Over thanksgiving, my brother loaned me a Nikon D100. This is my first foray into digital photography beyond using my shoephone's camera to take blurry snapshots of strange supermarket items.
Sending photos to Flickr, I'm finding I'm going to exceed the limits of their free-ride accounts. My first thought was "oh, I should go FlickrPro". Then I decided to check out some other services before I go about spending money.
Currently I'm checking out SmugMug.
So far, I like the slideshow feature. I think I like the themeability, but then again, I reckon I just want a Flickr theme. I like the fact I can have multiple galleries. The downside to multiple galleries, though, is I no longer have just "my flickr," but rather "my foo gallery on my smugmug." Flickr's concepts of sets as pulling from a global gallery as an organizational tool may make more sense in the long run. It's not about what gallery a photo lives in, but which collection(s) the photographer has chosen to display it in.
Of course, as my wife said, "but everyone else is on Flickr".
Just heard Diamond (link to mp3) by Bootcut ("The World's Greatest Hammond and Drums Duo") on the radio this afternoon, and thankfully they're progressive enough to have quite a handful of free MP3s available on their site. They are definitely in the general style of Medeski, Martin Wood or the Benevento/Russo Duo, but seem slightly more traditional (ie, less masturbatory) in their arrangements.
Check'em out.
This evening, sitting around talking to Jeff and Rebecca, telling stories, the idea of "half my life ago" came up repeatedly.
We were listening to And I Feel Fine: The Best of the IRS Years 1982-1987, the collection of the best years of REM. I recalled how one particular girl in my science class mentioned she had "that Rem album" and how event that marked the beginning of the end for REM, in my mind. Until that moment, REM was the poster-child for "alternative music." With Green, they'd become simply radio stars.
I then realized that this all occurred just about half my life ago. I did about as much living before that moment as I have since it.
So I decided to burn this evening into my brain as a new half-way point. Tonight will be the night I remember when I'm 66 (in 2039), thinking about where I was half my life ago.
Wow.
I'm finally home after a trip to San Francisco to meet my co-workers. It truly was surreal, in that I've been working for The Job for about a year, and had never met a co-worker, aside from Pete. When I joined, the team was 3 other people, and we were all in different states. New York. North Carolina. Michigan, California.
Now we are 18.
This is the first funded startup I've been a part of, and it's been fun to watch the growth of a company. I think we've assembled an excellent team of talented individuals. It certainly is a rather eclectic group (no, the children are not employees).
It is somewhat strange being the odd-man-out, clear across the country. This trip through, to finally meet everyone, helped solidify the realness of it all. When everyone is in different states, you've got a hip distributed team. When there's just one guy in the hills near the moonshine shack, he's just a remote worker . Ultimately, I wouldn't trade my grits and banjos for the world, and am grateful that an organization such as Radar is jiggy enough to keep a hillbilly round. But while proximity doesn't matter to Subversion or Jabber, we are all humans, and faces do matter.
I'd like to travel out there more often, and I aim to finally locate and hook up the iSight.
The point to this post? Technology allows you to never actually meet humans, but I wouldn't recommend it.
I was tagged by Paul.