I Make Things Go
The debaters are professionals, representing curiously consanguine divisions of the large corporation, yet the argument is over one of the more basic questions of life: Is the reward worth the risk?
That’s not how they’re framing the question though. Instead it was a conflict of perspective. Lost opportunity versus bad opportunity. Weirdly enough, the debate gave me a bit of an insight into personal branding.
Posted in life.
– 2011-10-23
“The concert was amazing,” the paragraph starts and already I’m second guessing because I don’t think I’ve said much if anything about the fact that I was going to a concert and that means I’m starting from the end without knowing just how far back to how much of a beginning that I need to begin with in order for this ending to make sense.
The concert was amazing, and as much as I wanted to get home afterward, I needed to walk a few blocks before the energy settled down enough that I could let go of the moment and fit inside my own skin.
– 2011-06-09
When you get right down to it, an Archnemesis is a hell of a lot like a little brother. Not that I have any siblings. (Anymore! [evil laugh goes here]) But then I don’t have an Archnemesis anymore either, so accept that I may be more qualified to speak on this than I might initially appear.
After all, I come from a large family so I have some exposure to the "sibling" syndrome, where you suddenly go from master of your sandbox to "Can you keep an eye on Billy while we run out to the store?" And don’t confuse this with any lack of faith in the capable malevolence of my younger kind, because what I’m talking about is purely that state where you’re both young but there’s a big age gap. Which is how your plan to finish beating the stuffing out of your opponents in a computer game gives way to wearing a wicker hat and sipping imaginary tea with Barbie and your little cousin Alice.
Posted in life, photography, rants.
– 2011-06-01
I’ve been on top of my newsreader for about 4 years now, despite the rapid increases in content, and the decreases in my free time. Sure, every once in a while, work or life would interrupt and I’d fall behind, but with some judicious resetting, I was always able to catch up. Until this year where I just stopped. I just didn’t have enough time or energy, and the onslaught of thousands upon thousands of new articles day by day made it impossible to keep up.
So I let go. I accepted that my Google reader unread count was at 1000+ (the most unread it’ll admit to) and that most of my feeds were close to or well past that mark as well. I took my fingers off the pulse of the world.
Posted in productivity.
– 2011-05-26
I got home from work Monday night tired and hungry, and with my mind filled with questions about just what snack I was going to have. To my surprise, there was another package I’d forgotten about, and this one was full of goodness. And not just because I suddenly knew what my snack was going to be.
Posted in books.
– 2011-05-17
Just to try something different, I’m going to start with the punchline. I’ve got a bunch of APS film canisters and I’d like to scan them. There are various options available to me, but in the end, I’ve decided that I’d like to see if I can rig a homebrew film scanner.
The rest of this post is just about…
I’ve only been comfortable calling myself a photographer for the last few years. But I’ve loved photography since my childhood. Like many folks, I took the classes in high school and got to develop prints on paper. (Unlike many folks, I’ve also used the same techniques to create circuit boards from copper-clad sheets). And during school and since, I’ve always been quite happy to wield a camera.
As for most people, digital was a gamechanger. Being freed of both the cost and the time of developing film really left me free to discover just how much I enjoyed taking pictures, and by taking so many, I really started to learn what I was actually doing. But before I went digital, I got hoodwinked by brochures promising the future.
Posted in photography.
– 2011-04-13
The question of what to do with this blog has come up before. A few months ago, an old friend and I were in the middle of our typical banter when the conversation turned to nameplate websites and privacy and Google. My friend is a private guy, and like me, he’s put careful effort into staying off the Google radar and is pleased by his success. Me, my view changed a few years back. And to spare you my attempt on a lecture about the evolution of human society in the next century, instead I’ll tell you about a Batman comic.
Posted in me.
– 2011-04-06
We lost a family friend a few weeks ago. My mother and him were neighbors as kids, and then they grew up and started lives in Canada. For me, he was an uncle; I didn’t know we weren’t related till much later. He was family, and his two sons were fondly welcome playmates growing up. We were children together and grew into teenaged geeks together.
But life happens, of course, and university and careers swept us across the world on the wind. At this point we’ve mostly been out of touch for years. And it took this loss to draw our threads once again briefly together.
I don’t like funerals. Not that anybody does, but I still feel the need to say so. On the other hand, I think those are important. Of all the major moments that we mark with ceremony, they’re the only one that is based in loss and not celebration. And they’re the only one where the featured guest at best only half the point. But you go because the person who passed away was important. And you go because the people left behind are important. Either way, I had to be there.
– 2011-03-31
That’s right. I love boxes. You have a problem with that?
In fact, it’s not just boxes that I like, but tins (*LOVE*), pouches, bags, blister packs (Most of them are outright evil, I usually hit a well-designed one just before I reach the homicidal stage of accumulated frustration).
It’s gone beyond the childhood magic of being able to play inside them. Which is good since I don’t fit inside the box for my bluetooth headset. But even if they aren’t viable as fortresses or spaceships any more, they are still magnificent articles of function and design.
For functional value, you can’t beat a box. It packages whatever original item you got that the box contains. Small ones can help to organize the litle doodads that seem to magically breed on my desk. Larger ones become storage for cables, or pencils. Shoeboxes store photos or cards or pens.
Posted in life, productivity.
– 2010-08-23
Yes. But, Be Careful.
I killed a computer that way.
USB is designed to let you use 127 devices per controller, and most computers have one controller per port. Which means that hooking up 2 drives (or more) isn’t going to be a problem for your operating system. Most of the time.
– 2010-03-16
