Archive for the ‘About Chuq’ Category
I have committed iPad.
It’s official. I have committed iPad. I noticed last night that one of the local Best Buy’s had them in stock, so I decided it was time and went and grabbed one. Looking back on what I wrote when it was announced, I think I got it mostly right. I bought the 16G WiFi model, and I’ve been whacking on it since to try to get it set up the way I want and the tools on it I need to get going.
Why now? I’m looking to move forward on some projects and the iPad will make doing those a lot easier. And in some cases, they wouldn’t be possible without. What are those projects?
Well first, a quick side trip:
Anonymous offscreen voice: Chuq! Don’t you work for that company that said it was going to build it’s own tablet?
Why, thank you Anonymous offscreen voice. Yes, in fact, I do. And yes, they did. And no, it’s not announced or shipping yet, and I have things to do and people to see.
In all honesty, the reality is this — everyone in the industry owns stuff on multiple platforms. If you aren’t seeing what the other guys are doing, you’re going to miss important stuff. I think the record at work is someone who carries (CARRIES, not “owns”) four platforms: webOS, Android, IOS and a Treo. I still have my iPhone, and it sits mostly in my backback and gets used as an iPod, it has it’s phone number forwarded to my main phone, and it carries the few apps that I can’t yet find an equivalent on webOS. But I dogfooded my Pre long ago, and I use the apps on it if they exist — because if you don’t dog food your own stuff, you can’t live through the pain points that need to be fixed. So I do, happily, and I think we do a pretty good job (and it keeps moving forward).
But there is no webOS tablet yet, at least not that I can admit to, carry around in public or use on a daily basis. When there is, I’ll dogfood that, too. Until that happens, I need something now that does stuff, and the iPad makes sense.
I figured I should just be up front about this, because we all know there are folks out there who look for things to take out of context and push as negatively as they can. And they probably will anyway, but I felt I could either pretend I didn’t have one (which only works until the first time someone sees me with it, and then I have some explaining to do), or I could just explain up front. So I am. Heck, I could actually be working on some fascinating cross platform thingie that causes sparkling ponies to fly across the room, and if I am, I couldn’t tell you. In any event, the bottom line is the addition of an iPad to the family doesn’t imply anything about anything else other than the iPad is a useful tool, and when I have other useful tools, I’ll get those, too.
So, why did I buy an iPad?
At the start of the year, I made a decision to stop buying dead trees, and I shifted almost all of my book buying electronic. That’s worked out pretty well — I love the Kindle format and I’ve been doing some interesting research into e-publishing myself. It’s really clear that the iPad is a tipping point in the publishing space and I’ve been doing some interesting research into epublishing (more on that later) and I’m at the point where I needed to be able to try things out to mvoe that research forward further. But mostly, it’s because I wanted something more convenient than a laptop to carry about for my reading, and something with a bigger screen than a phone (and my 50 year old nearsighted eyes thank me!). I like getting away from the desk, away from the keyboard and yet more and more of my “downtime” and research time is spent online. The iPad allows me to nicely sit on the couch with Laurie, or pretty much anywhere, and do that.
Another thing I’m looking to investigate is using tablets as part of my photography. I have a number of things I’m considering, but the one that’s intrigued me a lot I wrote about a few months ago. I think the iPad would be a nice way to do keywording and annotation of pictures, and I want to start prototyping up some options and see what happens. I think you could do a lot using a combination of a Lightroom plugin to handle migration, Dropbox and some custom code on the tablet to enable browsing and curation through updating the EXIF. Still a bunch of details to work out, but I’m ready to go work them out, and I can’t exactly do that without a tablet.
Finally, Project management. I’ve started doing some planning on a few fronts, trying to get back and moving on some things I’ve let sit fallow for a few months, and I needed something to help me get and stay organized. I grabbed a copy of Things, and I’m starting to figure out what I need to figure out about the projects I’m trying to reboot.
And yeah — the iPad is a damn good piece of work. but man, I miss multi-tasking of applications already.
road trip — california central coast (part 2)
(continuing a discussion on my recent birding/photo trip along the central california coast. go here to start at the beginning)
So it was now time for me to explore Morro Bay. But first, a digression.
Why Morro Bay?
I live in Silicon Valley, and have for for over 25 years, but I grew up in Southern California and my family still lives down there. This implies I’ve travelled the roads to LA a few times. I long ago got over feeling like the hour I save by driving down I-5 is “worth it”, so my preference is to head up and down 101 along the coast. A bit slower, but worth it.
In 2008, Dad got sick. Went into the hospital. Didn’t come home. Between Christmas 2007 and October 2008 when we finalized all of the details on the estate, I logged about 12,000 miles on the car JUST driving back and forth across the state. I honestly can’t tell you how many trips I took, 2008 was and probably always will be a grey blur. But a lot of those trips were long weekends, and on a lot of those trips, I started doing short side trips on the way home to unwind. Occasionally my “weekend” consisted of driving a couple of hours out of my way and seeing what I found (sometimes up highway 1, sometimes crossing from 5 to 101 through one of the passes like 198 or 46 — just checking out different parts of the state. Driving, far away from people, responsibilities and cell phone towers — was a bit of an escape.
I also started stopping in Morro Bay, because (among other reasons) it’s about half-way between the two ends of this journey. Drive four hours, stop for a couple of hours, grab a meal, then carry on. Many times, that was my weekend. I first visited Morro Bay when I was trying to decide how serious I was about birdwatching as an avocation, and hit a point where I wanted to get out and on my own and explore a bit and see if this really was something I wanted to commit myself to; I chose Morro Bay because it’s a major birding area with a great diversity to it — and I loved the trip and the location. Ever since then, I’ve used Morro Bay as a stopping off point on trips up and down state or when I need to get away. It’s close enough that I can daytrip if I really want to, but it’s a perfect place for an overnight trip or weekend to get away and unplug.
It’s no secret Laurie and I have talked about retiring (or relocating) out of the valley at some point. I’ve wanted to move to the Oregon Coast for years, and we have a great love for cities like Seattle and Portland and Vancouver. I could settle in to a city like Newport or Astoria quite happily, though, and some day, we might. Morro Bay, I found, embodies much of what attracts me to the Oregon Coast, and that became a great attraction. The town is small and friendly; it’s casual and has a nice, slow pace, but it’s close to civilization with San Luis Obispo within reasonable drive. It’s a great outdoor town and I’ve come to learn it’s full of really interesting people — many of whom used to work in Silicon Valley and fell in love with the area and moved down there when they could. There’s a very active birding culture, and there’s are a number of very good and fun photographers that I’ve come to know either in person or in email. It’s very common — almost every trip — for someone to wander up if I’m shooting around the harbor just to say hi and talk photography for a bit, or to offer suggestions on interesting places to take pictures or find an interesting bird. it’s just one of those places you occasionally find that you visit and it makes you feel like you’re home (or want to be).
So Morro Bay became my escape, and as I visited it, I learned more about it and I found new and interesting things to do there, and now it just seems weird if I don’t spend some time around the town if I’m in the central coast. When I need to crawl into a cocoon for a bit, it’s a great place for me to do it. And because it’s like that (Victoria, BC is another town like that for me) that’s one reason I was careful to make sure I stayed in Santa Maria and explore new locations — it would have been fine to just stay in Morro Bay for the weekend, but I wouldn’t have really pushed myself or done anything new, and I needed the break, but I needed to push myself, too. This trip succeeded at both.
I have a few standard visiting places in the Morro Bay area. I normally start at the sweet springs preserve in Los Osos:
It’s a small area, a freshwater spring that feeds a pond with some nice tree habitat, mud flats and wetlands that open up on the Estuary. In migration, it can be a great place to bird. Off season, it can be dead, but it’s always tranquil and I can go there and offload whatever stress I’m carrying, so even if I don’t see a bird, I enjoy the trip. But it’s a neat birding area, from peregrines and red-shouldered hawks to warblers and hummingbirds and woodpeckers and sparrows — and I’ve had lots of fun photographing a couple of family of quail that live there.
I love that place.
After that, it was time for lunch. Over in Baywood, across the estuary is the Good Tides Coffee house, a nice cup and a pastry, and the ability to sit and watch the estuary for a while (in the same location is Maya, a nice mexican restaurant I like to eat at; in fact, I came back to it for dinner that night).
I then drove up into the estuary and towards Morro Bay proper. I usually stop at the bayside marina because it can be a good place for otters to hang out, And then the Cormorant Rookery near the golf course in Morro State Park.
I’ve been experimenting with shooting that rookery a few times now. I must admit that for the most part, the rookery is winning. it’s a freaky place; you hike out to it along the water (hope for low tide). It’s up on a bluff a bit, and the cormorants are nesting up in the trees, so it’s hard to get good angles that show off what’s going on up there. I had fog this trip (of course), and that complicates it further. I’ve been there at times where the fog’s been heavy and turns the area into something really spooky — if you’ve never heard a rookery’s noises, you can’t understand what it’s like being near it in the fog.
And occasionally you see something you aren’t expecting:
Double-crested cormorants, egrets and herons all nest there. Pelagic and Brandt’s cormorants nest on the rock with the western gulls and peregrines. it’s both very accessible and difficult to photograph well, and I guess I’m going to have to keep trying…
After the rookery, I stopped at tidelands park; the main harbor was really quiet, so I headed over to the rock, where it was pretty quiet birding but there some otters hanging out. As it turned out, I ended up hauling out my camp chair and sitting down and watching and photographing the otters for about three hours. there were three hanging out and mostly sleeping, a young male, a mom and her young pup.
To sleep, Otters wil wrap themselves in a kelp plant because they use that as an anchor. It prevents them from drifting off as the tide changes.
Like Pelicans, I can sit and watch otters forever. I never get tired of photgraphing them, and they never disappoint.
After that, I was beat. 11 hours on the road, over 1,000 images taken. I headed off to the hotel room to check in and put up my feet and start importing the images. Importing ended up taking over 7 hours — one reason I decided it was time for that new laptop. I crashed early, got up early (but slept through my alarm) and headed out to the rock again to see if there was anything interesting to photograph. Other than a small flock of Brant Geese on the far side of the harbor, the answer was no. I did get a chance to say hi to one of the local birder/photogs who was out early as well, and we chatted a bit about the upcoming Morro Photo Expo and whether we were going, but that really needs to be its own posting.
After that, I headed north on highway 1 looking for things to shoot. What I mostly got was fog, I admit that the previous day had worn me out and I was looking forward to being home, but there wasn’t a lot that really caught my eye. what did — a few vistas around Big Sur — were out in the sun, but mid-day and flat lighting made those things to come back adn explore more some other time.
Point Lobos was encased in a fairly heavy fog, so I bagged it and drove in. Some days it’s just not worth it to fight for an image.
One lesson learned: I’ve lost enough hair that I can no longer pretend I can get away without a hat (and sunblock). Sitting out along the harbor for hours with the otters, even under a heavy fog/marine layer and no real sun, left me nicely sunburnt. Which, being a southern california boy, I don’t feel like it’s summer without one good sunburn, but I spend the next week or so doing a great imitation of a bad zombie movie as everything flaked and peeled, so before I do that again, I need to get a good hat and some good sunblock, and I just have to get in the habit of using it.
I do, actually, have a birding hat, a Tilley’s I’ve worn for years. But it’s getting a bit long in the tooth, and it’s a bit — informal — for general wear. And the reality is, like my dad, I need a hat I wear habitually when outside, and I have to find one I will wear that doesn’t (as Laurie has so described my Tilleys) make me look dorky. Okay, dorkier. So off to REI I go. (there’s a practical reason fo rthis beyond sunburn; my dad had multiple class one melanomas in his later years; that puts me at about 20% higher risk of melanoma than the normal population; my history as a bit of a sun hound in my SoCal youth doesn’t help that, either — so I need to get serious about protecting myself outside more than I do. That, and when I peel, I itch…..)
My next trip? hopefully up to Bodie, Mono Lake and Tioga pass for 3-4 days or so. We’ll see. I’ve been doing a bit more research and have a better feel for what I want to accomplish up there, and it’s an area I really want to see soon. But honestly, it’s been a few years since I’ve made it up into Oregon and the pacific northwest, and that would be nice, too… but that’s a more extensive trip, and I’m not planning more than a long-weekend kind of thing for the next few months. And honestly, I keep thinking that if I can get a longer trip organized somehow, it sure would be nice to get back to Yellowstone… (but that ain’t gonna happen this year…)
View central coast trip in a larger map
road trip — california central coast
(don’t forget to check out part 2, also)
So a couple of weeks ago, I went down to SoCal to visit family and spend a few days at the old homestead. I arranged things so that I could take a couple of days on the way back and go a bit of a road trip and relax and do some photography.
I’m trying to turn these trips into challenges, to use them to stretch my photography and to explore new areas or new techniques (or preferably both). One thing I’ve realized is that I’m very comfortable (and pretty good) at shooting the type of work I normally shoot but really uncomfortable away from those specific styles. Not a huge surprise, most folks are like that — but I feel that to really take my photography to the next level, I need to widen the types of photography I do and become capable and comfortable in a much more diverse set of photography formats. Push myself way out of my comfort zone, and then get comfortable there. (at the SAME time, honestly, photography is still one of those things I do to relax and recharge the batteries, and so there’s a tension here between never relaxing and never growing. These days, with everything that’s been going on, the needle is pointing further towards relaxing, but I need to change that up a bit).
I purposefully didn’t plan the photo trip until I got to SoCal, because I wanted to spend some time researching options and deciding what to do on the fly. With only two or three nights in a hotel, the options were somewhat restricted (no Bryce or Zion, for instance, because I’d spend too much time traveling and too little time on site). Part of the exercise here was to treat this as a photo assignment and do the research, choose the venues and the shooting plan — and then do it and see how the plan and the results match out and how well I adapt the plan to the conditions. It’s an attempt to simulate getting an assignment and then being able to understand how to carry it out.
I ended up having to decide on two ideas. One was to work up the 395 along the eastern Sierra and explore the Bishop to Bodie region (tioga pass, mammoth, bodie, etc). The other was to head up the coast and do some coastal shooting.
I ended up opting to stay on the coast for two reasons; first, I felt that a couple of nights in the eastern sierra was just too short for what I wanted to cover and I reducing the scope to fit the time available just made no sense. Since it’s been decades since I’ve been in that area, I’d need time to explore and scout as well as shoot, and I just felt I was trying to cram too much in (instead, I’m hoping I can take a trip out there for a few days after labor day. maybe. we’ll see. If not, it’s on the short list. But then, a birding trip to Salton Sea has been on my short list since 2006 and I still haven’t gotten there…)
I didn’t, however, want it to turn into another trip to the same places in Morro Bay, I knew there was a place in Pismo I wanted to go back and shoot, so I decided to overnight further south on the coast and then spend a full day shooting from the starting point into Morro bay, and then a second day in Morro and then take highway 1 home and stop in Point Lobos for a few hours of shooting.
One complication — a feature — is that along the coast, this time of year, it’s often foggy, grey and misty. In all, potentially a challenging shooting environment. That sealed the deal, let’s go find new stuff and go shoot it in the fog!
I ended up holing up for the night in Santa Maria, which was far enough north to minimize the travel needed before I started shooting, but far enough out that I was able to cover a fair amount of ground I’d never explored before hitting Morro Bay and more familiar territories. I chose two locations to explore: Guadalupe Dunes park for the possibility of some interesting dune formations, and Oso Flaco lake, because it’s a fairly well known birding site and I could accomplish a couple of things at the same time (perhaps). Adding in Pismo, that gave me two areas I’d researched but never visited, a third I knew about but had only visited for a short time a few years ago, and whatever caught my attention in the meantime.
I arrived near dinner time in Santa Maria and checked in and grabbed food — Santa Maria isn’t the most diverse culinary city in the universe, so I ended up at a Red Lobster (perfectly acceptable) followed by the starbucks for a coffee for dessert. And then went on a scouting drive. I drove about 40 miles E up the 166 towards the central valley looking for interesting stuff. One project I’ve been thinking of kicking off is a series on the california oak, looking for especially interesting trees and the remains of the fallen warriors. I’ve done a little shooting towards this, but haven’t really dedicated a lot of time to it. the trees on the 166, to my eye, were younger and just not very grizzled and not really all that interesting. One or two possible candidates but nothing I’ll prioritize going back for soon. Perhaps the 95 degree weather affected my judgement (it being a major heatwave in the state at the time….). Still, it was an interesting drive and exercise to explore for a purpose. But I really need to start keeping a formal scouting journal and a list of candidate locations for variious projects and potential shots…
Next morning I got up really early and got on the road and drove into Guadalupe and off to the dunes. I arrived — to fog.
Expected, but heavier than I had hoped. Guadalupe dunes looks like a fascinating place, but at 7 in the morning in the fog, it was me, a ranger, some really insane surfers and the sand. I spent some time trying various things, but ultimately, I wasn’t really happy with the results. the fog was heavy enough that the surf was effectively invisible (did I mention the surfers were insane?), and shooting birds in the fog just makes them look grey and uninteresting, at least with fog that heavy. I spent most of my time looking for interesting shooting options with the dunes, but just not finding many. My entire results from my time in Guadalupe:
The sand just didn’t have much in the way of interesting textures for close up work, and the wide angle stuff in the fog was just — boring.
I do feel like I continue to struggle with this type of shot in general; there are a couple of things I need to focus on here. My lens setup doesn’t go wide enough for my tastes (I’ve talked about that previously here) but rather than blame it on “not the right gear”, I’m trying to push myself to figure out how to take interesting shots with what I have before succumbing to the “new toys” syndrome, because I really see this as a lack of technique and what I need to do is force myself to practice and work on this; if I did buy a wider lens or two, what I’d end up with are boring pictures set at 10mm instead of 28mm.
After that, I drove up highway 1 to Pismo, where things got better.
Laurie and I discovered Margo Dodd park in Pismo a few years ago when we were looking for a place to take a break during a drive back from visiting my family. It’s right on the water, a small grassy area with a few picnic tables — but it overlooks a wonderful rocky area, tidepools and some interesting vistas. I’ve always meant to go back and photograph there. it’s next to a rock where gulls and cormorants nest (and it turns out pigeon guillemots!) and I thought there were going to be some interesting opportunities. I also knew I’d run into brown pelicans, and if you haven’t figured it out by now, I can watch (and photograph) pelicans forever…
So I did. The fog was much lighter. it was late enough that the cormorants were fledged, but a few were still feeding young. I found a couple of fairly young gull chicks, but very little in the way of active nesting, it was all later than that. And pelicans flying everywhere in formation…
But that location was more than birds. Instead of closing off photography, the fog here gave me opportunities to create some interesting images. I especially like this one. If the fog were lighter, I think it would have been boring, it gave the tree just that right tough of mystery. If there were more fog, well, it just turns into a grey blog. This was what I was looking for when I decided to go up the coast and shoot in the fog.
Well, that and kayakers:
Eventually it was time to tear myself away from the pelicans and carry on, so I packed up and headed north.
Oh… astute readers will realize that I haven’t talked about Oso Flaco at all. When I arrived there, I realized that the location left my car a bit too exposed for my comfort level; with it fully packed and full of “stuff” and gear, I really wasn’t hot to let the car out of my sight to go hiking, so I aborted and filed it away for another trip, later. Especially given how foggy it was there…
So onwards towards Morro. And I’ll talk about Morro and the rest of the trip in the next posting.
New Laptop Time revisited — aftermath and more thoughts
When last we talked I’d just picked up my new laptop and was about to delve into migrating my universe onto it. I”m now fully migrated and settled in, and so it’s time for a bit of a post-mortem on the process and discuss what I did (and why) and which parts I like and which parts I probably need to think about some more…
The first thing I needed to do was install the upgraded hard drive (500 Gig, 7200 RPM). thanks to some very nice instructions from Other World Computing (where I bought the drive) and the fact that Apple made the unibody Macbook Pros easy units to swap drives in (Thank You Apple!) that took all of ten minutes. I’ve done that enough times by now I could pretty much do it in my sleep, but it’s not always easy.
Once I did that, though, a bit of a quandry. I now have a Mac with an unformatted drive, a drive attached to nothing with MacOS X on it, and a need to get MacOS X on the new drive somehow. There are all sorts of ways to do that; I ended up using the recovery DVD and simply booting it, formatting the drive, and installing fresh from the DVD. That took about 30 minutes, very painless.
Other options: I could have wired the original drive into a housing and booted the mac onto it, then cloned the drive (or cloned the drives via my old Mac, or… or… and in reality, all of the other ways to do it would have been more complicated and taken longer, IMHO. That’s why the recovery DVD exists…
First thing I did: Cloned my old laptop drive (via Superduper) and then put that boot drive far away from potential chaos. I also took my old backup drives and put them far away as well. Before I started, I had THREE current, bootable copies PLUS my Time Machine backup. I took my secondary firewire drive and turned it off and unplugged the firewire so I couldn’t accidentally trash it (there was a 2nd current copy of that data in Time Machine). More copies a good thing when it comes to backups.
Once the OS was installed on the new drive, I booted onto it and it ran through Apple’s standard setup process. Put my old mac in firewire target mode, connected the two, and let Apple’s software copy the data. 4.5 hours later, data is copied and my new mac looks like my old Mac (except where it doesn’t… there are a couple of things to remember here….)
Then you fire up Software Update and let it download all of the updates. That took about an hour.
Then I fired up the Application DVD and fired it up (it is also the hardware test DVD in this generation of new-machine disks) – since I never upgraded to iLife ’09, I needed to restore the applications that were on the disk I didn’t use, and I couldn’t do that until after the migration was done. That took another 45 minutes or so.
One thing that isn’t done by the migration assistant is XCODE; if you have the Apple developer environment installed, it won’t migrate it. That’s not a big deal, and there was an update I needed to install anyway, so the last thing I did before crashing was start a download of the latest tools from the developer site. And then I crashed.
Started about 5:30PM, crashed at 1AM with the migration complete and the system fully functional (minus XCODE). And almost all of that time was doing things I wanted to do while the system was doing whatever it was doing. I probably spent an hour total actively working on the update, the rest was the computer doing things while I waited.
I know some people still prefer to move stuff over manually and don’t want to trust the migration assistant, and I suppose if you’re someone who’s off hacking the guts of the system, you might need to. My view is “have fun. let me know when you’re done”, and I long ago learned to trust Apple knowing how to do this better than me. I also learned long ago not to hack the parts of the system that Apple “owns” — if I need a custom version of Perl or want to run an Apache server, I create a user and install the software into that user and build my own custom versions and run those instead. That does two things: it isolated the installed system from breaking because I inadvertantly step on something it depends on, and it isolates my custom stuff from being broken at a bad time by a software update that steps on my customizations. Everyone wins — and since it lives in a user account, it’s compatible with the migration assistant. (this was a trick we learned to figure out how to build custom hacks into Perl and Apache while still being generic and compatible inside the Apple data center, so the data center could maintain the boxes and OS without impacting production systems, and we could build the tools we needed without the data center staff having to be involved or approving stuff. works great, once you get in the habit of doing it).
One thing to realize when you upgrade your computer is that a few things are going to change. In my cast, the necessary changes were that my old laptop had a DVI video out, and my new one has this new mini-video plug thing. Also, my old laptop was Firewire 400, the new one is Firewire 800. That meant a trip to Fry’s for a new video dongle and cable, and some replacement firewire cables with the new plug types. While there, I realized they had a 2Tb drive for $110, and that solved my backup problem. This all happened while my data was migrating, so it was all ready when the new machine was ready…
Next morning was installing the dev tools, upgrading a few apps I realized needed patches (especially Parallels and the XP partittion), and then setting up backups.
These things are easier if you’re careful how you store stuff on disk. Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty careful about where I put my data — yes, I use Documents and Pictures and Music and Movies and I keep stuff where it “belongs”, and I limit what lives on my Desktop to active files and projects. That REALLY simplifies major migrations like this. Times like this ARE a good chance to go through your files and identify stuff that you can throw out or archive offline, and in fact, I did take about 250 Gigs of data (mostly low-quality pictures) and copied them to two separate drives, one which will live in my desk, one which will live offsite. Next time I do this kind of archiving, I’ll buy a couple of new drives, copy the data from this archive onto it, add the new archived data, and then store a copy offsite. One way to limit the “I can’t read my only copy of this” is to keep two copies, and the other important way is to refresh the archive every so often. Given you can buy 2TB drives for $110 today, there’s really no reason not to simply replace your archives with a new, really larger drive every couple of years. And so I shall. And remember, THIS is the data I never expect to ever need or touch again, but am keeping around in case I’m wrong. So I’m comfortable only keeping two copies of it…
I plopped the new 2Tb drive in the dock. I ALSO took the old 2Tb backup drive and stuck it in a static free envelope and it and the offsite copy of the archive data and my old laptop then were put far away from my working area so I wouldn’t accidentally do something to them. In the morning, when I go to work, the offsite data will go with me. In a week or so, once i’m absolutely sure I have everything I need off of it, I’ll wipe the disk on the old laptop, and then it’ll go to a friend who refurbishes them and lends them out to underpriviledged kids that otherwise wouldn’t have computers.
Backups… When you’re schlepping around half a terabyte of data, it takes time. I fired up Superduper to clone my new boot drive to the 2TB drive and set up a timed refresh for every night at 1:30AM. Once that was done, I fired up Time Machine and got it started.
DAMN but Time Machine is slow. It copied data at maybe 40% of the speed of SuperDuper, and SuperDuper is pretty much as fast as you can get. I keep finding reasons not to like Time Machine in large data environments, but not enough that I’m ready to turn it off. Just don’t depend on it as your primary backup, folks, not if you do large data sets like this. For my mom — it’s great. For me, I get annoyed a lot.
Once my boot disk was copied (twice — once cloned, once Time Machine) I plugged in my secondary firewire and turned it on. And then fired up the backups on IT. And timed them, because I was now annoyed at Time Machine and wanted to make sure there wasn’t a performance problem with the dock. It took me 2 hours to finder copy 280 gigabytes to a 5400RPM drive in the dock. It took me over 5 hours for Time Machine to back up 165 gigabytes from that same source drive to that same dock with a 7200 RPM drive in it.
DAMN but Time Machine is slow.
And once that was done — I was done. Total time invested: about a day and a half of clock time. 7.5 hours of upgrade and migration, of which my time spent actively involved was about 1 hour. Getting backups set up and all of the data backed up? About 12 hours, of which I probably spent 2 hours actively involved and the rest of the time puttering. And about 2 hours involved in getting XCODE re-installed and doing the various updates I did (most of the time updating was getting XP patches up to date and getting the anti-virus stuff updated…)
Not bad.
Pretty much everything went as planned. there was one thing I did I want to do differently: I bought a VGA dongle and a VGA cable to replace the DVI setup I had. I don’t think it’s as crisp as the DVI was, so I’m going to go get a DVI dongle and go back to the old cable. I do need the VGA dongle as well, but it’ll live in my bag and get carried around for when I need to wire into a project for a presentation… All in all, not bad at all.
I also need to find and invest in a few really short (1-1.,5 foot) 800-800 firewire cables for neatness sake. Maybe a firewire hub; and clean up my cable monster behind the desk, now taht I know where everything needs to go…
When doing something like moving everything to a new laptop I find it’s a good time to reconsider how you use the system and what needs to be fixed or changed or upgraded. There have been a couple of projects I’ve been meaning to get to — and this seems to be a perfect excuse to actually get to them. One is that my contact list/address book has become a complete shambles; some of you are in my gmail lists, some in my Mac Address book, some in my entourage book at work, some on my phone and nowhere else. That’s long-term untenable and potential disaster, so I’m merging everything into a single list again (using gMail, and that syncs to my mac address book, and THAT syncs onto MobileMe and back out onto my phone), That’ll at least get the chaos under control for awhile, and keep it organized to the degree that I’m smart enough to only add data to the primary address book (but don’t bet on it…).
the other is that it’s well past time to get more paranoid about online accounts and passwords and get all of that data out of the way too useful but not terribly secure browser autofill and into something a bit more — discrete. And that is 1Password, a secure wallet that can keep a set of data and make it available on my Mac and iPhone/iPod_Touch (and there’s a way to sync data out to webOS via Dropbox). I’m going to be installing it tonight and as I start hitting up sites setting them up in 1Password, changing all of the passwords (way overdue) and getting that data out of the browser. If you haven’t done that yet — you really need to think about it. Just for peace of mind, if nothing else.
The new box? awesome. Spent some time in Lightroom 3, and rendering of images is a LOT faster, which makes me happy. I haven’t done a test import, but I can definitely feel the speed difference, so I’m hopeful. We’ll see, I’m going to head out and shoot monday or tuesday and see how import speed goes.
All in all, I don’t miss the larger screen or faster CPUs at all. At this point, that seems like money well not-spent.
new laptop time….
So a few weeks ago my laptop started giving me hints it was thinking about retirement. It’s given me yeoman service — it was given to me when I left Apple, so it’s had a nice, long, fruitful life. It was clear, however, that I was heading towards a badly timed breakdown and I wanted to avoid that. It started with rendering glitches that indicated problems in the video RAM when I ran the thing hot for a while (lots of video, or playing Civ IV for instance). No data issues, but it was obvious that as the box heated up, a video ram chip was getting flakey.
This has been slowly progressing. I had my first random reboot while in SoCal, and I’ve had two in the last four days while working in Lightroom. No data problems, but terribly inconvenient, and I don’t want to be importing photos if the box resets. So I decided it was time to upgrade the laptop.
My current laptop is a 2.16 Core Duo laptop, 2 gigs of RAM (max possible). The upgrades to the Mac lines since this came out (late 2006 model) mean just about anything is going to be a nice improvement. So what to get?
After chewing on the options for a while and considering my options, I ordered the new laptop today, and it’ll arrive in time for me to spend the weekend migrating. I thought it might be interesting to discuss why I made the choices I made and how I think they’ll compare to what I have.
When I worked at Apple, my traditional decision for buying a new computer was to get whatever the top end was (like that’s a surprise), although I had a tended to buy the N-1 generation on closeout unless there was some key technological shift that I wanted (like the switch from ADB to USB. For you youngsters out there, Apple used to have a non-standard connection setup for keyboards before they used USB, which was before we all started using Bluetooth…) — it was a way to leverage pricing but get powerful boxes.
In all honesty, though, these days, I rarely see people using most of the capabilities of their computers — and I don’t see the logic in paying extra so my idle loop can finish sooner. I also don’t see logic in spending money on extra computing hardware that can be spent on other things, like camera gear or an iPad, and a set of smart decisions on buying the laptop could save enough money to almost pay for an iPad (or a lens, or…) — so I didn’t want to overbuy.
In analyzing my existing setup, with a few exceptions, I was pretty happy with performance. The exceptions were becoming significant, though, and the big one was image processing in Lightroom. Upgrading from Lightroom 2 to Lightroom 3 helped in a lot of ways (but not all), and most especially, importing a day’s photo shoot was getting seriously painful. My central coast run I recently did generated 1,000 images in a single 14 hour shooting day, and then took over 6 hours just to import into Lightroom. The large size of the Canon 7D RAW file really slowed down processing on the old CPU and made some operations difficult. I did some investigation, and from all indications, the primary limitation was the CPU, not memory and definitely not I/O. The upgrade from 802.11g to 802.11n is going to be a nice plus.
In the past, I’ve always bought the 15″ Macbook pros. My current work setup, however, tethers the mac to a large (27″) monitor at my desk at home so I was tempted by the smaller 13″ screen for weight and portability (and price). I simply don’t need the larger 17″ screen much and I prefer portability over screen size here. Besides, if I’m road tripping and I want the screen horsepower, I don’t mind stuffing a display in the back of the car for the hotel room…
So the choices were 13″ Macbook, 13″ Macbook Pro, and 15″ Macbook pro. I decided against the Macbook; it’s cheaper, but not by that much and the lack of Firewire and the lower performance video wasn’t worth the saving. I ended up deciding against the 15″ Macbook Pro — while the shift from Core Duo processors and the upgraded video would definitely have been nice, it would have added $500-600 to the final price, and I finally decided that the performance boost from my old box to ANY current laptop would be significant enough that the added boost to the faster CPUs wasn’t as important, and I really was finding the idea of the smaller form factor of the 13″ units. It oversimplifies the decision, but it wasn’t lost on me that the price of the 15″ Macbook Pro was close to the cost of the 13″ Macbook pro AND a low-end iPad, and was the speed boost of the more expensive unit worth that price?
I went back and forth — and ultimately went for the less expensive 13″ macbook. Tough call. Your mileage may vary, but realizing how much faster even the low end box was from what I currently had made the decision easier. If you look at Macworld’s historical benchmark numbers, They show the photoshop benchmark as taking about 1:45 on my current laptop, and 0:48 on the 13″ Macbook Pro, and 0:43 on the 15″ (there are more significant differences between these two current models in other benchmarks, but the speed difference between what I have and where Im’ headed is even more significant)
Final decision: which speed of the 13″? I finally decided on the low end (2.4Ghz) — I decided again the cost different wasn’t worth it for my situation, and I decided I’d rather upgrade the disk than go with a smaller, slower disk and faster processor. I’ve also ordered (from Other World Computing, where I buy most of my disks and RAM upgrades) a Seagate 500Gig 7200 RPM drive which I’ll install and clone the data to, replacing the stock 250Gig 5400 in the new unit.
I’m currently running with a 360Gig 5400 + a bus powered 500Gig 5400, (plus a desk-bound terabyte drive) and moving to a 500Gig internal will let me shift my data around and put all of it back on the 500Gig internal, use the 500Gig bus powered as a cloned backup (via SuperDuper!) and keep my secondary data on the external firewire, simplifying my life a bit and adding another redundant copy of my portable data, making my backups more robust. Never a bad idea. I never take backups for granted, in case you haven’t noticed.
I considered the new internal 1Gig drives, decided that I didn’t need the space that badly (I’m starting to like the 500gig bus powers more and more as flexible and stable and convenient), and they’re new enough I’lll let someone else field-proof their MTBF stats. I also considered SSD for the internal, but again, price won out over maximizing performance; and I can make that upgrade later if I want to.
Given I’ve been living in 2Gig forever and this box comes with 4Gig, I saw no reason to spend money to bump it to 8. I’ll leave that upgrade to later if/when I decide it’ll be worth upgrading, so there are options here down the road to boost the computer a bit along the way if I find I need it.
So my bottom line — I’m spending about $1300 (including the upgraded disk) and also a new bluetooth keyboard and a monitor dongle, and I think I have a good overall compromise among the various factors. It’ll handle my Lightroom processing and importing much better, and honestly, I don’t need an ego computer (“look! it goes to TWELVE! and belches steam!”) and other than my imaging, my processing needs are fairly modest. This should fit my needs well for a few years and then we’ll see.
Oh, one other thing. I did not buy AppleCare. I have some time before I have to make a final decision on that, but I haven’t bought AppleCare on my last three computers and I’m not leaning towards doing it here. If you do the research on extended warranties and what the margins are on them for all products, you can see why manufacturers really want you do buy them, and that’s a good reason why I don’t. So far, I haven’t regretted it; and I’ve saved enough cash on NOT buying them to probably pay for whatever goes spung when it finally does happen to me. If your computer survives the warranty period, the most likely problems you’ll have with it (he says, IMHO! IMHO!) are things that may be challenged under your extended warranty anyway, like dumping a glass of wine on the motherboard or damage to the LCD screen, so I’m just not convinced I need it. Your mileage may well vary, and if you prefer the comfort of having it, be my guest. And to my friends in the AppleCare group back at Mama Apple, well, sorry…
So tonight I’m migrating data around to make the transition easier, and everything should arrive tomorrow. Sometime over the weekend, I’ll hopefully be on the new system, and I’m looking forward to seeing how Lightroom works on it. And when I know, I’ll let you know.
Hope this helps if you’re trying to think through the options on a systems upgrade; there are many options, and the price points are set up to make sliding up the pricing scale easy to convince youself (“hmm. For $200, I get the faster CPU, and it comes with that bigger disk. Oh, and for $200 I can go to the 15″ screen. And for $200, I can go to the faster CPU AND get 500 gigs of disk. And… And… And suddenly your $1200 computer is a $2300 computer, one upgrade at a time. So you can look at it and as yourself how much to spend to get what you want, or how little you need to spend to get what you need. And don’t forget, if you end up spending $2500 on a laptop, it’ll be a lot harder to upgrade to the NEXT one than if you can convince yourself you ONLY spent $1200 last time..Are you better off with a less expensive computer you are comfortable upgrading in two or three years or a more expensive one you think you have to hold onto for five to get the investment back on?)
And to think I once spent $2800 on a Mac IIfx. How things change..
(p.s: nope. no magic trackpad in today’s order. But it’ll be coming, don’t worry…)
early stats on the new chuqui.com
it’s way too early to do any significant analysis on the new blog design but I did a quick comparison in google analytics against some prior weeks (all of them mon-thurs and designed to avoid the holiday) to see how comparable dates differ. The early numbers are encouraging:
Total visits up 102% on average. Pageviews up 136%. pages per visit up 17%. average time on site up 81%. All really good changes. If there was one metric I wanted to change with this new design, it was the low pages-per-visit number and I looked for ways to encourage people to sample other parts of the site while they were there. It looks like I succeeded, at least initially. Whether that’s because the site is new and the regular visitors are curious or whether it’ll continue, I don’t know. I’m also seeing nice traffic on the Smugmug portfolio, much higher than I was seeing on flickr. Flickr traffic seems to be about the same, but I didn’t make it nearly as prominent on site as Smugmug, so I’m not too surprised.but I expect over time to see it increase traffic there.
all very early, but encouraging.
Announcing the new!improved! chuqui.com
I’m pleased to announce that I’ve just released a new design for my blog and the chuqui.com site. After 3+ years of living with the old design, I was long overdue for a refresh, and I’m quite happy with the result.
I’ve been researching this refresh for a couple of months as part of a larger look at whether I felt it was time to take the next step towards shifting my photography towards my goal of going pro — in fact the short answer for that is no, because I don’t want to take the time and energy away from the photography to work on the business, and there really isn’t any overriding reason why I should now (there’s a longer version of that answer, but it’ll have to wait for another time).
Goals for the redesign
Coming out of that research I came up with some goals for this new design. I felt my old site had a number of problems, it wasn’t a good design to show off photography, the design in general seemed dated, having the entry page also be the front page of the blog limited my flexibility, there really wasn’t a good way to integrate in other things I do or create ways to help people find the other places I’m active or connect with my via social media, and the old site had the remains of at least three previous blog designs and none of that content had ever been cleaned up or properly integrated into the site, leaving me with what can be described charitably as a chaotic mess with a horrifically bad taxonomy.
I decided if I was going to fix this, it was time to fix it right, and not just layer a new pretty theme on top of eleven years of blogging crap, so I did.
The new design
The new design uses the Clean Modern Simple theme, available from Themeforest. I spent a lot of time thinknig over what I wanted and ended up choosing a premium theme because it was well worth a few dollars to not spend tens of hours creating my own from scratch (although the geek in me wanted to). I chose it because it was light, open and modern looking, not heavily ornamented, and it seemed to present photographs pretty well but was still a good design for text-oriented material. That latter was a problem with many photoblog themes that seemed to presume only visual content and for more traditional blog themes that really didn’t handle large imagery well. This one does both without any significant compromises, which I like.
I expected to do some customization to the theme, but in fact I ended up making only two changes: I swapped out the front page image area with a gallery system from my smugmug account that will dynamically pull from my portfolio for images, and I wasn’t completely happy with how widgets laid out on the front page so I tweaked it so that the three columns all flowed separately so I could better control the look of the page. All in all, that was a very minor change.
I set up a custom front page that is designed to bring all of my activities together — not just the blog, but my photography, my various social media outposts and the other places where I create content like Google Buzz and Twitter. If you view the front page of the site as your “business card” — which makes sense if you think about that URL being the one most likely on your card that you hand out as a “drop me a line” contact — then I think this new front page does a good job of showing who I am and what I do while creating opportunities to connect and interact. It creates easy access for my two photographic activity points (flickr and smugmug) and provides easy ways to locate my blog and my social networking hotspots as well as aggregating some interesting content back from them so people get a sense of what’s there and why it might interest them.
My assumption is someone arrives at the front page of my domain because they were given the URL and are looking for something — a way to contact me, one of my photos, something. The front page is designed to make it easy for them to find whatever they came to the site for if they didn’t have a deep link directly to it, while also maybe encouraging them to check out some of the other stuff I do.
In researching blog/site designs and deciding what worked on other blogs and digging through the analytics on my site to see what worked and what (most of it) didn’t, it became obvious that visitors to a site generally do not explore it. They hit a link, they browse whatever is on that link, and they leave. The implication of that is that if there are other things you want to get them interested in, they have to be there on the page when they arrive. I’ve tried to create sidebar designs for different types of pages that reflect that. By splitting the blog front page from the site front page I can target them diffferently. The blog has the pointers to the archives and category pages (useful mostly to make sure the detail pages exist to the search engines) — which means I do not need to give up page space on the front page for those items. I also made a decision not to ppush any photo links or galleries on the blog page to keep it from getting too cluttered; there’ll be images in the blog entries and if that interests someone it’ll be easy enough for them to switch off and explore. Same rationale for the blog detail page and the supplementary pages (about, contact) and the photography page, although on the latter, I added in two small galleries to give visitors a jumping off point to my photo sites.
The RSS feed is a full feed. The politics of full vs. partial is it’s own extended discussion; suffice it to say I’m not trying to force people to generate revenue by forcing them to come to my site to be forced to see advertising, so I see zero advantage in partial feeds for my situation. And since I’m now explicitly using a Creative Commons license on the site that removes the other reason not to do full feeds; in reality, the pirates will do what they damn well want anyway, so gutting functionality to stop them is a stupid tactic, and given these choices this made sense.
Advertising and Revenue
My old design had Adsense advertising on it, which did very poorly, and I occasionally experimented with Amazon affiliate links that did surprisingly well given how rarely I used them and how little work I did to promote them. It’s my opinion that Adsense works better when your audience is a non-technical crowd (i.e. “my mom”) and since my audience is heavily skewed to high-tech and photography types, it’s not a good match. I won’t miss it, and I won’t waste screen space on something that performs badly for me.
One of the things I argued with myself a lot over was just what my proposed revenue model was. Was it trying to create content that I generate revenue with on advertising? Or is my site about me creating things that have value that I can sell? In my view, it’s very hard to do both at the same time: if the purpose of the site is to sell my images or to sell what I do, then advertising distracts from and dilutes that and confuses the message.
My long term plan is to create content and imagery that people want, and then sell them products based on that. Because of that, I’ve taken a very low profile on advertising. Doesn’t mean I won’t take on a sponsorship or sell advertising if the right situation happens, but I’m not pursuing it or encouraging it and I don’t expect it to be a focus down the road.
My long term revenue potential right now looks to have two aspects:
- Photography: The industry is still in the midst of a major transformation because of the online and digital revolutions. Some traditional revenue forms (like stock) have been devastated and aren’t coming back — or more correctly, will stabilize in some new form that will benefit some but many that depended on it will have to adapt. I’m waiting and seeing before trying to step in here. But I still think that there is a continuing market for quality images for both licensing and through prints, and so I continue to work to refine my craft to allow me to enter those markets.
- Writing: I think there’s a fascinating future shaping up here in ebooks and in writing. There’s a transformation just starting towards the electronic book (thanks in large part to the iPad, but also to people like Tim O’Reilly who has been fostering this form for years with things like his Safari Bookshelf); we’re just starting to see a revenue market and a mainstream audience being created for this form. I’m particularly taken by what David duChemin is doing with this in his Craft and Vision line of books, and I think there’s a lot of potential in the “short form” inexpensive ebook that he’s championing.
It takes a long time to write and produce and publish a 300 page traditional photography book that costs the consumer $40 and may be obsolete with the release of one key piece of software; that’s a main reason why I’ve never gotten into computer book writing, even though I’ve had opportunities. I do think there is a definite market for these traditional books in electronic form, both instructional and visual, and I’ve spent a couple of evenings with some of the work of William Neill who’s published three of his classic imagery books electronically, and I think that form works well. How it’ll make the transition and be priced and whether it’ll transform, I don’t know (but I believe so, and again, I think you’ll see a move to the shorter, less expensive form that is more of an impulse buy and easier/faster to produce. We’ll see.
The short form ebook at an accessible price looks like a great opportunity here. If you haven’t read any of duChemin’s books, they’re well worth the $5 just to see how he’s experimenting with the form. The iPad and the Kindle and other e-readers and the emerging market that is just starting to emerge for “consumption-oriented” devices like tablets or slates will accelerate this, and it’s definitely something I think has potential and I want to foster.
Needless to say, there are synergies possible between those two, and I also think that good imagery and well-written content on a nicely built site can help create opportunities to write for other venues down the road.
I am not a huge fan of online advertising as the core of a revenue model; the internet is littered with sites who are so desperate for every ad dollar that they abuse their readers in search of any revenue they can get. I am not a fan of sites that hold my eyeballs hostage and make me jump through 30 hoops to see their content — and in most cases, I leave without actually seeing it and rarely come back. I’m also not a fan of sites that load themselves up with every possible ad and every possible sponsorship and end up looking like cheap callgirls in a biker bar looking for some action, and I think ultimately people view the content on those sites that way, and I think my content and my audience deserves better. So I’m happy to not have to go down that path, and I hope that never changes.
Other stuff that finally got fixed
As I went over the old blog, I realized I really needed to fix some things. There was a lot of crap content in it, from the days I was convinced it was better to post content free messages than not post, so there was a lot of two-line postings, and a huge number of them had broken links to whatever I was originally pointing to. There was also a lot of — crap — that I just didn’t want to have published on my site any more, because it was simply irrelevant, uninteresting or no longer reflected a position I wanted to reflect. The old screwed up categorization and taxonomy needed fixing, too, badly. over 2/3 of the messages posted to the blog were sitting in an “uncategorized” category feeling bored and unloved.
So I did. I read every posting in the blog, all 2,600 of the 11 year history of my blogging past. And I deleted the crap and I restructured the categorization and I fixed the links and I polished the brass and I painted the trim, and now, honestly, I feel like the content might actually be interesting and useful. It can be tempting to edit history, of course, and I don’t promise that I did NONE of that, but my focus was on preserving the message that including significant material by me, and I was a lot less interested in keeping a post from four years ago that included a link to some random internet meme and a message from me that said “funny”. I think the universe is a better place for this editing.
And a fair amount of editing it was – about 40% of the messages in the blog went away, but maybe 25% of the content, and none of it will be missed. I’ve spent some time analyzing how people visit my old site, and to be honest, 95% of the visits went to the home page or to about 5% of the pages, and 75% of the pages got visited zero times in about 9 months of data.
Moving forward
It was interesting going back and reading what I was thinking along the way, especially given my view of those years and how I see things today. Most on that some other time. And it was interesting to dig into the details of the last design and see just how — unsure and chaotic — it was. Lots of stubs I never filled in, lots of mixed messaging, lots of confused thoughts and frankly, a pretty poor design. I intended at the time for it to be a relatively temporary placeholderr. I didn’t expect it to be three years to finally deal with it. In all honestly, it fairly represented what was going on in my head and life at the time, and no, that wasn’t a necessarily a fun and happy place to be.
But now I’m feeling healthy for the first time in a while, life is going pretty well, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand what I want to do and where I want to go; when I left Apple it wasn’t on a real positive vibe and it showed. Now I understand things a lot better, and I think that’ll show, too. So since the 5th is my birthday (#52), I decided to give myself a present, and one I want to share with all of you. And so, a couple of hundred hours of sweat equity later, here it is.
Let me know what you think, and let me know what you think it could be. I’m all ears and open to your ideas as well as mine…
And thanks for reading this stuff. There are a lot of voices and a lot of sources out on the net. I’m thrilled to know some of you think mine is worth investing some time and energy in.
My policy on interviews/comments about Apple and Steve
It looks like everyone has decided to write books about Apple and/or Steve Jobs, and I seem to be getting about one request a month to be interviewed by someone or other (or just “talk to”) about Apple or Steve or both. The rate of these requests seems to be accelerating, so in the name of saving me the hassle of answering this question repeatedly, here’s my policy on being intereviewed about Apple and Steve.
Short answer: thank you, but no.
Not quite so short answer: I’m honored. I’m amazed anyone actually CARES what I think. I really am. Heck, I’m actually amazed anyone remembers I used to work for the big fruit company.
However, today I work for a direct competitor, and I plan on working there for a while, because I’m having fun and surrounded by lots of fun and interesting people. I feel it’s inappropriate for me to make comments about or do analysis of a company my employer is competing with — ethics are a bitch some day, but I sleep well at night — and therefore, when I took my current position, I decided to keep my big mouth shut for the duration. I do not regret that. The potential issues of a conflict of interest (real or perceived) just make this kind of discussion difficult at best and an absolute disaster a real possibility, and I just don’t feel comfortable risking that, so I choose not to.
Believe it or not, my not talking about Apple has not caused the sun to go nova, has not solved the middle east crisis, nobody has grown a third eye and to the best of my knowledge, it had no bearing on BP’s decision to poke a hole in the earth and attempt to let it bleed to death (we need a bigger band-aid here!). So I don’t feel like the universe is missing much here. The sun still comes up in the east every morning somehow.
This policy will stay in place until I stop working for a competitor of Apple, or until nobody gives a damn any more what I think, or until I change my mind and decide to write my own book about Apple, or until the sun does in fact go nova. In case of the latter, I’ll be available for interviews somewhere in the third circle.
I appreciate your understanding in my wish to actually not talk about something. I realize it’s a rare thing for me… But we all need to sacrifice for the greater good.
Thanks,
Chuq
p.s. This is not my employer’s policy, this is mine. It will not change July 1 when my employer magically changes, because they didn’t set it. (in reality, my policy is more restrictive than theirs, since they wanted me to clear requests through them. They were, though, happy to hear I’d chosen to turn them all down for the duration).
p.p.s. Yes, I did just slyly admit that I am in fact staying with Palm after the merger with HP. I have the paperwork and anything, and to be honest, I’m looking forward to it.
p.p.p.s. Shh. Don’t tell anyone I told you that, okay?
p.p.p.p.s. Since about half the time the next question is “will you talk off the record?” let me answer that, too. No, I don’t talk off the record, either. I am not a fan of anonymous sources because they lead to stupid and lazy journalism, so I won’t be one.
p.p.p.p.p.s You’re welcome, Steve. I’ll buy the coffees next time.
p.p.p.p.p.p.s You’re still reading? Slow news day, isn’t it… Go outside and play already…
Online images and watermarking
Astute readers (in other words, you stalkers) will notice I’ve changed how I watermark my uploaded images. Again.
It probably won’t be the last time. But I figured I’d explain the rationale behind this new setup. Yes, there is one.
Old on the left, new on the right. Two things photographers love to argue over online, especially on flickr: borders and watermarks.
The new border is easy to explain: I never liked the old one much, but wasn’t sure how I wanted to fix it so I left it alone until I did. Now I do, as I’m starting to work through my blog redesign and other decisions, I realized the borders got in the way of using images elsewhere, so any advantage there might be to using borders on flickr are outweighed by the loss of flexibility for image usage. I’m also unconvinced just how much a border improves an image on flickr and whether it really matters if it does. A final reason to border — making it harder for others to repurpose an image in place — just doesn’t matter if you’re making the image available in creative commons, which I do.
So the new border is really simple: two pixel stroke, just enough to get the image edge a little definition. It’s “not quite black” (really a deep navy), which you’ll notice only if you haul out photoshop’s eyedropper and check, and which matters only in cases of copyright infringment verification as one way I can potentially validate that the image is mine. By using a color value I can prove I use that is rather unlikely to be chosen at random by someone else, it’s a subtle identification marker that could be used if I ever need to.
The new watermark? Well, it’s a watermark almost by name only, by design. I’ve gone back and forth with myself on this many times, and I’ve finally decided I’m in the camp with Trey Ratcliff on this. Well, mostly. A totally unwatermarked image lends itself to naive people to think it’s theirs to use without restriction; they don’t know EXIF from a hole in the ground so embedding that stuff in EXIF just isn’t sufficient to me (albeit it’s still necessary). I feel we as photographers should have some commitment to help people learn about and honor copyrights, and so I’ve designed a new watermark that is almost non-intrusive into the image, but which makes it clear that there are rights involved. I’ll be updating my web site to explain creative commons and my usage policies so anyone who doesn’t know what that CC badge is can click through the URL and find out. In other words, no real excuse to ignore or pretend ignorance.
And yet, since the image IS available for CC usage, it’s easy to crop the image to remove the footer and badge and use it if someone wants; however, if it’s used without the proper CC attributions, they’d have to remove the badge and URL to use it, so I don’t need to be patient with the “I didn’t know” whines. The tools to find out are there, or show me the site where you got it pre-cropped so I can yell at them instead…
Heck, you don’t even need to crop the watermark. You can hide it with CSS. I’ve misplaced my recipe for that, as soon as I re-invent it, I’ll post it and show examples, but it’s perfectly possible via CSS to take that image above, shift the visible window to hide the stroke and footer, and have it look pereclty clean and pristine on your web site — but if someone else uses it on theirs, the badge re-appears. Or if they copy your RSS, as least your ID info and CC badge are still visible. This seems like a real win to me, so I plan on documneting how I will do it (as soon as I figure it out again. dammit) and encourage others to adopt it as well. Unfortunately, in a naive public a visible copyright badge is needed — but that doesn’t mean it has to clutter your blog and web site when you use the image…
I think photographers worry too much about online piracy. To be blunt, the whole “don’t copy my images, I’m going to watermark them into ugliness to prevent you” thing reminds me way too much about the things game developers tried with copy protection and which other media types keep trying with DRM for music and video. The bottom line is none of that stopped the PIRATES, the people who know what they’re doing is pirating and don’t care. It only slows down those that naively think they can do it because they can (or because they won’t get caught), and it annoys the hell out of legitimate users, including the users who simply want to look at the picture without blotches spread all over it.
Besides, I think with CS5, most of these overlay watermarks are obsolete anyway. Wtih the new magic healing tool in CS5, it seems to me most of those can get healed out of the image without much trouble. I haven’t tried it myself, but I’ve seem some pretty intense things done pretty well, including seeing dogs disappear out of the image. If they can remove a dog with a single click, your watermark doesn’t stand a chance — so why bother? Have you tried your watermark in the healing tool in CS5 yet to see if it holds up? I’m curious…
But what the healing tool tells me is that it’s only a matter of time; even if your watermark holds up today, it won’t some day. Sooner or later, this tactic will fail. Do you really want to be in an arms race here trying to protect your images and wasting ever more time and energy that could be more productively spent?
What I’m doing instead is seeing online sharing as marketing. Let people use the images; the money you’d make selling low-res images for online use is pretty damn small anyway — at best. Doubtful enough to cover the time and energy spent policing it to get unlicensed images offline. So why bother? Turn it to advantage instead?
But that’s ONE key here. I only upload low-res (1000 pixels max at 72dpi) to flickr. I don’t mind making those available CC. The high res versions are another story. They still have value — and they aren’t on flickr (they’re on smugmug, where you can license them if you want; I’m just starting to build that out, so don’t expect a coherent setup yet. It’s not). I am not suggesting you CC or give away the high res/valuable images, not a bit.
My long term plan is to make low-res images avaialble via flickr, and lower-res wallpaper-sized images available on smugmug, then make higher res versions available for license as well as selling prints there — and do specific images as free wallpapers (with a watermark) for mobile and desktop, with higher res versions of the desktops available w/o a watermark for a nominal fee. That seems like a nice tradeoff and a way to encourage others to help market images by sharing and using, and for the uses that still have some value beyond the online world, still be able to protect and license the images for uses that have a higher value to them.
If someone decides to take a low-res image and print it out themselves instead of buying the 8×10, well, oh well. it won’t look nearly as good, but quality wasn’t their primary motivator in the first place. I’ll live with that.
To me, whether you like it or not, the online environment is about sharing and you’re better off figuring out how to take advantage of it instead of fighting it, because if you fight it, you’ll end up losing (if only the time and energy and stress of fighting for something that increasingly has little financial return); it’s like arguing against microstock. Like it or not, it’s not going away and the old business models aren’t coming back. So you can push back the wall of water with your hands, or you can complain and do nothing, or you can adapt and move forward. I’m building my work around where I see all this going, and so I’m working to adapt to take advantage of it.
I’ve put a lot of thought into creative commons and online sharing. In the online/digital world of photography, where there are a bazillion photos out there and half a bazillion of them are of the thing your photo is of — rarity no longer exists and no longer is a value proposition. So you can fight that other bazillion photos or you can embrace the sharing mentality and use it to reach out to potential customers of the aspects of your work that do have value in relative rarity, such as prints or for usage away from the web. Do it right, and others will do some of the marketing for you, for free. How is that bad?
two years ago
It was two years ago tonight that we held Dad’s wake. It also would have been his birthday, so we had a birthday cake, and it featured a pretty damn good mariachi band. I find I’m still figuring out what his loss means to me; I had no time to grieve at the time, so I seem to be doing it a bit at a time, over time, at moments where his presence in my life was important to me like his birthday and father’s day and christmas. And that makes me introspective, so I hope you’ll be patient with my relative lack of scintillating commentary and verbal amuse bouche that I try to serve up here.
My view on life has changed fairly radically in the last couple of years. I’m in that time where I’m losing people, friends and family and others I know — my dad to heart disease, another to breast cancer, a third to bone cancer, another to liver cancer, while others have either fought and won or fight today, including one more close fried who fought breast cancer and won, and two others dealing with different cancers right now.
I’m finding that I’m a much different person than I was a few years ago. I’m still figuring out who that person is, but I find I really like this new person, much more than the old one. I’m finding that plans I made and things I started in motion are starting to come to fruition — and that I’m now not so sure they’re the plans I want to be the priority in my life today.
I’m realizing I started on a journey back in 2003, and while I didn’t realize it at the time, it’s transformed me. That transformation seems to be rounding into its final form now. That journey wasn’t always a lot of fun; no, honestly, it was definitely never any fun. But now that I’m here, I’m glad I made it (as if I had any choice in the matter).
So if you’re here for pretty pictures of birds or wry discussions of the challenges of the left wing lock — you’ll probably still get some of that. In fact, you’ll likely see a lot more, given part of my relative quiet has been because I’ve been introspectively trying to understand what I was becoming. But I think it’s finally time, and I’m finally ready, to write the final pages on this chapter of life, and start mapping out the plot for the next one. “and they live happily ever after” is still not a given, but whatever’s next, right now I’m looking forward to finding out what it is.
On Memorial Day…
Thinking of my dad today on Memorial Day. He spent world war ii in a tank in the Pacific and helped liberate Manilla, then went off and spent three years in Germany covering the Berlin Airlift and the early days of the cold war for Stars and Stripes. After that, he and his first wife founded the Overseas Weekly, an independent (and uncensored) news publication for American military in europe.
To all of the veterans who put their lives at risk (or lost their lives!) to make sure we all have the freedom to complain about how screwed up things are here in America, thank you…
Of 3G iPads and MiFis
Fraser Speirs – Blog – Of 3G iPads and MiFis:
Today I asserted on Twitter that a 3G iPad is far superior to a WiFi iPad paired with a MiFi device. To save myself answering the “why do you say that” question twenty times, here’s the tl;dr version.
Fraser goes on to discuss the pros and cons of the Wifi vs. 3G iPads and describes nicely a major reason why I haven’t bought an iPad yet.
Not for lack of interest; the iPad sits in a niche I’d really like to fill. I love the idea of being able to sit down on the couch and “consume content”, get the keyboard out of the way and get back to the “good old days” style model that a paper book brought, only with all of the new content types the internet brings you. That and being able to sit down and play games on the same device? I’ve found it very re-energizing (sorry, you hard core geeks out there) to unplug for a while in the evenings — just get away from the laptop, away from email and keyboards and geeking and all that stuff; just sit on the couch with laurie and either watch TV or “do something” like read or browse my RSS feeds or play sudoku or fire up the XBOX. Or just hang out with Laurie and talk through things.
I currently tend to do that with the Palm Pre, but it’s not really the right form factor. I don’t want to haul out the laptop, it’s also not the right form factor for what I want to do, and if it’s busy crunching photos or doing “real work”, it’s not necessarily available. So there’s a need for a middle ground, one with a larger screen than the mobile phone (where the primary use case is “must fit in pocket and do stuff”) but without all of the extra stuff that comes with a laptop, like the keyboard.
And the iPad fits that wonderfully. Except…
The whole connectivity thing isn’t right for me yet. Wifi is fine here at home, but on the road? I don’t do a lot of travelling, but I see myself doing more photo tripping in the future, and probably starting to do some conference trips as well, so whatever solution I get I have to understand how connectivity is going to work on the road, where “on the road” doesn’t imply “depend on hotel wifi and Starbucks”. But I’m honestly also trying to keep my gadget life as simple as possible, so I don’t want to pick up something like a Mifi (and the Mifi monthly service charge!) just for few days a year of need. Not cost effective.
Neither is the 3G iPad — because there’s no tethering option. If the 3G iPad tethered so I could use it to connect in my other internet-enabled devices as needed, it’d be a no brainer and I’d do it in a second. But it doesn’t. That means if I’m on the road and would need to upload photos from the laptop (or, gasp, vpn in to work on an emergency) I’m still depending on hotel wifi and/or Starbucks. That’s a fail for me — I need an “on the road” networking solution, not an iPad that connect to the network.
Or I need some other tethering solution that supports the iPad — without adding in a new geek toy (and monthly service charge!) to do it. Unfortunately, my two cell phones (geek eye roll. sigh.) are my Pre on Sprint, and my (really old, really, really old) iPhone on AT&T. Neither carrier supports tethering on those devices.
So basically, I don’t like any of my options, and I just haven’t decided to jump in anyway; if I did, I’d jump in with a Wifi unit…. Which I probably will, but not until after I upgrade my aging, 4 year old laptop… I’m staying on the sidelines for now, waiting to see how various things play out.
My first hope is tethering will come to AT&T; WWDC is coming, iPhone 4.0 is coming, the tethering rumors have swirled again, and we’ll have to see. If they announce tethering for iPhone, I’m expecting we might also see it for the AT&T Pre Plus; if that happens, I can dump my Sprint phone, get a PrePlus upgrade on AT&T and turn on tethering and life is good (yes, I don’t mind paying a bit more for tethering on a phone, I do mind paying for another entire contract for another device for tethering)
It’s possible AT&T might do tethering on the iPhone and not push it out onto the PrePlus. If they do, I’ll make rude noises about their familial heritage and have to decide if I want to upgrade my AT&T contract to the new (currently rumored) iPhone and keep two cell phones (My preference is to simplify and get back to one phone on one carrier; right now AT&T is telling me to upgrade my contract to the pre is $249, so it’s actually cheaper to keep the two phones right now barring a real reason to upgrade)
If that doesn’t happen, Clear is coming to silicon valley around the end of the year. That’s what I’m currently looking at as an option to upgrade the home DSL network. they have a nice bundle that includes a home network connection and a mobile USB dongle that does uncapped 4G and falls back to a 3G connection (with a 5 gig/mo cap) if you’re out of 4G territory. There are currently some rumors floating that they’re going to refocus from Wimax to LTE, but either way, getting a home internet connection and a mobile dongle for $55/month is a good deal — once it rolls out. Assuming it works, of course. So I’m watching and willing to wait and trying to avoid things with contract terms until that hits the floor. And once it does, I’m hoping it pushes other carriers to reprice as well…
Smartphones really started pushing us into the world of ubiquitous computing; my pocket is always online, and that changes what data I keep and how I interact with it. iPad pushes that to the next level and really starts showing off online content as a commodity to be consumed; for the first time, online “stuff” is really for anyone, not just the geeky. That trend is going to continue, but the infrastructure is in transition to properly support that, and all of the pieces are just not quite there yet. And I’m just happy to be patient and give them all a chance to settle out rather than rush in and pay a few hundred bucks (and a two year contract) for something that six months from now I’ll have a much better (and cheaper) solution for… Sometimes, you dn’t have to be in a hurry.
Why I’ve been away from the blog…
Apologies for the radio silence recently. For once, I have a good excuse.
Two weeks ago, I decided that, since there wasn’t a hockey game on, I’d go out for a walk. First night since the playoffs started nothing was on, Laurie was on her road trip somewhere on the way back from Chicago, the weather was nice, and I hadn’t picked up a camera in days.
So off to Shoreline I go, thinking maybe i’d try to do some swallow photography and see if the cliff swallows were nesting yet (answer: just starting).
And while walking out towards adobe creek, I caught the edge of the asphalt path and went down like I’d been shot. Didn’t even have time to cuss. Suddenly I’m flat on the ground, looking like roadkill.
When you’re a “person of girth” no fall is trivial. The extra weight you carry brings with it potential for disaster, as well as completely messing up your center of gravity — I’ve always been a bit of a klutz, and despite being really aware of the potentials for taking a fall and being careful while hiking, I’m still a klutz. When you carry a chunk of extra weight, falls bring with it a real chance of broken bones or other damage.
I realize in retrospect I was a bit in shock. My first reaction was to see whether I was injured — somewhere in the back of my head a voice was screaming “systems check! systems check” at me). I started by moving arms and legs, flexing feed and wrists, wiggling fingers.
The good news — didn’t hit my head. Went down on my left side, got an arm out a bit to break some of the fall. I remember thinking I hadn’t heard anything crack, and as I started moving things, nothing caused me to scream in agony. That’s a good sign.
Suddenly I realize someone’s yelling at me. I’m hearing “Are you OK?” from somewhere far away. I look around and a girl I’d passed as she was headed out had come back to see what’d happened. She looked convinced I was dead or something, but god bless her for wanting to help. (cute girl, where at my age girl is anyone recognizably female and under about 30 years old; for some reason that recognition amuses me…). So I rolled over and said I thought I was okay.
She clearly believed me, because she asked again. and then again. I was still moving and flexing things and it was now clear that nothing was broken, so I decided it was okay to move, so I rolled over and sat up. Probably not exactly my most graceful moment, but honestly, I didn’t care. Still don’t.
So I’m now sitting up and madly moving fingers and rejoicing in the fact that they move as intended and I then look at her again and let her know I really am okay. And I”m not sure she really believed me, but she accepted it as proof she could stop freaking and get on with her life, and she did.
Again, dear, bless you for stopping and caring, and sorry I scare the crap out of you. It was much appreciated that you wanted to help.
And then I checked out the cameras. I was carrying both bodies, with the Tamron wide angle on the 30d and the 100-400 on the 7d. The Tamron landed first and got bodyslammed into the asphalt, while the 100-400 landed last on a nice soft cushion. Some preliminary checks seem to indicate that the poor cursed Tamron only took cosmetic damage — and it has a couple of interesting gouges on it — but I still need to do some serious testing for focus and alignment. I don’t see any sign of problems in the mechanism or some simple test shots. But to be honest, I haven’t really picked up a camera since, since picking things up has been a bit problematic.
Nothing broken, nothing dislocated. I landed left little finger first, and bent it and it’s neighbor back significantly. By all rights I should have dislocated something, but somehow, I didn’t. I did, however sprain two fingers rather seriously, the wrist less severely, and as I found out over the next day or so, basically sprained the entire hand, while hyperextending the elbow. I also whacked the right hand leaving it scraped (and sore and bruised where I think the 100-400 landed on it), and whacked both knees, fortunately, nothing beyond a bit of scrape and bruising. The hand swelled like a grapefruit, and I got the most interesting bruising deep inside the palm where bending things back stretched all of the ligaments and tendons in the core of the hand (did I mention I was damn lucky nothing dislocated or tore? a broken finger would have been the least of my hassles…)
So I’ve been a hurting puppy. Typing’s been — a challenge, so I haven’t any more than necessary, and what typing I could do without things spasming has been aimed at work, not play. Evenings have been mostly hanging out on the couch with body parts wrapped in ice bags. Tonight was the first night where I didn’t feel the need to haul them out and use them.
I’m still not 100%; I’m guessing another week before the arm is useful for carrying anything heaver than a soda can, but I’m finally able to do that, at least. My range of motion is about 90% of normal and improving daily, swelling is mostly gone, the hand is mostly functioning again, and I can type again with both hands — at least for a while. This is about it for the evening, though, because the little finger can only handle so much pressure on the key.
So things have been on hold for a while. Over the holiday weekend I hope to start ramping up a bit and moving things forward again. I haven’t exactly been idle — it was time I spent thinking through some projects that I’m chewing on that are getting close to surfacing where I’ll talk about them here. Some interesting stuff, and I’ve gond from researching and considering to making decisions and starting to create some plans, and so soon I can share some of it and maybe get a dialog going on it.
But until then, my hand’s telling me this is enough for now, so I’ll be off. But I had gotten a couple of people asking what happened, and I figured it was time for a quick status update.
and the quick status update is — I’m still a klutz, and fortunately, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. Which all things considered, I won’t complain about…
A merry ramble through El Capitan, Personal Projects, HDR, and life as we know it…
(originally posted on flickr in the JMG-Galleries discussion area)
This one’s going to wander a bit, but it just seems that kind of day, so why not?
Back in March I took a vacation and ran myself off to Yosemite for a few days to hide from reality. It mostly worked; turns out there’s WIFI in Yosemite now as well, but I mostly pretended my email didn’t work.
That trip was set up for a multitude of purposes; nature abhors a single-tasker. Taking some time off was important, but it was also a chance to define a personal project and work on a defined set of images I wanted, as well as a style of photography I don’t do enough of — big, iconic landscapes. It was also my first real attempt to do HDR in any serious way. My hope was to get there, have a winter storm blow through, sleep in long enough for the crews to plow the roads, and then get some really interesting shots of Yosemite with a fresh layer of winter on it.
Guess what?
I think I succeeded.
Yosemite after a winter storm is absolutely stunning. Just beyond description. And in the winter — pretty darn empty. Even better. I was quite happy with the pictures I took during that trip, but I also knew that most of them needed to be reworked; being brand new at HDR, =it was clear I was still on a learning curve with the software and I’d need to circle back and try again once I understood what I was trying to accomplish better.
So that’s what I’m now doing. Here was my original rendition of El Capitan framed in the trees. I thought it was a nice shot, although frankly it looks like I lit the scene with my car headlights (I didn’t. honest).
So I made a fresh start with it. For reference, here’s what the raw image looked like. (this was the +0 of the three image HDR series):
I ran that through Photomatix Pro — unlike in Yosemite, on a calibrated monitor (always calibrate!) and trying to bring out more of the texture of the rock and do away with that glow. Overall, I think it’s a much improved image now.
I still wasn’t completely happy with the quality of the rockface, it’s still a bit washed out and too bright, so I loaded that image into Viveza 2 to adjust it a bit more; the final image on the left, the previous version on the right; a slightly different crop, a tweak to the color balance to reduce the warmth a bit and some care to make sure the foliage isn’t too dark and shows some character:
My first thought was that the rock still ought to be a bit darker, but when I tried it, I felt it didn’t improve the texture or color, it muddied it. So I’m happy with this version, although I’ll probably try again down the road. I think it’s a marked improvement; the rock isn’t “glowing” and has a nice texture I think is very natural looking, the recrop to include a bit more sky improved the framing, and the trees are much better than in the original. I considered whether the trees along the bottom are now too light and decided to leave them alone, especially the bottom right corner I’m thinking I could darken and improve it. And there’s a little dot of color — do you see it? in the left side tree right at the skyline. That turns out under magnification to be a small bit of dead branch, and in the original, that area was dark enough not to really see it, but in this nwe version, it just kind of pops out at me, and not in a good way, so it probably needs to be cloned out at some point. And I’d like, at some point, to darken and increase contrast on the rock face some more, see if I can accentuate the rock face more. t least it is showing some of the color and texture that drew me to it properly now.
Question for the masses — if I didn’t tell you this picture was an HDR picture, would you have thought it was? For me, for this new version, the answer would be no (the original one I uploaded, the glowing rocks kinda scream HDR to me…).
And I think that’s one of the problems with the “debate” over HDR, and I admit at one point I made this argument as well: most of the anti-HDR debate is framed around the HDR you see posted that is overdone, or done badly. There are entire classes of HDR images that get excluded out of the debate because nobody stops to realize they’re processed via HDR. They’re just good pictures.
And I have a problem when you define something based on bad uses of it (or uses you define as bad. Lots of the debate really boils down to stylistic differences, and the same arguments against “grunge” HDR or the really vivid HDR processing are the same arguments you might have heard against the early work of Dali or the cubists. And I’ll bet it was similar to the early complaints about the Impressionists, too.
Thanks to HDR, I don’t need to carry Grad-ND filters any more (and I don’t!) and all I can say is — thank god. Trying to get what you want using that technology was always a hit or miss, guess and try it twelve times thing for me. HDR gives me the opportunity to capture the information, and then cratt it into the look I want. Today, the only filters I carry are simple ones: UV for lens protection, Circular polarizers, and ND 4X. One of these days I want to add 8x ND, although I’m kinda lusting for the Singh-Ray Vari-ND but can’t justify the price yet.
So whether you use HDR yourself or not, before you go jumping on HDR as garbage, stop and think; there are many photos you’re seeing on a regular basis that are HDR processed that you aren’t recognizing at that, because they are, well, merely good photos that don’t have any of the obvious artifacts people attribute to HDR. Yes, there’s a lot of crap HDR out there, but there’s a lot of crap photoshop out there, too.
My point? Don’t define something by the mistakes people make with it. Because once you start that, you’re basically guaranteeing that everything sucks, because every tool and technique can be abused or mishandled. HDR is a useful tool, and it can be used well or badly, and it can be taken to extremes. Whether you like or dislike those extremes is a subjective thing that you have to be careful turning into an absolute judgement…
Oh, and for what it’s worth, I”m not a huge fan of cubism. But that doesn’t seem to have killed that artistic style….
And to my mom…
A very Happy Mother’s day. And thank you for making me what I am. I try to live up to the standards you instilled in me every day. Some days, I actually meet them.
And every day, I’m proud to be your son.
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