This post contains strong language!

This is being typed in a rare moment of access to the internet. Nowadays I take internet access where I can find it and make the most of it.

About ten days ago Rich bought me an early Christmas present: a beautiful shiny new laptop to replace my very old and ailing machine. It was gorgeous - fast, silver, sexy, with a trendy aluminium pouch on the case so I could insert my favourite nude photograph into the laptop cover. It also had large and sparkly flashing orange and red lights all over it. I kid you not! You turn this baby on, and it lights up like a Christmas tree! With a nude photograph in the pouch, it actually becomes a nekkid-chix-yuletide-wonderland-sex-tool. Completely divine! The only thing missing is a pink furry mouse (and I’m still working on that - my cat brought me a real one today, but alas it appeared to be broken.)

After admiring and caressing the loveliness of my beautiful chick-tool, it was time to actually use it. I had recklessly elected, nay, actually VOLUNTEERED (in a moment of madness) to put Microsoft Vista on it. Rich cautioned against it - he said, “Stay with XP. Vista has got bad reviews.” Silly me, I should have listened. I thought I knew better. I thought I could cope. I thought I was invincible.

Needless to say I fell flat on my face. Since my Fucking Vista Laptop (henceforth to be known as FVL) has arrived, our day-job server network has crashed on average at least twice an hour, every hour of the day and night. The DNS has gone down every twenty minutes for ten days straight. Photographic clients thought I had freaked out in a jealous rage and forced Rich to give up photography. Day-job customers thought we had quit software. Rich has lost hours and hours of code. I have lost too many blog entries to count. Doesn’t matter how much we try to fix it. Nothing works. Richard is the cleverest and most advanced computer geek I know. If he can’t fix the FVL then no-one can.

I have no remote internet connection from the house, so the only time I can go online to blog is to sit alone all evening in a very cold office next door, attempting to go online by stealing someone else‘s PC, although the network is so poorly that it’s frankly almost impossible to do anything. Tonight it has taken me over two hours and countless attempts to order online my organic vegetable box for next week. Needless to say - I have failed in this Herculean task (FVL crashed, and the DNS went down), and the family is living off beans on toast for the foreseeable future.

I have now finally admitted defeat. I will therefore be off-net for a while (no change there then) whilst my FVL is wiped clean and XP is restored to it. So I lose some very pretty graphics, but it’s a small price to pay to get my life back. Rich then has to pick up the pieces of the network, and try to restore calm to a very upset computer network and an equally psychotic wife.

In the meantime, I am very cold - there is no heating in the office at night, so please do picture me, a little ol‘ lady (white-haired and nearly bald), wrapped in blankets, typing frantically over a lone keyboard under a single light, with only the cat (and accompanying mouse-guts) for company.

I am cybernetically paralysed.
I have PMS and Vista.
I have run out of chocolate.
I am not a happy woman.



The evil Vista vanquishes the helpless maiden.

(Actually Diablo and Jenvy from last year).

A man is only as big as the number of his pixels

We work from home, or more accurately, in a purpose built studio attached to the house. The bottom floor is dedicated to the day-job, a large open plan area where we (and our staff) sit and work, we can entertain clients, plus the three year old daughter can play (which actually takes up half the space, so the clients constantly trip over the Teletubbies). Upstairs the day-job servers are located (very noisy room, lots of servers, very loud, must be sealed during a shoot or it sounds like a wind-tunnel at 170 mph), and also our photographic studio, which is rather too small, and with sloping ceilings, which sucks, but hey, it costs $80K to move, so we’re staying put forever, O.K.?

Most of today has been spent expanding our downstairs office. There are no decent private printing companies in the UK which will cheaply and confidentially print nekkid chix to a decent A3+ quality, so rather regrettably, we have to do this ourselves. Likewise, medium format cameras remain a remote and erotic dream, because of our location. The poor chap goes to sleep fantasising not about beautiful ladies, but rather drooling over 16 bit colour depth (all hail the sacred Hasselblad!) but this remains a distant illusion because of the staggering cost of shooting digital in medium format. Alas we cannot shoot film here. The UK has very strict laws on disposing of poisonous chemicals such as those required for medium format film cameras, and we are on private drainage here, so it’s impossible to dispose of said horrible chemicals without feeding noxious goo into my vegetable patch and dying a violent death shortly afterwards. The only choice for us re medium format is to shoot digital.

The man eats and dreams a digital-back Hasselblad, which would set us back at least a year’s school fees at Hogwarts for the two boys (or four sets of breast implants – take your pick. And please do imagine what I‘d look like with eight very large perky rubber breasts) So medium format remains but a distant dream, and he sticks with his trusty Canon EOS5D and muddles through, despite that the spiritual Photographic Guru of the internet tells us that the camera is not important and that we should spend our hard earned cash on lighting instead (yes the Great Wise Guru uses the same camera as Rich, and yet, the laydeez don’t look quite as sexy under our watch!) To Rich’s mind, you’re ultimately not a serious art-nude photographer until you’ve got at least one book publication or one gallery showing with your big shiny medium format camera.

Anyway, we have decided that we are going to try to sell prints (Need money. Money = food. Please buy our prints oh wonderful browsers looking for porn), so we have negotiated at big expense a new A2 printer, the bloated Epson Stylus Pro 4800, which takes up a huge amount of space, hence the new expanded office layout to make room for this vast piece of equipment. I’m not sure if I’ll look better or worse printed A2 size, but it sure as hell shows a heck of a lot more wrinkles and cellulite. Poster size, it’s definitely enough motivation to put me on a diet! I look very big and old when I’m puffed up big, dammit!

On the bright side, we have now moved the office round substantially, so I have a much bigger working space, plus I don’t have to be driven completely and utterly crazy by watching him constantly biting his nails when he’s stressed!

Wonder what my bum would look like A2 size…

Stop press…..horrible result……hideous beyond belief….I look like a large lump of blubbery Jell-O….the stuff of nightmares…..Not even Digital Gem can save me…let’s not go there ever, EVER again…




Heaves a sigh of relief and returns to the youthful Jenvy, beautiful both in A2 or squished up tiny for Blogger.

A photographer is only as big as his equipment, don’t you think?!