I want to preface this post by saying that I realize that it will sound like pretentious self-important aren't-I-great writing. That's not what I intended, but it's difficult to write about this without throwing caution to the wind. Although I shoot a fair number of photographs, and at least partially identify myself as a photographer, I have had absolutely no formal training. I have no "expertise" on the subject, aside from that which has been self-taught, and experience gathered from shooting something like 50,000 photographs over the years. People have been asking me to provide some pointers on how to improve their photography, resulting in this blog post. OK. That's out of the way...

I just tried to navigate around in my Time Machine backup, only to find that it was woefully out of date. I'd set it to automatically back everything up, and had assumed that it would, you know, automatically back things up.

It hadn't been doing it.

Since December 5, 2007.

Over a month ago.

And I'd assumed that I had a reliable hourly/daily/weekly/monthly backup.

I just got my signed travel request approval to cover my pilgrimage to Lotusland for NothernVoice 2008. I mean, I was already planning on going, even if I had to stick the trip on my Visa card, but it's nice to know I can go with blessings :-) The moose is loose!

As I've said a few times, this is my one must-attend event. If this is all I get to do in 2008, the year would still be a success. The biggest draw for me is being able to hang out with a bunch of people whom I both respect and admire, and let myself get pulled out of my normal comfort zone to kick out the jams for what isn't a purely educational, nor a purely technology conference. I've blogged before about why I'm looking forward to NV08, and why previous NorthernVoice conferences have been so meaningful for me.

I just completed my "2007/365" project, where I took at least one photograph per day for the entire year. I didn't realize going in just how hard it would be, but it forced me to see things differently and I did learn to be a bit more proficient with the technical aspects of photography.

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Other versions available here.

Taking a cue from Dean Shareski, I've put together some of my favorite photographs taken in 2007. I maintain a "Photos I Like Most" set on my Flickr account, where I keep 100 photographs that I personally like. As I add a new one, I have to drop an older one. So, I just selected the photos from that set that were taken in 2007. This isn't a "year in review" or "my top 10 photos" - just some of the photos I took this year that I personally like. They're listed in reverse chronological order, with newest at the top and oldest at the bottom. Kinda bloggish that way...

This post is another in what feels like an endless series of love letters to Aperture. I've been using Aperture exclusively for a year now. At first, I was in way over my head. A complete amateur, lost in a professional tool. Now, I'm a complete amateur, able to salvage photographs pretty effectively in a professional tool. I've dabbled with iPhoto recently (using it to manage the photos from my son's Fisher Price camera, because sending a 5 year old into Aperture felt like overkill) and I'm positive I could never go back. I've imbibed deeply of the Aperture Kool-Aid. It's entirely possible that other apps (Lightroom?) could do what Aperture does, but Aperture works so amazingly well that I won't bother to check out the other apps for awhile.

Jim posted about Yahoo! Shortcuts, and while the WordPress plugin sounds cool (it claims to scan a blog post and automagically find links to blog posts, flickr photos, and other sources of info), I'm not sure how well it'll translate into real life. It looks like it scans the blog entry as you're writing it, and when done it'll run some code to insert stuff into the post before publishing.

Long ago, I made a decision to publish everything that I do under a simple Creative Commons Attribution license (CC:By). With all of the licenses available, and all of the clauses listed as part of Creative Commons, why did I choose not to invoke them?

I don't publish things online for fame, nor fortune. I started doing this primarily as an outboard, searchable brain. Over time, the network effects kicked in, and I've kept doing it for the additional reasons of sharing thoughts, experiences, and information with the rest of the class. The conversations that take place across the various bits of the social web have become far more important to me than simply publishing content. In order to honour the spirit of the network, attribution for use of content is required - a simple hyperlink - which then teaches Google, Technorati, and the rest of The Machine about the semantic connection between pages (and people).

This post is intended to counteract the funk that I was feeling (and generated) when I made my previous post. Things aren't quite as dire as I made them out to be. Yes, there is much room for improvement, both locally and globally, but this is statistically the best time in the history of humanity, so far. And the trends show that things are getting better, overall. See Hans Rosling's excellent TED presentation, where he backs this up with some powerful statistical animations (and even sword swallowing).

Rambling, less-than-coherent writing alert.

I've been wrestling with a bunch of large-scale demons for the last few years, trying to figure out why things are just so generally shitty in the world today. It feels like things are spiraling out of control into some giant, unseen cesspool. Why is that happening? Why are we letting/causing it? Why aren't we stopping it?

I went through a stage where I blamed unchecked capitalism - the mad rush to acquire the almighty dollar. This is why our important mass media sources are pandering to the lowest common denominator - because their primary duty isn't to gather and disseminate "news" - it's to sell advertising space. This is why we have to question all media sources, because at a very basic level, they have to tune their "stories" to attract and retain advertisers. This is why people actually aspire to owning a pimped out Hummer H2 full of the latest bling. This is why kids need "need" the latest toy/clothes/craze. This is why citizens are called "consumers" - we are described by our most valued traits.

I worked with our Faculty of Education to build a community blogging website for use by after-degree student teachers as part of their personal/professional development, reflection, and collaboration process, as well as to collect materials for use in ePortfolios. They had a set of pretty simple constraints. Because the student teachers would be writing about activities in the K-12 classroom, and likely would be posting media (photos, videos, etc...) they needed to restrict access to the site - there could be no public access to this content. Additionally, they needed to control with a fairly fine granularity which individuals within the community would be able to see specific pieces of content. Because of these constraints, we couldn't just load up WPMU and set them free, nor could we just point them to WordPress.com or Blogger.com. What to do...

I did it. I managed to ride my bike 3000km (so far) in 2007. Last year, I rode about 1500km. I estimated I might ride 2000-2500km this year. But this morning, after dropping Evan off at school, I pulled the bike out and rode along the Bow River Pathway. I've now ridden over 3000km this year, and hope to do even more in 2008.