An audience of one….

I got this in an email today. Since I’ve been thinking about similar things over the last week or so, I figured I’d continue mulling it over here in public for the amusment and horror of all…

I am finding that the volume of your personal tweets that seem to be replicated on LinkedIn keeps me from seeing updates from other contacts on LinkedIn.

I figured it was better to ask you first. How would you handle this situation?

There is, of course, an implied “and if you don’t fix this, I’ll have to unsubscribe from reading you” in the sub-text.

Which is understandable. Managing the firehose of information that is the internet is a challenge. So much to follow, and there’s always that implied worry that you’re missing something, so there’s a quiet pressure to keep broadening your reading, which means if you don’t keep an eye on it, it becomes an infinite time sink and then nothing useful gets done.

I’ve struggled with this over the years. I think we all have. It’s nothing new here, either — one of the challenges we always faced with mailing lists is that whenever a mailing list got onto a topic that the group was motivated to talk about, message volume would spike, and that would shortly be followed by people clamoring for QUIET because the volume of messages was bothering them. Imagine that — the best mailing lists were ones that weren’t used, because if you use them for things that the group was interested in, you got told to shut up.

And I say that somewhat facetiously, but it was a serious issue in using email for one to many communication, one that we never really solved well. Digests for mailing lists were at best a nasty hack, one I always hated. client filters solved the problem better if users took the time to learn them and use them, and too few did. It was easier just to complain that people were actually enthusiastic about a topic and that was bad, because it generated too much content. This was ultimately a key reason I gave up on mailing lists — they were from the “well, all I have is a hammer, so this must be a nail” era of the internet, and I’ve been exploring alternatives to mailing lists for group communication since my first painful attempts to use forums in about 1998.

The web and RSS changes the equations but to some degree doesn’t solve it; there’s still way too much content out there and the challenge is how to edit and filter it so you get what you want and need without drowning.

The tools to do this are still pretty young and immature, but we’re getting there, slowly. Here’s how I do it these days, and in that is the answer to my friend’s question.

I allocate a chunk of time to following the news, much as my mom and dad allocated time every day to read a newspaper. I don’t do it at the morning table — I tend to browse throughout the day, lots of the time comes while I’m waiting for “stuff” to happen or finish. Since I’m constantly exploring and finding new stuff to follow, it’s safe to say I’m always bumping up against the “credit limit” for my time budget here. When I find myself doing that, I look at what is in the feeds and I delete feeds that are least interesting (or more correctly, ones for whom the time it takes to process those feeds outweighs the content or enjoyment of processing them). Quiet feeds have a lower barrier of entry; busy feeds need to more consistently bring in useful information for me to keep following them.

I typically find having about 400-425 feeds in my Google Reader fits in my time budget. When it gets over 450, I find myself feeling like I’m wasting too much time on it; if I drop it below that, I feel like I’m not reading widely enough. So that’s my comfort level.

Ditto things like facebook and twitter and all of the other places that have streams of data passing through. They all get a time budget; that budget is a subset of the overall time budget I allocate to following “stuff” out there.

You get into my feeds if I find you interesting. You leave my feeds if there are other feeds more interesting  than you and I run out of time consistently before getting to your stuff.  And, of course, my interests are constantly evolving — I used to read a LOT of Apple-oriented feeds (for obvious reason); today, it’s about four. Those feeds didn’t become uninteresting — my interests changed. it’s not you, it’s me. Honest.

I don’t play the “I’ll follow you if you follow me” game. Most of the people doing that, in reality, are doing the “I’ll pretend to follow you to get you to follow me” game, and I have no time or interest in playing that game. I find it disingenuous, but not as disingenous as getting the notification of someone following me on twitter, only to see they’ve already unfollowed me by the time I go and look at whether I might want to follow them (which I do). Amusingly enough, that is a very common occurence among “social media experts” who follow 10,000 or more people. I’m sure they read those feeds religiously, too.

I post stuff to the various services for a very specific audience: me. I have an audience of one. I put it out there because it’s the stuff I find interesting enough to be the stuff I want out there when I’m looking. To the degree that what you find interesting is the same as what I find interesting is what makes reading my postings worth time in your browsing time budget. Or not.

I am sensitive to the time issue. That’s one reason why I consciously keep the blog relatively low-volume and focussed, and have shifted the more casual link-love and the chattering conversational stuff over to twitter. It gives people some options to subset what I do to fit their interests if they want. I long ago gave up the presumption that my every word is to be studied and cherished. Please, god, don’t archive me and turn me into a PhD thesis in 30 years, okay? I really wonder sometimes about people who feel everything they say has to go to every channel and be archived forever, and why they would even want that. But that’s just me…

The twitter to linkedin bridge is one I’ve wondered about. It seems to me Linkedin might better be served as a tighter, more formal communication channel. But right now, I think the balance and volume is okay, and to date, I’ve gotten, well, one complaint about it. So I’m leaving it alone, but I might decide it warrants a smaller firehose than facebook gets down the road. This is all new, and we’re figuring it all out as we go along…

Which is my long-winded answer to the question: if what I do has enough value to you to read and follow, great. If not, that’s great, too. If you feel you want subsets of the material, I’ve set up ways to do that in various ways (blog only, photos only, etc) or you can build your own filters if you care. Or you can choose not to follow it and use your time on something better fitting your interests. That’s the joy of this; nobody’s forcing you to do anything, there are always options.

I do hope you find me interesting and choose to read what I put out there. But if you don’t — life goes on. For me, what’s important is that what I put out there is what I find interesting. Too many people go into this trying to create content for an audience they hope to attract, and far too often, turn out uninteresting or commercial stuff. Me, I’m just trying to do what’s fun and interesting for me, and to the degree that there are those out there that also find it fun and interesting I’ll have an audience. I try not to pay much attention to “the numbers”,  but I will say they’re growing slowly and I’m quite satisfied that the time I put into creating content is a good investment of my time.

And that’s all that matters. If it’s a good investment of time, do it. If if it’s, do something else. to view it any other way is to overcomplicate things. …

Upgrading your printer — and do you really need one?

The Online Photographer: What a Printer Costs:

Regarding the expense of printers: remember that the cost going in is sometimes not an adequate reflection of the ongoing costs, because, as is well known by now, the profits are built into the consumables rather than the hardware.

We own two printers, a Canon that typically has standard paper in it for general day to day use, and the HP B9180, which at the time was a very good prosumer-class printer. Both are four years old. The B9180 has been very creaky for a while, occasionally spitting out a random part (usually wheels the paper handling) and it costs about $200 to refresh all of the ink carts. I finally decided that when these sets of inks ended, that’d mean the printer was retired.

And it’s reported one of the inks has failed. So it’s retired. No complaints about the printer, it’s given yeoman service, but time to move on. And the Canon is still performing admirably — but it’s four years old, and in some ways, I think it’s only a matter of time before it chooses retirement — and in four years, technology has changed markedly.

So I’ve been grappling with printers, printer functionality and printer costs recently. It’s a chaotic mess.

And I keep coming back to an even more basic question. Do I even need a printer? Or more correctly, do I need a photo printer?

I love printing out my images. I love stuffing them in the hands of friends. I love putting them up on walls. I love printing them out in fairly large prints for my walls. And I’ve really fallen in love with my prints on art papers such as Hahnemuhle’s German Rag.  I’ve been having trouble convincing myself to spend $400 and more for a printer to do that (I’ve been considering printers like the Epson R1900 or the Canon PIXMA Pro9000).

When you can print an 11×14 on standard paper for $7.00 at Mpix, or a canvas print for $25? How many prints do you need to produce to make it cost effective to bring printing in-house? What options are available in-house that you can’t do through a service?

For me, at this stage in my photography work, it’s hard to justify the cost of the printer to print the volume of prints I do. As I progress further towards art prints and want full control of the production — maybe. I lose access to the papers I like to experiment with. But it just seems to me that right now, and for the next year or so, there’s no way I’d be producing enough prints to justify a prosumer printer as a cost effective investment; I can do what I need (and most of what I want) with a lab like MPIX, and spend a lot less money doing so. Right now, I’m more interested in “hacking” on the post processing aspect of image creation than on print production, so outsourcing that seems like the right move for the time being. I do expect that to change, but I’ve decided I can defer buying a new prosumer printer for now (and spend that money on other camera gear instead).

Does that sound like a reasonable decision? If not, why not?

There’s still a definite need for a printer aroaund the house though; the day to day plain-paper printing still exists, and a quality photo printer that can print 8×10 glossy for simple work and proofing. It looks to me like printer technology today allows that to be the same printer — four years ago, I felt using a photo printer for “normal” printing was too expensive, but today, that doesn’t seem to be true.

What I’d like to find, then, is a good printer with a few key options: I’m willing to pay the costs for a printer with good quality archival-caliber inks, even for day to day printing. Has to handle normal printing and up to 8×10 glossy easily. WIFI/wireless capable. My current printer is an all-in-one, and I can count the number of times I’ve used the pieces other than the printer on one hand, so that’s not a priority. The one that’s stumping me right now: I want it to support two paper types so I can leave glossy paper in a secondary tray so I can print without having to reconfigure the printer.

I haven’t found a printer I like that has the two tray capability at a reasonable price. Anyone have suggestions?

We’re all selling bundles of bits… We can learn from each other

Dean Wesley Smith » The New World of Publishing: The Rolling Stone is Gaining Speed.:

The rolling stone of small and self-publishing is gaining speed as every day goes by.

Starting on last Thursday evening and running for three days, novelist Scott William Carter and I led a discussion with a little over thirty well-published professional writers on the reasons, the art, and the promise of both electronic publishing and POD (print on demand) publishing for fiction writers. Fun doesn’t even begin to describe the three days we called “The New Tech Workshop.” Tiring would be a understatement. We worked with the writers on the ease of doing web sites, then worked on taking a story and making sure the organization and formatting were correct, then we spent about two hours while everyone in the room built from scratch a cover for their story.

Then we worked them through getting that story on Amazon Kindle. And frighteningly enough, at that point we weren’t even halfway through the three days. We talked POD, marketing, building a publishing company and so much more.

One of the things I’ve been digging into over the last couple of months is information to help developers who are writing apps for our platform understand the economic and business environment they are trying to sell into. Another thing I’ve been researching is potential revenue models for my personal work, as I try to understand how the markets are starting to mature for online distribution and sale of things like photos and e-books.

Not surprising to me at all, any research into e-publishing and this massive disruption of the paper book publishing model leave me on the front porch of Dean Wesley Smith, author and the former publisher of Pulphouse Press and Pulphouse Magazine — which, back in the days when I was writing fiction, actually bought one of my stories. So let me say right up front that if you’re at all interested in e-publishing in any form, Dean’s blog is a must read, and you should subscribe to it and go look through his earlier writings on this.

What I did not expect to find, what I am still honestly trying to wrap my head around, is this — we are all increasingly doing variations of the same thing, and it looks to me if we can figure out how to get the conversations going between the right groups and people, there are massive opportunities for collaboration, mentoring and sharing that everyone involved in the online publishing e-commerce space can benefit from.

Think about this a second. It doesn’t matter if you are a musician recording a song, a videographer producing a movie, a pundit with a podcast, an author with a book, a photographer with an image, or a developer with a application — more and more, those are all variations of the same thing. Each of those specific crafts has many touch points in common:

1. You use your craft to create something
2. That thing is — ultimately — a bundle of bits
3. You have to package that bundle of bits
4. You have to distribute it
5. You need a way to collect revenue on it
6. You need marketing and PR for it and ways to create demand and generate interest
7. You need to manage the business that supports the creation of your craft items

Once you get past that first action — everyone is doing the same set of tasks with variations. And to a good degree, each craft is living in a silo, figuring it out in isolation and reinventing tools and techniques. without looking to see what other groups are doing.

Why?

The more I look at this, the more I see opportunities. Fiction writers and photographers have understood how to manage a small business around the craft of publishing material for years. So have photographers. Developers are figuring out how to create things for online use and working on the various platforms on didstribution (and this is already a fascinating space to live in, and it’s going to get a lot more interesting in the next few years as platform/carrier independent app stores start to emerge and come into their own.

I had a discussion today with some people about the need to start seeing all of these bundles of bits as variations of the same thing, and look for ways to enable their distribution and revenue generation, that we need to create tools and techniques to help get these things into the distribution channels without a lot of custom coding, and we need to figure out how to market and do publicity in this new era so that these bundles of bits can be discovered and sold and enough people make enough money to turn these things into livable revenue streams.

Paper-based publishing is going away. If you thought the disruption of the newspaper/magazine industry was “interesting” (in a very Chinese way), you ain’t seen nothing yet. The distruption that’s starting to happen in the book industry is going to make that seem like a picnic. In some ways, it’ll likely be less dramatic because we’ll have learned lessons from earlier disruptions, but it’s going to be a massive change and it’s going to impact significnant people and businesses — and it’s happening now.

Authors and photographers have much they can learn from developers about how to create and the logistics of publishing and distribution. Developers can get a better understanding of the business aspects from authors and photographers. Both can collaborate on figuring out and building the tools needed to make content shine on these new devices that are coming out, and figure out how to redefine content for the online and mobile worlds, not just repackage it (I have to admit, every time I see the “innovation” that are the iPad magazines being produced out of Adobe’s software, I want to cry. that is innovation like chopping a magazine up with an X-acto knife and faxing it to you is innovation….)

I’m convinced that if we get the right people all talking together, we can shorten the learning curve for everyone and interesting things will come out of it. I’m just not sure who those right people are and how to get them talking… But I’m hoping that some of you do, and can help me understand how to make this happen…

Thoughts? Ideas?

Some thoughts on Lightroom Keywords

A big part of the chore of refactoring my photo collection was getting my keywords and metadata in shape, and then updating all of the images to take advantage of the changes where necessary. That implies that every image got at least a quick look to make sure it was annotated properly. There’s no way to make that task not be a grinding time suck — but you can do some things to make it less of one.

Like most photographers, my initial setup for keywords on photos was a system known as “haphazard”. Sometimes I did. Sometimes I didn’t. Rarely did I try to standardize and I had no real plan for what keywords i used. As my collection grew and it became harder to find images, I started to understand why I needed to put some time and energy into keywords now to make finding images later possible.

A lot of people have put a lot of time and energy into keywords. If you’re thinking of shooting stock or microstock, a large part of your potential success depends on being findable in the stock libraries, so good keywording and metadata is crucial. Many stock houses have standardized keyword libraries and if you want to work with them, you should get copies and adopt them into your workflow.  There are also keyword sets available online, both for purchase and for free. Nick Potter has some that I like a lot.

I ended up building my own. Well, technically, I’ve created three standardized sets of keywords (so far), but this third generation I like and it seems flexible enough that I won’t need to tear it apart and start over any time soon. The top level of my keyword setup in Lightroom looks like this:

I have some journalism training in my ancient past, so when I thought about what keywords mattered, I fell back on what the essence of a story is: Who, What, Where, How, Why, and my dad’s addition, Wow. My keyword structure tries to answer those questions for an image: Who (or what) is in it? Where are they? What are they doing? Why are they doing it and how? What is notable about this image that makes it worth taking and viewing?

Some of this is duplicated elsewhere — in your title or caption, or if you geo-encode your images. I geo-encode all of my images with Google Earth and Jeffrey Friedl’s Geo-Encoding plug-in, but I want thelocation info in the keywords as well so I can quickly and easily find pictures from a location without a fight.

In my keywords, I actually encode location a couple of ways.

The locations section is where I stick generalized descriptions. I’m on a cliff, I’m near an ocean, I’m at a zoo. I then have specific location data under the “North America” section, which I’ve split into U.S. and Canada. Within each, I break it down by state or Province. Since I do the vast majority of my shooting in California right now, I made a decision to split that state further and include county and then city. County information happens to be very useful in birding, so it’s a natural requirement for me to include it on my bird photos, and as long as I’m doing it for them, I do it for all of them.

An important point here — when you design a structure like this, how well it’ll work for you depends on where your hassle factor hits. Are you more annoyed by looking through long lists of things? If so, design a hierarchy with more sub items and fewer items in each sub-area. If traversing the tree bothers you more, use longer lists and fewer sub-items. You can adjust this to your tastes as you work with it.

Also, don’t overbuild your hierarchy. For states other than California, I don’t use counties:

The reason I don’t is because I don’t need them. If you make your keywording system TOO complex, it’ll get in the way and annoy you and you won’t be as likely to use it. Remember, a keywording system is useless if you avoid it — and as your needs grow you can always re-arrange parts as you need to, so if oyu hit a point where you need counties in Oregon, it’s not a lot of work to add them. Just don’t do it until it makes sense.

When describing the Who or What, that’s the realm of a number of categories — Birds, Mammals, Insects, Reptiles, etc are all hierarchies of those kinds of animals. Buildings, Items, Vehicles define things. Organizations define groups, People define individuals, etc. You can define these top level hierarchies as you find useful. I tried “animal” “vegetable” “mineral” once, but decided that led to too much walking down the hierarchy looking for things. My goal is to have a set of top level definitions that fit on the screen so I can get to one without scrolling, and to try to have the ones I use most often be in the top level for ease of access.

Within my birds section, I’ve built a formal hierarchy, based on how the ABA classifies birds (and borrowed heavily from Sibley’s book and eBird).

With other categories, my dance card isn’t quite as filled out, so I haven’t put the work in to build the formal hierarchies. As I continue to add species to my photo collection, I eventually will. The same with the collections of things. Inside Vehicles is “Boats”, and inside “Boats” is “Tugboat” and “Container Ship” and “Ferry”, but I haven’t gone crazy designing keyword systems I won’t use.

Keywords in Lightroom have some nice options I find most people haven’t explored. If you right-click (or ctrl-click) a keyword, it’ll bring up a dialog box:

This is where you can edit the keyword, but it also allows you to define Synonyms, and there are a couple of options that can come in handy.

Synonyms, once you figure them out, are quite useful. For animals, it allows you to define the Latin name as well as any common nicknames. That helps you find the keyword when you’re searching within Lightroom, and also allows you to export those when you publish the image without having to define the keywords separately and having to remember to attach them. This simplifies the keyword attachment process more than you might think, so explore it and learn how to take advantage of it.

I use a couple of the tag options a lot. “Include on Export” allows you to set a keyword to not export — in other words, it’s used for organizing the hierarchy and not meant to be attached to the image. I don’t export “North America” for instance, and any of my “meta” keywords (the ones that start with “_” aren’t exported. That lets me use keywording for workflow process management as well as identification of the image, which can be useful, without actually exposing those special keywords out where people can see. If you turn off “Export Synonyms”, they’ll still be used when searching for keywords, but again, they won’t be exposed to the public. (it would be nice if you could define export on a per-synonym basis — I wouldn’t use it a lot, but there are times when that level of granularity would be really handy).

One place where use of synonyms comes in handy is when a thing has both a unique name and a generic name. Take, for instance, this keyword:

You could define a generic “harbor” keyword, and in fact you probably will for some situations, but if you create your tag so it includes Harbor as a Synonym, you don’t need to remember to add it, the system will take care of it for you. Again, we’re working to make keywording as painless and easy as possible, and once you start using this, you’ll find it simplifies your life by reducing a few steps.

A few of my categories are what I call “meta” — they are describing aspects of the photo or the subject. It’s not necessarily a clean analogy, but I think of them as adjectives, where the primary categories tend to be nouns or verbs.

The final two categories I’ll talk about are “_Submissions” and “__meta”. “_Submissions” is pretty straightforward. When I submit an image somewhere, it gets tagged with an identifier to that submission. Eventually I want to add a “_Published” hierarchy and tie it to some submission/publication database to track what I’m doing with my images, who’s licensed them and where they’ve been published. That’s all on the “to do some day” list.

“__meta” serves two purposes. The first purpose is that as you create new keywords on the fly, Lightroom places them in that first hierarchy, so it becomes a convenient holding place for them so it’s easy to see that they need to be edited and placed in the proper place in the hierarchy. The second is that it’s a very convenient place for workflow-related tags. I have one right now, “potential redo”. As I’m browsing my collection, if I see an image I think needs some work — it’s trivial to add this tag, and then I can easily find it and go take care of the image later. I don’t know about you, but if I write notes to myself on things like this, I lose them or don’t find them for months. This way, I have a very non-intrusive and quick way to flag a to-do onto an image.

It’s also easy to create a special tag for a specific kind of to-do and attach it to an image or set of images. For instance — when I upgraded from Lightroom 2 to Lightroom 3, I created a tag that told me which images were processed by the old processing engine and attached it to every image. Then as I went through the library and updated images to the Ligthroom 3 processing system, I removed it. (and yes, every image in my catalog has been redone in Lightroom 3′s processor. the improved noise processing made it a very worthwhile investment of time). When I decided to refactor the entire collection, I did the same thing. I created a tag “This image needs to be evaluated” and assigned it to every image. Then I started working through the tagged images. That way I could easily make sure every image was evaluated, and I didn’t waste time going over images multiple times or wondering if I’d processed this one or that one. I knew. Workflow tags can turn into a very useful tool once you realize what they can do for you and you decide how to take advantage of them.

By putting some time and energy into your keywords up front, and then getting into the habit of using them — and using them consistently — you’ll make your life easier over time, and you won’t run into the “okay, where is that image?” problems nearly as much. There are no real right or wrong answers here; this is my approach, hopefully it’ll help you understand how to refine and take better advantage of your own keywording system.

A few other quick notes on a keywording setup:

Spelling matters: I spent a lot of time finding and correcting typos in my keywords, especially the latin names of birds and animals. Try to make sure you get these things right. If you don’t, it’ll create headaches and annoyances until you fix it.

Define some standards and then stick to them. Capitalization, tense, punctuation and the like matters. If you aren’t consistent here, your work will come across as unprofessional and sloppy — even if people looking at your photos only notice it sub-consciously. In my keywords, I standardized on using the plural form (“Birds” instead of “Bird”) unless that was clearly inappropriate, and I lean towards a third person form, present tense and I always strive to use an active voice instead of passive. (Passive Voice writing is to be hated in all serious writing).

Getting all of the details right is — frankly — a pain. But once you get them right, they’ll stay that way with minimal work, and it gives a polish and professionalism to your work that leaves a better impression.

It takes some time and thought to set this up, but my view is that if you’re going to do this — do it right. And once you do, you’ll appreciate that you have. I certainly am glad I finally took the time to bring my collection “up to standards”, and now that I have, I plan on keeping it that way. And now I can actually find things without tying to memorize my entire collection….

The elephant in the sitting room…

Scott wrote a comment on my post a couple of days ago that makes a good opening as I shift gears a bit:

Sherman, set the wayback machine to…

Sherman, set the wayback machine to February, 2004.

It’s the standard weekly team meeting, only this time, it was a bit different. My management recognized me for finishing (surviving?) 15 years at Apple, and I got my pin, my plaque, and cake. the team we’d put together congratulated me. It’s something not a lot of people can claim.

Afterwards, I went back to my office and sat down to check email, and started crying. And couldn’t stop.

I was emotionally and physically exhausted. I blamed work and stress — I know better now. It wasn’t the first warning. Even six months prior I was noticing changes. I was honored to be invited to Tim O’Reilly’s Foo Camp 1 and found myself spending the time feeling isolated and distant from everything. I came home from Foo inspired to do a number of things — and instead dug a hole and crawled into it and pulled the sides down on top. It slowly got worse, too. Laurie and I took a long-planned trip up to Victoria and Vancouver to spend christmas. That was the year of the great freeze, with snow in Victoria, sub-zero (F) temperatures, and a mad dash out of Portland to the 101 on the coast to try to get home before the entire state of Oregon got snowed in. We made it, and those who weren’t smart enough to do the same waited about 5 days for I-5 to re-open at the california border.

That was the first time my body sat me down and said “DUDE! Stop! Listen to me. THIS ISN’T WORKING”. It was also the first time I ran into something I couldn’t just out-stubborn. Here’s a lesson learned that I wish I’d known then: if you’re blaming work and stress for how badly you feel and you take ten days off and go on vacation and you rest and relax and don’t think about work — AND IT DOESN’T GET BETTER — then hey, dude — it’s not work. And you probably ought to look into it.

I know that now. Learning that lesson saved me a lot of fun later down the road. When something’s going south, it rarely does so without some early warning signs. It gives you a chance to intervene and deal with it before it turns into a crisis.

If you’re paying attention. If you don’t think you can simply out-stubborn it.

In my case, I ignored it until the crisis hit. Then I tried to ignore it for another couple of weeks until I realized it was winning. That was a tough time for Laurie, one I regret to this day. I was seriously manic. By the time she told me to get help or else, I’d already made the phone call.

The words “nervous breakdown” cause interesting reactions in people. I was amazed at how many people I ran into that when I admitted it to them said “dude, yeah. Me, too”. And how many also said “whatever you do, don’t blog about this.” Maybe they’re right. We’ll find out. Mostly, my view today is any potential employer who reads this and won’t hire me because of it isn’t someone who deserves to have me work for them. Their loss, not mine. Better to find out those things before you commit.

My therapist was awesome. One of the first things he said in our first meeting was “You wouldn’t believe how many people in your industry end up in my office”. Later, as I talked to people about it, I found he was right. it’s one of the dirty secrets of high tech in Silicon Valley, how people commit themselves to work themselves until they fall apart, and how companies take advantage of that and create project demands that encourage it. The “sleep under your desk” mentality isn’t healthy, and it catches up with you eventually. When it does — the company rarely makes it up to you. In my case, I was lucky. My management was extremely supportive and did what they could. My team was even more supportive, and for a while, simply worked around the problem and took care of things until I got my act together enough to be a functional part of the operation again. For a while, I was pretty literally a basket case. In a lot of companies, they toss you to the curb and put another body in your cube. That’s something you ought to remember before you commit to chronic 60 hour death march schedules. The company benefits when you do. You probably won’t get a cookie. Just sayin’

I spent a couple of months in therapy, understanding my situation and learning what it meant and how to manage it. Some people need pharmaceutical help, I just needed some perspective and some ideas on how to cope.  It took me a couple of years, but I finally learned how to like myself, something that’s always been a struggle, and how to not let the stress and angst pile up until the container is full and it all spills out in a badly timed mess. For me, it came down to getting an outside perspective and some trained advice on how to change things I was doing to cope with life challenges (and failing at coping). Everyone’s a bit different, but the big lesson is — don’t be afraid to ask for help.  I always believed I could do anything, that I could make it happen by working longer and harder. Look where that got me. Maybe the hardest lesson I had to beat into my thick skull was that I have limitations, and sometimes I need help — and not to be afraid to ask.

What we didn’t do, what we didn’t realize was hanging out there, was look for the root cause. I thought it was work and stress, and my therapist saw no reason to think it might be something else, since dealing with mewling blobs of protoplasm caused by work stress was his stock in trade. And if you look at the dates involved, it’d be another three years before I did get far enough into this to get the root cause identified and treated.

The root cause here was the apnea. And while I don’t have many regrets in life, I do wonder at times how things might have been different had I made the connection and gotten it treated earlier. Would I still be at Apple? Perhaps. What I do know is that a number of people I know and love got caught as collateral damage along the way, and whether I was able to avoid any of this personally, I wish I’d been able to keep them from having to come along for the ride.

The lessons to take out of this?

• Listen to your body. If something’s wrong, don’t out-stubborn it, and don’t wait until your body pulls out the sledge hammer to get your attention. Things you catch when they’re small are a lot easier to fix.
• Make sure you’re finding the cause, not just treating the symptom.
• There are large chunks of silicon valley whose business plans are based on working you into the ground, and then replacing you with someone fresh and ready to go back into the grind. What are you getting out of this relationship? Deathmarches are a fact of life, and deadlines happen; but if every day is a deathmarch and the deadlines are never rational, do you really want to be there? And will they really make it worth what you go through to ship that product? Really?
• Too many companies demand loyalty but offer none. I know way too many people who did way too many 70 hour weeks to get a project done, only to find out their job moved to india (but thanks for making our quarterly numbers. oh, and we stripped the package. sorry). Find the companies that see you as an asset, not a cog, and make the relationships work both ways.

The reason I stuck at Apple for two years beyond my breakdown was simple: my management and my team kicked serious butt for me when I needed it, and I wanted to do everything I could in return for them. So let me close tonight with this final thought. To Axel and Dean and Michelle and Jason — the more time passes and the better perspective I have, the more I understand just what I put you all through, and the more I appreciate how you all helped me through it. It’s a debt I can’t repay, but it’s one I am happy to recognize and honor. Thanks.

That goes doubly so to my wife Laurie. I’m convinced I wouldn’t have made it without her.

Hey, can someone push the big green button on the Wayback machine? the one labeled “return?” thanks.

how time flies…

How time flies when you’re having fun. It was four years ago that I left Apple after 17 years to go do something else.  I announced my decision in July, and spent eight weeks transitioning, and in September 2006 walked out of Apple for the last time and into — well, at the time, I had no idea what I was going to do. Something different. I redid my blog into Chuqui 3.0, and four years later, again for my birthday, redid it again into its current form.

I tried my damndest to get hired by Yahoo! at the time. It’s still a company that looks to me to have huge potential — but right now, it’s just not clicking, and it looks like AOL is seriously gearing up to make a run at doing what Yahoo ought to be doing and isn’t (and some really interesting yahoo! talent keeps sneaking off to AOL land) . Not really sure why a Yahoo job never happened, there was plenty of interest in both directions, just never quite the right match (and in one case, an internal transfer that tooks a slot I was waiting for an offer from). Having lived through all of the bad years at Apple, not being hired by Yahoo turned out to be a blessing in disguise, and the best things are the things that don’t happen.

I wrote  a series of blog entries about all of this, the Apple Post-Mortem series:

• Part 1: Why I left: and more on this in a bit..
• Part 2: Jobs I Wish I could Have Taken: most of which are jobs I STILL wish I could have taken, and ones that I still think a company like Apple (or most companies) should create for some one…
• Part 3: no longer online (and I don’t even remember what it was, or why it’s offline. Doesn’t really matter)
• Part 4: Why Apple doesn’t have a blogging policy (and it ain’t what you think); by far, the piece that created the biggest kerfluffle, way back when.  And of course, there was great hue and cry about how Apple had to blog, or it was going to fail and the universe was going to shun and scorn it. We see just how badly faltered by failing to understand this basic requirement of the universe… This is the one where folks called bullshit on me without in some cases seeming to notice I’d actually left Apple.
• Leaving Apple after 17+ years was both an easy and tough decision. Part of me really wanted to stay, wanted to, as I put it a few times, get carried out on my XServe.  Not exactly, looking back on it from today, a ringing endorsement. Most of me understood that I needed to make some fundamental changes to my life or they would in fact carry me out on my XServe, and that would have been bad.  I was physically exhausted, I was emotionally exhausted, I’d gained close to 60 pounds in the previous year. I worked myself into pneumonia,  and then hid from my doctor and bosses that I worked through treatment for it.

I was a wreck. I’d spent a good part of a year trying to find ways to fix the job situation with the help of my bosses — and failed. In many ways I blamed Apple for this; in reality, there was nothing that happened that I didn’t volunteer for and jump into with both feet and great enthusiasm. I was physically and emotionally bankrupt, and I had no idea how to resolve the problem; I honestly wondered if I was simply too old to keep up with silicon valley. I didn’t know. What I did know was that the current situation was pretty literally killing me, and I was doing myself no good, my project no good, Apple no good and the people around me no good.

So I jumped, deciding that some time off would help me recharge and give me some time to reflect and decide on what to do next and how to fix my life. At the time, I was somewhat bitter that Apple didn’t do more to convince me to stay. In reality, it did me a great favor by not trying, and in reality, I didn’t work too hard to find a place to land, either. That was just exhaustion speaking, and now, I see that and I feel that Apple — and my bosses all those years — worked their butts off to try to make things happen. It was just a situation where nothing Apple could do could fix it.

Because what I didn’t know at the time, wouldn’t find out for another six months, was that I was really sick.

When I did finally haul myself off to my doctor and talked, he sent me off to the sleep clinic to be tested. They wired me up — and the results were stunning.

I had sleep apnea. I didn’t just have sleep apnea, I was seeing an average of 50 “incidents” an hour. An incident, by the way, is when your breathing passage blocks and you start to suffocate, at which point your body has to react (i.e “wake up”) and do something to allow you to breathe again.  I was — pretty literally — snoring myself to death.

I started wearing a CPAP that night, something I’ve been wearing every night since. it’s basically the inspiration for the Darth Vader mask. I’ve talked about this a couple of times in the past, but now that some time has passed, I have a better perspective on all of this.  it’s now clear, for instance, that I was suffering from Apnea for at least a decade prior to my diagnosis. The more I look at that time of my life, the more I realize how much it was impacted by this.

In the year prior to deciding to leave Apple, I gained about 60 pounds. At the time, I blamed work and the stress of the project I was on. I strained friendships (and lost a couple I still regret). I had no energy, I was always worn out and exhausted. I was starting to suffer from high blood pressure. I was not a lot of fun to be around, and I didn’t particularly want to be around anyone.

In the two weeks after putting on the CPAP, my blood pressure dropped 20 points and I went off blood pressure medicine. I slept well for the first time in years — and so did Laurie, because she wasn’t having to deal with sleeping with a fog horn. She stopped wearing earplugs to bed, and her sleeping improved, too. After about six weeks, my energy levels started coming back, and so did my attitude.

At that time I realized I had to get serious about lifestyle changes. I decided to try to adopt a new attitude. The easy way to sum it up is:

I’ve given up denial for Lent.

And that’s been the foundation for what turned into a major effort to rethink every aspect of my life, how I lived it, and how I needed to live it moving forward if I wanted to be around for a while and actually have a quality of life that made being around worth it.  I feel for the first time in decades comfortable in my own skin and satisified with how I’m living. For the first time in decades — warts and all — I like myself.

And here’s why I’ve decided it’s finally time to talk about this.

Your health is like a credit card; you keep putting purchases on it and making minimum payments against the balance, eventually it’s going to hit the credit limit, and if you go over, bad things happen. Lifestyle choices I made in my 20′s and 30′s came back to bite me in the ass in my 40′s when the bill came due, and here I am now in my 50′s, “restructuring the debt” and realizing that there are things I’m going to have to live with the rest of my life.

Things that were completely avoidable if I’d made different choices and taken a different path.

I can’t go back and do that, but I’ve decided this is my time machine, and hopefully I can help someone else who is just starting to move down a path to understand the options and maybe make a better choice than I did.

It’s probably not as much fun as geeking out over HTML5 transforms or complaining about the ref’s call in last night’s hockey game — but it might save someone’s life. I promise not to lecture and not to whine or play “poor me” games. I have no intention of telling you how to live your life. But if I can help some people better understand the implications of some of the decisions they need to make, then this will be worth doing.

We’ll try it and see what happens.

Refactoring a Photo collection

In my last post, I talked about refactoring my photo collection, which I’m sure a lot of the non-geeks in the audience (both of you) went “huh?” to.

In the software world, “refactoring ” is a term used today to define what happens when a programmer goes in and cleans up some existing code. In the old days, it was called “maintenance programming” and thrown at the junior programmers. Today, it’s called “refactoring” and it’s still thrown at the junior programmers, but now it has a fancy name to make them feel better about it.

Okay, not really. well, mostly not really. But refactoring is where you take a hunk of something that already exists, and you work on it to make it more functional, faster, cleaner (or simple less warty), add in functionality you wish you’d known you’d want when you did it the first time, and generally do away with all of the bits that annoy you and replace them with new bits that hopefully won’t annoy you as much.

That concept is relevant for software — but it’s just as relevant to your photo collection. Mine had, over time, gotten to be a bit of a mess. My oldest photos started out in a very early version of iPhoto. As I got more serious about my photography and the technology improved, I moved my collection from iPhoto to Aperture (first version), then to CS3 Photoshop/Bridge (when I got tired of waiting for Aperture 2.0), then to Lightroom 2.0 (when I got tired of Bridge not making my life easier and more painless), and now to Lightroom 3.0. Along the way I redefined my keywording schemes at least three times, on at least two occasions I accidently deleted all keywords off of swaths of the library accidentally and didn’t catch it until “later”, and did the same once for captions and again once on image titles — each to a different group of images that might have overlapped but none of them had things in common. All of which ended up in the “some day, I need to fix these things” pile.

Along the way I learned a lot about photography, and a lot about post-processing of images, and I figured out tricks to improve images that allowed me to create much better images than I was previously capable of. When Lightroom 3 came out, the new processing system was also much improved, especially around noise reduction, and “simply” reprocessing images in Lightroom 3 made an image better.

I’ve also gotten pickier about what images are good enough for me to want to have them in public with my name on them. At some point, you look at you online galleries and wince once too often, and you think to yourself “I need to fix this” and put it in the Todo pile with all of the other Todos.

So a few weeks ago I pointed someone I knew at one of my images and winced when I looked at it one too many times, and I decided it was time to actually fix all of this stuff, so I crawled down in a hole, and spent two and a half weeks at the task.

That’s not so bad. I’ve done this once before, back in 2008, and I spent four months at the project. At that time, there were a lot of other things going on (like my dad being sick and dying) and it was a part time project (and therapy) and a lot of it was done late at night in hotel rooms, but I found it a huge help in really seeing where I stood as a photographer and what I needed to work on — and how far I’d come along the way to that point.

Lightroom 3 has a new feature in it that I really wanted to take advantage of, the Publish module. Even better, Jeffrey Friedl has written some Lightroom plug-ins that take this functionality and extend it to be even more useful (and he’s done one for Smugmug, too).  In Lightroom 2 and earlier, you could export your images to Flickr (or some other service), but once you did, the two aspects of the image were disconnected. Changes to one couldn’t be merged in to the other. If you found a typo in a caption or wanted to update or add keywords, you’d have to remember to go to the places you had exported the image and make those changes manually to each instance. You did that religiously, right? Yeah. Me, too. But what that really meant was that once you hit that “export” button, it was a major pain to actually update/improve/fix things — so you ended up with a list of “need to fix this” spread all over your online sites. And of course, we all religiously keep track of all of these ToDo’s and work to complete them in our free time in the evenings, right? Yeah, me, too.

So over time, comments on flickr that noted mistakes got fixed in Lightroom (usually), but not re-exported back out to flickr or elsewhere. And as I refined my keywording (or more correctly, threw the crappy keywording systems out and built less crappy ones), did those improvements end up where you and the search engines could see them? Oh. Of course. Yeah, right.

Publish changes that; once you get your flickr (and smugmug) accounts set up and synced up with your Lightroom collection, changes you make to an image can be republished in place. No longer do you have that “damn, that sharpening is off” moment wher you have to spend 20 minutes exporting to your desktop and convincing flickr to replace a photo. No longer do you have to remember which images you fixed those typos in. Lightroom deals with it now. Once you get it set up, the process becomes pretty painless.

Once you set things up. I’ll come back to that in a future entry.

And once I sat down to implement that, I realized i now had a REASON to actually empty the “todo list”, which of course doesn’t really exist. But it was possible to create one and them empty it. So I did. And then exported all of that to Flickr. along the way, it gave me the opportunity to properly create my “serious” portfolio over on Smugmug, and start the process of cross-linking the two services. That’s still in progress as I decide what works and doesn’t — but if you look at my flickr images, they now include links to Smugmug. And with the new lightroom capabilities, as I implement how I want captions on flickr and smugmug to look, making that change and then re-publishing it is relatively simple — for instance, I want to add a short explanation of Creative Commons to my flickr captions. In the old day, good luck. Now?

Possible. And it opens up many options down the road to do things that before were simply too much hassle to warrant.

At a very high level, here are the tasks I undertook to refactor my image collection:

• Make sure everything is in Lightroom and nothing is lost of missing.
• Sit down and spend some time defining what your standards are. What kind of keywords should you use? To what level of detail? What is a “good” caption? What is a “good” title? Do you geotag images? to what accuracy? if you decide on your standards up front, it doesn’t make bringing the library up to those standards less tedious — but at least you’ll be able to make easy and consistent decisions on what needs to be done, which will simplify things down the road.
• Go through my defined keyword library and edit it into a consistent hierarchy and bring it all up to my current usage standards; that includes fixing all typos and doing things like standardizing usage and terminology, grammar, capitalization and thinking through things like your hierarchy. And spell-checking it. Twice. Trust me.
• Implement the publish system for the sites you upload to, and go through the work needed to sync up those services to those collections so that everything is connected and updates will go where they are supposed to go.
• Go through the library one image at a time and bring it up to your current standards: if necessary, re-keyword it. improve the caption and title. verify it’s geotagged and the geotagging is correct. validate the metadata. make sure the embedded EXIF data is complete and correct — especially contact and copyright info (you ARE adding that to all of your images via import presets, right? RIGHT?)
• Are the images well-processed? Do they need to be re-done? Do them. If you don’t want to lose the existing version of the image, use virtual copies and learn to use sets. Are there systemic processing mistakes you’re catching? Congratulations, you just improved your workflow on new images — you know not to do that any more, right? (I found, honestly, that I went through phases where I wansn’t just bad at sharpening, I was “driving the clown car backwards through the car wash with the windows down” incompetent; I finally took great swaths of the library and put a generic re-sharpening on them to remove the damage, and then evaluated them individually again later. And this was on images that were already on flickr and published, at a time I thought that was good sharpening. Oh, god. (wince))
• As you fix stuff, publish the fixed stuff so that the stuff that makes you wince goes away….
• Edit your collection. you’ve become a better photographer; there’s going to be stuff you look at and wince. When you wince, don’t be afraid to retire the image and take it offline. Don’t leave images online that you feel represent you poorly just because at one point you thought they were good enough. Edit. Ruthlessly. (in my case, I retired about 10% of my collection; a smaller amount than I expected to, honestly. In my 2008 refactor, I retired 35%, but that was when I started making the jump from enthusiastic amateur who pushed the shutter and prayed to a more studied amateur who actually tried to plan shots out….)
• And — don’t be afraid, if you get halfway through and think of something, to back up and implement it as well. Do something you decide isn’t working as well as you hoped? think of a way to make it even better? As long as you have the hood open — DO IT. because one of the things you want to do is make sure that once you put the hood down, you don’t feel any interest in opening it up and doing this again for a number of years. If you leave something half-done, or un-done, you’ve already started your next ToDo list.

I’m hoping this refactor will keep me for the next five years or so. I’ve matured enough as a photographer to have a sense of what makes sense (for me) and what base quality I want to show to others, and I’ve experimented enough with keywords and captions and titles to have a feel for what works for me, so I don’t expect to have to make major revisions “for a while”. and the Lightroom publishing option means I can tweak along the way and roll those changes out everywhere — meaning less deferred maintenance and less reason to let problems pile up until I can’t look at things without wincing…

So, how to do your own refactor? In my view, the one thing you need to get right, and the one thing that we all agree is a royal pain in the ass even when you do — is keywords. So before you do anything else, you have to get your keywording setup into some kind of consistent and logical shape… That’s next on the docket.