Designing a Web Presence

It should come as no surprise that anything I’m planning for the future involves the internet.

I suppose I could decide to move to Astoria and go to work in Starbucks. That’d be a perfectly acceptable second career — and if my other plans don’t work, it might still happen. That’d take a lot less work and planning, though, so I don’t have to think about that quite yet.

What I’ve known for a long time is that whatever this is going to be, it’s going to have a strong online component, which means a well-designed and well-built web presence. I use the term “web presence” here, not web site, because while a web site is a key aspect to this, nothing stands alone in the internet any more. You always have interfaces to other services, whether it’s social networking (Facebook, twitter), or communication (gmail) or to leverage other services instead of building your own (flickr, Smugmug, Cafepress, etc).

Because building a web presence to support this second career is going to be a large and complex beast by the time I’m done, and because one option both Laurie and I are looking at in the future is “build web sites for companies in Astoria” (or “build web sites for photographers”), having a portfolio site I can be proud of is crucial, and having the documentation on the how and why of the design and build process is a useful sales tool.

Besides, the conversation I hope this generates will help make it a better and more useful site; incremental feedback and early discussion is a lot more useful in fixing and tweaking when it’s easier and early.

So this is the second track of discussion that’s going to start showing up on the blog; there is the “why” of the second career, and here, the “how”.

But neither of those matters without the most important part.

Next up: the what. Because this all has to be about something, or it’s really rather silly to do.

One thing I’m not going to do…

One aspect of figuring out what to do in a second career is understanding what NOT to do. As I noted in the intro, one decision I made a while back was that even though my hockey writing was one of the largest segments of my blog’s audience at the time, I chose not to try to make it a focus of my plans. It might have been a leg to build an income stream on in the short term, but over the longer term, it conflicted with other, more important goals (like getting out of Silicon Valley), and I didn’t see any logic in trying to building a hockey audience knowing I was going to “retire” from it at some point.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m interested in a lot of things. Some days I think my brain is a magpie, always looking at some new shiny thing to go and explore. there are days when I feel like I need to put a huge sign that says FOCUS on the wall over my desk, just to remind me to stick to what needs to be done and not spend a few hours “researching”. (although research is necessary and useful, but not to the exclusion of getting real work done).

One of the things I’ve been thinking about for the last year — and reluctantly putting back on the list of things I want to do but can’t justify doing — is going back to fiction writing. At one point I was an active fiction writer, and unlike a lot of them, I was selling some of it. I gave it up for a simple reason: the pay sucked, it was a lot of hard work, and I enjoyed computers and geeking at least as much as I enjoyed writing and being a writer, and computers pay a hell of a lot better.

Fiction writing is a tough market. It hasn’t gotten any better in the time I’ve been away, in fact it’s harder now to succeed as a writer than it was 10 or 15 years ago, and the pay scale is about the same. Not “same adjusted for inflation”, but pretty much the same. A few writers make really good money, a good chunk of writers make enough money to keep writing, and a huge number of writers are fighting for waiter jobs with those actors and actresses and muscians and artists who are all in the same boat in their respective fields.

John Scalzi sums it up wonderfully.

I go back to what I felt when I decided to retire from writing: I enjoy being a writer (the act of writing isn’t as pleasant as having written) — but I don’t see anyway someone who WANTS to be a writer can successfully compete in a tight market against someone who HAS TO BE a writer. And I want to be a writer, it just isn’t something that wraps me in knots at night when I’m not writing. So even though my unfinished novel has been calling to me in the interstices of the midnight hour, one of the things I’ve decided I’m not going to do — is try to go back to fiction writing.

Although I’d like to. But I don’t HAVE to — and that’s something everyone should be brutally honest with themselves about when playing the “I want to be…. ” game. “Want to” isn’t a success strategy. In a creative industry, if it doesn’t come from somewhere deep inside, if the hunger isn’t there, chances are you won’t succeed, because someone who is driven by that hunger is going to fight for the same opportunities, and they’ll win most of the time.

Thoughts on the Second Career

As I noted the other day, I expect posting frequency on the blog to go up soon. About this time last year I started serious planning on my “what’s next?” project — that being my long-term look at how I want to make the shift into the second career. I see a time where I’m not going to want to work in Silicon Valley and hack high tech 24×7 (gasp), but I certainly have no plans on retiring.

The elevator speech: I want to earn a respectable income from my home office in Astoria, Oregon without telecommuting.

Yes, you could potentially contract and consult from there (although if I were going to do that game, I’d do it from Ashland or Medford — like, it sometimes seems, half the population of those towns) but that’s not the point. At some point, I know I want to get out of the Silicon Valley rat race and do something else. The question is — what?

I want to emphasize something: this is a long term (3-5 years) thing; in fact for about the last 15 years I’ve been keeping (with more or less intensity) a 3-5 year plan. That’s the first lesson in something like this: planning is good, because it helps you map a path, but it should also be flexible because as you do the planning, you’ll change your mind, new situations come up, the unexpected happens. For me, the planning on the second career wasn’t so much about implementation, but on understanding where I wanted to end up and to influence decisions now that will make it happen someday. And occasionally, after a really bad day at the office, as a way to keep my sense of humor and sanity. Well, okay. My sense of humor.

Now, the day for that second career is closer. I’ve known for a few years roughly what I wanted to aim at here. Various decisions I’ve made over the last couple of years have been driven by this long-term planning. My move of the blog from Typepad back here to chuqui.com was because I knew I wanted total control over my online environment, and I wanted it under my own domain name for branding purposes. I chose WordPress because I really like that tool as a platform for it’s flexibility and the community ecosystem that exists around it (my second choice, even thought I’ve occasionally described it as sportfishing off of an aircraft carrier, is Drupal, and the drupal community has done a really nice job of cleaning up issues that bothered me back when they couldn’t even run the Drupal site on the Drupal 6 release).

Another decision I made was shutting down the “Two for Elbowing” blog on hockey and de-emphasizing my hockey writing. I did that for a few reasons; originally, that blog was supposed to be for both myself and Laurie to write about hockey (“two for… get it? heh. heh.). Laurie’s life took her in other directions and it turned into a solo gig (although the hockey world is missing out on a damn good hockey geek, and I’m not talking about me); as a solo, I much preferred putting all of my writing into one place (the branding thing) again. Also, think about my long-term goal: moving to Astoria. Building an income around writing about hockey and the Sharks and moving to Astoria conflict. Just a bit. Besides, there are plenty of good hockey writers out there now, and if I was 25 (instead of 50+), I might take a run at doing something like what Rich Hammond is doing with the Kings. Instead, I made a decision to enjoy hockey, not sweat about what to write about it — and I only write when I want to. This is a feature, not a bug.

I’m firmly convinced that what Hammond and the Kings are doing is the future model for journalism in pro sports as the newspaper business continues to evolve and implode. NHL teams that haven’t figured this out yet should take a close look and find a good beat guy to bring on board and nurture. The Sharks could do a lot worse than hiring Dave Pollak and bringing him in-house, for instance. Having been writing about hockey online since before the Sharks existed, I do sometimes wish that the online environment that exists today had existed 15 years ago, but it didn’t. Sometimes timing is everything, and understanding that is a key aspect of designing success into your plans.

To succeed in ANY career path, not just a second career, it’s important to know what NOT to do, what not to sidetrack yourself on, what not to invest time and money in. That may be even more important than knowing what to do, in fact, because that’s how you stay focused and moving in the direction you want to end up.

In any event, this is the first in a series of articles on the idea of a second career and my thoughts and plans. I’m hoping this becomes a conversation, not a lecture; I’m doing this in public both because I hope you find it interesting and learn from it to help refine your own plans and ideas — and because I hope you will help me improve my own ideas and fix the flaws in my thinking and make my own second career success happen as well. I hope you find this interesting and useful; I know I’ll learn from your feedback and comments and end up the better for it. Together, everyone wins — and how can that be bad?

So, onward. The future starts today.

Chuq

Footnote on Astoria: For those not familiar with Astoria, it’s about 2 hours from Portland on the coast, and it’s a very nice, small, homey town, but has some really nice places like the restaurant Baked Alaska and Cellar on 10th that make it more than a small rural town — and it’s well located to a lot of great photographic opportunities). It might not be Astoria (I’m really falling more and more in like with Morro Bay, for instance, and I love the northern Oregon Coast so it could be anywhere from Astoria to Newport…), but that’s a nice placeholder for what I’d like to do.

Small, inviting, not urban, on the coast, lower cost of living but with some nice amenties and close to civilization when I want it. The kind of place most Silicon Valley Geeks seem to wish they lived, unless they’re the hard core urban type. I’m not, but Vancouver tempts me to convert…

Comment behaviour: How far is too far?

According to Greenbaum’s blog post (which was mirrored on his personal blog), someone posted a comment on a story in which they used a colloquial or slang term for female genitalia. It was deleted, but then was reposted. Greenbaum says he noticed that the comment alert from WordPress showed that it came from a nearby school. So Greenbaum called the school, and they asked him to send them the email with the comment, which he apparently did. About six hours later, he says, the school called and said that an employee had been confronted and that he had resigned.

Am I the only one who thinks that doing this goes way beyond the normal course of editorial behaviour?

via Comment behaviour: How far is too far?.

There’s been some interesting commentary on this case — but there are some aspects that I think haven’t been addressed very well yet. It’s a more complicated situation than many have considered, and the answers really aren’t clear cut.

Here’s my take:

There are really two separate issues here.

Did Greenbaum over-react by reporting this person to his employer?

Yes — but.

Yes, he did. In the grand scheme of things, reporting a violator back to their host is a serious thing because it can have serious implications — like getting someone fired. Which effectively happened in this case. So it’s a last resort thing. Before you do something like that, I prefer taking many other tactics first:

• Delete the post
• Warn the User
• Ban the User (and ban the IP and/or IP range as necessary)
• Make it clear that if it doesn’t stop, they’re going to be reported

If those all fail, or if for some reason aren’t possible, THEN you start considering going back to the user’s host for support in making the behavior stop. As far as I can tell, only the first was tried, so a number of (to me) necessary steps were skipped. This could have been ended with much less serious ramifications, and wasn’t.

However, here’s the butt:

• The post was deleted, and the user insisted on putting it back. The admins made it clear it wasn’t acceptable, and the user decided to overrule their authority. This user was far from innocent here.
• Once the user is reportd back to their host (and I use that term carefully, because it’s many times unclear if it’s an employer or what, and to some degree it doesn’t matter if it’s an ISP or a boss or whatever), it’s out of Greenbaum’s control. The rest of the escalation to losing the job was the result of actions of the host (i.e the school, or this person’s boss). None of that is caused by Greenbaum (directly) or his fault, beyond that he should have been sensitive to the fact that his action in reporting might have caused other actions to happen.

So, you know what? I think Greenbaum’s transgression is a lot less serious than the user’s transgression in reposting his vulgarity after it was made clear it wasn’t welcome. I would have tried other tactics to cut the abuse, but let’s not forget that it was abuse, and it was repeated abuse after the site made it clear the posting wasn’t welcome. Whether you shoot over someone’s virtual bow one time or three times is a minor thing in the scheme of it.

The user’s fault in this problem was a much bigger problem than Greenbaum’s reaction.

But what about the school? They’re the group that took the complaint and escalated it into a situation where the person lost their job. None of that is Greenbaum’s fault. Was the school wrong for turning this into a termination issue?

I’m not so sure. It’s easy to say they over-reacted, but let’s not forget:

• This person did this using the school’s network
• It looks like he did it while on duty at the school – while he was being paid by them.
• He likely was on a school-owned computer
• He was (I’m sure) under some kind of employment contract with behavior clauses. The school very likely has acceptable use standards for computers and networks, and for all we know, also personal use restrictions (which this would be a violation of).
• So while this cascaded into a situation where someone lost their job, it’s not at all clear that the details of the action were the cause. We also don’t know if this person has a history of previous violations of work rules that might have been part of this. Has this person been warned about this kind of behavior before? We don’t know. It could well be from the school’s view that this was a “last straw”. We don’t know.

And those complications are why I believe reporting back to the host is something not to be taken lightly; once you do, the final outcome is not really under your control. On the other hand, the person who could have prevented this was the user who posted the vulgarity — either by not doing it in the first place, or by stopping after it was deleted the first time, or by being smart enough to not do it from his employer on company time and company equipment. He had plenty of opportunities to not turn this into what it was; Greenbaum had one.

And it’s not as simple as many of the folks commenting on it want to be. Real life never is…

Some thoughts on Google Chrome OS (epecially for photographers)

Google Chrome OS was announced today and everyone is talking about it. Lots of interesting thoughts going down. Here is mine:

I have never been interested in the “netbook” because I’m MacOS-centric and I saw the netbook as a series of compromises from the functionality I want in a laptop that I found unacceptable — AND I believe that 95% of what most users see as the core functionaliry of a netbook, I see as functionalty that belongs on my phone. the netbook is at best a transitional technology, and smartphonees are quickly taking on most of what netbooks are trying to do today. I don’t like the price/performance of a netbook. Hell, I just don’t like the performance very much, not when I can already do most of it on an iPhone or webOS or Android.

As a photographer, I have also never been interested in buying so-called digital wallets such as the Epson P-7000; too expensive for limited functionalty, and to me, it’s more cost effective to just buy enough cards to handle the sitaution and wait until you can get back to the laptop to offload them and make a real backup.

But I take one look at at the Chrome OS type devices and I see something that can be set up as a rather nice digital wallet — PLUS give you access to some key computing capabilities (email, web, wifi, file uploading) and suddenly, for about the cost of what you pay for a decent digital wallet today, you get something that can hopefully act as a wallet AND access to some key computing features as well? Being able to offload pictures and send a few samples online via gmail or upload to smugmug from the field?

NOW you start having something I’d consider having. Neither device alone is worth the cost of buying it to me. But Chrome OS looks like it’ll have the capability to make these two devices one, at about the same price point of either — and now I’m interested. And it’s going to be a while before phones can take on the capacity we’d be looking for to do the digital wallet capabilities, so this is something a good smartphone can’t yet do.

If I’m a product manager for a digital wallet today, I’m looking at the end of life for this type of product and trying to figure out how to move to this new merged capability before someone eats my lunch. If I’m a developer for these new Chrome OS devices, I’m looking to see how to make it act like a digital wallet, because photographers are going to want to buy this.

And if I’m a photographer, I’m watching and hoping this happens, beacuse this has the potential to be a really nice addition to the photo bag that could allow me to stop carrying my laptop in the field but still be able to do a lot of what I currently want while out shooting.

Count me intrigued and hopeful here.

Stuff You’ll Like

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• Weekend Sherpa: Falling for the Coast.
• Another Cause of Obesity: The Bacteria in your Gut?
• OC Birding: birding by Google Maps. A useful way to find unexpected places to bird.
• Leah Culver: A combined Log-in/Register form design. Very nice. (via Daring Fireball)
• ASMP: Photography workflow best practices with dpBestFlow. The American Society of Media Photographers has created a web site describing what they say are the best practices for your workflow. Definitely a must read.
• Joe Decker: Communicating Immensity
• Joe McNally: Letter to a Young Photographer
• Steve Berardi: How to check Sharpness out in the field
• Mashable: how the SF Zoo uses Twitter
• Petapixel: Extracting the color of a photograph (this is really cool, because I’ve been thinking about automating setting a photo’s frame to a dominant color, and this is the code to do it; make a nice wordpress plug-in if done right)
• 80 in 107: learning all of the rules of hockey before the winter Olympics in Vancouver. do they realize the Olympics rulebook is different than the NHL rulebook?

Will google reshape online backups?

Another followup on my backup article. Google has recently announced the ability to buy online storage at prices dramatically lower than anyone else: 20 gigabytes for $5/year. This kind of pricing would take what I’m currently paying for S3 a month and cover my online backup for the entire year — over a 10X reduction in cost.

That would make online backups very economical, and with a vendor you can trust isn’t going away any time soon.

Only one problem. But it’s a big one.

The rumored “gDisk” product has never been announced, much less made available — this is Google’s version of Apple’s mobileMe iDisk. The only ways to actually use this inexpensive disk space is via gmail (Google’s email system) or Picasa (their photo sharing).

That makes this a non-starter for me. Neither platform is one I’d consider using for backups; the gymnastics needed to make it usable is a killer. So anyone who saw the pricing here and said “wow!” can go back to waiting. But maybe this’ll cause some of the other vendors to start reducing their pricing as well, because you have to believe Google is going to release gDisk sooner or later. Of course, I know people who’ve been expecting it sooner or later for a couple of years now, so maybe we can pull “sooner or” out of that wait loop.

Pre101 interviews, um, me.

An interview I did with Pre101 is now available for your amusement and befuddlement.

Should the Sharks break up the top line of Thornton and Heatley?

That’s the question I’ve asked myself after watching the past few SJ Sharks games.

via Should the Sharks break up the top line of Thornton and Heatley? | The Hockey Writers.

That’s the question Chelsea is asking.

The question I’m asking is why you’re asking this question with a team that’s 8-0-2 in their last ten, gaining 18 out of a possible 20 points?  Given their success (they have not lost in regulation two games in a row yet this season), whatever McLellan is putting out on the ice is working. So why are we trying to fix it?

Now, sometimes — to try to answer my own question seriously — a team can be winning but clearly not playing good hockey. The Sharks, however, are a team that is starting to get on a roll to my eyes. They just got Pavelski back, and he really makes the 2nd line dangerously good, and it looks like the chemstry is coming together and the team is starting to play its game.

So my short answer is — it ain’t broken. In fact, it looks good. I’d leave it alone. And with a team playing this well and winning this consistently, I’d ask myself why I’m looking for things to kvetch about.

But that’s just me.

Stuff You’ll Like

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• Audubon California: Water Deal is a big win for California’s migratory birds.
• Mockingbird: a web-based wireframe/mockup tool for web design, written in Cappucino. At first glance, looks really impressive. (via Ajaxian)
• The Art of Community: Jono Bacon’s new book on building and managing communities. I’ve been (slowly) reading the book, and it is very well written and informative. (available from O’Reilly via Amazon.com, also as a free download)
• Cocoa is my Girlfriend: Why version control is important for solo developers. (chuq: this is true also for web sites and web design, stand-alone writing and all sorts of other things. Note: do what I say, not what I’m doing. I need to really get this set up right before I start my next projects. If RAID doesn’t replace backups, Backups do not replace version control. Really)
• Gulls Winning Wetlands Battle: a look at the challenges of managing the wetlands here in the bay area, because the California Gulls are moving in and starting to nest in large numbers.

Looking at the Dany Heatley trade

Now that we’re in November, I wanted to take a look at the Dany Heatley trade and the Sharks in general. Given I wasn’t a huge fan of the trade before it was made (look here), what do I think now?

I like it. Heatley is doing pretty much everything I could ask to convince me that Doug Wilson knew better than I did about this trade. Gee, that’s a surprise — the GM knows more than I do (but it’s surprising how few fans are willing to admit that. Hi, Tom!).

Michalek is — well, he’s Michalek. What you see is what you get. Cheechoo is just floundering, and I feel bad for the kid, but… well, am I surprised? Not really. So what we gave up I don’t miss. And what I see I like.

Heatley has kept his mouth shut, he’s worked his butt off on the ice, he’s produced, and he’s fit in well with the team. Exactly what he needed to do. Even better, he’s shown himself to me to be a grittier player than I expected — he’s no brett hull, he actually gets his nose dirty around the crease. And the Sharks have had him playing penalty kill, which I didn’t expect, and he’s okay at it (his defensive coverage is sometimes a bit — lax — but he’s decent and he tries. He also has a nice edge to him, which I also didn’t expect.

So what can I say? He’s the player I hoped we’d get, and more. I have no real complaints here. And what we gave up? expendable..

And the Sharks? took a bit to get the chemistry going. right now? they’re looking somewhat unstoppable. I was all for some adversity early in the season, given that last year it was easy early and they put it into coast mode and couldn’t get out.

This year? I’m not seeing that. The big difference is on the third and fourth line. No offense to Mike Grier or Marcel Goc or the third liners last year, but they were good defensive players, but weren’t able to impact or change momentum. Bringing in Nichol and Ortmeyer has made a huge difference, and changed the mix witwh the younger role players, too, and now we’re seeing that the third and fourth lines are really changing the flow of the game.

Most notable change from last year? These two lines still do a lot of cycling on the shifts, but this year, they’re doing it in the offensive zone and creating problems for the other team, rather than last year, where we saw these lines mostly in the defensive zones preventing goals. Over a season, this is huge.

I give this team an A- so far. And they’re fun to watch, too.

It’s not a bad photographer, it’s a bad person

This seems to come up about once a year among the birders — bad behavior by a  bird phoographer. I wrote up my thoughts on this, since I live in all three worlds (birder, photographer of birds, and list admin to both), and decided I’d turn it into a blog post so I can point to it next time this comes up.

The reality is this: bad behavior is bad behavior, and I’ve seen bad behavior by both birders and photographers. I’ve turned birders into the rangers for going off trail. I’ve also done the same with photographers. My favorite “what are you THINKING moment” here was a photog up on the bluffs above Fitzgerald out in Moss Beach, where they went over the fence and ten feet DOWN the bluff to take a picture of a flower.

If you’ve been in that area, you know why I just stood and watched until he came back up safely. Did I mention it to him? no. Why? I’ve found people like this rarely are interested in constructive feedback (and I’m not always in a mood to be constructive!), and honestly, I have no authority. But I do have no qualms about reporting people to rangers and letting them deal with it. Note that since I have a camera, the ranger has evidence of the act, and on more than one occasion has chatted with the person back in the parking lot…

The biggest problem I think both birders and bird photographers run into these days are off-leash dogs and their owners. That one’s a real tough issue. I don’t consider “off leash” to be a problem per-se, but many dogs are a lot less under control than the owner wants to believe, and many of these dogs are being allow to chase birds in restricted habitats. We won’t even go into the ones that don’t bother cleaning up after their animals…

Of course, the core problem here is that as a society, many people feel the rules don’t apply to them, and don’t care as long as they don’t get caught. Or don’t care even if they do get caught, given the abusive reaction some of them have to the rangers and cops who call them on it.. It’s the “what I want is the only thing that matters” mentality. Fortunately, this is really rare in birding circles — just not rare enough.

Here is the scenario: birders chase a reported rarity and congregate to see it once the word gets out. Many photographers are also birders but carry with them digital cameras, big lenses and the desire to get photos. As birders like to accumulate birds on their lists, photographers like to accumulate photos. Nothing wrong with either on the surface. The issues are politeness around other people, and potential disturbance to the bird. If the result is scaring off the bird then others won’t have the opportunity to see it

It goes both ways here. I’ve had situations where I’ve been working a location for a significant period of time, camera on tripod, keeping quiet and letting a specific posture or behavior develop, only to have a birder come tromping up through the brush making enough noise to flush every bird in the time zone. I’ve had them walk up and proceed to stand directly behind the tree in my camera view, ruining the shot. I’ve had them come up and stand directly in front of me — usually oblivious, but occasionally they just don’t care what anyone else thinks.

I had one birder who, after coming up to check out the bird I was trying to photograph, consciously flush the birds when he was done — and smirk at me on the way out. He’s lucky I valued my tripod more than I valued beating some sense into him.

There are bad photographers. There are bad birders. The focus should be on bad behavior, not on one class of person or the other.

I live with feet in all three buckets here: birder, bird photographer, and list owner. There ARE huge differences in behavior and attitude between birding and photographing birds, and they can conflict. 99% of the time, though, if the birders and the photographers just work at it and communicate, everyone can be happy. On lists, it’s important to set ground rules and understand what the primary reason the list exists — and then discourage users that don’t work within that.

In the field, it comes down to cooperation and communication. Someone who gets on a bird first should be given the opportunity to watch it without it being flushed; people who come in later need to hang back and have some patience rather than plow in and ruin it for everyone by flushing a bird. On the other hand — the person doing the watching needs to be sensitive to others who are waiting for them and bring them in as soon as they reasonably can and “not be greedy”.

Note that I specifically leave the camera out of this, either group could be the camera person and either group be the birder. Birders fixed on a bird and oblivious to all around them are fairly common, you don’t need a camera to tune out the universe. A few people skills work for both groups.

Now, on the list, it can be trickier. I’ll be the first to admit I love passing around good shots of what I’ve seen. On a birding-centric list like SBB, there’s some tolerance for that, but it’s easy to overdo it. My PERSONAL policy for dealing with this is this: the birds have to be local to the group; they have to be timely; I post links to rarities or to one or two representative photos and beyond that suggest they look at my flickr for the rest. I try to be sensitive to the fact that the list is about birding, and the photography is documentary to the birding, not the reason for the list, so I try to keep it relevant and subdued. For other birding centric lists, setting written policies that spell that out will reduce the fighting that can happen ON list. (as someone who sometimes has to break up these disagreements on SBB, I’ve tried to set an example and hold myself to a conservative standard. I sometimes fail, but I’m learning…)

It might be worth hashing it out a bit on list, or polling the members and asking them to comment privately, and then set a policy based on that feedback. If it’s a small problem, grabbing a consensus and formalizing it will keep it small, and help everyone understand what’s acceptable. Not having a policy is where trouble lies, because members get upset and start defining policy on the fly, and the fights over who’s setting policy tend to be a lot worse than the fight that led to the meta-fight…

What I’d suggest is focussing on the bad behavior, not on whether it’s birders vs. bird photographers. Like Steve, I have no problem removing someone from a list if they are found to be chronic abusers of the environment or their fellow birders. Fortunately, I haven’t had to. Unfortunately, the last three cases I can think (on various lists I’m on) of where abuse issues have come up have all involved photographers, but four of the last five times I’ve had conflicts in the field have been by birders, not photographers; I think the camera geeks get noted because there’s a perception (not completely false) that “they aren’t birders” — actually we’re many times both.

As list owner I have NO control whatsoever when it comes to stupidity or bad behavior out in the field, a

Actually, to some degree you do. You have the power of expulsion from the list, and you have the power of public chastisement and censure. Neither of which should be used trivially, but sometimes, it can be considered (and threatened). Just as a thought. Now with a list like SBB, which is informally but tightly tied to the county Audubon, I wouldn’t consider doing something like that without consulting with them.

And sometimes that’s the best option; many times these people are known within the birding and/or photo groups. and many times, if you ask the right person, someone who knows them well will take them aside and “have a little talk”. And “things get fixed” without there ever being any formal action or fight. So it’s never bad to spend time learning who the various people are and knowing who you can bring in if you need advice or — a little help with something. getting the right thought in the right ear is sometimes the best way to take a little thing and keeping it from festering and becoming a big one. Especially if the problem is one of naivete or obliviousness. Nothing is going to solve those smirks, though, except a tripod to the temple… but I’d hate to dent a good tripod…

chuq

Some more thoughts on backups.

I had a couple of people email me on my backup article (thank you all for the links and feedback!), and that led to a few more quick thoughts.

Is there significant advantage to Firewire over USB 2 for a backup drive?

Firewire is faster. USB is slower, but the drives are less expensive.

Apple left off the firewire port on the new Macbook. There have been indications for a while that they’re starting the shift away from Firewire. What that implies for now is that any external drive you buy should have a USB interface so as to avoid long-term compatibility issues. That’s not a problem for most drives, but it’s something to be aware of.

I normally run my backup drives via USB now for a simple reason: I can plug them into a USB hub. If nothing else, it’s one less thing to plug in (not such a big deal for macpro, bigger deal for laptop). And it saves me having to think about buying a firewire hub as the drives multiply.

Firewire has target disk mode, but Apple’s also indicated it’s future is limited to the future of firewire. Apple seems to be thinking that the future is USB3, high speed wifi (N speed) and to a lesser degree gigabit ethernet. I’m going to be curious if they start including an eSATA interface, but I think if they were going to, we’d have seen one by now.

As long as you buy external drives that are USB2/Firewire400, you’ll be fine. No need to spend more for Firewire800 for a backup drive, the extra performance is more or less wasted except for the initial backup, and who cares if the initial backup finishes at 3AM instead of 7AM while you’re sleeping?

This drive to me is the sweet spot for archival backups. I’ve used the drive casing and it’s less expensive than heavier duty enclosure I recommended on my blog (only about $40 per drive over the raw disk unit). I’ve used them, they’re nice and reliable. the 1TB is a lot cheaper per gigabyte than the 2TB drives, so if you can use them, I would for now. Buying down a generation never hurts.

(FWIW, a little birdie I trust told me to not trust the 1.5TB drives, that entire generation, according to them, are going to be less reliable than the 1′s or 2′s. I haven’t seen any data to back this up, but given who they work for, I trust them enough that I’m avoiding using them. I wouldn’t freak and replace one, but I’d also plan on retiring them earlier than I might otherwise)

Why the recommendation of that Mercury Elite drive?  I’m trying to understand the price-performance-reliability issues here.  The Mercury you cite runs $160; Newegg, as just one sample, has Hitachi and iomega external drives, retail, USB 2.0 (or “Turbo USB 2.0″?), 1TB, at $90.

I’ve used them and found them reliable. If you have another brand you like and trust, be my guest. To a good degree, these are commodities, but I like to make sure I have a high quality enclosure and then upgrade the drive mechanisms over time rather than replace the whole thing. Some of them, honestly, cheap out on the interface and/or power supply, and some can run really hot under load (or really hot, period), which reduces reliability and lifetime. The OWC enclosures are well engineered from what I’ve seen and I have enough history with them to know that the enclosures rarely fail, so I trust recommending them.

But really, whatever works for you, but an unreliable disk enclosure can make your life hell and be more likely to die early in its lifetime.

Stuff You’ll Like

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• Better Habits for Better Photography: Today over on twitter someone reminded me of something Galen Rowell taught me many years ago, and I realized the subject required more than 140 characters to explain. The basic idea sounds simple to start with: Essentially, after you shoot, the idea is to leave the camera back at some “default” set of settings. In my case, that’s typically auto-focus, ISO 100, aperture-priority, f/16, RAW, mirror lockup enabled. (Except when it’s something else.)
• How to get better control of autofocus: Normally, your camera will auto focus when you press the shutter button halfway, but with back-button autofocusing, you have to press a button on the back of the camera instead, giving you complete control of when autofocus is initiated.
• How to be Lucky: 3) don’t blow a great shot with technical issues – that’s just mickey mouse – get that crap out of the way through lots of practice and careful routines, even check lists and being careful – and if hand holding under borderline conditions, take several shots so at least one will be sharp.
• Advice: Style is a voice, not a prop or an action. If you can buy it, borrow it, download it, or steal it, it is not a style. Don’t look outward for your style; look inward. Never apologize for your own sense of beauty. Nobody can tell you what you should love. Do what you do brazenly and unapologetically. You cannot build your sense of aesthetics on a concensus. Learn to say “I’m a photographer” out loud with a straight face. If you can’t say it and believe it, you can’t expect anyone else to, either.
• Birding at the Edge of the Bay: I’ve pointed to birding location guides for a number of counties, but never Santa Clara County for some reason. Gordon Barrett has done a nice job of building one for Santa Clara County with his birding on the edge of the bay maps.

More than you wanted to know about backups

It was a topic for discussion multiple times at the Morro Bay Photo Expo. It’s a continuing topic online in various blogs. It’s a continuing problem where the solutions seem simple in theory, but in practice…

So while I’ve written about it before, I realized while I was at the expo that my own backups weren’t in great shape (in theory vs. in practice), so when I got back, I fixed that, and so here’s a snapshot of what I do and why I do it.

George Barr at behind the lens has written a couple of pieces on backups I found really interesting:

• A good computer system requires two separate and distinct components – both reliability and backup
• What are you thinking about reliable painless off site backup?

But first, here’s a good take on backups from the point of view of a developer by Steven Frank.

And now my take. I try to be pretty anal about backups — despite that, in the last year, we lost some data off of Laurie’s disk when it failed because (ta da!) at some point I turned Time Machine off on that machine and forgot to turn it back on, and in Leopard, Time Machine’s ability to notify you of a problem like this is, well, non-existant. They have partially fixed that problem in Snow Leopard, but still: that tells you just how easy it is to screw this up, and not know until it’s too late.

The quest for the perfect backup system continues. It doesn’t exist. For me, “perfect” would imply:

• Fast
• Reliable
• Turn-key and non-invasive
• Cost-effective

Preferably, it works out of the box without requiring me to figure out how to make it work; Time Machine actually takes a huge step forward in this regard, but still has weaknesses. All other solutions simply aren’t close.

Here’s what I do to back up my laptop:

• I split my data between two disks. My key data is on the disk on my laptop and goes with me everywhere. My “secondary” data is on a firewire drive that sits on my desk. That second disk is effectively an archive of things I may want to use (installers, movies and videos retired from itunes, etc) but don’t need on a regular basis. My lightroom catalog and my iTunes library both live on the laptop disk.
• I have a second firewire drive that I plug in when I’m wired onto the desk. That is my primary backup disk; on it, I use Superduper to make a bootable clone of my laptop drive onto this disk. Superduper is compatible with sharing a disk with Time Machine, so that disk also has a time machine backup on it. Superduper runs nightly, so that bootable clone is generally under 24 hours out of date. This is a feature, not a bug.
• I have a third drive, this a bus-powered firewire drive, that I carry with me on the road. It’s a bootable Superduper clone.  When I’m at home, I update it weekly. When I’m on the road, I update it nightly. I do NOT run Time Machine on this drive, just Superduper.
• I’ve been backing up online for about the last year, using Amazon S3 and JungleDisk. I back up “key data” (photos, documents, and itunes) to S3 over the wire.

That is, if you’re counting, up to five copies of my key data, including an automated off-site backup online to S3. A few thoughts on why I do this:

• Time Machine is good for recovering A FILE. I don’t consider it acceptable to recover a disk for various reasons.
• This goes double for Time Capsule. When Apple released the Time Capsules, I bought two, one for my house, one for my mom’s house. I think it does a great job backing up my mom’s laptop at her house (this is the primary use case for this device, I think; non-technical user, light data usage, catastrophic recovery needs). For my uses, it fell short for many reasons — it doesn’t do well in data-intensive situations or multi-computer environments, and recovering over the network is beyond a pain (trust me, I tried). When Laurie’s disk failed, the first thing I did was clone the backups off the Time Capsule onto a disk (to preserve a copy, just in case) — and then found I couldn’t use that clone to recover the disk after plugging it into the computer. That forced me into a recovery over the network, and even running a long ethernet cable from the Time Capsule to the Mac made that recovery pretty painful. That along makes Time Capsule not acceptable to me in my environment.
• You should plan on your backup drive to be 3X the size of your drive that you’re backing up if you use Time Machine. Anything less, and it’ll probably end up thrashing with limited space and not keeping backups around as long as you’d like.
• Why backing up via superduper nightly is a feature, not a bug: If something corrupts and you don’t notice right away, one of the best ways to ruin your day is to realize that your backups are so efficient that they sucked in all of the corruption as well. That’s why it’s good to have a backup that’s only backed up once in a whilte, and even better, have a backup that you have to PLUG IN and MANUALLY back up. Because that way, you know you have a good backup even if your disk controller fries and writes gibberish over everything plugged into your computer. That’s why having a week-old backup in a drawer is a REALLY good thing — teach yourself to maintain it.

Bootable backups rock, as do bus-powered (i.e, don’t plug into an electrical socket) drives. If you’re on the road and your laptop fries (or runs away from home), a bootable, bus-powered drive means all you need to do is find a Mac and you can plug in and boot YOUR system; if you’re on the road with another Mac user, it makes surviving a lost computer a lot less painful (been there, done that); or you could even depending on circumstances find a cybercafe, or even overnight a new laptop from Amazon or Apple if that’s what it takes and be on the road again right away. That’s another reason why Time Machine shouldn’t be your only (or primary) backup.

I’ve bought my disks from Other Worlds Computing for years. I use their Mercury On-The-Go drives for my bus-powered carry-arounds. I user their Elite AL-Pro drives for my sit-on-desk and my archival drives. Laurie has an Elite AL-Pro dual-mechanism as her primary data disk on her Mac Mini, running mirrored drives via Softraid. SoftRaid rocks. The only reason I don’t use that configuration is that the ONLY failure I’ve had with a drive enclosure in the last half-dozen years was my RAID/mirror drive where the firewire interface died; I lost no data, but I never got around to replacing the enclosure; by the time it failed, I’d outgrown the drives anyway, so I just but a single-drive, much larger drive. Funny how data grows to fit available space.

That’s the first warning on RAID systems; there are still single points of failure in them. Two drives in a box is nice, unless the box itself fails.

RAID? SAN? NAS? Drobo? WTF?

It’s really easy to get lost and confused in the jargon. RAID? RAID 0? RAID 1? SAN? NAS? Drobo?

My view of all of this is simple: unless you NEED it, stay away. Keep it simple. The more complex you make your environment, the more pieces exist to go wrong, usually on deadline.

• RAID: RAID is a set of technologies that take multiple drives and hook them together in various ways. RAID 0 wires them up as one really large virtual drive. RAID 1 wires them up in parallel and writes the same data on each disk, in theory meaning the data will always exist even if one of the drives fails. Because theory rarely works as well in practice, they invented a bunch of other RAID options (RAID 5, RAID 10, RAID 1+0, RAID WTF) to try to accomplish in practice what RAID 0 and RAID 1 do in theory.

RAID is not a backup. RAID adds redundancy, but it is not a backup. If you don’t understand that concept, give a phone call to the people at Microsoft and Danger and ask about their Sidekick “oopsie”. Ask for Roz Ho (Hi, Roz!). RAID 1 has no capability to recover from many problems, including deleting a file off the disk (and wanting it back) or corrupting your data, because that data will be corrupted on  all of your copies. that’s a bad thing.

RAID save you from a drive failure, but the drive you’re most likely to kill yourself when it fails is the one in your laptop or desktop computer, and it’s not set up for RAID. To me, RAID serves many useful purposes. I just don’t consider one of them to be backups. RAID can make it less likely for you to need to restore from a backup, but it doesn’t create or replace backups.

• SAN: Storage Area Network: If your data needs are complex enough to need a SAN, you either have an IT department, or you better plan on budgeting for one, at least with an IT guy on retainer.
• NAS: Network Area Storage: NAS boxes are hot among the geeks right now, for good reason. It’s basically a big fileserver that lives on your network. Your files are wherever your are, and in the days of Wifi and laptops where you carry your computer around the house, a very tempting option. you can find NAS boxes that are compatible with Time Machine, NAS boxes that are compatible with windows boxes, and NAS boxes that make breakfast and brew coffee in the morning.

I have a couple of problems with NAS boxes: first, all of your I/O goes over the network. I don’t care how you’ve built your network, unless it’s fiber optic, it’s slower than a disk attached to your computer.

The other big problem I have with NAS boxes; you are buying a computer that has a bunch of disks on it. That adds cost and complexity (and things that can fail) to the mix. The more complex your environment the harder it is to make it work reliably and the more likely something will fail along the way. I like SIMPLE. Plugging disks into my computer is simple. NAS is a lot less simple.

Now, if you are in a multi-computer, multi-user environment where sharing files happens regularly, then the cost and complexity of a NAS may well make sense for you. Buying a NAS just to back up one or two computers? To me, that makes no sense. Using it for backups as well as file sharing and storage for a small office of a few people? Different story. But for me, a NAS would make backups slower and less reliable, and not bring much to the equation to offset that. Your mileage will likely vary.

• Drobo: The Drobo is another toy that a lot of geeks are drooling over. Basically, it’s a really smart, RAID-capable disk enclosure that worries about the details of data storage and tells you when you need to feed it more drives, and it worries about data migration and all of that. When they work, they work great. When they don’t — I know people who’ve gone insane dealing with them (but most of those were early adopters; Drobo’s done a good job of dealing with this stuff).

My complaints about Drobo are similar to the NAS — it adds cost and complexity, and for my needs, I just don’t see that I need it. Well, not now. But I’m going to buy a Drobo at some point, unless something better comes along, but not as long as I can live on (and backup with) simple drives reasonably, which is, right now, 2 terabytes.  When my backup and data needs outstrip the size of a standard large hard drive, then Drobo is a good option. Until then, I’ll go with SIMPLE (and cheaper).

It is, honestly, hard to argue with inexpensive and simple, and inexpensive and simple is to take a nice, 2 terabyte drive and plug it into your computer via USB or Firewire and back up via Time Machine and Superduper.

The combination of Time Machine (for short term backups and needing “that one file back”) and Superduper (nightly to online disk, and weekly to offline disk) is simple, manageable and it works, and it protects you from just about any kind of data/hardware failure below massive catastrophic problems like your house burning down.

If you can store your backups on a 2 terabyte disk (the largest standard drive generally available right now), then all you really need is a couple of 2 terabyte drives. Anything else adds cost and complexity, not reliability or better backups.

If you CAN’T live on a couple of 2 terabyte drives, the first thing you should do is ask yourself whether you really need access to all of that data all of the time? It not, come up with a plan to subset your data into your active data and your archived data. Data you know won’t change much is a lot easier to back up and by figuring out what you dn’t need to carry around, you can probably get to the point where you don’t need the complex solutions to make your backup work. And you lower your risk at losing data if you can figure out what data doesn’t have to be carried around to be lost.

Offsite backups

What about that catastrophic problem? Your house just burnt down. Your office is underneath that mudslide. Now what?

For that, you need a copy of your data in a safe place. I’ve been using Amazon S3, others use a safe deposit box. Literally, any place where you can reasonably say “the chances of both places being destroyed at the same time is very small” works; I’m comfortable with leaving a disk in a locked drawer at work, for instance. Any disaster that takes out my house AND my office — I probably have bigger worries, if I’m around to worry about them.

The easiest way to handle an offsite backup (there’s that word again, SIMPLE): buy two firewire/USB 2 Terabyte disks. Plug one into your computer, do a time machine and Superduper backup. unplug. Take to work, lock in a drawer. Plug in the other computer and run backups.

Now, once a month, take your backup disk to work, take the disk at work home and plug it in.

How tough is that? So why don’t we? (hint: just do it)

I’ve been doing offsite backups to Amazon S3 for the last year. There are some nice advantages to it; it’s trivially easy (when you, say, don’t forget to turn the backups back on, when the network doesn’t fail, when… ) — I’ve had no complaints — zero, none, nada — with Amazon S3 and Jungledisk. It works great.

I’m going to stop doing it, too, in favor of the “buy another disk, swap it with the one at work” method. Here’s why:

• Cost: I’ve got about 45 gigabytes backed up on S3. That’s not all of my data. That’s the data that I can’t afford to lose. That data is growing every time I take a photo, and it’s not going to shrink. Currently, this is costing me $15-20/mo in storage and access charges. That’s roughly $200 a year. That’s a couple of terabytes of disk a year I can buy. This isn’t the cheaper option.
• Reliability: it’s only as reliable as the vendor you entrust your data to. That’s why I’m using Amazon S3. I know I won’t wake up some morning to find out my backup storage vendor ran out of funding and is shutting down (or shut down without notice). It’s happened. A soon as you start bringing in services like this, you start having to qualify your vendors (i.e., all that nasty stuff I.T. does for you at work) and monitoring their operations and validating their services and paying their bills. Do you want to be your own IT department more than absolutely necessary?
• Recovery: Okay, pop quiz: how long will it take to download 45 gigabytes? If I ever do need to recover a catastrophic failure from S3, not only will my data set be incomplete, it’ll take me days (I’m guessing 2-3 weeks) to pull that data down. Assuming nothing goes funky and my ISP doesn’t decide I’m pirating music and turns me over to the RIAA or rate throttles me.

That latter’s a killer. I could handle “really slow” if it were cheaper, but the cost-benefit of online backups doesn’t match simply buying a couple of disks and stuffing them in a drawer at work. It’s slower, it’s more expensive, it won’t scale, your recovery will be more painful, AND you’re adding complexity and the need to manage a vendor relationship or two.

So I’m doing away with online backups. Convenient in some ways, but not cost effective, not simple, and if you ever need to recover more than one or two files, incredibly painful. And for one or two files, Time Machine works.

Some day, online storage will happen. But not now. If you’re considering it, think long and hard about the costs and hassles — and go buy another disk.

Some final thoughts

• Here’s a hint many people don’t think about; you don’t need to keep buying disks with enclosures; it’s quite easy to replace the mechanism INSIDE the drive. That can save you $50-100 per drive, which over time really can add up. Or use a drive dock, which allows you to buy bare drives and plug them in as needed without opening an enclosure. Simply wrap the drive back in the non-static bag (or buy some to keep them in), and they take up less space and cost you less money. It’s an easy operation even for a non-techie.

• Don’t wait for a drive to fail. You don’t have to wait for a drive to fail to retire it. If you copy your data to a new drive and retire the old one BEFORE it fails, you can stick your old drive in a drawer (as an emergency backup!) and save yourself the pain of having a drive fail. A little preventative maintenance does wonders here.

• Always buy bigger than you think you need. If you are currently on a 500 megabyte drive, replace it with a 1 terabyte drive. Or better yet, a 2TB drive. you’ll find ways to use it.

• Think in terms of “active” data, “accessible” data, and “archival” data. You don’t need instant access to every file every moment. If you come to grips with a plan for “what’s available”, “what’s handy if I need it” and “what I might need”, you can REALLY simplify your life and your backups.

• I handle archival data really simply: it lives on my secondary drive until I get around to copying it to an archival drive.  I make a clone of the archival drive. One lives in a drawer at work. One lives in a drive at home. Once every year or two, I take the oldest drive and retire it, and copy all of the data to a brand new (probably larger, because I’ll need it). That way, you continue to migrate that data to new media and minimize the chances of “it died sometime when we weren’t looking” or “wow, we can’t READ that zip drive any more”.  By making data migration to new media part of your backup/archival plan, you limit the problems you have going back to old data down the road, at minimal cost and no real pain.

• Burning to DVD? CDs? Don’t bother. First, if you aren’t using gold archival DVDs in your burning, the chances of having bit errors down the road are high, especially after a few years, and even archival Gold DVDs have longevity issues. And when you look at the cost per gigabyte of DVDs vs buying another hard drive, it’s a no brainer. We outgrew burnable media years ago.

If you take nothing else away from this article, do these two things

• Keep your backups as simple as you can while still doing the job: two copies of your data (three is better. Four is even better), at least one copy of data off-site.
• The best way to make backups painless is to never need them — and the best way to do that is to retire/replace your PRIMARY drives every year to 18 months. This is especially true for laptop users where drives get bumped around. Upgrade your working drives on a regular schedule, and you’ll significantly reduce the change of a drive failing on you at a bad time. And you’ll get a bigger (and probably faster) hard drive in the bargain. A 500 gigabyte, 7200 RPM Seagate laptop drive will run you under $10o. You can clone your data to it via Superduper (using one of the bus-powered enclosures, say, or the disk dock…) and then even if you pay someone to install it in the laptop, that’s still $150 — and that $150 could well make sure you never NEED the backups in the first place, and people never seem to think about doing this. Do it. To me, that’s money well spent.

I and the Bird #112

I and the Bird is logging a lot of frequent flyer miles these days. In the past two months alone, we’ve peregrinated from New York to India to New Mexico to Minnesota, some odd geographic choices to be sure. Believe it or not, we’re back to India, courtesy of Thomas of Walk the Wilderness. The return trip is definitely worth it to just to travel around the world with IATB again. See what I mean when you read this massive 66 entries! globe-spanning edition of I and the Bird #112.

via I and the Bird #112.

A very nice compendium of writing about birding. My “teachable moment” is included in this issue.

Where are they now? Ed Courtenay

For all you really old Sharks fans out there, a quick where are they now — Ed Courtenay.

Ed’s still playing hockey, and playing in Britain.

Courtenay is teh subject of one of my favorite all time radio “moments” in Sharks history:

Dan Rusanowsky: It’s a breakaway!

Dennis Hull: No, it’s Courtenay.

Dennis Hull was right. Never the fleetist of feet in the NHL, Courtenay still was one of those guys who brought the effort every night in the early (really sucky!) days of San Jose Sharks history….

A quick comment on the Sharks/Capitals game (and Sharks hall of fame ramblings)

I can only think of one thing to say about tonight’s game against the Capitals:

LOOK! A PUPPY!

(seriously, Sharks didn’t look terrible; a step slow, and they couldn’t handle Ovechkin tonight. Well done game by the Caps, the two quick goals took the fight out of team teal tonight)

So instead, some quick ramblings about the Sharks Hall of Fame. They were talking about team hall of fames on XM this morning, which got me thinking: if I were running the Sharks Hall of Fame, who would be in it? My list. Feel free to add your own, or complain about mine:

Players:

• Kelly Kisio: Kisio is one player that gets forgotten in the early years of the Sharks — perhaps he wants to forget the pain, I dunno. But the reality is, while Doug Wilson was the first captain and the goal was for him to lead the sharks out of expansion hell, injuries prevented his being much of an impact on the ice, and it was Kisio that really held the early years of the team together. Some nights, he was the only player that seemed to be fighting the good fight, and if there was a real “first captain” that set the tone of what the Sharks wanted to be, it was Kelly Kisio. He’d be the first player I induct into the the Sharks hall of fame.
• Arturs Irbe: was the player that kept the Sharks competitive night after night. He was nevera “pretty” goalie, more of the squeal-and-lunge school of goaltending, but it worked. He made the Sharks a lot better than they were, and deserves to be one of the initial inductees into the Hall of Fame.
• Jeff Odgers: Odgers more than any other players defined the lunchpail ethic of the Sharks and was the guy who brought his heart and work ethic to the game every night. Not the most talented guy in the game — but his stint as captain really helped create the shark’s team identity.
• Igor Larionov, Sergei Makarov, Johan Garpenlov: I don’t know that these three players are Sharks hall of famers individually (even though Larionov and Makarov are hall of famers for their contributions to hockey overall) — but this was the first true “identity line” that played together for a significant time and really showed magic on the ice to the fans. So they go in as a line, as they played on the team.
• Owen Nolan: Another player who defined “what it takes to be a Shark” and the Sharks first true All Star.
• Brian Marchment: Okay, okay. Just kidding.

Honorable mentions:

• Mike Rathje: who doesn’t get the credit he deserves for what he did, because the fans could only see what they thought he ought to be.
• Tony Granato: for taking what Jeff Odgers started and helping it mature.
• Jeff Friesen: who had a better career as a Shark as many (including myself) gave him credit for, because he never quite lived up to his draft position.
• Mike Vernon: just isn’t quite enough of a Shark in my eyes.
• Mike Ricci: ditto, but it came down to Odgers or Ricci (but not both) in my eyes, and Odgers won.
• Jamie Baker: most dramatic goal in franchise history, great player for the Sharks — but not quite the team hall of fame to me.

Future inductees: Joe Thornton, Patrick Marleau, Evgeny Nabokov. (maybe Dan Boyle, depending on how long he stays…)

Builders:

• George Gund: let’s not forget how much time and energy (and money) he put into making this team successful
• Dan Rusanowsky: The voice of the Sharks. Always will be.
• Frank Albin: who really has defined how the Sharks look on TV and made them very entertaining and accessible.
• Dean Lombardi: for how far he took this team, even if it wasn’t the final prize. Don’t underestimate how much of the team’s recent success is built on his shoulders.
• Tricia Sullivan: because I know who really keeps this franchise functioning.
• Joe Will and Tim Burke: the two people who make the draft work and understand which players in the system are expendable (and which aren’t). They’re the core of the foundation of the young players that the Sharks keep bringing into the team, and you simply can’t succeed unless you develop your own stars.
• Doug Wilson? — probably as a builder, but he still has some unfinished business before he gets nominated.

Honorable mentions: Roy Sommer, Mike Aldritch, Ken Arnold, Tom “Woody” Woodcock, Bob Friedlander, Dieter Ruehle, Warren Strelow.

A teachable moment (or why I love birding, even when I make a fool of myself)

(or — I did a dumb thing again, and we’re gonna talk about it….)

I’ve only been birding “seriously” for a couple of years, where seriously is defined as “for the sake of birding, as opposed to trying to photograph birds” — and it’s only been the last year or so where I’ve started to feel like I somewhat know what I’m doing. Mostly. I still have my share of ‘teachable moments’, and I had one this weekend I figured was worth sharing.

The bird shown to the right is the subject of my teachable moment. I ran into it down in Coyote Valley at a location where I’d previously found a large family of California Quail (which factors into my thinking later…) and I was seeing if I could find the family again (no) — but I suddenly see this bird walking away from me.

And in these cases, especially with a bird you don’t recognize, you suddenly go into “what the HELL is that?” mode. I snapped off a couple of photos immediately in case I lost the bird and tried to both watch it and get into a position for a better set of photos. The bird, bless it, watched me for a short bit, then swaggered off into the weeds and disappeared. Such is the life of birders, except many times, all you get is that first glance.

At this point, the brain starts wandering through your mental rolodex of birds. Quail? No (too large, wrong shape); Roadrunner? (body shape close, but head and beak all wrong), Pheasant? (too small, tail all wrong)… once THAT fails, you open up the field guide and use it to help you think through options. Since it’s living in the same habitat as the Quail, you start in the part of the guide where the Quail are and look for other species with similar habits.

I don’t realize it until later, but I’ve already made a key mistake in identification — and I’m about to compound it. Quail are game birds. Their primary function in life is, well, lunch. This is good habitat for that kind of bird. The other common game bird here in the bay area is the Ring-Necked Pheasant, but I’ve already evaluated that and decided it’s not a pheasant because of the size and the tail.

I defer further evaluation until I can get a photo onto a monitor and take a closer look. When I do, I’ve already started thinking down the road that this bird is a weird one, something unusual. That is a mistake (more on that in a second). It’s obviously a game bird, so what is it? I finally decide I don’t know (always a safe option), but that it’s most likely an adult female grouse. One problem: they don’t live here. But — aha — we do sometimes get birds that are kept and escape, either as ornamentals or by people planning to hunt them (there are resident populations of chukars in california that are escapees, for instance). So once I’ve decided it’s a Grouse, the logical reason it’s there is because it escaped and found an enclave of quail to hang out with. And I’ve trapped myself into a well-thought out braincramp, which I’ll now explain.

Now, it’s not unusual for bird that’s out of its native habitat to find the species that’s similar to it and hang out. My logic trail is quite logical, but the problem is it’s wrong. If I’d taken a step back and thought it through, the chances of a hunter keeping grouse (as opposed to Quail, pheasant or chukar) here in Coastal California is tiny, and in the area I was (Coyote Valley), the chances of someone keeping game birds for later hunting is beyond remote, and that bird wouldn’t have travelled any distance. It’s not a realistic scenario, so it should have been rejected.
I actually had the answer to my question at hand, if I’d thought about it properly. The hints are in this blog post as well as this one; since I’ve written about it,in retrospect I feel I should have made the connection.

If there’s a universal truth in identifying birds, it’s that you don’t think about the rare cases until you evaluate and reject all of the common ones. This is in conflict with the natural tendency of the enthusiastic novice, which is you’re hoping for that “rare” or “big” find, and so there’s a tendency to lean towards finding it. In reality, as a novice birder, you generally don’t really know what “rare” or “big” is — because you don’t really know what “normal” is yet. The hardest lesson I’ve had to learn so far is to back off and think through the “what it ought to be” situations before heading off into left field looking for that rare find.

The key to the mistake I made is the difference between these two pelicans. The one on the left is a young bird, young enough that the primary feathers on the wings and tail haven’t fully grown in. If you compare the wings with the adult on the right, you can see the wings look — stubby.

The logical bird to be where I was looking was the Ring-Necked Pheasant. I rejected that as an ID — why? because the bird was too small, and the tail structure was wrong. In reality, the bird is juvenile (probably female, but with kids, it’s difficult), or hatch year bird. It was a silly oversight to not consider a juvenile bird.

How’d I figure it out? I reported the trip to our local birding list (South-Bay Birds) which is full of extremely smart (and way more competent than I am) birders, and one told me they’d birded that same location and seen a male pheasant. Where there are male pheasants, there are female pheasants, and where those exist there are nests, and where there are nests, there are — baby birds who haven’t grown to adult size and who’s tail feathering is still growing in, just like those primary wing feathers on the younger pelican. Duh.

For those in the readership that aren’t birders (or birdwatchers — there is a difference, but that’s a different posting), birding isn’t so much about watching birds as it is about locating them and identifying them. I’ve found myself primarily curious about how an environment shifts over time, which is why I get excited over the return of white-crowned sparrows (“fall is here! the sparrows have arrived”) than I am chasing some rarity like the blue-footed booby that hid from me in Dana Point (I was going there ANYWAY. REALLY!); I love revisiting areas I know and watching how they change and what the resident populations look like over time. Birding is different for every birder, some of us consciously don’t set any goals at all, some are very competitive.

This is part of why I’ve really come to like birding — it is both a reason to get outside where I get exercise AND it’s a rather technical and challenging as a hobby. There’s an endless amount of technical geekery you can spend time studying and ultimately it requires a lot of time and energy to master. It really is the kind of hobby I think geeks can really get into if they choose to — but at the same time, it enforces a need for patience (something geeks aren’t always good at), because if you rush, all you do is scare the birds off or scatter them into deep cover.

And just when you start feeling comfortable with how well you’re doing, it throws you a curve that reminds you how much further you have to go.

Like baby birds that haven’t grown their tail feathers in yet.

But these are situations you can learn from; the lesson here is actually universal, too. It’s a simple one — and that’s that the further you get from the simple or common answer, the more likely it’ll turn out that you missed something along the way than it is that you’ve would up with something really rare. Even if you think you’ve ruled out the common answers — it never hurts to go back and challenge those assumptions before assuming those lights in the sky are a UFO instead of an airplane…

I long ago gave up hiding from (or denying) my mistakes; there’s plenty to learn from mistakes, and if you aren’t making  mistakes, you aren’t pushing yourself to improve. And the more I thought about it, the more this seemed a chance to talk about decision making in general and how easily it can go sideways based on what seem to be really trivial choices — and also to perhaps explain a bit why I’ve been talking about birding so much recently and why it’s turned into something I spend time on and enjoy as much as I do. Who knows, maybe it’ll convince you to experiment a bit and see what you think…

Battling Lightroom to a truce….

I haven’t talked about photography much recently, mostly because I really didn’t have much to talk about (not that this ever seems to stop me).

Truth be told, my photography’s been “in between”. I’d shifted from using Photoshop/Bridge to Lightroom 2, but I only had my new photos in Lightroom, not my entire library, and while I was using Lightroom, I wasn’t really comfortable or felt I was using it effectively — to call what I was doing a workflow would be an exaggeration. I was in that “dating but no committed” phase, and stayed there for an extended period of time because I just didn’t have the time and energy to dig in and study the tool and make decisions on how I wanted to use it. It also didn’t help that work and other things were keeping me busy enough that I wasn’t doing much with the camera, so there was little new photography in forcing me to figure it out.

I finally decided to get serious about this, so I spent a couple of evenings importing my library. The import was painless, but — of course — created a couple of problems, the most serious one being that the keywording on my old photos and the keywording I was using weren’t the same. This led to two days of intermittently rearranging, merging and rethinking — I’ve come out of it with a singe hierarchy of keywords I (mostly) like that have (mostly) been reconciled and is finally (mostly) unambiguous and without duplicated functionality in different places (mostly). Another day or so of refining will resolve most of the (mostly) remains, but that can wait (famous last words).

I also realized I needed to change how I was handling exported images. In Bridge when I generated an image for, say, Flickr, I ended up importing it back into Bridge and pulling all of the versions of an image together into sets. In Lightroom, you can’t use sets with collections, which initially seemed like a real annoyance, but I later realized that between using snapshots to generate master images in the appropriate formats (8×10, 11×17, etc) and export presets to automate the image creation that storing the final image isn’t necessary in most cases; instead, regenerate it if you need it (duh). throw in a few lightroom plugins, and suddenly the workflow works pretty well.

I’ve adopted in a few Lightroom plugins to make this happen, the major one being LR2-Mogrify from Jeffrey Friedl. the other ones I’ve started using are his Geolocating plugin (which allows me to add location data within Lightroom using Google Earth), his plugin for finding photos near a given geolocation (so I can find all of the other images from that spot — once I get them all geolocated), and his flickr uploader.

Using LR2-Mogrify I’ve created some export scripts to do my framing and watermarking, and for flickr, I now upload them directly from Lightroom, which has simplified things massively for me. Now that I have this basic workflow done, I can adapt it for other formats that I plan on supporting (such as creating wallpapers in various sizes, more on that later).And I finally feel like I understand how to work the way Lightroom expects me to work; things are finally clicking, so I feel comfortable that what I’m doing is going to scale. I still have some work to do on the workflow, but at least it’s — flowing.

Along the way I made a couple of other changes; I changed the frame I use on flickr (again); I’ve shifted to a transparent watermark that I think will work better but be less obtrusive.

And maybe most significant, I’ve shifted photos posted to flickr back to a Creative Commons licenseon imagesI publish onto the net. Those images will continnue to be smaller images (1024 pixels max on the longest side), watermarked and with embedded information. I’ll continue to reserve non-watermarked images for license, and I will continue my policy of licensing them to non-profit and other worthy (as I define it!) organizations at no charge on request.

I’ll be updating my web site’s policy pages on this over the next few days. For now, I’ve left existing images under the old license for now. I haven’t decided what I will do there, whether I’ll change them all to CC or do it on a case by case basis. As I start gearing up for creating an updated web site with a portfolio and real licensing options, I’ll be re-processing and re-uploading my best images anyway, so I tend to think the status quo is less confusing than shifting things around…

I am in fact getting back on the planning process towards what I need to do to upgrade my web site to support my goal of moving from amateur photography to semi-pro (and from there to pro); I have a business model worked out and a strategy to implement it, and over the next few months, I hope to get it going and see what happens. After a lot of thought and research I’m comfortable with the idea that even though thousands of others are all buying digital SLRs and hanging out shingles as “pro photographers” during a time when many tradition revenue streams for existing pro photographers are either going away (newspaper photojournalism) or being significantly disrupted (stock photography) there are still options and opportunities to succeed.

So we’re going to go for it. Unlike most of those other photographers, I think I can succeed; for one thing, I know it won’t be easy and I know it’s a long-term investment. For another, I’ve put a lot of time and energy into technique (especially post processing) the last couple of years, and I think my imagery is now pretty good (but can still get better) — I look back on older stuff and wince a lot, which is a good thing. And I thnk I understand how to leverage the new technologies and marketing opportunities and my lack of dependence on the old days” of photography business models to my benefit.

We’ll see. I could also prove myself to be a blithering idiot. Wouldn’t be the first time. But heck, it’ll be a fun hack.

what’s my plan? That’s another blog entry on another day…