Scott Lyerly

Jan 25 Photo

January 25th, 2016

Sometime a quick shot grabs my eye. This is the set of mailboxes for the condo complex where I live. I had just picked up the mail, it was evening, I was on my way home from work, and the light for the mailboxes against the evening darkness struck me. There was just something about it that had a noir-y feel. Maybe I’m reading and writing too much hard-boiled detective fiction these days.

Anyway, I took the photo with the native camera app, imported it into Black Cam, gave it a noir feel, and cropped it a little.
Jan 24 Photo

January 24th, 2016

Today’s photo is brought to by snow, without which the kids would not have played outside for an hour and a half, come inside frozen, and begged for hot chocolate.

By the way, the candy cane is actually a “peppermint stir stick”, made specifically for hot chocolate. My older daughter thought it was interesting how the red stripes tended to melt almost immediately when inserted into the drink. I’m sure that’s perfectly healthy. Better living through chemistry.
Dear Victoria’s Secret: A Rant

January 24th, 2016

Dear Victoria’s Secret:

What the hell’s the matter with you? You should know better.

You know what, maybe I should back up, provide a little context as to why I’m so angry with you. Let’s start with your most recent catalog. Something that was pointed out to me by a friend from high school, Leanne, on Facebook. Something I, sadly, wouldn’t have thought to look for. But I’m not the market for this catalog, am I, so why would I give a crap? Well, I do. I have daughters, so I care quite a bit.

Here’s a snapshot of the lacy thing on the back cover:

Notice anything funny (and I’m not talking funny haha) about this picture? No?

Let’s zoom in, shall we:

See it yet? Still no? Are you really that blind, or are you just being obtuse? Okay, let me outline it for you:

See it now? Compare it to the picture just before this one. Notice how this model’s underwear seems to extend out beyond the end of her hips? How the underwear is just magically floating out there in space? See it now?

So, I ask again: what the hell is wrong with you? Why would you think this kind of thing is okay?

Let me lay some foundation here. I’m not a body shamer. I think that people are the shape that they are, that it’s none of my business, and that’s that. Some of us work to change our shape because we don’t like it (that would be me right now, trying to lose all the holiday weight I put on). Some of us don’t care what our shape is. Some of us are larger and that’s just the way our body is, and some of us are rail thin, again because that’s the way our body is. I’m not about to start shaming a VS model for being too skinny, because I know nothing about her or her body. I don’t even know her name. Maybe she starves herself to make it into the pages of the catalog, living on Diet Coke and cigarettes. Maybe she works out eight days a week and eats well and her body is the fruit of those labors. Maybe she has the metabolism of a high school football player, eating Big Macs everyday and losing weight in the process. Doesn’t matter what her situation is cause it’s none of my business.

What IS my business is the blatant Photoshopping you’ve done on a catalog that comes into my home. When I (or in this case, my wife) invite you into our home, I expect you to behave in a manner that is polite and respectable. You’re digitally shaving off part of this girl’s body is not polite. It’s unbelievably rude. It shows incredibly disrespect for the human body. And it’s dangerous.

I have a twelve year old daughter. She’s too young for most of your stuff, thankfully, but she does like the Pink line you sell. Sweatshirts, comfy pajamas, stuff like that. Sure, I get that. Who doesn’t like comfy pajamas. She doesn’t look through the catalogs, it’s not her thing. She could care less about sexy lacy things at this point, and I’m more grateful for that than I can express. I’m completely unprepared for the day when sexy underwear becomes her thing. At that point I may lock her away in a tower, hire a contractor to dig a moat, and rent a dragon.

Except, what happens when she DOES start to look through the catalogs for those things? When she see these girls, who are made to look rail thin, simply because you want to sell more of a sheer lacy cover thing? God forbid she thinks this image is something to emulate. The last thing she, or any girl, needs is an eating disorder because of something she saw in a catalog. There is plenty of evidence that things that glorify “thinness” are a contributing factor to body image issues. Don’t believe me? Review this link, and notice the third category from the top.

Or maybe it’s even more insidious. Maybe you know and you simply don’t care. Maybe you have inventory to move and gross margins to hit and shareholders to report to. That would be even more inexcusable.

As a concerned, and irate, parent of daughters, I’m challenging you to fix this. How about you produce a catalog of VS girls in their underwear with NO photo editing at all? How about you let us see that these girls have paunches, cellulite, moles, birthmarks, and no gap between their thighs? How about you show the world what real women look like, apologize for your crassness, and make a statement that it doesn’t matter what you look like, that as long as you’re comfortable in your own skin, you’re beautiful? That would be a catalog I think we all would appreciate.
Jan 23 Photo

January 23rd, 2016

A quick shot out my front door tonight. For a change, the snow storm is hitting everything south of us. My little slice of Massachusetts is going to get maybe an inch of snow. So far, this is the sum total of our snow. This includes leftover snow from a few weeks ago.

Taken with PureShot, and cropped, tuned, and bordered in Snapseed.
Excel Geeking: Removing All Empty Sheets using VBA

January 22nd, 2016
You ever need to go through a workbook you’re working on and delete a bunch of sheets that have nothing in them? Maybe you’re creating a new automated report that requires you to plunk down a large chunk of data in a new workbook, but when you create that new workbook, it creates it with “Sheet1” and “Sheete2” and “Sheet3”. Yes, I know, you can change how many new sheets are present when you create a new workbook, but if you need to make your code portable, cause maybe somebody else will be running the report, and maybe that person has a backup in case they’re out with meningitis or something, and that person has an admin do it–well, you can lose track of your users pretty quick.

And let’s be honest: a report, or some other workbook, that has a bunch of “Sheet2″s, “Sheet3″s, “Sheet4″s, and so forth, in it looks pretty amateur.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a nice clean little function that let’s you go through and blow away all the sheets in a workbook that are empty of data without having to do that manually? And that aren’t just named “Sheet1”, “Sheet2”, etc.? It sure would. But how might you do that?

Wonder no more!

Below is some code I worked up for just such a task. It bases its actions on whether the UsedRange property is a single cell, that cell being the very first cell in a worksheet. If that’s all there is to the UsedRange, then we’ll take a quick look at the length of the data in that cell. If the length of the data is zero, well then that cell is empty, and that means the sheet is empty. There for we can blow it away.

As with most of my code, there is probably a better way of doing this. But this is what I landed on and it works beautifully (for me, at least). If you have a better method, chime in, I’d love to see how you tackled it.
```
Sub RemoveEmptySheets()
'   This deletes any sheet that has nothing in it.

    ' Variable declarations.
    Dim sh  As Worksheet

    ' Loop through all the sheets in the active workbook.
    For Each sh In ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets

        ' Perform two tests: checking if the used range is the very first cell,
        ' then checking to see if the lenght of hte cell contents is zero, meaning
        ' the cell is empty.
        If sh.UsedRange.Address = &quot;$A$1&quot; Then
            If Len(sh.Range(&quot;A1&quot;).Value) = 0 Then

                ' Delete the sheet.
                Application.DisplayAlerts = False
                sh.Delete
                Application.DisplayAlerts = True

            End If
        End If

    Next sh

End Sub
```
Jan 22 Photo

January 22nd, 2016

Today’s photo is what I think of as a “playing around” photo, where you take a picture and play around with it until you come up with something fun or goofy or both.

If you’re in my age bracket, you went to birthday parties in the 70s and 80s and invariably somebody had a Polaroid camera. You may not have known this, but Polaroid developed a photo app, Polamatic, which you can get in the App Store. It’s a pay app, but it can be a ton of fun.

January and February is birthday season in my house, which means we have birthday paraphernalia lying around in various states of use. Take this package of birthday candles, for example. I liked the look of the package of candles with one missing. But by itself, it’s a kind of uninteresting image.

That’s were the Polaroid app comes in. After a few touch ups in Snapseed, mainly just cropping and rotation, I imported the image into Polamatic. From their you can chose the kind of Polaroid film you want to use, any filtered effects, and the border of the picture.

The end result? A birthday image straight out of the 70s.
Jan 21 Photo

January 21st, 2016

This is a shot of a quilt my mother made for my in-laws at the request of my mother-in-law. My mother is a very accomplished quilter, which is made more impressive when you learn that she’s legally blind. She lost a huge amount of vision twenty-some years ago. Yet, she loves quilting and refused to give it up. She opened her own business quilting the backings onto quilt tops with a sewing machine called a long-arm. She has more swatches of cloth than a Joanne’s Fabric, so much cloth that she actually said, “I don’t need any more gift cards to Joanne’s, there’s nothing more I need to buy there.”

This particular quilt is called (I think) a wedding ring quilt and covers the king sized bed in the bedroom where my wife and I sleep whenever we visit my in-laws. The patterns you see in-between the rings is a stitched pattern that repeats over and over. It always boggles my mind how much work must go into making one of these things.
Jan 20 Photo

January 20th, 2016

I’m still getting the hang of using clip-on lens for my iPhone. This one picture was taken using a macro lens from CamRah. I figured since Alexander Hamilton is suddenly in the public’s eye once again, why not take a macro picture of a ten dollar bill? It’s not great, blurry at the bottom, but I do like how the macro lens provides detail you simply could not get before in an iPhone lens. The little red and blue threads that qualify our paper money as cloth finally stand out to the point where I can see them.
Jan 19 Photo

January 19th, 2016

Last picture from my New York trip. Just about to head over the Whitestone Bridge.

Shot with Hipstamatic.
Jan 18 Photo

January 18th, 2016

Another shot from my trip down to New York. This one taken with Hipstamatic. Like I said yesterday, really fantastic skies in the way down.