally get those really kickin’ rad soccer pictures of their kids. In general the lens that comes with an entry level SLR is 17-55mm which pales in comparison to some of the optical zoom options available in the point and shoot realm. After you’ve realized that your friend’s $250 Panasonic camera has better zoom than your new Canon Rebel you might be a little distraught and feel the need to go buy another lens to fill that void. That’s when you’ll realize SLRs are the biggest money pit on the planet. Your next affordable option would be a 70-300mm lens which you can pick up for as low as about $150. It also happens to be complete garbage and a total waste of your money. With exception of the 50mm F/1.8 lens there is very little you can buy for under $300 that will really distinguish itself from anything in the point and shoot world.

The second biggest reason you’d be better off not buying an SLR camera is because you’re still shooting in auto. The automatic mode in a P&S makes the bold assumption that the user really has no clue what they’re doing and just wants to press the button and make a pretty picture. They’ll generally do a better job about being shot on automatic mode as the SLR wants to believe you know at least something about photography. For example, your auto modes in a P&S might be Portraits, Night time, Landscape, Macro. However, on the SLR it’s pretty much “Auto”  and it’s left to try and guess at what you’re doing; picking generic ideal settings rather than you telling it how it might want to think.

For $500 dollars (even less) you can get a top of the line point and shoot. It will have modes for all sorts of situations, have more zoom than an entry level SLR, and probably even have nice things like facial recognition all baked right in. With the money you’ve saved you can buy a little case to put it in and maybe some memory cards.

Since I’ve covered my big pet peeves about people’s assumptions on photography I think that’s enough for tonight. I’ll write a follow up later that explains what you should really be looking for come camera buying time.

On January 4th 2010 I received an email from a seemingly random guy on the internet. Apparently this band I had never heard of was using one of my pictures on their web site.

Trevor to me

i like your picture. i guess owl city does as well…http://www.owlcitymusic.com/gallery.aspx?fid=2576&phid=2547
i hope they paid you a lot for its use.
Trevor

When people ask me if I’ve heard the latest [Insert Band Name Here] song I’m the pretentious prick that has to point out that I don’t listen to the radio and only have my iPod ergo I am totally unaware of new music and you should know this; why did you just waste both our time asking? So true to my ignorance when I received this email I had no clue who Owl City was (#4 in iTunes then) and just assumed they were some crappy Indie band that defaced my photo.

I was at work and didn’t have a lot time to dedicate to this picture problem. I went to the site and found a contact address then shot over an email.

Ben Eubank to ocmgm

Hello!

I’m usually pretty good about people cruisin’ over to my FlickR page and using my photo for things. Typically I get an email asking first, which helps, especially given that I don’t even allow creative commons license on it. In your case however no one has contacted me and there is an ugly photoshop lens flare and some strange emo guy that someone has felt the need to place over the picture. Not really a fan of this.

Not shown is the attachment showing my ownership of the photo and it’s publication on FlickR which has since been removed.

Leaving work I went home and thought nothing more of it really. When my roommate got in from work I mentioned to him that some [nice] band was using my photo without permission. Well, okay, apparently they’re a little more popular than I thought – interesting.

I don’t know this Trevor character was but later that night I started getting emails coming from my site and internetland telling me much more about the situation. My art work was used in a multitude of places, not just on the website. Most notably it part of the actual CD Artwork. One email I received went as far as giving me LinkedIn pages for some of the people responsible for the CD and the credited artist. It was odd to have all these random strangers come to my aid.

After it finally dawned on me that this might be slightly bigger than I had originally made it out to be I received two more emails. One was from Owl City saying they had purchased the images from an artist named Imran Khan and forwarded my email off to Universal Motown Republic Group to elaborate more and another from some guy who ran a website claiming not to be a big fan of Owl City. Because I wasn’t sure what exactly was going on and I sort of wanted to get paid for my efforts I asked Steve, the notfan, to please not publish anything more than a small blurb and not make any assumptions about what happened (i.e. please don’t say they stole anything until we know more).

Of course he didn’t listen and thus began my fifteen seconds of internet fame. Every one says you should get 15 minutes  but I can’t possibly see how I could claim to have achieved more fame than the band itself.  Shortly after other sites started copying the article and I got a few more emails from people letting me know that OC was using my work.

The next day I was contacted by guy from the record company asking if I could further prove the ownership of the photo and to please not blog about this on the internet saying “Adam” stole my artwork. Universal man was going to follow up with the artist, using the evidence I gave him, and see what he said when the ownership came into question.

As it turns out the artist said he was just that, an artist, not a photographer and had downloaded my photo from the internet then figured he could use it for commercial purposes. To my understanding he did all the album artwork and that raises an eyebrow but I’m not going to openly speculate on what that could mean any further.

Once actual ownership was established we went back and forth about a month discussing payout numbers ranging from incredibly low to considerably low. Fast forwarding a bit we settled on stupidly low the proper paperwork was ultimately signed and I sold out to The Man.

I’ve been told that I will be credited in future reprints of the album and even given a free copy. I’ll believe that when I see it because that’s one thing I do not have in writing. So neither Owl City or Universal Music purposely used my work, they’ve paid me for my picture and I’m not quite sure what happened to Mr. Kahn. The whole thing has been quite a pain in the ass and I’m rather positive it will not lead to future sales of my photography but I guess it’s fun to say I was part of something once.