So, what’s up with me? I basically haven’t been blogging for the past year. The major thing that changed for me was photography. That’s where all my free time goes these days. I started taking black and white photography classes at the Photographic Center Northwest in Fall of 2008. Why then haven’t I been posting photos left and right online? Well, I’m taking film based classes. Yup, old school. It’s been great. Since I work behind a computer all day, plugging a camera into a computer to engage in my hobby became a burden. Working analog has been liberating. For example, I dodge and burn with my hands versus virtual tools in Photoshop. I’ll loop back to digital at some point. But I’m enjoying the old school world too much to care about digital at the moment. It’s also fun doing something that pretty much no one else is doing. I get stopped in the street by people who want to talk about my Leica. Reminds me of the old days as a Mac user. Not unique to be a Mac or iPhone user anymore. I’ll get around scanning some photos at some point. Stay tuned.
Pretty cool, IFC will start streaming on Netflix beginning November 20th. Right now I have a Roku attached to my plasma TV. None of that web browser viewing for me.
“On demand” is definitely the wave of the future. Forget TiVo which pulls down content and stores it locally in you home. Content will live in the “cloud.” Eventually, every movie or TV show will be available this way. Still probably 10 years away from this happening. But there will be huge movement over the next few years.
I’ve decided to migrate my blog to WordPress. It’s been long enough that I’ve been mooching off friends (Buster all the way back in 2003 on his MovableType instance and most recently Bob on the mobileduo domain). Since all the cool kids seem to be on WordPress these days, that’s good enough for me.
On my last blog, I experimented a bit with displaying current books I’m reading, latest albums, Twitter posts, etc. But I found it too much trouble to keep updated. So, for my new blog I selected a clean WordPress template and put just the bare essentials in the sidebar: search, categories, top posts and links to me other places on the Web. The nice thing about a hosted solution is dealing with spam. I had to turn off comments on my old blog. I figure constant attention from WordPress should help deal with comment spam for the most part. Finally, with a hosted solution you get constant goodies released (like widgets) and don’t have to worry about updating your own instance to get them (or pestering Bob in my case)! So, I’m looking forward to the new location for this blog.
Another change in this rev of my blog, I will be no longer be creating posts around pointing readers to interesting links. I do that now through my Twitter feed. Microblogging is a much better vehicle for short bursts of interesting facts to followers. This blog will be focused more on narrative — hopefully original narrative. I’m going to try for a once a week post. Posts will center around technology, the film industry (for those that don’t know, I now work at IMDb), photography and any other topics that fit my fancy.
I have other ideas for blogs but I’m not going to launch those until I actually start blogging again. Stay tuned and hopefully find some of my thoughts interesting and perhaps share a few of your own.
As a few people have been asking me my opinion of the new Apple laptops, so I’m reposting an email note I sent out to a friend. Sums up my opinion in not too many words.
If I were buying a new laptop these days, I’d probably pick up one of the MacBook Airs. I think that’s Apple’s nicest machine. Beautiful display, light and portable. And then I’d likely connect it to an external display for home use. The new 24″ display is pretty cool.
The big problem with the new MacBook Pro is the screen. As soon as I saw the specs I knew their would be a firestorm over the lack of a matte option. Photographers and designers don’t generally like the glossy screens. I predict in the short run, the last rev of MacBook Pros will actually see a slight bump in their used value. And it will delay current Pro users from upgrading for awhile until the community figures out how to deal with it. Also somewhat worrying is the glass screen. If it cracks easier, that will be a disaster for sales. It almost seems to me that you now are required to get Applecare if you buy one of the new machines to protect yourself from a screen failure. Other than that, the track pad looks cool. I like the chicklet style keyboard better than the old one. And the asethics are great (though somewhat conservative in comparison to the Air).
As it’s a v1.0, I’d hold off on buying unless you’re really in need for a new machine.
Yes I’m still alive. Just haven’t been much in a blogging mode. But this YouTube piece on Jobs caught my eye. Over the past year or so, Jobs has gotten a lot of praise for his brilliance as a marketer. I’ve never liked that description of him. Yes, he is great at marketing. But where I think he really excels as a strategist.
In this YouTube video, you’ll see how Job’s brain works. The video is really an internal training piece for NeXT. So, it reveals a lot more details about his thinking than one would usually see in a keynote. But if you watch closely, you’ll see how he takes a very abstract and complex marketplace, the workstation market, and tries to simplify it and turn into easily identifiable segments. From this simplification, he is able to plot a strategy and communicate it to others in a very understandable way. As you watch the piece, compare his breakdown of the workstation market to how he breaks down the consumer and pro market for Apple products. It’s very similar and most importantly, simple. MacBook Pro/MacBook. iPod/iPod Nano. Pro Tower/iMac.
In my opinion, Jobs’ brilliance is not in making us lust to buy something. Though he has great aesthetic sense. His real ability is at taking a 10,000 ft level perspective of a market, breaking into a few basic segments and then targeting those segments with simple and straight forward products.
Oh, and hindsight being 20/20, his strategy was wrong in his presentation. He should have focused on bringing workstations to the masses. His real competitor was Microsoft not Sun. This would have meant a big price cut on NeXT boxes. That many have not been feasible at the time. But it was the only way they could have won big. IMO.
Can never get enough of Calatrava.
Tom Friedman’s latest post on diversity in the United States.
Let’s start with us. Walking through the Olympic Village the other day, here’s what struck me most: the Russian team all looks Russian; the African team all looks African; the Chinese team all looks Chinese; and the American team looks like all of them.
It is amazing that with our Noah’s Ark of an Olympic team doing so well “that at the same time you have this rising call in America to restrict immigration,” said Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International. “Some people want to choke off the very thing that makes us strong and unique.”
Amen.
Got this via Presentation Zen, Ken Burns talks about the power of still photographs. He also tells of his meeting with Steve Jobs where they discuss the using of his name for the Ken Burns Effect. Fun excerpt.
Latest Nike commercial for the games. No one captures the romance and passion of sports better than them. Makes me want to go workout!
Via Joe, I found about this ridiculous event of Seattle riders “protesting” their rite to ride on city streets. King 5 has some video here about an altercation with a local driver during the most recent protest ride. I’m totally embarrassed for all my fellow cyclists in the city. I’ve road Ride of Silence before which I think is a positive event–to honor riders that have been killed by bike/car accidents and bring attention for drivers to pay closer attention to cyclists on the road. But Critical Mass seems like overkill (too much protesting for little likely gain). Politically, I’d be surprised if the City of Seattle pays attention to this sort of a group.
I’ve been commuting for years and never felt like someone was denying my right to share the road. Yes some drivers get way to close to me and sometimes flip me off because I’ve slowed them down by 2 seconds. But for the most part, every year more and more people start riding and more bike lanes get built.
