Very pleasant evening tonight. Went to Sara's birthday party, which was populated by interesting, intelligent people who care about the world and the people in it. I wound up talking with quite a nice variety of people, from a bookseller and her (paper) game developer husband (he's given up hope that Americans can ever learn anything, and expects them to keep electing the Republicans forever), to a movie producer (or maybe director) who was quite enthused about the idea of the 30 minute Heroin detox method that Wired covered a while ago (in the abstract, don't think she uses it).

However, I think the hightlight of the evening for me (I'm so self-centred!) was Sara's friend (pictured to the left, though it's hard to see her from this angle) who currently lives on an organic produce commune outside Orangeville. Why, you say? Well, because, whether she was actually interested or not, she asked to hear about my thesis. In the end, I'm pretty sure she thinks of it as a trivial and useless thing (that seemed to be the gist of her comments), but it was at least useful for me in practicing how to present it concisely and coherently (I didn't do spectacularly well, but the introductory work covering the purpose of design seemed to work fairly well). Need to work on my talking points for eclecticism, modernism, functionalism, and high-tech.

Got quite a few shots that should be useful for doing 3D modelling, but I'm afraid I didn't really get all that many of people, and those I did get were pretty poor quality. The "P" mode of the camera is not the one to use for internal night shots where people are moving a lot (at least it seems that way). Mostly there isn't enough light to support a fast shutter speed, so everything winds up blurred, dark, or pixelated. Will have to work on finding something usable.

Anyway, have to be up in ~6 hours to play grams, so will call it a night. Do need to think about a better way to manage the pictures. Even manually uploading them to Vex is going to take a lot of time if I'm shooting 150/day (I won't be; I seldom go anywhere, after all, but I do intend to use it far more than I'd like to manually crop, upload and link). ZPhotoSlides is calling... but not as loud as that seductive siren bed.