Yesterday, I got a message from my counterpart on Team Black Swan. As has become traditional in times of stress or novelty, he sent along a picture of the day’s chosen beverage. Unfortunately, drinking establishments being how they are, it wasn’t too too light in there…
So I saved the picture out of MMS into my camera roll on the phone, fired up Photoshop Express, upped the exposure and ran a couple of sharpening filters, and tweaked the contrast ever so slightly…and got this:
Great picture? No. Able to clearly distinguish the straight whiskey with a beer? Absolutely. And I did all this with nothing but the very phone I received the message on. The same phone that I’ve blog-posted from before. The same phone that lets me video-chat from my phone to my wife’s computer. The same phone on which I see real-time updates of things happening right around me, whether it’s a parade or a Cal game or a night out at Singlebarrel – my friends can see what I’m doing and respond to it in real time from anywhere in the country.
I’m sure I’ve told this story before, but I’ll tell it again: when I was in first grade, the big thing was to fold up a piece of paper into a long strip which then got folded over three times and decorated heavily in number-2 pencil. On one side, when folded up, it was a badge with “Lt. whatever” (the universal sci-fi rank, is Lieutenant, which I couldn’t spell in first grade). On the other side, the various phaser/blaster controls. Open it up and there was your tricorder, your scanner, your force field, your cloaking device, all the necessities for a bunch of kids with runaway imaginations in the era of Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rodgers and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
It’s hard not to shake the feeling that thirty years on, all I lack is to put on a lock-screen picture of a badge that says “Lt. Donkey.”
I remember thinking “this is going to be way too dark, but if he sees the outline of the glasses, he’ll be able to figure it out.”
I remember thinking about two hours later, “so that’s why I don’t do this very often.”
The whiskey + beer is not a card I play very frequently, and for good reason. That’s what I get for having some serious job satisfaction questions combined with my best friend in town bartending once a week.