found_drama

Don’t normally link to videos but I thought this was pretty cool:

Thanks Tracy!

Back in June, I posted about my foray into GoodReads. At the time, I simply posted some “short versions of immediate impressions”. I was convinced that my time with GoodReads would be short, that I would quickly grow frustrated with it and move on. In part, I formed this opinion because I dove into it without a real sense of scope or mission. I had joined GoodReads on a whim, because a couple of friends had, and I had not really thought through what I wanted to get out of the site. After a couple months of on-again-off-again usage, I figured out how it fit into my overall plan; I could use it to track the books in my personal library, to track books I had taken out of our local library, to track what I was reading and when, to record my thoughts as I went along and then convert those notes into full reviews, to find other interesting books, etc. I suppose that is the site’s mission after all. Which is not to say that I do not still have some critiques. Read the rest of this entry »

Read Wired’s piece on the 37signals guys last night and then saw it again this morning via DF.  Haven’t looked around too much to see what others are saying but the DF emphasis seems to be on “ginned-up conflict” vs. doubled revenue in ‘07.  Coming away from the article last night, I find myself with my own mixed feelings about their approach.

On the one hand, if you’ve created something as massively popular as Rails, the conventional wisdom is that you are in some way beholden to that project both technically and culturally.  And regardless of the technical successes and/or limitations of your platform, there is a definite case to be made for a cultural failure if that cultural figurehead is out there making hostile statements and calling everyone else a crybaby.  Doubled revenues are nice but carving out a niche island and then burning all the bridges that lead there?

On the other, I would be a liar if I didn’t see some merit to the “fuck off” approach.  The conventional wisdom also tells you that “everyone else” is going to lean on you for answers first instead of either (a) trying to figure it out themselves or (b) making a substantive contribution.  I.e., Newton may have stood humbly on the shoulders of giants but he’s still Newton.  Not that the lads at 37signals are necessarily making Newton-level contributions to the webdev or business fields but I don’t believe that the metaphor is any less apt.

For me, the crux of the article lies in one particular quote:

“Someone on the outside would look at what we do and say, Let’s ratchet it up to some enterprise level,’” he argues. “I don’t want to make our software more complicated. I really don’t understand why everyone’s interested in Fortune 500 customers. I just don’t get that.”

Suggesting that it’s about your goals and your audience.  There is a lot of pressure when you shift your focus to those enterprise deals; the stakes are higher, the scopes change — everything is different.  And if that’s not where you want to be, if you are unwilling or unprepared to go there, then by all means don’t.  Maybe it’s because you believe the Fortune 500 companies are aging dinosaurs whose times are limited.  Maybe you just don’t like wearing collared shirts to your demos and presentations.  If nothing else: if your brand and your credibility are built on values like keeping it small and always keeping the middle-finger preemptively and defensively up, well then have at it.

High nerdery; join us.

Sarah asks:

If you were to design a holiday sweater, what would it look like? Would you wear it?

Random? Well, it’s not without some inspiration.

A few years old. But still hilarious. Happy Turducken Day!

Amazing how fast media go obsolete.  In between other chores this weeken I went through a couple dozen CD-Rs from the past 6-7 years.  First there was the shock that I have been backing up data to CD-Rs for at least seven years; then there was the shock that I was able to get about 20+ of those discs condensed down onto 4 DVDs (once I factored out duplicate back-ups, partially filled CD-Rs, etc.)  Strange times.

Spent about an hour messing around with hugin again tonight. The last couple of panoramics I have stitched together in PhotoStitch have been … disappointing. It mostly has to do with the seams; no matter what I try, there appears to be too much “vignetting” going on at those seams. The tripod has not really helped with that much; nor has cleaning the lens more frequently. I am left with the belief that PhotoStitch is what is doing it to me.

I keep getting tips via Flickr for AutoStitch but the Mac software that incorporates their API¹ is all on a trial basis. And while the Autopano Pro demo gave me some nice (watermarked) results, I just don’t know if I’m ready to drop 99 Euros on that part of my hobby.

So back to hugin…

I gave it a whirl a few months back and didn’t get too far but decided to give it another go after my most recent pano. Faint as the seam may be, they have started to grate on me. Though there is a certain “charm” in the intentional discontinuities of a hand-stitch (and/or the pride of a well-executed hand-stitch), I’ve gotten used to spending a few minutes instead of a few hours putting each of these together.

At any rate, tonight’s experiments did not yield the results I was hoping for. I got the hang of the control points and some of hugin’s other features but the end-results were not much improved. There were still some pretty obvious seams, I thought. Except rather than vertical, blurry grey lines, these were… Well, they were all manner of strange angles. I have not given up on hugin. I intend to try again with a different batch of images, for one. There are also vignetting controls that I am assuming are there for exactly the reasons I have in mind. If only I could figure out what those cryptic fields mean.

1. If that’s the correct term here. Maybe “framework” is more appropriate here?  Whatever.[↩]

• Went (indoor) rock climbing for the first time ever. My oh my but that was awesome.
• Vanity Googling has its hazards. But that can also spiral into a half-hour of amusement. (Fair enough.)
• C. stopped by somewhat randomly this evening to grace us with some bad-ass dinner and some bad-ass company¹.
• Better living through the Google Calendar? (Time will tell. But the evidence suggests … probably?)
• LOLBladeRunner. It’s coming. I give it 48 hours, tops².
  • UPDATE: Aaaaaand…  there it is.

1. He’s still here, as a matter of fact.[↩]
2. Alas, my brain is too broken to give a decent offering at the moment.[↩]