I know it's only a very small photography forum at the moment, but it was nice to find out this morning that Stephanie II has been nominated as one of the images in The Photobeat's regular Member's Choice Photo Contest. Let's see what the membership thinks when the poll goes up in a couple of days time.

This is another shot of Stephanie taken back in February. For this image though I was trying to follow the CBrush workflow as much as possible in all its intricate detail (and over the space of 3 days and the best part of 4-5 hours). I'll be first to say that this was more of a learning exercise for me and the result, whilst acceptable, does have room for improvement in it.

What I have found is that this workflow needs an awful lot of practice to make it second nature, more than that you begin to see how the use of multiple layers can impact each other massively; a seemingly sensible decision early on, can be hard work to unpick later once additional steps have been taken. It has been useful though in introducing me to new parts of Photoshop, and I will take much away that I can use in future pieces of work, particularly some of the many other images I took of Stephanie that day (about 140 of them).

Every organisation I've ever been part of spends time looking at how it attracts, recruits and retains employees - they wouldn't last long if they didn't. So today I find myself doing a bunch of tedious form filling on a 'Job Profiler'. Not such a bad job in many ways, I should at this point mention that it was for my own role, it just took a little time, patience and a methodical manner; out of the office so I could concentrate on it, as there are way too many distractions sat at my desk.

So why then, when sat in 25C heat in my back garden, do I find myself becoming rather annoyed about the whole thing? In fact, positively pissed off I'd say!

The form filling is aimed at doing the usual analysis of skills and their relative importance in doing the job, attention to detail, analysing data, delivering results and so on. Nothing untoward you'd think. At least not until I reached a short section on 'Building Relationships', and specifically a sub-element dealing with 'Impressing People'. It's not until you look at the declared facets of 'Impressing People' that you begin to understand where my ire begins to kick in, the facets being "Attracting Attention", "Promoting Personal Achievements" and "Gaining Recognition". At this point I begin to wonder what I'm completing. Is it really a requirement of my job, to blow my own trumpet? Shouldn't actions speak louder than words? Is this really a charter for some sleezeball of a bullshit merchant?

I suppose it's fair to say that I'm not a great fan of those who go in for self-aggrandisement and I certainly don't want that sort of crap written into the job spec. There are more than enough who'll do that sort of self-promotion anyway, without encouraging them. On a scale of 1 (Not Important) to 7 (Critical), you might rightly suspect I didn't rank this one very high. Maybe I'm missing the point of doing a job here and maybe I am (I've been wrong before), but this isn't my cup of tea.

I'm anticipating questions...

PS: I should point out that the questionnaire is text book stuff being run out of a consultancy, it's not a creation of the people I work for.

I guess at some point, everyone has felt that impending sense that something is about to or has gone wrong, though nothing around them has changed or is obviously amiss. Perhaps there's a feeling that a family member is hurt or perhaps you slow down on a corner where you normally wouldn't because you know there's going to be a slow moving tractor when you power out the other side. That sort of inbuilt tendency to somehow divine what you logically cannot know or see.

Such has been the last week, but not for anything as meaningful as the personal safety of myself or a loved one. No, for me it came in the form of a piece of technology; my PC. For some inexplicable reason, I've been wondering whether I should get the disks cloned off onto some new ones, much as I had to do for the music PC a while back. That was 6 years old though, this one only about 2½, so no real age, but the doubt was there. Perhaps more so because it gets a lot of use. All original 'straight out of camera' (SOOC) original files are stored here, all my iTunes files, Adobe CS4 is on here, as is just about every piece of OU work that AM and I have done is stored here also. More insidious is the rather unsatisfactory nature of my back-up routine. Whilst I've got a very nice WD MyBook sitting alongside me and the Windows backup is set to use it, the PC regularly decides it knows nothing about it and the backup inevitably fails. Neither do I take the precaution of burning stuff to DVD, just in case something should happen. So like the self-respecting IT person I am, I ignore the dangers and pretend to myself that it can't happen to me - after all, in the very finest of ostrich-like traditons, "What could possibly go wrong?"

Muppet alert!

This evening as AM and I are sitting in front of an episode of 'Without a Trace' (don't ask me to explain that one), I hear the tell-tail beep of the boot-up sequence on a PC doing its POST message.

...Shit! Why has that happened?

The PC has been idle for a couple of hours now, there's no reason to expect anything to happen, nothing was left running when I went to help make the tea. I had though spent a fair amount of time during the day messing around with a little light MS Access programming and working on making some changes to the default workspace settings in Photoshop.

I did save everything didn't I?

I get up to investigate and wander into the study to find that the PC has indeed re-started itself and is about half way through booting back up.

A good opportunity to make a cup of tea for myself and a coffee for AM

I get back to find that everything on the PC looks normal. Must have been one of those spurious things people tell me never happen on a Mac {spits}, until I notice a small flashing icon in the system tray. Clicking on it brings up one of those utilities that no one ever uses, the 'Intel Matrix Storage Console'.

Sounds grand, but what's it do...

I open it up to find that it's showing a failed system disk. I go slightly pale I suspect at this point

When was the last good backup taken?

I check - last December, just before I flew home for Christmas. Potentially not everything lost then, and the other disk is still reporting itself good, but one half of the RAID1 pair has exited stage left. The console says replace the disk...

You don't say!

But it's well known that if one disk in a RAID array has died, then there's a good chance the others are not so far behind.

This could get mighty serious...

First things first, get a current back-up; time to sort out the MyBook and get it back on line. I'd suspected for a while that it hadn't liked being connected via Firewire, so a few minutes later, the box it came in was located and the cable substituted for a USB one. All is good at this point and the MyBook is back visible again in the Windows Explorer. A few more seconds and the backup routine is running, though who knows how long that will take. Likely a while, given that the MyBook says it's rebuilding its own array (it's got a RAID1 pair too) - it has its very own obscure utility to tell me this.

As I sit here some 4 hours later, the back-up looks to be about 45% complete and the MyBook array rebuild is only 17% done. I suspect my sleep tonight is going to be a little disturbed, but at least I know where my urge to start replacing disks came from....

...and replacing disks is what needs to happen next!

Music to view by...