Saturday, February 06, 2021

Following My Own Advice

Many years ago, when people rode pterodactyls instead of the other way around*, I managed various projects at work. It didn't take long to realize that my biggest expense was labor. Tools and equipment were at most 1/40 of my labor costs. 

What that meant was that it made sense to buy my employees the gear they wanted. If that was a computer with a huge hard drive and a big processor, I would just smile and buy it. In the end, the cost was in the noise of my budget and my people felt appreciated. Which they were.

I've been an Adobe Creative Cloud honk for about a decade now. I'm pretty handy with Photoshop and Premiere and I know enough to be dangerous with Illustrator and InDesign. I'm no artist, but I enjoy playing with those apps.

It turns out that the best platform for Adobe CC is a Microsoft Surface Book 3. However, those suckers are expensive. $2,000 buys you a really nice one.

Wife kitteh has been bugging me to buy one because I keep borrowing her tablet and her laptop. When she goes up to see Oldest Son kitteh in Washington, I have to ask her to leave the laptop behind so I can take it to work meetings. She's still moonlighting for a realtor, so she needs it, too.

I didn't want to buy the Surface Book because I hate to spend money on myself.

My rule with my employees was: If it's used for something productive, spend, spend, spend.

I just bought the Surface Book. After a month of dithering, I finally remembered my own axiom.

My father became an artist when he retired after a career in the Air Force. I'd like to explore that as well and this will help me learn.

This is the sort of thing I'd like to create.

On a side note, I did some more work with the Arduino board. I'm hoping to have my time-lapse camera working in a few weeks.

* - I have no idea what I meant by this, it just seemed like a surreal thing to say.

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