A project I’ve been working on in the background for a while has finally all come together and I’m thrilled to be able to talk about it. After the Haiti earthquake I donated some funds to support the rescue efforts there but I realized there was going to be a long-term need there and started looking at the right ways to get involved. One of the organizations that I’ve considered donating to for a couple of years is Doctors without Borders, which fits the kind of organization I look to put my donation money into (low bureaucracy overhead, low marketing expenses, high percentage of revenues “on the ground” and not in the home office, etc..).

Then I ran into another organization trying to create a place where photographers could donate images for sale to generate revenue for Doctors Without Borders. Images Without Borders seemed like a cause I wanted to get behind, so I did some research, decided it was doing the Right Things, and contacted them to see if I could donate some images.

I’m happy to announce that five of my images are now available for purchase through Images Without Borders, and all profits for their sale will go to Doctors Without Borders. Each image is limited to ten prints and will then be retired. I want to encourage everyone who reads my blog to support Doctors without Borders, either by going to Images Without Borders and buying a print (mine or one of the other donating photographers), or by donating to the organization directly.

I will sweeten the pot further — if you buy one of my prints via Images Without Borders, I will send you a free 11×14 signed print of any image in my portfolio as my thank you for doing so. Simply email me a copy of the receipt on the purchase and we’ll work out the details.

Here are the images I’ve made available:

To help spread the word, I’ve created some free mobile phone wallpapers of these images. You are welcome to make copies of these and pass them around or install them on your phone. I will also be doing desktop wallpapers of some of my images, including these, to help support this cause — stay tuned for that.

I hope you all will consider supporting this organization and cause, either by buying a print, by donating directly, or by publicizing this and spreading the word to others. Haiti needs our help, and this organization is there on the ground trying to make a difference, and it deserves our help.

Thanks,

Chuq

(p.s. observant geeks will probably notice that my photos are being hosted on Smugmug and not flickr. I’ve been working towards creating a portfolio site where I can start selling prints and licensing images, and Smugmug was the site I decided to use for this (Photoshelter, the site hosting and donating its services to Images without Borders, came in a close second). I’ll be using Smugmug as the site for my professional portfolio the way I use (and will continue to use) Flickr to distributethings more casually and socially. I’ll talk more later about my plans for Smugmug and how this all ties together, but this situation was a great opportunity to fire up the new site and get this next phase of my photography going….)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Supporting Doctors without Borders through Images without Borders. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Supporting Doctors without Borders through Images without Borders

So having mentioned it was time for vacation a couple of weeks ago, I’ve actually done something about it. I was able to grab three nights at the Lodge on the valley floor, so I’m taking the week of March 1 off and heading off to Yosemite in about a week to get away from email and everything else, and just unplug and unwind and focus on recharging the batteries and taking some photos.

It’s still a ways out, but the ten day forecast for that period (3/1-3/4) is encouraging: maybe some overnight snow but temperatures above freezing during the day, and it looks like a storm will roll through during the trip, which I’m hoping for. Nothing scary in the forecast, and encouraging for landscape potential. So we’ll see.

What’s not settled is what to do around those days. I sat down and wrote up all of the things I might want to do and then started pruning out stuff that didn’t seem to make the cut from a time/energy/interest level:

• Grand Canyon (too much driving, too little time actually there)
• Bryce/Zion (ditt0)
• Vegas for birding and hiking in Red Rock (intriguin, but.. not this trip)
• Disneyland (I don’t want to “go urban”)
• San Diego Zoo (ditto)
• Salton Sea and wandering the deserts for wildflowers (tempting on any number of levels; ultimately more driving than I wanted to do)
• Carrizo Plain wildflowers and then SLO/Santa Barbara/Morro Bay (too early for Carrizo by a couple of weeks, and a bit of been-there-done-that on the central coast. It’s been where I’ve gone to hide a lot the last couple of years, so time to do something different…)
• Out to Tahoe/Reno, then down the 395 to Morro lake and Bishop and out the other side (ultimately, it’s too early in the season for some things I want to do in the Eastern Sierra like Bodie, and just way too much driving, much as I’d like some winter time with Mono Lake; Devil’s Postpile is also buried right now…)

As it turns out, I got invited to go birding with a group down in Monterey on the 7th, so that was encouragment to stay a bit more local. Much as I’ve wanted to get down to Salton Sea to bird for a while (it was the trip that got canceled by my dad’s final hospital visit), I find myself interested in driving less and “doing” more. I’m not making final decisions about what I’ll do until I leave Yosemite, but I’ve got a few informal plans I’ve framed out depending on what I feel like and what the weather dictates.

• Plan A: overnight near Galt so I can spend more time with the cranes and geese at Woodbridge and some of the northern Sacramento flyway stops and do some birding photography and try to observe one or two fly-ins and a dawn up there, then home.
• Plan B: go home (but don’t tell anyone), and daytrip. Lots of things I want to do, from the SF Zoo and the aquarium to exploring the marin headlands and presidio or even play tourist from Pier 39 to Ghirardelli… tempting.
• Plan C: change my mind and head down to Morro Bay (because ultimately I really love it down there…)
• Plan D: who knows? I’m open to suggestions…

In any event, I’m really ready and looking forward to this. Definitely planning a busy week, just a week doing stuff I want to do… Blogging may continue to be light as I get things prepped at work and here at home for the trip; then again, maybe I’ll just start a cube sabbatical and get my blogging caught up…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Yosemite on the horizon!. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Yosemite on the horizon!

The fun guys at Precentral have done an article where they all talk about the apps that live on their Pre or Pixi, so I figured now was a good time to chip in and do the same.  Do I need to attach a disclaimer here? Nah. you all know the drill — and I pay for all my apps, no freebies out the side door on weekends…

Here are the apps I keep close and handy:

• To Do Classic — relatively new to the catalog, but I like it because it’s simple. I’ve used a number of other to do apps but this one is my current favorite because I don’t need the extra power some of the other apps have. I also like GroceryList.
• gDial Pro and Visual Voicemail — connects me to google voice, which connects me to the thirty-seven-gazillion phone numbers I seem to own now.
• TVMCalc — my current favorite calculator
• Twee — my current Twitter client. Because I know you folks can’t survive without constantly hearing what I have to say, even when I’m at a hockey game.
• FourSquare — who knew? people volunteer to be stalked! (but it’s fun!); I’m also starting to experiment with FourSquare as a location tool for birding, and it looks promising.
• Where I’m At — I’m experimenting with location based services and the GPS as tools for my birdwatching. This one is my current favorite tool for grabbing location data and archiving it.
• MediaClock — my travel alarm. One less gadget I have to carry in my bag!
• StopWatch — which I use primarily for timing captures for night photography.

Below the fold, where you can’t see them:

• textPress, because a way to quickly take free form notes is amazingly useful
• Evernote, because you need a place to store your stuff. Having your stuff available on all of your devices rocks.
• The Weather Channel, because when it rains, you get wet. So go inside.
• TealTime, because when you work with people in five different timezones on a regular basis, knowing when they’re at lunch or asleep rocks.
• Parking Place, my current “where in the HELL did I leave my car this time?” app. Now, if I could just teach it to automatically figure out it needs to take a location, I’d be really happy.
• Preware and AppScoop, because we aren’t afraid of homebrew here.
• SuperSudoku, Free Klondike, and Mine Search because, well, sometimes those important staff meetings run a bit long. I’m glad my boss doesn’t read my blog.
• OpenTable, because dinner isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law.
• Flashlight, because I don’t see those funky menus as well as I used to. Isn’t middle age fun?
• DOF Calculator, because I’m a photo geek.
• Yelp!, because I need to know where to get a good plumber who makes lattes.
• Tip Em!, because the pre can never have enough Tip Calculators and this is my current favorite.
• Backgrounds, because plain and grey is boring.
• Sunrise Sunset, because knowing when it’s dark is useful for a photographer for some reason….
• Friendsbook, my current favorite Facebook app
• DirecTV, so when I remember I forgot to schedule that show, I can fix it.

What’s NOT on my Pre? As most of you know, before I came to Palm I used “that other phone”, but I believe in eating my own dog food, and I’ve been chowing away. But there still are a few things on that other phone I can’t do yet. Here are things I really wish I could do on my Pre, but nobody’s written them yet:

• BirdsEye and iBird — my birding field guides. We just don’t have these resources on the pre (yet).
• Best Camera, Focalware, Magic Hour – Photography apps I use once in a while.
• Darkslide — there just isn’t a Flickr browser as good as Darkslide yet. Ditto one for Smugmug.
• TideApp — another useful thing for a nature photographer and birder, because it sucks to get your feet wet for the wrong reason…
• Sirius/XM Radio – 24 x 7 hockey sports talk, baby!

Given I own about 100 apps for “that other phone” (yes, I’m an app slut), that’s actually not bad for a new platform out less than a year. I figure it won’t take too long because I’ll have alternatives. Right, developers? RIGHT? Don’t make me hurt your dog… (and if you think about it, all but Darkslide are what you can charitably call “niche” apps for a specialty audience. they normally trail in availability while we build the audience for them…. ). My “other phone” now lives in my bag, relegated mostly to iPod duty and when I need one of the specialty apps, and if I wasn’t so lazy about it, I could move the music onto the Pre, but I just haven’t bothered…

Of course, I’m constantly trying out new apps and shifting stuff around, but isn’t that half the fun? These, however, are the ones I lean on and use on a regular basis these days.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at What’s on my Pre?. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. What’s on my Pre?

The best laid plans… I have a bunch of blogging stacked up, none of which you’ve seen yet. Just as the New Year kicked in, so did a bug, which struck both myself and Laurie, and after a few rather grumpy days as a head cold, it headed to laurie’s chest and off camping in my ears, so I started off the new year under the weather and on deadline with both the CES announcements and our newly refreshed developer portal and blog.

Thank god for Sudafed, that’s all I can say, even though they make you sign 37 forms to get the damn pills now. I do not, for the record, recommend the sneezing, Sudafed and Starbucks Diet, but it does seem to work. After one last “battle of the bulge” over the weekend, I seem to have fought the bug off for the most part and the energy levels are returning, so the ability to string words together and have them make sense seems to be back. you really didn’t miss anything — insightful — the last week or so, anyway. Trust me.

But if you’re wondering why I’m just getting to looking back and setting goals as we roll into February, that’s why. So 2010 is off to a rousing start…

But it’s time to get back on the horse and start riding again, and I’m thinking through the next couple of months and one thing I’ve decided is it’s time for a damn vacation. I went looking, and I’ve suddenly realized that in the last

• 2009: 2 days (an extended weekend in Morro Bay for Photo Morro Expo
• 2008: 5 days for the trip to Yellowstone
• 2007: 3 days for my aborted research trip for Dare2Thrive after leaving strongmail, 5 days into the Northwest after leaving Laszlo, and 2 days for a spring trip into Yosemite
• 2006: 2 days for a christmas jaunt into Yosemite, and the 8 day summer celebration into the Northwest celebrating leaving Apple and moving on to whatever was going to be next…

The trip to Yellowstone (after spending most of the year dealing with Dad’s illness, death and the estate with my mom) seems like forever ago. Because to some degree it was. My moving to Palm was on a tight schedule so no time off, and this last year has been  an amazing year that I’ve loved just about every minute of (the minutes I didn’t love were the ones I was considering throwing myself, or someone else, off a roof…) — but it’s time for a break, so I’m starting to plan out some time off. Not sure what, or where yet, but I know I need to get in the car and take the camera and mostly unplug for a bit.

I’m guessing late february or early march. have to figure out what the work and hockey schedules are, and of course get Laurie’s thoughts and permission (shh.. I haven’t mentioned this to her yet… literally just thinking this through tonight after she’s gone to bed). The obvious ideas come to mind, which include Yosemite (too late for serious winter work(?), too early for waterfalls and WAY too early for spring and dogwood), but also to finally get to Salton sea and maybe spend time in Joshua tree and Anza/Borrego and the deserts — I had a trip planned for Salton Sea when dad got sick, and it got blown up and I’ve never gotten it rescheduled. But I’m hearing other things whispering also, whether it’s Grand Canyon or Bryce and Zion, or even shooting up the coast into the Northwest (but I’m likely to hold that off for a summer trip with Laurie…); some other venues come to mind like an extended visit to the San Diego zoo (I haven’t shot at a zoo in a while) or Disneyland or Vegas for the kitsch.

Dunno. Have to think. Have to make sure I don’t overschedule and spend too much time travelling and not enough time visiting. Maybe define a starting point and then see what happens. Right now I can definitely feel a tug between revisiting comfort zones (disneyland, yosemite) and pushing into fresh territories. I think I need to lean myself towards the latter, this feels like it’s time for some exploring.

I’m definitely open to suggestion. Feel free….

(and I think I’m going to try for a long weekend or a mid-week jaunt to Yosemite for the dogwood this year, if I can. But I’m always up for more than one trip to that place, especially in times when it’s relatively quiet. It’s been probably 15 years since I’ve visited at a time when Tioga was open…)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at A great way to start the new year…. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. A great way to start the new year…

Ten Photographers that made me a better photographer in 2009

1. Mike Baird
2. Ashok Khosla
3. Howard Ignatius
4. Hal Schmitt
5. Steve Berardi
6. Rick Sammon
7. James Duncan Davidson
8. Moose Peterson
9. Jerry Ting
10. Bryan Oleson

Photographers that influence my photography

1. Art Wolfe
2. John Shaw
3. George Lepp
4. Galen Rowell
5. Jim Goldstein
6. Michael Frye

Five Photographers that I’m currently studying to become better in 2010

1. David duChemin
2. Harold Davis
3. George Barr
4. David Hobby
5. Joe McNally

Ten most popular postings at chuqui.com in 2009

In 2009, 17,000 people visited chuqui.com about 35,000 times to view 49,000 pages. Overall traffic was up about 20% over the year. The ten most popular pages for 2009 are:

1. And the answer to the question is… — in which I announce I’m taking a job at Palm.
2. More than you wanted to know about backups (also see Some More Thoughts and Following my Own Advice)
3. This iPhone App is truly for the birds
4. Santa  Clara County Salt Ponds and Bay Area Birding
5. Some of my Past Fades to Black
6. Photo Links (and more photo links!) — early versions of what became “stuff you’ll like“
7. MobileMe Renewal? Yes or no?
8. Calaveras Bald Eagles (was out visiting them this weekend!)
9. Apple Drops hints about netbooks (which is only tangentally about an Apple netbook)
10. Some  more thoughts on weight (which is way overdue for some updates…)

My ten favorite posts of 2009

1. Three Rules “they” tell photographers, and why “they” are wrong
2. A teachable moment (or why I love birding even when I make a fool of myself)
3. 50 Reasons why I haven’t been blogging
4. On Paying Forward
5. Understanding the Starting Point
6. More than you wanted to know about backups (also see Some More Thoughts and Following my Own Advice)
7. In Search of Winter Birds
8. The Summer of Hockey’s Discontent
9. Some More Thoughts on Weight
10. 25 Things about me

My ten best photos of 2009

My favorite fiction of 2009

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Lists for 2010. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Lists for 2010

if Obama were on fire, the GOP would call fire departments a socialist plot. The folks losing it on the left, on the other hand, are being a bit petulant about both the actual human they elected to be president, and the practical constraints on his agenda. The man has monolithic, unified opposition in the Washington GOP, a fractious and fragile base in the diffuse Washington Democrats, and was handed two expensive, unpopular wars, a profoundly degraded political environment at home and abroad, and a national and global economy which were dual scorching pillars of oh shit we’re all going to die. That the man got anything substantive done, much less had what is objectively a politically remarkable first year, is impressive.

via Final Notes on Obama’s 2009 « Whatever.

I normally avoid talking politics here, mostly because it tends to attract the loonies and trolls like the plague (and who really cares what I think, anyway?) — but John Scalzi waded in, and honestly, it deserves a “what he said”, because if I were to write about this stuff, this is what I would have written. Only not as well.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Final Notes on Obama’s 2009 « Whatever. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Final Notes on Obama’s 2009 « Whatever

To understand the feature requirements for moderation we need some goals. Keep in mind that no moderation will be perfect, and you can easily come up with scenarios that will work around anything we come up with.

Therefore, we should focus on just some initial goals that will work right now, and keep in mind that these will need to be constantly tweaked and worked on as the spammers evade the measures.

• If given the choice between restricting free speech and preventing unwanted communication, free speech always wins.
• The system should increase the quality of discourse for any project, regardless of human language used.
• It should never give a small group the ability to hide communications from others.
• It should be implementable and not have high hosting costs.
• It should not rely on a dedicated person’s constant intervention.
• It never gates email through system before sending it, but rather allows initial emails with moderation after.
• It should use information from people’s rating habits to classify them as “ratings trolls” to prevent abuse.

With those goals in mind I’ve teased out two potential list quality strategies that might work.

via Proposals For Librelist Moderation Strategies.

Someone I work with turned me on to Librelist because they knew me interest and history with mailing list systems, and I find it interesting that some folks have decided it’s time to rethink the mailing list again.

They’re right. When I faded to black on the mailman project, it was at least in part because many of us felt that mailing lists were a technological dead end, and that deliverability issues because of anti-spam systems made the “personal mailing list” an increasingly difficult thing to accomplish.

Both are — for the most part — true. I certainly would never run my own mail server again, because the advantages of doing so are far outweighed by the time and hassle of trying to manage deliverability and reputation to make sure mail it sends gets accepted, and the constant onslaught of incoming spam turns them into a permanent infinite time sink. That’s why I either retired our lists or moved them to Yahoogroups (which I personally think is a pretty good system).

But there’s still room here to rethink the concepts and the Librelists seem interested in trying, and I think that’s great. Email and mailing lists are far from dead — but instead of stand alone delivery tools, they really shine as part of an integrated web strategy; Yahoo groups is a nice first generation of that, although there’s a lot more Yahoo could do if they decided to.

Message moderation really breaks down into two big problems:

• “Subscribe spam” where spammers sign up to the list to spam it.
• “Member warfare” where existing, approved members get into fights and they escalate into unacceptable territory.

The first is really simple to solve: new members are moderated, and messages aren’t posted until reviewed by someone to vet their content. Simple implementation; Yahoo Groups does it today, and on the lists I still manage, it works well to keep the spammers at bay. The way I manage it is all members are moderated until their first post. if their first post is acceptable, I turn off the moderation bit. To minimize delays in propogation of new member messages, simply choose a moderator pool large enough to guarantee held messages get reviewed and approved in a timely manner — you could even make that moderator pool all members in good standing if you want, because all you really need is someone you’ve trusted to post vetting that someone new is trusted to post.

Member warfare is trickier. I hesitate to call it trolling because the pure troll is a subset of the larger issue of two (or a small group of) people getting pissed off and going at it. A troll is simply one person going off on the rest of the list.

I’m more and more convinced the answer here are reputation systems, where over time a user’s membership in a group is used to define their abilities and restrictions. The longer a member is in the group in good standing, the more often they contribute material, the higher their reputation goes and the more the can do and the more sway they have on the decisions of the reputation engine. You can tweak the details of the algorithm almost any way you want, but if you define it in terms of “how long they’re a member” and “constructive contribution to the community”, you can come up with a metric on how valuable that member is to the community, and then use that to rank that member’s contributions and recommendations.

Here’s one rough view of how to build this. Please note that I firmly believe karma rankings are private and users have no way to see what their ranking is or compare it to others, except in really broad user categories (“member”, “senior member”, “top contributor”, “advisory board member”). As soon as you create a list of any form, you will attract people who see it as something they can game, and so they will.

User Karma is a value between 0 and 1, which starts at 0.5. Every time a user contributes to the system (a posting, a reply, a moderation recommendation, etc), the number gets bumped by some value. How much the value is incremented or decremented depends on how it’s rated by other users — so if User A posts a message, User B flags it as spam, but 80% of the membership feel that was a bad decision, User B’s karma is reduced in future decisions, they lose influence. Over time, the system self-corrects by giving increased influence of those who’s decisions match the community consensus and reduced influence to those who’s postings and recommendations don’t match up well.

The system can then choose whether to accept or flag for moderation a posting based on a poster’s karma score. You could potentially reject outright users that have karma scores below some value, or allow other members to choose not to see messages by users with karma scores below some value. Over time, users who are disruptive to the community will get karma’ed into the moderation queue (or out the door), and users who are seen as top contributors will have stronger influence.

My goals:

• A system like this can be built nicely with a good SQL backend and a bit of horsepower. I’ve actually done a detailed design and schema on this before, and it’s a fascinating thing I’ve always wanted to implement.
• It enables the power of individuals to police themselves.
• It limits the ability of an individual to harass or cause problems.
• It doesn’t lend itself to people playing the game of gaming the system by not exposing the details of the system (slashdot karma whores need not apply).
• Trolls get edited out of the system because the community will quickly recognize them for what they are and trash their karma, causing their postings to disappear to the bottom of the list.
• Cliques and Mafias have to be large to influence the results significantly. You don’t completely avoid the clique/mafia problem, but you can severely limit it’s ability to wreak havoc.
• It doesn’t require a lot of manual handholding or babysitting. Admins end up stepping in only in extreme cases.
• Because trolls tend to get edited out of the system quickly and automatically, they tend to go elsewhere because without feedback and controversy, they wither and die. And by editing them out of the system quickly, you avoid the whiplash and fighting that happens when people start fighting with the trolls and the wars break out.

Weaknesses:

• Any community tends to turn into an echo chamber. Automated systems like this encourage this because “different thinking” tends to get rated down.
• That’s usually a lesser evil to letting the trolls run wild.
• To my knowledge, nobody’s ever solved the problem of the conflict between the group-mind reinforcing the echo chamber and allowing the free thinkers to poke at the community’s comfort level by pushing them to think about things that make them uncomfortable. One person’s rebel is another person’s troll, and that’s not solvable in real life, much less in automated life like this…

These techniques are all based on (or stolen from) things that are in use around the net, with Amazon’s review feedback being one I really respect; while trying to avoid the pitfalls I’ve seen around the net (yes, I’m going to keep bashing on Slashdot’s karma system, it’s way too easy to game and always has been). It also (I believe) avoids the nasty politics that have made Digg a bit of a pesthole. And it’s also pretty lightweight and low-key, or at least it should be. The implementation details will be crucial, as will be tuning how the karma values adapt…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Proposals For Librelist Moderation Strategies. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Proposals For Librelist Moderation Strategies

Sometimes you have to know when to hold it. Sometimes you have to know when to fold it.

One of the hardest life lessons I’ve learned is this: if the only person who knows (or cares) about a deadline is yourself, it’s not really a deadline — and don’t kill yourself trying to make it. I used to really stress out when I’d commit to something then not make the date because other things came up (even though I felt those things were more important, or out of my control). Even though the only person it mattered to was me.

I finally figured this out, and started teaching myself not to sweat over details that didn’t really matter.  I decided back in 2006 I wanted to try to organize a second career around a camera; I never worked with Bill Atkinson, but you can’t be an Apple geek (or like me, an Apple alum) and not know about Hypercard, and in fact, I did a lot of work in Hypercard over the years. I did work with Dave Cardinal at Apple, and when I started dabbling with digital cameras and then run into their work, it was that seminal eye-opening moment that made me realize that I could make that shift as well, and that was the starting point for this second career planning.

That was in 2005.

In 2007, I thought I’d become a pretty good photographer and started seriously looking to fire up my second career plans. And then I blew out my knee by stepping in a gopher hole, then dad got sick (and then he died) and by the time I surfaced from helping mom through the estate, 2008 was almost over and it was time to try again. Then I landed the gig at Palm, and I knew it was going to an insanely fun few months and it went on hold again. And now it’s almost 2010, and I feel like it’s time to try again. So we will.

That doesn’t mean nothing happened in the meantime. In fact, the delays have been a blessing in disguise. I’ve spent a ot of time and energy in battling bits in photoshop and lightroom, in studying my work and really being honest about my strengths (and flaws) and working to fix the flaws; in studying other photographers and understanding their strengths and how to adapt them into my own work.

In 2007, I thought I was a good photographer. Today, I’m a much better photographer. Sometimes delays can be frustrating, but you turn them to your advantage.

There are always reasons to say “not yet” to your plans; planning is easy — and safe. Doing is hard, involves risk, and may fail. But sometimes, “not yet” is the right decision, even if you don’t like making it at the time. You might miss out on an opportunity, but if your plans are sound and your planning is done well, you’ll run into later opportunities later. (hint: if your plans revolve around a “now or never” situation, it’s probably a badly thought out plan. If you don’t have follow-on opportunities to build your business with, how are you going to grow your business?)

So knowing when to hold it — and using that hold time to improve your chances of later success as you can — can be a positive. You can’t be afraid to say “it’s time” and push the button and make it happen.

At the same time, you have to be realistic, and you can’t force yourself to push the button simply because it’s the date you said you were going to do it on — going in for the wrong reasons and at the wrong time makes the chances of failure skyrocket, and if it fails, it’s going to be harder to generate future opportunities or feel confident about going out and grabbing them when they happen.

There are also times when you simply need to fold the hand and try again. When I left StrongMail, I’d been working on a project called Dare2Thrive, and decided to take some time off and push that project into production. Once I left on my own, some outside factors kicked my motivation in the crotch, and I realized there were some fundamental flaws in my approach that I couldn’t easily solve.

The big one: I was putting myself into primarily an editorial role, not a creative role, and on a long term basis, I decided that was unacceptable; I wanted a situation that focused on my own material rather than creating an environment where I promoted the work of others.

That’s not something you fix by tweaking the CSS.  I realized I needed to start over, tear it down to the bare assumptions, and starting over. I hated the decision at the time; at the time I felt it was fixable, but the external issues I was dealing with made it necessary. I realize now that not only was it the right decision — it saved me from almost certain failure if I’d pushed forward, and that was without taking into consideration what 2008 was going to surprise me with…

Holding it and Folding it. Never fun. To take something you really care about and want to do and stuff it back in the closet is hard. To take it out behind the shed and “Old Yeller” it is traumatic. If it’s the right thing to do, though, it has to be done, and many times, it creates new, better opportunities later if you let it.

And for the record, the core or Dare2Thrive — the piece that first made me want to do the project — is alive and well as part of this new project. And dammit if it isn’t even a better project now than it ever would have been in its original form.

And if anyone wants to buy them, I have the original dare2thrive domains available and parked, at least until I figure out a use for them….

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Know when to hold it, know when to fold it. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Know when to hold it, know when to fold it

Many years ago, when I was doing book reviews for Amazing Science Fiction (at that time owned by TSR. I did say “many years ago!”) a common question I got was ‘How can I get paid to read books?’

It may sound like I’m picking nits, but this is an important semantical detail: I didn’t get paid to read books. I got paid to help readers decide whether to read (and buy) books.

Typing is a skill. Writing is a craft. You don’t get paid for writing. You get paid for selling what you wrote. What you wrote is an asset, and your income depends on how others value that asset and what they’re willing to pay for it.

Ditto photography. The act of taking a photograph is a skill. The act of making a photograph is a craft. You don’t get paid to make a photo; that photo is an asset; it has to be valued and bought to generate income. (or more wonderful thoughts on making vs. taking, see Scott Bourne and Chase Jarvis)

Nowhere in here have I mentioned the word “art” or “artist”. To a good degree, it’s an irrelevant concept in the discussion (except it’s not). In my way of seeing things, to be a craftsman, you have to master the skills. To be an artist, you have to master the craft AND have a specific inner spark or vision that drives your work beyond the typical. Few are true artists, but in some fields, defining yourself as an “artist” is a marketing tactic used to increase your value and and improve sales. That’s not a crticism — it worked wonderfully for Andy Warhol (but is what he did art?)

Stephen King is a craftsman. So are John Scalzi and Terry Goodkind and John Le Carre. Gene Wolfe and Michael Swanwick are artists. Joe McNally is a craftsman. Art Wolfe is an artist. One s not superior to the other, they are different (and many times highly subjective) paths down the same road — and I tend to believe that the louder someone declares themselves an artist, the less likely they really are.

This is a somewhat round-about way of pointing out that business of selling your work has very little to do with the act of creating it. If you don’t understand this, I can’t believe you can succeed as a business — but you may still be a great writer or photographer.

Which is a round-about way of bringing forward the idea that there’s going to be very little discussion about making great photos. It’s a given that you can do that; you can probably market yourself to some level of success if you’re craft is technically mediocre, but you’ll be constantly shooting yourself in the foot.

So this conversation is really about what to sell. It’s about how to market it so people know you’re selling it. It’s about making sure that someone who wants to buy it can. It’s about maximizing the value of your assets, and making sure that what you sell it for makes you more than it cost you to make it.

It’s also about when to give it away, because many times, the best sales tool you have is the free sample.

But the trick there is how to give it away, without, well, giving it away. Because if it’s free, why should someone pay for it?

And that issue is core to success in the internet-enabled universe, and is both a massive challenge — and a bigger opportunity.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at You don’t take pictures for a living…. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. You don’t take pictures for a living…

It should come as no surprise that anything I’m planning for the future involves the internet.

I suppose I could decide to move to Astoria and go to work in Starbucks. That’d be a perfectly acceptable second career — and if my other plans don’t work, it might still happen. That’d take a lot less work and planning, though, so I don’t have to think about that quite yet.

What I’ve known for a long time is that whatever this is going to be, it’s going to have a strong online component, which means a well-designed and well-built web presence. I use the term “web presence” here, not web site, because while a web site is a key aspect to this, nothing stands alone in the internet any more. You always have interfaces to other services, whether it’s social networking (Facebook, twitter), or communication (gmail) or to leverage other services instead of building your own (flickr, Smugmug, Cafepress, etc).

Because building a web presence to support this second career is going to be a large and complex beast by the time I’m done, and because one option both Laurie and I are looking at in the future is “build web sites for companies in Astoria” (or “build web sites for photographers”), having a portfolio site I can be proud of is crucial, and having the documentation on the how and why of the design and build process is a useful sales tool.

Besides, the conversation I hope this generates will help make it a better and more useful site; incremental feedback and early discussion is a lot more useful in fixing and tweaking when it’s easier and early.

So this is the second track of discussion that’s going to start showing up on the blog; there is the “why” of the second career, and here, the “how”.

But neither of those matters without the most important part.

Next up: the what. Because this all has to be about something, or it’s really rather silly to do.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Designing a Web Presence. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Designing a Web Presence

One aspect of figuring out what to do in a second career is understanding what NOT to do. As I noted in the intro, one decision I made a while back was that even though my hockey writing was one of the largest segments of my blog’s audience at the time, I chose not to try to make it a focus of my plans. It might have been a leg to build an income stream on in the short term, but over the longer term, it conflicted with other, more important goals (like getting out of Silicon Valley), and I didn’t see any logic in trying to building a hockey audience knowing I was going to “retire” from it at some point.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m interested in a lot of things. Some days I think my brain is a magpie, always looking at some new shiny thing to go and explore. there are days when I feel like I need to put a huge sign that says FOCUS on the wall over my desk, just to remind me to stick to what needs to be done and not spend a few hours “researching”. (although research is necessary and useful, but not to the exclusion of getting real work done).

One of the things I’ve been thinking about for the last year — and reluctantly putting back on the list of things I want to do but can’t justify doing — is going back to fiction writing. At one point I was an active fiction writer, and unlike a lot of them, I was selling some of it. I gave it up for a simple reason: the pay sucked, it was a lot of hard work, and I enjoyed computers and geeking at least as much as I enjoyed writing and being a writer, and computers pay a hell of a lot better.

Fiction writing is a tough market. It hasn’t gotten any better in the time I’ve been away, in fact it’s harder now to succeed as a writer than it was 10 or 15 years ago, and the pay scale is about the same. Not “same adjusted for inflation”, but pretty much the same. A few writers make really good money, a good chunk of writers make enough money to keep writing, and a huge number of writers are fighting for waiter jobs with those actors and actresses and muscians and artists who are all in the same boat in their respective fields.

John Scalzi sums it up wonderfully.

I go back to what I felt when I decided to retire from writing: I enjoy being a writer (the act of writing isn’t as pleasant as having written) — but I don’t see anyway someone who WANTS to be a writer can successfully compete in a tight market against someone who HAS TO BE a writer. And I want to be a writer, it just isn’t something that wraps me in knots at night when I’m not writing. So even though my unfinished novel has been calling to me in the interstices of the midnight hour, one of the things I’ve decided I’m not going to do — is try to go back to fiction writing.

Although I’d like to. But I don’t HAVE to — and that’s something everyone should be brutally honest with themselves about when playing the “I want to be…. ” game. “Want to” isn’t a success strategy. In a creative industry, if it doesn’t come from somewhere deep inside, if the hunger isn’t there, chances are you won’t succeed, because someone who is driven by that hunger is going to fight for the same opportunities, and they’ll win most of the time.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at One thing I’m not going to do…. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. One thing I’m not going to do…

As I noted the other day, I expect posting frequency on the blog to go up soon. About this time last year I started serious planning on my “what’s next?” project — that being my long-term look at how I want to make the shift into the second career. I see a time where I’m not going to want to work in Silicon Valley and hack high tech 24×7 (gasp), but I certainly have no plans on retiring.

The elevator speech: I want to earn a respectable income from my home office in Astoria, Oregon without telecommuting.

Yes, you could potentially contract and consult from there (although if I were going to do that game, I’d do it from Ashland or Medford — like, it sometimes seems, half the population of those towns) but that’s not the point. At some point, I know I want to get out of the Silicon Valley rat race and do something else. The question is — what?

I want to emphasize something: this is a long term (3-5 years) thing; in fact for about the last 15 years I’ve been keeping (with more or less intensity) a 3-5 year plan. That’s the first lesson in something like this: planning is good, because it helps you map a path, but it should also be flexible because as you do the planning, you’ll change your mind, new situations come up, the unexpected happens. For me, the planning on the second career wasn’t so much about implementation, but on understanding where I wanted to end up and to influence decisions now that will make it happen someday. And occasionally, after a really bad day at the office, as a way to keep my sense of humor and sanity. Well, okay. My sense of humor.

Now, the day for that second career is closer. I’ve known for a few years roughly what I wanted to aim at here. Various decisions I’ve made over the last couple of years have been driven by this long-term planning. My move of the blog from Typepad back here to chuqui.com was because I knew I wanted total control over my online environment, and I wanted it under my own domain name for branding purposes. I chose Wordpress because I really like that tool as a platform for it’s flexibility and the community ecosystem that exists around it (my second choice, even thought I’ve occasionally described it as sportfishing off of an aircraft carrier, is Drupal, and the drupal community has done a really nice job of cleaning up issues that bothered me back when they couldn’t even run the Drupal site on the Drupal 6 release).

Another decision I made was shutting down the “Two for Elbowing” blog on hockey and de-emphasizing my hockey writing. I did that for a few reasons; originally, that blog was supposed to be for both myself and Laurie to write about hockey (“two for… get it? heh. heh.). Laurie’s life took her in other directions and it turned into a solo gig (although the hockey world is missing out on a damn good hockey geek, and I’m not talking about me); as a solo, I much preferred putting all of my writing into one place (the branding thing) again. Also, think about my long-term goal: moving to Astoria. Building an income around writing about hockey and the Sharks and moving to Astoria conflict. Just a bit. Besides, there are plenty of good hockey writers out there now, and if I was 25 (instead of 50+), I might take a run at doing something like what Rich Hammond is doing with the Kings. Instead, I made a decision to enjoy hockey, not sweat about what to write about it — and I only write when I want to. This is a feature, not a bug.

I’m firmly convinced that what Hammond and the Kings are doing is the future model for journalism in pro sports as the newspaper business continues to evolve and implode. NHL teams that haven’t figured this out yet should take a close look and find a good beat guy to bring on board and nurture. The Sharks could do a lot worse than hiring Dave Pollak and bringing him in-house, for instance. Having been writing about hockey online since before the Sharks existed, I do sometimes wish that the online environment that exists today had existed 15 years ago, but it didn’t. Sometimes timing is everything, and understanding that is a key aspect of designing success into your plans.

To succeed in ANY career path, not just a second career, it’s important to know what NOT to do, what not to sidetrack yourself on, what not to invest time and money in. That may be even more important than knowing what to do, in fact, because that’s how you stay focused and moving in the direction you want to end up.

In any event, this is the first in a series of articles on the idea of a second career and my thoughts and plans. I’m hoping this becomes a conversation, not a lecture; I’m doing this in public both because I hope you find it interesting and learn from it to help refine your own plans and ideas — and because I hope you will help me improve my own ideas and fix the flaws in my thinking and make my own second career success happen as well. I hope you find this interesting and useful; I know I’ll learn from your feedback and comments and end up the better for it. Together, everyone wins — and how can that be bad?

So, onward. The future starts today.

Chuq

Footnote on Astoria: For those not familiar with Astoria, it’s about 2 hours from Portland on the coast, and it’s a very nice, small, homey town, but has some really nice places like the restaurant Baked Alaska and Cellar on 10th that make it more than a small rural town — and it’s well located to a lot of great photographic opportunities). It might not be Astoria (I’m really falling more and more in like with Morro Bay, for instance, and I love the northern Oregon Coast so it could be anywhere from Astoria to Newport…), but that’s a nice placeholder for what I’d like to do.

Small, inviting, not urban, on the coast, lower cost of living but with some nice amenties and close to civilization when I want it. The kind of place most Silicon Valley Geeks seem to wish they lived, unless they’re the hard core urban type. I’m not, but Vancouver tempts me to convert…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Thoughts on the Second Career. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Thoughts on the Second Career

Another followup on my backup article. Google has recently announced the ability to buy online storage at prices dramatically lower than anyone else: 20 gigabytes for $5/year. This kind of pricing would take what I’m currently paying for S3 a month and cover my online backup for the entire year — over a 10X reduction in cost.

That would make online backups very economical, and with a vendor you can trust isn’t going away any time soon.

Only one problem. But it’s a big one.

The rumored “gDisk” product has never been announced, much less made available — this is Google’s version of Apple’s mobileMe iDisk. The only ways to actually use this inexpensive disk space is via gmail (Google’s email system) or Picasa (their photo sharing).

That makes this a non-starter for me. Neither platform is one I’d consider using for backups; the gymnastics needed to make it usable is a killer. So anyone who saw the pricing here and said “wow!” can go back to waiting. But maybe this’ll cause some of the other vendors to start reducing their pricing as well, because you have to believe Google is going to release gDisk sooner or later. Of course, I know people who’ve been expecting it sooner or later for a couple of years now, so maybe we can pull “sooner or” out of that wait loop.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Will google reshape online backups?. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Will google reshape online backups?

An interview I did with Pre101 is now available for your amusement and befuddlement.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Pre101 interviews, um, me.. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Pre101 interviews, um, me.

Just a note to people who get upset when people post “too much” (I know you exist; I hear from you when I get frisky on the blog…) — I’m about to shift gears from a relatively quiet mode to a much less quiet mode. This is a good thing to me. If it’s not to you, I can point you at a dozen blogs to read that haven’t been updated in months…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Warning: blog activity increasing.. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Warning: blog activity increasing.

Western Grebe

Originally uploaded by chuqui

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Western Grebe. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Western Grebe

Morro Bay Harbor

Originally uploaded by chuqui

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Morro Bay Harbor. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Morro Bay Harbor

Common Loon

Originally uploaded by chuqui

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Common Loon. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Common Loon

Common Loon

Originally uploaded by chuqui

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Common Loon. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Common Loon

Dawn on Morro Bay

Originally uploaded by chuqui

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Dawn on Morro Bay. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Dawn on Morro Bay

Sea Otter at Dawn

Originally uploaded by chuqui

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Sea Otter at Dawn. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Sea Otter at Dawn

Morro Rock at Dawn

Originally uploaded by chuqui

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Morro Rock at Dawn. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Morro Rock at Dawn

Orion over Morro Rock

Originally uploaded by chuqui

Shot this morning (very early this morning) at the morro bay harbor

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Orion over Morro Rock. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Orion over Morro Rock

I recently got an interesting email that made my day:

My name is [REDACTED] and I am currently working as a consultant biologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in Kabul, Afghanistan. I hope you don’t mind me writing out of the blue – I received your contact information via the Tree of Life web project and Flickr. com websites, and would like to request your permission to use one of your excellent photographs of the Gazelle species (Gazella subgutturosa) for a WCS/Government educational project in Afghanistan.

In summary, WCS is working with the Government of Afghanistan to list a number of threatened animals and plants on the country’s first Protected Species List.  So far, 33 wild species have been formally declared as Protected, therefore prohibiting any hunting or trading of the species within Afghanistan (see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8091095.stm). One of the species to be likely listed as Protected in the Second round of listing is the Gazella subgutturosa. We are planning to produce a poster to present all these species to the Government and wider public; and it would be fantastic if we could use your photograph to represent this species on the poster (with full copyright details of yourself included). If this would be at all possible and you have the high resolution version available of the attached photograph, or you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to let me know – I would be very happy to send you a picture of the finished poster too if you would like?

Many thanks, in advance, and best regards.

I love being able to help in situations like this, so I reprocessed the photo and sent along a high res version along with my blessings (and formal permission to use); i may only help a little, but it’s great to be able to help at all.

To me, this is an aspect of paying forward; doing stuff that helps others not because of any expectation of a return but because it seemed the right thing to do. It has a nice karmic benefit that if someone doesn’t follow through, you never know, so you’re not disappointed in your fellow mankind — which keeps you from deciding that doing things like this aren’t worth it….

For the curious, here’s the updated version of the photo:

and for the geekily photographic, here’s the previous version I uploaded to Flickr; the changes are fairly subtle, but I think make i a much better image overall.

The real payback for doing these things? Sometimes it’s the knowledge that you can, and that it helps. Maybe in a little way, but the world is a little better because of it. And how do you know it helps?

because sometimes someone sends you an email like this one:

You don’t actually know me–but you’ve been helpful and kind several times to me.

I love the new design at Chuqui 3.0. I’m glad to see you’re at Palm–I’m on my second Palm, a TX, which I wanted just for reading e-books on planes, and ended up using for lots more.

Plaidworks was one of the first places I contacted when a client wanted a Web site, back in the mid 90s. You gave me helpful, friendly, thoughtful advice. Your blog was the second or third one I ever saw, and has been a model that I’ve sent people to over and over.

And you’ve had consistently good advice about email lists and community management.

I hope you and Palm succeed. And I love the bird pictures!

And it’s things like that that leave you grinning for days…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at On Paying Forward. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. On Paying Forward

A couple of quick updates on some recent software updates…

After waiting to see how Snow Leopard worked with others, I decided to take the plunge and update. Overall, the update’s done pretty well for me, with two exceptions:

My home wifi is broken; DNS connectivity fails. There is a fair bit of discussion on this (see here and here), and whether you see it depends on how your upstream DNS is configured; I don’t see it at work, I do see it at home on the DSL line. I’ve solved it (okay, “solved”) by switching to an ethernet cable for now. Hoepfully, Apple will fix this one soon.

I’ve also had Entourage 2004 kill out the entire login environment three times — each while forwarding an email. that’s rather impressive, and yes, I know how out of date Entourage 2004 is… The solution here is to shift to using mail.app for my work (aka outlook) mail, but I haven’t had time to experiment and see how it works. Maybe soon. Until then, it’s more “Doctor, it hurts when I do this!” “Don’t do that!”)

Overall, though, I’m happy with Snow Leopard.

I also upgraded to iPhone 3.1, and count me as one of those lucky travellers who are seeing the random shutdowns. It’s particularly annoying because it tends to shut down when you put it to sleep, and you don’t know that until you try to open it up to check your mail or use an app — and nothing happens. Which means in the meantime, you aren’t getting notifications and phone calls. So I find myself forming a new habit, which is to put it to sleep, then hit the button to bring up the screensaver immediately, just to make sure it actually does. My high point for it turning off was four times in 1 day, but I’ve now gone two days without it shutting down at all — I’ve seen seven or eight overall. Lots of blogs are talking about this, including Engadget.

That one’s a minor annoyance in a way, but it impacts a device like that in a huge way. Here’s hoping they fix it quickly.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Update on some software updates. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Update on some software updates