I got a rock.

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

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

Other highlights from the proxy:

 

 

 

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

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

A quick look at January….

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

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

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

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

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

Most popular pieces in the month?

• Changing of the Guard (about HP and webOS, not surprisingly)
• My piece on the ‘skiing crow’ (which got picked up by Google and which has fed a number of curious people over. Hello, curious people!)
• How not to be a doofus with a camera
• Some Thoughts on Lightroom Keywords (which keeps chugging along)
• My Favorite Images of 2011
• We’re having the comment fight again
• Everyone’s best photos of 2011 lists
• Why I walked Away from my Fiction (and why I’m back)

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

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

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

Dan’s Blog:

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

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

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

What if I just quit?

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

So what if I quit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(via Passive Voice)

Quick Recommendation: Gary’s Guaranteed Rooter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Going quiet to support stopping SOPA

I’m not hacking the site to black it out like some, but I am going quiet in support of the SOPA protest, so new blog postings have been suspended for the time being. We’ll be back later.

In the meantime, you should read Tim O’Reilly discuss this issue, because he can explain better than I can.

Assuming, of course, you can. If SOPA passes, that won’t be a given.

A couple of minor “where I am online” updates…

I had someone ask me why I had switched from posting my shared link posts to posting a collection of my twitter feed. The answer is simple: when Google updated Google Reader, they removed the sharing option I was using to queue up posts for the Shared Links, breaking my setup. I played with a couple of options to replace it (funneling them through Instapaper worked, but seemed the wrong answer to the wrong question), and finally decided to just consolidate it into twitter, because (a) I could with minimal work, and (b) I didn’t have a better option I liked.

To be honest, I think it makes the feed too noisy, and I’m not thrilled with it. I keep hoping that Google will release an RSS feed out of Google+, which I think would make a better option for this. Or maybe I’ll go see about creating something with iffft. I’m also thinking that maybe this could be a custom app I build that I feed stuff to, that spits out the articles once in a while. In other words, I’m doing this until I decide what a better solution is and I get that built.

My general view of what I want to post on the blog looks something like this:

• Photos, with or without some supporting content (generally short, 1-2 paragraphs)
• Long form writing (> 1,000 words), where I work on a topic in more depth and spend some time putting the article together. In general, when I go beyond 2,000 words, I’ll tend to split it up into multiple parts, because I find really, really long form gets unwieldy and people stop reading.
• Short form writing (200-500 words), a quick note on something that doesn’t need in-depth analysis.
• Links, which optimally are in a digest/list format. These are designed to give those links some visibility and Google juice, and are to bring to your attention stuff I find interesting and well-written. Please note “interesting and well-written” may or may not include “agree with”. These are things that I don’t feel warrant my commenting on, though, because I find blog posts that boil down to “hey, this is neat, read it!” ungodly awkward and boring…

The link setup has annoyed me since, well, forever. I mostly like how Daring Fireball and Duncan handle it, but I still think doing links as a once-a-day digest reduces the noise factor and pulls them together better. I’m at the point where I’m ready to build a quick web-app that I can feed it to and a cron job on the back end to suck it out once a day for posting. Hmm. I wonder if I could do something like that with evernote and a special tag? (Hmm. have to go explore that…)

In any event, the Twitter feed stuff is “good enough” for now, but not what I want long term. And I’m open to suggestions on ways to solve this problem, whether it’s something off the shelf, wordpress plugins, or other ideas. But I hadn’t thought about doing it via Evernote until just now; I have to go look into that…

I should also note in passing that I killed my 500px.com account today. I can’t say anything negative about 500px, I simple never figured out what I wanted to do with the site that made it worth investing time into building the site up or putting effort into posting and interacting over there. In my continuing effort to not let “keeping up with my social media stuff” take over my life and lead to information bankruptcy, sites like this have to fit into my long-term ideas for where I want to have my stuff exist. I could never find a way to use 500px that seemed like it added anything, it all seemed to duplicate other things i was already doing.

I like 500px; they do a good job of displaying images and taking care of photos. Their social media aspect is decent. At some point, I may figure out how to leverage the site. When I do, I’ll go back. Until then, I didn’t want something that never got enough time and energy to stay up to date hanging around looking vaguely abandoned (which it mostly was).

It’s not you, it’s me (and in this case, I’m not just being polite…).

Dawn Breaks at Merced

Dawn breaks at the Merced Refuge. Or it tries to — the tule fog has other ideas. The Geese see if before you do, and the sound of the morning chorus echoes through the fog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Experimenting here on the blog…

Just so you know; I’m starting to experiment with some things here on the blog. One experiment is a new category that just appeared, “Tales from the field“.  I just finished a long (400 miles of driving, 16 hour day trip, 1000 images shot) trip out to Merced to take in the Cranes and Geese. My typical post-trip workflow includes crunching like hell to get through all of the images and get them processed and posted and then trying to write a trip report with a set of photos or slideshow (or both). this compresses the time I spend on that part massively — and I don’t think that does me, the images or the stories of the images any favors.

So instead we’re going to try working on it over time, posting images one or a few at a time, with the story of the images, and then later, pull that all together and publish it as some kind of ebook on the site as a cohesive whole. that fits me current mood of trying to get serious about the whole ebook/epub thing, and allows me to process the images and give them more effort towards bringing out the best in them, and write something that’s more narrative and less book report. So if this works, I think better results will come out on all fronts.

And if it doesn’t work, I’ll stop it and try something else. And you can tell me how well I’m doing… The first Tale from the field will be arriving shortly…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what should you expect from me this year?

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

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

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

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

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

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

photography in 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

Actually, two.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is Silicon Valley.

And that is silicon valley.

And so is this.

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

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

How things could have been different.

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

Thinking about the blog and site in 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

looking back, looking forward, looking at birds…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy 2012!

Onward into 2012….

I’m not a huge fan of resolutions. It’s too easy to decide to start something, and then the first time you miss it or get it wrong or wake up without motivation, the resolution is broken — and that gives you permission to say “I tried, oh well” and give up. You’re setting yourself up to not succeed by making it easy and painless to fail.

The change of the calendar is a convenient time to remind yourself to step back and consider, take stock, and draw lines on the map that leads to tomorrow and align the ship to follow those lines. Even if you aren’t sure you know what the destination is, it never hurts to think about it and make sure your course is bringing you closer.

What I try to do is identify what commitments I have, and what interests me — and then prioritize to see where my time needs to go.

A huge part of this is deciding what NOT to do. I don’t know about your life, but in my life, there are many things I’d love to do — from picking up my clarinet again to restarting my needlepoint — but I don’t, because I’ve found if I start doing too many things, I end up doing none of them well. One of the challenges here is keeping the list short enough that the ones that make the list thrive, without making the list so short you end up regretting leaving something off it.

Once I chose those priorities for the next {choose period of time}, it’s about defining tasks and goals to drive them forward. Sometimes this process takes no time at all, because it’s obvious. Sometimes it takes days, or weeks, or months. And sometimes, you just leave it as “to be determined” because you won’t know until you get there…

So my roadmap for the next year? Here’s the 30,000 foot view:

1. My family — because nothing is more important. We lost Archie this year, which is a painful reminder that it’s never safe to assume for tomorrow, and that makes it even more of a priority to myself that I not take this part of my life for granted.
2. Myself — one of the realizations I had over the last year is that I was constantly deferring things that mattered to me because others wanted me to do things that mattered to them, and that I had hit that point where I was starting to resent how much of my time was being used by others. The answer (once I realized this) was simple: to make sure I prioritized myself into my list and make sure I didn’t commit myself to the point I had no time for my own needs. I’ve been trying to do that more in the last year, and surprisingly, the universe didn’t implode. So now, I plan on making sure I reserve time for my own interests and needs as a formal part of my planning and not just deal with it in terms of “whenever everything else is done”, because it turns out, “everything else” never is done…
3. My Job — many people I talk to about this forget to add this item to the list (“it goes without saying!”), but in reality, to find the right balance in life, you have to balance everything in it. Your job is going to take a lot of your time, your energy and your brain. It can add stress or create enjoyment (or both!) — it’s going to affect everything else in your life. And it pays your rent and your bills, and so it deserves to be consciously prioritized into your life (see note 1). My job is important to me. Beyond being my primary income, it’s always an important part of my identity and self-worth. I won’t thrive if i don’t give it proper respect and plan to give it the time and energy it needs to be successful. And if you don’t understand that and plan for it, you’ll tend to under-estimate your commitments to it, and end up overcommitting on other things and have to figure out how to squeeze it all in… (see note 2).
4. My website — I’ve consciously chosen not to push my online web “stuff” too hard, leaving it more as “the places i hang out” rather than try to turn it into some kind of “personal brand” portal thingie. It’s allowed me to just keep it casual and informal and, like the Apple TV, enjoy it being in “hobby mode”. But as I look forward into things I want to try to accomplish over the next couple of years (see points 5, 6, and 7) it’s clear that has to change, and so now is the time to start shifting gears and work and making my blog and site and the other pieces of online life that touch each other ready so that when these other initiatives start happening the site is ready to support them properly. So I’ve started a project to put in place a better online infrastructure and presence to start creating what I’ll want for these other initiatives.
5. My photography — as a practical reminder that all your planning means nothing in the face of reality, I thought I knew what I was going to do with my photography in 2011; I came home from the Yosemite trip completely frustrated and unsure what direction to head. I think I’ve figured it out and I’m ready to push myself forward again (but the details will need to come some other time…)
6. My writing — 2011 was a year where I went from “no, I’m retired” as far as any non-blog writing to “hmm. I want to write”. As it turned out, I did very little writing, but a lot of thinking and a lot of research, especially into the emerging ebook revolution and the disruption it’s causing traditional book and fiction publishing. This also caused me to realize that Palm/HP’s “employees can’t publish apps” policies were fundamentally incompatible with (see note 4) and when it became clear the efforts to fix this were going to get stonewalled again, made me start thinking about choices about what I wanted and what was standing in the way of that. Moving into 2012, I’m still frankly in thinking and research mode, and I don’t know where, if anywhere, this is going. But my novel keeps scratching at the garage door and saying “hey, remember me? let’s talk”.
7. My app development — I’m not the first person who worked in Developer Relations to wake up one day and say “I have this neat idea for an app”, and I’m sure I won’t be the last. In fact, right now I have three, none of which are related to photography, photo books or fiction. No idea where this is going, or if it will, but the reality is it was 100% incompatible with working at HP and that wasn’t going to change, so I left it in the “maybe someday” place. Now that those conflicts are gone from my list, it’s time to start thinking about what “maybe someday” means. right now, all I know is that the first platform will be IOS (sorry, webOS fans; when HP has hardware to sell again, I’ll think about it), but I don’t know how viable the ideas are or whether I really want to invest the time to head down this direction. Or if I’ll have the time to invest. But it’s been increasingly — interesting — to me, so I’m committing time to figure it all out and see what happens.

And those are the things that made the cut. I expect it’ll keep my busy. And there’s only one given — when I look back at this list in a year, things are going to have changed along the way. But at least I know where I am and what direction to go in to get to where I want to be, and that’s a start….

Notes:

Note 1: I’ve done a lot of research into this over the years, primarily because there have been times in my life when I realized it was a mess and I had to get my act together. I’ve also talked to lots of folks I know about this to learn from them, or to help them understand things I do they might want to try for themselves. One common thing we do that I believe is a mistake is not include “the given things” into the priority list “because they are givens”.

When you do that, however, it’s really easy to take things for granted, or not put the right priority on things, or to write up a priority list that is what you “should” do vs. what you really end up planning to do. For instance, if your family is first, but you’re putting in 60 hour weeks at work and never home for dinner, aren’t you really lying to yourself (and your family?) — these things do nothing for you if you lie to yourself. It is better to be honest to yourself about this in private than be politically correct about it and share. And if you aren’t honest to yourself, you’re going to end up with problems.

Note 2: This is, ultimately, teaching yourself that there are only 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 52 weeks in a year, and physics wins; given that, you have to figure out how to allocate your time across your priorities to fit it all in and still get what you want to accomplish done. (see note 3).

Note 3: And when you come back to this list in a few weeks or a few months, if you find that where you’re putting your time isn’t aligned to what you said your priorities are, you either need to rearrange where you put your time, or fix your listing of priorities. Especially early on, we tend to lie to ourselves about our priorities, doing the “should be” list instead of the “will be” list. And a big part of going through these exercises for me is to make sure where my time goes is in sync with what’s important to me — and making sure I understand what’s important to me, so I don’t waste time on low priority things and later regret not doing things that are important to me. (because if you finish a higher priority thing, then you can add something else to the list and start doing it. If you don’t get to a higher priority thing because you’re off playing with other toys — you’ll end up regretting it down the road. assuming you aren’t lying about priorities, of course. (see note 2).

Note 4: I know I’m going to have to try to explain this; at some point, I will try. Suffice it to say for now that the policy was that if you were employed by them, you couldn’t independently publish apps on any platform (webOS or not), and especially not on webOS. And while some of this was ambiguous (was a Kindle ebook covered? who knows? could I get a straight answer? Hell no) I didn’t want to risk HP making claims on my personal IP (like my photos) because I published them as a photo book that happened to go through an app store. So I just decided to put any work on these things on hold until it was, ahem, no longer a problem.

Changing of the Guard (and letting it down at the same time)

I want to wish a  happy, healthy and prosperous 2012 to you all.

2011 was one of those years where the more I try to explain it, the less it seems to make sense. The early part of the year was challenging and full of potential; the latter half of the year a roller coaster of stress and futility.

What I can talk about now that the dust has all settled is that 2011 started with me actively interviewing, after some rather unfruitful discussions with HP about role and salary. I was, in fact, in discussions with one of the big silicon valley companies that build things you probably have in your data center about coming on board to architect their social media policies when HP did an unusually smart thing and hire Richard Kerris. Richard and I sat down, and he outlined his plans for DevRel and where my role mattered, and he promised to fix as many of my issues as he could, and asked for time to try. He impressed me enough, and the product and team were important enough to me, that I pulled out of my interviews and dug back in for yet another round with the forces of webOS chaos.

For the record, he did solve most of them, except for the employee publishing rules and the salary. And he tried on both of those, but Ruby was strongly against allowing employees to also publish apps, and ultimately, a flotilla of HP Vice Presidents got overruled by a lawyer on that one. And salary, well, once again, HP bureaucracy is in some ways reportable to nobody, including vice presidents. Good luck, Meg. You’ll need it, because when lawyers and clerks set policies the overrule your executive management, good things rarely happen.

(how was life inside the webOS bunker? Let me put it this way. during my tenure at Palm/HP — just under three years — I had six direct managers, averaging about 5 months per, ranging from a first level manager to directors to a couple of VPs. I reported to, or up to, eight different VPs in that time. One of my direct managers (the last one) and two of those VPs are still with HP. Does that give you a sense of how well things were going in the organization? yeah, I think it does. Apple in the worst of days — the dark, damp days of Spindler that made you want to wake up screaming, but you couldn’t because you weren’t asleep — were never as bad as these last few months in Leoville. Seriously).

But early on in 2011, we had hopes. We really were thinking that the TouchPad wouldn’t suck. It shipped. Reality: it didn’t suck. It was a decent 1.0 product. It also didn’t sell. Disappointing. Frustrating. Recoverable. Something to build from, which we were.

And then we woke up one morning, and Leo had decided to take PSG, the PC hardware division, out behind the barn and shoot it. And evidently because the webOS group also had hardware, we got taken out behind the barn and shot, too. Just in case. However badly it was implemented there is in fact a rational reason behind his decision on PSG, although as Meg found out when she ran the numbers Leo didn’t do, it’s the wrong decision. I can’t for the life of me understand why he shot webOS hardware as well, or remotely think that he understood what he was doing of the implications of it. And from that point on, the year turned into a movie based on a Kafka novel.

A kafka novel with what seems to be a happy ending. I gave it a month, expecting HP to get its act together and sell us, hopefully to Amazon. When that didn’t happen and it seemed increasingly remote that it would, I decided it was time to get out and started ringing up the network. And now I’m at Infoblox.

I’ve been there just long enough to meet my cohorts, start learning names and find the bathroom. I haven’t talked about it much because there’s not much to say right now. They have some interesting technologies, they need some social media and community things done, and the building is full of fun and interesting people. So we’re going to go off, figure it out, get it built and make it happen. I’m going to mostly keep it off stage here for now, because there’s really not much to talk about.

My change of venue does change the dynamics of this place somewhat though. My self-imposed restriction on talking about Apple is dead, given I no longer work for a direct competitor and there’s no longer that patina of conflict of interest (but let’s be honest, we were never a competitor of Apple. Maybe worried them a bit at times, but we never remotely put enough units in the market successfully or sustained our momentum to be considered as competing). Ditto wading into the whole mobile space. How far I’ll wade into both topics, I haven’t decided. But I do expect to.

But one thing I’ve come to realize is how — careful — this blog’s gotten. If you look at the blogs I posted as influencing me the other day you’ll see one common trait is that they aren’t afraid to have an opinion and an attitude. Just by sheer necessity I was always fairly careful about what I said when I was at Apple (mostly), and that caution was encouraged at Palm and HP as well. For a company that paid me to be out there  and conversing with the developers, they were usually worried about losing control of the discussion, so “don’t say that” was a common refrain heard around the offices. I think that bled out onto my personal blog, too, and it’s gotten pretty bland. I need to change that, re-inject my personality and opinions into it more.

Over the last few months I’ve been working with a couple of people to help them understand what I’ve come to call this life of “typing without a net”, the part of marketing where there is no script, you don’t rehearse and ultimately, you can’t control the message, merely influence and contribute to it. this new world of social marketing scares the absolute crap out of traditional marketing folks, and some of what I’ve tried to do is help them understand how to leverage the interactivity and conversational aspects of marketing. With some success, I think.

A reality of this kind of work is that if you slip and screw up, you fall a long, long way. Just ask certain people who found that out the hard way in the last week. I’ve come to realize there’s a flip side to that, though. If you allow yourself to get too careful, you may never slip, but you lose a lot of your ability to motivate and influence, either. So one change to the site I plan on bringing because of my change of venue is to get a bit more energy and opinion to my writing again. No risk, no reward. And now, there’s no real reason to be so damn careful.

So we’re going to try to liven this place up a bit; not be so paranoid about subjects that might upset folks or get me one of those “why did you say THAT?” emails from PR… and we’ll see what happens.

welcome to 2012. I can’t decide which I’m happier about — that 2011 is finally over, or that 2012 is a blank slate just waiting to be scribbled on… either way, let’s go!

Your (not so) humble servant,

Chuq

(p.s. — a couple final notes on HP and webOS, and then I’ll close the book on that for a while and look firmly forward instead: while it’s been fairly trendy among the webOS fans to blame HP for all of webOS’s problems, in my opinion, most of the damage was self-inflicted. If you want to assign percentages, give 70% of the failure to the Palm side, and 30% to the HP side. And realize that if HP hadn’t stepped up and bought us, we’d have run out of money and failed. Any other buyer most likely would have grabbed the patents and run, so at least HP gave us a second chance to make it work. which we flubbed. HP has a set of challenges that I think are going to make Meg’s life challenging for a while — but Palm had a legitimate chance to make it work with HP’s support, and couldn’t. Mostly, blame us for that. And you’ll have to buy me a beer some time to get my opinion’s of why, at least for now…

And I know it was frustrating to many that it took so long for Meg to decide to keep webOS going and open source the technology, but to be honest, she did the right thing, and she took the time to understand the situation. Leo made some amazingly stupid decisions in haste, without appropriate research to understand the implications, and in reality, I don’t think anything was going to “fix” webOS by the time he was retired out and Meg stepped in — it was seriously damaged by those moves, and while it was painful to live in limbo like we did, she couldn’t fix the problem by making the same mistakes and making decisions quickly in ignorance of the details. So she gets full credit from me for taking the time to make the right decision, not a fast decision, even if waiting for it wasn’t fun. And I think she has the strategy most likely to give webOS a shot at returning from the dead again — but it’s going to take time.  It may not work, but the alternative was to give up and go home, and HP is investing a hunk o’ money in giving it a shot. Give them some credit for that, and support in helping them try to make it happen…)

six blogs that are influencing my going into 2012

One of my projects for 2012 is going to be to ramp up my work on the blog, write more and write more in-depth pieces, and to add some new functionality and content areas that have been on the back burner for a while.

Absolutely, and by thinking about why these sites attract me, it gives me some perspective on ways I can improve my own blog environment.

The big themes?

• Taking the blog more seriously, not as a revenue generator but as a presence.
• Personality and opinion.
• Design; especially a better representation of my photos, but without making my writing a second class citizen. Few sites pull that off properly; it’s one or the other that dominates.
• And making sure the blog properly represents who I am, in a way compatible with what I do.

What does this mean for the blog in 2012?

We’ll get to that…

Merry Christmas 2011

To all of you, from all of us, may you have a wonderful holiday.

A little something for Christmas Eve

Last year I posted one of my stories as a christmas gift. I wanted to point folks at it again this year, as a little something for all of you heading into the holiday.

A special Christmas gift: downtime @ Chuqui 3.0:

Merry Christmas!

 

Here’s a little christmas surprise — the story is called Downtime, and I wrote it in the early 90′s. It was at one point going to be published by Pulphouse but never made it into print. This is the first time it’s been published.

This work is not public domain. It is copyright 1994 by Charles Von Rospach. Please do not republish or post it anywhere else without my explicit approval.

A bit of history — I wrote a number of stories about your typical IT type contractor, who got into doing work for an unusual clientele;  other stories in this series that got published including being hired by God to hack Satan’s databases and working for a witch to fix her spell database on Halloween. The series was about your typical middle class normal working stiff finding out that things we consider fantasy elements were in fact true. I enjoyed twisting the standards of the field in different ways, just to see what happened, and treating fantasy as SF (or vice versa) was a writing hack I liked. These stories also tended to feature Apple computers and cockatoos, just because I could….

The intent was to write a continuing series of these stories, other future clients included an embezzling Tooth Fairy that wanted the evidence deleted, A leprechaun who lost his pot of gold at the track, Elvis and the Easter Bunny. Ultimately I thought I might tie it all together into a novel.

For now, though, it’s just a fun remnant of my writing life, and I hope you enjoy it.

2011 year in review — photography

My 2011 photographic goals @ Chuqui 3.0:

I’ve been thinking through the goals I want to set for my photography in 2011. I think I’m going to keep it relatively simple:

Push myself into new areas of photography to continue to improve my skills; specifically, it’s time to get serious about learning how to use flash, and it’s time for me to get serious about both field and studio macro photography.

I want to try to get back to Yosemite sometime this spring, hopefully when the dogwood is out and alive. I had planned a trip for 2010 at that time and ended up not being able to.

I want to get out on a photo trip to an area I haven’t been to and photographed and force myself to figure out how to shoot and then publish a piece about that area and tells its story.

I want to see if I can take at least one workshop as a way to push my skills via hands on work with someone else.

I want to take a close look at whether I can be “photoshop free”.

I’m going to do a personal quest to photograph as many species of bird again this year, and see if I can beat my 2010 number of 142 I need to experiment with video more.

And I’ll note for the record that nowhere in this list is “buy new stuff”; which doesn’t mean I won’t, but the gear needs to be defined by how it will implement the goals, not the other way around…

So that’s how I defined my photographic goals going into 2011.

I did, in fact, make it to Yosemite in May. The trip was in many ways a disaster. beyond letting myself get way too dehydrated and ending up feeling like crap (which, surprisingly, affects your motivation to do photography), I found not following my shot plan or working on my shot list, and more or less not really caring; using sloppy technique, and generally just being a not very good photographer taking not very interesting images.

And that set me down a path different than I’d expected, more or less wandering into the “if I don’t give a damn, why am I doing this? and if I do give a damn, why am I not acting like it?” — time to go examine my motivations and interests and figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

I actually put down the camera and didn’t pick it up again for about two months. There were other things going on as well (and my birding suffered during this time; I effectively didn’t bird spring migration, so my numbers this year are way down). I also sent off the 100-400 for repair when it was clear that it’d been dropped once too often. It ended up having to go for repair twice before Canon got it really fixed, and so my “go to” lens was gone for a while. When I did get back to taking images, that got me working with the 300F4+1.4x combo for bird work, which I’ve come to like even more than the 100-400, which… Well, I’m getting ahead of myself.

It wasn’t burnout; I’d love to be able to drama queen this and turn it into some interesting blog posts, but in reality, I just took a break because I didn’t feel like picking up the camera, especially if all I was going to do was point it at stuff and click, and take new images that looked a lot like all of my existing images of birds I’ve already taken images of.

Which doesn’t mean I wasn’t doing any photography. Instead, I went on a journey. The journey was really more of a “what do I want to be when I grow up?” and “what do I want my images to say? what is my personal style?”. The best way to describe it is this: David duChemin’s e-book house, Craft and Vision, has published a free book called Craft and Vision, 11 ways you can improve your photography. It is a series of essays by authors who have published other books through C&V. It is well worth your time, but in it is an essay called “Understand the Stages” by Alexandre Buisse.

He effectively defines the six stages of a photographer as:

• The Photographer has  no Artistic Intent, just record what you see. most people are doing this. (the “holiday snapshot” mode).
• The Photographer has discovered an interest beautiful images and is playing around with the camera they have.
• The Photographer has realized their lack of technical knowledge is hindering them, and sets off to learn the craft of image making.
• The Photographer realizes that focussing exclusively on technique is a dead-end, and that composition, quality of light and other intangibles are important in making a good image.
• The Photographer has finished acquiring the technical and artistic tools he needs and starts worrying about what to do with them.

Finally, the Photographer has found his voice and stopped worrying.

I read this when it came out, well after I was down the path of figuring this out on my own, but this crystallized my thoughts, and helped me realize that I’d hit that fifth stage and was fighting to find the sixth. And I still am, but now I understand what I’m trying to do and that’s helped me focus my efforts on things that can help me along that path.

I have found, for instance, that the list of photographers I read online has changed significantly. Photographers who talk mostly about geeky details have mostly disappeared from my reading list; honestly, I just don’t have a lot of interest in another 500 word note on why aperture creates bokeh. That’s not a criticism of those writers — they just are speaking to a different audience now.

Instead, I’ve been exploring and acquiring photographers who are writing about different aspects of photography, and most speccifically, tend to write about being a photographer. These days, the short list of writers I listen to most closely include people like David duChemin, Zack Arias, Kirk Tuck and folks like George Barr and the folks at Online Photographer (especially Mike Johnston and Ctein). One of the things on my list for after the new year is to explain why these people have drawn me to sit at their feet and listen.

This journey continues. The one thing you need for this shift into Buisse’s stage five and six is patience. It’s not something you solve by taking a lighting seminar, or even shooting a thousand images of a spider. As someone who’s written, I recognize it now as the photographer’s equivalent of identifying and harnessing your muse.

Along the way I ended up going through a couple of seminars, both online and both through Chase Jarvis’s Creative Live group. The first was David duChemin’s Vision-Driven Photography, and the second was Zack Arias’ Foundations of a Working Photographer. Both of these deserve some commentary at length, and that’s planned for the new year as well, but let me say now that I recommend both highly, and if you haven’t discovered Creative Live, you should go and explore their offerings. They also stream the live broadcast of new seminars free, so if you can free your schedule, you can take them in without costing you anything — but after you check out one or two, you’ll probably want to start collecting them. Laurie and I both have taken in some of the Creative Live seminars, and every one we’ve seen has been of exceptional quality. (another resource I’ll point you to is Chase Jarvis Live, and this weekend I watched his piece with Allegra Will on portfolio design and criticism, which I found fascinating. And yes, that now means you’ll see me restructuring my online setup to include a “real” portfolio, as soon as I figure out what I want it to be; and what I want to be. And so, we circle back…

The second half of 2011 was surrounded by Leo’s decision to blow up the piece of HP I happened to work with and the chaos and stress of living through that and trying to keep things operating and moving forward despite it — and ultimately deciding to move on and leave HP for greener pastures. Needless, it’s been a stressful few months, which has both gotten in the way of many of my original 2011 plans, but also encouraged me to use things like my photography as a refuge from it. So I did ultimately pick up the camera, but rather than force myself into new paths, I went back and simplified, and went back to my core of bird photography — and I spent a lot of time metaphorically examining my navel for inspiration and answers to questions I wasn’t sure how to ask.

So my goals changed on the fly, but in a good way (I think). I never did move into flash or macro, because I realized stretching into new techniques wasn’t going to solve the problem I wanted to solve — even though I recognize that once I know the solution to that problem, I’ll need these techniques to solve it. I never did do the bird listing (but it’s on the list for 2012), and I did, in fact, mostly go photoshop free, by deciding to bring in a copy of Photoshop Elements for those few times when I need something beyond Lightroom. I would say most photographers can (and should) go this path instead of paying the serious cash needed for the “full” photoshop. Maybe I’ll explain this down the road.

And as to my last “non-goal”, coming out of all of this, and when I made the decision to change jobs (and cashed in 160 hours of unused vacation), I did end up making my first gear purchase in two years. And I spent about a month planning that out and considering options before deciding what I wanted (and should) do. That is a big blog post in itself, so that, too, is scheduled for the new year; once the new gear shows up and I start putting it through its paces…

So overall, I think I’m existing 2011 in a  better spot photographically than I entered the year, even if it’s nowhere near the spot I expected to be at when I started the journey. And as I start planning for 2012 and what I want to accomplish, I’m hoping that it’ll be a really strong year for me. Assuming my CEO doesn’t blow up my organization and stuff it into limbo for months again…. And even if they do, we’ll figure it out and do something useful…

2011 year in review — the blog.

Looking back at 2011 here on the blog, I feel like it’s gotten some traction, if things didn’t exactly go as I thought they would in January. but then, who could plan for a CEO to take a shotgun to your organization mid-year, and then get left in suspended animation until someone could figure out what to do with you?

Overall, pageviews and blog traffic were up about 15%. All in all, a good year for the blog. I went into the year trying to get my writing going again; all in all, given the unforeseen complications in life this year, I think I give myself a passing grade, and hope to do even more as we move into 2012. I wanted to write some meaty, more in-depth pieces, and I think I succeeded at that. I wanted to write more consistently, and I think overall, I’ve done that as well. There are still times when life trumps blog — but I see that as a feature, not a bug.

• Once again, my piece Some Thoughts on Lightroom Keywords was the most popular entry on the blog by a wide margin.  Second was my listing of my best photos of 2010, which tends to get wide distribution thanks to photographer Jim Goldstein promoting that we all share our lists.
• My writing on backups continues to be popular; hopefully, it helps people avoid losing data. I’ll likely be updating it again in 2012, and I’d like to turn it into an e-book.
• My articles on my decision to leave flickr got plenty of visibility and I got lots of interesting feedback on them: (Change of Plans on Flickr, Whither Flickr,  and Moving Beyond Flickr)
• Finally, my five part series on using Smugmug was popular and got lots of people thinking about ways to take advantage of that system.

Other popular writing in 2011 included:

• So you want to be a nature photographer
• The ever-changing social landscape
• Thanks, Steve
• What’s been going on (where I talk about my decision to leave HP)
• Losing a Friend (on the loss of long-time house partner Archie to cancer)
• Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson
• Canon EOS 7d Autofocus Modes explained
• On filters and echo chambers
• Google+ – Lots of win, not perfect (and since then, continuing to evolve in good ways, especially for photographers)
• In defense of Gil Amelio

So as I close out 2011, I have to say, overall, I’m about where I should be, given how things ended up and what went on that was outside of my control. That’s not a bad place to be. And as I plan my way into 2012 and try to figure out what the next steps are, I think this is a good foundation to build from. But there’s plenty to do….

The new Gig — Now at Infoblox

quick note since I’ve got nine zillion things going on and no time…

I started the new gig this morning. I’m now the Technical Manager for Bloxtools at Infoblox in Santa Clara, California. Myself and my new cohort in crime (who will play the part of Community Manager) are coming in to support and build a community around these tools, and to help define a plan for for enhancing the tools and making them a more powerful and useful part of the Infoblox products suite.

What’s this mean? well, when we figure it out, we’ll know. Part of what made this an irresistible challenge was that it’s really a blank slate; great challenge, great opportunity. And it’s going to allow me to help build a new community from scratch, which I was looking to do, and get back more to my roots and be more technical than I was at HP.

Everyone I’ve met so far has been great, the company feels like a nice, comfortable fit, we don’t have CEOs randomly blowing up divisions because he’s bored, and I get to go off and figure out a bunch of stuff. I’m going to be busy for a while, but in a good way.

And then there was the money… Which frankly, HP was rather reluctant to part with, even going back 18 months when I first had that discussion with Ben and Dion…

More on all of this when I have time, and a chance to start figuring out the details…