Occasional Comment

I’m back. I have been off expanding my horizons with techniques gleaned from Julia Cameron’s excellent book, The Artist’s Way, among others. I found out about the book when I stumbled across an interesting website, http://750words.com/. It turns out that three pages of handwritten text comes out to seven hundred and fifty words. The web site keeps track of how many words you write, as you write them and rewards you with cute graphic badges when you meet various milestones. I started out writing to earn the badges and discovered that writing every morning helped clear my mind and improved my productivity all day long.

I also got my iPad on April 30th. I have spent the last month integrating it into my daily life. It has changed many aspects of my life so far and I expect it to continue to change it. I am discovering so many ways to use it. I am composing this post on it using an application called Captain’s Blog. It is a whimsical mock-up of the Star Trek the Next Generation computer interface. I have found a number of apps that allow me to draw diagrams, take notes, play games, make music, read ebooks, and much more. I don’t know how I managed without it. It, along with the announcement of the iPhone 4, has convinced me to leave Verizon for AT&T in spite of their coverage problems and poor customer service reputation.

My father was an avid amateur photographer. He owned a 35mm camera for as long as I can remember. He preferred taking slides and had box after box of them in his office. After he died, they inadvertently got disposed of before I had a chance to salvage them. I mourn the loss of that record of my childhood.

Being a photographer back then required a lot more effort than it does today. There were Polaroids and Kodak Instamatic cameras that made it easier to take pictures but even so, you had to wait for the shot to be developed to see if you got the picture you wanted. In the case of the Polaroid, the feedback was fairly fast, but with more conventional cameras it usually took days or weeks to get your prints back to see what you got.

In the case of the 35mm camera, my dad’s camera of choice, you had to decide what film stock you were going to use; color or black and white; what sensitivity to light (expressed in ISO number); what color balance. You had to measure the light illuminating your subject using a light meter. You had to balance the factors of exposure time (shutter speed), aperture size (f-stop), and the focal length of the lens. An amateur photographer had to be fairly well versed in the mechanics and chemistry of photography in order to be able to hope to capture his vision in a photograph.

Then there was the artistic side of things. Once you knew the details of how to take a picture, you had to learn how to compose a photograph. My college photography professor advised taking a lot of pictures. He said that you had to pay attention to what you did and the results that you got from doing it. This turned out to be hard to do,  given the lag between taking the pictures and getting them developed. It was also fairly expensive even when you bulk loaded your own film cartridges and developed your own film. Then there was the print stock that you printed your pictures on and the enlarger you had to learn to manipulate. That goes a long way toward explaining my dad’s preference for slides. There, the film that came out of the camera was the final product. No printing involved. Of course that meant that what you shot was what you got.

Contrast this with the state of photography today. We have at this point exceeded the quality of 35mm film with the current line of SLR cameras. We can immediately look at the shot to see if we got what we wanted. And with the cost and size of memory cards, we can take thousands of shots without having to worry about changing media. We can even take HD video with many current SLRs.

I wonder how this affects our attitude toward photography? There are still plenty of artists that express themselves through photography. This is evident even after just a few minutes browsing photo.net or flickr. The mental processes are still as hard to develop though. Even with all the automation available in the current cameras you still have to be able to see what you are looking at and select the image that you want to capture.

Of course now, with Photoshop and Gimp and the other photo manipulation tools available to us, what you shoot is not necessarily what you get. You have an even greater latitude for creative expression than the darkroom ever provided. Will this raise the standard of excellence for photography in the future? I hope so. And I hope to have more time to make pictures in that future.

How has the world changed in the past ten years?

• Cell phones have become ubiquitous.
• Everyone is on the internet.
• Broadcast TV has shifted from analog to digital.
• High speed access to the internet is available everywhere.
• Many people think of the library as somewhere to go to use a computer.
• Wikipedia has become a creditable research resource.
• There are working prototypes of flying cars (horizontal fan style).
• We survived the Y2K scare.
• We survived a major terrorist attack.
• We survived 8 years of the Bush administration.
• The DVR has freed people to watch what they want when they want to watch it (without the commercials if they like).
• Dynamic languages are making a strong comeback.
• Hybrid gas-electric cars are a fairly large segment of the automobile market.
• The space shuttle is near end of life, as is the International Space Station.
• We have a black president.
• We are experiencing climate change unprecedented in modern times.
• I am a grandfather.

So much for the short list. I may revisit the question in a couple of days if I think of any important changes that I forgot.

I read David Gelernter’s The Second Coming — A Manifesto today. I agreed with most of what he said and even when I didn’t agree with a specific prediction he made, I agreed with the motivation behind it. I’ve been saying for a long time that the desktop metaphor was unnecessarily constraining. It is fine if what you are trying to do is mimic the operation of a pre-computer office. The problem is that nobody wants to mimic the operation of a pre-computer office. The computer has changed everybody’s expectations of how an office should run.

I have been telling people that the future of computers would be based on constantly shifting clusters of computers, for example, if you walk into a room and you have a small hand held computer with you, it will form an ad hoc federation with the input and output devices in the room. If there is a display on the wall, your computer will associate with it. If there is a camera in the room, your computer will use it to watch you and look for you to make gestures to tell it what you want it to do. As Gelernter says, the focus will shift from the computer and the programs to what you want to accomplish.

I also agree with the indictment he makes of computer users for putting up with such horrible software without even complaining about it. I think the reason for this is that the average person doesn’t know how bad things are or how good they could be. There is a conspiracy between the people that understand computers to keep the people who don’t in the dark about what might be done with a little imagination.

All in all, the Manifesto is a great read. It inspired me to rethink my attitude toward software development. It helped me imagine the emergence of artificial intelligence just any day now. Go read it! Now! I’ll wait for you.

I started writing every night. I set a time, 10:00pm until 10:30pm, as a minimum time. I was inspired to do this by Gladwell’s observation that it takes 10,000 hours to learn to do something well. I believe in practice. I have recently discovered that an important component of practice is to make sure that you are practicing the correct way of doing something, else you will learn to do it incorrectly. I suppose that matters less when it comes to writing. I have never heard of a right or wrong way to write. Perhaps that is because, it is so difficult to write anything substantial that it is a miracle if you write anything at all.

I have so many projects in progress that it is difficult to keep them all moving. I am doing better than I have in the past though. I think that my nightly writing discipline may help me develop some blogging discipline. I’m an eternal optimist, aren’t I? I have noticed a pattern to my writing though. I seem to spend most of my time writing about writing. That is something that I need to work on changing.

I’m using OpenOffice to write at home on my MacBook. I have given up trying to write using emacs. I’m not sure why but I end up spending too much time thinking about the structure of the document, for example, placement of line breaks, etc., when I use emacs. When I use a conventional word processor, I just take the defaults and type.

I hope this works the way I think it should. I have never posted anything from my Blackberry using the WordPress web form interface. It is time consuming to type using the BB keyboard but it does allow me to post at times and in places that were not viable before now. This post is going to be short so that if it doesn’t work, I haven’t lost much.

Quick update: I was able to save a draft of this post but I couldn’t figure out how to publish it without using a “real” browser. Still useful. And maybe I’ll figure out how to publish from the BB with a little more effort.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately. With the current state of my bank account, thinking is a very inexpensive pastime. I’ve reached a point where I know quite a lot about myself, my profession and living in general. What I’m still trying to come to terms with is translating what I know into action. I’ve also had problems reconciling what I know with what I feel. My psychologist tells me that is because the limbic system takes much longer to achieve stability than the frontal cortex does. This means when you’re angry, you stay angry long after you’ve resolved the issues that made you angry in the first place. I suppose there was probably some kind of survival benefit of this at one time but it doesn’t seem to be nearly as useful in the modern world.

I am approaching a time when I can take early retirement from my job and draw a pension large enough to pay most of my bills. I’m too young, IMHO, to consider really retiring, as in quitting work and living the life of Riley. I don’t think I’ll ever really want to retire in that sense. Instead, I am considering what I want to do now that salary is not a major consideration. I have been thinking about what I enjoy doing most as well as what I can contribute to the world. I still haven’t achieved my initial goal of financial independence. I really don’t want to be rich. I just want to have enough money so that money is not hampering me from doing whatever it is I want to do. Perhaps that is at the core of why I am not financially independent yet .

Whatever I decide to do, I have this gut feeling that blogging is going to be part of it. Blogging is a way of getting your thoughts out where you can see them and doing it in a public forum helps keep you honest with yourself. I need to get in the habit of writing something here every day. It doesn’t have to be big, just regular.

I downloaded the brand new, fresh out of beta, version 2.0 of Flock. I’ll have to try it on the MacBook at home tonight. It looks like they have improved it somewhat. Give it a try if you’re in to social networking. I’m going to explore the RSS reader capabilities tonight myself. I think the drag and drop photo uploading is going to be useful too.

I will be blogging a little more frequently now. I’m doing an experiment in therapeutic writing. If I express myself here in writing, maybe it will help me work through issues and relieve some of my stress.

Tags: tech-tip, ramble, flock, rss

I love my MacBook but I spend all day every day that I go to work using the Dell PC laptop that my company provides me. It seems ironic to me that I have to endure the frustrations inherent in using Windows XP when I know there is a better way. I know that there are people that love Windows. My good friend, Jim is one of them. I just have a different opinion. I’m not a fanatic, just a satisfied user. I like other Unix based operating systems almost as much as I do OS X. As time goes by and all the operating systems improve (we’ll ignore Vista as an anomoly), it is getting less important than it once was. I guess I feel about my computer the way car lovers feel about their cars.

There are lots of features of my computer that I haven’t had time to discover yet. I am a professional programmer but I barely know the basic components of the OS X programming libraries. I also want to learn Objective C, one of the core programming languages on the Mac. The Ruby scripting language is another topic I’d like to explore more deeply but I rarely have time to play with it. From the little that I’ve been able to use the development tools on the Mac I’m convinced that they are far superior to any other tools that I’ve used on other platforms.

Another thing that I want to use my computer for more often is to write. I have several ideas for screenplays. I like to blog, as you can tell if you are reading this. I also think I have a novel and maybe a few textbooks that I want to write. I just installed Dave Winer‘s OPML editor on my MacBook and I’m using its WordPress tool to write this blog post. I’m trying to exercise some discipline and write something every day. I’m hoping that the OPML editor will help with this.

I went to the Huntsville, Alabama Hamfest on Saturday. I walked from around 10:00am until after 1:30pm. My feet were sore. I didn’t buy much. I bought an RCA Victor stuffed Dalmation for Riley and a bamboo cutting board for Pam. I bought me a little dual band (2m and 70cm) mag mount antenna with an SMA connector. It worked great. I got ready to go to work this morning and discovered that the main radiator had come loose and fallen off the antenna sometime since Saturday. I was angry and sad.

Also, this morning the sherrif was outside my neighbors house with a bull horn telling her to come out or call them on the phone and tell them her side of the story. Pam called later to say that she had come out of the house and gotten in the police car without handcuffs and of her own volition. We’re worried about her dog. We’ll call the sherrif’s office later and see if arrangements have been made.

I’m anxious about my trip to Huntington Beach this week. It’s not that I’m afraid of flying or anything. It’s just that flying to the west coast exhausts me. I have apnea and so I have to carry a CPAP machine with me. I can’t sleep without it so I  refuse to check it. I also have to carry a laptop to do my job while I’m there. The laptop the company provides me is a Dell M70 that weighs in at over 7 lbs. I am really excited about the training that is the reason that I’m going. I’m just dreading the travel process.

If any one is actually reading this, drop me an email. I am jkelliemiller at gmail dot com (you know the drill). I’d love to hear from you. Or comment here. Comments are moderated so it may take a little while for your comment to be approved. But I do read all the comments (even the spam).