Category — Administriva

I’m on Twitter now. Yeah! (I guess).

We got back yesterday from our week in Mexico and I’m slowly getting into the swing of things again. This was my first major vacation since leaving Microsoft on the one stark major difference was the amount of email waiting for me. I clearly remember taking a week off at Microsoft and coming back to easily 2000 plus unread emails, this time when I powered up the phone upon clearing customs and let it sync I had maybe 180 total across my three email accounts.  Nice. Either that, or I’m a total loser now and no one wants to talk to me.

Naturally, everyone asks how was the vacation, to which I respond, “As relaxing as it can be with a 5 year old and an 18 month old.”  All-in-all, I had a good time and wouldn’t trade the time spent with my family for anything else, but it was definitely one of those vacations where you feel like you need a vacation after it.

I haven’t even thought about going through pictures yet. I did manage to shoot a roll of B&W with the film camera and filled a couple memory cards. I also have at least one shot per day for Project 365, and a bunch more to fill out my Flickr stream, so stay tuned.  One nice photo surprise was waiting on my desk when I got back:

One of my co-workers who used to do wedding photography with his father found this in his basement.  It is a Mamiya Super 23. You can’t tell from my crappy camera phone picture, but it has a 6×9 back on it that will hold either 120 or 220 film. I don’t get to keep it, but I do get to run a roll or two through it, which should be fun, especially since it seems like spring is finally arriving here in Southeast Wisconsin.

Nonetheless, I hope to be back posting Project 365 images over the next day or so, and back to posting non-photo entries as well, so stay tuned.

I know you, the masses, have been waiting eagerly for updates here and I owe you, dear reader, an explanation.  Quite honestly, I’ve gotten busy at work, and while I keep snapping photos, Flickr is all borked right now and uploads aren’t working.  Hang tight, there will be more.

I realized today as I was queuing up photos for the project and I’ve been at it for two months.  Go me!  I’m not going to lie and say its been easy - its amazing how the inspiration ebbs and flows.  I first I worried I was shooting my kids too much, but then I was reminded of something a co-worker at Microsoft once told me, “You’ll never look back and say to yourself, ‘Dang, I took too many pictures of the kids.’” and besides, the project is for me first, so if you stick around you too can get tired of my kids (and I can watch my Feedburner count plummet).

A couple guaranteed shots coming up?  The youngest turns 18 mos this week, so I’ve been tasked with a formal portrait.  I bought myself sometime by tasking Mom with wardrobe duty while I think of how I’m going to shoot it.  We are also heading to sunnier climes later this month, so expect gratuitous beach shots.

Either way, thanks for reading this far. This whole blog thing is still fun, so I’ll continue to keep it up.

While the Holidays were nice, it is nice to try and settle back into a routine, or at least have the prospect of doing so. I know the time for reflecting on the past year is supposed to take place in December, but I’ve been pretty much offline since before Christmas, so I’m a bit late.

Last Year’s Resolutions

Looking back to my list from last year, I hit 50% of my goals.  I ran in not one, but two marathons, and finished one of them.  I also managed to post a whole lot more here in one year than I did in the whole time I had my blog on MSDN. I hit somewhere over 200 posts last year (I’m too lazy to count), but still don’t really have a direction for the blog, which still suits me fine for the time being. (I looked the other day and they finally shut me out of my MSDN site.  Up until about July I still had edit access. )

Where did I miss?  I only read maybe two works of fiction last year - Angels and Demons as I mentioned in my post, and The Hobbit.  So much else  took my attention that I’m not sad I didn’t meet this goal. 

I also didn’t update my MCSD.  This goal was probably a result of my Koolaid hangover from working at Microsoft so long.  While I did do quite a bit of actual software development (my primary reason for leaving), I also opened my eyes to the world outside of Microsoft.  While I’m still focused on ASP.NET development, I’ve dabbled a bit in PHP, mainly in helping to maintain WMSE.org.

What About This Year

Toward the end of last year, I read a great post by Christine Kane on a better way to set goals for the New Year.  I don’t know where along the way I added her to my Google Reader feedlist, but she doesn’t write that often and when she does it’s usually insightful, so she’s stayed through a lot of the purging that I do when I find myself dedicating to much time to reading RSS feeds.

Christine points out that typical New Year’s resolutions have  a DO-HAVE-BE model, “I will DO this thing. So I can HAVE this thing and I can BE this thing.” She turns it on its head and says to start at BE.  Pick one word to guide you through the year and let your actions come from that.

So I’m choosing the word “healthy.”  If I got to pick two words, the second would probably be “balance” but that would be partly in support of the first.  While I ran a ton last year, and got in pretty good shape from it, I think it was at the expense of a lot of other healthy routines I had.  Plus, since the marathon, I’ve been running a lot less (”a lot less” meaning zero.)  Hopefully I can strike a balance and improve my health this year, both mental and physical.

Photography

One thing I thought was my list last year but isn’t, was to make some money with my camera.  I did manage to do that.  In September I got the first five star rating from the Popular Photography editors on their PopPhoto Flash blog and my image made it into a web exclusive article. Sadly, that didn’t net me any money, but it did give me some confidence to become a professional photographer, at least part-time.

While I haven’t sold any of my stock photography yet, I did do several portrait sessions and sold some prints.  Below are some shots from that:

I’m going to keep at the photography, too.  Try as I might, I can’t bend “healthy” into that endeavor, but do have one straight-up New Year’s resolution.  I’m going to take at least one picture everyday for the whole year and post it up for critique.  Not an original by far, but one that sounds challenging.  I haven’t figured out where I’m going to host the project, maybe Flickr, maybe here.  I’ve got my shot for yesterday, and will get my shot for today. 

Once I have a home for the project, I’ll put up a link here.

Thanks for sticking with me on this huge post.  It grew bigger than I planned.  Thanks also for stopping by my site.  Feedburner still tells me I’ve got dozens of subscribers, and the logs say I still get a fair amount of traffic on the site itself.

I hope you all stick around to see what this year brings.

Quick exercise for you, dear reader.  Go to the UK Google:

www.google.co.uk

Enter, "i’ve never heard of led zeppelin" and hit "I’m feeling lucky."  I’ll wait for you to get back.

Short trip, right?  Like a good narcissistic blogger, I was looking through my referral logs and saw a weird hit from Google UK.  Evidentially the Brits don’t think I’ve heard of Led Zeppelin.

Over on Writer Zone, they make it official - Windows Live Write is out of Beta and is now Windows Live Writer 2008 (even after making fun of themselves, Microsoft continues with the lame product names.)

Dumb name aside, if you have a blog and are running Windows, this tool make it dead simple to post.  There is also a pretty good plugin community out there - I use the Flickr plugin a lot as well as a code formating plugin (which I don’t seem to be using as much these days.)

This week is a taper week for me - 9 miles. Weather looks like it will be perfect.I’ll probably do ten since I’ve found a route I really like. It still floors me sometimes that I can look at ten miles so flippantly.

Beyond that, don’t expect many updates here. We’re off to a friends place on Wind Lake for a little R&R and maybe down to Chicago for a family picnic. To top that off, I think we may start painting yet another room in the house. I’ve also got some prints to order for a client (my first paying photo gig!)

In sad news, I wanted the commemorative New Balance Jacket for the marathon though I felt a bit guilty since I still haven’t run it yet. I got it last week and while it was really nice, like most clothing for me, the sleeves are way too short, so it went back yesterday. I still want to get a decent high-performance jacket for when the weather gets colder. I’ve grown to love running outside too much to seriously consider spending all winter on a treadmill. I remember trying one on at REI last year, so I might start there. I just wish I could remember who made it.

So after almost three years, I got myself a new phone - my brand spankin’ new Samsung Blackjack arrived last night (I just looked, I got the old phone in October of 2004).  So far, I can’t get the Bluetooth to pair with my Acura TL’s Hands Free Link.  According to Acura, it may not be compatible, but I’m not buying it.  My old Audiovox 5600 wasn’t on that list either and it worked like a champ.

[No, I didn't rush out to get the iPhone. No matter how sexy, I couldn't justify the cost.  The Blackjack cost me less than $100 and does all I'd use the iPhone for to boot.]

I’d pretty much been wanting one for a while, but Microsoft bought me exactly one phone in the six and a half years I was there (even though they required me to carry one) and I left right when they were looking like they were going to buy me another.  Forced foot the bill for myself, I was a little hesitant.  I was also on a rate plan I didn’t need anymore - I don’t talk on the phone as much as  I used to.  Switching rate plans required a new two-year agreement, so I figured if I was going to have to sign a new agreement, I might as well get a new phone out of the deal.

So far, I like the form factor.  I forgot the specialized data cable at home, so setting the thing up all the way will have to wait. I do have it doing POP3 email for my photography address just fine. I also ordered a memory card for the thing so I can puts some apps on it (like Live Search, Google Maps, and after reading Omar Shahine’s take on doing GTD with it - Smarter Tasks).  With the Audiovox, installing apps really required a memory card otherwise you’d kill the performance of the phone.  I’m sure WM5 and Samsung have address some of that, but better safe then sorry.  Given I paid $70 for the 1G mini-SD for the 5600, the $24 for the micro SD card seems like a steal.

Got a can’t live without app for a Windows Smartphone?  Let me know.

I once had a co-worker say, “You know it was a good vacation when you feel like you need a vacation after it.”  We just got back from a week in the Outer Banks or North Carolina.  This was our first trip there, and our first trip to the Mid-Atlantic region in general.  We rented a house with the extended family and would definitely do it again.

One of the joys of my new job is less e-mail.  Gone are the days at Microsoft of 1000’s of emails a day (and, no, that is not an exaggeration.)  Granted you got pretty good at Outlook folder rules, but a weeks vacation would usually yield 600 or more items in the inbox.  This time, less than 125, most of which were dispatched quite quickly.

The most interesting was an email from a childhood friend I’d been trying to look up for some time.  I’d Googled his name a few times in the past, but never found much contact information or anything that led me to believe he was the same dude I knew from back in the day.  Turns out he was doing the very same thing and finally found me via my Photography Business.  I fired off an email to him last night.  It’ll be cool to catch up, as we spent most of our lives up through high-school together.

In case you care, I’m going to be tweaking the site a bit which will probably result in it being unavailable from time to time.