Thursday, 7/11/2019
Woke early, and the paper didn’t arrive until 6:45. This kind of inverts my usual morning, with internet browsing first and newspaper after. Not now, but when I am permanently back to the sixth floor next year, I will try to work out an arrangement to get the paper by 6am. I wonder when delivery happens on the 4th floor, where I’ll be soon?
Anyway, I had some time to pass before leaving for a day at Shustek center. I passed it by starting to prepare the cover files for the print book. The first issue is, what to put on the back cover? I have a lovely illustration for the front, and the PhotoShop file for it (which Affinity Pro opens nicely, fortunately as I no longer have PhotoShop access).
So I opened that and considered. I had some notion I could make a back cover by copying the base image, clone out the hiker figure (I love how the hiker is androgynous, could be man or woman, but still projects confidence and courage), leaving only the mountains, darken them, and put them under a night sky. So the back cover would be the same scene, but hours later, at night and the hiker has moved on.
I started doing that, then decided to find my night sky image. Googled “royalty free night sky” and of course there are gazillions of them, among which the following caught my eye.
It could be my hiker! Clearly this is my back cover. I’ll extend the sky upward into black to fill out a portrait-mode image, and put a block of text over the upper third with advertising copy. I’ll still have to work out a spine image, probably just a solid color with the title text.
So off to Shustek where Toni and I cataloged and arranged some of the multiple box donation of one Julia Wolf. (Not the mathematician in wikipedia, but a software security researcher.) Ms. Wolf has apparently attended every security conference and hacker conference held in the last 15 years, Black Hat, DefCon, ShmooCon and many others. At every conference she collected brochures and freebies like pens and backpacks, and bagged the schwag from each conference and labeled it. So now we were separating the artifacts (pens, badges, backpacks) from the texts (brochures, stickers, anything printed) because these classes are stored in different systems.
Sat alone at dinner; Patti (from my floor) came by and asked if I prefer to eat alone? Well, sometimes, yeah, not always. Tomorrow night, can you join me and some others? Of course! So dinner set for tomorrow night.
