Welcome to the first of what I can only imagine will be billions of nerdy bloggy posts written by yours truly. I've been reading through some blogs of other bloggers. Of the three employees in the Kodak directory with the last name Gilman, officially two-thirds of them are Kodak bloggers. There's me, of course. The other one-third is Paul. (We've never met, but I can only assume he is my long-lost quadrillionaire uncle who's been searching for a peasant relative for decades.)

My goal is simple: 100% Gilman bloggers!

I have met the other third of the Gilman trio. Happily, she is my lovely wife, who I can't seem to talk into blogging.

I'm writing today to discuss some of my infatuations. Firstly, I love a lot of things that I am incapable of spending the time to learn about and understand. This leads to frustration beyond measure, due to the "jack of all trades but master of none" life I seem to lead. By "jack of all trades" I mean I can muddle through some stuff but mostly guess my way around, hoping that it works out, like this blog! Ha!

Back to the point, you'll find, as you read through my various musings (I'm probably using that word wrong and presumptuously), I try hard to accomplish little. That came out weird. I'm not trying to accomplish little, I'm trying hard but getting little accomplished. Better?

I love numbers but I'm terrible at math. I love to draw but have no artistic talent.

I can kinda draw a tree or two!

I love to write, but words tumble through my fingertips in a nonsensical, difficult to comprehend, and run on-y sentence kinda way. Bringing Kodak's core into relevance, I love to take digital images but tend to leave them on the memory card for all of eternity.

There are a bunch of other things that'll show themselves to be of interest to me that'll come up in time, but I think the above will preface you for the trip you are about to take if you read anything I write.

Time is a huge factor in life as learning takes time. Learning is the root of life (maybe it's water? Air? I dunno, I'm just tossing darts here...) I'm a father of one and some change (brand

new shiny one is on the way, complete with new baby smell!) which gives me naptime to learn about all the things I'd like to. I find that a 2 hour nap can go by in about 15 minutes if I'm really figuring stuff out.

All this to say that learning for me, in the junk I'm interested in, comes in small chunks that are ineffective until 3 weeks have gone by - learning and relearning the same things. So, you'll have to be patient with my vast useless knowledge of a small part of a lot of stuff, and if that didn't make a lick of sense, you'll quickly get the idea of my writing style.

Size intrigues me. I love the size of all kinds of stuff. Giant stuff like the hotels in Las Vegas

are amazing, but more amazing when dwarfed by the Grand Canyon.

On the other side of that coin, I can't seem to stop taking pictures of stuff with the macro setting on my camera. Yesterday I took a picture of my eyeball. Really just the front of it, not the whole thing. And I'm sure this picture will be stolen and used for the iris recognition system I have on my front door; therefore, I've airbrushed it a bit to not get taken advantage of. (No really, I did).

Cameras are incredible. I can't look this clearly at my own face in the mirror, but here we sit noticing that I have a couple brown spots in there. I've never seen those before! If you look closer still at the reflection in my pupil you can see my hand trying to redirect the flash more on my face than over my head. A closer look still may show Kodak written on the front of the camera. I can't see that far due to temporary camera-flash-induced blindness, but it may be there! Too cool!

Speaking of small, I'm one of the people working to start production on a new Kodak Continuous Inkjet Printing project. We measure things in microns. For those who are unaware, a micron is really small. To be exact-er, it's one-one millionth of a meter or about one thousandth of a millimeter... Anyone seen a millimeter lately? No? That's because they are stupidly small to begin with. But oh wait, chop that millimeter into a thousand pieces, go ahead, I'll wait... My point? A micron is super tiny, which, in itself is pretty incredible, but it gets crazier. I've seen, when working on this stuff, measurements smaller than a micron. Let's take an example of like .952 microns... Written longhand it is 0.000000952 meters (or .000952 of a millimeter) or if I remember my decimal point counting lessons properly (and it's entirely possible that I don't) it would be 957blahblahblah millionths of a meter. Talk about making Vegas hotels look tiny? Yikes! I don't know about the rest of you, but these figures are so much smaller than anything I've thought possible! And we can measure and manipulate things at this level?! It makes ya wonder. (Well, I can't speak for you, but it makes me wonder!) Here's a little visual example:

Have a lovely evening, and I'll see you on the flip side!