Today’s Shared Links for July 6, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for July 5, 2011

Mid year navel gazing..

Has half of 2011 really flown by? My, yes. Look at the calendar. It has.

It’s been a busy, crazy time, in a good and only mildly insane way. The important news: we shipped the TouchPad, and I’m proud of the result for everyone I work with. It’s a great starting point to build a strong platform from, just like the first iMac started that process for Apple. We still have a huge amount of work to do — the journey is beginning, not finished — but I think we’ve made a good, solid start. My little piece of the world, Developer Relations, has been this crazy little beehive of activity, because without developers you have no apps, and without apps, you go home.

I’m not ready to go home. Having too much fun. The DevRel team, and so much of the HP-Palm world in general, are such awesome, talented, fun people to be around. I was blessed with really good, fun coworkers and teams at Apple, but this group I’m working with now is just off the charts, and that makes this all amazingly fun. Now that the TouchPad is out, there’s a really short breather as we figure out where we are, then then diving right back into the next thing that needs us.

I’ve been at Palm 2 and a half years now, since literally the day of the first developer kitchen for what became the Pre; I’m now the second most senior person in DevRel. We just released a number of new programs to support the new product and to improve our developer program, and I like the direction we’re going; our new boss (since February), Richard Kerris, has really been pushing to push things forward and make them work better and make the entire DevRel universe more developer friendly and developer-supportive, and I think it’s showing. (amusingly enough, Richard is ex-Apple from the time I was there, and as far as we can tell, we never met, even though there were a whole bunch of things one person off).

In two and a half years, I’ve had five vice presidents, seven bosses (and a chunk of time where I had no discernable boss), 160 hours of vacation accrued (and this spring, actually used some; I still have about 90 pending, I think), and five offices in three buildings. It’s been that kind of ride, and I’m loving it right now.

I expect the second half of the year to be somewhat less insane at work, but it’s never going to be boring. I like it that way.

The work crunch left its mark, though; I’m up ten pounds since October (five, half of that, in the last two months); I know why, I know what needs to be changed, but youc an only chop 24 hours into so many pieces before they stop being useful.  The diabetes is doing fine, but the last couple of months have been solid “at the desk grinding” type of days with lunch while I work, meaning no real chance to get out and walk or exercise, and the lunches have tended to be a bit too carb heavy and a bit too calorie rich, and so things have crept in teh wrong direction a bit. It needs a course correction, a fairly minor one, but that needs time and energy to push the changes into habits, and I just haven’t had that. Been annoying me, though, and so we’re going to try to make it happen before the next crunch hits.

It also means, I have to admit, very little photography and less birding. My year list is 30% smaller than a year ago, and I’ve been out birding once since my Yosemite trip. Now that we’re in the summer doldrums and migration is over, there’s not much interesting birding to do until fall unless I go tripping places. that’s not too likely right now. After my yosemite trip, I didn’t touch a camera for over a month, and then I went out for an afternoon, just to shoot some casual stuff and get back into it a bit. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been doing other things photographically, but not a lot of new material being made; I literally only added new keepers to my library 3 times in Q2, including the yosemite trip.

But having said that, my two trips involving time off added many new images into the keeper file, so that the number of new images for 2011 is actually close to how many I added in 2010 at this time in the year. That’s actually encouraging. Some of this was that I just wasn’t motivated to go take images of the same old stuff (how many snowy egret photos do I really need?) and just dind’t have the cycles to push myself into new or innovating opportunities. Another course correction for the next few months. I did spend a lot of time evaluating my library and critiquing myself and doing other things like studying what others were doing and evalauting their images — and that’s useful, but it’s not taking pictures. Time to get back on the horse.

What I have been doing instead is catching up here at the house. With the apnea kicking my butt in 2007 until I got it diagnosed, and then dad getting sick, and dealing with the estate issues with mom through most of 2008, and then the diabetes kicking my butt in 2009 and into 2010 until I got it diagnosed and under control, I haven’t spent much time on the yard or house, and so things have gotten pretty ragged and in need of some work. Despite the cold and wet year so far, I’ve been putting time in almost every weekend in cleaning up and clearing out and doing a lot of pruning and weeding (LOTS of weeding); sending out lots of green recycling every week to the city compost pile. five weeks of clearout in the front, seven so far in the back, and now, it’s finally at a point where it looks lived in again, and I can start finishing up projects (like the hot tub path that’s been half built for two years) and planting new plants to replace the ones that died or needed to be removed. Finishing up as much of the landscaping is the summer project, and then hopefully moving into the fall, back onto some of the long delayed house projects, and work towards some much needed indoor paint and carpeting. So it’s busy times, and good busy, but it’s amazing how things fall out of perfection when neglected, and how much work it can take to get that back into shape. But definitely worth it, and I’m happy with the progress, even if it’s rather boring stuff to blog about. (“dear diary: eight more bushels of weeds this weekend. I hate my wheelbarrow. love, chuq”).

There should be more new photography as the 2nd half of the year progresses, and more walking and getting out again, now that the big crunch is done. AT least, that’s the plan. we’ll see how reality goes….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for July 4, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for July 1, 2011

Happy Canada (and NHL free agent) day!

(edited for Handzus deal)

July 1, Canada day above the border, and NHL free agent day, when some free agents back up the brink’s truck, and other free agents wonder if their phone is working.

The Sharks, as usual, were relatively quiet today, staying away from the frenzy around top tier players and letting other teams make mistakes by overpaying for talent on this day of days. Their primary deal was Jim Vandermeer, rugged defenseman who fills the spot filled by Wallin and Huskins last year.

It doesn’t feel that way, but Wilson and the Sharks have been quite busy in the offseason. The list of changes I have:

New:

  • Burns (D)
  • Vandermeer (D)
  • Handzus

Gone:

  • Setoguchi
  • Wallin (D)
  • White (D)
  • Mayers
  • Nichol
  • Eager

Fading to black (per Pollak)

  • Wellwood (F)
  • Huskins

Is the Sharks team a better team today than it was when they cleared out their lockers?

Yes, I think so. Impressive work by Wilson.

Blueline:

  • Boyle
  • Burns
  • Vandermeer
  • Vlasic
  • Murray
  • Demers
  • Braun

Honestly, on most teams in the league, Braun would be a 4th or 5th best defensemanm, not the 7th. That is a very stacked group. And if, off the top of my head, you put lines of Boyle/Murray, Burns/Vlasic and Demers /Vandermeer together, there are very few teams in the league that can say their defense is better, and there isn’t an offensive forward in the league looking forward to seeing those guys on the ice.

And with players like Mike Moore in the system, the sharks have eight solid players who would be on any NHL team’s starting roster. Nice depth, having given up three guys that were on the roster last season. Unless you are Devin Setoguchi or a Setoguchi groupie, you have to see that Wilson’s done a great job here.

Top six forwards:

  • Thornton
  • Marleau
  • Heatley
  • Clowe
  • Couture
  • Pavelski

Honestly? Replacing Setoguchi with Pavelski makes our top six forwards better. Sorry, Seto fans. but Pavelski is a lot more consistent and deserves a top six placement (it needs to be noted that Pavelski could also play a good 3rd line role, and Setoguchi couldn’t).The rest of the depth:

  • Handzus
  • Ferriero
  • Desjarsidins
  • McGinn
  • Mitchell

And there are a couple of spots TBD in camp from guys like McLaren, Mashinter, McCarthy, Wingels, maybe Zalewski.

I will make a prediction. I could note that this roster can open camp and this team would be ready to roll; Wilson basically has his work done on July 1. But I think he’s going to add one more player as a 3rd line forward before the season starts. Nothing that’s going to blow away the east coast media elite, but he’ll find someone like Jamal Mayers or Ben Eager to add some depth, but Wilson and the Sharks aren’t afraid to actually let their own prospects earn places; DesJardins basically won the job away from Nichol, for instance.

So without a lot of fanfare (well, okay, some decent fanfare for Burns and Setoguchi) Wilson’s got this team ready for next season — and IMHO, it’s a better team. And it wouldn’t hurt to consider adding a greybeard with some character (like Jason Arnott? who would be affordable). And his wheels ain’t what they used to be, but do you want someone in that locker room teaching the kids how to win? How about giving Kris Draper one more kick at the can? he could play third or fourth line for 50 games and the playoffs, and do a lot of talking in the locker room, and McClellan knows him well. (edited; the handzus deal probably scotches this idea; according to wilson, he’s slotted into the third line center. it’s a bigger deal than I expected, but I like it)

Who else won in the July 1 derby? Detroit and Pittsburgh are two teams, because both of them let Philly win the Jagr derby, and let me predict this now — the Flyers are going to wonder what happened. Because I see no scenario where Jagr will be worth the money he’s going to get. I’m unconvinced he can be an impact player for a full NHL season any more. But we’ll see.

(update: literally as I was posting this, word hits that the Sharks have signed Michael Handzus off of the Kings. is he our third line center? Or is he on the 2nd line and Pavelski back on the third. Either way, this is a good signing)

 

 

 

Backing up your data (the 2011 edition)

Back in 2009, I wrote a series of articles on why it’s important to back up your disks, and my strategy for doing so. It’s now 2011, my needs and strategies have changed somewhat, and so I felt it was a good time to revisit this and revise this and talk about it a bit.

The original article was More than you wanted to know about backups, and it goes into the philosophical background behind the strategy. I still feel this way and so I recommend you go ahead and read it as background for all of this. The quick summary:

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

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

and my final takeaway on that piece is still valid:

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

And that’s really how I continue to push my backup strategy: every task I have to do (instead of automate it) and every chunk of time I have to spend (instead of computers doing it without my intervention) are excuses to let it slide or lapse, and the more you let it slide and lapse, the more chances you have to finally get bitten by the “oh, now what?” problem. So I’m a huge fan of not over-complicating my backups because if I do, I know at some point, I won’t follow the plan, and the n at some point, I’ll be in trouble.

Back in April, I made some changes to how I did things and switched from using firewire drives for everything to a NAS. I talk about that decision in I have committed NAS; updating my data storage and backup strategy. I’ve refined things a bit since then and so here I’ve decided to pull this all together and talk about the strategy in one place.

Here’s a diagram of my current computer and disk setup

 

2011 disk backup diagram

 

To give you a bit of scale; this setup consists of 2 500Mb 2 1/2″ drives, and 5 2TB 3 1/2″ SATA Caviar Green drives. That’s 11 TERABYTES of disk space allocated here. In 2009, it was 3 x 320Gb plus 2 x 500Gb for a total of 2.2 terabytes. In 2006, it was around half a terabyte. And honestly? My data needs are relatively modest compared to a lot of photographers, and absolutely tiny when you start talking to video geeks. But yes, 11 terabytes of disk (which cost me about $500) freaks me out when I think too hard.

The core change I’ve made in the last two years is deciding to break with the idea of keeping all of my data with me at all times. This complicates some things — you have to think through what has to be with you and what you can leave behind — and implement a strategy for doing that in a way you can actually make it work. But it simplifies things as well, because the data you leave behind you can be somewhat less paranoid about losing if someone walks off with your laptop or you drop it in a river.

I decided to use the SAN model over a firewire because it allows me to unplug the laptop from the desk and still have that data available as long as I’m in wifi range of the SAN. I chose the SAN I did (Dlink NS323) because it has hardware mirrored RAID, giving me thought-free redundancy on that data. The big issue with this is that it is no longer indexed by Spotlight; in practice, I find this not a huge problem, but for some people, that could be hell.

Oh, and you can’t back it up with either Time Machine (not that I would) or Superduper. And remember, RAID is not a backup. A mirrored RAID still needs a backup.  That SAN makes it easy to swap drives on the fly; it’s possible to do your offsite backup by removing one drive, swapping in one, and rebuilding the RAID.

I decided not to do it that way. Instead, I plop a drive in a firewire housing, mount it on the mac, and rsync the data onto the disk. That’s fairly simple: “cd /Volumes/Volume_1; rsync -az . /Volumes/san_backup” and then sit back and watch the show.

To move about 8/10th of a terabyte off the drive via ethernet (wired megabit) onto firewire took about 16 hours. The nice thing about rsync is that after this initial copy, it’ll simply copy changes, reducing massively the data moved; I’m estimating a typical “once a month rsync” will take 3-4 hours max.

The advantage of rsyncing to a macintosh-formatted, mounted disk is this: if the SAN fails, I have the data in a native format that I can mount on the computer and use. I don’t need to figure out how to get it off the RAID-formatted disk or get another SAN box to make the data usable. And on a mac-formatted disk, if for some reason I need to feed it to spotlight, I can. it gives it to me in an easily usable, standard format that I don’t need special hardware to access — which makes it more compatible with the future and less risky based on any specific product or technology. Never hurts.

My primary dataset is about 200 Gb on the laptop drive, with about 250Gb free. that gives me space to go on a photo trip without worrying aobut running out of space (or I can buy a couple of disks for the trip if it’s extended). That drive gets backed up to the primary backup disk BOTH by superduper (a bootable clone) and TimeMachine (for individual file recovery). A separate 500Gb drive that is bus-powered also is used for SuperDuper, and I update it about once a week at home, and nightly while on the road (it travels in a bag other than the computer…). Once a month, I pop out the Time Machine drive, take it offsite, and replace it with the OTHER Time Machine drive, which updates and gets back in sync within a few hours.

So the 500Gb of “most important” data lives on the main drive, is backed up hourly to Time Machine, nightly by SuperDuper, weekly to the bus-powered backup, and lives offsite in two forms updated once a month. That’s SIX copies of that data on four drives, one of which may be a week old, one a month old. And having a week old drive is important: what if a drive fails but corrupts stuff and you don’t notice for a few days? Updating all your drives immediately isn’t a feature.

My secondary data (about 8/10 of a terabyte) lives on two drives in the SAN, mirror RAID. and on an offsite drive, updated monthly. So it’s on three drives. Since the data isn’t as important (by definition, sort of) but more importantly, doesn’t travel and can’t be dropped in a river, I don’t feel I have to be AS paranoid as the traveling data.

I’m estimating this setup will handle my data needs for the next 18 months, which means if it lasts a year, I’ll be happy. Even better, it scales easily: if the SAN fills, I can choose to either upgrade to larger drives (the 3Tb are avaialble now, but pricey) or add a second SAN and simply scale that way. All that would take is a unit, 4 drives (about $500 in current costs) and some thought about how to partition the data across them. It’s never a bad idea to think about how your setup will scale, because it will have to, sooner than you plan for it.

And now that I have this all down and automated, the time it takes me to manage this is about 1 hour a month to swap drives around and reset the backups. everything else runs without intervention on a normal basis.

Don’t forget my basic premise of backups: try to never need them. And the best way to do that is replace your drives before they fail. For a laptop, I try to replace them every year or so. I usually use the old one as the carry around backup drive. For the bigger drives, every couple of years seems rational. At $90 for 2 terabytes for Caviar greens, that’s CHEAP insurance compared to recovering data from a crashed drive. So be proactive here. Build a good, simple, “run without help” backup system, but also take steps to never need it by replacing drives well before their normal lifespan ends, especially on the ones that travel with you and get bumped and bruised over time.

 

If you want to go back and see some of my previous writing on all of this, here are the key articles:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 30, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 29, 2011

Wednesdays In Review: Two Bay Area Restaurants

This week I wanted to give a quick shout out to two local restaurants I’ve really taken a liking to.

A friend of mine has a sort of hobby — he likes to discover the restaurants his favorite chefs go to when they take a night off from their own kitchens. It’s an interesting way to find hidden gems, and they aren’t necessarily famous or expensive; it’s quality food that comes first.

A recent find here is Vedas Indian Restaurant, which is in Milpitas, not a town you normally think of for great restaurants. In fact, it’s a rather unpresuming place, in a strip mall on a secondary street and from the outside doesn’t look very distinctive. Inside? it’s beautiful, and it’s full of really awesome food.

We’ve eaten there twice now, and I’ve been blown away both times. They have their standard menu, but they always have specials as well, and on our last visit we found out they’d just brought on a new chef in from India, and he’s been using specials to experiment with some new dishes. We tried a couple of those experiments, a cooked chicken wing appetizer that we all loved (“this is how buffalo wings should be made!”) and a vegetarian dish that my friend raved on. They also shared a special bread that was cooked in no oil and had parsley added to the dough that was quite tasty.

Being a carnivore, I tend to eat from the tandoori and curries. This last visit I tried the Basil Murgh Makhmali Tikka, tender and moist, and the Daal, which was one of the best Daal soups I’ve ever had. They also do a mango and avocado salad that’s quite tasty. Laurie tends to eat the lamb or goat, and my friend is a fish vegetarian, so we tend to hit most of the menu over time. Everything we’ve ordered there has been astounding.

The restaurant has a very good wine list, and this last visit we had a rather nice Argentinian Malbec from Filus; that should be a hint that this isn’t a list full of generic Napa Chardonnay by the glass. Pricing on the wines is reasonable, and the servers are happy to talk over the list and help you find something you like.

The service has been fine on every visit; attentive without hovering or trying to be your best friend. We typically set our reservations for 7 or 7:30 and it’s not unusual for us to stay at the table for 90 minutes or two hours; typical for an Indian restaurant, when we arriver they’re almost empty, and when we leave, they’re packed.

Pricing is moderate; we’ve spent about $50 a head on our two visits there, including cocktails, wine and tip. Of the various indian restaurants we eat at (including Maudhuban in Sunnyvale and Mynt in San Jose) this one’s rapidly become my favorite.

If you’re looking for something more Italian and upscale, you might want to try Tigelleria Risorante in Campbell, right on the edge of downtown. This is a small place doing very well-prepared Italian dishes using organic and heritage ingredients. The dishes are generally not complicated, but they are cooked as well as the chefs can make them. Menus are changed quarterly. They do both pastas and meats here, plus they do a full charcuterie with cheese, meat and veggie boards that include both locally sourced artisan meats and cheeses and high quality, imported italian options as well. I strongly — very strongly — recommend that at some point you bring a couple of friends and you all agree to share a few boards off of the charcuterie. You won’t regret it. As someone who’s occasionally driven to speaking in tongues by a well done cheese board, their selection left me speechless and whimpering.

Our last visit, we tried their carpaccio and a gelato al peperoncino appetizer (chili pepper ice cream over arugula with aged vinegar and pine nuts); their soup was a carrot, potato and parmesan soup that was velvety and would have made a great entree, they’ll usually have a gnocchi on teh menu and it’s always been light and fluffy. Our last visit the menu included everything from squid ink noodles with shrimp and asparagus in a paprika and cream sauce to wild boar tenderloint to a seared duck breast that was cooked perfectly and was quite tasty in a wine and orange sauce. Their menu is appropriate for both vegetarians and carnivores, and as you can see, this is not your lasagna and pizza roadhouse.

desserts are just as innovative, and the wine list is extensive and they have a full bar including a selection of grappa.

Tigelleria isn’t inexpensive; we typically end up spending $100-125 a head. But for that price there’s usually two bottles of wine, cocktails before, grappa or cordials with dessert, and a full meal and a tip. The staff is well trained and attentive and it’ll be hard to avoid the owner, since she likes to wander the room and make sure everyone is happy.

It may be headed towards the “special event” price level for a restaurant, but it’s not a formal place like Manresa or Kuletos; it’s that nice combination of really great, serious food in a place that isn’t taking itself too seriously.

Because of the price, though, it’s a place we tend to visit about once a quarter to try out the menu when it changes. It is, however, a very good value for the price, and you can keep the cost more moderate by being a little less — enthusiastic — about the wines and cocktails. Still, it’s fun to once in a while just go and pamper yourself, and this is a good place to do some pampering.

(If you’re looking for more of family-style italian restaurant that you won’t mind going to on a regular basis, we really like Mama Mia’s, also in Campbell, where you can get in for a good meal and a bottle of Chianti without upsetting your bank account). I typically judge an italian restaurant by the lasagna, not just because I really like it, but because it’s a dish that suffers if the kitchen is just going through the motions, but if they really care about the food, it tends to shine. It’s quite good here, and this is a good place to come for a nice italian oriented seafood dish, because they always have one on special based on what’s good in the market).

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 28, 2011

Closing out the hockey season…

With the draft happening over the weekend, now’s a good time to close out last season and take a final look at hockey for a while. At least until free agency, which will happen at the end of this week.

To close out my playoff predictions, I picked the Canucks, so I missed on the final round. Still, I was 11-4 in picking the playoffs, which is pretty good if you ask me. I’ll take it.

I don’t talk much about the draft, because I don’t get a chance to see the prospects and I therefore think critiquing the choices is a silly thing to do. I’ll leave it to the experts.

The Sharks highlight during the draft wasn’t their drafting — a few days before the draft, Setoguchi signs a three year deal at about $3m a year, which I thought was a fair deal for both sides. And then suddenly finds himself a Minnesota Wild when Wilson trades him (and a prospect and a draft pick) for Brent Burns. At first glance this looks like a sign and trade, but Wilson has said that wasn’t true, and he’s typically a straight shooter. I believe him when he says the deal didn’t happen until after the signing — but that ignores the reality that the deal Setoguchi signed was an easy deal to build into a trade, and Wilson clearly was willing to trade him; once Seto was signed, I’m not surprised there were phone calls inquiring about him.

Without actually saying “I called it”, I did speculate on the Sharks deciding to shake up the forward lines, and that I felt Setoguchi was the player most likely not to be a Shark from the top six forwards come camp:

If there’s a top 6 shakeup on the sharks, I would be picking him as the player to shake up, if I could. I certainly would be trying to sign him for a shorter deal for not so much money with incentives.

And as it turns out, that’s what happened. Brent Burns? Very nice pickup. Physical, and he’s the kind of player Wilson finds that makes you go “how did he do that?” — in one transaction, he brings in depth to fill out our blueline, replaces Pavelski on the power play point to allow him to play forward, gets Pavelski off the third line and back in the top six forwards, and adds some nice physical play. And he does it with a player that has one year left on his contract, but seems very signable by the Sharks, not someone likely to jump to free agency.

When pavelski is a third liner, you have forward depth to spare, so using it makes sense. I really like this deal on all levels, even though we lose a good prospect n it. It’ll be good for Setoguchi as well, I think.

So, Wallin, Nichols, Mayers and Setoguchi out, and it’s not July 1. Burns in on the blueline. Desjardins filling in Nicholl’s role. Pavelski slipping into the top six forwards, so there are a couple of 3/4 line forward spots at grabs, and a lot of good talent that played part time last season taht can fill it in,  like Mike Moore. Still some work to do on blueline depth, but the team could open camp tomorrow and I think it’s a better team.

Elsewhere in the league?

It’s great to see Winnipeg back, and that they’re the Jets again. Now the hard part starts, which is making money in Winnipeg. I feel pretty good about that happening, though.

And while it won’t happen this season, Atlanta -> Winnipeg means realignment. The rumors have the league looking at a four division, two conference format, with Columbus and Detroit going east and divisions organized around timezones. I’ve been a strong critic of Detroit going back to the east (because it makes the west look even more like a poor cousin to the eastern conference), but I like this rumored realignment a lot, because th schedule gets re-aligned as well, and the plan is to have everyone play a home and home against every team outside their division. I’ve wanted that for a long time, and if they bring that in instead of the current schedule, they have my support.

The realignment rumors also indicate they’re looking at doing first round playoffs in-division, then reseed within the conference for later rounds. I like that as well, so here’s hoping it all comes through.

Drew Remenda gives his view of re-alignment on the Sharks blog. I like it with one exception. That is that he has two 8 team divisions in the east and two 7 team divisions in the west, and I’d prefer the conferences to be 15-15, which means one team needs to move west. And that means either detroit or columbus, but that admittedly screws that team a bit, so it probably shouldn’t happen. But I’d rather the conferences be balanced if possible (and if the league eventually does expand to 32 teams, which I don’t expect for at least five years, it reduces the probability of needing major realignment again. So maybe we go with drew’s idea, but I’d still like to find one team to move west… although I can see why neither of the logical suspects would like that idea much.

One last item I had flagged to mention: the league is tweaking rule 48, the hit to the head rule. I thought it was a good first try at controlling this problem, but also didn’t go far enough — but how to handle this without removing the physicality from the game is a complex dance and not easily resolved (blanket bans to hits to the head won’t work, not at the NHL level). The previous rule made it illegal to hit to the head on a lateral or blind side hit; that restriction is deleted, and so now any hit where the head is targetted and the principal point of contact is now going to be illegal. You NHL players that roll around the ice with your elbows up, get ready to sit.  At first thought, I think this is an appropriate change, but until we see how it’s enforced and whether the players pay attention, I need to reserve judgement.

Also changed for next year is rule 41, the boarding rule, making it clear that players need to protect a defenseless player and avoid or minimize a hit against one. That’s true both along the boards and in an icing situation, and makes illegal a few hits from last season that weren’t illegal (but should have been), so I like this cahnge as well.

So barring a major free agency surprise by the Sharks or a big trade, that’s probably about it until camp opens. The Sharks seem well down the path I wanted to see towards being a bit different and a bit better going into next season; the Jets are back in town (san jose arena music folks, haul out that dusty copy of West Side Story!), and the league is grappling with the hits to the head and pushing the rule forward since it clearly didn’t fully protect players last year. And we’ll see how that goes.

So, when does the puck drop? Can’t wait!

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 27, 2011

So You Want To Be A Pro Nature Photographer

So You Want To Be A Pro Nature Photographer | Outdoor Photo Gear:

Nature photography is one of the toughest fields of photography to make a living in. I’ve found that for me being diversified is the key to making it. Having multiple streams of income keeps the money flowing. Those streams all take a lot of time to keep them flowing.

Here’s something I learned as a fledgling science fiction writer back in the day, and which is part of the reason I retired from writing to focus on high tech geekery:

If you want to be a pro photographer or a writer or a dancer or a whatever, you have already failed. Because these are very competive disciplines, and you will lose out to the people who HAVE to be one.

If you aren’t driven to succeed, you’ll get run over by those that are.

That doesn’t mean you can’t generate some income, whether it’s selling the occasional story or print. But make a business of it?

Want isn’t enough.

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 26, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 25, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 24, 2011

Avoiding email bankruptcy (part 2)

Continuing the discussion from this article…

Okay, you’ve blocked out time to handle email. Now what?

You need a plan.

I’ve tried a bunch of different workflows for handling my inbox. I’ve ended up with a very simple one, but it works pretty well for me. Your mileage probably varies, but consider using this as a template and adapt it as you feel makes sense for your situation.

I use my inbox as my “to do” list. Anything in the inbox needs some kind of attention. When I’m done with it, it leaves the inbox, never to return.

I’ve tried using a lot of task-specific folders, I’ve tried using many filing systems. I’ve kept a “todo” folder. I’ve used no folders at all. I’ve ended up with a folder structure that looks like this:

  • Inbox
  • Archives
  • Mailing Lists

Seriously. that’s it. Sometimes I will create a folder for some ongoing task where I want to cloister all of that email together, but then I treat that folder as its own inbox and manage it like one. But typically, I may only have one or two of those, for the duration of the project.

The only thing I use mail filters for today is to automatically sweep mailing lists into the mailing list folder. That stuff is by definition bulk mail; it can wait, so I don’t want it clogging up my inbox.  Many times people are on too many mailing lists, and they try to force their way through them. As I talked about when talked about RSS in On Filters and Echo Chambers, if you can’t get through this stuff consistently without stressing yourself out, start unsubscribing. It’ll be obvious which mailing lists to get rid of because they’re the ones you’re leaving from day to day, or deleting messages unread to keep up. Save yourself the hassle and stress, and just turn them off. Or if they’re something you can’t (an external mailing list that won’t unsubscribe, or a work list someone thinks you have to read that’s pure noise), filter them to the trash. Trust me, I haven’t yet worked at a company where I wasn’t on at least one mailing list by fiat that nobody ever noticed if I just made them all magically disappear.

If you aren’t sure how to filter mailing lists, “full headers” in your mail client is your friend. Most mailing list systems put some headers in the email that are hidden by your client, but which can be used to identify the mailing list explicitly so you get no false positives and no misses. List-ID is a good one to look for. (for the geeky, that’s RFC-2919); many mailing lists also support list-unsubscribe (RFC-2369) and I do wish it’d become more endemic and mail clients had fully adopted some of the capabilities it was intended to allow (and yeah, if you look, you’ll see my name tied up in some of the arguments about those headers…).

So mailing lists are hidden in a folder and waiting for you to have some free time to browse through them. (I’m assuming you keep a work inbox and a personal inbox. If you don’t, you’re crazy, and please set it up right away. And make sure the appropriate emails go to each; so when you’re busy at work, you can ignore personal stuff, and when you’re at home, you can choose to turn off work. If you mix them together, you probably will never get your inbox straight).

I keep email sorted by date received, newest emails at the top. So at a glance, I’m looking at the most recent, unread ones. When I go into my inbox, the first thing I do is check each unread email, one at a time. My goal is to resolve each email on first reading — which isn’t always possible. but that’s the goal. This first pass is triage.

You read the email. Does it need a reply? No? Great. So either delete it or archive it. I delete stuff I know I don’t care about (like Jira update notices) and archive everything else. It’s not 100%, but 90% of the time, I trash auto-generated emails, and I keep almost everything else. It all goes in that one big archive folder (but more on that later).

If the email does need a reply, then if you can reply immediately and can reply quickly, do it. My rule of thumb is 2-3 minutes or less, reply and file. Longer than that, reply if I have the time, otherwise defer. Again, the goal is to get it out of your inbox, and if possible only have to read the damned email once. Any email you reply to you keep, so reply and then stuff in the archive folder. And it’s gone.

I have my mailer set up to cc myself on replies, so I always have a copy of what I wrote. Those all go in the archive, too. This gets all of that stuff out of the way — but I can refer back to it through looking into the archive or my computer’s searching tool (like Spotlight).

So, any time you look at the inbox, anything unread needs triage. Anything read has a pending action (by you or waiting for someone or something to happen). By the time you triage all your unread mail, you’ve deleted or filed most of it, and you’ve answered a large chunk of it and you’ve gotten a huge chunk of that email out of your life forever (or at least in someone else’s inbox to be frustrated over).

Here’s a special case: if there’s an email thread going on where you have multiple emails on the same thing, that’s a good time to switch your client to sort by subject so they all group together. Read them all together, then decide if a reply is needed to the thread. You save yourself (and others) the joy of you answering an email someone else already answered and duplicating the answer — and adding to the sag in everyone’s inbox. Many times, you’ll find someone else handled it, and you can read and file instead of continuing or lengthening the thread, or you can reply only to a specific subset of items and keep it shorter and simpler. And pull a half dozen emails out of the inbox in one bunch instead of plowing through them interspersed with unrelated emails. it’s a judgement call, but once you realize you can reconfigure your client on the fly to resort your inbox, you can learn to take advantage of that. Another sort I use a lot is by sender, so I can see everything a specific person (or mail daemon) is sending me. that can be useful to grab a bunch of things, send a single reply, and file them in bulk.

Some people use a mail filter to color certain sender emails a special color so they stand out (hint: your boss’s emails!). I don’t. My goal is to handle everyone’s emails in a timely and efficient manner so I don’t have to handle my bosses email as special cases. I think doing that sets up a mental workflow that works to the detriment of actually processing the inbox well — but it’s an option to consider for some situations (and people)

If you’ve thought about this workflow,I am recommending that you handle your inbox primarily LIFO (last in first out). That is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing, because the LIFO method puts the newest emails at hand to start, and those are the ones you are most likely to be able to process and file — and in the triage phase, your goal is to get as many emails out of the inbox as efficiently as you can — while answering appropriately and good writing and appropriate content. It’s really easy to empty the email with shoddy replies and faux answers, but that doesn’t help solve the real problem, which is getting things done (another reason why “inbox zero” is a bad goal. the real goal is to get stuff answered and filed).

You can’t spend 100% of your time in LIFO/triage mode, or the older stuff gets buried and lost, so once you finish triaging new emails, start working through the ones you left behind. Generally, I do that by focusing on emails from today and yesterday, but a couple of days a week, I start with the oldest and look at each one; the idea is to put your eyeballs on everything pending often enough that you don’t forget it. Some of them will get answers or become irrelevant along the way — archive them. Some of them you’ll decide you aren’t going to answer; archive them. when you’ve moved out of triage mode, use the time you’ve allocated to do what is needed to get to the point where you can answer emails, answer them, and archive them.

(digression: about now, I hear a few of you saying “but I never even get through triage!” short answer: then you aren’t allocating enough time, so you need to block off more so you can. Or, you need to find ways to reduce incoming email, and triage more emails in less time. The latter typically means responding to fewer emails and filing more unanswered. In a work situation, answering email of your coworkers is part of your job, so you have to make sure you budget time to do it appropriately. In  a personal inbox, you have more leeway to trash emails that came in from unexpected sources. Learning to give yourself permission to NOT answer emails is important, or the obligation will bury you.)

As you get used to this workflow, you’ll get into the rhythm. It’ll take some time. The large majority of emails will go from unread to archive quickly based on one viewing. a big part of the efficiency of this workflow is that most emails only get touched once, and you take an action and forget them. The intent is to minimize how many times you look at an email and try to decide what to do. A few emails will take a long time to deal with and archive; and one or two may refuse to die. Sometimes, the work to respond properly is complex enough that you’ll need to make it its own task and allocate time JUST to deal with that email.

Hey, who owns your time? You? Or your calendar? But that’s a different discussion (hint: if you don’t actively manage your time on your calendar, you’re giving everyone else carte blanche to screw you over by taking up all your time for their priorities. Learning to actively schedule your time on your work calendar is key to finding time/ability to focus and produce; if you don’t, you’re life will get eaten by meetings until everyhting is hunt and peck in the minutes around them…)

And that is how I try to keep my inbox sane. To summarize:

  • Allocate time to your email; the inbox is not something that will magically empty, and you’ll never succeed doing it around the edges of your other tasks. It is its own task, treat it as one.
  • Try to touch an email once. Learn to touch each email as few times as possible before resolving.
  • Don’t let emails die of neglect. Review all non-archived emails weekly to see if you can move them forward or resolve them. Don’t be afraid to declare them resolved or no longer of interest and archive them.
  • Archive aggressively. Get stuff out fo the inbox so you aren’t spending time looking at stuff and trying to remember if you answered them.
  • Delete almost nothing; sometimes, you need to go back to an archived email for context. Or the thread returns to life. Disk is cheap. but your inbox is expensive. Love your archive folder. desktop search (or gmail search) will become your friend.
  • Stuff that isn’t bringing you value, dump. unsubscribe or filter.
  • Keep your filtering simple; otherwise, maintaining it becomes a task in itself and waste time you should use on doing email.

And with a little practice, you’ll be able to keep your email inbox lean and under control. Mostly.

A few words on the Archive folder:

I used to try to organize my email archives. Desktop search cured me of that. Now, I simply shove everything in a folder called “Archive”. Every week to ten days, I take everything older than two weeks, and move it into a second Archive folder that’s dated (“2011-06″). I also do that for my “sent email” folder. Then I delete all of that mail out of those folders, leaving only the most recent stuff. And then I clear my deleted email folder of anything older than a week.

That keeps any single folder from getting too large. My active email is in my inbox. My recently touched email is in Archive. My fairly recent email is in dated folders within easy reach. Email older than three months (“2011-02″) I export those folders as .mbox folders and get them out of my active email system — and then import them into a secondary mail client that makes them visible to the desktop search (in my case, I use Entourage or Outlook for work, and Gmail for personal; my .mbox files get exported and the imported into Mail.app so Spotlight can see them as needed; if I want to open an older email, spotlight will fire up mail.app for me). that removes that email from the server and the mailboxes, which speeds up dealing with the mail servers (those of you with zillions of emails in your folders and lots of emails on the other side of Exchange or Outlook, you’re slowing yourself down). I keep old email indefinitely — just not in a place where it clutters up and slows down what I’m doing.  That keeps your email trim and fast as your server will allow; but keep older email around if you need it, which you’ll find is going to be pretty rare.

Doing that folder management in the archives takes me maybe 20 minutes every couple of weeks; It’s a good investment in keeping the mail server running fast.  Guess how often I’ve talked to someone who’s told me “god, Gmail performance sucks” only to find their primary mailbox has 12,000 emails in it? And yes, sometimes gmail performance does suck, but if you do that to the server, you’re not helping your own cause.

On a typical day, my inbox has about 80 items in it waiting for me. When I’m ahead of the game, about 40. When the inbox is winning, it grows to 300 or more (and I get frustrated) — that’s when I know I have to temporarily allocate more time to email.

Multi-tasking in meetings won’t fix this. trying to squeeze it in between meetings won’t. Realizing email is something you have to dedicate chunks of time to, and learning how to use those chunks efficiently — that’s the solution here. Or at least, part of one for most people. There’s no one perfect way to handle this, every situation is going to be somewhat different. Hopefully, though, this gives you some context to look at what you’re doing and find a way to get your inbox under better control.

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 23, 2011

Avoiding email bankruptcy (part 1)

I thought I’d forward the discussion of email charters and intelligent agents a bit, I wanted to point to a couple of interesting follow-up pieces: Michael McCracken posted Email Charters and Lists as Parties, and calls out Luis Villa’s blog on Mailing Lists are Parties. Or they Should be. Both are well worth a read. He actually makes some very good points, and I’ve touched on some of them a bit in the past (see The Lifecycle of Mailings lists [2002], An Audience of One [2010], etiquette, “standards” and online social environments… [2004]  and just for giggles, How Many Mailing List Subscribers does it take to screw in a lightbulb [2001]).

Yes, I’ve built email systems and run mailing lists since the dark ages, so I have a few opinions on them. I think Luis has some neat ideas, best summed up here:

 

Bottom line: Software can’t save a mailing list full of people who actively dislike each other. Maybe I’m crazy, though, but it seems like software that helped mailing lists function more like parties could really help mailing lists cope better with anti-social people.

In which he’s effectively calling for (whether he realizes it or not) the USENET “kill file“, although the modern flavor of that are the various reputation systems that are being invented (and the one I really like and which seems to be the one people are borrowing heavily from these days are the Stack Exchange systems).

But enough linking around for now.

The ultimate failure of mailing lists — and one we never solved over 20+ years of using and innovating them — is that they don’t scale. They seriously suck at scaling. They are a push-oriented, interruptive system that ultimately controls you, and you have to fight to keep some control on it. The easiest way to make a mailing list fail is to make it popular. They don’t scale to size, and they don’t scale to volume.  I can’t tell you how many times a mailing list I ran got into a really interesting discussion and a bunch of users got going and started talking about it, only to have others on the list walk in and start yelling at everyone to shut up and quit dumping crap into their inboxes.

Imagine that, a communication service that works best when people don’t really use it. But when it gets used and gets popular, it causes problems.

So from the very beginning, understand that email bankruptcy is not you, it’s the technology.

And the key to avoiding email bankruptcy is understanding that — and that gives you hints on solutions to preventing it, or getting your inbox back under control.

I’ve been doing email for 25+ years now. Most of my email environments tended to be high volume; people suffering from email bankruptcy. Currently, email is a huge part of my job — right now, I’m sending (sending, not receiving) ~225-240 emails a day on average. My inboxes see about 400 on a typical day. My record for sending email in one work day is around 550.

So if your inbox makes you wince or cry, I feel your pain. Been there more than once. I’ve reworked my email workflow many times looking for the magic solutions. And here are some of my thoughts on how to get out of it if you’re there, and how to avoid it if you’re not.

There are two primary causes of email bankruptcy:

  • Arriving email interrupting you: when you start getting too many emails, it prevents you from actually focusing on things are spending any significant time working on anything.
  • There are so many emails in your inbox you never get to the bottom of it (the legendary “inbox zero” syndrome).

How do you get there? Here are a few rules and thoughts:

Inbox Zero is not the goal. Inbox Management is. So don’t stress yourself trying to get to Inbox Zero. What you want is an inbox that you can look at and know at a glance what’s going on and what needs your attention.

Complex filtering systems are not the solution — unless they are self-teaching and self-learning. Frankly, most filtering systems in most email clients just plain old suck, and they are more trouble than they are worth, except for very simple, “let’s take a broadsword to this problem” solutions.

Keep it simple: you don’t fix the problem by shifting the problem from dealing with the email to trying to maintain the workflow.

If you take nothing else from this article, take this item: in talking to people over time over getting their email under control, the single most common cause of email bankruptcy is that they are doing significant amounts of communication via email, and they have somehow convinced themselves they can do it around the edges of their real work. Email is a task, and you need to commit time to it, the way you do meetings and your other tasks.

This is an amazingly common situation; you get up, you get to work. you try to check emails on the bus or at stoplights; you run to your first meeting, in the five minutes before everyone gets there, you’re madly scanning your inbox. While in the meeting, more emails come in. You have three meetings in a row, and suddenly people are sending emails asking why you aren’t answering emails. So in your next meeting, you try to multitask and do both the meeting and email. And suddenly, you’re doing nothing well.

Sound familiar? Yeah. I do it to at times. We all do.

So the first rule of avoiding email bankruptcy is admitting that email is a task and allocating time to it. Block time in your calendar for it. It is really a virtual meeting (albeit not real time, not face to face). It’s part of your work or personal tasks, and you will fail if you treat it as a hit and run situation. How much time depends on your life, your inbox and how your inbox relates to your work or personal situation — but stop pretending you can just handle it ad hoc, and schedule it into your life.

If you do not do this, your relationship with your inbox will never stop being a guerilla warfare situation, and it will win.

So find time to sit down every day and deal with your inbox. Maybe an hour, maybe 30 minutes twice a day (morning and afternoon, whatever you find works.

 

A side effect of allocating a regular timeslot to your inbox is this: it gives you permission to shut email out of your life at other times. If one of your problems is you’re constantly having email interrupt your other tasks and breaking your focus, learn to turn your email off! But psychologically, people find that hard if they know at some level they’re behind and have emails that need your attention. Your guilt at not having gotten to you inbox tends to make you bounce in and out and check every incoming email for an emergency, whnich breaks your focus, which ruins your productivity and train of thought, which means other tasks take longer, which means you have less time to do email, which….

So set up your schedule so you spend time focusing on email and handling it, so you can give yourself permission to ignore it (because its not out of control any more!) and all of your work will happen better. And when you do have that five minutes before a meeting, you can use it dealing with an email or three, and not feel pressure to “catch up”, because its’ all handled. So even that mini multitasking will be more effective and less stressful. And you’ll be a lot less tempted to multitask a meeting (unless its really boring).

Okay, you’ve blocked out time to handle email. Now what?

We will cover that in the next piece. Stay tuned….

(edited to add: hmm. Looks like Matt Cutts might be interested in these articles…)

Today’s Shared Links for June 22, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 21, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 20, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 19, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 17, 2011

Help Create an Email Charter (part 2)

In Part 1, I looked at Chris Anderson’s call for an email charter, declared it a failure, and said it ought to be done anyway. Because ultimately, the failure is meaningless and hides a potential for much success, and the fact that we won’t get 100% success out of the project doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.

I suggested that protecting the commons of email would require more than asking everyone nicely to behave. I feel comfortable saying that, because 25+ years of history here on the net shows that any commons will ultimately be destroyed if the primary protection to it is purely voluntary.

It’s interesting to compare email and USENET here; email is in fact older than USENET, and they were originally built with the same general design esthetics, which boiled down to “we’re all mature adults here, we know how to behave”. Which worked, as long as the internet was small and we all knew each other and peer pressure had some value in moderating behavior. As soon as the internet grew into something the general public had heard of and started getting involved in, it because a resource to use, and for some, that meant it became a resource to exploit, and down that road lies spam in all its glory.

And yet for all our bitching, USENET is for all practical purposes dead and buried, and here we are, once again worrying that it’s only a matter of time before email implodes and dies. Only if you look at Chris’s argument, it’s not spam burying email, it’s sloppy and lazy usage.

Without realizing it, Chris has declared that the spam problem in email has been solved. And it has. Not 100%, but honestly, for most of us, Spam is rarely more than a minor annoyance. And that’s because a lot of people put a lot of time and energy into building big, nasty fences with barbed wire and electricity and lasers and nasty things on them to protect the commons of email from the people who wanted to exploit it until they killed it, the way they did USENET (where we never did figure out how to build that wall in time).

And that’s my point; to solve the problems Chris wants to solve, you can ask and lecture and write charters and build guidelines all you want, and if adoption is voluntary, it will fail. It will partially succeed — and that’s what makes the charter a worthy goal in its failure — but it’ll fail.

If you want to fix these problems, you have to go beyond asking nicely. You have to build walls, with gates, and locks, and people with sharp pointed sticks to keep those people on the outside from climbing over the gate if you don’t want them in.

Where the spam problem was ultimately solved at the mail server level; the issues Chris is worried about are smaller and more personal. He’s going to find that the devil is in the details: 90% of us are going to agree with his recommendations 90% of the time; that other 10% is likely to create endless arguments and the occasional flamewar, and accomplish little more than stress and frayed relationships.

Having been down this path more than once, it’s my view that these kind of things are intensely personal, and we all have different preferences and hot buttons. Remember HTML email? That used to be a hot button that caused a lot of fights. Today, I’d guess maybe 2% of the population gives a damn enough to strip HTML out of email, and 90% of email users would say “HTML? what’s that?”

Remember the days of pitched battles over “reply-to” in mailing lists? Honestly, 20 years later, the only reason we can possibly claim it’s “fixed” is that nobody really cares any more, except that last 1-2%. or top posting vs. inline replies? Or bottom posting? Name your poison.

Given that I’ve been involved in this for so long, and email was what I made my living in for a good number of years, and the servers I’ve built have sent god knows how many billion emails with my hand on the rudder, I’ve been in many of these arguments, sometimes on both sides at the same time. I’ve been yelled at, chastised, ambused, laughed at, ridiculed, thanks, honored, bought beers, offered chocolate, and more times than I can count, been asked my opinion.

And the one thing I’m firmly convinced of is that asking other people to change their behavior to do things that way you prefer is the wrong way to solve these problems, because nobody can, or will, want to remember the email preferences of the various people in their address book. Let’s see, these 80 people want inline responses, but those 15 want topposted responses, and Jeff, he insists on bottom posting or he won’t read it. Yeah, I’ll remember that. And jeremy doesn’t read email sent between 10PM and noon, while jason throws out emails on Saturdays because he’s Jewish, and…

See how quickly that system breaks down? I certainly can’t remember that; it’s not worth my time (and amusingly enough, what Chris is complaining about is how other people’s use of email effectively eats his time; his response is through effectively asking them to do things that shift the burden the other way. So if I were to ask Chris, for instance, to only send me email in 18 Point type colored red and never use italics, do you think he’d remmeber? and actually do it? Or would he see that as a burden on his already burdened time? So right from the start, how are people going to respond to his asking them to take on more of the burden in email to ease his? Like they aren’t also burdened by all of this?

That’s why the “let’s all be nice and play together right” fails.

If you want to solve this, then, you have to take responsibility into your own hands; and that means you need to have (or build, or have built) tools to enable that. That means pushing for better and intelligent email clients that can learn how you want your email — how to format it, how to prioritize it, how to manage it, how to leverage your time to maximize your efficiency and interest. And then teach your mail system to manage your incoming your email your way. Beacuse telling everyone else to do it the way you want fails when you stop to realize 50 other people are telling those people the same thing, and none of the 50 requests match up into a single set of options.

Now, I’ve had this discussion with people over the years; rarely is it well-received. People don’t want to do the work to make their life easier. they want to tell other people to do the work to make their life easier. I did have one person who actually DID send me all my email for about six months in 18 point bright red text, just to try to prove a point, but I’m not sure what point that was, other than it was unique that only one person in all of those discussions actually DID it, and he stopped when he got bored of trying to prove a point. Was I being pedantic in my request? Oh, absolutely. but that was the point.

Ultimately, if you want to fix this, you have to control your own destiny, not push it out on others. Most email clients have rudimentary tools and filters that can do a lot; the technology here is still pretty crude and brutal (although Apple’s Lion looks interesting in how they’re doing some smart formatting things and fixing that wart on email’s face). But; technology clients that learn from what you do to predict what you want done?  intelligent agents that you teach to act as a personal secretary? Nobody’s really cracked this year; it’s long overdue. But if you really want this solved, that’s where the solution lies. Not in documents or playing nice.

Computers have gotten massively more powerful and smarter over the years. We should take advantage of that to solve problems like these. If you push out your ideas of “how this should work” to others, you’ll get some level of cooperation and some improvement for some group of like-minded people for some relatively low level of investment.

But figure out how to enhance tools to learn and predict and leverage your time and do the grunt work for you? That’s where the solution really lies. Because then, even if what you want is 18 point red type and no italics, it’s a matter of teaching your client to do that. I looked into this ten years ago, and the processing power really wasn’t there yet. Now? I bet it is, with the right people and the right attitude — to give everyone the power to customize their experience to their expectations rather than build standardized walls that sort of work most of the time for most people. Mostly.

And that’s where I suggest this discussion really go, if what you want is a real solution; The charter is a good starting point, quick and low-intensity, and can do real good. But the real solution is in enhancing the client tools to empower a user to customize their environment and teach the environment to act as an agent for an individual. Not easy tasks, but maybe now we’re far enough along to make something that’s useful…. Worth a try?

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 16, 2011

Help Create an Email Charter! (part 1)

Help Create an Email Charter! – TEDChris: The untweetable:

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is in fact a potent ‘tragedy of the commons’.  The commons in question here is the world’s pool of attention.  Email makes it just a little too easy to grab a piece of that attention. The unintended consequence of all those little acts of grabbing is a giant rats nest of voracious demands on our time, energy and sanity. To fix a ‘commons’ problem, a community needs to come together and agree new rules.  That’s why it’s time for an Email Charter. One that can reverse the escalating spiral of obligation and stress. I have reserved the url emailcharter.org for the finished product.. But first let’s figure out what the charter should be. Let’s do this as a crowd.  It’s a shared problem. Let’s come up with a shared solution. It will only work if lots of people agree to it. The Charter must focus on reversing the underlying cause. We need a world where it is much quicker to process email than to create it. Bearing that in mind. Here are some candidate rules for an Email Charter.  (And btw, much of this applies equally to other online messaging, such as Facebook.)

 

 

Chris Anderson makes a call that we need an Email Charter. I felt a disturbance in the Force. I had to reply. So I am, in two parts.

The concept of an email charter is an honorable goal.

The reality of an email charter is that it will fail.

The practicality of an email charter is that you shouldn’t let that failure stop you.

Let me explain.

This concept is not new. It has been tried before (but if you need 26 rules to get the point across, it is too complex). Books have been written about it. It’s been done for other protocols.

Back in 1983 I authored A Primer on How to Work With the Usenet Community, which we would now recognize as a crowdsourced document, but the word crowdsource wouldn’t be invented for another 20 years; it did, however, coin the term Netiquette, which ultimately made it into the dictionary (yay us). It’s been translated into 30-some languages (that I know of), it’s been referenced in thousands of other documents over the years, and it’s influenced countless people’s behavior over the 20-oh-do-I-feel-old-plus* years it’s been in existance.

Just look at USENET today, and see how well we succeeded at managing that commons.

So before you even start a project like this, realize that IT WILL FAIL. You are creating a document with a voluntary set of ruiles (sorry, guidelines**) and asking people to follow them. Doing so will fail if only because there is always going to be an influx of new, naive users who don’t know the guidelines exist and therefore can’t follow them. There will also always be people who don’t want to, don’t agree with them, don’t care what you think, or simply feel like being contrary. And the griefers and trolls who get off on screwing up stuff other people value. And the spammers who only see a free resource they can suck dry for their own personal benefit and profit.

And I am recommending that you accept this failure, embrace it and recognize it. And that you don’t let it stop you from pushing this to fruition.

Because if history is our guide, what you will see are the failures. What you must understand is that behind the failures, if you do this well, is an army of successes that don’t get noticed because, well, they aren’t failures. It took me a long time to really see that. A good document that institutionalizes best practices succeeds quietly — it influences people designing systems, it influences influencers and teachers. It gives a context for creation of teaching and training materials. People crib from it and use it in other documents, and spread it around. Users see it and learn from it and adopt it. Programmers innoculate it’s standards into the tools we end up using. And you’ll see almost none of that; and if you don’t understand that, eventually the weight of watching the failures may cause you to feel like the project failed, when in fact, it succeeded, but just not with a 100% perfect success.

So do it. Because if you do it well, it will help, and potentially help a lot. But understand from the very start that it won’t solve all of your problems or get 100% adoption, so it’s not a complete success. And if there’s something to be learned from the horrors that USENET became, it’s that asking nicely ultimately fails, because no matter how many people agree and abide, the ones that don’t will ultimately overrun the commons and destroy it.

But if your real goal is to prevent the tragedy of the commons in email that we saw in USENET, this is a useful tool, but it won’t be enough. We need to do more, because asking won’t succeed. What is going to be needed?

I have some ideas, and I’ll talk about them in Part 2.

* — you do not need to remind me that this document is older than most people reading this blog posting. Honest.

** — Sorry, usenet cabal in joke. wanna see the scars?

*** — Just checking to see if you realize I only have two footnotes…

(Hat tip: Duncan for finding this gem)

Congratulations to Boston and Tim Thomas

Huge congratulations to Tim Thomas and the boston Bruins, deserving Stanley Cup champs. Vancouver carried a lot of the play tonight, especially early, but the better team definitely won and took home the championship.

While Luongo can be fairly criticised for some of his play in Boston, I didn’t see anything tonight that was “his fault” and he seemed composed and palying well. If you want to consider what went wrong, 8 goals in 7 games means that your goalie’s play was irrelevant. You’re not winning a series if you never score, and you don’t get style points for losing 1-0. This series was Thomas vs. the Canuck forwards and Thomas won by a wide margin, and so Luongo simply wasn’t a factor in how the series ended.

One huge thing in how this went down to me was the Hamhuis injury, followed by the Rome hit and suspension. That thinned out the depth on defense significantly, forcing more minutes on other defensemen, and I think they just were too fatigued to compete against a Boston team that pushed hard and rolled four lines a lot. Fresh legs beat tired legs. Tired legs lead to positioning mistakes, which lead to opportunities, and Boston buried them. Erhoff at -7 says a lot, but not necessarily about Erhoff as much as the entire blueline having to take on a little too much due to the lost bodies.

That doesn’t mean I give the Canucks a pass here; watching them reminded me too much of the Sharks, in that I’ve seen the “carry play, make a mistake, pull it out of your net, unable to rally and pull even” style of hockey too much this season. Maybe the missing component on the team is that neither the Sharks nor the Canucks had — Mark Rechhi. The veteran influence who teaches by example, and who can pick his spots and carry the team as well as lead it.

Unfortunately, Vancouver hasn’t taken the loss well, and significant rioting has broken out. I’m disappointed, but somehow not surprised. That seems sadly common after major sporting events these days, beacuse the crowd give the idiots shielding to show up and look to create problems. It looks like it started near the CBC studios where crowds gathered to watch on jumbotrons; it may be we simply can’t set up those kind of congregations any more.

A sad note on a very happy day for the city of boston.

But for me, it’s thomas that I’m going to carry forward from this year’s hockey. He joins Lanny MacDonald as one of those guys who defines what’s good about hockey…

 

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 15, 2011

Wednesday’s in Review: David duChemin

I was listening to this podcast where David duChemin talks about his fall in Pisa and how he’s recovering from it today. duChemin is a photographer very far away from my core competency, which is what first attracted me to him and his work; before his accident he’d made a decision to make changes in his life and was spending the year touring the U.S. — part vacation, part sabattical, part, it seems, mid-life crisis and reinventing himself. That’s something I can sympathize with since I’ve gone through a similar process since leaving Apple, and that he was willing to do so openly and in public made his story fascinating to me and something I’ve really wanted to support.

As a photographer, he’s best known as what I’d call a humanitarian photographer, traveling to various locations and shooting the people and places in ways that help illuminate those people; many of his clients are the non-govermental agencies (NGOs) that work to improve lives around the world. He’s also a strong travel photographer that brings a real humanity to his images. He’s also a board member of Focus for Humanity, a non-profit foundation aimed at supporting and mentoring photographers who are trying to tell those humanitarian and cultural stories around the world.

Given how rarely a human being appears in any of my photos, my being interested in his work may seem a bit odd, but he’s one of the photographers I’m studying because I know I need to improve this aspect of my work, and his technical and esthetic craft appeals to me as a style I want to adopt into my own photography.

He is the author of a couple of books published by Peachpit press, including Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision and VisionMongers: Making a Life and a Living in Photography, and he has a new book, Photographically Speaking: A Deeper Look at Creating Better Images (Voices That Matter) due out this fall. His books are a bit different than many photo books in that they are less about the knobs and levers of making the camera behave and more about understanding your inner voice and learning to see the emotion in an image and how to translate what you see and feel into an image that can translate that to others. I would define this more as writing about being a photographer than being a book about photography, and I found them well-written and fascinating reads with good insights. The photography he chooses to illustrate his work is solid and the production quality of the Peachpit books is solid.

He’s also behind the e-book publishing imprint Craft and Vision, where he’s been experimenting with this new form publishing by reinventing the photography book. As I’ve written in the past, this is an area I’ve really been looking at as well for future projects, and frankly, I think his publishing model is the one I like best to date and would try to emulate if I ever decide to go down this path. The basic model is that instead of the traditional printed photography book — $30 or more, a few hundred pages and a huge effort to write and get published, the books from Craft and Vision are shorter (around 25-30 pages typically), more focused, can be written more quickly — and only cost $5.00. I’ve written about a few of these books in the past (Michael Frye’s Light and Land, for instance) and I’ve found them to be consistently high quality and well written, and at five bucks a shot, you can make them an impulse buy and not feel guilty.

If you want to explore duChemin’s work or this new ebook form of publishing, here are a few C&V works I can recommend:  Ten Ways to IMprove your Craft. None of them Involve buying Gear (and Ten More). Chasing the Look (ten ways to improve the Aesthetics of your Photographs) and Drawing the Eye (Creating Stronger Images through Visual Mass). The latter two would make a great introduction to this format and to duChemin’s work and philosophy of photography and I recommend them quite highly.

If you haven’t discovered duChemin, you should, through his blog, his online portfolio, and his books. He’s an interesting writer and inspired photographer and his way of communicating his vision has helped me shape and refine mine.

(and in a total coincidence, between my writing this and posting it, David’s announced his next C&V ebook, Deeper. Looking forward to getting my hands on it)

 

game 7 baby!

Game 7. Stanley Cup final. 60 minutes of hockey left in the season, plus maybe some overtime.

After this, both teams go golfing, but one goes with a smile.

I’ve really enjoyed this series. Both are really good teams. The Canucks problems in Boston are curious, but I don’t read too much into the blowout factor. Game 7 is too close to call. Clearly, Vancouver has the advantage since Boston has yet to win on the road either, but I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable putting money on that. I do hope the good Luongo shows up instead of the Boston Luongo, or it could get ugly. If Luongo is off his game, the team seems to fall apart in front of him.

Tim Thomas wins the Conn Smythe even if he loses game 7 5-0. Start engraving.

When I think about Luongo right now, two names come to mind.

First is Evgeny Nabokov, the goalie the Sharks thought would take them to the promised land, but who simply never quite seemed up to that last step up to the podium. Having watched Nabby play for a number of years, and then watched a season of Niemi after he and the Sharks figured out how to play together, you can see the difference. When I watch Luongo in the playoffs, I see more Nabokov than Niemi. And on every whiteboard in every opposing locker room next year will be the words “shoot high glove”. It’ll be curious to see how Luongo solves that little weak spot. Um, big weak spot.

But I also think about Chris Osgood, because he’s a goalie with 2 Cup Rings and a long, successful career where fans and media continue to argue he isn’t really a Hall of Fame goalie, because he played behind a really good team and it wasn’t really that Osgood was THAT good. I’ve come to believe that Osgood is a Hall of Famer and is being disrepected a bit, but I also understand where this criticism comes from. I can’t see those REd Wing teams winning the cups with andre racicot in goal, though.

But that’s a legitimate question for Luongo, too, because his performance in the playoffs makes me wonder about the Olympic gold. Just how much of that was Luongo? And how much of that was the team in front of him? And that’s not a comfortable question for Canucks fans, because unlike the Sharks with Nabby, the Canucks have Luongo tied up for a good while and he’s not going anywhere. Schneider probably is, though, since he could be a starter elsewhere.

It’s clear, however, that even if he wins game 7, Luongo won’t put the critics to bed; nor should they. And Luongo has to stop and figure out how he is going to do that, or he’s likely to become the next Chris Osgood, no matter how many rings he wins. If he does.

Right now, if I were a Canuck fan, I would not be comfortable about game 7 — or the long term sustained success with this team fronting Luongo.

My head and sympathies are with the Canucks, since they’re at home and they win at home.

My heart is clearly with Boston and Thomas now. If Vancouver wins game 7, it’ll feel like they cheated the Bruins, because they haven’t shown themselves to a a better team, much less a dominant one. For me, a perfect ending here is Thomas winning, 1-0, in overtime. Because the series is that close, but ultimately, Thomas really deserves the victory and series.

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 14, 2011

The challenge and opportunity of Zynga

Zynga’s Empires & Allies rockets to nearly 10M users in nine days | VentureBeat:


Zynga‘s Empires & Allies game has rocketed to nearly 10 million users in nine days. That’s a remarkable start for any Facebook game, but for Zynga that is becoming a predictable result.

 

Zynga has more than 249 million monthly active users on Facebook, according to AppData. Empires & Allies, a combat social strategy game which is akin to “CityVille meets Risk,” has more than 9.5 million monthly active users as of Friday. And it gained more than 5 million users on Friday alone. That makes the game one of the fastest growing in Facebook history.

But will they sustain that number? That’s their challenge. And the numbers seem to indicate no. Zynga’s model seems to be to always have a new shiny for users to flock to, and it seems to work. One wonders what will happen if they have a new game flop. So far, it hasn’t happened. Might now. Mafia Wars, which until Sunday was one of my guilty pleasures, has seen a significant drop in users and is now under 2 million active per day even though over 15 million users have “liked” it on Facebook at one time or another.

As I just noted, I used the word “was”. On Sunday, I completed Ruby level Brazil, which means in essence, I’ve lapped the game designers. I decided that was enough, spent some time distributing my high value items to my loyal mafia clan, set my character name to “gone fishing”, and walked away.

Zynga’s been very successful to date. They deserve it. Hey, I played the game for a long time, and I put some amount into buying upgrades (because I believe it’s worth a few bucks into the tip jar if I get some reasonable enjoyment out of it — this is where money I used to spend on Xbox games has gone for a while…). But they’ve also got some issues they need to figure out.

Over the last year and a half (more or less) Mafia Wars has been my “minesweeper” a pleasant way to take a break and waste a few minutes while waiting for something else to happen or to ponder over something while hacking away and enemies, and during this time, I’ve grown a character to level 1176. It’s now powerful enough that I can complete a game area faster than they can add them to keep me busy.

That is, as they say, a problem, and one Zynga has been struggling with for a number of months; there are many users far senior to me, and Zynga has to build a game that’s balanced enough that it doesn’t obliterate or frustrate new users while having enough to do to keep the more senior members busy and interested. One way Zynga has been attempting to do so is through a proliferation of mini quests and side games. That has in many ways backfired, since the numbers indicate members have found this proliferation not interesting and many of the more senior members in my mafia have gone dark over the last few months. I sympathize; many of these new games are nothing more than

That’s not why I gave up the game. Mostly, it’d just run the course and it’s time to go do something else, and that shows one of the challenges Zynga has to figure out. As someone who’s now a recent retiree from the game who’s actually rather positive about the experience, I thought it might be interesting to write up my thoughts on this.

I went into Mafia Wars because I was curious about the game play design, and even more interested in the design and use of virtual goods and the virtual economy. it’s a huge aspect of the online universe (gameplay and not; it’s relevant to photos and writing as an aspect of in-app purchasing, for instance; it’s also a way to, I’m thinking, help fund endeavours without strong physical good aspects like web comics). The challenge of gameplay and game balance are nothing new; go back to the elder days of Rogue or Zork to see that the model Zynga uses in Mafia Wars is a classic one of matching the player’s power inflation to the game’s monsters and challenges.

Rogue and Zork had virtual money and virtual goods, too; you just didn’t put real money into the hopper to buy fake money to buy your virtual goods. What Mafia Wars has that Zork and Rogue don’t have are the words “multiplayer” and “social”.

The word “social” is one of the things Zynga pushed too hard for my taste. Everything at times seems like it’s aimed to get my to send a thing to someone to encourage them to send me a thing (it’s even worse in Farmville, which I don’t play, but my wife has). A point of frustration is that the game and/or Facebook have limits on how often you can throw messages around — and a common occurance if you have a thriving mafia is for you to attempt to send someone a thingie, only to have Facebook tell you you’re out of messages and come back tomorrow. Or for Zynga to tell you that the recipient has already gotten too many thingies, so send them another thingie instead. or that you got too many thingies from your mafia, so they’re converting it to a thingie of no real value.

So if you’re working in a fairly large and cooperative mafia, the message of “here! do this! Fool! we won’t let you do what you just got told to do! ha ha!” is common. Not a great gameplay, and Zynga frankly sucks at this; the system should recognize these limits and pull the requests or something, not have you click the buttons and be told you’ve failed. I found it one of the more frustrating aspects fo the game, and a number of mafia members I know feel the same, and ultimately, it caused me to really scale back on my attempts to join into the social aspects beyond being a good neighbor to my core mafioso. It seemed from watching how others were giving stuff to me that this is a fairly common occurrence.

I admit up front the way I prefer to game doesn’t lend itself to “social”. Nobody knows my Xbox Live account (by design); I’ve never joined World of Warcraft because too much of the gameplay forces you into guild and cooperative dungeoning to achieve many goals. That’s now how I game; I might not touch something for a few weeks, then play it a lot for a few days, then not touch it again for another few weeks; I’m more likely to put in a couple of hours late at night, when I decide I’m just not into geeking any longer — but it’s like pulling up a book, not something I’m going to schedule like I would going clubbing with friends. So to some degree, I’m not Zynga’s demograhic, just like I’m not Warcraft’s.

So I like Zynga’s casual aspect; not it’s social. it does well in “minesweeper” mode, at least until you get senior enough. Then it requires enough care and feeding to start feeling like a bit of a burden, which is why ultimately I decided it was a good time to retire. Having completed the primary challenges and finding the mini-games and side quests all pretty “meh” helped.

Ultimately two things made me decide to move on at this point. First is that Zynga’s design esthetic really started to annoy me; there’s a nasty lack of consistency to gameplay — simple things like when you fight in one city the fight screen rolls back to the top, and when you do the same thing in another city, the screen stays centered on the location where you initiated the fight. Isn’t there someone at Zynga defining what basic gameplay elements ought to be and making sure they all operate the same way within the same game? Evidently not. That may not be something that annoys you, but it started really annoying me, and to me, it shows a relative lack of “fit and finish” — and deep down inside, Mafia Wars was acting more and more to me like Zynga was throwing stuff at the wall and seeing which things the users didn’t hate, not really thinking through the game dynamics many times. Which is weird, because in other ways, watching how they refined and enhanced the game at times was really fascinating. I though the progression of gameplay through New York to Vegas to Italy to Brazil was great, and I really thought the design of Italy and Brazil was good in most ways (Italy was too easy, just as I thought Bangkok was too grinding but not really hard); Fight tournaments in Vegas was an interesting concept, but once you master the levels, they never did anything else with it. It’s a shiny stone that turns out to be cubic zirconia.

But the big thing that finally annoyed me out of the game was the QA. I got tired of tripping over bugs. Over basic rendering issues. Over inconsistencies. Server failwhales (although they seem to have those under control now, for a while, the system was badly unstable). But the QA? horrible. Buying items in Bangkok might seem a basic need; but when it breaks and stays broken for weeks? anyone paying attention? Or for a good giggle, try filtering your inventory on “giftable” and see how many data errors are in the set. Also look at how inconsistently it finds the same number of items in your inventory. oops.

Soultimately I realized it was trying to demand more of my time and I was enjoying it less, and the — the only word is sloppy, or maybe I’ll upgrade that to “hurried” — implementation just took the edge off it. So it was time to go do something else.

And if Zynga wants to better keep people like me, the more senior people in the game who’ve invested in the game in fairly significant ways, this would be me recommendation: fit and finish matter more than lots of crap tossed against the wall. Because what I finally came to see in mafia wars was something being treated as itinerant and disposable — and I finally did.

Not sure what I’ll do instead; Zynga’s new game looks okay, but not something I want to dig into. Honestly, I think I’m ready to spend most of that time with the Kindle, at least for now…. And maybe finally get around to starting up Dragon Age and go kill some orcs or something…

 

 

 

 

 

The Art of Editing

OP – The Blog» Blog Archive » The Art of Editing:

So this is an area where I think we can all help each other. Who do you turn to for objective feedback about your work? What kind of experiences have you had with camera clubs, or photo-sharing web sites? Please let us know by posting a comment!

This is something I’ve been chewing on for a while; I’ve found people and groups on flickr who’s feedback I trust and appreciate, but it’s tough to pull these resources together. I don’t know how someone who’s not quite so — outgoing — as I am does it.

I think you could build a criticism site around a Stack Exchange model quite successfully. Don’t use formal groups, but use an ad-hoc criticism setup with a karma/reputation metric to help people understand which opinions are recognized within the community. This was on my short list to design and see about launching this year, until I realized I’d have no cycles for something like this most of the year so I tabled it. But I’d love to see it. I’d love to join it. I’d like to build it some day, if I ever have time to do it properly. (still undiscovered is the underlying funding model; I’d like to charge a minimal fee for critique submission just to keep the noise level down and self-limit posting frequency and try to encourage it towards the serious user; you could waive fees based on reputation and frequency of recognized contribution; you could use fees to build a reward structure to reward contributors — and you could use the results to generate galleries and curated showings that might drive traffic, and perhaps build a sales area off the side. Lots of capability here, both to create a community that might drive something like JPEG or affiliate with an online sales gallery system like Imagekind…)

But one thing I’ve realized is if you don’t have the cycles you can’t sweat the details, and if you don’t sweat the details if doesn’t thrive. so it’s better to not do something than do it badly. But I’ve looked around for a site that organizes critique sessions and the like, and I haven’t found one I’m interested in joining or participating in. So I’m still doing ad hoc things….

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 13, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 13, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 12, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 11, 2011

Game 5 — one bounce makes the difference

As I said after game 4, until Boston breaks serve and wins a game on the road, this is still Vancouver’s series to lose. And after game 5, we’re now at that “no tomorrow’ point. The next Boston loss is their last of the season, so either they run the table, or Vancouver celebrates.

This series is a great example of how home ice can be huge — if the teams are evenly matched. Home ice has some significant advantages, such as last change, where you can architect matchups to your advantage to a degree. But it also has less obvious ones, like knowing how the boards will react in a given situation and, say, shooting wide on purpose knowing it’ll pop out the other side, and having someone on the other side realize this and be able to take advantage of it. That’s something a home team can do that an away team has trouble being ready for.

In Game 5, that was the difference in the game.

Both teams played well; great game overall. Both goalies were superb. Thomas got beat on — call it a lucky bounce if you want, but it was a lucky bounce that the Canucks clearly went for (and got). So I’ll call it “making their luck”.

I would not be at all surprised if this goes seven. Honestly? I’m hoping, because it’s some great hockey. I’m not convinced Boston knows how to beat Vancouver at home, but I’m also not convinced that Vancouver has the grit to beat Boston in Boston; whether Boston has the grit to overcome Vancouver at home, we’ll have to see. hopefully.

Right now, my Conn-Smythe winner is whichever goalie hoists the Cup. thomas clearly is the reason Boston is contending and two wins from the series. Luongo — you can look at the two blowout losses and being pulled all you want — has a team that has scored six goals in the series one win from winning it all.  Think about THAT for a second, and tell me the goalie wouldn’t deserve the Conn-Smythe, blowout losses or no. Sometimes it’s not how many goals you stop, but whether you stop key goals. If he does that one more time (and with Thomas playing in the other goal, he’ll have to), the award is a no-brainer.

Great series; possibly a classic one. the next game (or two) ought to be some awesome hockey.

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 10, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 9, 2011

After game 4: we have a series!

After game 2 I expect lots of folks in vancouver were planning a parade. Now, after game 4, at best Canucks fans are nervous, and should be.

Boston fans need to remember, though, that until the Bruins win a game in Vancouver — break serve — they won’t win the cup. And they haven’t. home team wins all four games, and if that continues, vancouver takes it.

I think it’s been some great hockey. Boston right now looks to me to have the distinct edge because it seems to have dug in and found that extra level; it’s turned the knob to freaking twelve; that and Tim Thomas, who is just unbelievable right now.

My biggest worry for the Canucks: Luongo. I’m watching him, and the Bruins have him figured out and are in his head. He needs to find a way to get back on his game or it will be over.

My thought on Luongo having watched the last four games is a simple two words, Vancouver fans: Evgeny Nabokov.

Can’t wait for game 5…

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 8, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 7, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 6, 2011

The funniest comedian you (probably) never saw…

 

It’s with some sadness I read today that a couple of people have passed away — Wally Boag and Betty Taylor. Boag was 90, and Taylor was 91.

Unless you’re an entertainment geek of the proper age and persuasion, neither name will mean much to you. But Boag and Taylor were hired by Walt Disney to perform in the Golden Horseshoe Revue in Frontierland. Bpag played Peco Bill and Taylor was Slew-foot Sue and emceed the show. The show ran from almost the opening of the park in the 50′s to 1986, and Boag and Taylor did the show live 5-6 days a week, 3-5 shows a day for thirty years. They and the show are in Guiness as the longest running stage show with over 47,000 performances.

As a kid growing up in SoCal, I visited the park a lot, and later, worked there for four years after high school. My job there gave me a lot of opportunity to explore the bowels off hours, as I worked mostly swing or graveyard, and left me days free, so of course I spent a number of them in the park as well (because I self-admit to having no real life).

One of the places I went to a lot in the park was Golden Horseshoe; it was a cool, quiet place in the heat of the day where you could get a sandwich that wasn’t a greaseball and a cold drink and sit for a bit. And the show was a lot of fun, especially for someone with a fondness for slapstick humor. I’m not exaggerating when I say I probably saw it around a hundred times over the years.

Taylor was a strong performer with a classic vaudeville/broadway voice, the singer that could fill a room, much like Ethel Merman. Boag was your classic slapstick comedian, very mobile face, a good sense of timing. Steve Martin, another former Disneylander who’s schtick I saw a couple of times when he was  working in the magic shop, has said Boag was a major influence of his; I think it says something about Boag’s influence that he hosted the Muppet Show when most people watching the show likely had no clue who he was.

What made the Golden Horseshoe fun time and time again was how these people kept it fresh; I honestly have no idea how someone could do effectively the same routine for 30 years and not end up phoning it in or losing enthusiasm for it — but if they did, I never saw it. What they did wasn’t Shakespeare (and wasn’t intended to be), but the quality and consistency stood out. They were pros and they were proud of what they did, and they made sure the people there were entertained, every show, every day.

So this is one of those little pieces of my history that’s now moved on; I never met either, although I saw them both backstage a couple of times in my work there. So enjoy, if you will, a couple of youtube clips of their work and raise a glass and a fond wish on their passing.

 

(this clip seems to be from, I’m guessing, the mid or late 60′s)

(this bit by Taylor is from some special broadcasted performance much later, probably late 70′s or close to retirement time)

(and finally, Boag on the Muppet show, doing his Horseshoe routine with Miss Piggy as Slewfoot Sue).

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 5, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 4, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for June 3, 2011

On filters and echo chambers

Do We Have Too Many Filters, Or Not Enough? Tech News and Analysis:

 

 

 

 

 

Will there be people who have such a uniform social graph that any form of social filtering will just allow them to live in an online echo chamber? Of course there will be — but then, those people already exist, and seem to have no trouble living in a cocoon with or without the Internet. Social filters aren’t going to make that phenomenon any worse (J.P. Rangaswami has a very thoughtful post about filtering, and business blogger Tim Kastelle also wrote a great post recently about the virtues of different kinds of filtering).

 

 

 

This has always happened online, going back to the days of USENET where kill files could virtually disappear someone out of the social circles of a group if they didn’t follow the party line well enough. One of the great struggles I’ve seen with mailing lists going back 15 years and more is for a tendency for a list to stagnate over time. I used to look for ways to break that stagnation and try to keep fresh blood entering the community, but one of the side effects of keeping a group of people together for years is they get really comfortable with each other, and whether they realize it or not, they don’t always make newcomers welcome. It may not even be a visible “we don’t want you here”, but a more subtle lack of being welcoming where people just don’t end up feeling comfortable so they don’t tend to stick.

In today’s environments it’s easy to set yourself up so that you only see what you want to see; I think that’s inherent in the unknown and uncomfortable causing stress and as humans, I think most of us unconsciously try to minimize our stress where we can — as such, whether we realize it or not, we filter for the known and comfortable because it’s, well, known and comfortable.

There’s no place where this is more overtly visible than what I like to call the Silicon Valley tech bubble; you know who they are, it’s the high profile A-lister bloggers who are a large part of the group that writes or influences what’s written in the tech and analyst press about high tech, especially here in the valley. This group all watches each other very closely, and stuff found by one tends to circle around to all quickly, and when they get it in their mind that something is (or should be) true, disagreeing opinions rarely get much visibility.

Worse, when they are wrong, the mistakes tend to get quietly buried. Look, for instance, about the hype and predictions leading up to the release of the Verizon iPhone. In the view of many, that was going to be the death of AT&T and that there would be mass riots of AT&T customers chasing Verizon iphones. Could this be influenced by the fact that AT&T networks are particularly bad in some areas of silicon valley and maybe that influenced their thinking? Well, maybe. But that thinking also clearly influences the tech and financial analysts, and the whole “Verizon iPhone diaspora” concept because kind of a running meme in the tech press, until finally, Apple and Verizon actually shipped the damned thing.

And it turns out, it was a nice, modest success on all accounts, but… Where was the massive shift of customers that everyone was predicting? And how many of these people actually stood up and said “well, heck. I guess I got that wrong?” — few. And how many actually analyzed why so much of the predictive coverage of this was wrong? Almost nobody, that I saw. And how many of you actually held them accountable for being wrong and demanded accountability, or stopped reading them because they proved themselves to be more about wishful thinking than real analysis? Hmm.

That’s one problem here. Analysts and writers with frankly pretty lousy track records aren’t held accountable, especially if they’re interesting/fun writers and because we as readers love the rumor/gossip aspect and don’t actually seem to care if any of that is actually correct. There’s a strong aspect of Entertainment Tonight to all of this, which is amusing because many of these folks would pluck out their eyes rather than admit they pay attention to that kind of stuff. Unless it’s in the geek press.

There are a couple of things in play here. One is the tendency over time to focus what you follow away from things that cause stress, meaning a quiet tendency towards narrowing to the comfortable and familiar. On the flip side is what I think is a subconscious worry that you’re going to miss something important, which leads to bringing in more sources and more feeds, which means you’re spending more time going through all that stuff (and skimming, so you’re actually seeing even less detail and capturing less info) — until ultimately, you hit information bankruptcy and blow everything away and start over. Do that two or three times and you probably find yourself and you find youself simultaneously stressed over adding new sources to the things you’re watching (because you’re already overloaded and struggling to keep up already) and also stressing because there’s stuff you wish you could follow if you weren’t already stressing over being overloaded. And once you hit that point, you’re firmly in the grip of your personal echo chamber.

I’ve fought those issues; we all have. I continue to, but I feel like right now, I have things set up in a way that I’m comfortable with and which seem to be working pretty well. And I figured some folks might find how I simultaineously fight the echo chamber while avoiding information bankruptcy useful as hints to adopt into your own information surfing workflows… So here are a few thoughts on what I’m doing today:

(1) If it’s important to me, it will be brought to my attention. This is a core concept to get your head around; it’s the core of all of these social networks we’re in, yet one of the hardest lessons I had to teach myself was that I didn’t actually have to find all this stuff myself, but to relax and leverage the networks I’ve built myself into. This is easier said than done, but I think it’s very true: if you touch the right points in the network, then stuff you should know will end up being within your attention space. And if it doesn’t, you probably didn’t need it. Those exceptions you will run into (because no network is perfect) are those places where you need to figure out how to tie into the right networks to get  that information the next time). Embrace this concept, and you will likely wave bye-bye to bankruptcy forever, because you are embracing leverage over sheer volume.

(2) Budget by time, not size or number. I finally got over the “how many feeds can I read?” mindset. It ignores things like how busy a feed is and how noisy a feed is; you can’t treat a feed that updates weekly but is full of gems the same as some of the sites that post 30 articles a day, 20 of which are crap. I finally realized what mattered was time, so I budget time: my goal, about 90 minutes of surfing for information a day. If you come up with a budget for how much time in a day this is worth to you, you can start adjusting what you do to maximize the value of that time investment. I don’t know about you, but time is the one commodity I can’t flex and the one I very much tend to need to be creative about. If time were available in packages at Lowe’s, my credit cards would be maxed permanently.  So decide how much time you are willing to invest in this, and then that gives you permission to explore (if you’re under) and makes you edit (if you’re over); and through the editing you’ll keep yourself pro-actively away from bankruptcy.

(3) At the end of the day, throw it all out and start over. How often do you find yourself around someone who fires up Google Reader and it shows they have 1,000 unread articles? 10,000? And they peck at a few things and then leave the rest of that mass there, and rpobably say something apologetic. They’re in bankruptcy and won’t admit it. The amount of time they’re willing to commit is clearly smaller than the wad of information they’re trying to process, and they’re choking on it. They are in reality editing (by picking stuff on the fly) without editing (by leaving the rest behind in this faux fantasy they may catch up soon). And they’re stressing themselves out by doing so. So my suggestion: at the end of the day, if it’s not read, mark it all read and move on. Start fresh tomorrow. Remember point 1; if it’s important, it’ll be brought to your attention. Of course, if you’re that far overloaded, you may be too overloaded to see that it was. Which is why you need point 4.

(4) Edit. Ruthlessly. Often. Whenever you start falling a bit behind, start dropping things out of your feeds. Find the things that are least useful, least interesting — the least value for your precious time commodity — and unsubscribe them. don’t just mark them read, mark them gone. How often do you look at at site you’re following and wonder why you subscribed? Or the last time you got a useful article from it? Or clicked through a link to  something? Or did you research how to write web apps in Dec/RSTS three months ago and are all of those feeds still in there even though you ended up adopting Node instead? Edit. Edit. Edit. Even if the feed you drop is mine, drop it. seriously, I won’t mind. Think of ever piece you’re committing to follow as needing an ROI, where there’s an investment of time and a return of information of value. Anything that doesn’t meet that ROI that isn’t a boss, co-worker, spouse or your mother’s blog, should go (there will always be a need for VIP sites, of course). Think about it this way: the act of editing what you read can be intimidating because the process of going through all of those feeds can be time-consuming, and time is what you’re most missing anyway. If you get in the habit of editing out low-value feeds on the fly, one here, a couple there, you won’t hit a time where it all overwhelms and becomes a big hairy monster. And you can build the habit such that as you’re going through things, you’ll find yourself mentally suddenly do a sanity check: “when was the last time this site gave me value?” and if you can’t answer it, you drop it. And by building that habit, you’ll find your feed management almost becoming automatic within the time you’ve budgeted; if you start spending too much time in the feeds, you’ll edit more seriously, if you’re well in your time budget, you won’t. but by building that habit, you may hit a point where you rarely even notice your time budget any more; it becomes almost automatically self-sustaining.

(5) Fresh Blood. Lots of it. Always be adding new things to the mix; don’t be afraid to audition a feed. About 80% of the feeds I add get removed again within a month, but that’s okay. Many times I’ll check something out because of a particularly interesting piece someone linked to, but I don’t see much else that keeps me interested. Rather than continuing to skim and hope, I know if something else really interesting pops up, I’ll get told about it, so that’s okay. Also, don’t forget that your interests and needs and skills change over time; as I’ve grown as a photographer, the list of sites I follow on photography has changed by about 80%.; that’s not because those sites stopped being good or interesting, it’s because I stopped being their demographic and I started wanting different kinds of information to feed on. That’s good, but adapt your feeds to it, don’t just keep stuff around because it was useful once….

That’s another aspect of the edit ruthlessly; it not only helps you avoid bankruptcy, it gives you permission to explore ruthlessly, too. That’s how you avoid echo chambering yourself. My typical pattern seems to be that I subscribe to a number of feeds roughly equal to 5% of my feed collection every month. Most of those don’t survive the month, but many do. Along the way, I drop out weak feeds that come to my notice, but not as many as I add. Eventually (it seems to happen about every two months) I decide I’m spending too much time on all of this stuff, and I go in and do some more enthusiastic editing that typically takes me back to about 80% of my time budget. Note that all of this is thought of in terms of time expended and the value received for that investment in time — but if you want a raw number, my Google Reader subscriptions tend to cycle around 400.

You can almost think of it as an agile process; lots of short iterative acquisition/editing cycles instead of massive binge/purge projects.

And the core determining value is a simple one, in theory: are you getting a good return on the investment of your time? If the answer is no, then you need to adjust and edit until you do.

Of course, that’s still easier said than done, but I’ve found it definitely worth doing…  And if this helps, great. If not, well, maybe this site isn’t a good investment of your time… (grin)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 2, 2011

That was a pretty darn good game 1.

Did you pick Raffi Torres for game winning goal?

Nope. Neither did I. but how often do the experts point out that the top lines tend to neutralize each other and it’s a role player that steps up? Anyone want on the Raffi Torres for Conn-Smythe bandwagon?

No, me, neither. Laurie and I talked about that tonight (I categorically refuse to worry about Conn-Smythe until final round, because it’s silly speculation earlier (and will change). But now? surprisingly, we agree 100%. If Boston wins this series, it has to be Thomas. If Vancouver does, it’s either Kesler or Luongo, and we both add in Bieksa as a possible candidate.

By the way,  on the close call that led to the goal, two different camera angles showed me the linesman made the right call. In one angle, you could clearly see him dragging the skate and the skate was vibrating, showing that it was in contact with the ice and not raised going across the line. In another angle, you could compare when it crossed the blue line with the puck, and the puck entered the zone JUST ahead of the skate by maybe a couple of inches, but it was there. Very difficult to get right with multiple angles in slowmo with repeated viewings, and the linesman had the angle to get it right on the spot in real time with no second chance. well done.

Well done, both teams. A great play and a timely goal and Thomas had no chance, and hopefully the entire series will be this completive and close.

Going into game 1 was Bettman’s annual “state of the game” talk, which is fascinating reading. League revenues break $3 billion, and the cap is going up (again) because the league continues to grow.  George Malik has the details, and they’re fun to read.

Colin Campbell is stepping down as czar of discipline and Brendan Shanahan will don the hair shirt in his place. My sympathies to Shanahan. If you read around the press and net the commentary on this change, watching all of the people with axes to grind at Campbell throwing sparks is a good indication of just how much fun Shanahan will have stepping into those shoes.

My take on Campbell: he did a very solid and fair job in a role that’s guaranteed that no matter what you do, people will gripe. He had a strong vision of how discipline should be managed and he was very consistent within that vision. There are many who disagreed with that vision, but in my view, most of the complaints aimed at him were more about people not agreeing with decisions (and therefore they’re wrong).

My one complaint about Campbell was that I felt suspensions needed to be longer to be a true deterrent (there are other changes to the system I’d like to see, for instance, teams shouldn’t be allowed to replace a suspended player on the roster but be forced to play with that slot empty for the duration — but that’s a Board of Governors and rules committee decision, not something Campbell could mandate), and from Bettman’s talk today, it seems clear that’s on the docket. Otherwise? whlie I didn’t always agree with the suspensions, I got to be pretty good about guessing how long they’d be.

I think Campbell did a yeoman’s job in a thankless position, and maybe some day I’ll get to buy him a beer and thank him.Everyone else should, too. I’m sure glad I don’t have that job, I’d probably have gone postal on a GM more than once…

Mostly, the state of the league speech is of course merely an excuse for everyone who hates bettman and the league to spin everything he says negative. It’s really rather sad, especially some of the canadian press (yes, I’ve been bashing the canadian press pretty heavily recently. for good reason). they have growing revenues, attendance is up, ratings are up. a nice new TV contract with great exposure — and if the league had done what the “experts” had demanded and gone back to ESPN, it wouldn’t have been remotely this much money or exposure. Is everything perfect? Of course not. name a three billion dollar company with 30 organizations that is? Some are always going to be stronger than others; some things are always going to need fixing. It’s interesting that the two leagues that seem most stable and in the best shape right now are the NHL and MLB, both places with long-term commissioners that are generally disliked by fans and media; probably because both aren’t afraid to make tough decisions rather than popular ones. And while I’m a bettman fan and not a selig fan, I do have to admit that MLB had done well overall with him as commissioner.

But let’s enjoy watching the media spin all this to crap and not worry about the facts backing them up. Remember, good news doesn’t sell newspapers or drive pageviews, which is what’s really important.

Want to toss a quick congrats to Winnpeg for getting a team back. It won’t be mentioned, of course, that it was fundamental financial chances that Bettman pushed for — and yes, the shut down fans hate him for drove a lot of this — that make going back to Winnipeg possible. I remember when the Jets left, handing out blue ribbons around san jose arena and pinning one on Greg Jamison, even though it was clear it was too late to save the team. That the league can go back there is awesome.

I feel bad for the fans in atlanta. Unfortunately, as Winnipeg can attest, having fans isn’t enough, you also need owners, and if you don’t have enough, or the right ones, then all the fans in the city won’t be enough. This wasn’t a failure of the city, but of the ownership. and I don’t know that Atlanta will get a third chance to make it work for a good while. which is sad.

Next up in the franchise merry go round (let us not forget, Phoenix is not fully fixed, but seems under control; and the islanders are still in various troubles, although they’ve finally agreed to a vote on possible funding for the arena deal; it’s far from a guarantee it’ll succeed) is, I’m guessing, Kansas City. expect to see chatter pick up about that location again.

But you know what? No matter what some like to say, the league’s doing pretty well and the hockey is pretty damn good. There are problems in the league but there are probelms in every pro sports league, if only because when you have 30 owners some are going to be better than others and some will be more successful than others, and the commissioner can’t dictate, he has to create consensus. and if bettman does nothing else well, it’s his ability to get 30 competitive owners to work together well enough to let the league succeed. That’s pretty good, IMHO.

What really matters, though, is that game 1 rocked, and game 2 should, too. I just wish they weren’t in June (but I understand why….) — looking forward to saturday to see how these two teams adjust to each other.

 

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for June 1, 2011

Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Diving Into the Wreck

This week I’m reviewing Kristine Kathryn Rusch‘s Diving into the Wreck, first book in a new SF series. This is high energy space adventure about a wreck diver, someone who searched space for derelict spaceships and then explores them for usable material. The lead diver, Boss, is a loner who discovers an ancient ship in a location where it shouldn’t be and decides to bring in a team to explore it. The ship may hold great value and great secrets, but it carries risks beyond the obvious one of going inside amid the ruins of a dead ship. There are also other parties interested in the ship and contents, not all of them your friends, and along the way Boss finds herself dealing with various interpersonal conflicts among her team and some unexpected personal history from her past.

This is a high energy story, a fairly quick read, and very entertaining. What attracted me to this book — other than Kris being one heck of a writer — is that I while back I worked with a guy who was just getting involved with scuba wreck diving and it was something we talked around a lot; it is an extremely rigorous and risky hobby with a lot of care and detail put into a dive to explore safely and carefully (and get out alive), and Kris has translated this quite well into the even more dangerous vacuum of space.

I thought the characters fit the story well; they aren’t exceptionally deep or complex, but they aren’t really the focus on the story and I found them internally self-consistent and there were enough conflicts and complications in the relationships to make the story interesting without getting in the way of the action that’s the base of the story.

All in all, a very successful evening’s enjoyment.

The second book in the series is City of Ruins and it’s just come out in paperback and audiobook. A kindle version will evidently be coming along later, and I’ve definitely put it on my todo list.

If you like a good rip-roaring read and space drama, this one is one you should add to your list. Definitely recommended.

Today’s Shared Links for May 31, 2011

2011 playoff predictions: it’s the finals!

And here we are in the finals. 28 teams are golfing, two are playing. And it’s June. At least four, any maybe as many as seven, games of hockey left. I’m already kind of missing the game since there are nights when I can’t stick a game into the background while I work.

Round 3, Boston vs. Vancouver. This should be a great series. Sedins vs. Chara. Thomas vs. Luongo. Some nice stories and challenges here. And the Cup has a chance to return to Canada for the first time in a while. I’m disappointed (but honestly, not surprised) that San Jose isn’t in the finals, but if any team was going to get past the Sharks, it was the Canucks. (side note: there were only two teams in the west that could really beat the Sharks, the Canucks and the Sharks.)

I’ve had a pretty good playoff run myself: Picked the east, missed the west, so I’m 11-3. I guessed wrong on Boston in the first round, Washington in the second round (who didn’t? Other than Yzerman) and San Jose in the third. One wrong, one implosion, and one flukey goal off a stanchion (but the Sharks shouldn’t have let themselves get to that point). I’ll take it.

If you think I’m NOT going to pick Vancouver, you’re crazy. the Bruins are going to have trouble controlling the Sedin twins. The big piece that worries me with Boston is Thomas, and whether he can out-duel Luongo. I think that’s a very distinct possibility. He could steal this series. If he does, that’ll be awesome.

But I expect that the Canucks will win out in six, and take the Cup back to Canada. And if they do, they’ll have well earned it and deserve it. And if Boston somehow takes it instead, just hand Thomas the Conn-Smyte and all of the Canadian press can go spend a couple of months writing articles blaming Bettman for it somehow….

I’m really looking forward to this series. There’s been a lot of great hockey in these playoffs (too bad some parts of the Canadian hockey press seems to be blacked out from those broadcasts and are instead writing about stuff they think sucks and the whole Winnipeg cluster. Guys, there’ll be plenty of time for that in the offseason, how about the hockey?) and I expect this series to be pretty epic.

Can’t wait. but honestly, I’m ready for a bit of a break, too. But camps open not too far away, right?

Go Canucks Go!

 

Today’s Shared Links for May 30, 2011

Who is my audience?

Recently I’ve been evaluating my blog and online presence, to see what works and what could be improved. To be honest, I don’t pay much attention to the analytics and readership numbers most of the time because I’m not trying to write for a mass audience and I don’t want to get in the mindset of doing things to grow the numbers — I want to stick to trying to write what I find interesting and what I hope others find interesting and entertaining, and let that find its natural audience over time.

The numbers, however, are useful for helping you understand what is interesting, but raw numbers need some thought and interpretation and to be honest, there are lots of numbers that all mean different things, and the ones most people focus on seem to be ones that I don’t think mean very much. So I’ve been chewing on the numbers trying to figure out what they mean and what that tells me about what I’m doing.

This implies, by the way, that I’m starting to redesign the blog; it’s been about a year, I’m ready for a new look, but not a radical change. And in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been doing some quiet tinkering to experiment with some ideas to see if they change certain behaviors in any way (or even if they don’t, if I like the look they bring). most of them are things you aren’t likely to notice and don’t deserve talking about in any depth; a lot of it is trying to understand how to improve discoverability of material by people who come and visit the blog, and to improve interconnections between the different pieces of my online universe.

When I redesigned my blog a year ago, the big weakness that I saw was discoverability. people brought in by an RSS link or a search engine search or a link from another site looked at the page they landed on and then left again. There was very little exploration, and there was nothing on the old site to encourage people to explore. The two numbers I paid closest to on Google Analytics were the average length of visit and the number of pages visited per visit. Before I redid the blog, they were terrible — with average stay on the site under a minute, and average number of pages visited under 1.2. The blog design actively discouraged people from finding anything other than what they came to look at and the front page, so they didn’t.

In the redesign, I tried to bring into view a few key articles and other things that might be of interest to people visiting the site; this is typical split out into a semi-permanent list of “best of” articles and a regularly changed list of most popular pages on the site in the recent past. I haven’t found a wordpress plug-in that does that the way I want to do it, and it doesn’t take long to manually update, so I manually do that every 4-6 weeks. each blog post also has an auto-generated list of related articles, and that’s worked pretty well.

I’ve experimented with a few ways to do the same with photos, and haven’t liked any of them; they all clutter the pages up and/or compete with the front page slide show. I’m currently trying something rather less kowabunga, a couple of widget boxes with one photo each for the portfolio and the wallpapers; I like the look, it’s too early to tell if it’s doing anything useful — but I do like the look, and I can tie it back to the saturday or sunday blog posts and create some linkages there.

Overall, the blog redesign did what I was hoping for; average time on site has grown from under a minute to about 1:40. That may not seem like much, but it’s just under double (55 seconds to 95 seconds); pages per visit has grown from about 1.15 to 1.6, up about 25%. Can this be better? I dunno. I certainly don’t want to do things that get in the way of the users primary goal (which is read whatever they can to look at) or be annoying. I can continue exploring how to make sticking around interesting, but I understand most folks are focuses on their task, and I am not going to interrupt that for the wrong reason.

For instance, you’ll never see me do pop-overs or other things that prevent you from reading the article until you do something (like register) or dismiss the dialog. There are a couple of photo sites who aggressively try to get you to subscribe to their newsletter; I know that annoys me, and eventually, I stop visiting links pointing to their sites when I recognize them. If it annoys me, why would I do it to others? So I won’t. I think this comes from thinking about the wrong numbers — total subscribers vs engaged readers. It’s easy to track total subscribers, but I think it’s basically a meaningless number if the subscription isn’t actually read. And I can only wonder how many people those kind of techniques actively drive from the site. I can’t see it as a net positive.

I don’t want to force you to subscribe. I want to convince you to want to. Hijacking your eyeballs won’t make you happy, I can’t see that as a way to build a positive relationship. Because of that philosophy, I’ve played with how to make sure you can figure out how to subscribe (if you want to), but without making it pushy or obnoxious. I’ll take smaller subscription numbers but actively interested readers any day.

So how many subscribers/readers do I have? That turns out to be a suprisingly complicated number. And how does that compare to a year ago?

That turns out to be even more complicated.

You can get content on my site a few ways: you can bookmark it and come visit any time you want. In reality, very few people do this; I know if your site doesn’t have an RSS feed or some way to get notified of updates, I’ll lose track of you — and I know pretty much everyone I talk to is like that now.

I use RSS, Twitter, and Facebook for new content notifications. Whenever I post a blog entry, it goes on the RSS feeds and Twitter. The Twitter updates flow off to my facebook page.  Stuff that goes onto facebook tends to stay on facebook; it’s very sticky about data, so a comment stream there will not end up tying back to the blog; most of the comments I get on postings happen on facebook now, but it doesn’t integrate well with the rest of the universe (in Facebook’s view, this is a feature, not a bug; I don’t care enough now to try to “fix” it and get that data back on the blog. someday, maybe I will).

Twitter has links that point back to the blog; not all twitter clicks have referer data that point back to twitter, so the exact percentage of clicks twitter generates isn’t accurate. In general I’m finding about 15% of my blog visits start with Twitter these days. That’s pretty good (and the real number is somewhat higher; 35% of my visits have no incoming referer, and a chunk of those are from Twitter; it’s not unreasonable to think that 1/3 of my blog visits come from Twitter)

RSS? It all goes through Feedburner, and since I use full feeds, you can read my postings without actually visiting the blogs. This is convenient for readers, inconvenient for trying to maximize pageviews and complicates generating analytics and statistics no end. Since I don’t care about pageviews for advertising and I can live with complicated statistics, I’ll stick with with making it convenient for the reader. I have considered putting some limit to the size of an article in the RSS feeds (say, 750 words) or tweaknig RSS and how it presents the photos, but deep down inside, my view is — not broke, don’t fix.

So really, people who read my blog read it in two places; one is on the blog itself, and one is inside their RSS reader via the RSS feeds. So to answer the question of how many readers I have, I have to figure both of those out. And the data on the RSS feed doesn’t include how long they took to read it, so unless they actually click on a link, it’s hard to tell if they read it, skimmed it, or merely marked it as read while answering the phone…

So how many subscribers are on the RSS feed? Somewhere around 550. the number is variable (if you don’t fire up your reader, you don’t get counted). And that number is down from a high of 700 in January, but in clearly fell off a cliff and so that change was a change in how Google manages or interprets numbers, not a massive die off. It looks like the data slowly inflated and then was corrected (if Google told anyone they did this, I missed it). If I look at that number from a year ago, it’s down from about 625.

But as I’ve said, I find that number rather bogus, and there are clearly problems with that number given the obvious artifacts I see in my two years of data. Feedburner gives you another number, called “reach”, which is an indication of how many subscribers actually interacted with an article (active vs. passive) — and a year ago, my reach number was typically in the 50-75 range. It sometimes spiked into the 200s, and if i wasn’t actively posting, dropped down around 5, so reach is the number I use to gauge how many users are actually looking at the content or doing something with it, not just subscribing to it.

Think about these numbers from a real world perspective. If you hire the post office to deliver a flyer, they’ll stick one in every mailbox on the route for a modest fee. You can claim a huge subscriber base — but a 1-2% response rate is considered great in the bulk mail world, and 90 or 95 of the 100 flyers gets tossed in the trash unread. That’s what your feedburner subscriber number is, it’s a bulk-mail number, and says nothing about whether someone actually looks at your article, just that they have a mailbox it gets stuffed into.

Reach is a number that gives some indication that the reader did something — looked at it, clicked at a link, something. It’s the indication there’s actually a reader there, not just that someone subscribed sometime in the past. So to me, that’s what matters. I spent too much time at Apple fighting the “wives and cattle” mentality of amassing huge subscriber lists of people who mostly wanted off those lists to ever see that as a good thing (I was known to say “Anyone who comes and tells you how large their list is, instead of how many users did something based on that email, should be fired” — which did not sit well with people who liked to brag about how large their lists were).

So a year ago, my average reach was about 50-75. Today, that number is around 200; tripled or more. Even though my “total subscribers” is down (in theory), the number of users actually reading or clicking on a given article is significantly larger. Not remotely “engadget” numbers, but still, that’s a huge grown in active readership.

On any typical posting, about 200 RSS users view the article within the first 18 hours, and that number will grow to between 260 and 400 over the next week. It’s interesting that the time between posting and first read is that short and the curve this sharp; RSS is still very much about finding content fast and then moving on; because there’s always more content arriving. After two weeks, I’ve seen 99% of the RSS reading I’m going to see for any given article.

Based on all of this, I’m now consciously trying to write fewer posts, but longer and with more original writing and less “drive by blogging” crap. My target now is 5-7 pieces a week. two of those are photoblog entries. I’m trying to do 1-2 more extended (over 1000 words) pieces if I have time, and the rest of the articles I’m trying to do 500-700 words. What really matters is that whatever I write about gets the attention it deserves and that it’s me writing, not me just filling space by cutting and pasting from what others are blogging.

If I get too busy to do that properly, I don’t blog. No filler crap any more.

So that’s my goal: two photoblog entries a week; one long-form review piece around 1500 words. one long-form piece on something worth writing about. and 1-3 shorter pieces that don’t require as much writing time.  I’ve said for a long time that successful blogging isn’t about posting every day (one of those things “experts” say I’ve always griped about) — it’s about writing consistently with good content. I made a commitment this last year to try to do that, and I think the readers are showing me I was right. So moving forward, I’ll be trying to do it even better, and more consistently. But I like this format and I like this structure.

And added benefit of sticking to the “one piece a day and a link summary” format is I have to think through what to write about. There are always things I put in the “to do” pile that get thrown out. That’s a good thing — it forces me to think about what the more interesting/important issues or topics are, and that also leads to better content and writing. The idea of throwing everything against the wall and hoping some of it sticks just doesn’t work very well. IMHO.

So over on the RSS side, the change has been massively to the good; tripled active readership, lots more engagement and interaction. The link summaries turn out to be really popular, and they create some visibility and help spread the word on other sites and writing of interest without a lot of clutter; I’ve experimented with ways to do that, and I think I finally have a setup that works well. I do have some wish for a short form, where I could maybe write 25-100 words on a link and give some context; I haven’t found a way to do that I like yet, and it’s not a huge priority. But some day…

What about on the blog itself?

Looking at the last two weeks of the blog, here’s what I see: compared to the same two weeks a year ago (and both two week periods are “typical” of blog performance at the time — you need to be careful about grabbing data that isn’t representative of overall usage); visits are up 30%; pageviews are up 67%. 25% of traffic is coming in with no referral, and I think a large part of that is twitter. 25% from search engines. 30% from twitter with a referer, and about 12% from RSS, and 7% from Facebook. The rest is from random sites.

quick digression: a meme out on the net is “RSS is dead”. Mostly, I think, from people addicted to always going off and playing with the new and bleeding edge: my response, based on my numbers: “no, it’s not. but it’s been commoditized”. And the twitter traffic I see driven to the blog seems to be close to the amount of activity I see on the RSS feed (since I use full feeds and they don’t necessarily click over to the blog to read, there’s some guessing and handwaving here), but I think close to 35% of my total reader engagement on a given post is now via twitter, 35% RSS, 25% search and everything else combined is “other”. Most of what is happening on twitter probably would have been RSS subscriptions 2-3 years ago, so to that degree twitter has replaced RSS as a primary interaction channel. Twitter, however, is having its own fight to prever commoditization of twitter as it tries to capture its own feed and give it an economic value; if I had to guess, I’d say they’ve already lost that fight and twitter will end up like RSS, something in the background that moves data around where other things turn it int information of value. Whether twitter can also be the thing that creates that value (and monetizes it) I’m not so sure.

The last thing I’ve looked at is what kind of content generates the most interest. One first problem with that concept is defining “most interest”. I decided that meant two things: how many folks read it (on the blog; sorry, RSS readers, but it gets too crazy otherwise; if you like something, CLICK THROUGH TO THE BLOG; easy, and it leaves an indelible mark on that article for later analysis) and how long they spent reading it. Since I’m trying to focus more on long-form writing, I think it makes sense that the stuff people spend the most time reading is the kind of stuff both I and the readers want more of. Make sense?

This is all really subjective. Without going down a rathole with lots of lists of individual articles without any real context, here’s what I’m finding.

The photo essays I’ve done about my trips seem to be popular (such as this one); people seem to spend some time enjoying those.

I’m a little surprised to say this, but the pieces I write about thinking through the planning process of a shoot or trip seem to be a lot more popular than I’d expect (this one is a good example). This to me indicates there’s a lot of pent up interest not so much in the geeky aspects of photography, but in learning the logistics of being a photographer (shoot planning, visualization, trip planning, etc). There’s definitely interest in the geeky stuff as well, but it seems a lot of us are trying to figure out the mental aspects as much as the bits involving a camera. I know that’s why I post it — it helps me focus my musings and structure the ideas.

It is still too early to make any real judgements, but the “wednesdays in review” series is seeing some nice responses. People seem to be reading them in good numbers, and spending some time reading the pieces. And I’ve made FOUR whole dollars in Amazon affiliate referrals. John Scalzi owes me for the six books of his I’ve sold so far… I thought this would be an interesting thing to do on a regular basis, and the early response is justifying that. Another couple of months and I’ll be able to afford to go to Starbucks. Once.  (as I have more experience with this under my belt, I’ll write in some detail about the whats and hows).

And yes, photo geeking is fairly popular.

If I wanted to maximize readership, I’d write about two things: hockey and Apple. Writing about Apple is off the docket as long as I work for HP/Palm due to conflicts (and honestly, my massive enthusiasm for that is a bit past as well), and while I’ve picked up again on the hockey side again, I’ve done it only to the degree I want to write about it. It’s about writing what’s interesting to me and not just maximizing pageviews. And there’s no reason I should be seen as an expert in the photo field — but it’s really where my head’s at much of the time, and so it’s where i spend a lot of my time and energy. And so that’s why it shows up on the blog so much. Maybe, over time, it’ll help build a reputation, but mostly, it’s a chance for me to learn so I can share, and occasionally to teach. And sometimes such as my lightroom keywords piece, they catch on and become something that benefit large numbers of people. That piece now accounts for about 6% of the pageviews on my blog (and I’m damn proud of it…). Now, I need about 20 more pieces that good and popular.

Which means it’s time to shut up about this and get writing… But hopefully, if you’re trying to think through how to evaluate your own site and you are looking at feedburner or Google Analytics and going “none of this makes any sense at all”, this will help give you some ideas on how to view your own data. And if not, at least give you some comfort that you’re not alone at looking at this stuff and thinking to yourself “this is all gibberish!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for May 29, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for May 27, 2011

Some more thoughts on the Sharks…

Even more musings about the end of the Sharks season.

First, Dave Pollak has the full list of sharks injuries. Joe Thornton not only played with a separated shoulder (surgery evaluation to come later when the swelling goes down), but Robidas separated the end of one finger from the rest of his hand an d he’s been playing with it since. The wimp. he’s scheduled to get it wired back together now.

Clowe didn’t have a concussion, he also had a separated shoulder. Demers, high ankle sprain. Heatley a broken hand from the regular season (explains why he couldn’t score) and a high ankle injury earlier in the playoffs (explains why he looked slow). the wimp.

There were knees, skate cuts, broken noses, ankles. The surgery count stands at two, with three more under evaluation.

Gotta love hockey players, the wimps.

Notably absent on the list from my expectations was Setoguchi, now a restricted free agent. I’m really tempted to make him my whipping boy but if you look at his numbers (18 games, 10 points), that’s actually not bad. His -7 is weak, but that’s true of a number of sharks I have no intention of yelling at. So I’ll give him 2/3 of a pass, but to be honest, I thought his performance in the playoffs was substandard, and ditto for various parts of the regular season. There’s a fine line between streaky and “oh, c’mon and get it going”, and right now, Setoguchi’s career path seems closer to Jonathan Cheechoo than Ryan Clowe. If there’s a top 6 shakeup on the sharks, I would be picking him as the player to shake up, if I could. I certainly would be trying to sign him for a shorter deal for not so much money with incentives.

If your interested in the free agent list, Pollak has it as well.

(Eleven players who saw action in the post-season have contracts that are about to expire. Restricted free agents are Setoguchi, Benn Ferriero, Jamie McGinn, and Andrew Desjardins. The unrestricteds are Nichol, Wellwood, Ben Eager, Jamal Mayers, Ian White, Niclas Wallin and Kent Huskins.)

Setoguchi is the only restricted I’m on the fence over. If someone wants to sign him off our hands, I’ll take the compensation.

Unrestricted? I’ll bring back Nichol happily, and Ian White (who impressed me beyond expectations). I like Wallin for what he is as well.

Wellwood? He showed more than I expected, but… I think there’s a reason why he’s bounced around a lot, and he’s smallish, and he tends to fade as he settles into a team. The name Todd Elik comes to mind. Sign him for black ace money on a one year with incentives and let him earn playing time? sure. anything more than that? No thanks.

Jamal Mayers? another black ace candidate at best. Love his character, wouldn’t mind having that in the locker room. Is there room on the roster for him, given the depth in Worcester and what some of the younger players have shown? I doubt it. His depth chart is fading to black.

Kent Huskins? thanks, Kent. write if you get work.

Ben Eager? Well, that’s — complicated. Brings an awful lot to the table, including, it seems a tendency to let his intention to make a difference in the game get the better of his hockey judgement. Can that be better controlled? Well, Steve Downie is a strong indication that answer is yes. If the Sharks think they can work with him on this, then definitely, he has a spot on the 4th line. But if he’s too much of a loose cannon.. Well, both raffi Torres and Steve Downie are going to be on the free agent market in some way… But I lean towards keeping Eager, with questions I don’t know enough to answer.

Ferriero, Mcginn, Desjardins — Mcginn is on my 4th line. Ferriero and Desjardins probably make my team at least as black aces and playing some 3rd/4th line time. maybe earn more. Braun makes this team next year. I wouldn’t mind seeing Mike Moore on the blueline instead of huskins.

If you think about it, the whipping boys of the last couple of seasons have been Marleau (“at times enigmatic” to quote myself), Thornton (“too easy going”), Heatley, and probably Vlasic. And those were merely our #1, #2 and #4 scorers, and Vlasic was third in blueline scoring and second in blueline +/-. I think they all proved themselves out this year. Not sure who the new whipping boys will be moving forward. Actually, I do. Probably Thornton, Heatley and Marleau, no matter what they do. Me, I guess I nominated Seto for that role.

All in all, I give the team a B, but this team should have been able to get a better grade than that, so it’s good, but underperforming. And it’ll be interesting to see how wilson figures out how to solve that. I sure don’t have an obvious answer.

 

 

 

 

Why I love hockey, reason number 3714

Dave Pollak:

“We love it here,” Nichol said, just before heading off for shoulder surgery.

Okay, how often does a sentence like this get printed about a baseball player?

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for May 26, 2011

Sharks fans, what would you do?

Over the last seven seasons, the Sharks have one of the best overall records in the NHL; the only team with more regular season victories in the league is Detroit. They’ve won the presidents trophy, won their division five times, have made the playoffs six straight years and 12 of the last 14. Gone to the conference finals two straight years and three times total, and only been eliminated in the first round four times, and only once since 2000.

If you step back from being elminated this season — those are some damn impressive numbers. Yet, I think many sharks fans feel disappointed because the team hasn’t gone to the cup finals or won a cup. Now, in reality, in the last 15 years (30 teams playing) only 16 different teams have made the cup finals and of that 9 of them only made it once. Detroit has been there 6 times and New Jersey 4. So half the league hasn’t made the league finals in a decade and a half.  In the last 15 years, only 9 different teams have one the cup.

I feel the same way, by the way. I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t. The cup finals were very attainable this year, and the team didn’t get there. Not because of the fluke goal, but because the team allowed themselves to be in a position where the fluke goal eliminated them. That situation was avoidable, but they didn’t.

But objectively, there are easily 25 teams in the league that would do almost anything to have the success of the Sharks. Consistently good, consistently competitive, consistently in the playoffs, and consistently going fairly deep into the playoffs. Most teams don’t get that far, and the Sharks show no signs that they’re going to fade.

Yet it’s not good enough, and shouldn’t be.

And so here’s a question for Sharks fans that I’ve been pondering.

What would you be willing to accept to make the Cup finals?  If you were told the Sharks would win a Stanley Cup — guaranteed — next season, but in return, they’d have to miss the playoffs for three seasons after that, would you take that bargain? Five seasons missing the playoffs?

What Devil’s bargain do you make to get to the Cup? Or are you willing to step back, realize what is going on here is pretty good, keep things  the way they are, and support the team as they continue to try to push to that next level, but without guarantees?

Honestly, if you could guarantee a Cup, I would in fact take a couple of seasons out of the playoffs for that. Two or three. Five? I don’t think so. I’ve done my time with an expansion team, I’m not looking forward to doing it again. But I’d make the sacrifice of a sucky team for a couple of seasons to get over the top. Would you?

And think hard about that question as the pundits go out and start calling for the sharks to do something drastic to get over the hump. Or when you do. And realize that when Doug Wilson and his team have to make that decision, there won’t be a guarantee.

And remember that 27 teams were sitting at home watching the Sharks play the Canucks and wishing that was them this week.

Every year, 30 teams open camp in august trying to win the cup, and 29 of them fail. That’s why they want them so badly. I’m not for a minute suggest we should settle for what we’ve got with the sharks and not strive for that next level — but realize exactly what we’re asking for, and how hard it is to get there. In 15 years, half the league’s never been able to.

And so what the Sharks have accomplished needs to be remembered and not discounted, and we have to realize that every step that needs to be taken is infinitely harder than the step just accomplished. And no matter how hard the team tries, it might not succeed.

But try it must, and will.

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for May 25, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for May 25, 2011

Old Friends

I think most of us go through periods were we do relatively little reading, and so you fall behind on books and authors you like. As I’ve been moving back into a period where I’m doing a lot more reading again, I’m not only discovering new writers like Patrick Rothfuss (review coming soon) and established writers I never got around to reading for some reason (like Michael Stackpole), I’m also taking the time to go back and spend check out new works (at least, new to me) of some of the authors I’ve enjoyed many times over the years.

So if you will indulge me a bit, today is all about saying hi to some old friends.

My first visit is with Michael Moorcock, who’s been writing fiction almost as long as I’ve been alive, and I’ve been reading his work almost as long as I’ve been able to read. There are three authors that I grew up reading that have defined the classic sword and sorcery style of epic fantasy, and Moorcock is one of them (the other two are Tolkien and Fritz Leiber, who I’m sure I’ll talk about some other day). Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone.

Elric is the last Emperor of Melnibone, a sorceror and an albino. He is the owner of — and owned by — a demon in the shape of a Sword, Stormbringer. If there’s a common theme in the Elric stories, it’s that whatever else happens, “lives happily ever after” is not likely, and not sustained. Elric is far from a noble being and the world around him is dark and bleak, but I don’t believe he’s an evil person. More properly, he’s a survivor in a world that is evil around him.

Del Rey has recently come out with new editions of some of his work, with two collections of his earlier short stories, Elric: The Stealer of Souls and Elric: To Rescue Tanelorn. There’s a third volume, Elric: The Sleeping Sorceress which I haven’t read yet, but which is on my todo list for sometime soon. The universe Elric lives in is rich and complex, Moorcock’s language is powerful — and the imagery he builds in these stories is dark and frequently somewhat disturbing. I find I can only read so much of his work at a time, and then I have to stop before it depresses me too much; it leaves me with a bit of a desire for something light and fluffy for a while to counterbalance it. Any time an author affects me that strongly it’s a good thing, but at the same time, I do suggest if you find yourself reacting that way as well, you might want to take your time and read these volumes in bits and pieces.

But read them you should, and if you haven’t discovered Moorcock yet, you’re in for a treat.

Another flavor of fantasy I love is urban fantasy, where the themes and memes of the fantasy world get interwoven with today’s reality in a way that makes you feel that perhaps you’ll cross the street and find yourself slipping into Faerie by chance. There’s no author who does that better than Charles de Lint and one of his better books at exploring this intersection is The Onion Girl. His characters live in a typical city, and then the walls into the Faerie world start breaking down, and much of the story involves them coming to grips with this as their world turns upside down.

In the Onion Girl, Jill Coppercorn is an artist who has long painted a fantasy land that doesn’t exist, the dark and the shadow that hides within the city. When she’s hit by a car and facing a long recovery while unable to paint, she falls into depression and disappears down into her dreams to escape her reality. Her friends face the challenge of helping her through this time — but when things start happening in this reality that seem tied to the land she visits in the dreams, de Lint calls into question reality in general.

I love de Lints’ characters and how he tells their stories. Their stories are rarely fun — but this isn’t the bleak desolation of Elric, but more the sadness of desperation and isolation. His intertwinining of the real world and the faerie world is fascinating and complex, and he seems to love playing with the concept of which is “the real world” by challenging our assumptions that what is comfortable and familiar is what is real.  He’s another author that if you haven’t discovered you will find a treat. Other works of his I’ll happily recommend include Svaha, Forests of the Heart, and Jack of Kinrowan.

I seem to be on a darkish fantasy kick this week, so let’s continue with one more. Peter David has been in the field for a long time as a writer of comic books and Star Trek novels, and also has a strong set of original fiction works as well. He’s written science fiction and fantasy, light work, dark work. I have to admit that Laurie and once named a pair of bad guys in a story we published after him — and he retaliated by making me the sound effect of one of his superheroes being run over by a tank in one of his comic books. I was honored.

Tigerheart is one of my favorite books that he’s written. It is a retelling of a classic victorian tale that we will all find familiar but which won’t get him in any legal trouble with the J.M Barrie’s estate. It’s the story of The Boy, and Gwenny, and the Bully Boys, and a little fairy that cusses a lot more than she did in the Disney movie.

To the degree that Peter Pan is darkish and without happy endings, so is this. But it’s a lot of fun and a rip-roaring read, and a lot of fun. Unlike Peter Maguire’s Wicked (which I love, but I love the stage play even more — but the play is a much different telling than the book of the same story. But I digress), where Wicked puts the story into another character’s viewpoint and turns it on its ear, David tells the same story, but tells it very differently. Both retellings have an adult sensibility to them, so don’t plan on using them to read your kid to bed.

One final book for this week, one final old friend to share. I’ve been reading Larry Niven since high school. His classic work Ringworld defines the hard SF genre for many of us, and his Ringworld universe is one I’ve visited many times. But today, let me introduce you The Draco Tavern. It’s a bar —  but it’s a bar that caters to all of the known sentient species with all of their known foibles and vices.

Okay, remember when I was talking about Elric and saying that after a while, I felt like I neede something light and fluffy to read? Well, this is it. Larry Niven gets to invent interesting and weird species and have them walk into the bar (or slither, or fly, or teleport, or…) and then entertainment ensues. They’re fun stories. They’re engaging stories. They are not going to make you rethinking the core of your philosophy, but they’ll leave you with a smile, and like everything Niven writes, they’re well done. Mostly? They’re fun. and sometimes, I don’t know about you, but i don’t want deep, earth shaking fiction, I want to turn off my brain and enjoy myself. And Draco’s Tavern is a wonderful place to do so.

In many ways, Draco’s Tavern is Niven channeling James White’s Sector General, which is the same style and type of stories, only set in a hospital designed to take care of the sick of any species known in the universe (and capable of figuring out ones that get discovered). If you’ve read White, you know what Draco’s Tavern is about. If you haven’t, then when you’re done with this book, go grab a copy of Hospital Station. This stuff is classic mind candy — but sometimes, what you need is mind candy. And these are well worth an evening on the couch.

Until next week, enjoy….

sharks playoff postmortem

I must admit I’m not happy writing the word “postmortem”. But here we are.

The injury reports are coming in. So far, to the surprise of nobody, Thornton played tonight with a separated shoulder. Can we please put the soft reputation to bed once and for all? What a warrior.

Also, Ryan Clowe played hurt the entire season, and I’ve heard intimations surgery will be necessary but no details yet.

I’m waiting to hear how Heatley was hurt; I’m guessing a pretty bad groin given his lack of power and speed. He gutted it through, too. and I’m wondering whether Setoguchi was playing hurt. I’m sure there are others, but those seemed obviously dinged to me.

We got a “let the boys play” reffing game tonight, especially late and in overtime. The good news is that neither team abused that and focused on playing hockey, but both teams benefitted from non-calls. People who want to whine about the missed icing call that led to the 20 minute goal and overtime should go look at the tape of the Ian White blatant trip that stopped a clear scoring chance that was building. The sharks really benefitted from the reffing tonight, to be honest, and they had opportunities to prevent that goal. Calls happen. Good teams rise to them.

The fact is, the sharks did not deserve to win this series but did deserve to win this game — and didn’t. Luongo was insanely good most of the game, especially early on those first power plays, and gave the Canucks the chance to win. The Sharks had clear chances to win this game, and didn’t. And ultimately it was lost by a faceoff loss, bad coverate that led to the game tying goal, and a bad bounce. None of that involves refs.

And if the sharks took care of their business better, this game would have been over before the canucks got the bounce. So it goes.

The primary cause of the loss of this series was — the Detroit Red Wings. This sharks team was worn out and tired, and the Canucks were a little fresher and a little better.

So the Sharks fall short again, and congrats to the Canucks. If there’s any team i’m not unhappy to lose to, it’s them. they’re damn good.

So, now what?

well, frist up, the offseason.

I expect changes in the team and organization after this loss. This is not a team that you can look at and say “if we keep it together, we’ll be better next year” — there are some fundamental issues that (as good as this team is, and it’s one of four left playing!) aren’t going to be solved without changes.

The thing most disturbing to me is consistency. This team plays amazingly well with its back against the wall; it doesn’t play that well consistently until its back is against the wall. It squeaked out of the detroit series that way, it’s now going home to golf on a crazy bounce with Vancouver. Say what you will, that has to be fixed. The main difference between the sharks and canucks (or the sharks and the wings) is that consistency. Some might call it killer instinct, but more, it’s mental toughness. This year’s team is a lot tougher mentaly than  last year’s — but not tough enough, and that won’t change by giving them another year to mature.

So expect some restructuring.

Players on my keeper list: Boyle, Demers, Murray, Thornton, Marleau, Heatley, Clowe, Couture, Pavelski, Niemi. That’s a pretty damn deep list if you think about it.

Guys I like (but if we need to, we need to): Vlasic, White, Mitchell, Nitymaki.

Guys I’m on the fence over: Setoguchi,  Wallin.

Guys to look to upgrade: Huskins, Mayers.

Also on my keeper list: doug wilson and coach McLellan. I’ll leave the staff to those two to sort out, but these are the guys I want defining this team. This team is VERY close. It’s not there, but it’s very close. We don’t need to blow up,we just need to find the next piece or two.

I read a suggestion today that the sharks should go after Raffi Torres, if only to put him in a position where he can’t hurt sharks any more. I like the idea, and not just for that. He plays like a bastard, but this team could use a bastard on the third line.

Close, but no cigar. Good, but not good enough. Not a situation where I would stand pat and expect it to get better next year. Improve the core and character, but don’t massively restructure.

Trade one of the big players? I think it’s possible. I have a hard time seeing how that makes us better, it just makes us different. Is that a good thing? I’m unconvinced. But if you only swap the depth players, can you really make a change that matters? That’s the challenge for Wilson.

So now, if you don’t mind, I’m going ot go off and root for the canucks. I like the team and the players and the organization, and if the team that beats the sharks wins the cup, that removes a bit of the sting….

 

Today’s Shared Links for May 24, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for May 23, 2011

It’ll never end: the UV Filter religious fight…..

Every discipline has its religious fights; wherever there are people with opinions, some of those opinions will oppose each other and people on both sides are going to be sure they’re right. In computers, it used to be Mac vs. Windows, and Emacs vs. VI. With audio, it’s vinyl vs. everything, and whether you get better sound with analog gear over digital.

In photography, one of the constant arguments that breaks out everywhere is whether to put UV filters on your lenses or not.

I’ve always been in the “it’s good insurance” category, but recently, for various reasons, I’ve been rethinking that assumption. And because of that, when I saw this article by Kirk Tuck, I linked to it. And when I linked to it, that generated this anonymous response:

On “Keep you lenses clean … Don’t stick a filter in front …”. The author didn’t make a good case from my perspective. My test shots showed me that a “high end” L lens with a UV quality filter is able to generate “high end” images with nil to nul image impact. The fact that I have cracked 2 filters and 0 lenses shows to me that the aded protection bonus of a filter is not to be ignored.

Now, given that Kirk starts the article with:

Keep your lenses clean. Don’t keep cleaning your lenses. And for God’s sake don’t stick a filter in front of them!!!! It’s obvious the battle line is drawn.

What made me link to the article was this:

I’ve experimented many times over the last few decades and I’ve proven to myself that filters in front of lenses degrade the quality of the final images.  Here’s how I understand it all:  Every air to glass interface causes a slight loss of resolution and contrast.  This tends to make a lens look “flatter” and less sharp than it could be.  Lens designers have understood for over a century that adding more glass elements increases the compromise.

Now, I like reading Kirk’s blog because he’s sharp and willing to shoot from the hip. I’ve read and talked to other photographers with as many years as a pro as Kirk who’d take the exact opposite view of him. I’ve seen at least half a dozen experiments where photographers have done tests, taking a series of shots with and without filters and asking people to pick out which are which — and I’ve never seen anyone able to do so. I’ve done those tests myself, and I can’t tell the difference in the final print. If you really want to piss off a bunch of photographers, take a half dozen prints, tell them three were taken with a filter, three without, and ask them to tell you which is which (but really shoot five of them with a filter and one without…). The results I’ve seen are invariably random — and some photographers are going to be insistent on their ability to do so and refuse to admit being wrong.

But.

I’ve been thinking about this around the use of the word “insurance” — UV lenses cost money. Broken lenses cost lots more to repair or replace. The core of this is that by putting the filter on the lens, ultimately that will pay off by saving you from having to replace or repair that lens.

Which at some point in your life, it probably will. In my case, I have one time where a filter definitely saved me from a damaged or destroyed front element, and a second time where it probably did. So personally, using UV filters have saved a len, maybe two.

But.

Until recently, I’ve never stopped to ask a different question: this technique can save your lens. But is that a good investment? After all, UV filters cost money. Over the years, you’re going to buy at least one UV filter for every lens. Over the years, you’ll proabably replace a UV filter for a lens once or twice. How many UV filters have you bought over time? And how much money has this cost you?

There’s no question cheap filters degrade your image, so if you’re going to buy filters, you need to buy good quality ones. Without starting another argument over which manufacturer makes “good quality”, for my that’s typically meant Hoya or B+W. And that means my UV filters are costing me $35-80 each. I currently carry four lenses, and the filters on those lenses cost me right around $275. I’ve replaced two of them in the last three years, so my total cost over the last few years is between $350 and $400.

The cost to buy the lens I almost destroyed new: $600. So over the last few years, I’ve spent about 50% of the cost of the replacement cost of that lens to save the lens.

Is that a good investment? To be honest — I can’t answer that. Which is why I’ve been thinking about this. I do know that the more expensive the lens, the better investment a UV filter is, because the more expensive it’ll be to replace or repair.

On the other hand, Kirk also posted another fascinating piece a few days earlier, titled A second chance at writing a competent review of the Zeiss 21mm lens. And the takeaway of that post for me was this:

As we were putting the lens on the front of a Canon 5dmk2 Paul put on his reading glasses and looked carefully at the front of the lens.  There were two small spots on the front element.  Could have been water marks.  Or dried spit.  Or some outer space goo.  But we’re talking maybe one or two millimeters in diameter, tops.  And quite transparent.  Paul wiped out a cleaning cloth and ministered to the front element.  Minutes later we were shooting amazing tests with absolutely none of the flare I’d seen previously.  As Paul explained (and I should have known) flaws on the lens surface are magnified with wide angle lenses.  It’s imperative to keep the front element cleaned.

And that’s where this UV filter thing gets complicated. The more expensive a lens, the more expensive and catastrophic repairing or replacing that lens is going to be — but the higher quality the lens, the more chance you’re going to have that UV filter impacting the quality in some way. It probably won’t under good conditions, but when you start talking about flare issues or bad lighting (backlight, strong sidelight, etc) and a top quality lens, I can definitely see where the extra glass of a UV filter is going to start impacting your image — and never have I seen tests for UV filters take those conditions into account.

This is where I think I’m getting off the bus on using UV filters as chronic insurance against damage.

So here’s my current thought on the whole UV filter thing; if you were to ask me whether to put on your lens, my answer would depend on the situation; if you’re one of those people upgrading from a point and shoot to a DSLR like a Canon Rebel, and you were smart enough to not buy the kit lens but instead spend a bit more to buy a good starter lens (like the Tamron 28-300 I use), I’d probably recommend you put a UV filter on it. Why? Because you’re still figuring out how to use the gear, you’re still figuring out how to take care of it, you’re more likely to find damage to a lens catastrophic (where that might cause you to give up on photography!), so in that case, a lens is good insurance. think of it as training wheels if you want. And honestly, for a person like this, they won’t notice the image difference, and probably couldn’t identify lens flare in an image if their life depended on it.

But as your skills increase; as your gear improves, as you move to owning better and more lenses, the cost of buying all of those UV filters increases, too, your skill as using and protecting your gear increases, so the chance of an accident drops, and the chance of the filter impacting the quality of the final image also increases. Add to that two other factors: as your skill as a photographer increases, you are going to spend more time taking images in the type of challenging lighting where the filter could impact your image, and your eye for image quality will increase such that you will see the impact.

So the more skilled you are as a photographer, the better the quality of your gear, the more you need to consider not using a UV filter.  For me, personally, that means owning a set of UV filters, but for use under conditions where some lens protection is a good idea (salt spray, for instance); treat them like I do a polarizer and own one I can put on as needed, but not use it chronically.

For your situation? you need to answer a few questions. Is the money spent on UV filters a good investment? Are you better off investing that money in other gear? How well do you take care of your gear, and what are the chances of an “oops” that the filter is going to save you from? And what are the chances you’re going to shoot in conditions that might trigger image degradation, and is your gear of the quality where that degradation might be noticeable?

Want an easy rule? If your lenses are F5.6 or slower, I wouldn’t sweat putting a lens on it. If your lens is F2.8 or faster, I’d never put it on, unless it was to protect the lens from conditions.

The bottom line, if you ask me, is that both sides are right — depending on circumstances. (ain’t life great?)

But that’s not going to stop the argument….

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for May 22, 2011

Vancover/San Jose game 4

Another game with lots of penalties of the “oh, what were you thinking?” sort? I’ve already had one friend call the game tightly reffed. I’m not so sure. Most of the penalties called tonight would be penalties if the refs were blind and calling a game in a dark coal mine at midnight. they were that obvious and I can’t see much here that you could say deserved a non-call, even in a hard “let the boys play” world.

For the record, the Torres hit on Thornton was clean, lest there be any wonder where I stand. And I don’t think I would have called Glass for the boarding call, but the league is trying to prevent injuries (especially head injuries) right now — not as effectively as I’d like, but at the same time, being a bit too active in calling forceful hits (hint: the solution here isn’t rule changes, but technology improvements,e specially better protective helmets. and it’s being worked on; which probably defines my position on “banning all hits to the head”. I’m not interested in watching the National Ringette League…)

The Sharks deserved to lose. The Canucks handed them opportunities early, and the Sharks let them bounce off their sticks and out of the zone. Then when the Canucks put on their press, the Sharks sgtruggled, took lots of bad penalties, gave up 3 five on three goals, and that was pretty much it. I was impressed by the late push that made the game a bit interesting, but less than you might think, because the Canucks were in protect mode and not being very aggressive offensively, adn I always wonder if that push would have been as effective if the other team was pushing back instead of just preventing the knock out blow.

The Sharks will deny it, but I think the key issue here is the Detroit series. They look physically tired. Or more correctly, MORE tired than the Canucks are. The penalties are for the most part the penalties you take when you react just that little bit too slowly and then do something to correct before thinking that what you’re doing is a penalty. The too many men was a glide to the bench instead of a skate. Heatley’s high stick could be looked at as tired, too, not being careful at a time you normally are. Beating the wings took a lot out of this team, and the canucks are keeping the pressure on, and the Sharks just seem a bit too tired to compete the entire 60 minutes. A half step slow, a bobble on a pass instead of tape to tape, a beat too lnog setting up a shot, a twitch too slow getting into a passing lane. It’s not mental tiredness because they ARE executing, it’s physical tiredness because when they do execute, they’re missing by THIS much. The puck that Murray blocks is in the net, the pass that Thornton completes bounces off a skate and leaves the zone.

Niemi isn’t the problem; you can only do so much on five on three. But it is a bit insane to only give up 13 shots and have four go in; until you realize 3 of those were on five on three.  Defense is about commitment and exertion, and one could argue the sharks had that in spades, and if they could have stayed out of extreme penalty problem, they played the canucks well. But of course they didn’t, and that’s what matters. And the canucks buried them because of it.

Thornton has let some folks know he’s planning on playing the next game. that doesn’t mean he’s not hurt. t means he’s going to play anyway.  The Sharks are missing Demers more than most people admit, since their game is driven by puck movement and control. I’m convinced Heatley is hurt in some way and is playing through it. We won’t know why until the season ends, but he’s not close to 100%.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this series goes six games, but I believe the Sharks lost the series tonight, and they had the opportunities to even the series and couldn’t. I’m finding it hard to blame anyone for this, though, because if the Canucks aren’t the better team, it’s only because the teams are very even in talent and depth, but the Canucks are the fresher team, and the failure I”m seeing is one of a rapidly emptying gas tank, not a lack of “try” or talent.

And I don’t know what you do about that, unless we can magically create a rain out to delay game 5 by a couple of days… maybe slip into the arena and turn off the airco?

But barring that, I think the sharks will try, but I’m thinking they’ll go down trying. and right now, they deserve to (but not by a wide margin).

 

 

The Sharks: Game Three — Tom Benjamin

The Sharks: Game Three : Tom Benjamin’s NHL Blog :: CanucksCorner.com:

Alain Vigneault refused to comment about the officiating – he didn’t want to get fined, he said. I can’t be fined, but I can’t comment either because I don’t know what a penalty is in this league any more. It appeared to me that the officals used the exhibition season standard, but what do I know besides the fact that I hate games when special teams are on the ice half the time. Either both teams played very poor and undisciplined hockey or the officials chose to ruin the evening.

 

To me, the phrase “I don’t know what a penalty is…” is both code and a cop-out. It’s code for “I don’t like how the league calls penalties”, and it’s a cop-out because if people paid attention to how things get called, they would know what a penalty is. But that’s not the point, really, the point is they want to complain that they don’t like how it’s being called. I’m not picking specifically on Tom here; he’s one of many people who use that phrase, and many of them are people who’s salary involves studying this stuff, and if they really don’t know, they’re just being lazy about it.

In fact, they’re just taking a lazy way out to whine about it. Typically in some form of “oh, in the good old days, when real men played hockey…” edited memory of the NHL, where in Don Cherry’s version of the universe, guys try to kill each other for 60 minutes (but with respect) and then salute each other over a beer as they have their teeth put back in.

I’ve been chewing on the whole “respect” thing as its own essay, so no more on that now. Suffice it ot say there’s a whole lotta calling bullshit on some people around the league that deserves its own bully pulpit.

This is all compounded by the fact that referees miss stuff. And referees make mistakes. And since reffing is impossible to get perfectly right all of the time, reffing is by definition going to have some inconsistency to it. This makes it easier for people to play the “I don’t understand game”, by pointing to all of this as proof. Fact is, most of the time, it’s because at the core, it’s human judgement and human perception at work in a massively chaotic situation, so of course there are going to be times when the system fails. Shall we go back to the days of taking that judgement out of the refs hands, like we did in the “toe in the crease” era? Maybe ask Brett Hull that question. or Buffalo fans.

Anyway, my take on the reffing in game 3 — Tom is partially right here. I think the players were expecting the refs to give them more leeway than they did. If you like that interpretation, it’s called “letting the boys play”. if you don’t, it’s called “swallowing the whistle”, and which you choose probably is 90% decided on by whether the team you root for won. I felt that given the first two games and how the physicality was ramping up the refs were worried about it getting out of control and players getting injured; they tried to keep a handle on things by clamping down. The players didn’t adjust to that well, and so we had a bazillion penalties. I felt that the penalties called were good ones and they refs called consistently.

The question I guess whether the referees should have backed off and stopped calling penalties even when they were penalties (“good playoff hockey. He let the boys play! Refs shouldn’t decide games!” quoth the Cherry) or whether the players should have gotten a clue and stopped doing things that the refs were going to call. The players didn’t — and that’s therefore the refs fault. I guess.

Look, seriously — the Canucks lost both Erhoff and Rome. Couture got banged up and left the game. That’s three significant player injuries in one game (“now THAT’s playoff hockey!” chortles the Cherry). One might wonder how many bodies get carried off the ice if the refs backed off and called “playoff hockey rules” that night. When does it stop being hockey and start being rollerball?

So to answer Tom’s question — both teams played undisciplined hockey and didn’t adjust to a very clear message that the referees gave starting early on about how the game was going to be called. And because of that, there were a bazillion penalties. Some argue this is the referees fault, and they should have backed off and called fewer penalties. I think that’s crap thinking, but I’ve argued for years that choosing to not blow the whistle and choosing to not call a penalty that is a penalty decides a game just as much as throwing a guy in the box — it just biases the decision in the opposite direction, in the direction that leads to goonery and the kind of game play we all hated before the obstruction clampdown. So the referee decides the game either way, by calling or not calling. And if you call, you decide the game in favor of skill instead of in favor of the guys who clog and hold and trip.

Frankly, I hate refs that swallow the whistle. I hate the kind of play that leads to. And players, especially in the playoffs, should be smart enough to realize where the referee is drawing the line and not constantly be crossing it, rather than complaining about where the line was drawn. I thought both teams deserved the penalties they got, and that’s not the refs fault. It’s the players.

If the players don’t want to spend half the game on special teams, stop taking penalties. Don’t yell at the refs for calling what’s there.

But you know people won’t. it’s always the refs fault.

(I give the reffing in game 3 a B-. It could have been worse; there were missed high sticking calls that deserved to be called, and yes, I’m saying there should have been MORE penalties called. But within the parameters of the game as the refs defined it, they called it pretty consistently against both teams. Too bad the teams didn’t listen and adjust….)

It’ll be interesting to see what happens in game 4. I expect both teams got yelled at for lack of discipline. I’ll be curious if the refs back off and let them play more, and if so, whether someone leaves on a stretcher. I sure hope not, but part of the reason the refs were calling so tightly in game 3 was because the physicality from both teams was headed into dangerous territory.

Heck, who cares? Let the boys play! If someone gets hurt, that’s the player’s fault, right?

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for May 21, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for May 20, 2011

A “spring” visit to Yosemite

One of the realities of nature photography is that you can only control nature so much — all the planning in the universe won’t prevent some challenges, like a change in the weather. Sometimes you go and epic pictures fall in your lap. Sometimes you go and conditions are such that you just grind it out and hope some of the images are good. And sometimes you sit in the hotel room listening to the rain and wish you’d cancelled….

This week was my spring trip to Yosemite. It’s been a truly weird year weather-wise, in case you haven’t noticed. Spring is late, cold and wet. The wildflower season has been at best, late and erratic. Bird migrations are off as well. All in all, it’s been tough planning around “spring”. But finally, word came out the dogwood was starting to bloom, and I really, really didn’t want to schedule time in Yosemite after Memorial day — as it was, it was clear the park was getting busier and the hotels around it closer to capacity. I finally decided I needed to go, or decide to wait for some other time. So I set everything up for a few nights in the park.

Of course, then I watched the weather, as a late, wet, cold, spring storm decided to hit Northern California and the Sierra. The couple of days prior to my going, yosemite was seeing highs near 70 and plenty of sun. the day before I was due to arrive, the storm moved in and the temps plunged donw into the 40s, and more storms were moving in as the week progressed. There is, unfortunately, a fine line between hitting the edge of a storm and the unbelievable skies that can create for your landscapes and having the clouds move in and close everything down in a sodden grey mass; and many times, you won’t know which you have until you get there and have to haul out the umbrella.

To be honest, I seriously considered canceling. I thought the weather was going to be iffy, but I felt it was worth a shot. So I went, making a later start on Sunday in hopes of trailing the storm and hitting the motel, then driving into the park to scout and see if there was anything interesting to photograph in the late afternoon. I ended up arriving on the Valley floor about 5PM.  The temp was in the high 30′s, and the clouds were pretty heavy., but there were a few opportunities at shots.

Yosemite Falls by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

I stuck around for a couple of hours, and then it started sleeting. That was enough for me for the night, and I headed out to grab a few last supplies and hit the room for the evening.  I chose not to do dawn patrol because of the temps and worry there might be ice or chain issues on the roads, but I got up early and was in the park around 8AM, to bright skies and a rather pleasant set of views.

Yosemite Falls in Winter by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

This was the day I knew I’d have dry weather. What I didn’t plan for was for the clouds to build back in as early as they did. By noon, we were back to mostly drab grey, although it did warm up, that afternoon it may have even hit 50. Welcome to “spring”.

My original plan was to travel out towards Hetch Hetchy for birds and critters. The road out was on chain requirements just after Foresta, and Foresta itself was under a few inches of snow. I scouted out there a bit, didn’t go into the chain areas, and finally headed back to the valley. I decided to head out to Wawona (to scout, and for gas) and it was fascinating to see how much snow had been dropped — 6-8 inches and the drive through that area looked like a winter trip. Other than road construction, nothing really caught my eye, so I decided to focus on the valley floor and headed back.

While I was doing that, the clouds were moving in. And so were the crowds. The park was busy, making parking a challenge in places, and to top it off, I was starting to feel like crap, with a headache building and generally feeling like a bug was coming on. On the other hand, the water flow in the Merced was amazing, and the waterfalls were even more amazing. I mentally shifted away from photographing birds and critters and instead decided to focus on the falls.

There are many falls in Yosemite that are only active during spring melt, and which dry up again after a few weeks, so unless you come during this period, you’ll never know they’re there. Some of them are stunning to watch.

Spring Vernal Waterfall by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

Some of the more familiar falls were kicking, too. Bridalveil was as full and active as I’ve ever seen it.

Bridalveil Falls with the Spring Thaw by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

And it wasn’t until I took these shots that I realized I’d never photographed Horsetail Falls at all.

Horsetail Falls, Yosemite by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

Unfortunately, I kept feeling worse; by 3PM, I was exhausted. Almost fell asleep twice parked and watching the falls to judge how to image them. Ultimately, I decided I wasn’t doing myself any good and pulled the plug. On the way out, however, I saw the clot of people that signposts “critter!”, and in the middle was the ranger, which usually means the critter is a bear. So I found a place to park, grabbed the binocs and camera, and headed back to where everyone was clustered.

California Black Bear feeding by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

Meet “White 1″, a 28 month old cinnamon black bear — not all black bears are black, but this color is fairly rare in Yosemite. He was busily foraging for grubs in the fallen tree. Ryan the ranger was thrilled — as he said “I have a wild bear doing wild bear things, and everyone is behaving so I don’t have to yell at anyone”. And then he pointed to one person who was busily running through the meadow “well, except him, but he’s a pro”.

@yosemitesteve hunting bears by Chuq Von Rospach http://www.chuqui.com

That was @yosemitesteve, who films for the park and does the awesome Nature Notes series available on Youtube. If you haven’t discovered them yet, do so — check out his one on Frazil Ice.  And kids, don’t try that on your own… I ended up with the “wrong” lens on the camera, the Tamron 28-300, which is unfortunately really soft at 300MM, as you can see from that image. I’ve also posted a few more on flickr for your amusement. If I’d been thinking more carefully, I should have swapped to my critter lens, but didn’t. And when I went back to get it, of course, the bear ran off just as I attached the big lens to the camera body — of course. So all I have are some rather soft pictures as a great practical example of why I try NOT to use that lens beyond about 150mm except in an emergency (and this came up over on the Stack Exchange photo site, and I ended up chiming in on it).

Photographing a bear qualifies as an emergency. As bears go, it’s a rather small animal, being quite young. But still — I wish I’d grabbed the other lens. But still — being able to just watch an animal like that for a while totally made the trip for me.

After the bear skedaddled, I got back in the car and headed back to Mariposa for the night (Having your hotel room an hour away creates tradeoffs, which I talked about on my Wednesdays in Review). It was at dinner that I suddenly realized I was exceptionally thirsty.

So a nice meatball sub and a liter and a half of water later, I headed back to my room, already feeling better.

Dehydrated. Which explained why I felt like crap. And honestly, I know better, I really do. I’ve known since high school that I dehydrate early and often, and when I’m travelling, have to be careful — the air in most hotel rooms is fairly low humidity, and I tend to lose a lot of water in my breathing. And even though I thought I was taking in enough water, I evidently started the trip a bit dehydrated, and it spiraled. So sometimes, even if you think you have details covered, they get away from you (another truism about only being able to plan so many details; the one you miss messes with you). I actually have a protocol for staying hydrated on the road; for various reasons, I didn’t follow it properly, and it caught me. (yes, my life is an endless mental checklist of things I’ve learned not to forget over the years — and which I sometimes forget anyway). That’s a lesson learned — again.

I was asleep before 9PM, and slept 11 hours. And woke up thirsty. And woke up to rain. Which I expected. The new storm moved in overnight, and things looked ugly. I still felt somewhat ugly, and I’d decided the night before that if the weather was bad as expected, I’d cut the trip short and head home, because there was a 2nd, bigger storm chasing that morning storm into the area. The chances I’d had much good photography in those conditions was minimal, IMHO, so I decided to cut and run.

I drank another two liters of water on the drive home; it wasn’t until I was within 10 miles of home that my body started telling me my hydration levels were fine again (do I really need to explain how you can tell? No, I didn’t think so).

So some thoughts on the trip. Instead of the planned 2 full days and two partial days, I got one full day and a few hours the afternoon before. Instead of spring weather, I got late winter blustery and dull grey skies (and sleet). I took a total of 350 images, a percentage of that was pieces for HDR generation. My ding rate was about 10%. I ended up putting about 50 images into my primary library including HDR material, with a total of 27 “keeper” images. the rest went into my retired library (technically good, but overlapping the keepers and not as interesting, but there if I want a different take of need them in some way). I drove 620miles, and I spent about $500 on the trip.

Was it what I planned? Not remotely. Did I come back with some good images? Yes. Was it worth it? Just to stand and watch the bear for a while, absolutely freaking totally yes. Despite being disappointed at having the wrong lens handy for the pictures, I don’t care. Much.

Would I do it again? Yes, but without the dehydration; that impacted the day a lot more than I realized until later (I don’t know about you, but when I get dehydrated, I get slow and tired, low energy, a headache, grumpy and a bad attitude; so I didn’t push myself into doing as much as I would have if I felt better. oh well). Part of that is practical; I wasn’t going to reschedule my time off at work again. I wasn’t going to push my Yosemite trip out past Memorial day. Staying home instead was an option, but hell, a chance to go to Yosemite?

But I do wish I’d hit more spring than late winter. And it’s a bit annoying that a couple of days after I pulled out, the rain is gone and the weather is heading back into the 60′s. This storm was perfectly timed to annoy me.

Still, when you’re doing nature photography, it’s important to remember nature doesn’t always cooperate. And just roll with it. (and drink plenty of fluids).

And I ended up with zero shots of dogwood blossoms, after all of that. Because they were gonig to be a big part of the 2nd day of photography. oops. well, next year.

And that may be the important lesson of a trip like this (other than “drink that bottle of water NOW, and open another”) — a place like Yosemite, you don’t visit once and have a finished portfolio. Too much to cover, too many different things, too many different looks — adding images every trip is how you do this, over time and with some patience. And in the final judgement, the images I added weren’t the ones I’d planned (except the chapel image, which I’ll write about tomorrow), but they were the ones that deserved to be added based on what was going on when I got there. And with that, I won’t complain about a little sleet and a headache. After all — Yosemite? Or going to work.

Easy answer.

 

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for May 19, 2011

Sharks after game 2. Now what?

I’ve been pondering what to do with the Sharks after game 2, what they need to do after what happened in Vancouver.

Part of me wonders whether simply coming home — last change giving them the advantage in match ups and the face off advantages — will be enough. I can see them winning both in San Jose. But I’m not convinced.

I throw out the score of game 2. After the breakaway goal (how did he get THAT open? No sharks in the same time zone) the game devolved and the Sharks lost focus. How badly they got beat doesn’t matter, just that they did.

My first (and twitter) reaction was that ben eager is shoved into the press box. McLellan’s quotes indicate he thinks otherwise, and to a good degree, I understand his position. Eager’s enthuisiasm and energy is a positive. If he can be channeled to not be quite so cement-head (his penalties were deserved and stupid) the Sharks need that energy. I guess we could also use someone that the Canucks might decide to waste some energy on, but I don’t see that happening.

I’ve seen a few people bitching at Niemi for a bad game, I don’t see it. the team exploded in front of him, I don’t see that there was much he could do. I specifically told Laurie at one point in the game “I just can’t see Nabokov playing anywhere near this well for us” — and I think that’s true, much as  I was always a fan of him.

It could well be the Canucks are just a better team. As good as the Sharks are — so are the Canucks. Look at the regular season. And right now, the Canucks are playing well and with confidence. The Sharks play well and with confidence SOME of the time. At other times, they look like someone snuck Worcester into the uniforms. To a good degree, both teams are playing to the way they played in the regular season. The question is whether the sharks will get on that roll or not again. Part of the game 1 loss was fatigue from the Wings series. Game 2, the credit goes to the Canucks for simply outplaying the Sharks until the Sharks system collapsed. And then burying them. (for folks who want to focus on blaming the sharks, sometimes the other team beats you. honest).

This is obviously vancouver’s series to lose now, and they deserve that. I feel it’s not that the sharks are playing badly, but the Canucks are clearly playing better. Can the Sharks turn that around? Yes. Will they? Unclear. If the Sharks don’t win both games in San jose, it’s over. If they don’t win EITHER game in San Jose, it’s obviously over.

Right now, my feeling is Canucks take this in 5 games, confidence factor 70%. If the Sharks don’t win game 3, they won’t win the series. and if they don’t, it’s hard to see it as a Sharks failure instead of being a Canucks success, unless you simply want to blame the sharks anyway…

(and hat tip: for an interesting canucks perspective, check out long timer Tom Benjamin who’s been at this since long before blogs existed.)

 

Today’s Shared Links for May 18, 2011

Wonderful Mariposa

Having just returned from my Yosemite trip and using Mariposa as my base camp, here are a couple of places I can happily recommend if you end up in this area….

I stayed at the Mariposa Lodge. This is the first time I’ve actually stayed at the Lodge I’ve recommended the Lodge to a few people over the years based on recommendations I’ve gotten from others; all of the people who stayed there gave it the thumbs-up, and I’m happy to say I can as well. This is your classic motor lodge, park outside the door to your room, carry your bags 20 feet kinda place. Some of these places can be a bit dated; my room was in great shape and seemed recently renovated, but the furniture didn’t quite match, so it avoided that “corporate sameness” problem you have with the chains. Even better, it was quiet, the bed was comfortable, the room was large, and the television had Versus so I even got to see a bit of hockey. The staff was friendly and happily moved some things around to get me a room away from stairs (for which my knees thank them). And they’re inexpensive. Not the cheapest place in town, but the towels won’t exfoliate you when you shower, and your neighbors won’t hear you typing away at night on your computer… It’s in the center of town (such as the town is defined) and there are some places you can walk to if you want food or coffee. I can recommend them without hesitation, since they’re going to be my place of choice when when I’m staying there.

I spent most of the trip eating from carried supplies, but I did have one dinner at the Happy Burger Diner, because I was ready for some protein and grease. Burgers and similar fare. Fries, Onion Rings (which rocked), drinks, shakes, desserts. Your classic burger joint. Bonus points for friendly staff, double bonus points for saying “hun” without is sounding silly or forced. More bonus points for the sign telling you it’ll take 15 minutes to get you your meal because they actually have to cook it — it’s a burger joint, not fast food. Tasty and well done, and the onion rings were nicely hot and crisp and just a bit greasy, the way god intended, and not the way you get them in the chains. For those in the bay area, food is similar to St. Johns, but not quite so production line. I saw a couple of folks eating chili in a bread bowl that looked quite tasty, too. Maybe next time.

Now, a few words on using Mariposa as a staging point for a Yosemite trip. Be aware it’s a drive — 40 miles one way from Mariposa to the valley floor. It’ll take you a good hour each way, so this is not a place where you can decide to pop back to the room, you’ll see the room at the start and end of the day, and you need to plan drive time into your schedule.

Your options are somewhat limited when visiting Yosemite, though, especially when the weather might be off. You can stay in the park, but it’s expensive. Yosemite Lodge at the Falls, which remind me of a 70′s Travelodge — well cared for but dated — will set you back $220 this time of year, if you can get a room. My room was $90 (both prices before taxes). The primary advantage of the Lodge at the Falls is that you’re in the valley, so you have little travel time. On the other hand, food in the park is either expensive and not very good (the Lodge cafeteria) or more expensive but very good (the Lodge restaurant). Other places within the park follow that model. If you want to stay at the Ahwahnee, expect to pay double that price for the room, and dress for dinner (cost: don’t ask), if you can get a room. Curry Village is less expensive, but — rustic. many rooms without electricity or heat. If that’s your style, great. Not me, not any more.

I happen to love the Wawona, which is on the south road. It’s a three season hotel. pricing is on a par with the Lodge at the falls, but it’s a beautiful place. Many rooms share a bathroom, some have their own. And the restaurant is pricey but good. Be aware that even though it’s in the park, it’s easily a 40 minute drive to the valley floor; you aren’t saving much time, if any, staying here. But I really like it, and it’ gets you away from the crowds to some degree.

Further south out of the park is Tenaya Lodge, run by Delaware North, the yosemite concession host. supposed to be nice, I haven’t visited. And pricey, but upscale. Even further drive than Wawona.

Between Mariposa and the park is El Portal, which is really little more than a couple of hotels and gas stations. Right next to park entrance is the Yosemite View Lodge, and a few miles down the road towards Mariposa is the Cedar Lodge. Yosemite View Lodge gets good reviews by people I know, and is typically where photo seminars run in the park stay. Cedar Lodge is less expensive — Laurie’s stayed there and rates it adequate with a bit of character. So to speak. Either one is a reasonable option, but in both cases, if you’re staying there, you’re going to be eating at the motel restaurant, because there’s no other infrastructure around.

As the crowds around Yosemite build (starting now — the park was fairly busy and some hotels in Mariposa were full), the prices for rooms goes up and your options get limited. But as a checkpoint, right now, Yosemite Lodge at the falls would run you about $220, Yosemite View Lodge about $160, Cedar lodge about $120, and Mariposa Lodge was about 90. All plus tax. If you can find rooms; right now, everything within the park is stuffed, and both Yosemite View Lodge and Cedar Lodge seem to be basically full well into June.

One hint if you want to stay within the park is keep an eye on the yosemitepark.com web site, some times you can grab last minute cancellations. Unless you plan way ahead or go during very slow times (November through early March), that’s about the only way you’ll grab a room within the park. They also have a newsletter (somewhat hidden on the site, look for the “Email Updates” forms spread around) that if you’re timing it flexible, can get you offers for discounts if you can go during slow times or can plan ahead.

My recommendations: when I visit in the winter and roads and weather can be ugly, I try to stay at the Lodge at the Falls. Off season rates are fairly reasonable, and I don’t have to worry about the roads being accessed; the valley floor is rarely impassible, but the entrance roads can get iffy or require chains. Either motel in El Portal is a reasonable value and minimizes the commute, but be aware you’re limiting your food and gas options; what you save in driving you’ll invest in more expensive gasoline (warning: do not buy gas in El Portal. It is by far the most expensive option. It seems counter-intuitive, but you’ll get your gas cheaper by driving into the park and going to Crane Flats or Wawona. Mariposa is the closest reasonably priced gas, but El Portal is typically $.50 or more a gallon more expensive than Crane Flats. Be warned).  But while the drive from Mariposa is long (it’s sort of like visiting Disneyland by staying in San Diego) I find I prefer that. It depends on what I’m trying to do — if I’m going to be doing a lot of night photography or crack of dawn work, El Portal would be worth it. But I think the best values are in Mariposa. Just fill your tank before you head in…

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for May 17, 2011

Guess where I’m not?

Guess where I’m not?


… Winter Storm Warning remains in effect until 11 am PDT
Wednesday above 6000 feet… 

A Winter Storm Warning above 6000 feet remains in effect until
11 am PDT Wednesday for the higher elevations of the southern
Sierra Nevada. 

* After a break in the action today… another round of
potentially dangerous winter weather will arrive in the 
southern Sierra Nevada this evening… and will persist into 
Wednesday.

* Snow accumulations: storm totals of up to two feet or more of 
snow are possible above 8000 feet… 10 to 18 inches above 
6000 feet.

* Timing: after a break today… snow will begin this evening… 
then continue heavy at times into Wednesday.

* Locations include: Lodgepole… Shaver Lake… Yosemite 
National Park… Camp Nelson… Huntington Lake.

* Winds: southwest winds 25 to 40 mph with gusts to 60 mph over 
the crest.

* Impacts: late season winter weather with snow… strong winds 
and cold temperatures will return this evening. Be aware 
that dangerous traveling conditions in ice and snow are 
possible. 

Precautionary/preparedness actions… 

A Winter Storm Warning means significant amounts of snow are
expected or occurring. Strong winds are also possible. This will
make travel very hazardous or impossible.

Just made it home, pulled the plug a day early because the weather was bad and going to get worse. I knew there was rain moving in last night, and a second storm behind that I woke up to a seriously wet Mariposa in the 40′s, and it was only going to get worse from there. Given my day on the valley floor yesterday, I saw no good coming at trying to gut it out through this storm, so I didn’t.

Currently weather is reporting 32 degrees on the valley floor. When I got there Sunday afternoon it was 37 and sleeting. So much for a fun spring expedition! The expectation is for rain to kick in again later today, and to rain until afternoon tomorrow, with lows in the 30′s, and a high of 50 tomorrow (which I don’t remotely believe. I’m betting mid-40′s at best). It will, of course, warm up again a bit towards the end of the week and start drying out.

But lots to talk about, even in a short trip. No idea if I have any usable pictures yet, I was asleep before the import finished last night. But I will say that some trips the pictures just are everywhere around you, and some days, you find yourself grinding away for anything worth pointing a lens at. Guess what day yesterday was?

Except for the bear… And even if the pictures suck, the bear was totally worth the trip.

More later, after i unpack and figure out if I took anything useful…

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for May 16, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for May 15, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for May 14, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for May 13, 2011

Round 3 predictions

The plot so far: I went 7-1 in the first round. And in the second round….

I picked Washington and Boston. Got the Bruins, I still have no idea how the Caps blew that series. Fro that matter, I bet the Caps have no idea how they blew that series, but perhaps we should just plan on not ever betting against an Yzerman team, even if he’s not in detroit. I will give full kudos to St. Louis and Roloson. They really deserved to move on, and Washington did not.

Boy, I’ll bet in January a lot of people were looking forward to a Pittsburgh and Washignton eastern final. Well, that’s why we play the games…

And in the West, I picked Vancouver and San Jose (in 7!) — and we have Vancouver and San Jose. Oh ye of little faith, it’s not the first team to three wins, its the first to four. Although honestly, the San jose andwings deserved one or two overtimes just to extend the season a bit. it was that tight a series, both teams deserved to win.

But only one could, and the Sharks did it.

So I’m 10-2 for the playoffs so far. By far, my best playoff call ever. so far.

So now what?

In the east, having just said not to bet against Yzerman, I will. Boston in 6, on the back of Tim Thomas. I just think the Bruins are a better team. and if Tampa again proves me wrong, that’s awesome. But I expect the Bruins to win through.

And in the west…. wow.

I’m not sure who I prefer between San Jose and Vancouver, to be honest. So I’m going to pick the Sharks in 7, but I’m hoping it’s another barn burner of a series like San Jose and Detroit was. I think Luongo and Niemi cancel each other out in terms of shut-down capability, and so it’s going to come down to 2nd and third lines and how well san jose can contain the Sedins.

So. Boston in 6. San Jose in 7. And I honestly feel I could be wrong in both series and not feel bad about it.

I can’t speak to much in tonight’s game because, honestly, I only saw the first period before we went out to dinner with a friend. We did, however, after taking a vote, pull out a phone and tie it to NHL.com for updates every 15 minutes. I have the game on PVR, but right now I’ll probably look forward, not bad. (for what it’s worth, the restaurant is one we go to about once a quarter, Tigelleria. And it’s awesome. It’s usually worth about $125 a person with wine and tips, and I consider it a great value. The duck breast and carrot soups tonight were out of this world. And we still spent significantly less than our former seats would have cost us to sit in tonight…)

And I’m going to be in Yosemite for game 1 and I may or may not be back from that trip to see game 2. I am, shall we say, crushed.

Not. Which is not to say I’m not interested. And won’t be watching closely when I’m in town or grabbing scores when I can. Just taht right now, hockey is not the do-or-die priority of my life. I know. Sacrilege. Given how many years I’ve missed the Yosemite dogwood blooming for the sharks, I hope they understand…..

So now there are four teams left — and all are awesome. The hockey has been awesome. The fan response has been awesome. And have you noticed how the canadian hockey writers, especially out of Toronto, are trying to talk about possible lockouts and seeing what negative things they can write rather than actually accept that maybe the hockey right now is pretty damn good? It’s too damn bad those folks are unable to just enjoy the sport for what it is, and instead try to revel in negativity. Perhaps that’s a reason why the rest of us should stop reading them….

Dear hockey writers: there’s plenty of time in the offseason for you to complain about everything you don’t like about hockey. How about, right now, shutting up and enjoying the damned sport for a few weeks? Nah. never happen, because then, the fans might focus on how good things are right now instead of paying attention to you, as we all know the center of the universe ought to be the toronto hockey writers. and larry brooks. always larry brooks, who’s an honorary ontario hockey whiner…

onward to some damn good hockey, with or without the hockey press! actually, preferably without….

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for May 12, 2011

The Future of Digital Publishing | Stormwolf.com

The Future of Digital Publishing | Stormwolf.com:

I got a call from a writer friend last evening. We spoke about digital books and I answered some questions about why I had chosen which formats to sell through my store. We discussed sales strategies and how I’d seen things evolving.

[....]

He’s not the only author I’ve heard express this sort of reservation. Every time I’ve heard it, I’ve been struck that somewhere, sometime, some one standing on the top of a burning building has looked down at the airbag below, and just before jumping has said, “You know, I think there might be a better spot to land, and I’m sure I’ll see it very shortly.” (Note: these folks are different from the ones who perished two floor below because they were pretty sure that the sprinklers that had failed up to this point, would kick in at any moment and save them.)

When he made that comment, I said, “Here’s the problem with that: to affect such a change would take a lot of money and the investment of a lot of time. I just don’t see anyone out there doing that.”

 

All the above cases leave us with one more suspect: The Unknown Player. This is the ubiquitous “someone” who will do “something” to somehow “change” everything. Right now, inside track is on Santa, since he delivers all the cool devices for free, and that’s the sort of universal cost and delivery system we’d need to make such a change. The digital book market has built up a lot of momentum and is making a lot of money for a lot of folks who are now invested in seeing this expansion continue so they can profit without having to invest a boatload more money in research, development and advertising.

 

I think one of the issues here is that we talk in terms of these new tools and technologies replacing traditional publishers, when in fact they really only replace one piece, the distribution part. This is dumping other functions back on the authors, who typically aren’t as skilled or experienced in it as the publishers are. Ebook publishing handles the distribution piece, but marketing and packaging are two big pieces still being figured out.

Some authors like Amanda Hocking have this figured out, have taken on the marketing aspects themselves, and are thriving. But the best practices don’t exist — heck, no practices exist, so everyone’s kind of feeling their way around in the dark. What works and what doesn’t is still being learned.

Packaging is still a big “I dunno”, too. The ebook market is a lot like the foreign markets, only maybe even more complex. PDF? MOBI? ePub? do you tie onto Kindle, or build a custom app? What platforms? What are the logistics for packaging these? and doing QA? And which geos do you distribute and in which flavors?

Before, you had to work out a deal to sell to the US, and the UK, and Germany, and.. and…

Now? You have to publish on Kindle via Amazon, but what after that? iBooks on IOS? Do you roll your own? If so, on what platforms? IOS? Android? What about web apps? webOS? (disclaimer: guess who I work for? and I’m not speaking for them) Nokia? RIM?

How do you package for each of those? How do you QA those distributions? And — seriously — once you do get your work out into all of those little details, how do you freaking market your work so people know to go and buy it?

This is where this “unknown player” is going to appear. There’s a big need for tools that help get material published onto these platforms without massive undertakings and a lot of custom work. I keep thinking building some tools using something like the phonegap frameworks could create tools that would help the cross-platform issue. Ultimately, there’s a need here for some kind of “Pagemaker” for ebooks (or perhaps more correctly, Framemaker) with good templates that authors could use without having to do a lot of custom, one-off work.  Create an after-market such as WordPress has that allows designers to create custom themes, and a tool that’ll take a theme and a book formatted in a standardized way, and spit out your Kindle and Nook editions, something you can sell off your web site, IOS and Android and webOS versions (and wahtever other platforms need support) and in a way that doesn’t require the author to read each page of each edition to find issues. After all, what makes authors money is writing, not proofreading.

Although in honesty, as traditional publishers continue to fade as we move to this new publishing paradigm, the needs for things the publishers do won’t go away. it’ll just shift. So I expect to see service bureaus (much like certain specialty houses produce CDs for indy musicians) and book designers and copy editors and proof readers will all come in to the market, only now, authors will be hiring them instead of publishers.

And people who help authors figure out how to market. Agents and agencies will probably step in here to some degree; whether that’s what authors should use — is another question. Independent groups and people will, also.

The point is, publishing the ebook isn’t the entire process, it’s only a piece; those pieces are now migrating out to the authors where they used to be the domain of the publisher and editor. And there are problems associated with authors having to take these pieces on, but also opportunities. And one of the big opportunities for the “Unknown player” in this emerging industry as traditional publishing is disrupted is that people who step into these roles and take a lead and help authors figure it out are going to make decent money and create opportunities for themselves.

thinking about game 6 and 7.

Until game 6, the sharks/detroit series was basically a pick’em. The Sharks make no bones about basing their plan for success on how the Wings built themselves into a powerhouse. Early in the series, there was a sense of the student telling the teacher graduation was at hand — and the teacher has made it clear to the student it’s not going to be that easy.

Game 6 we saw the loss of Clowe hurting the Sharks. They held on, got a goal, but the Wings simply ground them down and won that game fairly handily. Until then, any game could have gone the other way based on one or two bounces. The wings got a couple of breaks from reffing mistakes in game 6, but really, it didn’t affect the outcome.

I predicted 7 games in the series, so I can’t claim to be disappointed we’re in game 7. I expect the sharks will adjust to Clowe’s injury, whether or not he plays, and coming home to the home crowd (and last change and the faceoff advantage) will all help. I certainly don’t see a game 7 victory as a given, now how the Wings are playing. Leave it at too close to call.

If the sharks win, they go up against a rested Vancouver, and that’s not going to be any easier.

If the Sharks lose, the media’s going to have a frenzy of second guessing I’m not looking forward to. To me, it is pretty simple: the teacher knows some tricks the student doesn’t know they don’t know until they learn them the hard way. And at best, these teams are very evenly matched; it was never clear to me the Sharks were significantly better. But that won’t stop folks, nor should it. being up 3-0 and losing 4-0, this team will deserve to be second-guessed. If it happens.

I’ll leave that for after game 7, to see what happens first.

Good luck to the team tonihgt, and may the best team win. (either way, I expect it to be close, hard fought and epic.)

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for May 11, 2011

John Scalzi

 

There aren’t many authors in the SF field where I can claim both of these statements are true:

  • I have read every one of their published novels.
  • I make sure I grab and read their books as soon as they are published.

John Scalzi is one of those authors; in fact, the only other two I can think of are Steven Brust and Terry Goodkind. Mike Resnick would be on the list except he’s written so much stuff over the years I’ll never catch up with the backlog, but I’m trying…

The reality is that there’s more SF and Fantasy published in the US in a month than I could reasonably read in a year; add in horror, historical fiction and spy thriller/mystery fiction as areas I dabble in to a lesser degree and the chance I’ll ever come close to keeping up with the field is ludicrous. In many ways this is a good thing, since choice and diversity are great — but it also means that no matter what, there are going to be books and authors I’ll never get to. To be honest about it — in my years involved with SFWA I got to know way more authors than I could keep up with, so even limiting it to “friends and acquaintances” is a big fail.

So I don’t even try. Back in the days when I was publishing OtherRealms, I set myself the goal of making sure at least every fifth book was by an author I’d never read before. I still try to keep to that today — it forces me to explore the diversity and the new voices of the field, but it means I’m less likely to read deeply within the works of any specific author. It helps that I tend to shy away from pure series authors and long series, unless they’re really extra-ordinary (and note for the record that one of the authors above is Terry Goodkind, who is both, so obviously, it’s not a hard and unbreakable rule. But the why of that’s for some other time.)

Which brings me, in the long way around, to John Scalzi. I don’t remember how I got turned onto Scalzi, but it was probably people sending me pointers to things on his blog, Whatever. I liked the writing, and even better, the attitude behind it. So I gave Old Man’s War, his first novel a try. Halfway through I ordered The Ghost Brigades so I could dive into it immediately. This was 2007, and The Last Colony had just come out in hardcover, so I grabbed it, too. And The Android’s Dream.

This isn’t typical of me. I rarely buy hardcovers any more, more because of space than cost — and the sad realization that my reading backlog is such that I rarely GET to a book before it comes out in paperback. The Kindle and ebooks are changing this for me, since I’ve made a commitment to buy as few dead trees as absolutely necessary and so I now target the electronic edition of a book (and sorry, if you don’t publish an ebook version, I’ll probably not buy it for a long time).

But over a three month period, I read four Scalzi novels. And since then, whenever a new one’s come out, I’ve grabbed it and put it at the front of the line. Why?

He’s a very good writer, and a very clear writer. He has a strong voice, he’s not afraid to take a strong position, he’s not afraid to challenge difficult topics, and he’s not afraid to challenge himself — but ultimately, his books are solid, good, entertaining reads. The series starting with Old Man’s War (and also including Zoe’s Tale and The Sagan Diary) is a new take on some classic SF themes — interstellar warfare and galactic politics. Scalzi’s an admitted fan of Heinlein, and this series starts by taking Starship Troopers and re-imagining it and expanding its scope to look at the bigger issues around the conflict and the people involved within the conflict.

Old Man’s War tweaks Starship Troopers in a new direction; take your elderly population and offer them a new life — if they enlist, they get a new young body. If they survive the wars, they go off as colonists to one of the newer outposts within human space. There’s a nod to Joe Haldeman’s Forever War here, in that as you get further into the series, it becomes obvious less obvious what you’re fighting for and why. In Ghost Brigades, Scalzi looks at this body translation from a different direction, where the military uses the DNA of dead people to create soldiers they then raise and teach, rather than transfer the memories of a person. These Ghost Soldiers are human — but not completely humanlike. In some ways it’s almost as if they’ve raised an entire army of functioning autistics and he does a good job of leaving you feeling a bit uncomfortable with the result. In the third book, The Last Colony, Scalzi takes his soldiers and releases them from military duty and sends them off to colonize a world, which gets complicated in various ways that bring forward the real questions of why the war is being fought and who your friends and enemies really are, and what necessary things you do to protect what you care about.

It’s a fast-paced, entertaining read, but it has a quite complex subtext underneath it. I can’t recommend these books highly enough.

And then he went off and did a couple more books in the series — Zoe’s Tale is the story retold, but from the point of view of one of the other characters, who just happens to be a teenaged girl. To be honest, I don’t think there’s an idea that scares most male adult writers than writing a book with a strong and honest female character, much less a teen-aged one. To me, Scalzi pulled it off; more importantly, when I’ve talked or read about the reactions of girls, they seem to think so, too. Circling back into a story is always a risk, because the reader knows how it’s going to turn out, so you have to find other ways to keep then entertained and interested. In this, Scalzi succeeds. In the final book of the series, The Sagan Diary, Scalzi takes a closer look at the Ghost Soldiers with a shorter work written as a series of diary entries by one of the Ghost Soldiers, who realizes she is different than “real” humans and is trying to figure out how to become one. it’s a shorter work published via small press, but it’s a fascinating read.

Along the way, I’ve picked up some of his other works. Android’s Dream is just a weirdly interesting book. If you can imaging Phillip K Dick going off on a long weekend with Keith Laumer’s Retief of the CDT, then you have some idea of what you’re in store for here. If you can’t; well, grab a copy and settle in for a fun and crazy trip.  You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing is aimed at people who think they want to write for a living — and is a book where Scalzi’s sense of humor (we could call it wry, we could call it dry or sardonic, but honestly, the best word for it is snide) comes out in full force. it’s a fun read — and has a lot of really good material on the reality of the writing life. If you are thinking of being a writer, you ought to read it, because it’ll give you a perspective you won’t find in the “work hard and keep trying! and buy my next book!” writing books out there… Another book where his sense of humor is in full swing is Agent to the Stars, which is a pure skiffy romp through a first contact story that both covers some serious issues (how do you think the world would react to real little green men?) without ever taking itself very seriously. Lots of fun.

And finally, his most recent work, The God Engines. Another shorter book, here Scalzi shifts gears completely and writes a darkish fantasy, albeit one with spaceships. Those spaceships are driven not by machines and physics, but by beings, and those beings are not always willing, and so there’s a societal conflict over what is effectively kidnap and torture for the common good — and the implications of what that means to the people (and other things) involved.

I’ve been waiting (somewhat) patiently for his next book, and it hits the stores this week. Fuzzy Nation is based on the classic by H. Beam Piper and is somewhere between a sequel and a re-imagining. I’ve already ordered mine, and it’ll be going with me on my trip next week.

If you haven’t read Scalzi, you should; start with Old Man’s War, his first novel, but he was very much a mature writer when he took this on. I also suggest God Engines as an introduction, and I expect I’ll be recommending Fuzzy Nation once I read it as well. The rest of his Old Man’s War series should be read in sequence, it’s not something you can pick books out at random. And if you like Old Man’s War, you’ll like the rest of the series, because he keeps the quality up throughout, and the story he tells is sustained through the entire series. All of his stuff is recommended; he hasn’t disappointed me yet. And that’s rare.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for May 10, 2011

planning a shot list for the trip

One of the things I’ve been doing leading up to this trip is figure out what I want to accomplish while I’m on the road. Yosemite is one of those places you can just point the camera in random directions and press the shutter and end up with good images, but a little thought and planning can leverage that time and push forward other initiatives as well.

Yosemite Valley from Tunnel View, Yosemite National Park, with Bridaveil Falls showing a rainbow=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+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.

In previous trips I’ve focused more on the grand imagery of the park, classic shots and classic locations. This trip I want to try to spend more time looking at Yosemite on a smaller scale — the trees, not the forest, so to speak.

All of this is open to change based on weather and opportunity, but here’s my current thinking. I’m looking to spend three nights there, with a  room in Mariposa. I could have gotten a room at Wawona (and I like that hotel) but I’d rather spend the money other ways, so I’ll drive a bit more and spend a lot less.  Yosemite Lodge at the falls was full, as was Yosemite View Lodge at El Portal, and Cedar lodge had rooms but for a bit less money, it seemed to make sense to stay in Mariposa.  Because the hotel situation looks opretty busy, I expect the park to be fairly busy, unlike my stays in February and March when most of the visitors are up at Badger Pass, but far from the crowds you get after Memorial Day.

Day 0 is driving in; I’m considering doing a birding trip through San Benito county to get into central valley, and arriving later in the day. It would be a good excuse to show up with a cold dinner and hang out at tunnel view, weather cooperating. Or down somewhere on the meadows looking for opportunities for classic landscapes.

Day 1 is the first full day. Expectation is to get up rather early and get out on the road to Hetch Hetchy, exploring the Mather and Foresta areas. An early start gives me a better shot at wildlife, get there before other folks are up and around, and that area should be quiet in any event, so the wildlife won’t be driven out of site by the crowds. That’s an area Ic an look for mountain quail and cassin’s finch and interesting woodpeckers, also good opportunities for mule deer and coyote. If I get lucky, maybe fox, maybe bobcat. we’ll see. but the trick is to get out there early for the mammals, explore hetch hetchy, slow trip back looking for birds,  and be back on the valley floor for a late lunch. The afternoon and evening is for exploring the valley floor.

Day 2, I go out the other direction. don’t need to start as early, but I want to explore big trees. On the way back, I want to try to do some photography of the Wawona Inn and see what happens. When I’m done, again it’s on the valley floor.

Day 3, hopefully a pre-dawn start and onto the valley floor for early wildlife. I expect to spend most of the morning exploring Happy Isles area. I’m not sure my knee’s going to let me go out to Mirror Lake, but if I can, I will.

Things I specifically want to shoot include the chapel, the Ahwannee, Wawona Inn, and exploring around the Merced River. Instead of the iconic vista landscapes, I want to focus more on smaller, intimate ones, do more work with the macro lens, and work a lot more in the 70-120mm range. I’m hoping for blooming dogwood, but we’ll see what I have when I get there.  I’ve got half a dozen birds on my list (the two above, white-faced woodpecker, pileated, mountain chickadee, and golden crowned kinglet) plus wahtever is in the area for spring. Bears are always on the list is opportunity safely arrives, but I’m hoping I can find a bobcat and I’m fairly confident I’ll find coyotes. Mule deer are a given…

I’ll be taking along both flashes and light stands and umbrellas, and my copy of Syl Arena’s Speedliter’s Handbook because I’ve been intending to start working on my flash technique, and if I don’t push myself to actually start, I never will. And this seems to tie in with my hopeful plan to work with my macro lens… Or maybe it’ll just sit in the trunk and mock me…

And of course, as soon as I get there, I’m sure this will change… And of course, it’s waterfall season there, and I’d be an idiot to ignore them. But I don’t want to just go take new versions of the images I’ve already taken…

Today’s Shared Links for May 9, 2011

prepping for a trip….

I’ve just finished spending a couple of hours prepping my camera gear for the trip. I’m about a week out, and now is a good time to do a first pass at heavy cleaning, choosing what to pack, and thinking through my shot plan.

Why now? Because with a week left, I still have time to make sure everything works, get it repaired (or replaced with a rental), take things out for cleaning if needed, and make sure I have what I need with time to get to the store or order things to get here in time before I leave. If you wait until the last minute and suddenly realize you have a broken thing? you’re screwed.

So today was cleaning day. Everything got pulled out of the bags and looked at; every glass surface got cleaned and evaluated, the sensors got wet cleaned and checked, all of the external surfaces got wiped and all of the gear got evaluated for problems.

What am I packing? Two bags.

Bag 1 is a shoulder harness that carries my main 7D and the 100-400. It just fits and protects it while traveling. Typically, when I start shooting, this bag gets stuck somewhere and I don’t touch it again until I’m done, but I don’t waste space in my main bag with the camera that’s active. Attached to this is my R-strap harness, and in the pocket of the R-strap is my second battery and my second flash card (I currently use the Lexar 16 GB 300x CompactFlash and have yet to have a failure).

I swap in a freshly charged battery before cleaning the sensor, because if your battery runs out, bad things happen.

Actually, I pack THREE bags. I have a small packing cube that I store in my main luggage that carries my non-shooting accessories: Those include my chargers, my card reader, an air rocket, my sensor loupe, the sensor cleaning kit and a couple of microfiber cleaning cloths. This stays in the room and covers all of my non-shooting needs and can get me through most field emergencies (like goop on the sensor). With care, you may never need to wet clean a sensor in the field, but if you’re in the field and need to, you better have the tools.

(Digression 1: I love packing cubes. they’re inexpensive, they let you build up standard sets of things, and they’re light and portable. I found once I started using them, my chances of leaving something important behind went WAY down, because I could build a set of standard packs of things (from sensor cleaning gear to toiletries to all of the stuff I need to support the laptop) in different cubes, and as long as I knew each pack was complete and packed — so there were fewer variables and fewer chances of missing that USB cable for your backup drive. Keeping formal lists for each pack kit and a list of needed pack kits is a good way of organizing your life so you don’t get somewhere and screw yourself because you forgot some $5.00 widget that’s a six hour drive away).

(Digression 2: my philosophy of lens and sensor cleaning: less is better. I almost NEVER wet clean sensors. Maybe twice a year unless something gets on them I can’t get off otherwise. The best way to not get stuff on sensors is to stay out of the sensor bay. With the 7D’s auto sensor cleaning, you almost never have to go in there yourself. With the 30d, which is a generate of body before that technology, I’m constantinly cleaning the damned thing because it’s a dust magnet — so it gets ritually blown out with the air rocket before and after every shoot that I use it. I will only wet clean a sensor if air blowing fails, and I will only air blow if the auto-sensor system fails. I’ve gotten in the habit of power cycling the 7D every couple of hours, just to cycle the sensor cleaner while in the field, and that’s cut my issue with dust blotches. For lenses, I’ll use a cloth a lot. I’ll use cleaning fluid only if the cloth doesn’t solve the problem, although a couple of times a year I deep clean everything like I did today. But I try not to do more than needed — but I try to do what’s needed frequently. fewer liquids and chemicals is good, but ignoring the dirt is bad).

(Digression 3: Can you remember when you last replaced your microfiber cloths? If you can’t, throw them out and buy new ones. they’re cheap. And all that crap they’re taking off your lenses is going somewhere, right? Yup, onto the surface of those cloths, along with crap picked up in your bag, oil from your fingers… I try to replace my cloths every six months. I don’t want one deciding to put that crap back onto a lens in the field)

Back to my bags… Bag 2 is my Lowepro Photo backpack, which has done yeoman duty.  IUt’s also about ready to be retired but I haven’t decided with what. I’ve tried some different options and nothing has pleased me, so I continue thinking about it. Someday I’ll do something. Until then, I stuff everything in this bag. In it is the 30d body, my 300 F4 (with 1.4x attached), my 180F2.8 macro, a 580EX and a 580EX2 lens, a Better Beamer,  another air rocket, more cleaning cloths, and a few toys I hate doing without, especially my Hoodman HoodLoupe and my hot shoe level. I also carry spare AA batteries, a bunch of extra flash cards for the 30d and the spare 30d battery. I also carry my filters in packs that can be attached to the camera strap if I want.

Filters… Politically loaded topic. Should be its own blog post. But here’s my take:

I carry two filters for each lens size; I currently carry lenses with 67mm, 72mm, and 77mm fronts. I carry a circular polarizer and a 4ND neutral density. If you stack them, you can get about 8ND if you need it. In all honesty, that’s not enough ND, so I want to start carrying an 8ND filter as well, but haven’t, because I am arguing with myself about whether to add in a 77mm 8ND and two step-down filter rings, or whether to go to the square filter format (Cokin “P”) — because I know that focus is going to be a royal pain in the butt with an 8ND filter on, so I’m thinking the square filter will work better logistically than a round. maybe. If I was sure, I’d do something. Until I’m sure, I’ll keep arguing and do nothing. But I see no real reason to carry anything but the polarizer and the ND’s, because everything else (especially graduated ND things) can be “fixed in post” or by shooting in HDR. Which is why I say this is a politically loaded topic…

All of my lenses have a UV filter, another good way to get photographers arguing. Well, two of mine currently don’t, because one lens had one fail and I haven’t replaced it, and anotehr, when I pulled it off to clean it, went sproing and I am retiring it. And while I’ve always been on the side of having a UV filter on my lenses as insurance — I’m not so sure right now. But that is a different post for a different day.

So everything gets taken out and cleaned. I’ve wet cleaned my sensors, because it’s been 9 months since I’ve needed to, and because when I checked the 7D I found a hair in the sensor bay, and in trying to take it out, I proved once again I’m a klutz and touched the sensor and left a fingerprint. the hair finally lost to a pair of forceps I keep handy for these things… the fingerprint reminded me I needed to clean things up anyway, and hence this blog post. (kids, don’t stick your fingers in the sensor bay. really. especially if you’re a klutz).

I reformatted all of my cards. Do you know how old your cards are? they wear out, so replace them BEFORE they fail on you in the field. Mine are a year old, I’ll live with them for now. I’ve charged all my batteries, made sure they’ll keep a charge. I’ve checked my cleaning cloths, and new ones are going on order. I’ve found myself two UVs short of a full set, but I’m going to leave that for this trip. ditto the 8NDs, which I’ll probably regret not having. Since I did this today, I can order the cloths and get them in without sweating. If I waited to the last minute?

The other thing I’m thinking through while doing this is whether I want to rent any gear. I’m thinking my next gear purchase is a T3i to replace the 30d; I can’t justify a 2nd 7D body, but I do want to upgrade the 30d. The logical upgrade is either a T3i, a T2i, or a 60d, and I think the T3i is the best option for me. But I don’t want to turn this trip into a field testing exercise, so I’ll wait. Part of me wants to grab a Sigma 10-20 (wider! must go wider!) but that’s not the focus of this trip, so I’ll decline. I really want to spend some time trying out a 70-200 F2.8 with teleconverters as a possible upgrade to the 100-400 (idea from Art Morris) that combo really intrigues me. So I’m considering that, but I dunno.

And once these bags are packed, one less thing to worry about at the last minute, which is when you’re most likely to be in a hurry, and forget that minor but crucial widget…

 

 

 

 

Today’s Shared Links for May 8, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for May 7, 2011

Page 5 of 18« First...2345678...Last »