Maybe you are like me and you’re pondering whether or not you should get the new 3G iPhone next week.

And maybe, like me, you like most of the features of the 3G iPhone and are starting to get cozy with the feature-to-price ratio of the phone. However maybe, like me, you really wish they would fix the lousy camera, the lack of internal video recording support, and the slow typing (fixable if you could turn the keyboard horizontal).

Despite the few shortcomings, you like me, don’t really care about the price of the phone itself, but the very pricey AT&T service. And in a perfect world, you like me, wish you could buy the phone separate of the service and pretend you live in a world were that is cool. Read the rest of this entry »

I just spend 3 days writting 13 lines of code.

Well not actually. It started out as 60+ then I widdled away, making it more efficient and faster, and finally I ended up with 13. It’s a pretty complicated little chunk of code. Very generic and highly flexible. It’s got parallel dictionaries and arrays, sorting algorithms and nested for-loops. And in the end it doesn’t touch the database more than it needs to (a good thing). But you don’t care about that.

Basically I’m quite proud of myself. I was looking around for a high five, but I wrote this instead.

I’ve been watching the live video stream from the National Press Photographers Association’s board meeting all day and I kind of feel the need to take a shower.

It is full of politics. Bylaws, committees and ‘future’ talk which you kind of feel will never be implemented. But hey that is politics.

But then I hear, “Can we do any worse?”. And then all of a sudden I could breathe, for once.

There’s something great about streaming the board meeting live. For an organization as large as the NPPA is, it is nice to see the wizard(s) behind the curtain in a time of disbelief and complacency.

It is nice to see there is someone at the helm. It is nice to see that people are conversing and actually talking about the problems of the organization. Because lets face it, the organization has lots of problems. Or in their words…

“We haven’t done a great job at this organization. Let’s be honest”

“We have the inmates running the asylum …our craft isn’t running a non-profit organization.”

Jim Sulley NPPA Treasurer

But this is politics, and therefore it’s ugly. I don’t blame the people running the show, it’s just easier to attack the faceless organization. And this is the problem.

For the most part the board is talking community. The membership is whinnying, the organization is slow to react and people are thinking of jumping ship. The community is fragmented. And that’s understandable. The organization is very very large and is spread out all over the world. Oh yeah and it is non-profit (i.e. little motivation?).

Sulley said it best above that the craft of the members in charge are not organizational leaders by nature. They are professional photographers.

But then again a few days ago I read this article on quiting the NPPA. If you are a photographer of any kind you should read it as well (including comments). The questions being raised by the author are nothing short of some of the laundry list of complaints that are dancing around on everyone’s head the last few years. Mainly, what is the NPPA doing for me?

The biggest issue is perhaps the lack of community, at least in feel. With over 10,000 members you think there would be something, anything resembling the loud yammerings of a crowd of photographers. But this is all absent. Not even a whisper.

The crime, is the NPPA doesn’t facilitate such conversation. The crime is there is no community. What good is an organization that doesn’t support community?

The only talk seems to only happen at conferences for members and board members alike.

I’m not exactly offering any answers here, perhaps that is for a later post, but I want to make sure the conversation is out there. The board is talking right now about huge changes. Name changes, region restructuring and new rules for board members. These are drastic changes. Maybe they have been discussed before but I wouldn’t have ever known that before this year’s live stream.

As a member, this post is my talk. Members need to talk as well. Is the NPPA worth saving for instance? Can the board make the right decisions, or should members step up?

Honestly these conversations are going to directly effect whether I renew my $110 membership this year. Personally I’m asking myself all of these questions, and many more.

But I will say that before this live stream, I all but wrote off renewing. Through this live stream the board have put a face on the NPPA and have demonstrated that there is progress trying to be made.

This is important regardless of the progress being made. It instills trust and builds support for the leadership and the organization. It demonstrates community and contradicts the feeling that the members are all alone. Efforts like this are a step in the right direction and even a slight tease of community like this live stream just may save my membership and all of the NPPA.

After some late dinner I caught the last showing of Iron Man Sunday night. I don’t quite want to give it a review, but I will say it was nothing short of a good time. I enjoyed the movie very much. It was that zany comic book world without being as boring as Spiderman. Yes I hate the Spiderman movies, all of them. Deal with it.

Iron Man struck me on many levels as something worth my 8 bucks. First off, Hollywood only seems to be making a few movies that really require the ‘theater’ atmosphere. You know big screen, big sound and annoying people whispering behind you. These are all good movie theater experiences. Iron Man, as most scifi / fantasy movies really thrive on the theater experience. In fact the movie was too loud. Someone rocked the theater by turning the volume level to 11. Honestly I didn’t mind. When was the last time the movie was to loud, usually it seems the other way for me.

Plot aside, because I care not how accurate it was to the comic or anything like that, the movie appeals to my sense of engineering. Tony Stark played by Robert Downey Jr. (which was say 80% why I wanted to see the movie), builds all kinds of cool stuff in this movie, most notably the Iron Man suit itself. However there are lots of cool toys and tools in which he does so with. It’s like when you watch Minority Report but it doesn’t feel like the director is looking down his nose at you with all his fancy technology. Instead, the technology in Iron Man feels more realistic, even though it is perhaps farther off than the tech in Minority Report.

So what’s cool about the movie is the inspiration factor. Who cares if the technology doesn’t exist. It feels right. This isn’t technology for show (Minority Report) this is technology as a tool.

• Minority Report obviously inspires large multi touch screens (cool).
• Iron Man inspires small power sources, robotics and holographic CAD programs (very cool)
• Spiderman inspires shooting jizz out of your hand. (not cool)

I am not alone in this spark of inspiration stuff. A blog I regularly frequent known as Hack a Day asked its readers for their inspiration from the movie. If you aren’t familiar with Hack a Day, it is a cool blog that is like Macgyver’s blog but driven by a community. The hacks on this blog do often emulate movies and I don’t think it would be that far fetched to see a post in the future on Iron Man realities. They’ve already presented some spin offs from X-Men, (i.e. The Mechanical engineering student who made a Pyro device for his final project).

Sidenote: AOL bought the blog a few years ago but has not at the time of writing managed to totally screw it up like everything else it touches. Yet.

So go watch Iron Man. Go enjoy it. Then wait two years for the sequel April 30th 2010.

Can’t wait? Then watch The Incredible Hulk (June 13, 2008), X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), Thor (2010), Captain America (2011), and The Avengers (2011).

Yeah, they’re working on some more.

It comes down to this. Much like Batman (The Dark Knight starts July 18, 2008), Iron Man is just a man who controls his destiny through tools and technology not witchcraft, mystical powers, or a freaking spider. Super abilities aside, these are always characters/movies I want to relate to.

Here’s the skinny.

Morgan Freeman = As an ex-Military badass in which I assume he will play something very similar in the upcoming movie “Wanted“.

John Cusack = Plays a mix between Grosse Pointe Blank and Martian Child – an ex-cop turned gym teacher. I assume he will play something very similar in the upcoming movie [insert Cusack movie here] until the 80′s return.

The tagline is “Every Killer Meets His Equal”. Ooooo mercenary vs gym teacher. Round one, fight!

This is a movie that disappoints on so many levels. Again like a lot of let down movies lately it is high production value with no story. Cliche cliche cliche. I found myself actually mouthing words of characters before they uttered them. It’s that bad.

There are lots of characters in the movie. But you end up caring for none of them. A single dad failing at fatherhood (Cusack). A rebelious son who you wish would die (no name bad actor). And the less interesting makeup of the A-Team representing Freeman’s ex-military team. But the fun doesn’t stop there.

Yet again, The State of Washington makes a sad typecast appearance as ‘state of epic monsoon rain’. Not quite as bad as in the movie Firewall when it comes to the rain, but equally disapointing, there are other fun suprises in this movie like a shot of Spokane Washington with added trees to represent Woodburn Washington. This would probably piss off the real residents of Woodburn, except there is no Woodburn Washington. There is a Woodburn Oregon though, but Oregon, Washginton, they all kind of blur when you have no real sence of geography, climate or any basic knowlede of the world around you.

Now you start to understand the quality of this movie.

It’s not even useful in the sense of a good/bad Van Damme movie. Not even a group viewing and lots of alcohol can save this one.

It’s no Cast Away, so I give it a 2 out of 5.

I’ve been living in Spokane now for about 3 and a half months. I arrived in Janurary so basically all I’ve experienced is cold and windy. Knowing Spokane can get pretty hot, I’ve been excited that the weather lately has been quite nice. Well too nice I guess.

The promise of summer brings out the best in many. All I can hear is birds chirping non-stop out my window now. The blue sky is calming and the fresh breaze is well, refreshing. But while relaxing on my balcony and taking in the view my peace was interupted by the roaring sound of a two-stroke engine grinding away down the street.

The sound got louder, and louder. Then the culprit presented itself…

I care not why they have lost their shirts. I care not why they are wearing wigs. I don’t even care about where they got the cane that the second one is being pulled with. I care to know if this was just a few degrees above normal, what possibly can mid summer bring?

Balance.

Progress through your work. Make change inspired by your life around you.

Peak. Platou. Stress out. Go Play

Balance.

Recover through play. Recharge your creativity, your place in the world.

Smile. Become complacent that nothing gets done. Go work.

(kind of haiku like eh)

I have to take a second and recognize two very cool things that have come across my desk in the last week or so.

First django. Django is a web framework that is written in Python. Basically it translates to some really cool stuff that I have not seen in web publishing in many many years. Short of all the technical reasons why it is cool, I usually explain django as a philosophy change more than a new language or tool. django really emphasis reusability, separation of ‘code’ and design, and collaboration. All of this translates to sites that are quicker to build and faster to evolve. All good things. You’ll see more of this I promise.

Yeah not as new as django, but certainly no slouch. WordPress is by far my favorite blog engine. It is the most powerful and most customizable engine that I’ve ever come across. And I’ve tried them all (I researched this for about 3 months once). Now the reason I blog with a smile lately is WordPress released version 2.5 about 3 weeks ago. Well since I run my own installation of WordPress I didn’t see the upgrade immediately like the people at WordPress.com (where they host it). All I can say is yes!

The new interface is something worth admiring. Even though WordPress did their ‘big’ upgrade to 2.0 a while ago, it’s been the same interface for ever. An interface that you get by, but don’t particularly love to use. The new interface? Butter, pure butter.

If you don’t use WordPress or have a blog (equally offensive), get on that bandwagon now. It’s only getting easier and I’m serious when I say that the interface makes it fun for once. Kudos to the random designer locked in a basement at Wordpess.

I just came back from the Desert 100 in Odessa. Although I didn’t ride, I am very much beat. The photo is one of the devices I ended up throwing together in order to get point of view footage from a racer. Erik Miller volunteered and we ended up shooting over 90 minutes of the “Ironman” event Saturday. Unfortunately the Ironman was a little too much man for Erik and drained him so much that he didn’t participate in the Desert 100 race on Sunday. But that is ok. You’re still an Ironman in my book Erik. (he also got a t-shirt to prove it).

Anyway Odessa provided a vast amount of opportunity to test, experiment and break all kinds of stuff. I basically played around all weekend with camera setups, angles, audio, gps and any other information sources I had at my hands. Now I’ve got to sift through it all slowly in the coming weeks.

The event was great. And although camping was dirty and cold it looks like I’ll be back next year prepared and with more helmet cameras.

Erik and I decided this camera setup would not be TSA approved. …the other one looks worst.