Things You’ll Find Interesting March 31, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

Things You’ll Find Interesting March 30, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

The Mac App Store Needs Paid Upgrades

Call Me Fishmeal.: The Mac App Store Needs Paid Upgrades:

The Mac App Store has been a huge boon to Mac software developers, but has an enormous flaw: it needs to allow developers to charge existing customers a discounted price for major upgrades.

Right now developers selling through the Mac App Store face a lose/lose choice: either provide all major upgrades to existing customers for free (thus losing a quarter of our revenue), or create a “new” product for each major version (creating customer confusion) and charge existing customers full price again (creating customer anger). Why The Mac App Store is Nice

 

 

This was one of those things I got to talk about with developers a lot back in webOS land. All developers want this. No app store (with any significant audience, that I can find…) implementation provides it. Why the disconnect?

Behold the three stages of product manager hell:

  • Okay, to make this date, what features do we absolutely positively have to have for launch? Upgrades? We can add that later. It waits.
  • The SAP geeks say it’ll take eight months to add support to the back end for this. We need to launch in Botswana. It’ll have to wait.
  • I know the developers are asking for this, but we seem to be doing pretty well without it. It just doesn’t seem to be a priority right now, not compared to [REDACTED].

Now, throw in a random “oh my god, do you know what this will do to our tax liability and reporting requirements in Lithuania?” and you get some sense of how you end up down this path. I’m sure no software developer has ever had discussions like this about their product, right?

Just sayin’

My view on this: I see the developers pain. I see what the expectations users have for this. One of the things I asked for when we implemented coupons (aka promo codes) was the ability for a developer to send out discounts to existing users so they could release “Delicious Monster: TNG” at list and give existing users a code to upgrade at 20% off. Did I get it? (hollow laughter).

If you look at what Apple does (since it doesn’t actually say anything) and guess to their intentions, I’m guessing — based on what they’ve done with Aperture — that their model is moving forward without upgrade discounts. Instead, they’ve cut the cost of the product up front. What used to cost $200 now costs $79. When they release Aperture 4, it’ll cost $79. And Aperture 5 will cost $79. And if a user complains about paying full price for each release, Apple can ask if they’d rather go back  to paying $200 for the package and getting upgrades for $99. it’s actually a persuasive argument, if your business plan can handle it and you don’t mind getting hit on the head a lot while explaining it.

And so, if you’re building product, that’s what I’d recommend you plan for. No upgrade discounts. Which implies setting your pricing scheme so that you can make a good “cost over the life of product” argument to users, and make sure each release has persuasive upgrade features (I’m looking at you, Adobe CS 5) or users will simply yawn and skip the release.

Honestly, as a user, I can live with that model. And yes, if I think a product is overpriced or the features of a release are not persuasive, I will skip it (he says, as a proud owner of CS 3; neener, Adobe, I spent my money elsewhere — but happily upgraded to Lightroom 4, because it was worth it. hint hint). It’s going to require retraining users who expect discounts. that will be painful. But I think Apple has set this standard, and I think that’s going to be what it is moving forward. I don’t see a persuasive reason for them to change their strategy.

And whether they admit it or not, I bet a lot of product managers for app stores on various platforms have the “if Apple isn’t doing it, why should I?” test for feature requests. And then they go off into a closet and come up with reasons for the powerpoint that don’t sound so, well, reactive and lame.

 

The Mac App Store has been a great new source of revenue for Delicious Monster — we’ve seen almost double total sales of “Delicious Library 2” through it. And although paying ~⅓ of our gross to Apple is pretty steep, if Apple’s finding new customers who wouldn’t have found us before the Mac App Store,

 

 

Of course, if you remember back to the good old days… Not the good old days of selling downloads on your own site, but the REAL good old days, if you could have gotten your software INTO a store like Best Buy, you’d have to pay for physical packaging and distribution, and deal with returns and all of the sales and management of your retail channels — and those channels would suck about 50% of your sale price off on top of it for THEIR margins.

And FWIW, that 30% margin they take is maybe break-even. they certainly aren’t paying for expensive cars in the parking lot with it. App stores aren’t cheap to run. Or so I hear.

 

 

 

 

The sharks — what happened? (and the ratto vs drew deathmatch)

In the post game, Ray Ratto and Drew got into it. I admit: I missed this live, because Laurie and I were so thrilled at the game, we turned off for a DVRed episode of Good Eats. No, really. Good Eats reruns.

Here’s my take on all of this. If you caught me on twitter during and after the game, you’ll know I pretty much wrote off the Sharks after this game. For once, Ray Ratto is right: this is not a playoff team. It hasn’t played like one since the start of the year. Last night, I saw a team working hard, but not working desperate.

I love Drew, he’s smart, fun to listen to and usually right, but last night, his attachment to the Sharks and to coaching got the best of him. He loves this team (and so do I), but his rant last night was more denial than explanation. Ratto nails it. Here in the Western Conference, which is a nasty ass conference, and the Pacific Division, which is a nasty division, the Sharks are not a playoff team. Even if they squeeze into the playoffs, I can’t see them getting past the first round.

After the game, Joe thornton said this team needed to win out and go 4-0 to close the season. Best case is 3-1 might get them in. Is the team that lost the last two games going to do that? I don’t’ see it. They’ll be lucky to go 1-3. Right now, I expect the Kings should sweep them.

How did we get to this point? That’s a tough, complicated question, one I’ve grappled with for a while. My current thinking is something like this:

First, and most important, the conference and division has gotten better around the Sharks. This is, first and foremost, not about the Sharks getting bad, but about the team being as good as it is and the rest of the league catching up. Did you see St. Louis getting as good as it has this year? No, me, neither. There are no soft teams in the west, and even “bad” teams like Edmonton can and will make you crazy. So the primary “failure” here is — parity.

Having said that, I think this team has had a “of course we’re a playoff team” mentality, perhaps leaning a bit too hard on “we just need to be ready for April” and planning to flip the switch. You can’t ever let the regular season be a tuneup for the real season, or, well, you hit the last ten games of the season in a dogfight for 8th, and lose that slot to a team that’s learned how to be desperate. This team maybe has coasted a bit on its belief that it will just be there when it really matters, and now that it’s really mattering, finding it’s not quite as easy as it thought.

I think injuries have taken a toll on this team; there have been enough to keep the roster in flux all season, and that’s kept this team from ever generating the kind of “on a roll” chemistry it’s shown in the past.

I’m am curious whether or not Marleau is playing with an injury. If he’s not — what the hell happened? Marleau has always had times when he’s gone into funks; it’s never been at crunch time and he’s always ended the season putting up the kind of numbers we expect from him. But honestly, right now I want to put his picture on a  milk carton. I don’t see any reason why he’s been so — invisible — on the ice.  He is the only top six forward I can call out as being a significant disappointment to me. It’s now the Joe and Joe and Logan and Ryan show out there, and all four get nothing but positives from me.

Drew’s support of the coaching staff is not misplaced. I share it. I don’t see this as something that puts either Doug Wilson or Coach McClellan’s job at risk. I do wonder — and I am completely unqualified to judge — how significant the loss of Trent Yawney from the staff for this season is affecting things, especially given the plummet in performance in special teams. Jay Woodcroft seems like a great person, but it seems to me this team might need a more seasoned and experienced voice helping McClellan (and let me emphasize that I’m not saying anything against Woodcroft other than maybe this team needs someone further down the career path; or maybe not — that’s something Doug Wilson will have to evaluate).

Wilson made some roster changes during the offseason. I like and continue to like the Brent Burns deal. It took him some time to acclimate, once he did, I’ve liked his play. Given setoguchi’s play in minnesota, a no-brainer. the Heatley deal for havlat got sidetracked by injuries, that was a known risk of the deal, and it’s a risk that we got hit by.

I look at Huskins in St. Louis, and I look at Ian White in Detroit, and then I look at Colin White here in San jose, and I think to myself — really? Sorry, Colin White was not an upgrade, not in any way, shape or form. This team would have been a lot better off keeping Ian White; I’m not a huge fan of Huskins, but he’s been put in a  system where he’s been solid. Even so, Huskins would be a step up from Colin White.

That said — that’s a minor blip in the Doug Wilson track record.

The end result here? The better a team is, the harder it is to keep making it better. I think the Sharks ran into that this year. They plateaued. At a high level, but it’s still a plateau. I think the biggest off-season loss was Yawney on the coaching staff, and I think that needs to be looked at in the offseason. Injuries were never catastrophic (no Sydney Crosby injuries) but enough injuries happened to keep the roster from gelling and this team from ever building momentum or chemistry. It challenged the organization depth, and the depth is okay but only okay. And I think this team mentally got a bit complacent, and got into a mindset that what really mattered was being ready for the playoffs. And they did that in a conference full of teams hungry for the playoffs, and now — it’s on the outside wondering what happened.

And then there’s the mystical missing Marleau.

And perhaps missing the playoffs will make this team pissed again, and playing with that edge again. Which is something this team needs, and which I think was missing this year. And that will be good for this team — next season. It’s too late this year.

I don’t think this team needs major surgery. I do think changes need to be made, but that’s true every year.

For now, though, I’m just counting down the days to the playoffs, and I’m looking forward to seeing just how far the Blues can go, and how many team they’re going to scare along the way…

 

(hat tip: Kukla)

Things You’ll Find Interesting March 29, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

That’s how it goes some times…

 

Official Rules – Rule 63: Delaying the Game – NHL.com – Rules:

63.6 Awarded Goal – In the event that the goal post is displaced, either deliberately or accidentally, by a defending player, prior to the puck crossing the goal line between the normal position of the goalposts, the Referee may award a goal. In order to award a goal in this situation, the goal post must have been displaced by the actions a defending player or goalkeeper, the puck must have been shot (or the player must be in the act of shooting) at the goal prior to the goal post being displaced, and it must be determined that the puck would have entered the net between the normal position of the goal posts. When the goal post has been displaced deliberately by the defending team when their goalkeeper has been removed for an extra attacker thereby preventing an impending goal by the attacking team, the Referee shall award a goal to the attacking team. The goal frame is considered to be displaced if either or both goal pegs are no longer in their respective holes in the ice, or the net has come completely off one or both pegs, prior to or as the puck enters the goal.

So right now, twitter and the sharks broadcast are harping on the official call leading to the third goal. Here’s my take. Okay, two takes.

If you read the rule, the intent of what Boyle did means nothing. He knocked the goal off, whether he intended to is irrelevant. If the referee feels the puck would go in the net, then he was correct to call the awarded goal.

That was the incorrect interpretation, but if it took us three looks in slow-mo on replay, I’m going to cut the refs some slack on the call. It was fast, close, and a lot of moving parts. The puck missed by maybe an inch. Catching that at full speed in real time is tough at best.

There was a somewhat extended discussion with the situation room in Toronto, but the decision that matters (“the goal was going in, so the goal is awarded”) isn’t reviewable. Even if toronto tells the refs what happened, unless the refs on the ice can change that call, it won’t be changed. it looked to me like all four zebras huddled to see if someone had an angle on the call — and ultimately, the original call stood.

And so the goal did, too. That’s how it goes some times. The referees made the appropriate call on the ice. It wasn’t the right call, but it was a situation where the right call was almost impossible to make, and it was a call that Toronto’s situation room couldn’t correct on review. (whether we want even more interminable delays in the game for reviews is another argument. I lean towards coaches having one call a game in some situations, but honestly, I don’t want more time spent standing around wondering what Toronto is going to decide slowing down the game)

And frankly, this all misses the point completely.

it matters not at all whether the Sharks lose this game 2-1 or 3-1.

the Sharks still lost. And now are holding onto the playoffs with two fingernails and a prayer. They didn’t play badly, they didn’t play great. They needed great. And the Ducks are the difference this year between the sharks winning the division and maybe missing the playoffs. A team the sharks simply don’t match up well against, and it showed again tonight. Close, no cigar.

And the OTHER team the Sharks really don’t match up well against is — the Blues. And who are the sharks likely to see in the first round? And if not the first round, sometime in the playoffs? yup.

So to me, this non-controversy is even more non-controversial, because I still don’t see the Sharks going far if they do make the playoffs.

That’s how it goes sometimes….

 

Things You’ll Find Interesting March 28, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

Things You’ll Find Interesting March 27, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

Things You’ll Find Interesting March 26, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

A cat picture

Because I can

 

 

Testing blogsie, if you must know…..

Things You’ll Find Interesting March 25, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

Things You’ll Find Interesting March 24, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

Things You’ll Find Interesting March 23, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

Things You’ll Find Interesting March 22, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

Right now, I’d say the Sharks will miss the playoffs.

‘There’s way more value in rest right now than grinding it out in practice. They need energy for the games’ | Working the Corners:

No, things aren’t going well for the Sharks.

 

But they’re also on a stretch that has them playing nine games in 15 nights so Todd McLellan decided that his players needed time away from the rink more than they needed another practice.

Yes, I know, some of you would have bag-skated them after going 0-for-California at a time that’s crucial to their (fading?) playoff hopes.

It almost pains me to say it, but right now, the Sharks look to me to be missing the playoffs.

It’s hard to put a finger on what’s wrong. I don’t think the coaches know. I don’t think the players know. I sure don’t. But from watching them, it’s not that they’ve given up or stopped caring. They haven’t tuned out the coach. I like their work ethic. their conditioning seems fine. They’re trying hard. But at key moments, they don’t seem to try smart, and mistakes bury them.

And  now they’re second guessing themselves. something goes wrong, and they falter. the textbook definition of “fragile”.

McLellan is right that bag skates is the wrong thing, especialy this time of year. Especially since it’s not lack of effort. That’s not sending a message or fixing the problem, that’s just revenge thinking. wrong idea.

Fact is, this team just isn’t clicking. In the West, there’s no margin of error, and this team is error prone. If I were to point at a single failure point, it’s the number of and timing of injuries — this team simply never got a roster set and in a rhythm. I think. Maybe.

right now, I think it’s too late. I suppose they can wake up and go on a run, but I don’t think they will. I’m not sure they should. Why cost ticket holders one round of playoff tickets? (that sound you just heard was Sharks ownership wincing). But unless this team really changes overnight (and it won’t), even if they squeak in, they aren’t going far.

I’m guessing they have company. Detroit and detroit’s goaltending looks to be joining the “what happened here?” club. I’m not seeing them go far, either.

God help whoever runs into St. Louis in the first round. they’ll need it.

I could, I guess, get up some righteous anger at the Sharks, but you know? Some years, it just never happens to plan. I think we’re seeing a glimpse of what might have happened if Havlat had stayed healthy.

I know there’s been some rumblings about the Minnesota trades during the offseason, but to be honest? I think the Sharks won those trades. Heatley/Setoguchi are at 77 points for the season, but Burns and Havlat are at 56; not that far behind, and Havlat only played 30 games. If he played 70 at close to that rate, this pair well outscored the former sharks. And heatley and seto are a combined -19 vs +14. And look at where the Sharks are in the standings vs. the wild. I’ll take what we have vs. what we gave up.

So for me, it’s about playing out the string and seeing how this team fights through the rest of the season. I don’t think sharks fans need to panic. I do think they need to realize that sometimes, an engine throws a rod, and by the time you fix it, the race is over. That’s the Sharks this year. But I’m unconvinced you need to throw out the engine or the drive for next year’s race. (but replace a few parts? definitely. But that’s for later… there’s still hockey to complain about…)

 

 

Things You’ll Find Interesting March 21, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

Reinventing mistakes…

Pinterest allows impersonators free rein—but for how long?:

Each new social media service that crosses the threshold of public awareness sees two things: brands and celebrities rushing in to find out if they can use the service to their advantage and, right before that, squatters and jokers who got to the brand name first. The latest to experience this Wild West phenomenon is the visual bulletin board service, Pinterest, which recently announced a brief policy statement on usernames that hardly clears things up for companies, celebrities, and satirists alike.

 

We have something like 35 years of history and experience here on the internet now. Along the way, we’ve made pretty much every mistake we can make, usually multiple times.

But I really don’t know why startups ignore this history and keep getting hit from behind by things they should know are coming.

A basic reality: when you’re small and nobody knows about you, “be nice and act like mature adults” works. As soon as you get some visibility and growth, every service should know that there are common problems that are going to show up that need to be dealt with:

  • Porn
  • Spam
  • trolls and griefers, abusive jerks in general
  • Name grabbers and impersonators

The list goes on. The reality is, every site that succeeds at some level has to deal with them. And most of them, it seems, waits until they actually show up and create problems to sit down and go “we need to do something. What?”

I don’t understand why, either. They’re coming — unless you fail up front. So why not plan for these up front in your policies and your systems and controls? Maybe you won’t get it right the first time, but you’ll have a leg up over “now what?”

Pinterest seems to have missed the implications of copyright issues on their site. They’ve had their first wave of porn and spam, the impersonators are moving in. They seem to be reacting well, but some of these things (like the impersonators) they shouldn’t have to adapt their T&Cs to; it should have been there at launch.

Even worse is google; I swear 40-50% or more of the people circling me these days aren’t really people, they’re empty spam hubs waiting to activate. And a good 20% of the names are clearly failures of the real name policies they claim are so important. Taht’s the problem with making a priority of policies that don’t scale in enforcement, I guess.

To sites looking to launch into these social worlds: study what’s happened to sites that came before, and learn from them. It’s a lot less painful than learning on the fly.

Or ask advice of someone who’s been through the wars; at least they can tell you where the troll lairs are likely to be found…

 

John Scalzi

Reader Request Week 2012 #1: Snark and Insult – Whatever:

It’s rather less legitimate to label Mr. Cameron a “pestilent toad,” because, well. He seems pretty clean. But more to the point, calling him a pestilent toad doesn’t really do much other than call him a name. One may argue that he spreads the pestilence of intolerance and that his antipathy toward gays is positively amphibian, but you have to explain it and it seems the long way around, sort of like suggesting how “unnatural” really refers to philosophical concepts pioneered by Aquinas. It might be better to keep things simple, or if not simple, then immediately relatable to the subject on hand.

Now, ironically, should Mr. Cameron ever attempt to sue me for libel, my defense would be marginally better if I did refer to him as a pestilent toad than an ignorant bigot, because I could claim “pestilent toad” as an example of hyperbole, since I don’t really believe he’s an actual pestilent toad, whereas I suspect he may be an actual ignorant bigot. But this goes back to the whole “public figure” thing.

I’ve written before that I like John Scalzi as an author. Every book of his I’ve read I’ve loved. He’s not just an author, he’s a thinker. And he’s got a rather unique sense of humor.

But it’s stuff like this that makes his blog a gem, too. If you aren’t reading Whatever, you should be.

Things You’ll Find Interesting March 20, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

Things You’ll Find Interesting March 19, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

Things You’ll Find Interesting March 18, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

Things You’ll Find Interesting March 17, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

Things You’ll Find Interesting March 16, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

Things You’ll Find Interesting March 15, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

The Photo Web Gallery project — update 3.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve written about my web gallery project. As I kept working on it, I started seeing places where it was getting too complex, too many moving parts, and the biggest issue for me, too much manual bookkeeping to keep things straight, instead of having the system figure it out for me.

And then I asked myself the question “how do I do ‘new images’ on this thing, anyway?” — and I didn’t like the answer.

So I shut it down for a bit to think it through (and play some Skyrim. Oh, and work). And then tore it apart and rebuilt it again.

This is one reason why I like the “code early and refactor” mode of writing programs. What seems like a good idea in theory may not be as good in practice, so building out the framework and coding down into the details lets you figure that out and minimize the pain of fixing the warts.

In the original version, I was building out the page structure based on a hierarchy of folders of images — which makes sense at some level; organize the images on disk the way you want to present them, then write a web site around them. In practice? that has issues. Images that you want to show up in multiple pages are on disk in multiple places, for one. The logistics of publishing those images out of Lightroom gets to be a bit complicated, and you are at risk of having an image having multiple URLs, or have those URLs break if you decide to move your folders around. Both of those are bad. And then there’s the problem of building “smart” pages based on what’s published, like recently modified or newly created images.

The answer was (as it is with me so often), back to keywords and metadata. Now I publish a single folder of images, and define a set of pages I want to create based on keyword matching in the image metadata. All of those html pages live in the root of the folder, Keywords can be custom to the galleries, or you can match based on your normal key wording. And there’s now a single publishing point in lightroom, and no file duplication. The image URLs don’t ever change unless I delete an image. And that means it’s easy to programmatically create “smart” pages.

One smart page is “miscellaneous”, which is all of the images that don’t match a keyword, so none of them get lost if I don’t set up keywords right. The index page also has sections for “new images”, “recent modifications” and “featured images”, all generated on the fly. Each page on the gallery is tied to one or more keywords in a config file, and an image can be on as many pages as it matches keywords.

I like it. and you can see a look at the current progress (the look and feel hasn’t changed, and isn’t final, not by a long shot).

There’s still a lot of detail work to do, but the main structure now seems complete. Some of the things on the TODO list include:

  • An RSS Feed for new images
  • Defining sort order on the page on a per-page basis
  • page header/footer/descriptions on a per page basis
  • cleaning up the semantics of the HTML
  • hiding keywords I don’t care about
  • google analytics
  • figuring out how to do a two or three layers of pages (hence the ‘Yosemite/Tunnel View’ — eventually, it’ll be a sub-page of the Yosemite page).
  • I’d like to enhance the lightbox for next/previous image. Maybe eventually a slideshow.
  • I’ve spent some time creating a configuration system so I can set these values without hardcoding them in the code — and I want to be able to change them on a per page basis (of course). It needs some more work, though.
  • If I’ve blogged about an image, include a link to the blog entry. Ditto if the image is on smugmug for licensing or sale.

So there’s still a bunch of stuff to do… But it’s nice to have visible progress, and in a way that really simplifies use and makes it more powerful and flexible. That’s never bad…..

And it’s gone from 200 to 400 lines of perl; although there are some areas I’ve flagged for refactoring…

In any event, I still plan on releasing this on the “if you find it useful” license when it’s done. And if you have suggestions on features you think it ought to have, let me know… I’d love to hear your ideas now, rather than after I think I’m finished with the first version…

(oh, and yes, the previous versions of this beast are gone from the photos site; now that the structure is “final” (as final as anything in the internet is), I’ll just update this in place as I add stuff to it, and occasionally talk about it when I think it deserves it. But what the heck. First person who reports to me a new feature after I publish it gets a free print of one of my images. Feel free to try to win one!)

 

 

 

Things You’ll Find Interesting March 14, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

The reality of the Sharks

On flight delays, more from McLellan after that 3-2 OT loss to the Flames and grading the road trip | Working the Corners:

The Sharks obviously let two points get away from them on this road trip (shootout loss in Dallas, last night against the Flames), but a 1-1-2 record is an improvement over a 1-3 homestand and that horrific 2-6-1 journey in February.

 

Not saying they’ve turned any corner. Much yet to be proven on the ice. But let’s just say they’re less of a mess.

It’s March, that big red line over the head of the team is the cutoff line for the playoffs, and the positives being taken out of the latest road trip is a moral victory that it wasn’t as bad as the previous road trip.

And yet, to apologize for them a bit, yet another injury (Tommy Wingels) of a guy playing really well that is now out for some period of time causing lines and roles to get jumbled up again. Sometimes teams find ways to fight through these things, sometimes they have to grind it out and struggle. That’s this year’s Sharks.

But still, on the outside, looking in, in a really, really tough conference.

 

I’m not a “curator” – Marco.org

I’m not a “curator” – Marco.org:

First of all, readers aren’t going to learn what those symbols mean. The distinction between them is also unnecessary and will lead to more confusion: I’ve been running a hybrid articles-and-links blog here (↬DF) for a while, I wrote the function that added “via” links to billions of reblogged posts on Tumblr, and I didn’t even know the difference between “via” and “hat tip” until today.

But the inscrutability of these little symbols is irrelevant, because most writers aren’t going to use them.

The problems with online attribution aren’t due to a lack of syntax: they’re due to the economics and realities of online publishing.

 

Marco brings up problems with Curator’s Code, an attempt to define a way to standardize and encourage the “hat tip” attributions that go on from site to site (or should).

Now, I always try to give proper attribution. I’m not perfect, but I think it’s an important aspect of the ecosystem of the web. I thought about the proposal in Curator’s Code, and honestly, I’m not that impressed, for the reasons Marco states. But at least someone is starting this conversation, and it’s a conversation we should encourage (and link to).

I think there are a couple of problems with Marco’s argument, though.

First, while the codes may seem inscrutable, if they are adopted and evangelized, we can get past that inscrutability. This same argument could be waged against Creative Commons, and yet, it seems to have become fairly well understood (but with far from 100% awareness; this is the internet, of course). That’s one reason why I’ve tried with my Creative Commons licensing to not just use it, but to pro-actively explain what it is and what my philosophy for using it is. These codes would need similar treatment over time to become really useful, but I think it can be done.

Another aspect that Marco seems to miss is that even if the reader misses these completely — the search engines won’t (unless a site is doing their via/hat-tip links with “nofollow”, which seems like it’d be a wanker action and seriously disingenuous). So even if the person misses the attribution, the Google wouldn’t, and that in itself helps.

But for a situation like that, tying this into some kind of micro format would seem even more useful; and if we were going to push to adopt something like this, we should do it in a way that works both for the human and the machine ready. That seems to be missing here completely, and that’s a big reason why I’ve decided to not adopt this.

Consider a typical post on The Verge, a widely respected tech blog:

while I like the Verge, Marco is dead right here. Their attribution is a nasty example of design over usability. It’s basically impossible to find, even when looking for it. Which seems to be the point of what they did — it’s hidden in plain sight, which is too bad.

So, let’s take this another step or two. Let’s tie it into a microformat, make sure that it’s done in a way that works for sane web designs for both readers and spiders. This was a nice start to the discussion, but this proposal isn’t going far enough, or what’s really needed.

 

Things You’ll Find Interesting March 13, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

The NHL GM meetings…

The NHL GM meetings are going on, and as usual, they’re considering rule changes.

It’s been a slow process, but it looks like hybrid icing is finally winning their approval.

NHL GMs express support for hybrid icing – The Globe and Mail:

Seven NHL general managers who discussed a change to the icing rule on Monday at their semi-annual meetings came away in unanimous agreement that the league should move to the type of hybrid icing now used in the NCAA and USHL.

The rule will now go to all 30 general managers over the course of the next two days and will need the support of two-thirds of them in order to be sent to the competition committee.

The idea of hybrid icing is to keep the chase to break up the icing call in the game, but in a way that removes some of the risk of the catastrophic injuries that have happened when that chase puts a player into the boards hard and fast. Think Marco Sturm, Kurtis Foster bad.

I’ve been generally supportive of the status quo, but the current proposed change makes sense, and seems to walk that compromise between doing nothing and going to full automatic icing, which bores the crap out of me in college and international hockey. So I support this change; and it’s another instance where I think the league should get some credit for taking the time to get it right when people around them are screaming for a fast “easy” decision that really isn’t.

The Brian Burke “bearhug” rule got shot down hard, again. The idea here is to allow some limited obstruction/holding in some specific situations to give defenseman an alternative to pinning a player to the boards like a bug, in hopes of limiting some of the injuries. I sympathize somewhat with Burke, but nobody seems convinced that’s the right solution — including me.

Darryl Reaugh brings up some of the other issues up before the GMs. I agree with much of what he says. But of course, not all..

Dallas Stars Blog:: RAZOR’S INAUGURAL 16th ANNUAL 10 THINGS THAT NEED TO GO:

 

1.) Elimination of the Redline Brett Hull was right. The worst, most anti-skill play in hockey, the one where a d-man slap-passes the puck to a forward just over center-ice and he angles his stick to tip the puck deep into the other end of the rink, is about 90% of what the decision to remove the redline has produced – and it suuuuuucccckkkkks.

I like the removal of the red line. there’s been discussion of putting it back to try to reduce some of the injuries we’ve seen with people flying down the ice and the inability to protect a defenseman against a physical forecheck. I don’t think the red line is the solution to that, just as nobody seems to think the bear hug is, either.

But the center-ice tip to clear the puck and avoid icing? Reaugh is right; it sucks, and it’s not helping the game. But don’t put the red line back in. Instead, force the player in center ice to take control of the puck. Use the same standards we use today for whistling down a delayed penalty. If the player doesn’t stop the puck and then shoot it down in a separate motion, then call icing on it. I definitely want to see this tip play pulled back out of the game, but I think the way to do it is to require a higher skill play to replace it, not simply put the red line back in.

2.) Trapezoidal Areas It never worked. Whoever came up with it didn’t understand geometry, or modern goaltenders, or game flow.

The Brodeur rule. And it’s time for it to go. But, we need a couple of other things here as well. One is that goalies outside the crease and behind the goal line aren’t eligible for the kind of “goalie interference” calls they get today. And they can’t be allowed to do the moving wall of goalie trick to wall off an opposing player — that should be called interference, just as it would be if a real skater tried it.

3.) Kicking Motion This needs to be rewritten to say, “…as long as the players skate never leaves the ice, good goal”

I have never liked the “distinct kicking motion” rule. it’s just too arbitrary, and it’s one of those things where you HAVE to let the war room in toronto decide. Oh, sorry. “situation room”. These kinds of situational things make it too ambiguous and open to criticism. I say, either you allow pucks going off the skates to count, or you don’t. I vote for “don’t”, but going one way or another is preferable to this “guessing intent” call.

4.) Illegal Hand Pass No one can explain to me why a hand pass should be allowed in the defensive zone only. Unless, the league secretly wants to aid defense and bridle offense, which I know isn’t the case

Yes, please.

6.) Overtime Necessary for playoffs, unnecessary for the regular season. For the first 82 lets just play 60 minutes for two points and then, if tied, go straight to a 5-man Shootout. Save some wear and tear, and save our fans from more intermissions and confusing standings.

I’m no great fan of the shoot-out, but yeah. let’s just go straight to it.

8.) Permitted Icing During Penalty Kills A team should be fully penalized for an infraction, not ‘partially’. You can’t ice it during even strength play so why permit it when you’ve done something delinquent?! Duh.

again, yes. after all, this league IS troubled by too much scoring, right? so let’s look for some simple ways to inhibit the defenders that won’t materially impact the game.

 

In other news, it’s good to see that according to the data, the number of concussions in the league has flattened out. The number of man games lost to concussions has gone up, but as much as anything, this is more about really starting to understand the implications of the concussion and being more strict and careful about letting players come back — more time off and being more paranoid about their health. That also, to me, is a really good thing to see, although for the players suffering (especially Chris Pronger, who may be done), it still sucks. That, however, is what they’re trying to deal with.  It seems we’re making progress here.

 

What’s wrong with the San Jose Sharks?

Roundtable: What’s wrong with the San Jose Sharks? Has the window closed for Stanley Cup hopes? | Puck Daddy – Yahoo! Sports:

But again: The San Jose Sharks are chasing the No. 8 seed. The winner of four consecutive Pacific Division titles is swimming upstream to make the playoff cut this season, one year removed from a Western Conference Finals appearance — and after an offseason that saw GM Doug Wilson load up for what looked like a Stanley Cup run. What the hell happened? Who do we blame? And even if they make the playoffs, can they still challenge for the Cup? We asked a few of the best Sharks bloggers their thoughts on the matter.

Hey, the Sharks beat Edmonton. Life’s all better now, right?

Count me as not so sure. But I thought the work ethic and the attention to detail tonight was pretty good. Rom Renney ripped the Oilers after the game, but to be honest, I thought it was more about them running up against the theoretical sharks and not the recent sharks than anything his team didn’t do. The bigger question is whether the theoretical sharks are going to show up for more than 50 minutes a game every third game (or not).

So what’s wrong with the Sharks? Good question. If I really knew the answer, I’d be doing something other than writing blogs about it.

But here’s my take.

First,  injuries have hurt this team more than expected. There have been enough, and key enough, that this team’s never gotten the lineup set and everyone on the same page. This is especially true on defense. Boyle playing through a broken foot early and unable to play his game well impacted this, too.

Some of the off-season moves haven’t worked out as expected. While I won’t say it was as simple as “the sharks let Ian White go and brought in Colin White” — it’s never that simple — the face is that Ian White’s doing pretty well in Detroit, and Colin White has been, well, a disappointment. Has not lived up to expectations, definitely.

And early on, when the Sharks were doing pretty well, Niemi wasn’t. Until the last couple of weeks, Niemi has struggled with timely saves. I think this got into the heads of the players a bit, and they started expecting bad things to happen; bad bounce, soft goal, bad penalty. And when they did, they collapsed and lost focus. Too many games this year where a missed play or a goal turned into two or three goals in really short order before the team got back into its groove. Lose focus, get buried.

Now, it looks like Niemi is getting back into the groove, but the team is still playing fragile. A mistake turns into not one goal, but two.

This can be a nasty thing to fix when it gets going; many times players don’t even notice it, but… you lose games because of mistakes, or soft goals. You start to expect it. That makes it a bit harder to convince yourself to go down and block that shot, so you flamingo it. Or instead of standing in front of the goalie screening him, where your kidneys get constantly crosschecked by that defenseman, you stand a foot to the side, where you’re kinda sorta screening him and the defenseman lets you, because you’re not really hurting anything.

Oh, wait. that’s “clearing the crease”, it’s not cross-checking. Because if it was cross-checking, the referees would call it. My bad.

But you get my point. When you start expecting a bad thing to happen, it can get into your head that you might as well not get that bruise blocking this shot, or go into the pain areas scrumming for a screen, or maybe you let up just enough chasing down to kill that icing. Little things, not even conscious decisions. And in this league, where everyone is so evenly matched and the margin of victory so slim, those little things matter a lot. And it is those little things that tend to manufacture good luck and good bounces, so if the players aren’t doing it, the bounces tend to go against them — and that can reinforce it.

The only way out of this is to commit yourself as a player not to NOT do the little things. To take those cross-checks, to block those shots, to gut it out. And relearn the work habits and details you as a player thought you were doing, but really weren’t.

What I liked about the Edmonton game was that the Sharks were doing those little things well, consistently.

So now we see if that’s a trend, or whether it fades again. We’ll see. But the Sharks are still on the outside looking in. and it won’t get any easier…

 

 

Upgrading to Lightroom 4: reprocessing before and after

A primary reason I upgraded to Lightroom 4 so quickly after it was released was to get my hands on the new processing engine. Normally, I’d let others live on the bleeding edge and upgrade after the release has proven out a bit, but in this case, I had decided it was time for a complete library re-edit — and it made no sense to start that project until I could do it using Lightroom 4.

I’ve frankly hit that point where it’s hard to look at my library and portfolio without wincing. This is (mostly) a good thing, in that while looking at an image and thinking “look at the noise. Look at how soft that is. Look at the color cast” is no fun, because at some point in the past I clearly thought the image was both good and finished — but I’m continuing to move forward in what I’m capable of, how I see a potential image, and my ability to bring that potential out in the final image.

But it also means that every so often, you have to tear it down, rebuild it all from scratch, be willing to retire stuff that magically got sucky while sitting on your disk over the years, and reprocess everything so it meets up to your current vision and capabilities. And that takes time and energy.

And so, with Lightroom 4 in hand, here we go. Here’s an image I picked to see what I could do. This is an Anna’s hummingbird that became fairly well known among the bird photographers here in the Bay Area; one summer he took ownership of a tree near Shoreline Lake and held court and he wasn’t afraid to show off for a camera. Here’s the image after I ran it through my lightroom 4 workflow:

Anna's Hummingbird, Shoreline Lake, Mountain View, California

 

Just for reference, I thought it might be interesting to start showing the original, unprocessed images as well, as comparison of what came out of the camera and what I ended up with. And no, this wasn’t my best capture, although there was no clipping on the whites or blacks…

100131 163550 chuq

So now we start down the path of a complete collection edit. Last time I did this, I retired 35% of the images. I expect I’ll retire 15-20% this time through as no longer up to my standards. Painful in some ways, but a good thing, and a useful exercise to spend the time revisiting your collection and making sure it represents what I want my published collection to say about my work. This will likely take a couple of months to complete on a part time basis.

As I start working with LR4, I can see how the processing engine is improved. It’s a lot more logical to use, and it seems to be able to work with problem images with less fuss. I haven’t yet used ti enough to really feel comfortable with my workflow or think I’m close to doing the best possible work in it yet, but I definitely feel that the upgrade and the shift to the new processing is going to be more than worth it…

 

“New iPad” — Wifi or LTE revisited

About “The New iPad” and other updates…. @ Chuqui 3.0:

I like the new iPad. As someone who is still using a first gen tablet, I’ll probably upgrade. But not right away. Let the lemmings beat their head against the brick walls of the apple store to get first access to day one bugs. have fun, guys. I’d love to upgrade to an LTE device and turn it into my tether hotspot — but the cost for data is too high, so I’ll stick with a wifi tablet and my iPhone hotspot for tethering when I need it.

 

 

The Verge has come up with updated (read: correct) pricing on the LTE plans for the new iPads:

New iPad LTE data plans: no mobile hotspot with AT&T at launch | The Verge:

Apple has been shuffling the data plans that it shows for the Verizon and AT&T versions of the new iPad with LTE service in the past day, and it’s a little confusing — AT&T’s $30 plan was originally indicated as 2GB instead of 3, and buyers still can’t see all four Verizon plans that are available. Here’s the definitive word on the commitment-free offerings from both operators:

AT&T (3 plans total)

250MB $14.99, overage $14.99 per 250MB 3GB $30, overage $10 per 1GB 5GB $50, overage $10 per 1GB Verizon (4 plans total)

1GB $20, overage $20 per 1GB 2GB $30, overage $10 per 1GB 5GB $50, overage $10 per 1GB 10GB $80, overage $10 per 1GB Perhaps more notably, Verizon’s plans include hotspot service across the board at no additional cost

 

I went and spent some time on the ATT wireless web site (which is just such a joy to work with) trying to figure out when I bought our iPhones and what our usage is to see what might make sense moving forward.  If I’ve read this right, my iPhone 4 is right around 18 months old, since ATT is almost ready to offer me “a deal” to upgrade to a new phone (with new 2 year agreement. of course). Laurie’s was bought about six months later, so she won’t get that special deal until fall.

The corrected info on the LTE charges isn’t as bad as the original pricing people were quoting. I seem to be averaging about 700-800 meg a month on my iPhone, laurie less. Neither of us is a road warrior, so working through Wifi is available most of the time, and even adding in an increase in usage because of the retina display, faster network and 1080P capabilities, it still doesn’t seem unreasonable.

So… I still have no plan to upgrade to the new iPad immediately. But when I do, I may well decide to upgrade to an LTE version. Because ATT isn’t doing tethering, I’d do this via Verizon. And to put it bluntly, while I’ve been moderately positive about ATT over time (because I live in an area where it works pretty well; sprint, not so much, as I found out in my life in webOS land), increasingly you can see how they’re slow to the game on things like tethering, and those things are becoming more important to me. So, ATT, consider this advance notice. I expect new iPhones to be released by Apple sometime in 2012; Laurie and I are skipping the 4S because with our phones, skipping generations works just fine for us — but we’ll be moving to the next one. And when we do, I fully expect to shift from ATT to Verizon as the carrier. And it looks like it makes sense to do the tethering via the LTE iPad on Verizon vs. using the phone as the hotspot, although if I haven’t bought the iPad by the time the phones come out, I might change my mind. we’ll see.

But in looking how both Verizon and ATT are setting up their plans and support models here, I’m convinced: it’s time to move off ATT, because it’s increasingly not competitive with how these devices are used and are going to be used, because ATT hasn’t gotten their networks up to snuff to be able to let us use them that way. (but ATT is a damn site further along than Sprint is…)

All of this of course subject to change. but I doubt it…

 

 

Welcome to the new sharks. they look familiar….

That blown lead — not missed tripping call — has Sharks shaking their head after 4-3 shootout loss | Working the Corners:

For what it’s worth, nobody in the Sharks locker room seemed remotely satisfied with a well-played game that didn’t result in two points. No, it was a glum place after that 4-3 shootout loss to the Dallas Stars. And, as the print edition story linked in the right-hand column, emphasized the Sharks were beating themselves up for failing to hold onto a lead in the game’s final minutes.

 

The good news: the last couple of games, the Sharks have been playing better. the guys brought in at the trade deadline have been definite helps. And now, they’re losing because of bad bounces instead of because their deserving to lose. That’s a step on the process a team often takes as it finds its way out of a slump.

The bad news: they’re still losing, and this still looks to me to be the Sharks team we can expect to see for a while. I’m not seeing the “okay, we’re getting on a run and we’re clearing the table” out of this team yet.

Although also on the good news side, Niemi seems to have mostly woken up from whatever nap he was taking.

This is not yet a team that has “deep into the playoffs” written on it. Nor do I see signs of that changing.

 

Requiring Captions Might Keep Pinterest From Getting Sued Into Oblivion

Requiring Captions Might Keep Pinterest From Getting Sued Into Oblivion:

Pinterest has tried to avoid legal trouble by having a Terms of Service that places all the blame for copyright infringement on its users, but a new solution may be on the horizon: mandatory captions. Requiring users to comment on pinned photos may cause the sharing to be protected under “fair use” because it becomes the subject of “commentary”.

 

 

Or maybe not.

Way back in the ancient of days (going on 30 years ago now, I guess), there was this thing called “USENET”. And it had a problem. People were including the entire text of a message and adding a one line reply. This was deemed “bad”. So those of us who managed (okay, “managed”) USENET and maintained the source decided to fix this, and taught the posting system to reject postings where over half of the material in a posting was included. The idea was that this would encourage people to edit the included content for context and not post entire articles with trivial replies.

What we got, of course, was the entire included reply, a one line reply, and then garbage, filler lines until the system stopped complaining at the user. Made the problem worse. Many sites quickly disabled this “fix”, and it got removed from a later release of the software completely.

If Pinterest tries this, it will fall to the same fate: they will not convince people to magically start adding useful content. They will, instead, garbage up their site as people throw whatever it takes to make the complaining monster shut up so they can post their picture. The people who WOULD add useful context (i.e., make it a reasonable fair use situation) already are. The ones not doing it won’t magically change their ways, they will simply look for how little work will it take to make whatever is bitching at them go away.

That’s human nature. And so ultimately, this “solution” will add noise, not signal. And not solve the problem. Unless Pinterest wants to get into an arms race with these people by turning this into an algorithmic “is this useful content?” thing where they try to actually see what the user is doing. If they try THAT, I wish them luck. (twitch).

This probably qualifies under the “if you study what’s already been tried on the internet in the past, you can maybe save yourself a few face plants” category of “old farts have their uses….”

And for the record, anyone who gets email, especially in mailing lists (double especially of those lists have digests) can tell you the problem is completely unsolved — we STILL get people quoting entire swathes of email and attach a one line reply. And if you bring this up with them, the most typical response is “huh? what’s the big deal?”

So have fun fixing this one, Pinterest. If this is your solution, I suggest you start thinking about how to fix it once this one fails.

 

 

 

Nathaniel Borenstein, Creator of MIME Format

Seven Questions for Nathaniel Borenstein, Creator of MIME Format – Arik Hesseldahl – News – AllThingsD:


The Internet isn’t known for looking backward at its history all that often, and yet once in awhile it’s worth a look back to appreciate why things we do every day work the way they do. March 11 is one of those opportunities. It is the 20th anniversary of MIME, which stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. You never think about it, and yet every time you attach a photo or a Word document, or practically anything else to an email message, you’re using it. It was created by Nathaniel Borenstein, a computer researcher who, 20 years ago, worked for Bellcore, the research arm of the Baby Bell telephone companies. At the time, no one really gave much thought to the idea that email could or even should comprise any more than basic text messages, and when attachments were involved, incompatible formats caused the kind of headaches that we would consider unacceptable today. Curiously obsessed with the evolution of email, he teamed up with Ned Freed, a fellow Internet pioneer, to write the MIME standard that is the backbone of email attachments today, supporting more than 1,300 types of files and enabling billions of email users to ignore any worries about compatibility among email programs.

As someone who used to write email software for a living, it’s hard to UNDER estimate how important MIME is to where the internet is today. If you’ve never worked in the bowels of email, you may have no clue what it is — but that’s the point.

Email is now 40+ years old. It’s one of the more ancient protocols on the internet, and yet it’s still one of the most critical and resilient and one we all depend on, for all some pundits keep insisting it’s going to die, really soon now.

I’ve been involved in two formal investigations for replacing email over the years, and a couple of informal ones. None gained any real traction, because the reality is that email is amazingly flexible and we’ve been able to innovate it greatly in place, rather than having to figure out how to replace it and gateway things back and forth. A huge part of that flexibility is MIME, and it’s ability to give people the ability to innovate the content forward but maintain compatibility through reduced functionality as well.

So his contribution to where we are today is mostly behind the scenes, but MIME is a huge advance that allowed us to move the net forward instead of tear it apart and try to reconstruct it.

Well done. Well done.

 

Stellers Sea Lion

Last weekend I went out on a day trip, starting out in Moss Landing and ending up exploring the by-roads of Monterey County. The primary purpose was to do some experimenting on some gear I’ve been meaning to get comfortable with — my Better Beamer flash extender, and my new intervalometer. Moss Landing was a good place for this because I knew I’d have subjects, they were convenient to the car, and the lighting conditions are challenging — unless it’s overcast, the sea lion dock is generally covered with partially backlit, glare-filled light.

Much to my surprise, we had a cousin visiting:

Stellar Sea Lion by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

That’s not a California Sea Lion, it’s a Stellers Sea Lion. He’s a huge beast, too; look at him in comparison to some of the California Sea Lions you can see in the picture — he’s like 4x-6x the size and weight of those guys.

His presence there was notable enough to get a blurb in the papers. At that time, I wasn’t sure what I had, but someone on the birding lists from Elkhorn Slough clued me in (thanks!). He was evidently seen in the harbor last winter for a short time, and was around for a few days when I happened to be there as well — he’s since moved on again, it seems, and hasn’t been seen since Sunday.

So nice timing. This is a species that generally lives north of here, although there’s now a small breeding population at Ano Nuevo and another on the Farralons. While there, his primary activity was — sleeping. This was one of the rare times he actually sat up, and if it’s not obvious, he’s scratching an itch. And then he laid out and went back to sleep.

And yes, as you can probably tell from this image, the lighting was challenging. And I still have work to do on my flash technique, but it was good practice at dealing with the beast. Oh, and complete trivia: this is the first image I’ve published using Lightroom 4 and their new processing engine…

Look at the whiskers on that guy. They are significantly longer than the california sea lion’s head.

 

 

About “The New iPad” and other updates….

Nice solid update to the Apple TV; I expect I’ll upgrade for the 1080p. Not revolutionary (no app store), I didn’t expect that now. I do assume we’ll get there, but I expect that’s something more likely to be addressed in IOS 6 down the road.

I like the new iPad. As someone who is still using a first gen tablet, I’ll probably upgrade. But not right away. Let the lemmings beat their head against the brick walls of the apple store to get first access to day one bugs. have fun, guys. I’d love to upgrade to an LTE device and turn it into my tether hotspot — but the cost for data is too high, so I’ll stick with a wifi tablet and my iPhone hotspot for tethering when I need it.

Lots of software updates today. more integration with iCloud. I like the new iPhoto capabilities on the tablet, but they don’t work on a 1st gen; for me to use iPhoto on that device, I’ll have to upgrade. One of the things on my list to do since deleting my flickr account was figure out the best way to get images for display on the Apple TV. Now seems a good time to actually do that.

Hidden in things that happened today is that Apple is starting to change up things to allow for free trials with subscriptions via in app purchase. This is potentially huge for developers, depending on the details. Well done. It was something I was pushing hard for “over there” back in the day, because it really breaks down resistance to buying a paid app, even more than the “free trial” does, because there’s still resistance with some consumers over paying for and downloading a “new” app even if you like the demo. anything that decreases purchase resistance, we should be for…

Of course, not everyone is happy. They never are.

Apple’s press conference showed a brand unraveling | VentureBeat:

Today’s event and the tiny but glaring inconsistencies bring up the impossible-to-answer question: Would Steve have green-lit that?

 

No one can say definitively whether “resolutionary” would have passed muster under Jobs. Steve is gone. While fragments of him live on in the company’s website and wording and product design, that likeness is destined to degrade over time.

At some point in the future, it’s within the scope of my own limited imagination to envision Apple products that bear little or no resemblance to anything Steve Jobs created.

 

And maybe they have a point, but the history of these things is that there’s always a group that has unrealistic expectations and knocks down Apple for not meeting them, only to be shown to be idiots when the market buys a bazillion of the devices anyway. If the struggles I saw with people trying to buy on the store today (via twitter) were indicative, Apple’s going to sell another bazillion, and the usual suspects will continue to declare impending doom and wonder why nobody is paying attention.

(by the way, having put in a few years at Apple myself and working in some areas where I might have gotten a bit of perspective on this, I can well see Job’s green lighting resolutionary. As he did “Think different”, and if you don’t remember the kerfluffle over the grammar of that phrase back then, go read a little history…)

I give today’s announcements a solid B. Nothing bad, nothing universe rendering. well executed and evolutionary. Which, of course, in the minds of some, means they’re a failure. Except out in the real world, which is where it’ll really matter.

 

 

Nashville Is Becoming A Hockey City

KuklasKorner : KK Hockey : Nashville Is Becoming A Hockey City:

The Predators have sold out 17 games this season and have already sold out the last three Saturday games of the season. The team’s all-time sellout record is 20.

Last season, the Predators saw their revenues increase between 25 and 30 percent, and their television ratings have gone up 50 percent over a year ago and are continuing to grow.

Ever so slowly, the Predators are moving towards that magical moment when the buzz surrounding the team creates a demand for tickets that outstrips actual seats in the house.

Seemingly forgotten now that Nashville has turned it around is that at the time, many were screaming at the league and Commissioner Bettman to quit wasting energy trying to save Nashville and just hand it over to Jim Balsillie to move to Hamilton or Toronto, that Nashville was a lost cause. The drum beating was especially loud in the Canadian media where, of course, any bump in the road in an American team is a failure and the solution is to bring hockey back to Canada, where it belongs.

Speaking of air pockets, anyone take a close look at RIM recently, and what a good job Balsillie’s doing running it? Oh, wait. RIM fell apart, and Balsillie was replaced as CEO. I suppose in the mind of some canadian press members, that simply means he’d have even more time to be an even better owner, since he doesn’t have the distraction of a company to run and can focus more on the hockey team…

Bettman of course ignored all of this and just pushed to make the Predators work again — and now, they are. I would link to all of the press people writing pieces about how Bettman was right and they were wrong, but, well, I can’t find any. They’re too busy writing articles about how Phoenix has failed and just move it to Canada already…

So I will: good job on sticking to your guns and working to make Nashville work, Mr. Bettman. You were right about it.

Just as he was right about Calgary and Edmonton; it’s mostly forgotten that back in the days, not only did Canada lose Winnipeg and Quebec City, there was serious worry about them losing either Calgary or Edmonton (or both) as well. Bettman orchestrated changes in the finances of the league to help support and later championed changes in the CBA to help make it easier for Canadian teams to be viable. This has worked well enough that when it was clear Atlanta wasn’t going to succeed in Atlanta, it was able to move back to Winnipeg and the league has returned to that city. There are continuing rumblings about getting a team back to Quebec City at some point (a good idea, when a team is available), and even Saskatoon has popped up and expressed interest (that, frankly, is not such a good idea. Sorry, guys).

With a league with revenues as large as the NHL and as many owners and cities as the league has, there will always be struggling teams. Not so long ago, chicago was a disaster. Today, look at how well it’s doing. Nashville had problems, but the league found the right people to take it over, and now, it’s rebounding. Atlanta? the right ownership just couldn’t be found for that city, just like, in the day, nobody wanted to own the Jets and they had to move. Now they’re back.

This is typical: if you look at baseball, both the Oakland A’s and the K.C. Royals are struggling; in basketball, you have the Clippers, and Cleveland’s had trouble drawing fans for a while. Sacramento was strongly rumored moving back to Seattle (where the owners convinced the city to spend tens of millions of dollars on key arena and build a poor upgraded building, got tired of the building and demanded tens of millions of dollars to upgrade it AGAIN, and then left when seattle said no — now, a couple of groups seem on the path to building new arenas….) — a weak team is not the sign of a troubled league — necessarily.

Right now, the three big problem franchises are Phoenix (and IMHO, how Phoenix got into this lousy shape is a case study of things you shouldn’t do), and Columbus is struggling, and on Long Island, you have a team in a lousy building with poor prospects of getting a replacement built. These are problems that need work; it looks like the decision is to try to keep the team in Phoenix, if the financial issues around the arena and lease can be worked out. Glendale (where the arena is) has a rather unpopular choice: convince the local populace it makes sense to subsidize the team and eat some of the costs of the building — or lose the team to another city, and lose even more money because now the building is empty (but the bills continue). I always felt the deal in Glendale was a bad one; I’m not happy to have been proven right.

I’m not sure what the answer is in Columbus. Right now, I think the answer is patience; it’s struggling, but it can wait while people figure out what to do. I’m a lot more worried about the Islanders. Charles Wang has a real problem up there, and I just can’t see a good solution up there now — there’s a new arena in brooklyn, but it’s not hockey friendly in the same way the old arena in Phoenix, or the Thomas and Mack in Vegas, or the Key in Seattle wasn’t hockey friendly (and we’ve seen hockey in all three venues, and trust me, that footprint simply won’t work for hockey). I’m a little surprised Wang hasn’t said the hell with it and looked to sell the team to have it moved; I still think ultimately that’s what he’ll do (quebec city, white courtesy phone). And frankly, given how he was treated by the folks in Long Island, that’s what they deserve. But we’ll see.

It’s hard to see how some of these issues will work out. But what I do know is this: Bettman never does what the “easy” solution seems to be, at least to those that write about it without actually having to pay or live with the outcome think is easy. But his track record shows that the while decisions Bettman makes may not be popular in some corners, they’re typically right. And he won’t get credit for it when he’s proven right…

 

White-Breasted Nuthatch — Nemesis Bird

I can finally scratch the white-breasted nuthatch off my list of nemesis birds as a photographer.

White-breasted Nuthatch by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com
Getting a good shot of this bird has been tough; they’re small. they don’t stand still much. their feeding pattern is to work through a tree gleaning insects out of the crevices of the bark, and they never stop. And since they are working on the larger branches and trunks of the tree, they are often in dark shade.

 

White-breasted Nuthatch by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

But on my most recent trip, I finally lucked out. There were not one, but two working the oaks in the area, and every so often, one would get close enough for decent shots, and pop out into both clear view and decent lighting.

Just don’t ask how many bad images I took to get a couple of decent ones…

 

Acorn Woodpeckers, the bird kingdom’s clown princes….

Acorn Woodpecker working its Granary by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

Up in the area where I watch the bald eagle’s nest, there’s an established family of acorn woodpeckers with an extensive granary in the mature oaks in the area. These are the clown birds, as you might guess from their faces. They have a lot of personality, that’s for sure.

Acorn woodpeckers live in extended families of a number of birds; the unusual thing is that all of the females in a family are sisters, and they bring in males to join the group. They work communally to gather food and manage the granary, which is their winter food supply.

Acorn Woodpecker by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

I spent some time watching two of the birds that were around this visit; one was busily eating the budding leaves of the oaks; another was working on the granary — as acorns dry, they shrink; the woodpeckers will check their stored seeds and if they find a loose one, they’ll remove it and find a new, tighter hole to store it in so it doesn’t fall and be lost.

They will also protect their acorn stores from others that might try to borrow from it; I’ve seen very enthusiastic disagreements between the woodpeckers and both squirrels and scrub jays here. In all cases, the woodpeckers won the discussion.

It it’s march, it’s time for the eagles to nest.

Bald eagle on nest by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

It’s early March, and that means spring is springing in the bird world. The red-tails were building nests when I was down in Panoche valley, the Mockingbirds have arrived here in the neighborhood as they do every spring, the oak titmice are singing their lungs out, and it looks like the Bald Eagle pair near Calaveras Reservoir is nesting again.

Okay, technically, they are way above Calaveras reservoir, in the top of a high tension power tower. I’ve been watching this pair when I can since 2008; I believe their first year nesting here was 2007. In 2008, the nesting failed as far as we can tell. In 2009, they fledged one chick, in 2010, they fledged 2. In 2011, they abandoned this nest and built a new one down in the treeline nearby; my life at HP was strange enough that I basically had no time to watch them, so I have no idea if they successfully fledged. and here in 2012, they’re back in their original nest and starting again.

Typically they’ll work on the nest in late January and early February. Egg laying seems to happen in late February or early March. There was a report by one birder that they were working on the nest earlier in the week; when I checked in on Friday, as you can see, she (assuming it’s the female, she spends ~80% of the time on the eggs, her mate covers the other 20% but does most of the hunting) is in it. In the 40 minutes or so I watched, she never left the nest. This isn’t absolute proof they’ve laid —  I was talking to an expert today and eagles can have false incubations — but we believe, especially given their track record, that she’s laid and is sitting.

Incubation is about 35 days. If all goes well, at the end of March or (more likely) early April, they’ll hatch. Bald eagles can lay one to three eggs; they rarely fledge three chicks, typically, the weakest chick is ejected by the others at some point. If food is somewhat scarce, the strongest chick will prevail. The third egg is essentially an insurance policy in case something happens to one.

The parents will care for them; early on, dad is the primary hunter, as they mature, mom will be able to spend more time away from the nest and do more hunting. Bald eagles are typical fish hunters, but this pair is a pair that has adapted to the local area and hunt primarily ground squirrels, which number in the zillions in this area (the Benito County eagle pair does the same).

By mid-May, the chicks will be testing their wings. By early June, they’ll fledge and leave the nest, and the cycle will be done for another year. This pair is bonded, they will likely be together and nesting unless one of them dies. They’ll continue to breed throughout their lives, as long as 30 years if all goes well.

Here’s some video I shot of them in 2010 with the chicks close to ready to leave the nest.

My hope this year is to monitor them every couple of weeks until the chicks hatch and then every week or ten days or so through fledging. And get some much better video when I can. And probably borrow a bigger lens, since they’re far enough away that the 420mm setup I use just isn’t enough… The good news is the nest is nicely visible from the roadway for those that want to look, but visitors can’t really annoy or interact with the birds. the bad news is that you need good binoculars or preferably a scope to get good looks, and even my birding photo gear has trouble getting quality images at this distance against the wind and a common bit of heat shimmer that will show up when things warm up…

Doesn’t keep me from working at it, though…

You can see some of my photography of these birds from earlier years here.

Are the Sharks a playoff team?

San Jose Sharks’ playoff quest hinges on improved defense, health of key players – San Jose Mercury News:


So who are these guys? Are they the tight, efficient defensive team that totally shut down the NHL’s most productive offense in beating the Philadelphia Flyers 1-0 on Tuesday night? Or are they the collective sieve that gave up 35 goals stumbling through a 2-6-1 trip. Give up that many goals, and you all but guarantee more losses than wins. The Sharks have 20 games — and if things fall their way, the playoffs — to provide the answer. But that “if” is what separates this season from the recent past and doubles the doubt that seems to surround the Sharks every spring.

Short answer, yes, although they are showing a distinct capability of messing it up enough to miss given how tough the west is.

Do I like the moves made at the trade deadline? Overall, yes. I like the three players (Moore, Galliardi, Winnick) Doug Wilson brought in. I think they’ll definitely help. I’m sad to see Jamie McGinn go, but he was something Colorado wanted, and I expect they’ll be happy with him. McGinn really matured this year, and showed himself to be a solid fourth going on third liner, but when his role was expanded and they auditioned him as a support player on the first and second line, that just wasn’t where he thrived.

McGinn was a player I really enjoyed watching this year. Simple play, hard play, consistent play. He reminds me a lot of Jeff Odgers (he is, actually, notably more talented than Odgers was); It would not surprise me to see McGinn play a third/fourth line role for a number of years in the league and it also wouldn’t surprise me to see him given an alternate captain position at some point. The Sharks did not give up on him or dump him, he was a value piece in the trade (unlike someone like Jed Ortmeyer).

He’s fun to watch. He brought the right attitude. He’ll help Colorado with it. Thanks for everything Jamie.

The incoming players will help the penalty kill, which we need. And hopefully make defense in general more consistent. What the Sharks really need is to get healthy; too many injuries affecting the wrong people. Losing Doug Murray hurt this team more than most folks seem to realize, and really hurt that long road trip.

I’d still play Greiss more and Niemi less, at least until Niemi shows he’s got his game back. The shutout was nice, let’s do two or three more games like that, and then I’ll relax. maybe.

The bigger question is not whether this is a playoff team, but a contender. Right now, I’m not convinced. My pick out of the west is Detroit, and I’d pick Vancouver over the Sharks right now, too. The Blackhawks are in the same “not convinced” mode as the Sharks, and I’m very wary of seeing the Kings in an early playoff round, and god help whoever meets the predators in the first round.

I just named six teams (including the Sharks) that are seriously worrying. In other words, there’s no easy first round. There’s no easy round; it’s three rounds of war to get out of the West (again). Let’s assume, just for the sake of it, that the Sharks somehow win the Pacific, and see the Kings in the first round, Nashville in the second, and Vancouver or Detroit in the western finals. Is that a set of teams the Sharks can beat in three rounds and still be able to compete in the cup final?

I’m not convinced. And if the Sharks fall to 6th or 7th in the west, and hit Detroit or Vancouver in the first round, and then have to play the Kings or Nashville, and then whichever of the Canucks or Wings they didn’t get in the first round? Good luck with that.

It’s important that the Sharks get it together and win the west, or the playoff trip is going to be beyond perilous. Even under best circumstances, winning the west is amazingly tough. and if they fall short? It’ll be more because of health issues than the trade deadline deals (or lack thereof). It’s just an amazingly tough conference — and I know fans won’t be happy at the prospect, but I’m just not convinced this is the best team in the west. it’s maybe the third best. Or even fifth, but the difference between third and sixth or seventh is really tiny. No margin of error, and this year, the sharks have been on the wrong side of that margin more often than not.

I guess we’ll see.

 

One More quick snark on publishing…

While I’m here, still thinking about what I just posted from Kris..

O’Reilly Publisher Joe Wikert Is ‘Breaking the Amazon Habit’ | The Passive Voice: “Why does everybody seem to be going public with their business disputes with Amazon these days? Wikert griped about the Kindle Owners Lending Library when it was announced in November and he’s still griping about it.

A quick check on Amazon makes it appear that O’Reilly doesn’t have any books enrolled in the Kindle Owners Lending Library program (and that its ebook prices are almost identical to its print book prices, but that’s a separate post), so Wikert is upset that Amazon won’t pay him the way he wants to be paid for enrolling O’Reilly books in the lending library.

PG is upset that one hundred dollar bills don’t fall from the sky into his yard, but he’s never blogging about it (except for snark purposes).

The bottom line for writers, IMHO: In the “war” between Amazon and the old-line publishers, if Amazon wins this battle 100%, slays all of the publishing dragons and takes out B&N, Nook, and installs a monopoly where the only place in the universe you can publish a book is on a Kindle through Amazon — that would still create a better environment for writers than they had under traditional publishing over the last 20 years. And I say that with great apologies to the really neat people I know inside those publishers that I know did what they could for their authors over the last 20 years fighting the system from within.

And if you don’t like how Amazon does business? Well, ultimately, Amazon worries about itself and the market in aggregate, not about you. When you’re an 800 pound gorilla, you’re able to do that. Don’t like that? Get back in the weight room and start bulking up yourself. Throwing bananas at the gorilla from the top of the tree doesn’t do anything, unless, well, you piss him off and he notices where you’re hiding.

 

Can I get an AMEN?

Today’s quote to ponder…

The Business Rusch: You Asked For My Opinion… | Kristine Kathryn Rusch: “Here’s the thing: If you don’t like a company’s business practices, don’t do business with them. If you think Amazon is working toward a monopoly and you are opposed to monopolies and all that implies, then for godssake, pull your e-books off Kindle, close your Amazon account, and don’t let money associated with you flow to or from Amazon.

It’s really that simple.

Now a bunch of you are going to say, “But if I pull my e-books from Amazon, then I’m screwed. They’re the biggest market.”

My reaction? A shrug. Either you have convictions or you don’t. Either you act on those convictions or you don’t.

 

First looks at the Lytro

The Verge reviews the Lytro camera – Marco.org:

Noisy, soft, low-resolution photos that take tons of CPU time to import from the camera. But you can refocus them

Unfortunately, it looks like my suspicions were correct: it’s a novelty for shooting one type of photo, and not particularly usable for anything else. That’s too bad — I really thought the Lytro had more potential.

This is about what I expected. The Lytro is a first generation proof of concept of what looks to be a very interesting technology. It reminds me of the Apple QuickTake cameras — I owned one, back in the day, and played with it until it was removed from my car in Vancouver without my permission (along with a window and some associated other stuff. But that’s a different blog post).

The Lytro looks great. It has no real practical purpose, but it’s well designed to get the geeks who love bleeding edge and trendy geeky toys drooling a bit. I know a couple that were on the waiting list, and I’ll have to nudge them to get my hands on it myself.

But this isn’t a real, useful camera. It’s a fun and interesting toy. Which is enough, honestly. It’s at least as useful as the QuickTake was in the first generations, and, well, digital cameras turned out pretty good. A nice reminder to the folks who tend to look at V1.0 stuff and make final pronouncements and snap judgements.

My gut tells me that Lytro is a “please buy us” product. Proves the technology works, and be manufactured and used. I don’t think it’ll be a camera company buying the company — where this technology really has potential, I think, is in things like medical imaging technologies, so don’t be surprised if they get bought up by one of the big medical tech houses, and THEY license it out to the camera companies to dabble in the consumer markets. Either that, or a military tech house.

But I do want to congrats the Lytro folks. I think it’s a great start. And I am fascinated at where I see these technologies can go. I don’t expect them to go there with Lytro as an independent company, but that’s not a bad thing… And while I won’t buy one of these first gen things, you can bet I want to get my hands on one and play for a bit…

 

 

building a new web gallery

So, a few weeks ago, I started doing some serious thinking about revamping my web sites (again). For the last few iterations, I’ve always done the “some day, I need to do this all RIGHT, but for now…” and pull some stuff together that works. Well, mostly works, okay, and kinda the way I want, and sort of looks good.

Actually, that last isn’t fair; the wordpress themes you can get from a site like Themeforest are quite good, and with some care in choice and some thoughtful tweaking, it’s hard to argue against spending $40 for the theme and 20 hours of customization when building it all from scratch might take you 100-150 hours (or more). Since time is a valuable commodity to me, I am willing to make those kind of buy/build decisions (and I have found a new wordpress theme I really like, but it’s going to take me a chunk of time and energy to do other things around it. But that’s for another blog post, later).

One of the things that’s been on my “figure it out already” list for a while is what to do with my online images. When I dropped my flickr account, I lost the ability to keep my “portfolio” images in one place and my larger set of published images in another, and that bothers me on a number of levels. I’ve also never taken the time to fully customize Smugmug, which is another of those things on my “when I have time, I need to…” list.

So the end result is that it all looks rather uncoordinated and, well, amateur. Which it is, but it doesn’t have to look that way.

I finally decided it was time to get serious about fixing some of these things, and for the last couple of weeks I’ve been exploring bringing my photos in and publishing them myself, taking full control (and blame) for this instead of offshoring it to another site.

That means building out my own galleries and publishing them myself. Which means “hello, Amazon S3″. Amazon S3 implies a static site, not something with PHP or some other language behind it, which implies building the thing in advance. I also wanted it built around HTML and CSS, not flash, and mobile friendly. And I want it as turnkey as possible, as close to fully automated as possible.

Adobe Lightroom has the Web Module, which can generate web galleries. The default HTML templates Adobe ships are — decent. But not what I want. In doing a lot of research into third party add-ons and plug-ins, I found a couple that I thought were pretty good (specifically Photographer’s Toolbox Elegance and the plug-ins from The Turning Gate), but ultimately nothing I found did what I wanted (of course).

So I decided to start hacking.

Creating the S3 setup was straightforward. My hosting service handled setting up the DNS. And thus was born photos.chuqui.com.

I stated with Jeffery Friedl’s workflow for exporting images to the iPad, which works awesome (and which I use to dump images onto my iPad for loading into my Portfolio app). His collection publisher plug-in allows you to create a nested set of directories to export images to. Using smart collections, you can, if you want, automatically choose which images are candidates for each folder; tie this into a publish service, and you can dynamically add or delete images to these folders by adding or deleting them from the services without having to muck with the files on disk at all. If, for instance, you set up the smart collections to be tied to a set of keywords — you can do all of this purely by adding and removing keywords to images and then running the update to the publish service. Set up the images to output to the size you want them to be displayed in their large format, and you can even have lightroom watermark them on the way out.

if this all sounds like greek, don’t worry. When I’m further along in the process and this graduates out of “plaidworks labs”, I’ll give more detailed instructions. But if you look at Jeffrey’s discussion of his iPad workflow it’ll take you well down this path; if publish services are new to you in Lightroom, check out my piece on a geek’s guide to publishing to smugmug where I go into detail on this.

So now I have the images on disk, in a set of folders. Now all I need to do is create a gallery to display them. I spent some time today hacking on this. It ain’t pretty, but it works.  I wrote a perl script that walks the folders. For every image, it creates a thumbnail and extracts key EXIF info. It then creates the directory’s index.html on the fly. Right now, if you bring up that link, you’ll see the thumbnail and the EXIF shoved onto the page without any real formatting (as I said, “proof of concept”).

So it’s now a working web gallery. I added links that allow you to walk through the nested directories and back up to the root. The thumbnail that shows up when you load the page is auto-generated. The large image that you see when you click on a thumbnail is exported from Lightroom.

If I run the script again, it deletes all of the thumbnails and all of the html files and regenerates them. That way, if I delete an image, I don’t leave broken links behind. If I add images, they’ll show up when I regenerate.

That all took 150 lines of Perl, plus the addition of two sets of libraries (ImageMagick and ExifTools), which should be portable to any computer that runs perl. It took me about 2 hours of coding to get to this point, plus about 90 minutes of fighting to get ImageMagick installed and running right — something that’s been a problem since the days when I worked at Apple, and it’s a bit disappointing to see it’s still a problem today. If I were more motivated, I’d build a full Perl setup (like I did when I was at Apple) but I wanted to stay as generic as possible.

Getting all of this onto S3 is easy; I use Panic’s Transmit. This means that this tool chain can be nicely automated; when the perl script is done, I can set it up to run via Cron, and also set up Panic to fire up and mirror any changes up to S3 without me needing to touch it. I can do that in the middle of the night when I’m asleep, meaning 99% of the work can be done in Lightroom (image selection and keyword additions to hook them into the publishing services, then firing off the publishing service to write them to disk). If I delete an image, when I regenerate and sync the updated html files out, it’ll disappear — no hanging links anywhere.

Still a lot of work todo, of course. Next step is to create a way to add descriptions and information about each gallery. Probably create a parent page that links to all of the galleries, have some way to bring forward thumbnails as the link images for each, that sort of thing. I’ll probably do that via a file that lives in each directory and gets integrated into the HTML when I generate it.  Then make the HTML semantic, do a design to make it pretty and “HTML-y” (most of the EXIF probably will live in a pop-up, and I’ll pop up the image into a lightbox instead of making it a separate page). The look and feel will all go into the CSS, and I’ll hook this up to Google Analytics.

All of that in the perl script generating it; by the time it goes to S3, it’ll be pure, static HTML. If I don’t add/delete a big picture, they won’t change, so this is browser cache friendly. Oh, and since I fully control the HTML being generated, I can make it SEO friendly; and if I decide I want to change that around, I just update the script and regenerate. I’m not tied to hoping the web galleries

I do plan on making the script available when it’s further along. I’m considering whether this should ultimately be in Python or node instead of Perl, but, well, I’m deep down still a Perl geek. The nice thing is that these galleries don’t require Lightroom (you can create the images from anything), don’t require any specific service (you can host them on any web server) or back end processing, and I can do all of this on my laptop, meaning wherever I go, I can update this stuff as long as I have access to the internet, so it doesn’t require a server somewhere to generate them — just access to the hosting spot. And Amazon S3 is incredibly inexpensive.

What it doesn’t do is things like e-commerce or print sales, since there’s no back end processing capability. I’ll still use Smugmug for that. What that allows me to do is slim the Smugmug site back to just the “best” images and make it more of a “serious” portfolio site again. And one of the things I’ll want to do (of course) is make sure the galleries link to images on smugmug when they exist there…

So this is a good start. Right now, generating everything for about 60 images takes under 2 minutes, and the sync process for an update about 2 minutes as well. Sometimes I think we get so focussed on “interactive” that we forget that it doesn’t always require a big web back end full of PHP and MySQL to do these things. A bit of thought and some scripting will create a nice efficient site that looks to be quite maintainable and flexible moving forward without a lot of manual hacking and babysitting. Seems like a nice deal to me.

Of course, now I have to finish it. Back to work…

How about those Sharks?

Day 16.5 — Engine issues keep Sharks grounded in St. Paul, no new info on Couture, those darn deflections | Working the Corners:

No, not the angst that comes with a 2-6-1 roadie. And not even the literal pain that Todd McLellan is dealing with after getting smacked with a stick early in the second period.

 

Because of on top of all that, on top of the fact they’ve been on the road since before Valentine’s Day, the Sharks are not flying home as planned tonight.

Mechanical trouble grounded their charter plane and they’ve all been brought back to their usual hotel in St. Paul, which luckily had not filled the necessary 40 or 50 rooms.

How about those Sharks?

Two losses to end the nasty 9 game road trip; they had a chance to turn this trip into a mediocre one, and ended up turning it into a disaster. You now have to look at this team and seriously think “given how the western conference is playing out, they could miss the playoffs”.

I can’t figure out why. the word being used by the team and players is “fragile”, and that’s true — when a mistake happens or a bad bounce, this team freaks out a bit, and suddenly they’re down a couple of goals. Niemi is off, can’t find his game; at least Griess seems to be stopping the stoppable goals.

I don’t know why this team is like this. The core players haven’t been like this in the past. They haven’t tuned out the coaches, they aren’t pissed at the GM, they are playing hard — just not playing smart. They seem (mostly) to play late parts of the game hard and intense, it’s starts that are killing them. Or in Minnesota, a good start, but they had about 3 minutes in the third where they gave up a couple of goals. They don’t play 60 minutes of good hockey, and playing 45 minutes kills in this league.

I said earlier in the week I expected Wilson to make a trade to shake up the chemistry. I’m more convinced now something needs to be done. The scary thing is that I’m not sure the coach or GM knows why things are off, or how to fix it. The players definitely don’t — they seem mystified as to why they’re this way. It’s not lack of interest or effort. It’s lack of sharp focus and execution. And that’s not necessarily easy to fix.

Maybe a shinto priest for an exorcism. If things weren’t bad enough, tonight the coach gets brained by a stick and knocked out (thank god is wasn’t WORSE than that, but there were five minutes there when I was wondering if this team had stressed him into a heart attack), and now, the plane breaks, and they can’t even get home until tomorrow. So even the hockey gods seem pissed at the Sharks right now.

Laurie turned to me tonight and said “I am so glad we don’t have season tickets this year, because if we were paying $100 a seat to watch this hockey, I’d be really pissed”. And she’s right. I miss the folks we used to sit around; I don’t miss dragging my butt to the arena 35 times a year and all of the disruptions that imply — and I don’t miss being in the arena for the games. I do still love the team and the game, but I’m really enjoying being able to not worry about it until game time, turning on the TV, and if they mess it up, pulling out a book or the iPad and multitasking around it… And the way they’re playing hockey this year makes that decision seem even smarter….

In any event, the road trip is done. Well, the last road game is done for this trip. hopefully the team can get home. Unfortunately, they haven’t shown that “home” is a fix of this, either…

And now, to the trade deadline. I wonder who won’t be in teal on Tuesday…

 

Today’s fun bit of reading

go have a chuckle as John Scalzi writes a review of a book he hasn’t read, by deconstructing how the book came to be. Via a book review.

(and he’s right. what a cluster. and why?)

The Lifespan of a Silly Argument – Whatever:

I have not read the book yet, but from the review and other pieces I have read about it online, the problem here appears to be that in regards to the essay, Fingal was under the impression that the piece was non-fiction (probably because The Believer apparently does not accept fiction), and therefore the facts within it had to be, you know, non-fictitious. Whereas D’Agata appears to have argued, essentially, that facts were stupid things, that that their individual truth value was not as important as an overall “Truth” that he was aiming for, and the the essay form in itself was being deprived of resonance due to a slavish insistence on factual correctness.

 

can we agree to do this more generally now?

Flickr disables Pinterest pins on all copyrighted images (exclusive) | VentureBeat:

The Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site has just added Pinterest’s newly introduced do-not-pin code to all Flickr pages with copyrighted or protected images.

Good for flickr for doing this early, and actually seeming to take a leadership position (sort of) on something. Kudos to them.

But now, can we now come up with a general solution that works across sharing sites in general? or should we suggest all sites that allow for image sharing adopt this as a “do not share/copy” flag?

I’m someone who’s decided to put a creative commons on most of my online images and don’t mind them being shared. But I fully understand why some might feel otherwise. How can we create some defacto standard they can use that sites can adopt to acknowledge that preference? Should they just do it via this flag? Or should there be a more generalized solution put in place?

Someone should bell this cat. I would, but who’d listen to me? (grin)

 

 

Today’s OMG quote….

(Duncan talking about the setup at TED. Just freaking unreal that we’re dealing with storage headed towards the petabyte stage. Us old farts can remember a time when the entire united states computing universe would fit on those drives…)

Thunderbolt at TED2012 – Duncan Davidson: “In the lower right photograph, there are twelve 12TB Pegasus R6 arrays. That’s 144TB total. It’s a tenth of a freaking petabyte of usable space.”

 

Red-Tailed Hawks building a nest

From my Panoche Valley trip. This pair nested here last year, so I wasn’t surprised to find them rebuilding the nest and settling in this year. The male was bringing in sticks and headed back out again, the female was doing the construction and keeping an eye on things in between visits.

Red-tail hawk pair building a nest by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

Red-tail hawk pair building a nest by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

Asking for some feedback…

 

I’ve been ramping up my work on the next generation of my site, blog and online photos. I’m now making decisions, setting priorities and trying to decide on what to focus on and what to let fade into the dust.

It seems to me you all need a voice in this process, so here I am, asking your advice. Here are a few (hopefully quick) questions I’d like everyone who reads this to answer:

1) What one thing about what I do/post online do you want me to do more of (and why)?

2) What one thing about what I do/post online do you want me to do less of (and why)?

3) What are the reasons/things for reading this site? Why are you here?

4) What, as a reader of this site, do you want to tell me?

Be as short or as long as you like. Please send your notes to me at chuqvr@gmail.com, or you can post them here as replies if you prefer.

Everything will be read and pondered. your name and email will be kept private. It will help me better understand what your likes and dislikes are, so I can adjust what I do here.

Silence, of course, will be considered to mean everything is perfect, or that I suck and you don’t care enough to even send an email, depending on whether I read this stuff when I’m in a good or bad mood…

Thanks!

 

Dealing with Crap apps in the catalog…

There’s a kerfluffle going on with the Apple App Catalog over “crap app”, which is a bit of a misnomer because the primary anger is being aimed at developers who build apps aimed at grabbing money with poorly designed copycats of more famous apps. Sort of like what Zynga now does for a living, but not on Facebook.

What caught my eye were phrases being thrown about like “Apple’s missed opportunities to prevent disaster were such simple and quick fixes”, which, once I stopped laughing, made me want to cry in sympathy.

It’s not simple. It’s not quick. If it was, Apple would be doing it.

In my previous life, I was involved in these issues on a regular basis. Before we hired our App Review gods and goddesses, I didn’t duck fast enough and got do do that as well. I was in on the discussions with the lawyers setting up the rules early on; I was consulted (as the voice of the developers and official tie breaking vote when needed) on apps we weren’t sure passed the smell test on whether they should be published.

So I can pull out and play the “been there, done that, no T-shirt” card here.

And the reality is, it ain’t easy. And what Apple probably would LIKE to do it probably can’t, and would open itself up to various legal challenges and a whole can of really foul tasting worms.

Your first problem: one of the underlying concepts of the DMCA process that gives companies a safe harbor is that they take a hands off approach to the content. There are some broad areas where exceptions to this are carved out, especially around adult content, and there are some areas where companies have decided to do some broad fireaxe enforcement like the “make me rich, do nothing” apps. But the reality is, once you start policing content, you start opening yourself up to liabilities on all of the content you do not police. It can even cost them the safe harbor, and then the entire app store infrastructure could be at risk.

So you have to be really careful how and where you do your enforcement and bans, and you have to do these things such that you minimize opening yourself up to legal or PR fights over “you did that, why aren’t you doing this?” as well. These quickly turn into scenarios that make lawyers wake up screaming. And situations that boil down to “he’s ripping off this other person” become entirely subjective, and as a reviewer, you can make jokes about the app (privately), but you can’t reject it for that — until someone files the complaint of infringement. There’s a legal protocol defined here, and if you cross that line and start pro-actively rejecting apps, you are buying yourself and your company a whole lot of legal indigestion.

There’s just a wide swath of things that a company like Apple really can’t (and shouldn’t) do, and if they DO, they’ll end up getting yelled at. Think back over the last couple of years over every time an App doesn’t get through the review process into the catalog, and the developer complains, and everyone gets up in arms over “big brother Apple” and yells for a while. And here we are, calling for Apple to do MORE big brother stuff.

Apple is in a no-win situation here. Because you know if they did start being more pro-active here, it’d just feed the “apple is big brother” screamfests instead.

The Curious Case Of The (Cr)apps That Make Money | PandoDaily:

 

 

Apple has a serious problem on their hands, and it is one they need to fix it as soon as possible. No, this isn’t a diatribe about the lack of Flash on the iPad. And, no, this isn’t about the need for an SD Card slot for iOS devices. Instead this is an issue that Apple’s biggest ally – iOS developers – are complaining about, one that hurts the user, and one that could end up damaging the iOS ecosystem more than any set of labor issues ever could.

The issue we are facing, is the proliferation of scamming apps.

 

 

First, Apple needs to cut off the funds. Taking the approach of going to the root of the problem, Haddad noted that if Apple “makes it clear that if you try to defraud customers, then you aren’t going to get any money. If there’s not any financial incentive to scamming then it’s very likely that most of the problem will just go away on its own.” This would likely cut out most of the scam apps from the App Store.

 

As soon as you start touching money, it gets even nastier. So, if Apple cuts them off and doesn’t give them the money, then what? Apple keeps it? refunds it? If you refund it, what do you do with everyone who wants refunds for apps THEY feel are scams, but Apple doesn’t agree? What do you do about all of the people demanding refunds, and because the only way to get a refund is to have it declared a scam app, starts complaining that everything they decide they don’t want is a scam app?

This is a a PR and customer support nightmare. trust me on that. Even in a “no refunds for whatever reason” policy app catalog, refunds are a horror. This just makes it even more of a horror, because now a chunk of users will try to wedge what they want into this policy to get what they want.

Only real solution? How about a “refunds for seven days” for any app users don’t want? Developers, do you really want to go down that path? Apple would have to hold funds another 30 days or so before sending them to you to avoid having to claw them back. Users could pay for an app, use it a while, then get their money back; free seven day rentals of your full function app, effectively. if I were a game developer and Apple proposed this, I’d be headed to cupertino with torches and pitchforks. Be careful that the “fix” doesn’t create an even nastier problem.

 

However, in between the time that scammers hit the Top 100 and the time Apple is issued a takedown notice, many users can get irritated by the lack of quality apps in the store. To mitigate this problem, Haddad recommends that Apple start to curate the Top 100 list beyond automating it based on sales.

 

And whatever policy Apple implemented on this, it’d create a firestorm, because “the fix is in!” because it is.

The core problem here: Crap apps are like porn. everyone has their own definition (which overlaps in many, but not all, places), and everyone sees what needs to be stopped as obvious. And however you define these rules, it’ll piss off enough people that the firestorm will probably be continuous.

 

The real question is what happens if Apple does nothing and continues to use their flawed policies. It hurts the user, who loses their money. It hurts the overall App Store ecosystem, as people stop trusting the look of applications, decreasing sales. Finally and most importantly, it hurts the developers, who have to fight harder for users, as user trust will continue to decline. There are any number of end-game results, and none of them are good. Apple needs to nip this in the bud now, before it gets any worse.

 

All of which are to some degree true. But be aware of fixes that actually create different, bigger problems.

2012: The Year Scam Apps Killed the App Store | Impending:

 

A Beefed Up Fraud Team: I can only speculate at the size and competency of the App Store fraud team,

 

Is this fraud? If an app developer’s intellectual property is infringed, the DMCA process already exists to mediate that conflict and take it to a resolution. This isn’t Apple’s responsibility to deal with pro-actively, it’s the developer. If the developer initiates a complaint, there’s a (long, complex and ultimately off to the courts to decide) process to follow. It works, and it actually takes into consideration the issues of BOTH sides of the complaint a lot better than ACTA or SOPA ever did… Apple’s IP isn’t impacted here, so it has to stay out of it. As a developer, you need to work the system to protect your IP. Apple won’t (can’t, and shouldn’t) babysit for you.

 

Automated Returns: What I can’t fathom is Apple’s refusal to automatically refund all customers who were defrauded of their money. There have been hundreds of open and shut cases, and to this day Apple requires customers to jump through hoops and phone calls (in 2014!) to receive refunds. This is insanity.

 

Discussed above. Ask a high end department store about women “renting” dresses for parties to see how much fun a relaxed refunding system would be for developers. Especially game developers. Be wary of what you ask for.

 

Video Previews in the App Store: Requiring a short video demo of the app in action would have prevented the common scam of providing one or two misleading screenshots to fool browsing customers.

 

Hah! we did that. It works great! Apple should. seriously. Or you can post them to Youtube or Vimeo now, and link to them in your marketing material. Seriously, this is a great idea. It works. If you aren’t doing free trials or screen videos of your stuff (especially games) you’re missing a great marketing opportunity. Ways to enable this by Apple would be a nice addition.

 

Better Education of App Store Customers: Much like the fashion industry, the App Store’s plague of knockoffs created a problem of uneducated customers unable to recognize the real thing vs. the counterfeit until after the sale.

 

“educating the customers” is something people have been advocating forever. And it always fails, because there’s always a subset of them who can’t or won’t be educated. Which doesn’t mean you don’t do it, because to the degree you can do it, it reduces your problems. But — it won’t solve your problem. Just reduce it.

 

The App Store could have done a better job profiling quality studios and developers, beyond highlighting individual apps, and rewarded those who built an ongoing track record and reputation. Not just developers, but App Store customers as well, to weight their reviews and ratings.

 

In my previous life, I designed a neat social system to do just that, and couldn’t get the people who should have been interested to care. Heck, I sat in meetings with product managers where I had to explain why pulling an app from the catalog if ONE PERSON flagged it as offensive was a bad, bad idea. And I had to argue about that multiple times.

But heck, I still have the design, and I do think a self-regulating community could moderate a lot of these problems if properly implemented. It’s too bad we never got past “I think we should have a LIKE button” in my previous life. And I’m open to discussing this with the “right people” if they want my advice. You know how to find me (or send me a linkedin).

Automated self-policing policies are the right answer here, if done well. If done badly, don’t bother.

The big problem in all of this? Discovery in an app catalog ecosystem still sucks. We didn’t solve that problem. Apple has made some progress, but it’s still very much not a solved problem. And it won’t be any time soon. Because it’s hard. And that’s why when I see phrases like “simple and quick”, I laugh, to hide the tears. buy me a couple of beers, I’ll show you the scars… As a developer, frankly, you should know better than play the “how hard can it be?” game, because isn’t that what your non-developers friends say about that new feature they want you to add to your app?

If it was easy, Apple’d have done it by now. Seriously.

(hat tip: Daring Fireball for the links to these)

Don’t think about this one too hard…

Attorney generals fear Google’s new privacy policy is an “invasion of privacy” | VentureBeat:

The new policy, Google has insisted, is meant to simplify things, but users, Congress, and now state attorney generals are attacking the policy for granting Google unfettered access to user data across its products.

 

“Google’s new privacy policy is troubling for a number of reasons,” the letter reads. “On a fundamental level, the policy appears to invade consumer privacy by automatically sharing personal information consumers input into one Google product with all Google products.”

 

I’ve been pondering this since Google announced the simplified and consolidated privacy policy.

Was Google really unaware of the implications of this simplification and what it meant for consolidating a user’s information into one big lump, and how users were going to react to that consolidation? Were they really that naive?

Or…

Was Google fully aware of this implication, and thought they could pull this off without people noticing and getting up in arms by calling it a simplification and declaring it to be good for everyone? Were they really that naive?

Which version of Google bothers you more? The Google that was incredibly naive about the implications of such a significant action and only saw what it thought was a good thing t do? Or the malicious Google that naively thought nobody would see through their plan to consolidate this data and thought they could pull this off with some smoke, a few mirrors and handwaving?

To be honest, I lean towards the “well meaning but incredibly naive” Google of the first choice, rather than the overtly evil and malicious Google. I’ve seen enough Google missteps to believe they’re mostly well meaning but naive, and incredibly tone deaf about the implications about things they do that impact their users. But at the same time, in a company like Google, that tone deaf, naive worldview doesn’t make me feel much better about things.

I’ve tried to come up with a third scenario that didn’t involve Google being naive or evil, and I can’t. And I can’t see a scenario where a change this significant wouldn’t create a kerfluffle over the implications of the changes — and yet, it looks like Google didn’t see a scenario where it did. If you’re that unaware of how your users think and view you, that’s a problem. Especially for a company that’s made a strong commitment to “go social”.

No matter how you look at this one, it creates a worry point about depending on Google. Not because of what they’re doing (although it’s not harmless, either), but because of the implications of how they think and how they understand their users and customers that they could do this and not see the tidal wave of criticism coming… And as far as I can tell, they didn’t, and they still aren’t working to manage the issues this is causing…

 

 

 

Next for the Sharks: a trade….

Dreger: Sharks a strong contender for Blue Jackets’ Nash:

The San Jose Sharks are emerging as a strong contender for Rick Nash. Sources say Columbus initially targeted Logan Couture, but was quickly told that was a non-starter. But, make no mistake, San Jose will stay in the mix until Monday’s deadline.

 

Nash and Sharks veteran Joe Thornton are good friends and have shown an impressive chemistry when playing together internationally that isn’t being overlooked. The Sharks would prefer an off-season deal to avoid the in-season disruption, but San Jose is keen.

Blue Jackets GM Scott Howson won’t discuss specifics on any of the deals he’s working on, but tells TSN there has been a lot of creativity suggested with a variety of his players. You can’t blame Howson for working outside the short list Rick Nash provided at the beginning of this saga.

Having watched the Sharks stumble through this road trip, and especially last night’s loss to Columbus, one thing is clear: there’s something off about the team. It’s not tuning out the coach, or not caring, or not working hard, or lack of commitment, or any of those things. But still, this team’s just not right.

And while bringing in Dominick Moore is a nice deal, that’s not going to fix it. This team, as much as anything, needs a kick in the butt and a shake of the neck, and when this has happened in the past, Doug Wilson hasn’t been afraid to do the kicking.

I smell a trade brewing. Not a spear carrier, 7th rounder going back trade, something fairly significant.

But I can’t convince myself it’s Rick Nash. I’m sure they’re talking; Wilson talks a lot, and sometimes, you talk and end up with Joe Thornton. But I’m not convinced a Nash trade would make the Sharks better. Different, definitely. Better? Not so sure. On the other hand, I don’t think this team necessarily needs to get better. I am convinced it needs to be different or they’re unlikely to shake this funk.

The problem is that a Nash deal would require some significant assets going back. I would assume, with Couture not an option, that it’d be a significant forward and a defenseman. Would you really want to give up both Pavelski and Doug Murray? Because it might take that, and a draft pick, and maybe a prospect, to do the deal. I’m not convinced.

So I tend to think Wilson will go in a  different direction, and look for a top six forward. To get it, he’ll need to give up something good, and my thought is that’s going to be defensive depth. So my nominee for trade bait is…

Doug “crankshaft” murray. Not because I want him gone (not a bit), but because he’s the kind of player that will bring back a significant talent — and I see no chance the Sharks would trade Vlasic, who is the other defenseman they’re probably fielding lots of calls over. oh, they’re probably hearing about Demers, also, but I don’t think he’s going to bring back a top six forward.

Now, the short term problem is that Murray when and had his throat caved in, and it’s hard to trade someone who’s injured. But I find it interesting they sent him home, but still haven’t put him on IR. I wonder why…

So we’re close to the trade deadline. And as usual, my greatest hope is that trade deadline day hits, and nothing of importance happens, just to let us enjoy watching the crew on TSN sweat it out and read their favorite poutine recipes on the air. But it won’t happen.  And this year, San Jose is in the mix, and needs to be. It’ll be interesting to see what Wilson does. I can’t see him doing nothing.

(and since I know Doug reads my blog, another piece of advice. Start Greiss for a couple of games, let Niemi take a break, and see what happens. It might be disaster, but Niemi’s a bit of a disaster right now anyway…)

 

 

 

Day Tripping Panoche Valley

With Monday being a holiday, I took advantage of it to do an extended day trip, spending a chunk of it out in Panoche Valley and ended out at Merced Wildlife Refuge in search of a pretty sunset. The day started about 6:30AM, ended about 7:30PM, and covered about 320 miles.

Panoche trip

The primary goal of the trip: get out, get alone, do some thinking, make some decisions. Oh, and Panoche Valley is a very interesting birding area in the winter, and full of interesting geological details and other things of interest worthy of pointing a camera at. The morning started out cool and damp — raining, actually — but the weather prognosis was clearing, so I decided not to go back to bed (tempting, though). I got on site about 8:30 at Paicines Reservoir, which was surprisingly quiet, other the the adult bald eagle (always a kick) sitting in a tree watching the area.

A big part of the trip was to give the new lenses a series workout and start understanding how best to use them, and to integrate the T3i into the mix and get a good feel for the picture quality and what it can do (and, compared to the 7d, what it can’t). I love being back in a two body photo gear configuration; for a trip like this, I put the 300+1.4x on the 7d, and the 24-105 on the T3i, and swapped in the 70-200 as appropriate. That seemed to work quite well through the day.

Every time I bird Panoche, I come back thinking I should spend time exploring it as a photo location. This time, I did, and I really came away wishing I’d done so before. the landscape is — the best description I can think of is “starkly beautiful”, ranging from wide open ranch lands to lots of convoluted hillsides to areas that look straight out of a desert. There’s a lot of oak, and that’s a tree I find fascinating and I’ve started exploring how to show that beauty.

It wasn’t a great day for photography; it started out early very damp and grey with weak light. I hoped it’d clear to partial cloudy, but by mid-day, it was in some areas fully cleared, leaving me with glary light and bad shadows, and the birding dried up as well (not complaining; while working on the shot below, I was serenaded at length by a singing california thrasher, and visited by a greater roadrunner. Both nice additions to this year’s list). That made some of the day more of a scouting trip, but I still found places where I could get some nice shots.

I ended up driving fairly far up New Idria, mostly to see what was there, and then backtracking and going out through Little Panoche. Once I popped out the other side, it was off to Santa Nella for a late lunch (the in-n-out is open!). And once I was there, I convinced myself to head off to Merced to look around and try for a nice sunset. Merced was really quiet, though, the Geese had headed to an evening roost nearby but off the refuge, and the Cranes were in small numbers and not particularly close to the tour route. The sunset I’d had hopes for turned into more or less a dud, enough so that I cleared out early.

Still, though, a nice and productive trip, although this is likely my last visit to Merced until fall. Some decent birding, some nice intense work with the cameras, and a nice day out where even the cell phone can’t interrupt. I’m just starting to work through the images, but some of them seem pretty nice. I’m really liking these new lenses and the quality of the images they generate, and the T3i is living up to my expectations and beyond as a second body. It looks to be a nice combo with the 24-105 for general shooting. More on that when I have a chance to do some more experimentation…

This shot is of a barn on a ranch on the early part the drive through Panoche. I loved its look, and how it was well-lit while framed in shadows. I ended up deciding to use two different shots of it, and then realized it would make a nice black and white as well, so I went and did conversions. I like all of these (but I think the first image in monochrome is my favorite). What’s your thought?

A Farm Building on a Ranch in Panoche Valley, San Benito County, California=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+This image is free to use and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use.

A Farm Building on a Ranch in Panoche Valley, San Benito County, California=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+This image is free to use and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use.

A Farm Building on a Ranch in Panoche Valley, San Benito County, California=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+This image is free to use and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use.

A Farm Building on a Ranch in Panoche Valley, San Benito County, California=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+This image is free to use and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use.

In the first, the sky was a bit too blown out, so I ended up cropping it out, but I like how I ended up with that composition.  These are all processed with dFine and Viveza 2, and the monochromes through silver efex pro (which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to upgrade…). That’s a much more complex workflow than “just” Lightroom, and that’s part of the set of decisions I’ve been chewing on the last few weeks (or longer) as well. More on that in a future blog post…

There’s a lot of interesting subject matter in Panoche Valley, and I’m just scratching the surface, but now that I’ve taken some extended time there with an eye to the environment and not just the birds, I’m starting to see places to shoot and seeing the times and weather where it can make them sing. It’s an area that’s going to be a long term project, though, that’s for sure…

Not that I’m complaining..

 

 

Fix The Sandbox

When I first saw what Apple was doing with the sandbox and the restrictions it causes, my guess was that they’re setting these restrictions up for something else — and it seems to me the most likely thing is there’s some new product line coming (next gen apple TV box, perhaps?) and if your app is compliant with the sandbox restrictions, it’ll work on this new device, day one.

So what they’re really doing is getting app developers writing for this new product line, without telling them that’s what’s going on. IF you fit within this box, you’ll fit on this new thing, whatever it is.

Just thinking out loud. But that seems very much like Apple.

 

Red Sweater Blog – Fix The Sandbox:

At its best sandboxing is a means for app developers to faithfully state their intentions in a manner that can be evaluated by users, and also be reliably enforced by the operating system. So if your new “Fun on Facebook” app declares its intention is to connect to the web, you might judiciously allow it. If it says it needs to write files to the root of the filesystem, you’d be wise to search for another app.

 

Sandboxing on the Mac works by providing developers with a standardized list of “entitlements” which are clear descriptions of things it would like to do on your Mac. Examples include: access the internet, read files from your Pictures folder, print things on your printer.

The number one broken thing about sandboxing as it stands today, is the list of entitlements is simply too limited. Many apps on the App Store, including my own, will need to have their functionality considerably diminished, or in some cases made outright useless, in order to accommodate the available list of entitlements that sandboxing offers.

 

 

Your Address Book Isn’t Yours

Your Address Book Isn’t Yours | PandoDaily:

When you agree to upload an address book en masse, you ignore this mish-mosh collection of agreements and are treating that data as if it’s yours, when it absolutely isn’t.

So, what do we do? We’re not going to come up with some magical replacement for good ol’ contact cards — it’s been tried before, and always falls to simplicity.

 

And if you stop to think about it, the company that understood this was Facebook, and it got roundly criticized by many in the tech elite for trying to limit people’s ability to slog this data around from service to service.

This was also something we tried to manage in Synergy in webOS, and we got roundly criticized for it, as well, because the mental model most people has is “my address book”, and it was a point of — discussion — I had with users and developers on a regular basis, because our decision to tie records to the service they came from made sense in some ways, but made it difficult to build the kind of PIM services people wanted. And part of the reason they wanted them was because those services existed long ago on Treos running webOS, and they couldn’t understand why they didn’t exist on webOS.

I’m not pretending that we got it 100% right (I don’t think we did, not close), but this is a problem that didn’t exist in the days of the Treo, where data didn’t live on 30 different services with 30 different terms and conditions.

This is a cat that needs to be belled, but I haven’t seen a mouse able to get close yet. Plaxo dealt with some of the micro issues, but not the macro challenges. The fact is, this is all brand new, and the rules of engagement (and disengagement) in a world where data is hyper distributed and not easily controlled by the owner.

And that’s my view of this — it doesn’t matter that the data lives in your address book, or on google, or iCloud or yahoo or wherever. It’s still MY data, even if I gave you permission to store a copy for your use. I should have the right to say how that’s to be used, and how it can be shared. Or whether.

Which means there needs to be some way to infinitely distribute that data while still having that data check with some authoritative point for both updates and access authorization.

You really want to be the service that controls (and monetizes) someone’s online identity? Solve that problem, and we’ll all use your service to manage how people access our personal information.

And until that happens, these fights and challenges will continue…

 

 

iPhone Address Book Fiasco Should Be Apple’s Cue to Build Its Own Social Network

iPhone Address Book Fiasco Should Be Apple’s Cue to Build Its Own Social Network:

Apple can take all that address book data and make a real social platform out of it, adding features like two-way friend confirmation, blocking users, public profiles, photo sharing, activity streams, whatever. Then, one click could let you import all that stuff, especially all those existing friend relationships, into apps. Eventually, this could even become a standalone social network service, like Facebook. Maybe call it “Friend Center”.

Why bother?

It’s hard to overstate the importance of social apps for Apple’s iOS platform. Many of its most popular apps are owned by social networks, including Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. And many of its top games are social, too, ranging from “Words With Friends” to multi-player card games.

 

I think this is a great idea. I don’t see it happening.

There’s a problem here. You can’t build social networking systems if you don’t understand social networking. If you try, you get — Ping. You get Google Wave. You get Google Buzz.

Google finally figured that out, and put work into changing the corporate DNA and getting people in who saw these things as social systems and not engineering systems, and I think Google+ is a good system that’s getting better (it’s interesting to live in two worlds and hear both sides of the Google+ story — the geeky elite seem to put it down a lot, and the photographers caught on to it early and love it (I lean towards the Photographer opinion, for what it’s worth).

Google, though, is further down the social path than Apple. They at least grok the need to converse with users and be part of the social space, and they have done a fair amount of blogging (corporate and personal) and while Google Groups needs a massive makeover, well, Apple Groups are, um… And where is Apple’s presence in their own support forums?

Steve was simple not interested or supportive of the core of the social phenomenon, which was talking to customers. You can’t control a conversation, and Apple was about control. You can join into a conversation, you can influence it, you can do a lot of things, but you can’t control it. And so, Apple was never IN the conversation.

I expect this will change under Tim Cook, but the DNA to be successful in this is missing from Apple even more than it was missing from Google when they thought Buzz was the answer. There are people at Apple who would love to do these things, but I think it’s going to require big attitude shifts within the company, and an influx of people who can both understand the Apple way of things and mindset AND social systems before you have a hope of something like this happening. Which to me means it’s easily a few years off. And people who can translate social systems into something that won’t give Apple hives (and work to transform Apple into a mindset that will work in a social universe, too). I think this shift is necessary; this “snow blind” issue of Apple and social systems is a place where I think Apple’s success is at risk; it’s a way for a competitor to shift the market away from Apple in a way that Apple can’t compete with, similar to the way Apple used the iMac and design esthetics to do that to Microsoft in a way Microsoft couldn’t understand how to react to. Not an easy task, but it’s where I see a big vulnerability to a market disruption that Apple can’t fight.

This isn’t new. It was one of the things I was pushing to people who would listen, way back before I left Apple.

Jobs I wish I could have taken at Apple (Apple Post-mortem, part 2 of some number….) @ Chuqui 3.0:

 

2) Community architect for iTunes. This is one I actually had some discussions about. Maybe you’re familiar with Pandora or last.fm? One of the questions I’ve had since the start of iTunes (and the Clear-Channel-ification of broadcast radio) was how people found out about new and interesting music. It’s sure not on broadcast radio any more, especially here in Silicon Valley. Pandora and last.fm are heading in that area — but what if you could turn the iTunes community into a real recommendation service? And how would you do it? there are some very simplistic tools in iTunes today that are “very Amazon” and not “very community” — and they’re nice, as far as they go. I felt that there was a lot of opportunity to build something really sharp and best of show. There was definitely interest among some folks inside iTunes, too. It may well happen — it just won’t be something I did. ohwell. Here’s hoping, though. There’s such opportunity here.

3) Community architect for .Mac. Although honestly, .Mac needs a lot more than community building. Allow me to defer detailed discussion of .Mac for later (remind me if I forget….), but while I think it’s good for many things, there are lots of things Apple really ought to do with .Mac (they should have bought Flickr, dammit, to name just one), and Mac Groups are barely adequate for organizing a church picnic. But there are some decent bones here to build from, if they’d just commit to doing so. Unfortunately, I just never got the feeling they would.

 

And now, six years later, we have — Ping — and iCloud, and Apple’s emergence into the social fabric of the net is still, well, completely missing. Well, Phil Schiller now tweets once or twice a month…

Apple should be going in this direction. I see no indication they are. Apple needs to bring people in who can help them, people who both understand these technologies and understand Apple and its culture. Good luck finding them. And it’s going to take Tim Cook and Eddy and Phil and the top execs committing to not just integrating twitter into IOS in some superficial way, but bringing this stuff into Apple and the Apple mindset and corporate DNA.

The one thing I do know is that Tim Cook understands how Steve made Apple successful, but he’s not Steve, and he has his own ideas and vision. He’s started shifting Apple down different paths already; he’s much more likely to have his own blog than steve ever would have, for instance, and he’s a lot less controlling, but not less demanding. So I think the possibilities are there in ways not possible as long as Steve was in charge.

But still, I’m not holding my breath.

 

 

turning off the twitter feed posts…

 

I’ve just disabled the daily twitter feed posts. Since Google dropped the sharing option out of Google Reader I’ve been experimenting with that as an alternative, and honesty, I just don’t like it. Lots of noise, little information, less amplification of that information. This is especially true with twitter putting the links through their shortener, since I don’t even get a benefit of using bit.ly to figure out which ones (if any) you click on; the analytics are pretty opaque, and the links point at twitter’s shortener, not the original site, so they don’t get any direct google help. The analytics show that almost nobody is clicking in to read those articles (not surprising), and it’s effectively impossible to see if anyone is using them out of the RSS feed.

Add in that all of the twitter chatter gets in the way, and the more I look at it, the more I see a useless blob of stuff with little to really call useful to someone. So why bother? Don’t be surprised if I go back in and nuke all of those postings, now that I’ve decided they’re pretty worthless…

So for now, if that stuff interested you, your best bet is to monitor my google+ page. If and when google gets its act together and makes that available as an RSS feed the nightly digest might return (or maybe not), but until then, I see no reason to post that stuff in the current form. It’s just not that useful or interesting.

(and yes, I’ve submarined out of the blog again. Right now, all my energy is being pushed at work stuff — I’m living in Omnigraffle as we try to push the site design off to various groups for review and implementation, and so in the evenings, I’ve been mostly just — gasp — kicking back. As soon as this really busy phase shifts, I’ll be back more reliably. This is a good pause, and lots is happening really fast, but I just haven’t been feeling like writing in the evenings because of it. But we’re going to, we hope, launch in about half the time sites like this typically launch, once we get there, or so it looks right now…

 

 

RIM avoided an outside CEO because they’re all children or morons, says director | VentureBeat

Oh, good lord…

RIM avoided an outside CEO because they’re all children or morons, says director | VentureBeat:

 

“So we’re supposed to hand it over to children, or morons from the outside who will destroy the company?” RIM director Roger Martin told the Globe and Mail in an interview. “Or should we try to build our way to having succession?”

 

no, no. stick to the current plan and destroy it from within. That’s much more effective.

 

 

 

I got a rock.

HP proxy: Ray Lane’s $10 million plus comp and other fun facts — Tech News and Analysis:

Lane, who became executive chairman of HP on September 22, 2011 (he had been non-executive chairman since November 1, 2010, the start of HP’s FY 2011)  logged more than $10 million in total compensation — the bulk of it in stock and options — for the fiscal year, according to the HP proxy.

Other highlights from the proxy:

 

 

 

Meg Whitman who famously took the HP CEO position in September for $1 in salary, gets $16 million in stock and options. Former CEO Leo Apotheker walked away with $30.4 million when he was fired by HP last September.

 

Igotarock

Except for my first year tenure, when they couldn’t even afford that. (but don’t feel bad for me, according to them, I was very well compensated).

 

 

WOULD 4-ON-4 BE BETTER?

Dallas Stars Blog:: WOULD 4-ON-4 BE BETTER?:

No sport seems more at war with its playing surface than hockey.

The players get bigger and faster. Coaching keeps getting smarter, deeper and tech-enhanced. Yet the rink remains 200’x 85’. And because of this scoring, offense, and creativity is suffering.

So what should be the strategy to counter this? Make the rink bigger? Not gonna happen, those seats with fannies in them are the lifeblood of the individual teams. OK, what if they eliminated a player per side and played four on four?

Noted stick and puck sorcerer, Mike Ribeiro is in my camp on this and I’m-a go ahead and say many of his ilk would concur.

If this radical change were to be implemented me thinks the impact on the game would be both positive and profound.

At first thought, I can see the attraction of shifting the NHL to a 4 on 4 league full time. I’ve wondered at times whether the league should expand 4-4, or go to it full time myself.

Well, unless you’re a player or the player’s union. It’d likely mean losing 3-4 roster spots per team, or 100 player jobs. I can’t see the union buying into that any time soon.

But I think back to the wonderful days of Roller Hockey International, which for a few fun years was a summer distraction in NHL arenas (“Let’s Go Rhinos!”). It was summer fare populated with a few IHL/AHL caliber players, but mostly European and ECHL caliber athletes.

And it was four on four full time. And the more I think back to the style of play we saw watching the RHI for a few years, the more I remember thinking that it was hockey, but it definitely wasn’t what I’d call “real hockey”. And that there was a reason the NBA outlawed the zone for those many years….

I think the four on four discussion is a lot like the international rink discussion. It seems logical and like a good idea, but in both cases, the answers to what’s going on with the NHL is a lot more complicated, and you might solve some problems shifting the league to four on four, but you’d definitely create new and different problems, and it’s not at all clear to me it’d make the league better, just different.

Having watched RHI hockey and full time 4-4 for a few seasons, I don’t think that’s the kind of hockey I’d want to watch every night in the NHL. I don’t think it’d be better. Just different.

 

A quick look at January….

1/12th of the year is gone already. How time flies when you’re having fun…

I apologize for the quiet on the blog the last week. Blame it on a rhino-virus, which took just enough out of me to make sitting on the couch a lot more attractive than other options. Tonight I’m back off sedated, off the Aftrin, energy levels almost back to normal, so I thought I’d check in and remind folks I’m alive.

I’m into my sixth week at the new gig, and things seem to be progressing well. It’s been this whirlwind of meeting folks, listening to them, offering them our views, and trying to figure out what exactly we need to do (as opposed to what we were hired to do). We’ve made lots of progress, we’ve gotten the contract with the developers approved, I’ve gotten the first round of wireframes making the rounds and the various teams looking at them haven’t laughed or cried yet. But we’re just scratching the surface; I’m already mentally planning a year out, and trying to make sure when we get there, we have what we need. Good stuff so far. My new cohort in crime and I seem to sync up well in complementary ways, and it’s nice being in an environment of yes.

January was a positive month for my online stuff and a good start to the year, despite my being pretty quiet the last week or so. Overall visits were up 60% over December with page views up 50% — and up 110% over January 2011. Traffic to my photos on smugmug rocketed to almost double my previous highest page view month. I got my first video experiment up, and it got 125+ views and good feedback and some very useful critiques. I only got out with the camera twice, but both were very intensive trips and both generated some really nice images — but I also got the trees pruned before the apricot budded and I’m making good progress on some neglected work in the yard and the house — much as I wish I could spend all my spare time out with the camera, there are other things I like doing as well. I also filed 13 reports with eBird for a good start to the year — one lifer and 114 species to the year list, my best january since 2009, which beat it by about 8 species, and if I hadn’t caught this stupid cold, I’d probably have gotten out one more sunday and caught it.

And I’ve started the redesign of this site and my online stuff, although you probably won’t see it for a while. it’s not just swapping in a new theme, from the looks of it. But that’s where my evening focus is right now (that, and skyrim and the sharks). I am working to shift to a more active creation attitude from a content consumption mentality, and so far, I think things are headed in the right direction.

Most popular pieces in the month?

Although I have decided, for the short term, to focus on blog writing and the blog redesign as the primary tasks, and photography as the third wheel. Other stuff will wait to later in the year, just so I can keep focus on things I want finished sooner.

So I’m hoping to carry this forward into February, and see what happens. It’s both nice and scary to be through January, because I feel like i’ve accomplished a lot and set things up to accomplish even more — but I’m not sure where the month went. Been good, and busy. Better than the alternatives, I guess.

 

Merced National Wildlife Refuge Video

One of the goals I set myself this year was to try to do more storytelling instead of just posting images, so one of the things I’ve started doing is experimenting with different tools to publish that help tell a story.

This is one of those experiments, a video slideshow of Merced National Wildlife Refuge, which by now you’ve probably figured out is a favorite place of mine. Nothing too fancy here, just working out the workflow and making sure I can go end to end through the tools, but I think it turned out pretty well (would love to get your feedback on this…)

Merced National Wildlife Refuge from Chuq Von Rospach on Vimeo.

 

Does my favorite author now have to spend a couple hours a day on Facebook?

January 24, 2012 | Trent Nelson | Photojournalist:

Tech people keep saying that artists can make it without the distribution systems, and they all trot out Jonathan Coulton as the example of someone who has made it on his own (by the way, he’s amazing). He offers his music for free, or you can buy it, and he does great. Hooray, there’s one guy making it. One guy.

Okay, you can add Radiohead and Louis CK, but both made their reputations over years in the old media system and only now have the power to make independent new media work. That’s three, so I’m still seeing a lot of artists left out in the cold.

Here’s a question to think about as a new artist-friendly distribution model evolves…

The employees of the old media distribution system did a lot of work, like promotion, financing, and obviously distribution. Who is going to do that in the new model? The artists? Does my favorite author now have to spend a couple hours a day on Facebook? Because I really want my favorite author working on the next book, not tweeting or other garbage that could be handled by someone else.

The problem with the old model was that the distribution system forgot who they worked for and started to think they were the important part. The new system will turn it around and put the creatives in charge. Maybe the band of the future will sign a record company to a deal instead of the other way around.

 

There are actually a bunch of people making it. But they tend to be smaller, they tend not to have a big PR machine pumping them onto the networks. The old system tended to push massive success towards a very few, whether it was Stephen King or Michael Jackson. There was a middle ground where you could grind out a living (and occasionally someone would turn that into a very lucrative business, like the Grateful Dead did). And there was a huge mass that the old systems didn’t want anything to do with at all that never got a break. And in most cases, they old system was right (ever sit down and read a slush pile in a publisher’s office? Seriously, most of it, be glad they filtered the worst of it away).

But yeah, that also limited access to some good talent as well. And as this new model evolves and matures, eventually the old system will figure out how to find and pull talent out of the pool and turn them into the next Stephen King or Michael Jackson and they’ll continue to be the promoters and publicity pushers for the elite super-earners. But their role as gatekeepers is diminishing, and will die off.

thank god (but that also means that we need to find other ways to protect ourselves from that slush pile, folks; in whatever form it takes).

Does this mean your favorite author will have to spend time pushing themselves on Facebook? When starting out, yes. But look at someone like Trey Ratcliff. He’s just hired something like his tenth employee. As his business grew and his revenues went up, he brought people in to take on parts of it. That’s always been the case with small businesses. That is the model we’ll see moving forward. The talent (whether singer, video maker, photographer, app developer or author) will continue to do the parts they’re good at and enjoy doing; as their income grows, they can farm out other parts — bring in someone to help with marketing and publicity, or proofreading, or formatting their ebooks, or handling Facebook. Whatever is not economic to do themselves, but needs doing.

This is nothing new. But it does mean you can’t succeed JUST by being a good talent; you need to be able to run your business, too (or get successful enough to hire someone to run it for you); in fiction, agents sometimes took that on. For that matter, that’s a common case for pro sports, too. I expect you’ll see the agent role mutate into more of a business manager instead of a submission broker.

The model for this is well known; it’s not new, and it’s been used successfully for a long time. What’s really happening is that all of these talent-centric industries are moving to that model with increasing speed, and the transition is at best unsettling for those caught in the middle. And it’s going to create problems and failure for some, and opportunities and success for others.

Which, honestly, sounds a lot like what talking movies did to silents, and what television did to radio, back in the day. And in both of those cases, some people woke up without a future, some people moved from one to the other just fine, and some found opportunities created where none existed before. But now, just being a good writer (or singer, of photographer, or…) isn’t enough to be a successful one.

If it ever really was. (I have my doubts).

(hat tip: BW Jones)

Sea Otter and Kayaker

Sea Otter and Kayaker by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

Moss Landing is a good place if you want to photograph sea otters, since there’s a colony that lives in the harbor. Here was one that was wandering around the harbor, but when a kayaker went by, stopped and watched her. She was careful to keep her distance, and once she passed, the otter went back to doing whatever it was he was doing….

 

 

The Day the Internet Grew Up

A VC: A Post PIPA Post:

these two bills were drafted by the MPAA and the RIAA and walked into Washington without an iota of conversation with the technology industry. I can’t tell you how many Senators and Representatives have told me that they were told by the MPAA and the RIAA that the technology industry was on board and that these issues would not impact the Internet and tech community adversely. This is no way for one industry to propose that Congress regulate another industry. I think it is absurd that one industry would have the arrogance to think it is appropriate to ask Congress to regulate another industry for them. And yet that is what went down on these bills.

Back in 1988 (before many of you were potty trained…), I wrote this April Fools joke for the net. the in-jokes are a bit dated, but this part sums up the attitude of the internet then, and through the years:

Note: This conference is a rescheduling of the conference originally
scheduled for October, 1988 but cancelled after the United States Department
of Commerce decided that the material was too sensitive to allow
non-American citizens to read (including the material written by the
Canadians on the committee). Because of this, the conference has been moved
to Canada, which doesn’t have a complete Freedom of Speech written into it’s
constitution, but has better things to do than worry about ways of
circumventing civil rights. Americans having trouble getting their papers
cleared for distribution at the conference should contact Professor Shikele
about setting up a direct uucp link for the troff source.

For many years, the net was too small for the authorities to worry about, and this “wild west” mentality ruled, that the rules didn’t apply. And in many cases, they didn’t. As the net has grown and gone mainstream, this attitude has continued, although increasingly, whether it’s been the companies stomped in court when they became too annoying (like Napster) or countries like China implementing massive censorship firewalls (and the accompanying controversies as companies have to decide whether to go along with them or not).

The day the net went dark over Sopa is, to me, the day the Internet grew up and became an adult. Instead of thinking we can just sneak around doing what we want in the alleys and not get caught — we now realize we need to sit at the table with the adults and talk (and argue) with them as adults. The net mobilized and forced some major and entrenched powers to back down. They won’t get caught by surprise next time, and don’t for a minute believe they’re done with this.

But, and it’s a big but — neither will we, both collectively as “the internet” and the big companies that drive the net like Google and Apple and Facebook. They clearly realize they can’t let others drive the agenda and sit on the sideline, so you can expect everyone to get more involved in the process in Washington — because like that game or not, we can no longer pretend we’re immune to it or can ignore it.

I think the entertainment industry badly misplayed their hand through arrogance, and I think they’re going to regret it.

Because I think they woke the sleeping dragon, and the dragon now has their eye on them. They won’t be able to sneak their way through Congress without a fight, and many of their allies in Congress now realize that the fight is going to require them to take sides. And I bet a bunch of them will realize the tech industry is a better side to be on.

But now is the time for those companies that represent the industry and the net to make it clear to Congress that they expect a seat at the table in future discussions. And you can bet, the entertainment industry won’t like that. Not that I care what they think…

 

Why I walked away from my fiction. and why I’m back…

Dan’s Blog:

I have a confession to make, it’s been three weeks since I did any serious writing.  I’m supposed to be finished with my next book right now.  Fact is I’m a little less than halfway through.  I’d like to blame it on the holidays or the fact that I’m juggling writing, being Mr. Mom, and taking a class in programing.  Heck I’d settle for blaming it on my rampant ADD, I’m easy that way.

Truth is, however, that I’m not writing because I’m just not seeing any future in it.  The writing industry is changing rapidly right now and even if I got a contract on my last book, who knows if the market will be there when it comes out?  Then there’s the whole e-self-publishing route where no one really knows what’s going on but we know that some people are selling millions of books.  Quite frankly it sounds like there are better odds playing the lottery.  (For the mathematically challenged, playing the lottery is only slightly less risky than throwing your money down the garbage disposer.)

So, for the last three weeks or so, I’ve been kicking an idea around in the back of my head.

What if I just quit?

I mean lets face it, while I have been published four times, I haven’t cracked the level of success where I can actually make a living.  I used to be a hotshot computer programmer and, while my skills are very rusty, I can whip them back into shape.  Programmers make good money (provided you move out of Utah, which I could do).  Heck, I’ve worked in the game industry and have contacts there, maybe it’s time to resurrect that dream.

So what if I quit?

If we can set the wayback machine back to about 1995 for a minute….

I had hit that point where I had published enough stories to qualify for active membership in SFWA. I was starting to get solicited for stories for anthologies, and was right at that cusp where I seemed to be getting the acceptance knod on a regular basis. I had a novel in progress, a second in planning.

And I had to make a decision. Geeking computers paid well, and I enjoyed it. Writing SF/F didn’t pay well and I enjoyed it. I was convinced I couldn’t do both well at the same time and have a real life, too. I chose computers, and retired from writing. Why?

Because I looked at what I wrote, and where I slotted into the industry, and I saw the squeeze coming. I was a midlist novelist; I read for entertainment, my favorite books were the kind of things you picked up when you were tired after a long day at work to relax and enjoy. That was the kind of fiction I wrote, and wanted to write. If I were to name a single name, I’d say I wanted to be James White when I grew up. (those of you now going “what? who?”, well, my point. but click through and grab that volume and have a fun evening or three).

The problem was that even back then, almost 20 years ago, you could see the midlist part of the publishing world shrinking and the collapse starting. Chain bookstore buying practices was increasingly pushing the buttons on who got published; chain bookstore return practices was continuing to shred the time a published paperback was actually on a shelf where it could be bought. The first author I knew had found out their first novel sales were weak enough that the chains wouldn’t buy their next book, even though the editors loved it (he ended up going behind a pseudonym and breaking out pretty well — the pseudonym is now a pretty successful author). Advances were flat to down. The short fiction market was already shrinking. Sharecrop universes (star wars, star trek, etc) were growing and taking shelf space from the midlist, too. In talking to other authors, the midlist grind was getting tougher and tougher.

So that was the publishing universe I was contemplating. It’s possible I could have written something that broke out, but if I didn’t, I might be a book or three into it, and without a publisher because some algorithm at Barnes and Noble didn’t like my trend line. I was never a fast writer like Dean or Kris or Mike, so the multi-genre, multi-name publishing empire wasn’t an option, and I didn’t have the many years of backlist to fall back on Mike has. I had sharecrop opportunities — but I wanted to write my stories, not someone else’s.

So I shut it down and walked away from my fiction, knowing some day I’d probably fire it up again. As it turns out, my worries about the midlist getting squeezed came true, and the market got increasingly tough. And I haven’t done badly in the computer industry, so I made the right choices.

I was at Apple when they shipped iTunes, and I watched as it transformed and disrupted the music industry, I’ve watched the video side of entertainment slowly disrupt (primarily because the studios were determined not to let Apple do to them what happened to the music industry, even if it killed them. Which it still might). I’ve seen the online universe disrupt my dad’s world, newspapers, and seen this tsunami washing through all of the traditional media universes.

Smartphones came along, and with them, apps, and I saw in that the path to the book reader. When I got the opportunity to go to Palm, I grabbed it, because I wanted a chance to influence this if I could. Then came the the iPad and the Kindle, and my muse rang the servants bell from her tower, and when I unlocked the door, she looked at me and said “it’s time”.

And it is. And one reason I didn’t go to work for Nokia (or Amazon, or Barnes and Noble, or… — all of which I talked to in some way, shape or form along the way) was I didn’t want my “real” job to create conflicts with my ability to figure out how I and my writing fit into all of this, the way the rules at HP did. Even if I end up never doing anything significant down this path, it was a path I wanted the freedom to explore.)

That’s why Dan’s blog post struck me as it did. He published into the market I walked away from, because I saw it as — on balance — a success path with too many risks given the benefits and effort. Especially compared to geeking computers. He’s now seeing what I see as that chance I’ve been waiting to happen for almost 20 years as the end of his opportunity. And if you only see traditional publishing as your future, you’re correct.

But what is happening here is the rebirth of the midlist, which since that seems to be where Dan’s work lives, should be cause for celebration. No more “that book you spent a year writing has three weeks on the shelf to find an audience”. Instead, the shelfs are now almost literally infinitely large, and your work has an almost infinite time to find its audience. It’s ability to find an audience is now very much up to the author; that may be scary, but if you’re a midlist writer, the push you got from your publisher was little more than “here’s a pretty cover and we’ll pray” anyway, and heck, find a good artist to do covers for you…

So my advice to Dan is this — you beat the odds in a big way by getting published in the old markets; this isn’t the end of times, but the beginning of a better time where you can succeed, and better yet, have a big say in that success. Read Dean and Kris. Read Mike Stackpole. Read Passive Voice, and start understanding how you can take advantage of these new opportunities. Go see what Lawrence Block is doing.

There are a lot of unknowns in this, but out of that, a lot of opportunity. A much better opportunity than existed back when I walked away. And 2012 is where it looks like it’s all going to come together.

 

 

 

 

 

(via Passive Voice)

Apple’s publishing announcement, and the usual commentary

Tell me if this sounds vaguely familiar. Apple announces they’re going to announce something. A few details leak. The speculation goes crazy, and the usual suspects end up deciding that what Apple needs to do includes a couple of puppies, a unicorn, three rainbows and free coffee for life.

Apple makes their announcement. It merely includes one puppy, a pony and a rainbow. No free coffee.

And the usual suspects jump on Apple because the product isn’t what they decided they wanted, even though that was clearly not what Apple ever intended it to be. This is somehow Apple’s fault.

The big criticisms coming back at the announcement seem to boil down to:

It’s for the iPad only, and it isn’t a publishing environment that can be used for other devices or platforms (like the Kindle).

And the licensing says if you sell it, you have to sell it via Apple’s iBook store.

Horrors.  And, evidently, that kind of licensing is unprecedented.

Well, no, it’s not. If you view the iBook store as a platform, which many pundits have already declared it to be, than the new Apple book publisher tool is the equivalent of its SDK. And it’s not unprecedented for a company to limit use of it’s developer tools to its platform. We did that with webOS, where if you wanted to build webOS applications and sell them, you had to sell them through our store.

Matthew Ingram @ GigaOM worries this puts this content deep into Apple’s walled garden, and I sympathize, but there’s no licensing restriction that keeps you from publishing your content on other platforms using other tools; merely not using this tool to publish on those platforms. That’s a standard business decision about going cross-platform. If the market warrants it, you take your source code and build it for two platforms, only in this case, those platforms are iBook and Kindle instead of IOS and Android. In my mind, it’s a non-issue, just like it’s a non-issue to worry that publishing Angry Birds on the iPad might keep it off of other platforms. It won’t — if there’s a market for it. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable for Apple to “not make it easy” to publish on competitive platforms, that’s not in their self-interest.

Much as I want a multi-platform, one-button, publish my stuff everywhere tool — I fully understand why Apple wants to see some return on the investment it made in its tools, and I never expected Apple to create that. Ultimately, Apple is about selling hardware, so the way you do that is target the results of the tools to the platform that runs on that hardware. That’s what Apple did.

The alternative is to charge for the tools up front. If they did that, we’d simply be having a different argument, and the chance of adoption would go down dramatically. Now, if you want to do content to give away, you have many more options then if Apple charged $99 for this too. And if you plan on charging for it, well, don’t complain about Apple wanting a piece. That’s business.

Thinking that Apple should build a tool and give it away for free that enables you to put your content on the Kindle store and sell it? Incredibly naive, if you really think they should do that.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the publishing tool I was hoping to see, primarily because of these licensing restrictions. On the other hand, what I wanted it to be was never what Apple intended to build, and I didn’t really think they would.

I do think, however, that now that we’ve seen how Apple built this, it’s only a matter of time before some third party does build a tool very like it that does spit out a PDF and a Kindle doc and an iBook doc from the same tool. Apple has defined the direction, and (not surprisingly), targeted it to benefit Apple. I know this upsets some of the geeks, but hey, ultimately they have to pay the bills somehow. In this case, by convincing folks to put content on iPads instead of Kindles and Fires and TouchPads (hah. just kidding) through building really good tools to build it with. (and that’ll work. Just watch).

These tools will arrive for the other platforms, now that Apple has (again) set the bar. It’s not like Apple built a closed platform; others can build tools to publish to iBook as well, without the licensing restrictions. And they will (it should be Adobe, but it won’t be, I bet).

And this is a 1.0 product, in a new market they’ve been involved in for less than 24 hours. Free Coffee takes time to brew. And it’s far from unprecedented for Apple to build the basic product, stick the flag in the ground, and say “we don’t really know where it goes from here, so we’ll ship it and innovate as we find out where we need to go” — they did that with iTunes, and it didn’t turn out badly (and with iAds, where it didn’t turn out so well). You have to start somewhere, and if you wait until all of the features are thought out and implemented, you lose, because someone else will have shipped something first and pushed the market away from you.

The only problem I see here is the common one with Apple announcements: it’s not the product people fantasized it would be. And my guess is that like other times when the tech echo chamber roundly raised up in horror over not getting enough free coffee and rainbows, the criticisms will be ignored by those the product was really intended for, and it’ll be a nice success. Which will only annoy the pundits even more….

I really like what I saw today. I’m admittedly disappointed that it doesn’t serve my personal goals — in other words, I’m going to experiment with it, but probably not publish through it — but I’m not the intended audience. Fortunately, I actually recognize that, so I don’t take it personally. And I see how this can be extended later, and how third parties can compete against it and build on its foundations, and I’m pretty sure it won’t be too long before I do start getting the tools I want, driven out by what Apple set in motion today.

And I think this will impact the education system in a number of good ways, too. Which is bigger and more important than getting me what I want, anyway…

(hat tip, Daring Fireball and ReadWriteWeb)

 

Quick Recommendation: Gary’s Guaranteed Rooter

Friday night started “one of those” weekends. Laurie called me in from the other room, because water is flowing from under the toilet. The wax seal has failed. hint: this is not good.

Worse, our other one has been, well, offline for a few weeks because we dropped a shampoo bottle in it and it’s been on the “we can’t fix it ourselves, so we need to get someone out here to take care of this” list.

So we got everything under control, got towels down, etc. and since it was late, got to bed. In the morning, I called the plumber, Gary, at Gary’s Guaranteed Rooter. We’d used him before when we got that slab leak that needed some major surgery. He agreed to get out here as soon as he could.

And literally, as soon as I got off the phone with him, we started getting sewage back out of the bathtubs, and up around the toilets. So it wasn’t (just) a bad wax seal, but a full sewage blockage.

And hilarity ensued. And Gary got a second phone call, and re-arranged his other appointments, and generally got his butt out here as fast as he could, pulled off a miracle or two, got everything cleared up, the toilets fixed, and just because he could, fixed a dripping sink while he was here.

I know enough about plumbing (thank you, This Old House) to know when I shouldn’t be mucking with it, and enough to have some idea what needs to be done. Gary’s now pulled out butt’s out of the fire twice, and he’s not only a good plumber who knows his stuff, he gives a damn. If you need a plumber, from San Jose up the peninsula, he’s a good option to have, especially when the, um, stuff is hitting the fan. In this case, literally.

And despite short notice turning into this oh-my-god emergency, his prices are fair. His number is (650) 766-7821; it’s one you probably want to stick in your address book for that day when you really need it, because when you really need it, you don’t want to go thrashing around trying to figure out who to call…

(And now life is back to normal, although one of the bathroom rugs is a goner; all of the towels have gone through the “sanitize” cycle, and hopefully, we won’t have to worry about this for a while. We’ve been in this house since the mid 90′s, and this is the first time we’ve had this problem. Hopefully, with a bit of scheduled maintenance, we can keep it from happening again…)

 

 

Merced Birding…..

I have acquired a strong fascination with the cranes and geese that visit California’s central valley in the winter. There are a number of places you can go to take them in, but one of my favorites is Merced National Wildlife Refuge, which is roughly halfway between Santa Nella and Merced. It’s about two and a half hours of driving from home, so it’s not a trivial drive, but it’s very much something I can do as a day trip.

The cranes and geese start arriving around the end of October, and start leaving in February or March. I’ve gotten into the habit of trying to get out into the central valley three or four times a winter to visit and photograph the birds and the area; more if I can. Some of those trips Laurie and I do together and make it an outing, but sometimes, it works best for me to go solo and just focus on trying to get pack as much into the trip with as much intensity and focus as I can.

There is just no way to be enthusiastic when the alarm goes off at 4AM. The best I can muster is not turning it off and rolling over; a quick hot shower and I’m off after clothes stashed in the other room, because my one goal right now is letting Laurie get back to sleep. Some mornings, you walk out the front door and look up into the dark sky and realize you’re screwed, and you might as well go back to bed. It’s 4:30, it’s 40 degrees, and it’s clear skies.

South to Gilroy, I find the open Starbucks (thank you, bless you). Over the hills, and down into Santa Nella and Los Banos. And into the fog. Now, I’m worried; I might arrive and be fogged out. The fog is playing games with me, though, as Tule fog can; sometimes it goes away. sometimes it’s impenetrable and you’re driving by braille. Outside of Los Banos, it lifts, but only about 20′, so it’s as if I’m driving in this weird grey tunnel. It’s a weird feeling, with the air completely clear around you, but when you look up, you can see nothing.

I make it to the refuge at 7:15, beating sunrise by about ten minutes. The fog is there, but not heavy. When the sun hits, it’ll build a bit, then it should burn off before too much time passes. I pull into the refuge to set up the cameras and get ready for the show. I can hear the geese stirring in the distance. My car thermometer reads 35 degrees. I reach for my coat, and realize I left it at home. All I have is my in-car denim jacket that lives there for these kinds of situations. It’ll help, but it’s really not heavy enough.

I’m the second car into the refuge. One has already headed up the auto tour a bit. I’m in the entrance area, unpacking gear and setting up the car the way I like it for these trips. A lone bird flies through. It turns out to be one of the few glimpses of an Ibis I’ll see today.

Sunrise at Merced National Wildlife Refuge by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

Those who have a fantasy that the life of a nature photographer is a glamorous one, set the alarm for 4AM, drag your butt out of bed, and go sit on a bench in the local park for a few hours and wait for something to happen. Maybe something will, maybe it won’t. That, in a nutshell, is nature photography. As you get better at picking locations, the chances something interesting will happen goes up, but it’s never guaranteed. Hours of prep, minutes of opportunity. Maybe.

Some people like to visit a lot of places. Get to know a few places well, rather than see lots of places superficially. You can go overboard on that, become too insular, too “cocooned”, but for me the attraction is to understand a place, not just see it. To watch as it changes over time and through the seasons.

Sunrise at Merced National Wildlife Refuge by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

This trip to Merced is my “new job vacation”; instead of taking time off and going somewhere, I took the accrued vacation and put that money into gear. It’s also my first “serious” trip to start learning how the gear should be used in the field. I’m consciously experimenting more with the wide angle, forcing myself to use it and not get so heavily into the rhythm of shooting at 400mm and seeing everything in that mono-vision.

I am going to have fun today. I don’t intend to let the cold stop me. Or the fog. Or even doofuses. Those are all things to work with, and around, they can only be excuses if you let them. Early on, the fog makes bird photography tough, putting everything into soft focus. I spend more time thinking about how to bring the refuge to those that can’t be there.

Sunrise at Merced in the Tule fog, as the sun and the fog fight a battle for who will own this ground today. ultimately the sun won, but it wasn't easy.=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+This image is free to use and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use.

Opportunities do exist, of course.

Juvenile Red-Tailed Hawk by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

American Bittern by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

American Bittern by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

A loggerhead shrike sits up for a portrait session. This has been one of my nemesis birds; I have lots of so-so images of them. I don’t have many I’m proud of.

Loggerhead Shrike, Merced National Wildlife Refuge=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+This image is free to use and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use.

Now I do.

I spend the afternoon with the geese, alternately trying to figure out how to show what it’s like sitting out in a marsh with 10,000+ birds, and trying to get some good flight and landing shots.

How do you describe 10,000 birds visually in an image?

Merced National Wildlife Refuge by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

That seems a good start. It’d be a better image if it was a panorama, but I didn’t want to get out of the car and risk spooking them to set up for a formal pano, and the handheld one wasn’t very good. Some days they work, some days they don’t.

Geese, everywhere. Never quiet, and there’s always motion.

Ross's Geese by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

Every time I visit a refuge, I want to do video, I want to do audio. I want to try timelapses. I now have most of the gear I need for these, but haven’t had time to practice the setups. Next visit, hopefully.

Merced National Wildlife Refuge by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

Then the geese explode; they’ve been spooked. The entire flock hits the air at the same time. The noise is intense, almost as intense as the visual chaos. Birds are flying everywhere. I don’t know how they avoid collisions, but they do.

 

Merced National Wildlife Refuge=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+This image is free to use and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use.

 

 

And then it’s quiet, and empty. The geese have gone in to settle for the night. I can feel the first tendrils of fog seeping back into my It’s time for food, something hot, and the drive over the hill home. Until next time.

The President’s Post-SOPA Challenge: All Right, You Come Up with a Solution!

The President’s Post-SOPA Challenge: All Right, You Come Up with a Solution!:

 

The Internet and politics have a way of magnifying each other’s faults. Depending upon which source you read this morning, President Obama either came out forcefully against SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy legislation on Saturday or he staked out a position enabling himself to back away from opposing it outright.

 

Buried in-between the apparent opposition and the apparent ambivalence is the most important part of Saturday’s statement, which would otherwise resound like a clarion call: “Rather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don’t limit your opinion to what’s the wrong thing to do, ask yourself what’s right.” The actual Obama Administration statement itself may have been as good a compromise as King Solomon himself may have managed in this environment: Speaking on behalf of the administration, a trio of technology officials including the U.S. CTO came out against all the principles that the populist movement against SOPA claimed to be against, without Mr. Obama having to personally stand against the entertainment industry which supported the legislation.

 

It’s good to see the SOPA bill pushed back. I’m not convinced that the solution lies in tweaking the bill. The bill itself is a sign of larger conflicts that I’d like to see us help Congress grapple with, and I think if we do that, it will lead to understand how to find the compromises needed to solve the problems that led to the introduction of SOPA.

If you take a step back from the bill itself, the underlying problem is that the current laws around copyright simply don’t cope well with the reality of the internet and with digital media content in general. I don’t think we’re going to solve the issues surrounding SOPA until we grapple the bigger issue of copyright and sharing rights in the internet age.

It’s not just that the big media organizations have ben trying to protect their existing business models, but they’ve been using this transition to try to push back and reduce or remove rights that exist as well — not only have there been consistent attacks on the right of first sale doctrine, we’ve seen organized attacks on the entire concept of fair use, and as we’ve started seeing a shift to ebooks and electronic publication, even the basic concept of lending a book to a friend has been restricted; just try to lend a Kindle book to someone, even your spouse (that doesn’t share your Amazon account) — it’s now up to the publisher to allow this, or the Kindle won’t let you. Compare that to a paper book and you see how this entire fight isn’t just about stopping piracy, but that it’s an attempt to erode other existing rights for sharing, in ways that, of course, benefit the publisher (at least in the short term) by ‘encouraging’ unit sales.

So to me, it’s time to have this discussion in Congress — what does Copyright mean in the internet era, and how do we update it to deal with the realities of electronic media, of mashups. How do you reconcile a media owner’s right to choose (and license for sale) how their media is going to be used with the interests of an individual who might want to resell his legitimate copy when they’re done, or loan it to a friend, or mash it up in some fun way.

If it was up to just the big media companies, none of that would be allowed, which goes far beyond simply protecting the equivalent processes of the printed media world but in fact strips away user rights that are currently accepted there.

This is a big, hairy, complex problem. Before it’s done, both sides (the big media folks and the “we want to share this stuff” side) will have to compromise. Somewhere along the way, we’ll probably have to deal with Orphaned Works issue. We need to take a close look at Creative Commons and integrate it’s concepts into real copyright law. We need to protect a creator’s right to earn income from their work, but we need to understand where we can draw lines around fair use and make sure that concept is strengthened, not weakened or destroyed (I would love to see fair use and Creative Commons non-commercial licenses go off for a long weekend and bring back something we can use as a model here). We need to understand how personal loans of electronic media can be managed; we need to understand how to allow first sale doctrine transfers in an electronic world. The answer from the big media folks (“all of that has to go away”) can’t be allowed to be turned into the new rules — and for the sake of the media folks, too, for the more they try to lock things down, the more they’ll encourage people to go around the rules (and be termed pirates, which they may or may not be). Piracy will aways exist; a rational set of reasonable use restrictions — most people would live within and accept.

The compromises — and the fight over them — won’t be easy. But I think this is the path we need to take to get to these solutions. Until we understand how the basic concept of copyright needs to work in the internet age, we can’t figure out how to legislate making it work, and the existing copyright rules and concepts are horribly broken in an electronic media age. So it’s time to get started, and figure this out.

And I think we can, with some work. People like to rag on the DMCA, but as someone who’s dealt with it both as a content creator and as an administrator, it’s not awesome, but it works, and it has the checks and balances needed to generally let both sides have a say. There are flaws in it, and flaws in how some sites implement it (not everyone handles appeals and the process beyond the initial take-down well), but overall, I think it does a better job than it’s given credit for many days. The one thing I think it’s missing is a “vexatious litigant” aspect where people who are found to be abusing the system can be banned from making new claims; if we added that, it’d be a hammer to help keep some of the media companies that have been “over enthusiastic” about filing take downs in better check (imagine if Youtube had the right to tell, say, Universal, that they’ve filed too many failed claims, and therefore, they can file no more claims without doing so through a court for approval. That might slow down some of their enthusiasm for taking down stuff that falls under fair use, and give people more incentive to push back when they do).

I’m worried that if we don’t start having this discussion, we’ll end up trying to solve these issues by using the existing laws and processes, and they’re broken. And if we try that path, that’ll work to the big media’s benefit. So what I suggest is it’s time for us not to go to Congress and fight SOPA, it’s time for the tech leaders to go to Congress and start lobbying to help them get educated on copyright and our need to update it to the digital realm — and through that, work for a solution to these issues that SOPA is trying to fix (by taking a fireaxe to them…)

 

 

 

ArtisanHD

This year for the holidays I decided to try something different with a couple of my gifts. Every year, I try to make christmas gifts for the family a little personal, and in the last few years, that’s meant something using my photos.

This year, rather than a standard framed print or a calendar, I had prints done via ArtisanHD on Plexiglas. It looked like an interesting, modern alternative to the standard matted print. These images in the 12×18 size (good for 11×14 prints) ran a bit over $50, and to be honest, I was blown away with how they looked.

If you’re looking for something different and memorable, with good quality, something that’s going to leave an impression — this is something you might want to consider. I liked the quality of the final product, I was very happy with the quality of the print, and in fact, I did one for myself, which is going up in my cube at work tomorrow, too. And I expect it’ll get people to come into the office and ask about it.

Definitely recommended.

 

 

Hutton’s Vireo: Life Bird 257

Hutton's Vireo by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com
During my trip out to Merced, I took a couple of mid-day hours and went off to the O’Neill Forebay, which is near the San Luis Reservoir and a good winter birding spot, especially for ducks. It was a nice break, and is near Santa Nella where I grabbed lunch. Birding was nice but not astounding, and I didn’t get many interesting pictures, but here’s one of them.

I initially thought it was a ruby-crowned kinglet, but on watching it a bit, it was clear it wasn’t. Then I realized it was a Vireo, but I wasn’t sure how to ID it past that. This was the only usable shot of it I got. When I got home, I hauled out the field guides and the image, and finally decided it was a Hutton’s Vireo. I then went to eBird to sanity check, and sure enough, that’s a Vireo that’s seen in that area in the listings for this time of year. Good enough for me. This is my first life bird for the year, and not a bad start, especially since I’m weak with Vireos in general…

O’Neill is a great place for flight shots of Canvasbacks and Buffleheads, if you’re patient.

Canvasbacks in Flight by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

A red-Tailed Hawk

 

Juvenile Red-Tailed Hawk, Merced National Wildlife Refuge=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+To download a low-resolution version of this image, right-click on it. The low-resolution image is free to use and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use or to use it in an altered form without my explicit permission. If you wish to buy a print of this impage or license it for commercial use (you will receive a full-resolution, non-watermarked jpeg), you can do so in the store by clicking on the Buy button.

 

To be honest, this young red-tailed hawk seems to be enjoying this warm, sunny morning almost as much as I was….

 

Juvenile Red-Tailed Hawk, Merced National Wildlife Refuge=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+To download a low-resolution version of this image, right-click on it. The low-resolution image is free to use and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use or to use it in an altered form without my explicit permission. If you wish to buy a print of this impage or license it for commercial use (you will receive a full-resolution, non-watermarked jpeg), you can do so in the store by clicking on the Buy button.

 

Best Photos of 2011 — the list

Once again Jim Goldstein has compiled the list of “best of 2011″ pages by photographers around the net. This year, the list has grown to almost 300 photographers, and there’s some amazingly good photography available.

You should really check these authors out!

 

  1. JMG-Galleries Best Photos of 2011 – Jim M. Goldstein
  2. Dalal al-Dhubaib’s flickr – Dalal al-dhobaib
  3. www.mawpix.com – Matthias Wassermann
  4. 2011 Retrospective – Alex Wise
  5. Jon McCormack Photography – Jon McCormack
  6. Top 10 of 2011 a Exploring Light Photography – Chris Moore
  7. The year in review: My favorite 2011 Photos – Ed Rosack
  8. Dave Wilson Photography – Dave Wilson
  9. Top 10 from Behind The Clicks – Mohammad Noman
  10. Art in Nature Photography: Best of 2011 – Floris van Breugel
  11. Alaska Photography – Mike Criss
  12. My best photos from 2011 – Lasse Sørnes
  13. My Five Best Images of 2011 – Peter Cox
  14. My Top 10 images of 2011 – Charlie Widdis Photography
  15. MY TOP PHOTOS FROM 2011 – Chaz Curry
  16. Best of 2011 – Juan Guevara
  17. Stories From Home – David Patterson
  18. My Best Of 2011 – The Photographs – Sven Seebeck
  19. The Uprooted Photographer – Zach Frailey
  20. Top ten wildlife photos of 2011 – Burrard-Lucas Wildlife Photography
  21. Eleven From Twenty Eleven – Jacob F. Lucas
  22. My ten favorite photos of 2011 – Stefan Bäurle
  23. Changing Perspectives – Jenni Brehm
  24. 2011 Top 10 Photos – Andrei Olariu
  25. Best Photos of 2011 – Ahmed Almuhairi
  26. Favorite Photos of 2011 – Pat Ulrich
  27. Top 11 of 2011 – Younes Bounhar
  28. Natural California – John Wall
  29. 2011 – A Review – Jim Denham
  30. yeeehah.com – William R. Bullock
  31. 2011Top11 – Kate Church
  32. Top Ten Photos of 2011 – Steve Cole
  33. http://www.davidjohnstonart.com/index.html – David Johnston
  34. 7 Images of Denver in 2011 – Neil Corman
  35. My Top 10 for 2011 – Lon Overacker
  36. Craig Ferguson Images | The Year That Was – Craig Ferguson
  37. My Best Images of 2011 – Clark Crenshaw
  38. “Sort of the best of 2011: ants – Jeroen Mentens
  39. Best Photos Of 2011 – Dawnstar Australis – Daniel McNamara
  40. Skolai Images – Carl Donohue
  41. Favorite 10 of 2011 – Alan Dahl
  42. Tony’s Blog – Tony Unwin
  43. FlixelPix Best Photos of 2011 – David Cleland
  44. Ilja Melnikov – Ilja Melnikov
  45. Best of 2011 – Rob Tilley
  46. Free Roaming Photography 12 Best Photos from 2011 – Mike Cavaroc
  47. Adventures Through the Lens: 2011 in Review – Rebecca R Jackrel
  48. Top Photos of 2011 by Gary Crabbe / Enlightened Images – Gary Crabbe
  49. My 10 Best Photos of 2011 – Michael Russell
  50. Digitized Chaos’ 2011 faves – Rian Castillo
  51. Top 10 Photos of 2011 – Mike Chowla
  52. John Fujimagari’s Best of 2011 – John Fujimagari
  53. 10 Best Landscape Photos of 2011 – Cody Duncan
  54. Best photos from 2011 – Janis Janums
  55. Best Photos Of 2011 – David Leland Hyde
  56. PhotogAbby’s Photoviews – Abigail Gossage
  57. Do Not Get On or Off While in Motion – G. Kaltenbrun
  58. Tony Wu’s Underwater Photography Blog – Tony Wu
  59. 12 Months – 12 Favourite Images – Petr Hlavacek | NZICESCAPES IMAGES
  60. Alpenglow Images | Greg Russell Best of 2011 – Greg Russell
  61. An End of Year Retrospective for 2011 – The Top 11 Images of ’11 – Derrald Farnsworth-Livingston
  62. 11 from ‘11 – Dru Stefan Stone
  63. William Neill’s Top Forty Images for 2011 – William Neill
  64. Dave’s Best Of 2011 – Dave Reichert
  65. 10 Best Photos of 2011 by Scott Thompson – Scott Thompson – Scott Shots Photography
  66. My best 10 images of 2011? – Duffy Knox
  67. My 5 Top Photos from 2011 and Photography Year in Review – Tommy Holt
  68. Russ Bishop Photography – Russ Bishop
  69. My Top 10 Favourite Images of 2011 – John Dunne Photography
  70. Asif Patel Photography – TopPhotos2011 – Asif Patel
  71. The Best of 2011 – Neil McShane (aka Mononeil)
  72. Top Nature Photographs of 2011 by Mark Graf – Mark Graf
  73. Year 2011 in 10 photos. – Filip Lucin
  74. Views Infinitum: Best of 2011 – Scott Thomas
  75. Dobson Central Photography – Top 10 Photos of 2011 – Ken Dobson
  76. “The Best of Myrmecos – Alex Wild
  77. Your Favorite Shots from 2011 – Fred S. Brundick
  78. Patrick Gensel – The Best Of 2011 – Patrick Gensel
  79. 100 Favorite pictures from 2011 – Patrick J Endres
  80. My Ten Favorite Photos of 2011 – Randy Langstraat
  81. KennethVerburg.nl – Kenneth Verburg
  82. Naturography: My Top 5 for 2011 – Mike Spinak
  83. Edith Levy Photography – 2011 A Year in Review – Edith Levy
  84. G Dan Mitchell Photography – G Dan Mitchell
  85. Jonesblog – Bryan William Jones
  86. Timages’ 2011 Top Ten – Tim Mulcahy
  87. naturalvision-photo.com – Derek Griggs
  88. Favorites of the Year: 2011 – Ken Trout
  89. Beetles in the Bush – Ted C. MacRae
  90. Chuqui 3.0 – Chuq Von Rospach
  91. Peter Carroll Photography – Peter Carroll
  92. My photos of 2011 – Frederico Quintao
  93. http://raptorgallery.wordpress.com – Glenn Nevill
  94. Best of 2011 – Brad Barton Photography – Brad Barton Photography
  95. Non-Rocky Best of 2011 – Erik Stensland
  96. My Favorite/Best Photographs of 2011 – Inge Fernau
  97. Best Photos of 2011 – Ryan Golias
  98. Best of 2011 – Larry Rosenstein
  99. Best of 2011 – Mellimage
  100. The Quiet Picture – Year 2011 In Pictures – Minna Kinnunen
  101. 11 Best of 2011 – Olivier Du Tré
  102. Best Photos of 2011 – Jim Coda
  103. Living Wilderness: Best Images of 2011 – Kevin Ebi
  104. Oxherder Arts – Best of 2011 – Don Schulte
  105. my best images of 2011 – Rhoda Maurer
  106. http://www.stamates.com – Jim Stamates
  107. Organic Light Pan – Youssef Ismail
  108. Rick Diffley Photography – Rick Diffley Photography
  109. Best Images of 2011 – Robin Black
  110. PhotoWalkPro – Jeff Revell
  111. Highlights from 2011 – Roman W. Schatz
  112. Uncommon Depth – Roberta Murray
  113. TKM Journal – Highlights of 2011 – Kent Mearig
  114. Amanda Herbert’s best of 2011 – Amanda Herbert Photography
  115. Google+ – Umes Shrestha
  116. Anne McKinnell’s Top 10 Images of 2011 – Anne McKinnell
  117. Best Photos of 2011 – Jim Maher
  118. www.fredmertzphotography.com – Fred Mertz
  119. Top 10 Photos of 2011 – Ireena Worthy
  120. 11 in 2011 – My Favorite Photos – Debra Feinman
  121. 2011 Top Ten Plant Photos By John Manuwal Photography – John Manuwal
  122. www.azaelmeza.com – Azael Meza
  123. David Sharp – The Best of 2012 – David Sharp
  124. Looking back at 2011 – Ivan Makarov
  125. Best Photos of 2011 – Pete Miller – USKestrel Adventography
  126. My favorite 10 of 2011 – John Christopher
  127. Neil Creek – Photographer – Neil Creek
  128. Momentary Awe – Catalin
  129. 2011 Top Ten – Andrew S Gibson
  130. “Crest, Cliff and Canyon – A. Jackson Frishman
  131. 2011 – A Good Year – Margaret Summers
    Temporarily Removed at the Request of Photographer
  132. Favorite Photos from 2011 – Richard Wong – Richard Wong
  133. latoga photography – Favorite Photos of 2011 – Greg A. Lato
  134. Looking Back – 2011 – Derek Fogg
  135. My Photo Blog – Ron Niebrugge’s favorite photos from 2011 – Ron Niebrugge
  136. My 10 Favorite Photos of 2011 – Dan Bailey
  137. My 11 favorites from 2011 – Kurt M. Lawson Photography
  138. Happy New Year – Lori Ann Cole
  139. My Top 10 Mixture – Ashley Cottle
  140. Google+ Beach Photography – Jennifer Brinkman
  141. Top 10 images of 2011 – Denise Goldberg
  142. www.azaelmeza.com – Azael Meza
  143. Erwin Kessing Photography – Erwin Kessing
  144. The Closing of the Year – Eustace James
  145. Mark Feenstra Photography: 10 Favourites from 2011 – Mark Feenstra
  146. Best Photos of 2011 – Ingo Meckmann
  147. Dynamics of Light and Shade – Richard Murphy
  148. My 20 Best from 2011 – David Maurer
  149. Top11 2011 – Patrick Ottoy
  150. Best of 2011 – David Edenfield
  151. The Owl and the Wildcat – Jen Joynt
  152. Best of 2011 – Alison Wells
  153. My 2011 Best Nature and Landscape Photographs – Steve Sieren
  154. Best photos of 2011 on Flickr – Jono Hey
  155. Best Photos of 2011 – Ken Snyder
  156. Best Photos of 2011 by Ilya Genkin – Ilya Genkin
  157. My best of 2011 – Terri Jacobson
  158. Piya Trepetch Photography – Top Ten Images from 2011 – Piya Trepetch
  159. My Best 10 Pictures for 2011 – Barbara Newson
  160. Woo’s 2011 in Pictures – Gary Woo
  161. My (Possibly) Ten Best Photos from 2011 – Jim McCoy
  162. Favorites – 2011 – Daniel Leu
  163. Closescapes Favourites From 2011. – Marshall Black
  164. Nature and Landscape – Small Choice 2011 – Ben Schreck
  165. http://wernerpriller.wordpress.com/ – Werner Priller
  166. Peter de Rooij’s Top 10 for 2011 – Peter de Rooij
  167. Best photos of 2011 by ISIK MATER – ISIK MATER
  168. Best Photos of 2011 – ysvry
  169. Focused Planet Photography – Justin Scicluna
  170. Best of 2011 by Carl-Johan Rådström – Carl-Johan Rådström
  171. Western Skies Top 11 From 2011 – Björn Göhringer
  172. My Best People Shots – Matt Goode
  173. Darin Rogers Photography: Best Of… – Darin Rogers
  174. http://www.juzno.com/ – Rob Castro
  175. Remembering 2011 in Photos – Aaron Hockley
  176. Favorites From 2011 – Brad Mangas
  177. Robb Hirsch Best of 2011 – Robb Hirsch
  178. Best Photos of 2011 – Sathish Jothikumar
  179. My best underwater photos 2011 – Suzy Walker
  180. Year 2011 in review and favorite images – QT Luong
  181. Photoimagery.net – Peter McCabe
  182. 2011 – Our Favorite Images of the Year – Isabel & Steffen Synnatschke
  183. ylitalot.net – Juha Ylitalo
  184. Top Ten Photos of 2011 – by Brian Grzelewski – Brian Grzelewski
  185. Jim Nickelson Favorites of 2011 – Jim Nickelson
  186. 2011: My Top Ten Images – Michael Frye
  187. My Top Images of 2011 – Andrew Kee
  188. 2011’s Top 10 Picks – Vidya Narasimhan
  189. Mara @ Fantasia – Photo Round up of 2011 – Mara Acoma
  190. My Journey through 2011 – Kevin Thornhill
  191. My 10 personal favorites of 2011 – Marleen Hallaert
  192. Favorite Photographs From 2011 – Seung Kye Lee
  193. Best Photos of 2011 – Michael Gerken
  194. My Top Ten Photos of 2011 – Mike Isaak
  195. http://lensmankc.com/?p=811 – Amit Jung K.C
  196. baliultimatephoto.blogspot.com – Hendra Wiguna
  197. John Dusseault’s top 10 of 2011 – John Dusseault
  198. Favorites of 2011 – Plastic[Picture]
  199. Farsighted – Ron Artigues
  200. Google Plus – Darren Harmon
  201. Bill Hornbostel Photography – Bill Hornbostel
  202. Korwel Photograpy blog – Iza Korwel
  203. Favorite Photos of 2011 – Elizabeth Brown Photography PhotoBlog – Elizabeth Brown
  204. 2011 Highlights – Alan Grinberg
  205. TJTPhotography.com – Ted Truex
  206. Thamer Al-Hassan Photographer – Thamer Al-Hassan
  207. Top 11 of ‘11 – Brian Arnold
  208. Looking Back – 2011 Top Ten – Jessica Sweeney
  209. Light Coming Back – Favorite Images of 2011 – Jennifer Durham
  210. My Favorite Landscape Photos of 2011 – Joshua Cripps
  211. Favorites Photographs from 2011 – Sudheendra Kadri
  212. João Almeida Photography – João Almeida
  213. Five Pictures for 2011 – David Lloyd
  214. Ian Ference – Google+ Top Photos 2011 – Ian Ference
  215. Marcin P?kalski – Google+ – Marcin P?kalski
  216. www.thephotographerblog.com – Mandy Jones
  217. My Top 10 of 2011 – Clement Biger
  218. russell.tomlin at Flickr – Russell S Tomlin
  219. My Top 10 shots for 2011 – Greg Berdan
  220. Best of 2011 – Dan Baumbach
  221. Top Photos 2011 by Mark Dodge Medlin – Mark Dodge Medlin
  222. The Carey Adventures – Peter West Carey
  223. http://www.wildernessadventureimages.com/ – Michael Burkhardt
  224. “Looking at the West – Andrew McAllister
  225. Photos and Ramblings by Steve Mattheis – Steve Mattheis
  226. My Favorite Photos of 2011 – Brandon Doran
  227. Shanti Gilbert – Best Of 2011 – Shanti Gilbert
  228. “10 of 2011 – David S. Ottavio
  229. Best photos from 2011 – Mark J P
  230. Heather’s Flickr – 2011 Top 10 – Heather Wallace
  231. Ben Chase Photography – Benjamin Chase
  232. Hypo-theses – Ian Stimpson
  233. “Best photos of 2011 – Robert Kusztos
  234. “Best of 2011 – Anton Huo
  235. Best of 2011: JMG Gallery – Stephen Zacharias
  236. Flickr Best of 2011 – Esther Reyes
  237. My Top 10 of 2011 – The Siggins Photography – Richard Siggins
  238. Andrew Benson | Best of 2011 – Andrew Benson
  239. http://www.johnpaulcaponigro.com/blog/ – John Paul Caponigro
  240. Google+ – Jim Davis
  241. Google + – Paul Conrad
  242. Avelino’s Best of 2011 – Avelino Maestas
  243. JMK Photography’s Best of 2011 – J. Krasner
  244. Rob Dweck’s Top 10 From 2011 – Rob Dweck
  245. www.myFedoraPhoto.com – Neal Fedora
  246. Best of 2011 on Google+ – Robert Mann
  247. My Favorites from 2011 – Michele Wassell
  248. My Top 10 Images of 2011 – Tom Bushey
  249. Favorite Images from 2011 – James B Martin
  250. shirley lo photos – shirley lo
  251. Google+ – Christina Lawrie – Christina Lawrie
  252. Gary Randall Photography – 2011 – Year in Review – Gary Randall
  253. 2011 faves – Anthony Chiong
  254. NewmanImages: 2011 in Retrospect – Jay and Sue Newman
  255. My 11 favorite pictures of 2011 – Marc Perkins
  256. My Best Images of 2011 – Vaibhav Tripathi
  257. My Best Shots 2011 – Annika Ruohonen
  258. Top 11 Photos of 2011 – Shane Srogi
  259. Wolfcats Top 10 images – Wolfcat
  260. Alexander Filatov Photography – Alexander Filatov
  261. Wendy Baker Photography Best of 2011 – Wendy Baker
  262. My 6 best of 2011 – Patrick Smith
  263. randomfire: The best of 2011 – Ramin Miraftabi
  264. Closing California Parks – Eliya Selhub
  265. MY BEST OF 2011 – Stan Rapada
  266. 2011 Top 10 – Kyle Jones
  267. 2011 Studies | Best of 2011 – Oskar Bruening

Quality time with an American Bittern

American Bittern, Merced National Wildlife Refuge. This bird flew out past my car, doubled back and disappeared into the rushes. I dind't expect to see it, but when I drove up to where it had bee, there it was, hanging out halfway up the reeds and trying its darnest to convince me it wasn't there. At this point, I am maybe 3 meters from it. It was wary but didn't seem to be stressed, so I took a short period of time to get some images, and then got away from it so it could get to a safer place.=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+To download a low-resolution version of this image, right-click on it. The low-resolution image is free to use and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use or to use it in an altered form without my explicit permission. If you wish to buy a print of this impage or license it for commercial use (you will receive a full-resolution, non-watermarked jpeg), you can do so in the store by clicking on the Buy button.

American Bittern, Merced National Wildlife Refuge.

This bird flew out past my car, doubled back and disappeared into the rushes. I didn’t expect to see it again, but when I drove up to where it had bee, there it was, hanging out halfway up the reeds and trying its darnest to convince me it wasn’t there.

At this point, I am maybe 3 meters from it. It was wary but didn’t seem to be stressed, so I took a short period of time to get some images, and then got away from it so it could get to a safer place. There is a judgement call to be made in a situation like this. You don’t want to stress the bird or cause it problems. I am, honestly, way too close to it, but I don’t have many options because I can’t move the car without risking making it flee. If it’d shown any sign of panic, I’d have left and gotten away from it. It seemed comfortable that I didn’t see it and was willing to watch me instead.

I stayed with the bird for a total of three minutes, trying my damnedest not to make any moves it would see as a threat. It didn’t move at all, other than shifting a tiny bit to keep a watch on me. After that, I thanked it for its patience and got far away from it so it could get to a more defensible position and relax. When I checked back later, it was long gone (but probably within 50 feet of where I’d seen it, just out of sight).

 

How not to be a doofus with a camera

The one thing that marred the visit to Merced was that I ran into a couple of doofuses. Here’s a quick guide on how not to be a doofus with a camera (or binoculars).

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The “Area Beyond This Sign Closed” sign evidently didn’t apply to this couple, who entered the refuge shortly after I did and headed back into tour area ahead of me. The car is significantly beyond the “do not enter” sign, and they are significantly beyond that. What you don’t see or hear here were the three or four coyotes that were actively making a lot of noise somewhere off to the left of this scene but between me and them. Sorry, but “it’s okay if the ranger doesn’t catch us” doesn’t sit well with me. I guess it’s also okay if the coyotes decide  not to catch them, too.

These two seemed to be fairly knowledgable birders and at first glance their gear seemed to be of the “okay, they’re serious about this” quality. Not “take out a mortgage” glass, but “we’ve upgraded once or twice” glass. One would hope that serious birders would know to stick to the rules and not do things that impact the birds. Unfortunately, for some birders, “getting the bird” is most important, even to the detriment of the bird.

In fact, this is a minor transgression. They’re on a maintenance road. It’s just annoying to me when I see someone who’s first act when they arrive at a place like this is to put themselves above the rules. Rules which are there to protect them and to protect the birds they were interested in enough to come and visit. I just don’t have a lot of patience with the “it’s okay if I don’t get caught” mentality. Of course, you never know who might know the rangers and email them a picture of them, their car, and their license plate…

Just saying’.

But the big doofus was in the afternoon. I’ve made my fourth trip through the refuge, this one to sit with the geese until the light fails or they leave. The geese are being moderately cooperative, with about 10,000 sitting in a large group with the close edge about 50 yards off the road, just past the back observation area. I’ve found a parking spot where I have good views, good light, good angles, I’m off the road, and I’m in the car shooting, watching and hanging out.

And along comes a photographer, walking up the access road, camera, tripod. Pro-caliber Nikon body, pro-caliber nikon lens. expensive tripod. He walks up, and proceeds to set up and start shooting. Right directly in front of me, directly in my line of sight.

Okay, say freaking WHAT? It’s not like my car’s invisible. I decided to defer having a cow and give him some time to get some shots in. Instead, I grabbed my long lens and started taking flight shots around him, since he only moderately impacted that. When he heard my camera going off, he looked, saw the lens, and asked me if he was in my way. And I noted that yes, at some point he was going to be impacting my shots. So he then said “well, tell me when I am” and turned around and went back to shooting. After about five minutes of that, he graciously decided that was good enough and moved to a new location off my rear fender that was out of my line of sight.

This is wrong on any number of levels. First of all, you don’t just plop yourself down in front of someone and start shooting as if they aren’t there. He compounded this — his actions and the way he said things made it clear to me that until he realized I was also a photographer that this was okay. It was only once he realized I had a camera that he worried about impacting my sight lines. It doesn’t matter if I have a camera or if I’m just there for, say, a gorgeous sunset with the geese, you don’t have the right to decide to just set up camp in front of me.  I was mildly annoyed when he did it. I was majorly annoyed when I realized he thought it was okay until he realized I was another photographer, because that implies that he does this to others as well, because, evidently, his camera gives him right of priority view or something. And that he did it without acknowledging my presence until I hauled out a lens about as big as his.

I didn’t make a deal with it with him directly, because nothing good ever happens when you do, but man, this is annoying, because it’s this kind of behavior that gives all photographers a bad rep. When someone with a lens wades in and just plays this kind of game, it makes us all look bad to non photographers. So, kids, when you have a lens out, remember that your actions and how you act leaves an impression on those around you, and that impression is not just about you (and what a doofus you are), but on photographers in general. If you don’t care what people think about you (and I clearly think this man is a doofus) worry about what people think about all of us other photographers. Because it’s actions like this that get all photographer’s access restricted, when enough doofuses do things that annoy non-photographers enough to start making rules.

But it gets better. Or worse, I guess.

The other thing my friend didn’t realize was that he was scaring off the geese.  He was standing out in the open moving around a lot, shifting his camera around. Every time he did, a few geese closest to him took off and flew off or flew deeper into the pack. I figured it was only a matter of time before he spooked a goose that spooked the flock and caused them all to leave.

Okay, a quick digression. Refuges allow access to restricted parts of the refuge. Many parts are out of bounds so that the birds can go places where they don’t have to deal with the stress of interacting with humans. that’s why humans shouldn’t be going into out of bounds places. At refuges like Merced, access is via a gravel road set up as an auto tour. One of the rules they encourage you to follow is to stay in the car, and use it as a blind. There’s a reason for that: the shape of a human scares the wildlife, and they move away from you, or they leave. If you’re carrying a big camera with a long lens, it looks an awful lot to geese like that other long, pointy thing that got pointed at uncle bob before he fell out of the sky and was never seen again. When you’re that close, the geese are going to notice you and react to you, especially if you’re moving around a lot.

What ultimately happened, though, was that another photographer arrived, parked back up the road a bit, and walked out from behind the screening trees to where the rest of us were (three or four cars, the photographer wandering around. fairly big crowd, actually). He was wearing a red sweatshirt, and got two steps out from behind the screening brush. The flock jumped, and suddenly we had 10-12,000 geese in the air in total chaos. Within a minute, they’d organized and flown off, and we were all sitting there staring at an empty pond.

That is why the rangers tell you to stay in the car, and use it as a blind. Because these folks didn’t, the rest of us lost access to the birds, too. Show over. So much for trying to get a picture of the flock in golden hour light.

If the first photographer had been more aware of how is movements were putting the geese on alert, the second photographer appearing might not have spooked them. Or maybe he would have. Or maybe nothing would have happened (but in the previous times i’ve been in this situation, there’s a fairly decent change they’ll find a reason to get spooked, whether it’s person, noise, or raptor. But one can hope). The point is, I guess, is that if people had been following the recommended rules, the chances we’d have had a longer time watching the birds would have gone up significantly. By being that close to the flock and unaware of what their actions were doing to the birds, they messed it up for all of us.

If you’re going to shoot wildlife, you should strive to understand their behaviors and know how to minimize your impact on them. Failing that, at least know what the rules of the refuge are and follow them, because they’re designed to help you do that. It’s sad and frustrating when I see people who seem oblivious to the stress they’re putting on the animals; this isn’t Disneyland, and these aren’t audio-anamatronic robots.

I’m still wondering what that morning couple’s plan was if those coyotes decided to come out and say hi. They were, after all, only 100-150 yards out from their position. Fortunately, a coyote is generally uninterested in taking on a person, but there were at least three in a group together. That’s not a situation I particularly want to be in, out in the open with a coyote between me and my car where I might be safe. What I did was watch from the “do not pass this point” sign for a couple of minutes, just to make sure there was no sign of the coyotes moving, then I wished them luck on whatever they were doing and moved on. I wonder if they even realized the coyotes were there? (they were sure noisy enough…)

And my friend the doofus? I guess I see that kind of behavior often enough now that it’s merely annoying. If he hadn’t moved, I’d have eventually escalated the situation, but I figured if I gave it time, it’d solve itself without creating a fight, and it did. Once they scared off the flock, there was no reason to stay, so I fired up the car and headed back to the front of the refuge, because if there’s no active flock involved, that’s a better place to photograph the evening fly-in (except when it’s not), where I ran into a nice couple who was there for the first time, and I spent some time trying to help them with what to expect. It was, unfortunately, a fairly weak fly-in, with the cranes mostly missing until very late when they all flew in at once, and the geese — well, they’d already flown off to the evening roost for some reason, so activity was low.

But still, even a lousy sunset on the refuge is better than most things…. And I’ll give this one a C+.

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Dawn Breaks at Merced

Sunrise at Merced National Wildlife Refuge by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com
Dawn breaks at the Merced Refuge. Or it tries to — the tule fog has other ideas. The Geese see if before you do, and the sound of the morning chorus echoes through the fog.

The alarm went off at 4AM, at that point, my only goal in life is to shut it up and get into the shower so Laurie can keep sleeping. The shower gets you going. I know the Starbucks will be open — the one 45 minutes down the road.  Welcome to the glorious life of the nature photographer. Bed beckons. So do the Geese. This time, the geese win.

The sun vainly tries to lighten the sky, but for a while the tule fog beats it back, leaving it a faint cold smudge. Then the geese roar to life and leap to the sky, flying out for a day’s work of whatever it is geese do.

It’s 7:15AM. The geese’s day has just started. Mine is three hours old and 120 miles from the bed already. And all I can think of is whether I’ll end up with anything worth showing to the world.

Sunrise at Merced National Wildlife Refuge by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

What you don’t see of course, the first thing I saw, was the huge blotch of sensor dust front and center. I’m really, really hoping it’s not on every image I took with that body the entire day, but I’m guessing it is. That’s Lord Murphy for you, a quiet “don’t get cocky, kid” — that dust blotch wasn’t there yesterday when I checked. But it was fixable. This time, this image.

This is the first published images off of my new T3i and my 24-104F4L lens. They are going to become best buddies, and dust blotches notwithstanding, this seems to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. By the time this day is done, I’ll have driven 400 miles, been on the road almost 16 hours, and shot over 1,000 raw images, taking in both a sunrise and a sunset at the refuge, and visiting another nice birding place in the vicinity during mid-day times. I found a nice decrepit barn and forgot to take a scouting shot (but it needs late afternoon sun), spent some good quality time with tens of thousands of Ross’s Geese, and got home exhausted and happy.

And had plenty of time to think about how I wanted to do things when I wasn’t sitting with my finger on a shutter button.  Sometimes it’s about getting alone with your thoughts because it’s the only way to sort them out. And sometimes, it’s the only way to stop avoiding them…

But mostly, it’s about the birds, and the world they live in, and figuring out how to bring it to life for those not privileged to be there in person (yet).

Faux G

parislemon • “4G”:

As Sullivan points out, the iPhone and the Galaxy are getting the exact same speeds. That’s because AT&T’s network is actually HSPA+, which the iPhone supports but refuses to call “4G” even though AT&T does.

Why does AT&T call it 4G? Because they were one to two years behind their competitors in rolling out an actual 4G network. In other words, when all hope fades, lie.

In AT&T’s parlance, real 4G is “4G LTE”.

 

You didn’t hear this from me, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if asking the right people, you might find out that AT&T wasn’t the only carrier seriously working to play the “Faux G” marketing naming game…

 

 

Testing the new lenses…

I had to go visit the dentist this week, and I had just enough time free before the appointment that I could sneak down to the Palo Alto Duck Pond with my gear and do some head to head tests and start learning how the new lenses are going to operate.

This exercise was intended to try to understand a couple of things: first, how well the image quality of the T3i stands up to the 7D, so I know what situations I have to depend on the 7D, and when I can use the 2nd body. Second, I want to get some sharpness tests of the 70-200F2.8l+2.x combo against the 300F4+1.4x to see whether the former would work as my birding rig, and if not, how far can I push it before image quality starts to fail. And third, I’ve just had this nagging question about whether the 7D needs to be serviced and whether it’s giving me the clean, sharp images I expect from it.

To try to start figuring this out, I sat next to the pond (trying to avoid the kids with the bag of bread and the resulting chaos, not always successfully) and shoot the same subjects at the same time using the same settings so I have some rational images to do comparisons with. For all of these images, both bodies were set to ISO 400, AF to the center sensor, Aperture mode (adjusted by +2/3 stop as I typically do), with AF set to AI Servo and autoexposure to Center Weighted Average; I had no custom settings set.

These images are shot raw, with almost no processing; perhaps a bit of exposure and contrast tweaking, but all have the same default sharpening and no noise reduction or lens correction. The camera profile was set to camera neutral. All lenses were shot hand held, with IS on, set to setting 2.

Also, just to be clear, here’s the list of lenses and bodies I’m experimenting with. You have to be really careful because after a while, all of the letters can start running together, and it matters whether it’s the “70-200F2.8L IS” or the “70-200F2.8L IS II”. The “2.X II” teleconverter isn’t as sharp as the newer “2.X III”, but if you aren’t paying close attention, you can miss the difference in the model naming.

  • 7d body
  • T3i body
  • 70-200F2.8L IS (not “IS II”)
  • 2.x Teleconverter II
  • 1.4X Teleconverter II
  • 300 F4 IS

Click through each image to see the large version:

Here’s a second round, shooting at something close up instead of relatively far away:

 

So my verdict?

If you look at those last two images side by side, you can see an obvious difference:

The right image is significantly sharper. That’s the 300F4+1.4x combo. The 70-200+2X seems to be acceptably sharp up to about 300mm, and then softens. In some cases, especially with relatively close birds, it might be “good enough” if the other lens isn’t available, but honestly, I think that’s wishful thinking. It’s just too soft. The quick testing I did with the 70-200 with the 1.4x seems to be nicely sharp, but even that the sharpness falls off as it heads towards max magnification.

This is normal with teleconverters. It’s not a matter of whether the image will degrade, but whether that degradation is acceptable. The 2x will soften your image; don’t pretend your 300+1.4x is going to be as good as a 400F4 — this is understanding the tradeoffs between quality, budget and having to hire a sherpa with a mule to carry it all.

So, my bottom line?

I’m not seeing any significant change in image quality between the 7d and the T3i. This is good; I didn’t expect to, since they use the same sensor down in the bowels; the pricing difference between the two bodies is primarily about manufacturing and features — and when you pick the two up in each hand, you can definitely tell the difference. The 7d feels built like a rock, the T3i feels more “plasticky” and is definitely lighter. It seems perfect for my needs as a 2nd body, though, and a good value compared to the 7D. (this also implies there’s no obvious issues with the 7D body indicating it needs a trip to the shop. also good). This means I can feel comfortable using both bodies, within the limits of the T3i — for instance, the more limited buffer for burst shooting.

The 70-200+2x combo is noticeably softer at 400mm than the 300+1.4x is; for my purposes, it’s “too soft”. This doesn’t surprise me much. I was hoping I could use it as my primary birding gear, but I wasn’t depending on it. I now know to stick with the 300 setup for that. From what I can tell, the 70-200+2x is acceptably sharp up to about 300mm, so in a pinch, I can use it if the 300mm is handy with some limitations, but the 70-200+1.4x is even sharper in that range, so I should use that instead.

Shooting at F8 helps, as you might expect, when compared to wide open. But doesn’t make enough of a change to change the results.

(and because I want to be clear on this: this isn’t a ‘problem’ with the lens. I was experimenting to see if I could push the envelope in an attempt to lighten the kit I haul around. I thought it was unlikely I’d get away with this without spending a lot more money on the 70-200F2.8 IS II lens, which is just beyond my budget. My opinion, honestly, was that I’d rather buy these lenses now and save up for my 500mm than put even more money into the more expensive 70-200. That’s all part of looking at the bigger and long-term picture of what your needs and priorities are….

The attempt was worth a shot, and now I know. Doing these kinds of tests is an aspect of learning your gear, so you know without thinking (or worrying!) what to grab to make a shot happen. If you know what the gear can do — and what it can’t — you can focus more on the shot, and less on wondering if you’re going to get it.

Do you know how your lens will react if you change it from F5.6 to F11?  What center-weighted exposure mode does vs. evaluative, and when to use which?

you really should, because if you stop to think through which settings to use when, by the time you think it through, the shot will be gone. Putting time into experiments like this is part of the process of making the gear more invisible to the moment.

 

 

 

 

The next CBA fight begins…

NHL delays realignment after NHLPA refuses consent – NHL.com – News:

The National Hockey League announced today that it will not move forward with implementation of the Realignment Plan and modified Playoff Format recently approved by the NHL Board of Governors for the 2012-13 NHL season because the NHLPA has refused to provide its consent.

“It is unfortunate that the NHLPA has unreasonably refused to approve a Plan that an overwhelming majority of our Clubs voted to support, and that has received such widespread support from our fans and other members of the hockey community, including Players,” said NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly.  “We have now spent the better part of four weeks attempting to satisfy the NHLPA’s purported concerns with the Plan with no success.  Because we have already been forced to delay, and as a result are already late in beginning the process of preparing next season’s schedule, we have no choice but to abandon our intention to implement the Realignment Plan and modified Playoff Format for next season.”

“We believe the Union acted unreasonably in violation of the League’s rights.  We intend to evaluate all of our available legal options and to pursue adequate remedies, as appropriate.”

So the player’s union has balked at realignment, and the owners have delayed implementing.

Are you surprised? I’m not.

For all the rhetoric, this issue has almost nothing to do with realignment. It’s about jousting for power, and aligning up the forces for the next labor negotiation, coming to your sports talk shows way sooner than most fans want to believe.

If you think back to the last labor negotiation, one of the things the owners talked about was making the players a partner in the business, and everyone shook hands and said nice things to each other and signed the CBA and went back to work. And the owners have brought the players into discussion on policy — in very limited ways, practically speaking. Things like the competition committee, which has seen players resign from it because they felt it was being ignored.

I think the owners intended well here. I also think, ultimately, that we have to remember that the owners are owners, and the players are, well, employees. The players would like the owners to continue putting up the money, but the players would like to be a able to tell the owners what to do as well. Oh, sorry. be more involved in decisions that the owners are making.  And since the owners are, in fact, putting up the money, they don’t seem to agree.

So this fight was inevitable. When the players brought in Donald Fehr, they telegraphs that this was going to happen. And this is really a fight over what things the players should have a say in, and what things the owners feel the owners should be able to decide on their own.

In other words, a typical battle between management and labor that will be hashed out in endless detail that will bore the crap out of even the lawyers involved before it’s done.

So I now invoke my “labor negotiation recommendation” — both sides are now in full rhetoric to sway and influence the fans and media to listen to and support their side in the upcoming labor talks, so believe nothing either side says. It’s all posturing. Take none of it seriously.

By deferring this out of next season, the NHL has removed it as a possible short term lever of influence from the NHLPA, and made it something that will ultimately be hashed out in the CBA negotiations. My prediction: the owners will get what they want. they union will get some concession for “allowing” it. Both sides declare victory. Fans will grind their teeth and wonder why the two sides can’t just work these things out — and the answer to that is “because the way labor negotiations are structures, that’s not possible”.

Remember, in labor negotiations, there is never a deal until the last possible moment, or somewhat beyond that moment, because no matter what, if the two sides come to agreement earlier than that, someone will criticize one side or the other (or both sides) that if they’d pushed harder, they’d have gotten a better deal. Therefore, as fans, simply plan for lots of screaming and yelling and threats and bluster, and then expect a last minute deal of some sort (where “last minute” may include ‘losing’ stuff that doesn’t matter much, like pre-season, games in october, or as in the case of the NBA, anything before christmas when the owners aren’t making much money, the TV networks don’t really care, and the players would rather be on the beach surfing… If you don’t think the first have of a pro sports season isn’t filler to make time and sell tickets until the real season kicks in later, think again. If the owners and players could figure out how to convince everyone to pay for 45 game playoffs, you can bet they’d do it in a minute and throw the regular season away. and the Networks would love them for it…)

This is simply the union starting labor negotiations early, and letting the owners know they don’t plan on being patsies. The owners pretty clearly knew exactly what was going to happen. It almost feels scripted from both sides, which it probably was. And now, the jousting begins.

To me, this is actually good news. If they start the arguing now instead of waiting for formal CBA negotiations to begin, I have hopes they’ll be able to solve more of the issues early, and have some idea how to generate a new CBA without any (or any significant) stoppage in the league. Better they start drawing battle lines early and figuring out how to work out the framework of the next deal early than not talk to each other and let it drag on deep into a locked-out season later.

For me, I’m going to watch this with interest. But believe almost nothing that’s said. I suggest the rest of you do that, too. Anything said from now until they sign the next CBA is going to be posturing towards the next deal, and therefore, assume they’re lying. Because they probably are…

(by the way, as far as I can tell, the NHLPA has no legal right to demand a say in this decision; this is an issue which is traditionally something the owners have had complete control over without union input. They seem to be invoking language involving travel rules, but that seems — stretching it. That, of course, is what Donald Fehr is all about. And why the union hired him.

The union could have tried to force the issue into court or arbitration, and probably would have. Given that, it makes sense for the owners to delay implementation and add it to the list of things to negotiate in the CBA. If the next labor negotiations were a couple of more years out than they are, they probably would have pushed back. And it seems obvious the owners believed this was going to happen and more or less intended to let it happen all along, given how I’m reading Bill Daly’s formal response to the union’s formal response…)

 

Horrors! Fans pick the all stars they want in the All Star game!

NHL names All-Star Game starters:

The NHL has just revealed its All-Star Game’s final six fan voting leaders and starters: Ottawa Senators forwards Daniel Alfredsson, Jason Spezza and Milan Michalek will be joined by fellow Sen Erik Karlsson and Toronto Maple Leafs captain Dion Phaneuf on defense, and Boston Bruins goalie Tim Thomas will start in goal.

It must be all-star game season again, because the fans have been voting, the players selected, and the usual suspects are complaining about it. Typically, this means some members of the press and media bitch and moan, because it seems the fans are not actually competent to choose who the fans want to see in the All-Star game. Instead, if you listen to these media people, that responsibility should be passed over to the people who really know best — the media.

No conflict of interest or enraged egos here. Nope.

My take: it’s a silly All-Star game. who cares? To some folks (mostly media types, it seems), that the fans are actually interested and motivated to get involved and vote is a bad thing. These media types seem to prefer the fans stay quiet and uninvolved, and simply do what the media tell them to do instead of think for themselves. I wonder why?

Me? I’ll take anything that gets fans involved and motivated and active and noisy. Especially since — ultimately, it doesn’t matter WHO is chosen, just that players get chosen. If they all want to band together and send the backup goalie from Muskegon? Great! At least the fans are involved. And 48 hours after the game, not only will nobody care, nobody will remember — except that backup goalie, who will have a weekend he’ll never forget.

There are some members of the media who take everything way too seriously, and need to chill out. There are other members of the media who simply look for any excuse to find fault with the NHL and the game and complain. And there are some members of the media who seem to think they should be in charge, and we should all shut up and listen to them (hello, Ken Campbell) and just do what they say.

My suggestion: anyone who is complaining about how the voting is done for the All-Star game is a media person you should serious consider no longer reading or paying attention to.

I think the NHL has done a very good job of creating a way for fans to get involved, while limiting the problems of fan voting filling the rosters full of semi-qualified players. the current system seems to work quite well in limiting the politics and removing some of the common challenges of roster building.

But beyond that, it’s an All-Star game. A time to relax, party a bit (and let the league help their sponsors party and network), honor some players, have a good time, and not think too hard about it. Anyone who starts worrying about this like it’s the end of the world, I honestly suggest you turn off the TV that weekend and go skiing instead. Or stop listening to the media folks who keep trying to turn things like this into crises, because honestly, all they’re looking for is lazy columns that are easy to write. Or chances to write about how much smarter they are than everyone else. Either way, not the kind of stuff I feel like reading.

Me? I don’t vote for All-stars, haven’t for years. I don’t worry about who gets voted in. I don’t worry about how the team is chosen. I went to the game in San Jose, got mugged by both the mascots from Tampa, gave the Florida panther mascot some cough drops because he needed them even more than I did that year, and had a great time. And every year, I sit down and watch the All-Star game, unless I have something I want to do more. Either way, I have fun. Both ways, I take this about as seriously as it deserves to be taken.

And I suggest everyone do the same. Relax. Vote (or not). Watch (or not). and have a good time. There are serious issues in the league that deserve attention and consideration (and column inches). This is not one of them.

 

Close but no cigar….

Behold the Say’s Phoebe.

One of my test images using the 70-200+2x combo. This could well have been a really nice photo, with one minor problem. That being the stupid bird is flying away from me. But even so, I kinda like it. This is actually heavily cropped; I like the sharpness and the wing detail. Even shooting at 800ISO with the 7D, the noise cleaned up nicely. I was madly trying to get the camera/lens to AF using spot focus as the bird hovered and flew around looking for a bug to eat, and this is an image where it locked in well. The 70-200 color rendition seems different than the 100-400 in subtle ways, but I like it. It’s going to take a bit of getting used to and experimentation to understand how to process images well, but I’m starting to get a feel for it.

 

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Now, if only the stupid bird would TURN AROUND.

(in reality, none of my shots from Coyote Valley were keepers, but some were interesting in various ways anyway, and useful for figuring out the lens, which was the real point anyway…)

 

A last bit on 2011 and 2012, before you all shoot me for writing novels…

One last piece on leaving 2011 and entering 2012, before you all have me shot for writing endlessly on the topic. But for me, the reality is that the timing of the job change and some of the things that went down in the last year turn this transition into a big thing, both in reality (because of the timing of the new gig) and symbolically (because I really like being able to lay 2011 down and watch it fade into the past, even if that’s really just a symbolic thing). I had hopes 2011 would be a pretty good year, and in ways it was, and in other ways, thanks in large part to Leo, it really, really sucked. oh well. We’ll give it a C, because right now for some reason I’m into letter grades for things. (or maybe going back to my 2nd grade report card, something like “English: A, handwriting: F” — the good was really good, the not so good was, well, really good-not-so).

So we’ll try again in 2012, and do our best.

I’ve gotten the usual “why do you post this stuff?” of which their is a common subtext of “Oh my god, I’m too afraid of what people might think to post stuff like this”. I understand the fear completely. It’s tough to get past. Most people are afraid people will look down on them for having problems (or admitting to them). I’ve found the opposite: I hear from people who are amazed someone is willing to talk about them openly. And in some cases, I hear from folks that it helps:  when I talked about my sleep apnea, I heard from three people who went to doctors and getting under treatment, on the diabetes, four that I know of. Being part of helping someone avoid a problem or crisis? Priceless. (For a recent reminder of this, there’s a nice blog post by Jason, over on Webomatica. some of his thoughts this year echo some things I’ve been chewing on again as well).

The main reason I do this, though, is that the process of thinking through what to write and organizing it is what I need to actually crystalize my thoughts and feelings and understand them for myself. I put them here on the blog because that way, when I come back to review them over time, they’re there — and I can’t edit the past on myself as easily. It helps (forces!) me to be honest with myself, and these journal entries when viewed over time help me see how my thoughts and priorities and attitudes have changed over time. I must admit that, having left a trail of babbling that goes back on the internet into the early 1980s, that I sometimes wake up from a nightmare where I’ve found myself turned into some PhD student’s thesis… But hopefully, that won’t happen until I no longer have reason to care…

The last few months, for some reason, I have been thinking about starting a second blog. This other blog would be private, and password protected. And have a deadman’s switch, where if I don’t go and reset the dates, it’ll out itself, because, well, the assumption is that I’m no longer able to. And then I realize it’d be a really boring thing, because no, I’m not going to put stuff in it that I wouldn’t put in here. No salacious crap, no hidden diatribes about who screwed up what with webOS, no special notes about that secret weekend with the Queen Mother. None of that. Well, maybe some. But I’m not ready to accept my own mortality to that level yet, much as I realize I may not have a say in the matter.

In any event, onward. My priorities for 2012 are pretty simple: figure out my blog, upgrade it so it better represents who I am today, because I think it’s still somewhat lost in the muddled idea of what I was that was part of the decision to leave Apple. Now I know who that person is, and I really like how it turned out, and now, my online presence needs to better represent that.

That interest in representing my vision is what’s pushing me forward in my photography again. And it’s why after all these years I’d dragged out my old writing and the unfinished novels and I’m taking a close look at it — although to be honest, and I’m a much different writer than i was then, and most of what I left unfinished deserves to be, so that’s all going to be a fresh start. All I’m keeping are the core ideas.

So what should you expect from me this year?

More of the same. But more me. More commentary. I think I’ll wade into some of the geek and tech echo chamber discussions more. I want to talk a bit less about photography, but write about it more (and if you don’t understand the difference, maybe I’ll explain it later). The occasional picture of a kitteh or a puppy or a unicorn, just for old time’s sake. And if I get to the fiction, and it doesn’t suck and doesn’t make me crazy doing it, you’ll see some of it here, too.

I want to get serious about the ebook work; the backup series I wrote is on the list for conversion to a more substantial and packaged form. Ditto some of my lightroom writings. I’m going to do more reviews, and while some of that will include affiliate links, I have no intention of trying to turn this place into a revenue generator or blow up the design in search of page views and ad clicks. If I try, please shoot me. Turning your blog into something that looks like a neon whorehouse on New Years in search of micro payments for clicks just seems like a losing proposition to me (even though I know some people make good money at it); the most my affiliate links have ever done in a month is about $15, and most months, it’s <$5. Maybe I’ll sell a few prints, sell a few ebooks. If so, great. If not, Google Adsense isn’t going to pay the rent and I’m not interested in giving up the screen real estate and turn this site into a billboard chasing it.

If a writing opportunity hits that makes sense on some other site, I might consider it, now that I’m away from HP and the conflicts that entailed. But I’m not looking to chase those; I’d rather focus on my own site and writing for now.

And I have to decide whether I’m really serious about getting into writing apps; I have some ideas that are intriguing. I’m not such if they’re viable, or if I want to commit the time to implement them. That’s a decision I have to put time into and probably won’t happen until summer, if then. (and yes, I’ll be writing for IOS and perhaps WinMobile. Sorry, webOS folks; if and when there are viable hardware devices, we can talk. And android just doesn’t interest me, and the numbers back on paid apps with android just don’t give me a warm feeling; it may be no platform makes me feel like it’s worth the investment. we’ll see). The big challenge I see is that I think if I try to do blog + photos + fiction + apps I’m spreading too thin. It may well come down to making a choice between going into app development or going back into fiction writing, and I don’t know which way I’ll choose. I know my heart says “Novel!” right now, but maybe that’s just a fling with my past, and my head will change that decision… honestly, it’s fun not having easy answers, because sometimes, the real fun is in the chase, not the catch.

Heck, if the answers were easy, it wouldn’t be worth chasing, right?

Hope your 2012 rocks. Don’t be afraid to thrive.

 

 

we’re having the comment fight again…

While I wasn’t looking, it looks like the “Comments: good idea, or tool of Satan?” fight has broken out again. Matt Gemmell fired it off:

Comments Still Off – Matt Gemmell:

Just over a month ago, I switched comments off for this blog. I wanted to post a very brief follow-up on that decision.

 

In a nutshell, it was definitely the right move.

 

but a number of people with a clue have chimed in, including:

 

That’s some heavy talent with a lot of experience in dealing with the practical realities of this issue. Who’s right?

They all are. It comes down to what you’re trying to accomplish and what you want for your own blog or publication.

I will note for the record that this discussion happened across the various blogs for the most part, and also note for the record that if it had happened in the comment section of any of the blogs except for Fred Wilson’s, it would have gotten buried and almost nobody would have seen it because comments are notorious for not ending up in RSS feeds, search engines and the like, and most rational people get to about the third troll in a busy comment area and bail out, because they have better things to do than wade into the mosh pit.

Which is my way of noting that while comment sections definitely can work (and do, if you work at them), most comment sections fail the “why am I looking at this?” test pretty quickly, Fred Wilson’s blog being a notable exception. And Youtube being a site that proves the rule beyond any need to argue, because, as usual, absent landlords end up breeding slums.

Now, I use Disqus on my blog, and Akismet, and I have almost no spam problem, because my blog is small and generally ignored by the spammers and trolls. I’m also pretty careful to vet comments and back links and don’t encourage trolls and don’t post trackback links that point to spammy sites, which I think discourages them from trying a bit. And mostly, because I’m small I don’t get lots of comments in the first place. If I got popular (hah! not likely) and started seeing high numbers of comments (I wish!) I might change my mind and go commentless without feeling guilty. I think right now, they’re a net positive to my site, but I long ago stopped seeing them as necessary, required or some kind of freaking inalienable right like some people (mostly trolls, I think) do. Heck, if I were a troll, I’d demand free places to do my trolling and insist on no adult supervision, too. I’d love to spend other people’s nickels to spread my opinions…

So my bottom line is that comments are useful, but are mostly broken. You need to put too much work into them to keep them useful — even disqus, which I think does a better job than the others I’ve looked at. But I’m not sure “nuclear” is the ultimate answer here, either.

Some suggestions:

I’d like a way to configure Disqus to turn off commenting after a period of time (like 30 days, or after 3-4 days of no comments); there is little reason to carry on a conversation after it dies down the first time, and so open comments (and trackbacks on blogs) after a couple of weeks is useful only to spammers; reduce the places they have a chance to lay their stuff by turning comments off on older material.

I’d like a way to feature good comments, give them a visibility that doesn’t exist right now. Great example: The Online Photographer, which as far as I can tell, is manually editing them into the body of the article. It’d be awesome if Disqus supported a way in the admin interface to click a checkbox “feature this” and have them appear “above the fold”, so that we can start curating the good comments into the conversation stream as a way of giving them visibility, instead of only trying to keep the noise down by moderating out the worst stuff.

But really, this is a job for a reputation engine. Disqus is well suited to implement this, and spread a reputation across all sites that use Disqus. Allow a site to define what minimum reputation is needed to display them on a site, and track the +1 and abuse flagging back to the Disqus user to generate their reputation. the trolls will sink, and a site owner can choose just where to draw a line and say “below this, you don’t get on my site”, either by not accepting comments or not displaying them. And then let a disqus user override that on an individual basis if they want. even a decent reputation setup with some minimal metrics would make it a lot easier for a site to choose whether to display or dump the trolls, and if someone does post a troll note, let the other users vote it into oblivion if they want.

I think there’s still a lot of life in comments. Fred’s blog shows the possibility, just as this discussion about comments shows how well the alternate possibility (distributing across many blogs) shows how well it can work as well. But to make the kind of environment Fred’s fostered work without the kind of fostering that someone like Fred (or Teresa Nielsen Hayden does at Making Light) we need better technology underpinnings. Most site owners/admins/moderators don’t have the “touch” to guide a community into becoming what Fred and Teresa have. Or maybe they do, but not the time or will to make it happen.

But isn’t that what all this technology is about? finding ways to enable these things and free humans from having to drudge through the grunt work? And moderating comments is drudge work. serious drudge work. With some thought and some code, we can enable the community to self police itself here. So why not do it?

(and just because I can, here are some previous rants on this topic from previous rounds of this discussion: 2008, 2003, 2011 (think comments as critiques here)

Note 1: my infamous emacs vs. VI joke: What’s the difference between an emacs user and a VI user? Give the Vi user a file and set of changes and they will sit down and edit the changes into the file and then go to lunch. Give it to an Emacs user, they’ll sit down and code a macro that they’ll use to make the changes automatically while they’re at lunch. Afterward, both of them have the changed file, but the Emacs user has a macro that he’ll file in his library of macros and never touch again in his life.

 

Blackbird IDs…

One of the birds that has been hanging around Coyote Valley this winter is the tri-colored blackbird, a species that is seen almost exclusively in California, and has been in decline in recent years, so it’s one that birders and Audubon is tracking and working to help conserve.

It’s nice that a flock of a couple hundred decided to stick with the blackbirds in the south county because otherwise, adding them to the year list means a trip into the central valley and a bit of luck. I ran into them where you normally run into blackbirds — around the cows.

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At first approximation, the way you tell the tricolor from the red-winged blackbird in the field is the epaulet. In the adult male, the red-winged shows, well, red here in California (in other regions, it’s a red/yellow combo, but in California, the yellow is mostly hidden when the bird isn’t flying or displaying). The tricolor shows a white stripe where the red is mostly or completely hidden.

As I was going through my photos, however, I ran into these birds. One is white. One is — well, more of a cream color. Which led me down the path of taking much closer looks at the birds in terms of the ID.

If I’ve got the ID’s right (always an open question around my life), the one on the right is a tricolor. It also has the black and much thicker bill, a slimmer body shape. The bird in the middle is the red-winged. I’m thinking this is a younger bird starting to move into adult plumage, which is why the epaulet is a creamy yellowish rather than bright screaming yellow honker yellow and red; I think the red is hidden here, and the yellow in the epaulet is in process of arriving. But if you look you can see a much thinner bill, the feathering in general has a different shine, and the bird looks chunkier to me.

A nice reminder not to over-rely on any single field mark, because female and juvenile birds will mess you up badly if you do…

(the bird on the left? it’s a brown-headed cowbird. The blackbird flock, which was extended all over the pastures when I was there, is a few thousand birds, including these two species, plus Brewer’s, plus a good number of cowbirds, and of course, our dear friends the European Starling. Better birders than I estimated the tricolor numbers at a couple hundred or so…).

 

photography in 2012

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to accomplish in 2012.

No, that’s not true, what I want to accomplish is easy: push to improve, push to be more relevant, push to generate images that people care about, push to contribute more to the larger community.

What’s not been so clear is how to do that. I have general thoughts, which boil down to “the map says it’s off in that direction, let’s go!” and seeing what happens — and while I”m going to actually DO that, I’ve wanted to have something a bit more concrete in the plan for the year.

I had to have a long talk with myself about why I was doing this — at the core, what was it that makes photography pleasurable. Ultimately, I’ve decided, it’s that I really like seeing my images up on the wall: fine art prints. Something I realize I let kind of disappear when I retired the HP 9180 printer. Does this mean bringing in a new printer and getting back to playing with making images myself? Or do I print images through a lab and frame them up? I dunno. But I’m exploring the latter right now, and at the very least it’s a direction to explore. I think NOT printing my images, going to online/onscreen only, let me relax my mindset on what a quality image was, and so I need to get back into the mental view of requiring my stuff to be better, good enough to warrant being printed on Hahnemuhle Pearl Rag, not just on the monitor.

I need to learn my new lenses, and I intend to dabble in time lapses and video and see what happens. those aren’t goals, those are pure lab experiments.

But I knew I needed something to focus my work. it’s time for (cue dramatic music) a personal project.

Actually, two.

One I’ve known I was going to do for a while. A couple of years ago, a number of bird photographers decided to do an informal contest to see how many species they could photograph in a year. I ended up with about 120 or so, about a third of what the winner got, but it was a lot of fun, and it forced me to focus both on my birding and my bird photography. I’ve decided to do that again this year and see what happens. I’ll be adding some pages to the web site soon to support this, and I’m integrating it into some work I’m designing into the next generation of the site I’m designing.

I wanted something that pushed me in new directions, and I really had no clue what it was. But this morning, as I was working on some images I took yesterday at Coyote Valley, it all came together. One of the reasons I started on the Dare to Thrive project was to showcase what was special about Silicon Valley, away from geekdom, cubes and high tech.

That sounds like a great photo project to me, so that’s what I’m going to do. For 2012, I’m going to be looking for the Silicon Valley most of us don’t see, don’t look for. The parts away from the job that make this place a great place to be. The things take take us beyond a job to having a life. Arbitrarily, I’m going to limit this project to things no more than a 45 mile drive from the center of Silicon Valley, and arbitrarily, I’m setting the center of Silicon Valley to be Infinite Loop in Cupertino, because it amuses me and i=I know it’ll piss off various people, and that also amuses me.

The 45 mile limit is defined specifically to end Silicon Valley short of San Francisco, because to me, that city is many things, but it’s not Silicon Valley. It’s it’s own environment and reality. Once you set the stake in the ground there, we might as well use that to define the boundaries. Since this is all arbitrary, what the heck. It works for me.  And I want to exit 2012 not just with images, but with an ebook that’s published in some form where I tied it all together and show my vision on this, as opposed to just having some photos.

It’ll push my photography into new areas. It’ll push me to visit places I’ve meant to visit but never gotten to. It’ll push me to explore and research and find new places, and research how to get it written and formatted and published, beyond just pushing the shutter button. It seems like a bit of a reach, and that’s why I like the idea. and I’m guessing there will be interesting blog fodder along the way, just because that’s what I do.

To give a sense of what I’m aiming for, here’s an image that is the essence of it.

Northern Harrier by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

In the background is Hangar 1, the historic hanger at Moffett Field that they are now stripping the skin off of because it’s full of asbestos. This is one of my oldest images and one of my favorites, because of the juxtaposition of the open space I’ve come to love around the valley, and the buildings that come out of the history of this area that led to the industries that Silicon Valley was built around. If there’s an iconic image that defines Silicon Valley for me, it’s that building — and yet, within view of it, you can completely get away from all of the high tech and tilt ups and cubes and traffic that many people think defines Silicon Valley today.

That is Silicon Valley.

Harbor Seal by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

And so is this.

And this is what inspired me to do this. These are some test shots I did yesterday, what David duChemin would call scouting shots.  This is out in Coyote Valley, and I found that dead tree snag to be an interesting items. I was experimenting with the 70-200+2x, and it seemed like a good test of the sharpness (this is far away from my shooting location….). OTOH, the light was bad, the air was hazy, and there was some heat shimmer, so these aren’t by any means what is possible with the subject. But it catalyzed at the moment what I’ve been trying to find in terms of my direction for the next year, and I know I’m headed back there at a different time with better air to try again and get the shot I know is out there…

 

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By the way, this hooting location has its own fascinating Silicon Valley connection. It is on the land Apple wanted to build it’s corporate campus on. Not Infinite Loop. Not the “spaceship” campus it’s trying to build in Cupertino, but their first corporate campus, back in the early 1980s. If that campus had been built, the pastures that are some of the best wintering land for raptors here in Northern California would have instead been yet another corporate campus. Fortunately, that plan never happened.

How things could have been different.

Welcome to 2012. it’s going to be an interesting ride. Don’t forget to take pictures along the way…

 

Thinking about the blog and site in 2012

One of the things I’ve been putting a lot of thought into the last couple of months is the blog, my website on chuqui.com, and the various pieces that connect into my online presence.

The underlying question: what does it want to be when it grows up?

That in itself is a significant change of mindset, because for a long time, my intent was to keep it very simple, very personal, very informal — that it should never grow up. It’s never been intended to be more than a place for my stuff, and that any of you care enough to follow what I put on it just makes my toes tingle, so if I haven’t said it recently, thank you most sincerely for your interest and feedback.

Like the Apple TV is to Apple, this is a hobby, has been a hobby, and knowing that gives me the freedom to choose to ignore it when other things complicate life, or to experiment with strange things (and delete them when they fail badly), and not worry too much about the other side of the fourth wall and whether what I’m doing is enough of a dancing bear to keep everyone amused or informed (or hopefully both).

But that’s been increasingly unsatisfying, and I think out of sync with what I’m interested in doing online.  And given I’m working with community and social media professionally, part of me feels like what I do in my personal part of the universe needs to be done a bit more — not professionally — officially? with gusto? Well, something more serious that I’ve done to date. But please, if I ever use the phrase “social media guru” non-ironically, please slap me silly.

So I’m thinking that it’s time to start ramping up the volume. Lots of thinking about what I like about the sites, what I don’t, how they interact. What I like about other sites and how to bring them onto mine, whether it’s technology, design, features or content. And deep down inside, what I want this site to be about, other than “me” or “what I feel like talking about”. Not that I ever intend to turn this into “a site about this topic”, but planting a few flags in the sand and creating some topic areas to focus on? That seems to make sense.

I’ve been using mind maps a lot recently as a thinking/note taking tool. The current view of the site setup looks like this:

Chuqui com next gen

There’s a lot more to do in the pre-planning phase before I get down to the nitty gritty of design and architecture, but you can see some thoughts about what I’m considering.

This isn’t about turning the site into a revenue generator. It may be about creating something that might be something that can generate revenue later, but that’s not on the docket for this generation. It’s about putting a more professional (or at least polished) look on my content, adding some functionality to support things I’m thinking of doing, like e-publishing my writing, both fiction and not.

It’s about architecting things so that things this site are about are findable. Like reviews. One thing I keep coming back to is reviews. A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I published OtherRealms. it was about reviews. It was well-regarded. Every so often, I get asked if it’s ever coming back (answer: no). At least, not like it was, going on 30 years ago. But I keep thinking…

When I left Strongmail, it was with intent to put some time and energy into a site I called “Dare to Thrive”. The core idea was to focus on going really local, wandering in the space Yelp lives in, but curated. The concept started over a beef tongue in this hole in the wall chinese restaurant in deep Chinatown in Vancouver back in 2005 (hi, roland! hi, boris!), and fermented for a while. I’ve long thought there is a strong ability for a good, curated site to compete against the Yelps of the world — the elevator pitch is “Sunset and Via magazines meet the web”. the tag line was “because there’s more to life than a cube and a cot”, and the hook was that the site was to help people understand there’s a lot of great stuff in and around silicon valley, and more to life than sleeping under your desk at that startup.

For various reasons, I aborted my plan to take time off to work on D2T and went back into the job market, then a few months later, came to the realization that the concept simply wouldn’t work for me, so I reluctantly took it out behind the barn and shot it. Problem 1 was that when I got realistic about time commitments there was no way the thing would succeed, much less thrive, on a “as I have time” basis running it. there were too many things that would need tending to — that it required a full time commit, and I just wasn’t ready/willing to do that. But problem 2 was the real killer: I realized that I was designing a system that would allow others to write and review and contribute, while I was primarily going to end up administering, managing and editing. And that’s when I realized the writing itch was returning, and what I really needed to do was build stuff that focused on my own writing rather than enable other’s to write.

Good idea; damn good idea, IMHO. But the wrong idea for me. So I Old Yeller’d it. And hated doing it, but I’m glad I did. And put in the back of my head that I needed to figure out how to pull out the essence of the idea, and translate it into something that was about my writing, rather than enabling other’s to write.

I’ve been chewing on that ever since, on and off. And now that idea, and my tech writing, and my fiction  writing (if it happens) and my photography are all coalescing and my general “commenting and talking about stuff” are all coalescing, and need a home to live in and thrive on. And what I have isn’t it.

And how to make it something people can contribute their thoughts to — and want to. And share their own things. Blog+disqus is easy, but is that enough? blog+forum seems wrong. it’s something I’m still chewing on.

So we’ll see. Not sure where the flag is on this map, but I think I know where the flag is, and I’m headed in that direction. I expect this will be an interative set up updates, not a massive, all at once “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” update. But we’ll see.

Half the fun is finding the flag, honestly. sometimes, all of the fun is searching for it….

I know some people fear having more questions than answers. for some reason, I love it… As I figure out pieces of it, I’ll make them happen, and if they’re interesting, talk about it.

Because it’s what I do… and thanks for putting up with me…

 

 

looking back, looking forward, looking at birds…

Like much of life in 2011, what I thought I’d accomplish with my birding in 2011 and what I actually did were some significantly different. I have no complaints, though; birding is one of those things I do  to get away from all of the other stuff, so any time birding is a good time, even if I kinda forget to bird once I get there. Or to put it another way,

Sometimes birds are the reason. Sometimes, they are the excuse

My final year list for 2011 was 183 species; that’s significantly better than i expected it to be, since I was able to add 15 species in Q4, and eight in december. It’s short of what I did the previous two years where I made it to about 200 species, but looking at my ebird lists, there’s about a two and a half month slice of time where I effectively didn’t bird at all, and that included much of spring migration. Such is life.

I added six species to my life list: Palm Warbler, Evening Grosbeak, Phainopepla, Baird’s Sandpiper, Marbled Murrelet and Yellow-Billed Loon. That’s not a bad set of additions. I successfully missed boobies two years in a a row — last year there was a blue-footed booby at Dana Point harbor, which I chased on a trip and looked for it without success (it turns out it was two days after it was last seen); this year, the Dana Point Booby was a masked booby, so as we left SoCal after the christmas visit, we gave it a try, but it was evidently out fishing; none of the four groups looking for it had seen it, but it’s been seen since, so it just saw me coming and hid.. Maybe next year..

For non-birders, I should note that a birding list is effectively logarithmic. The first ten birds are trivially easy, and it’s fairly common for birders here in the Bay area to start a year list and hit 80-100 species on January 1. But each ten birds are that much harder, because there’s only so much diversity; 250 species is a pretty good year for most birders, 300 is many times impossible without travel, and 400 is amazing. John Vanderpoel has been doing a “big year”, effectively birding full time, everywhere in the US for an entire year — and he has 742 species. Read his blog if you want to see what effort is required for something like that (not me! not any time remotely soon).

All I can say about birding in 2012 is that about the time this gets posted to my blog, if things go well, I’ll be out chasing birds to start out my list for 2012 (and to see how well my new Vortex 8x42s work). Beyond that? We’ll see. 200 species seems to be a nice goal, so we’ll try it again. If things go well and I hit it, we’ll reset the bar higher.

A few years ago I did a year where I tried to build a photographic year list, seeing how many species I could get a usable photo of. I’m thinking that is worth trying again, to give me something to reach for that ties both the birds and the cameras together. So perhaps we’ll see that appear on the web site soon..

But mostly, birding for me is a relaxation, and I think it’s important that when you’re off relaxing, you, well, relax. Don’t throw too many goals and requirements, don’t stress about whether you’re doing it right (or at all). Take the things you like doing and turn it into another job? No thanks. So remember to keep some things in your life loose, so you don’t lose the joy of doing them…

Happy 2012!

 

Day 1 birding…

So Laurie and I did a little birding today just to get the lists started, including a bit o’ feederwatch and then laurie and I headed down to coyote valley and visited east and west Laguna and Richmond.

Highlights were seeing about half of santa clara valley audubon hanging out on Laguna working on their year lists. Even more fun was stepping out of the car, saying “with any luck, we’ll see the golden eagle that’s been hanging out here”, looking up, and seeing an immature golden eagle (checking the guide, it was a juvenile) about 70′ straight up. it soared with three red tails for a while, the they all went high and south out of view. (my comment: “I should have suggested California Condor. that was too easy”).

The blackbird flock was intermixed brewers with a few red-winged and some of the continuing tri-colored. I was able to catch 6 of the tri-color individuals, mostly around the cow corral in the middle of west Laguna. Found the Ferruginous Hawk (Light morph) on Richmond, flying. it got a bit annoyed at a turkey vulture that wandered into the area (the turkey vulture’s response seemed mostly to be something like “dude! chill!” and it moved on). Three western bluebirds (2 male and a female) were on Richmond; I’ve seen them there before. A wild turkey called every so often from the distance well N of W Laguna, but never showed. A few magpies were seen at the end of W Laguna, with more heard. The single long-billed curlew was continuing, and I found a couple of killdeer near the house on W Laguna, but no burrowing owl (I’ve decided I’ve pissed off the burrowing owl union, and they’re on orders to hide when they see me coming).

Driving in, there was a flotilla of white pelicans flying up 101 headed N, right at Bailey.

Eurasian collared doves easy to find, both at the ranch house on W. Laguna and at the hay store on Richmond.

(Santa was nice to me, and I got a set of Vortex 8x42s, which compared to my old 8×30′s, my initial response is “WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE?” and the new Nat Geo and Stokes field guides, both of which after some casual rummaging through seem to be really good in very different ways. the Nat Geo is drawing based, and the Stokes is photo based, and they complement each other well. Neither is one I’ll actually haul into the field any more (I use iPhone-based guides now, plus keep the Sibley west in the car) but both look to be helpful in trying to get my head around plumage subtleties…

Happy New year! 39 down, lots to go…

 

 

—– Home, Santa Clara, US-CA Jan 1, 2012 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM Protocol: Stationary Comments: feeder/yardwatch 12 species

Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura) 1 Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) 1 Ring-billed Gull (Larus delawarensis) X Mourning Dove (Zenaida macroura) X Anna’s Hummingbird (Calypte anna) 1 Black Phoebe (Sayornis nigricans) 1 American Crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos) X Chestnut-backed Chickadee (Poecile rufescens) 3 Oak Titmouse (Baeolophus inornatus) 1 House Finch (Carpodacus mexicanus) X Lesser Goldfinch (Spinus psaltria) X House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) X

This report was generated automatically by eBird v3 (http://ebird.org) Coyote Valley, Santa Clara, US-CA Jan 1, 2012 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM Protocol: Traveling 5.0 mile(s) Comments: laguna east and west, richmond. 33 species

Wild Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) 1 heard only, N of laguna west. American White Pelican (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos) 7 flying up 101N @ bailey in formation. Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias) 1 Great Egret (Ardea alba) 8 Snowy Egret (Egretta thula) 1 Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura) 6 White-tailed Kite (Elanus leucurus) 1 Northern Harrier (Circus cyaneus) 1 Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) 4 Ferruginous Hawk (Buteo regalis) 1 Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) 1 2nd year seen in flight, soared off S. American Kestrel (Falco sparverius) 5 Killdeer (Charadrius vociferus) 2 Long-billed Curlew (Numenius americanus) 1 Rock Pigeon (Columba livia) X Eurasian Collared-Dove (Streptopelia decaocto) 6 Mourning Dove (Zenaida macroura) X Black Phoebe (Sayornis nigricans) 3 Say’s Phoebe (Sayornis saya) 2 Loggerhead Shrike (Lanius ludovicianus) 2 Yellow-billed Magpie (Pica nuttalli) 4 American Crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos) X Common Raven (Corvus corax) 3 Western Bluebird (Sialia mexicana) 3 on richmond European Starling (Sturnus vulgaris) X Savannah Sparrow (Passerculus sandwichensis) X White-crowned Sparrow (Zonotrichia leucophrys) X Red-winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) X Tricolored Blackbird (Agelaius tricolor) 7 Western Meadowlark (Sturnella neglecta) 3 Brewer’s Blackbird (Euphagus cyanocephalus) X Brown-headed Cowbird (Molothrus ater) X House Finch (Carpodacus mexicanus) X

This report was generated automatically by eBird v3 (http://ebird.org)

The Bobrovsky “controversy”

Twitter / @NHL: Share your thoughts on Bob …:

Share your thoughts on Bobrovsky getting the start for the #Flyers! Join Facebook debate: on.fb.me/uX4UJO #WinterClassic

This is all over the NHL network, and the pundits are making hay on this.

My thought: the talking heads need some controversy to talk about, of they have many hours of otherwise boring airtime to fill. This is the biggest, juiciest controversy that they can find?

If this was a “normal” game, it’s unclear that the beat writers would even mention it. it is basically a non-issue, but it’s fun listening to Melrose try to drum up the possibility of rifts in the locker room and stuff. I guess that makes for better television than “and we’re right on track for the game tomorrow, but stay tuned while we show you the video of Jagr walking from the locker room to the ice for the 39th time”.

48 hours from now, this will be forgotten and they’ll be back to drumming up some other controversy, like how screwed up all-star balloting by the fans is.

But I guess grabbing onto this and harping on it is easier than, say, actually generating interesting content to fill the time on air with.

 

The Barch language incident…

(updated: Barch got a game off and a stern talking to; what he said was inappropriate and vulgar, but not racial. Which is what I’d hoped it would turn out to be…As far as I’m concerned, the system worked as expected — the linesman has to respond to what he thought he heard, but everyone sat down and hashed it out and didn’t over-react, and didn’t sweep it under the rug. )

KuklasKorner : Hockey:

Scott Norton, who has known Barch since he was a 15-year-old junior player in Canada, said that Barch is “upset and concerned for his family.” He added the comment directed toward Montreal’s P.K. Subban from the Panthers bench was misconstrued and “didn’t have any racial undertones nor was a slur. It may have been a misunderstanding or taken out of context” by linesman Darren Gibbs.

A league official told The Miami Herald on Saturday that Barch was ejected for using racially charged language.

This is a tough one, and if it  turns out to be true, Barch needs to be suspended for a while.

But we should also remember that this isn’t the first time an incident like this has happened. A number of years ago, Bryan Marchment was accused of a similar slur, when he was accused of calling a  black player a “little monkey”.

Except as it turned out, Marchment called everyone he was agitating a monkey of some sort. And he was cleared of any hint of a racial slur once everyone sat down and talked it over.

So while it’s clear Darren Gibbs heard something, even if he heard what he thought he heard, let’s wait judgement until everyone has a chance to sit down and talk it out. But it’s good to see the NHL not ignoring potential issues like this when they crop up.

 

 

 

 

Onward into 2012….

I’m not a huge fan of resolutions. It’s too easy to decide to start something, and then the first time you miss it or get it wrong or wake up without motivation, the resolution is broken — and that gives you permission to say “I tried, oh well” and give up. You’re setting yourself up to not succeed by making it easy and painless to fail.

The change of the calendar is a convenient time to remind yourself to step back and consider, take stock, and draw lines on the map that leads to tomorrow and align the ship to follow those lines. Even if you aren’t sure you know what the destination is, it never hurts to think about it and make sure your course is bringing you closer.

What I try to do is identify what commitments I have, and what interests me — and then prioritize to see where my time needs to go.

A huge part of this is deciding what NOT to do. I don’t know about your life, but in my life, there are many things I’d love to do — from picking up my clarinet again to restarting my needlepoint — but I don’t, because I’ve found if I start doing too many things, I end up doing none of them well. One of the challenges here is keeping the list short enough that the ones that make the list thrive, without making the list so short you end up regretting leaving something off it.

Once I chose those priorities for the next {choose period of time}, it’s about defining tasks and goals to drive them forward. Sometimes this process takes no time at all, because it’s obvious. Sometimes it takes days, or weeks, or months. And sometimes, you just leave it as “to be determined” because you won’t know until you get there…

So my roadmap for the next year? Here’s the 30,000 foot view:

  1. My family — because nothing is more important. We lost Archie this year, which is a painful reminder that it’s never safe to assume for tomorrow, and that makes it even more of a priority to myself that I not take this part of my life for granted.
  2. Myself — one of the realizations I had over the last year is that I was constantly deferring things that mattered to me because others wanted me to do things that mattered to them, and that I had hit that point where I was starting to resent how much of my time was being used by others. The answer (once I realized this) was simple: to make sure I prioritized myself into my list and make sure I didn’t commit myself to the point I had no time for my own needs. I’ve been trying to do that more in the last year, and surprisingly, the universe didn’t implode. So now, I plan on making sure I reserve time for my own interests and needs as a formal part of my planning and not just deal with it in terms of “whenever everything else is done”, because it turns out, “everything else” never is done…
  3. My Job — many people I talk to about this forget to add this item to the list (“it goes without saying!”), but in reality, to find the right balance in life, you have to balance everything in it. Your job is going to take a lot of your time, your energy and your brain. It can add stress or create enjoyment (or both!) — it’s going to affect everything else in your life. And it pays your rent and your bills, and so it deserves to be consciously prioritized into your life (see note 1). My job is important to me. Beyond being my primary income, it’s always an important part of my identity and self-worth. I won’t thrive if i don’t give it proper respect and plan to give it the time and energy it needs to be successful. And if you don’t understand that and plan for it, you’ll tend to under-estimate your commitments to it, and end up overcommitting on other things and have to figure out how to squeeze it all in… (see note 2).
  4. My website — I’ve consciously chosen not to push my online web “stuff” too hard, leaving it more as “the places i hang out” rather than try to turn it into some kind of “personal brand” portal thingie. It’s allowed me to just keep it casual and informal and, like the Apple TV, enjoy it being in “hobby mode”. But as I look forward into things I want to try to accomplish over the next couple of years (see points 5, 6, and 7) it’s clear that has to change, and so now is the time to start shifting gears and work and making my blog and site and the other pieces of online life that touch each other ready so that when these other initiatives start happening the site is ready to support them properly. So I’ve started a project to put in place a better online infrastructure and presence to start creating what I’ll want for these other initiatives.
  5. My photography — as a practical reminder that all your planning means nothing in the face of reality, I thought I knew what I was going to do with my photography in 2011; I came home from the Yosemite trip completely frustrated and unsure what direction to head. I think I’ve figured it out and I’m ready to push myself forward again (but the details will need to come some other time…)
  6. My writing — 2011 was a year where I went from “no, I’m retired” as far as any non-blog writing to “hmm. I want to write”. As it turned out, I did very little writing, but a lot of thinking and a lot of research, especially into the emerging ebook revolution and the disruption it’s causing traditional book and fiction publishing. This also caused me to realize that Palm/HP’s “employees can’t publish apps” policies were fundamentally incompatible with (see note 4) and when it became clear the efforts to fix this were going to get stonewalled again, made me start thinking about choices about what I wanted and what was standing in the way of that. Moving into 2012, I’m still frankly in thinking and research mode, and I don’t know where, if anywhere, this is going. But my novel keeps scratching at the garage door and saying “hey, remember me? let’s talk”.
  7. My app development — I’m not the first person who worked in Developer Relations to wake up one day and say “I have this neat idea for an app”, and I’m sure I won’t be the last. In fact, right now I have three, none of which are related to photography, photo books or fiction. No idea where this is going, or if it will, but the reality is it was 100% incompatible with working at HP and that wasn’t going to change, so I left it in the “maybe someday” place. Now that those conflicts are gone from my list, it’s time to start thinking about what “maybe someday” means. right now, all I know is that the first platform will be IOS (sorry, webOS fans; when HP has hardware to sell again, I’ll think about it), but I don’t know how viable the ideas are or whether I really want to invest the time to head down this direction. Or if I’ll have the time to invest. But it’s been increasingly — interesting — to me, so I’m committing time to figure it all out and see what happens.

And those are the things that made the cut. I expect it’ll keep my busy. And there’s only one given — when I look back at this list in a year, things are going to have changed along the way. But at least I know where I am and what direction to go in to get to where I want to be, and that’s a start….

Notes:

Note 1: I’ve done a lot of research into this over the years, primarily because there have been times in my life when I realized it was a mess and I had to get my act together. I’ve also talked to lots of folks I know about this to learn from them, or to help them understand things I do they might want to try for themselves. One common thing we do that I believe is a mistake is not include “the given things” into the priority list “because they are givens”.

When you do that, however, it’s really easy to take things for granted, or not put the right priority on things, or to write up a priority list that is what you “should” do vs. what you really end up planning to do. For instance, if your family is first, but you’re putting in 60 hour weeks at work and never home for dinner, aren’t you really lying to yourself (and your family?) — these things do nothing for you if you lie to yourself. It is better to be honest to yourself about this in private than be politically correct about it and share. And if you aren’t honest to yourself, you’re going to end up with problems.

Note 2: This is, ultimately, teaching yourself that there are only 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 52 weeks in a year, and physics wins; given that, you have to figure out how to allocate your time across your priorities to fit it all in and still get what you want to accomplish done. (see note 3).

Note 3: And when you come back to this list in a few weeks or a few months, if you find that where you’re putting your time isn’t aligned to what you said your priorities are, you either need to rearrange where you put your time, or fix your listing of priorities. Especially early on, we tend to lie to ourselves about our priorities, doing the “should be” list instead of the “will be” list. And a big part of going through these exercises for me is to make sure where my time goes is in sync with what’s important to me — and making sure I understand what’s important to me, so I don’t waste time on low priority things and later regret not doing things that are important to me. (because if you finish a higher priority thing, then you can add something else to the list and start doing it. If you don’t get to a higher priority thing because you’re off playing with other toys — you’ll end up regretting it down the road. assuming you aren’t lying about priorities, of course. (see note 2).

Note 4: I know I’m going to have to try to explain this; at some point, I will try. Suffice it to say for now that the policy was that if you were employed by them, you couldn’t independently publish apps on any platform (webOS or not), and especially not on webOS. And while some of this was ambiguous (was a Kindle ebook covered? who knows? could I get a straight answer? Hell no) I didn’t want to risk HP making claims on my personal IP (like my photos) because I published them as a photo book that happened to go through an app store. So I just decided to put any work on these things on hold until it was, ahem, no longer a problem.

 

 

Changing of the Guard (and letting it down at the same time)

I want to wish a  happy, healthy and prosperous 2012 to you all.

2011 was one of those years where the more I try to explain it, the less it seems to make sense. The early part of the year was challenging and full of potential; the latter half of the year a roller coaster of stress and futility.

What I can talk about now that the dust has all settled is that 2011 started with me actively interviewing, after some rather unfruitful discussions with HP about role and salary. I was, in fact, in discussions with one of the big silicon valley companies that build things you probably have in your data center about coming on board to architect their social media policies when HP did an unusually smart thing and hire Richard Kerris. Richard and I sat down, and he outlined his plans for DevRel and where my role mattered, and he promised to fix as many of my issues as he could, and asked for time to try. He impressed me enough, and the product and team were important enough to me, that I pulled out of my interviews and dug back in for yet another round with the forces of webOS chaos.

For the record, he did solve most of them, except for the employee publishing rules and the salary. And he tried on both of those, but Ruby was strongly against allowing employees to also publish apps, and ultimately, a flotilla of HP Vice Presidents got overruled by a lawyer on that one. And salary, well, once again, HP bureaucracy is in some ways reportable to nobody, including vice presidents. Good luck, Meg. You’ll need it, because when lawyers and clerks set policies the overrule your executive management, good things rarely happen.

(how was life inside the webOS bunker? Let me put it this way. during my tenure at Palm/HP — just under three years — I had six direct managers, averaging about 5 months per, ranging from a first level manager to directors to a couple of VPs. I reported to, or up to, eight different VPs in that time. One of my direct managers (the last one) and two of those VPs are still with HP. Does that give you a sense of how well things were going in the organization? yeah, I think it does. Apple in the worst of days — the dark, damp days of Spindler that made you want to wake up screaming, but you couldn’t because you weren’t asleep — were never as bad as these last few months in Leoville. Seriously).

But early on in 2011, we had hopes. We really were thinking that the TouchPad wouldn’t suck. It shipped. Reality: it didn’t suck. It was a decent 1.0 product. It also didn’t sell. Disappointing. Frustrating. Recoverable. Something to build from, which we were.

Turkey Vulture, Laguna Road, Coyote Valley, San Jose, California=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+To download a low-resolution version of this image, right-click on it. The low-resolution image is free to use and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use or to use it in an altered form without my explicit permission. If you wish to buy a print of this impage or license it for commercial use (you will receive a full-resolution, non-watermarked jpeg), you can do so in the store by clicking on the Buybutton.

And then we woke up one morning, and Leo had decided to take PSG, the PC hardware division, out behind the barn and shoot it. And evidently because the webOS group also had hardware, we got taken out behind the barn and shot, too. Just in case. However badly it was implemented there is in fact a rational reason behind his decision on PSG, although as Meg found out when she ran the numbers Leo didn’t do, it’s the wrong decision. I can’t for the life of me understand why he shot webOS hardware as well, or remotely think that he understood what he was doing of the implications of it. And from that point on, the year turned into a movie based on a Kafka novel.

A kafka novel with what seems to be a happy ending. I gave it a month, expecting HP to get its act together and sell us, hopefully to Amazon. When that didn’t happen and it seemed increasingly remote that it would, I decided it was time to get out and started ringing up the network. And now I’m at Infoblox.

I’ve been there just long enough to meet my cohorts, start learning names and find the bathroom. I haven’t talked about it much because there’s not much to say right now. They have some interesting technologies, they need some social media and community things done, and the building is full of fun and interesting people. So we’re going to go off, figure it out, get it built and make it happen. I’m going to mostly keep it off stage here for now, because there’s really not much to talk about.

My change of venue does change the dynamics of this place somewhat though. My self-imposed restriction on talking about Apple is dead, given I no longer work for a direct competitor and there’s no longer that patina of conflict of interest (but let’s be honest, we were never a competitor of Apple. Maybe worried them a bit at times, but we never remotely put enough units in the market successfully or sustained our momentum to be considered as competing). Ditto wading into the whole mobile space. How far I’ll wade into both topics, I haven’t decided. But I do expect to.

But one thing I’ve come to realize is how — careful — this blog’s gotten. If you look at the blogs I posted as influencing me the other day you’ll see one common trait is that they aren’t afraid to have an opinion and an attitude. Just by sheer necessity I was always fairly careful about what I said when I was at Apple (mostly), and that caution was encouraged at Palm and HP as well. For a company that paid me to be out there  and conversing with the developers, they were usually worried about losing control of the discussion, so “don’t say that” was a common refrain heard around the offices. I think that bled out onto my personal blog, too, and it’s gotten pretty bland. I need to change that, re-inject my personality and opinions into it more.

Over the last few months I’ve been working with a couple of people to help them understand what I’ve come to call this life of “typing without a net”, the part of marketing where there is no script, you don’t rehearse and ultimately, you can’t control the message, merely influence and contribute to it. this new world of social marketing scares the absolute crap out of traditional marketing folks, and some of what I’ve tried to do is help them understand how to leverage the interactivity and conversational aspects of marketing. With some success, I think.

A reality of this kind of work is that if you slip and screw up, you fall a long, long way. Just ask certain people who found that out the hard way in the last week. I’ve come to realize there’s a flip side to that, though. If you allow yourself to get too careful, you may never slip, but you lose a lot of your ability to motivate and influence, either. So one change to the site I plan on bringing because of my change of venue is to get a bit more energy and opinion to my writing again. No risk, no reward. And now, there’s no real reason to be so damn careful.

So we’re going to try to liven this place up a bit; not be so paranoid about subjects that might upset folks or get me one of those “why did you say THAT?” emails from PR… and we’ll see what happens.

welcome to 2012. I can’t decide which I’m happier about — that 2011 is finally over, or that 2012 is a blank slate just waiting to be scribbled on… either way, let’s go!

Your (not so) humble servant,

Chuq

(p.s. — a couple final notes on HP and webOS, and then I’ll close the book on that for a while and look firmly forward instead: while it’s been fairly trendy among the webOS fans to blame HP for all of webOS’s problems, in my opinion, most of the damage was self-inflicted. If you want to assign percentages, give 70% of the failure to the Palm side, and 30% to the HP side. And realize that if HP hadn’t stepped up and bought us, we’d have run out of money and failed. Any other buyer most likely would have grabbed the patents and run, so at least HP gave us a second chance to make it work. which we flubbed. HP has a set of challenges that I think are going to make Meg’s life challenging for a while — but Palm had a legitimate chance to make it work with HP’s support, and couldn’t. Mostly, blame us for that. And you’ll have to buy me a beer some time to get my opinion’s of why, at least for now…

And I know it was frustrating to many that it took so long for Meg to decide to keep webOS going and open source the technology, but to be honest, she did the right thing, and she took the time to understand the situation. Leo made some amazingly stupid decisions in haste, without appropriate research to understand the implications, and in reality, I don’t think anything was going to “fix” webOS by the time he was retired out and Meg stepped in — it was seriously damaged by those moves, and while it was painful to live in limbo like we did, she couldn’t fix the problem by making the same mistakes and making decisions quickly in ignorance of the details. So she gets full credit from me for taking the time to make the right decision, not a fast decision, even if waiting for it wasn’t fun. And I think she has the strategy most likely to give webOS a shot at returning from the dead again — but it’s going to take time.  It may not work, but the alternative was to give up and go home, and HP is investing a hunk o’ money in giving it a shot. Give them some credit for that, and support in helping them try to make it happen…)

 

My favorite images of 2011

This has become a bit of a tradition (thanks to Jim Goldstein for driving), so I’m once again posting a list of my favorite images taken in 2011. These aren’t necessarily my best images (whatever that may be), but the ones I like best that I think define what I’m trying to do with my photography.

2011 was a strange year for me, and that included my photography. The word that keeps coming to me when I look at my work is “transition”, and my photography is undergoing a transition, one that’s taking a big chunk of time to accomplish (mostly due to external factors). I’m not entirely sure where it’s going to end up, but I do believe it’s leading to better photography.

As I went through my 2011 images and made my selections here, the one thing that I kept thinking was “I can improve that”, so after I made my picks, I did — went back and reprocessed the images. 8 of them were changes, and made better for the changes.

Which tells me it’s time for a portfolio edit. I can’t decide if I’m looking forward to that or not…

In any event, here are, in no particular order, the ten images I felt were my favorite for 2011.

White-Faced Ibis bathing

White-faced Ibis bathing, Merced National Wildlife Refuge, California=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+To download a low-resolution version of this image, right-click on it. The low-resolution image is free to use and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use or to use it in an altered form without my explicit permission. If you wish to buy a print of this impage or license it for commercial use (you will receive a full-resolution, non-watermarked jpeg), you can do so in the store by clicking on the Buy button.

California Sea Lions Arguing

California Sea Lion, Moss Landing Harbor, California=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+To download a low-resolution version of this image, right-click on it. The low-resolution image is free to use and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use or to use it in an altered form without my explicit permission. If you wish to buy a print of this impage or license it for commercial use (you will receive a full-resolution, non-watermarked jpeg), you can do so in the store by clicking on the Buy button.

Morro Bay Harbor Panorama

Morro Bay harbor Panorama from Sweet Springs Nature Preserve, Los Osos, California. Note very low tide. Baywood and the Back Bay Inn to the right. 10 part stitched panorama.

Taken from one of my favorite places, Sweet Springs Nature Preserve.

Brown Pelican Posturing

Brown Pelican, Palo Alto Baylands and Duck Pond, California=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+To download a low-resolution version of this image, right-click on it. The low-resolution image is free to use and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use or to use it in an altered form without my explicit permission. If you wish to buy a print of this impage or license it for commercial use (you will receive a full-resolution, non-watermarked jpeg), you can do so in the store by clicking on the Buy button.

Sandhill Crane in Flight

Sandhill Cranes in flight, Merced National Wildlife Refuge, California=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+To download a low-resolution version of this image, right-click on it. The low-resolution image is free to use and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use or to use it in an altered form without my explicit permission. If you wish to buy a print of this impage or license it for commercial use (you will receive a full-resolution, non-watermarked jpeg), you can do so in the store by clicking on the Buy button.

Yosemite Falls in Winter

Yosemite Falls, Yosemite National Park

Elephant Seal Pups Play Fighting

Piedras Blancas Elephant Seal Rookery, near San Simeon, California=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+To download a low-resolution version of this image, right-click on it. The low-resolution image is free to use and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use or to use it in an altered form without my explicit permission. If you wish to buy a print of this impage or license it for commercial use (you will receive a full-resolution, non-watermarked jpeg), you can do so in the store by clicking on the Buy button.

Ross’s Geese in Flight

Ross's Goose, Merced National Wildlife Refuge, California=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+To download a low-resolution version of this image, right-click on it. The low-resolution image is free to use and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use or to use it in an altered form without my explicit permission. If you wish to buy a print of this impage or license it for commercial use (you will receive a full-resolution, non-watermarked jpeg), you can do so in the store by clicking on the Buy button.

Lark Sparrow

Lark Sparrow, San Luis National Wildlife Refuge, Los Banos, California=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+To download a low-resolution version of this image, right-click on it. The low-resolution image is free to use and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use or to use it in an altered form without my explicit permission. If you wish to buy a print of this impage or license it for commercial use (you will receive a full-resolution, non-watermarked jpeg), you can do so in the store by clicking on the Buy button.

Morro Rock at Sunset

Okay, I lied. This is my favorite image from 2011. By far.

morro bay harbor at sunset, CAlifornia

Happy New year, and may your photography in 2012 thrive.

some early images out of the new gear.

during my trip to LA for christmas with mom, we took a couple of hours out to go to a local lake and get some sun, and I sat on a bench with my new gear and fiddled with it a bit. That’s the only time I’ve had to work with the new gear, but I just took a quick look at some of the images, and I think I’m going to like it…

Here are a couple of images straight out of the camera (as raw), zoomed 1:1 in lightroom, and taken as screen shots. that means no processing, no sharpening, no nothing.

LightroomScreenSnapz001

with zero sharpening, this actually looks pretty darn good. A nice first test of the 70-200 plus 2X teleconverter. Taken using the T3i, not the 7d.

LightroomScreenSnapz002

this shot really impressed me, because it’s a cormorant in flight, and I’m handholding the T3i, 70-200F2.8 and 2x, in pretty funky light. Getting an image this nice handholding 400mm of lens at F5.6 at 1/400? Remember, that’s an untouched raw with zero sharpening, either in post or in export.

LightroomScreenSnapz003

I decided to pull the same 1:1 zoomed image from the 7D/300F4/1.4x, just to take a comparison (this is from a recent trip who’s images I haven’t had time to play with). Again, no processing or sharpening.

At first glance, the 70-200 sharpness with the 2X is going to be just fine. I never expected to get a shot like that with the cormorant in that light at ISO 400 (the IS is really helping in that image). Nothing definitive here, but the results are really encouraging. At first glance, it looks like the 70-200/2X stands up well against the 300F4/1.4x prime setup in terms of sharpness. I know looking at the images non-zoomed in lightroom the images look pretty darn good, even without processing…

I do expect to get out for some serious tests this weekend, head to head between these lens sets.

And just for giggles, a shot from the 24-105 from christmas day, same zero processing. I added the 580EXII flash, bounced through a diffuser off the ceiling for light…

LightroomScreenSnapz004

 

(no, they don’t. sort of) Yes, Verizon Still Wants $2 From You

Harry McCracken:

Yes, Verizon Still Wants $2 From You:

When Verizon says it won’t charge $2 for online payments, it’s saying it’ll get $2 out of you in some less obvious manner. Some victory.

I don’t think so. This (unlike the Bank of America land grab) doesn’t seem to be designed as primarily a money grab, and I think that’s one reason Verizon backed down so quickly.

If you look back at the original announcements and read between the lines a bit, what they really want is for people to sign up for Autopay. This $2 fee was added to the payment options that people who haven’t/won’t do that use.

So this was really a strategy to encourage people to shift to autopay, where (indirectly) you’ll help them drive down their costs because they don’t have to worry about collecting or reminding people who forgot or who realized that they could afford to pay the phone bill OR the rent, and chose rent. It’s about putting the phone bill on automatic, which is good for Verizon, by adding incentives to move away from the services that are used to pay the bill monthly.

It’s clear they didn’t expect the backlash; should they have? I dunno, but I can see why they missed it. But as soon as it hit, give them credit, they realized that out here in the real world, it wasn’t about “incentivizing users to move to autopay”, ti was about “greedy damn Verizon bastards!” and they pulled it, because it wasn’t really about the money, and wasn’t worth the controversy.

I wonder how many users already screaming at Verizon about this are already on autopay and not affected by this. And I wonder if there’d be this outcry if the bank of america money grab hadn’t happened and sensitized people to this…

 

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