I know, I know, I'm a couple days late. :) Having to work on New Year's Day does that you. It wasn't until the -night- of NYD that I decided on a Christmas present to myself. With end of year bonus helping, I managed to rationalize myself into buying a top of the line multifunction printer. *beams* The Canon MP780. Woot.
It's a gigantic monster, kinda the size of one of those office printers, so I'm christening the lil bugger Typhon - after the Greecian storm giant. And I'm super-happy with it. I got a great bargain off the retail price, and it so happens Canon was offering cashback as well, so I ended up getting an effective 20% discount. He's a beaut and a beast at the same time. Setting up the print head made me shiver, it was like trying to put in a computer processor - one wrong move and there goes the bulk of my money, lol.
Did a test run of printing. Very nice duplex feature, it seemed slightly slower than I expected, but granted, I asked it to print 4 pages (front and back) on one A4 sheet of paper, me = paper-saving bastiche. But the duplex meant I could ask it to go print and walk away if I wanted to.
Scanning made me a very happy camper. I'm an inverterate collector, and tons of my mini and computer game boxes have been lying around, unwilling to throw them cos the pictures look so kewl - pathetic, right? Along with one old photocopied kid's book that I was too sentimental to throw away. But you see, I don't /need/ the physical objects hanging around, I'm happy to look at a picture of 'em.
Alas, the old scanners took about 5 minutes per object just to preview and scan in, and after that, I needed to load into Photoshop to start cropping and this and that - severe crimp and delay in actually scanning a lot of stuff.
The most pressing reason that I talked myself into this All-In-One (AIO), an Automatic Document Feeder. Worked like a breeze. I fed in like all 30 pages of the book and used the program to batch scan, and it came out in like under 10 seconds per page. As for the 'found' objects, the scanner program is able to selectively crop and save as separate images = time-saver. Damn, but technology is getting so much better.
Ditto a calendar whose images I wanted to save, but was so awkwardly shaped that it was a pain to attempt scanning. See, on the back page, are the 12 photo-like pictures that tell you what's in the calendar. So I try whack as much of the page as possible on the scanner. To my amazement, the scanner prog tried to automatically detect each as a separate photo and gave me a nicely cropped version of 3-4 of them. Sure, they weren't real photos, so it couldn't detect them all, but that was a pretty cool feature, imo. If I were scanning real photos, I could just lay them all on the flatbed and let the prog detect it for me.
In under 1.5 hours, I finished a mountain of junk that's been laying around in a "To Be Scanned" pile. Now they're all in the dustbin and in My Pictures folder. Good.
Point of the long story is that I'm superthrilled by my new toy and all hyped up to make new resolutions for the New Year.
Things like:
I will balance my life out much more - do some hobbycraft, play some single-player games, seriously work on organizing my stuff, actually exercise, work on career and financial areas of life, meditate and give some time to being more spiritual, unsoweiter. (Not just work/CoX/eat/sleep)
AND in conjunction with this new striving towards spirituality, I am going to learn to develop a thicker skin and attainment of detachment. I am NOT going to respond to flamebait and trolling on the forums. It's gotten rather bad recently, and while I've actually resisted posting, some of the comments have managed to get my gander going. They are designed specifically to rile people after all. It stops today.
At most, I will objectively look at it and try and figure out what personally annoys me in what they write. It's probably just "generalizing from a specific instance, without quantifying" and "incorrect facts" and "just plain obviously trolling badly" - sorta equivalent in annoyance to spam mail.
But I will endeavour to even cut back on the mental "urgh"/mild anger response to the trolling and turn it into a funny thing. Prolly better for my stress levels/blood pressure that way. And I will not respond in kind, no matter how tempted I am to make a smartass comment. It may seem temporarily satisfactory, but in truth, I would have just gotten baited by a troll.
So I will practice the art of ignoring without actually ignoring. I'm used to be quite a master at this in RoD - the permanently AFK tells-can-come through silence. It totally pisses off people trying to get a rise out of you because they feel like they're shouting in the Grand Canyon where no one can hear them or give them any attention and so they stop and go bug someone else more amusing.
Rowr.
Ok, let's go play CoX.
Oh ya, I had a great time yesterday running around BB. SGmate wanted the shivan badge, and so I decided to accompany him and get my badge at the same time. S' always safest running into a pvp zone in a group. We got into a heapload of fights and won quite a bunch of them. I'm proud to have died only twice, having a handy store to retreat to for inspirations is damn nice.
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