market – Page 3 – dangermouse.net

Sunday Market day

I had my market day today. Got up at 6, went to pick up the car I’d hired to take all my gear and stock to the market, drove over there, unpacked, set up the stall. The forecast was for rain today, but it turned out sunny and warm. Unfortunately, this probably encouraged people to go to the beach rather than to the market, as attendance was very low today. I chatted with other stallholders and they agreed business was very slow. But they reckon that things will pick up in the next few months as autumn brings cooler weather, and maybe people will continue to get more adventurous after COVID.

It’s interesting the observations you make of people while you’re tending a market stall. I’m selling photographic prints. The images are beautiful, if I do say so myself. But it’s amazing how many people wander past the stalls, taking some time to look closely at the stall next to mine, but then approach mine, take a single glance that must genuinely be less than a second long, and their eyes immediately move on to the next stall and they walk right past mine without a second look.

Obviously some people are not particularly interested in buying photographic prints, but I’m amazed at just how quickly they can apparently dismiss the idea of even taking a slightly longer look. I’m a very visual person and I love looking at artwork and photography. Even if I have zero intention of buying anything, I always pause and look closely at any market stall that has visual art. It’s interesting and intriguing to me that there are so many people who apparently have no interest whatsoever in stopping to look at some beautiful pictures.

This is mostly adults I’m talking about. Children usually seem a lot more interested. I watch families walk past, and the parents do the split-second glance and their eyes move on to continue around the array of stalls, but the children tend to gaze a lot longer at my photos. It makes me ponder if children are naturally drawn to visual art and imagery, but somewhere along the path to adulthood this natural fascination with images somehow gets beaten out of people.

My best customers are often lone parents escorting one or more children. The children get excited by the photos, and the parent agrees to buy some greeting cards, or in some cases a matted print. But when both parents are present with kids, I seldom make the sale.

The exceptions are the handful of adults who are genuinely interested in photography. They come over and look through every single image in the boxes of matted prints, and praise me on the photography, and ask questions about specific photos. These people are a delight to talk to, and I’m very gratified that there are indeed other people out there who love visual art as much as I do.

By the end of the day, I was fearing I’d make a loss after the stall and car hire. But one final customer came by about 15 minutes before closing time, and bought a matted print, which pushed me over the line into profit for the day. Not a lot of profit, but definitely better than being in the red. So thank you to that woman.

New content today:

Sewing supplies

Tomorrow is my next market stall – back to the smaller suburban market in Lindfield this week. Last week at Kirribilli, although I was in the road tunnel and sheltered from any rain (if there’d been any), I realised I was vulnerable to wind blowing through the tunnel. It got a bit breezy, and at one point it blew some of my greeting cards over, off the stand, and onto the ground.

I realised I need a way to make my display stands more robust to wind. So today I went with my wife (and Scully) on a trek to a large sewing and handicrafts store. She actually wanted to go to buy a sewing machine and some material, for a project she wants to work on. But I needed to go to get some elastic cord, which I plan to string across the front of the display stand to form a bit of a barrier to hold the cards in place. I’ve also been wanting to get some sturdy cloth ribbon to use to replace a drawstring on some old shorts that I just wear around the house, but whose drawstring has frayed and broken.

So it was a good confluence of needs that saw us spend an hour or so picking up various sewing supplies. That store is actually really amazing for arts and crafts stuff. Besides strictly sewing supplies, they also have large sections of materials for other crafts.

Apart from that expedition I didn’t do much today. I was up late last night playing games with friends online, and I want to rest a bit before the market tomorrow.

New content today:

Kirribilli Markets!

Today was the big market day! I had my first stall at the big Kirribilli Markets, selling my photography. It was a long, tiring day!

I got up at 5:45, took Scully out for toilet, had a quick breakfast, and then jumped in the car with my wife and Scully. We dropped off one load of equipment and stock at the market, then she watched it while I drove home and picked up the second load. I unpacked everything, and then she drove home with Scully. I wanted to be really early, because there’s limited parking for cars and vans to unload, and they said the earlier the better.

I was basically set up and ready to go by about 7:30, with the market officially opening at 8:30. I was hoping for large numbers of shoppers, but the numbers were really down on what I’ve seen at this market before. I’ve been here as a shopper before and it’s always very crowded, to the point of being difficult to walk sometimes, but today there was maybe… a quarter of the people, I estimate, if that. It’s a combination of the complete lack of tourists in Sydney at the moment, plus maybe a bit of COVID-shyness still.

I managed to make enough sales to cover my costs, and make a modest profit. So it was worthwhile, but I expected and certainly would have liked to make a bit more profit. The market closed at 3pm, so it officially lasts 6.5 hours, but with the setup and then packing up and getting back home afterwards, it was a 10-hour working day for me.

I’m exhausted, but at least feeling good that I’ve made some money, even if the hourly rate is pretty poor. I have Kirribilli booked again for next month, and hopefully there’ll be more customers, or even returning ones who decide that this time they’ll buy something rather than just looking.

Phew!

New content today:

Virtual Sydney meeting day 5

This morning was the last day of the ISO standards meeting. It was all just administrative stuff to finish off, going over summary reports of all the technical discussions, listing action items, and so on. One important thing was to decide the timing for the next meeting, which is on 7-11 June. I’ve been fortunate to have this meeting and the previous on at a favourable time in the morning, but the European delegates have been up in the middle of the night. The June meeting is going to allow the Europeans to have a comfortable afternoon, while I will be stuck beginning the meeting at 11pm here in Sydney.

At this stage the plan is for a physical meeting at Apple in Cupertino in October, but realistically I expect that will probably be virtual as well. Even if it isn’t, there’s no way I’ll be going.

Meeting done, I spent the rest of the day preparing for tomorrow’s market. I have a stall at Kirribilli Markets, which will hopefully be busy and full of people wanting to buy my stuff. I had to collate a pile of greeting cards and envelopes and stuff them into cellophane baggies, ready for people to buy, and then print out some more price signs and stuff. Then I collected all my stuff and did a test pack of the car, to make sure I can transport it all to the market in two trips. I’m not hiring a large car this time, as the market is not far away, and I worked out that I can get everything there in two trips (with the first taking my wife so she can mind the gear while I return for the second load). It was a bit like working out how to cross a river with a lettuce, a goose, and a fox.

With that, it’s an early night, because we have to get up before 6am to start moving stuff to the market nice and early.

New content today:

Virtual Sydney meeting day 4

There were only two technical sessions in the ISO meeting today, as a spot opened up during the agenda planning meeting, and it was decided to put it at the end of today, so we could finish early. The day that is – we have one more day of meeting tomorrow.

Today’s first session was on autofocus, measuring the speed and the accuracy of camera autofocus mechanisms. The project leader has been experimenting with methods to measure these things. It’s not as straightforward as you might think. We care about digital SLR cameras, where you have manual control over things like triggering the autofocus, but most cameras these days are also phones, and we have to be able to measure those too. When was the last time you manually triggered autofocus on your phone?

Right… you don’t need to, because it’s continuously refocusing. So you can’t just place a phone camera in front of a test calibration chart, defocus it and then time how long it takes to focus and repeat 100 times to get good statistics, because there’s no way to force it to defocus. The only way to change the focus is to point the camera at something a different distance away. So the project leader was running experiments where the camera would be pointed at a distance wall, and a mechanical arm would swing in a test chart at a near distance, thus forcing the camera to refocus, and then take a photo, and then measure the photo image of the test chart to see how good the focus is – and repeat hundreds of times.

He reported that while this method seemed like it should work, there was a problem. The camera typically refocuses in a fraction of a second and then takes the photo, which we should be able to analyse for any defocus blur to see how good the autofocus is. The problem is that by the time the camera takes the photo, the test chart is still vibrating from the sudden movement into the field of view… so the photo has significant (several pixels) of motion blur in it! This makes it very hard to figure out the defocus blur. So he wasn’t sure what to do about this. I suggested changing the experimental setup to have the nearby chart fixed, but to put an angled mirror between it and the camera, which would reflect the image of a distant wall into the camera. So now the camera can focus on the wall, and the mirror can be removed quickly, forcing the camera to refocus on the near chart, which hasn’t moved – no vibration! He said that was a good idea, and he’ll try it out. There were a bunch of other technical details reported as well, which I won’t go into further.

The second session was about measuring the accuracy of depth cameras – which produce images telling you the distance to points in the scene. This is a preliminary exploratory stage of what will be a new standard. The main difficulty here is that there are several very different technical approaches to making a depth camera, and a test method that will work for one of them won’t work for another. So we’re compiling a survey of what we want to measure and how we can do it for all the different types of camera. We seem to have put together an agreed list of things, and the project leader is planning to write up a first draft in time for comments and discussion at the next meeting.

This afternoon I started planning for my market stall on Sunday. I’ve done three markets at a small local suburban market last year, but this one is a bigger market in the inner city, with many more stalls, and hopefully many more customers. It’s going to be a jump up in complexity and experience level, and I have to figure out how to get all my stock and gear there in our car with my wife’s help, without hiring a larger car to put it all in. This market is much closer to home, so we can make two trips, which after test packing of the car today I’m pretty sure we can manage. I was a bit worried about one of the items being too big to fit, but turning it a certain way I managed to get it into the car boot and close the door.

I’m going to be having early mornings both Saturday and Sunday this weekend… for the final day of the ISO meeting, and then getting up super early on Sunday to haul gear to the market and be set up and ready to go before 8:30!

New content today:

Listing things to write

Several times in the past weeks I’ve sat down to write my daily blog entry and thought, “There was a thing I wanted to write about today, but what was it?” And I’ve been unable to remember what it was. So I’ve started writing down brief notes to remind myself. Let’s see how we go today…

I’m overdue for a haircut. I’ve avoided going for the past few weeks because of the current COVID outbreak here in Sydney, but now it’s getting long enough that I think I really need to get a haircut soon. The NSW Government has ordered mandatory wearing of masks in places specifically including hairdressers and beauty salons. At first I thought okay, I can just go to the barber and wear a mask… but then today I realised that there’s no way they can cut my hair normally with a mask on, as the barber trims sideburns and around the ears and stuff where the mask straps are. So I don’t know how that works. (Some searching now reveals on the NSW Government site that “You may also remove your mask for the proper provision of goods or services, for example, if you are having a facial or beard trim.” So I suppose that applies.)

Secondly, I had my first ever peanut butter and jelly sandwich today. In the USA food package that I received the other day was a jar of Smucker’s Goober Grape PB&J. Peanut butter and jelly is a very American food. We don’t really have “jelly” like in the US here in Australia, so it’s actually not easy to replicate the effect, except by using jam, which usually has at least small chunks of fruit in it. Indeed, to most Australians, the very idea of mixing peanut butter with jam/jelly sounds disgusting, so it’s not something that most of us would try to experiment with, either. So yeah, I’ve never had it before. I do enjoy making a sandwich with peanut butter, honey, and cinnamon, so I’m not averse to mixing PB with something sweet. And I like jam. But I still approached this PB&J with a bit of trepidation.

PB&J prep

I took some photos of the preparation. I’m guessing that traditionally in the US PB&J is probably made with plain white bread, but I never buy plain white bread – I always get wholemeal or something with lots of seeds in it. But today the only bread I had was my home-made sourdough. So I spread the PB&J on a slice of sourdough.

The verdict: Well, it was mostly PB since the top of the jar seems to have a lower proportion of jelly in it than further down. It tasted fine, PB with a bit of sweetness mixed in, not disgusting at all. I’m interested to see how it goes when I get further down the jar, where the jelly ratio looks higher. I expect it’ll be perfectly fine, even yummy.

In market news today, I received an email from Kirribilli Markets, where I’m supposed to have a stall this Sunday. I thought it might be notice of cancellation due to COVID, but no. It said that they’d been informed that the current railway sleeper replacement work being done on the Harbour Bridge was behind schedule, so instead of finishing this Friday, it would extend over the weekend. Which means no trains running to the station where the markets are located. They figured this would reduce shopper turnout enough that they felt the need to postpone the market for a week, moving it to Sunday 17 January. At first I thought this would conflict with my other market, which is on the third Sunday of each month, but then I realised that that market had already cancelled for January. So there’s no conflict – it just means this weekend’s market is moved to a week later.

Workwise today I had planned to complete all of the Irregular Webcomic! annotation writing by lunchtime, and then move on to writing new Darths & Droids strips. As it turns out, I had so many distractions that I still haven’t completed the IWC annotations, and probably won’t until tomorrow. I try to schedule a certain amount of “worklike” stuff each day, but it’s often amazing how long it ends up taking.

And I reached a milestone in my Italian practice today. I’ve been using Duolingo every day for a practice session for 183 days, more than half a year as of today. I’ve had longer streaks before, but I was interrupted by travel towards the end of 2019 and took a while to get restarted. But I’m pleased to have made it six full months of practice again.

Oh, and finally I got a photo of some rainbow lorikeets while taking Scully for a walk today.

New content today:

Post-market stocktake

I mostly relaxed today, taking things a bit easy after the hectic day at the market yesterday. I did have to do a stocktake of how many greeting cards and matted prints I have left, so I could update my stock levels on Etsy – to make sure I don’t sell something that I’d need to then order from the printer, thus taking an extra week or two to ship the item. Then I had to pack all the stock and ancillary equipment (easels, folding table and chair, display crates, miscellaneous bits and pieces) in the garage, out of the way until the next market day.

And I went to the post office to mail off an Etsy order to a buyer in the UK. I hope it gets to them in time for Christmas!

What else did I do…? Oh, some housecleaning. Cleaned the bathtub properly, which I haven’t done for ages.

Oh that’s right… I was also a bit lazy because of the weather, which was stiflingly warm and humid all day. The temperature hovered around 30°C most of the day, but a strong westerly wind came in around 3:30 pm, blowing hot air in from the desert, and that pushed temperatures up to 36.5°C on the coast, but as high as 41°C in Sydney’s inland suburbs. This was the hottest November day for five years.

I took Scully out to the dog park at that time, not realising it was going to get even hotter that late in the afternoon. She was very lazy in the heat, and only did a few half-hearted ball chases and then our regular walk down to the waterside and back, before deciding she’d had enough and she took off back to the car to wait for me. She does that when she’s ready to go home. I’m still chatting with the other dog owners, and all the dogs are playing and whatever on the grass, but Scully is sitting up by the road next to the car waiting for me!

New content today:

Market day and more Scully photos

Today was my first market day since June, and only the third day this year, following multiple COVID cancellations. I got up at 6:30 and went to collect my hire car after a quick breakfast, then drove it home to pick up all my stock and gear. I was at the market by about 7:30, and setting up my stall, ready to go by 8:30.

Customers were starting to drift in already even though the market didn’t officially open until 9:00, so I thought it would be a good day – certainly better than June which was almost completely dead and I didn’t even recoup the cost of renting the stall space. I was hopeful people would be out and about and doing Christmas shopping, with our local COVID cases now reduced to zero for the past week. There were a good number of people, but honestly not as many as I’d been expecting or hoping for.

That photo was during a quiet period when I could wander from my stall for a few seconds. I made several sales, recouped all my expenses, and made a small profit, although honestly it didn’t work out to a great hourly rate. Nevertheless, it was good to make some money! And a couple of people asked me if I gave photography lessons, which I answered by saying I haven’t done so, but I would certainly consider doing it, and gave the inquirers a business card to contact me. So maybe that will lead to something.

I got home after unpacking the hire car and returning it about 15:30. It was a hot day, and I was exhausted, but my wife said Scully needed some exercise! So we went straight out to the park. And since she’d been groomed yesterday, I wanted to try to get some more photos of her running across the grass. So I took my camera and we encouraged her to run straight at me while I took photos.

This one is the best pose I captured, but unfortunately she was still a bit far away from me and doesn’t fill the frame of the camera.

This one’s much better at filling the frame, but the pose isn’t as good. And these are the best shots of about 60 or 70 that I took. It’s hard taking photos of animals in motion!

I am exhausted…

New content today:

Market eve

Tomorrow is market day – I have a stall again at The Great Market at East Lindfield. Last month’s market was cancelled because of forecast stormy weather, but tomorrow’s is definitely on.

I spent time today going through my checklist and collating all the gear I need to take, getting it set up in the garage, ready for loading into the hire car in the morning. I have to hire a care to take my stuff to the market because my own car isn’t big enough (which means another expense that I need to recoup). I also bagged some newly printed greeting cards in cellophane bags with envelopes, ready for sale. I’m hoping the cards sell really well with this market being the first one in a long time, and in the lead up to Christmas. I’d really like to sell some of the mated prints too, and I’d be ecstatic if I sold one of the large mounted prints.

We’ll see, and I’ll report tomorrow. I have to be up at 06:30 to have a quick breakfast (and make some sandwiches for lunch), pick up the hire care, then pack it, and drive to the market, then unpack and set up my stall, by 9 o’clock.

The other thing that happened today was Scully had an appointment with the dog groomer. It’s been six weeks since her last groom, and we’ve usually been doing it every five weeks, so she was getting a bit shaggier than we were used to.

I took photos immediately before and after the grooming:

She’s almost two different dogs!

New content today:

Those thunderstorms

If you recall yesterday, my market stall day was cancelled due to forecast storms today.

It did rain a little overnight, but lightly, and it had stopped by the time I got up this morning. It remained dry… all day until around 5pm. The sun even came out for extended periods. When the rain finally came, it was about 5 minutes of light spattering, and then it stopped. There were actually thunderstorms in parts of Sydney, but very localised, and not until after 4pm. So basically the forecast storms during the market day didn’t eventuate at all, as we all would have been packed up and leaving before 4pm.

Oh well… I can’t blame the market organisers. They had to work with the forecast they had. It is another case of what’s become a common occurrence here though – the Weather Bureau forecasts rain, and pretty much nothing eventuates. We have had a little rain in recent months, but not a lot. Grass in parks is starting to die off and go brown all over the place. Just looking up the stats, so far we’ve had 6mm of rain in the first 18 days of October, while the monthly average is 77mm. In September we had 23mm, while the average is 68mm. In August we had 79, with the average being 81, so that was close to normal, but since August it’s been noticeably dry. And this in a spring which the Weather Bureau had predicted would be wetter than normal due to La Niña.

Instead of the market, I mostly spent the day at home, just going out with Scully a few times. For lunch I made bruschetta:

Chopped tomato, garlic, basil, mixed together and spooned on toasted wholemeal sourdough bread drizzled with extra virgin olive oil, then topped with salt, black pepper, and caramelised balsamic vinegar. I enjoy a simple tomato sandwich, and this is like the grand royal version. Yum!

New content today: