It's amazing how easy names make things. And equally amazing how quickly confusion sets in when a name is incorrect.
While these musings may seem like the most obvious of "duh!" statements, two things happened over the weekend to make me contemplate the Name Game.
The first has to do with an article that my hometown newspaper, The Courier Express ran on Yours Truly. I'm always happy to talk to the press, and even happier when that press is in my hometown -- it gives me all kinds of warm fuzzies. I heard from my parents that the article ran over the weekend (I believe it appeared in Sunday's edition). I also heard from them that they got my maiden name wrong.
Now, if anyone needs to know a person's "unmarried" name, in order to know who the heck they're reading about, and to determine whether or not they know the person in question, it would be people from the subject's home town, wouldntyathink?
I double checked the notes I'd e-mailed to the reporter to verify that I had, in fact, spelled my name correctly. And I had. It wasn't that difficult. Only four letters. L-O-N-G. Oh well...
The second Name Incident that came to my attention happened on Sunday afternoon. I was working on photo editing for The Rider's Back Book when I discovered that the names of the pictures in the thumbnail .jpg images I had did not correspond to the RAW files.
After some frustrating and mostly fruitless searching, I discovered that the photo files were, in fact, THREE folders put together. In essence, each folder started sequentially numbering at 0001. Since they came this way (something I need to discuss with Sir Charles for future projects), I can't rename and renumber them for ease of reference. Which has led to spending significant blocks of time pondering the importance of a name...
Multiple files named "DSC_0035" notwithstanding, the photo edit is going swimmingly. I hope to have most of it finished by the end of Monday. The rest of the week is earmarked for finishing up the edit.
With any luck, by Labor Day weekend, the book will be as finished as I can make it. The only things that remain outstanding are a few model releases (Shouldn't be much of a problem. Besides -- if the models refuse to sign a release, that'll just be one less picture in the book...) and some medical images that are "on their way."
Tune in tomorrow for further updates...
