I have been absolutely slammed over the last two weeks with timthumb hacks and general technological chicanery, so I’ve been wildly behind on my favorite media. Case in point: Triangulation with Leo Laporte and Tom Merritt. First, this is just the kind of show that sucks my brain out my ears and cleverly disappears hours at a time. Second, because they talk to such brilliant people and do so at such depth, I get to call that time research.
I’m dropping episode 10 of the show below, an interview with one of my favorite authors, Cory Doctorow. Head to about 35:10 for Cory’s dissertation on competition for art, and parasitism in media. So, so very good.
On RoughlyDrafted:
What do Google and Motorola get from being under the same management? Google gets access to Motorola’s home networking gear, GPS devices, cable boxes, and cord/cordless phones, all of which work directly against what Google has been trying to deliver in its Android push. In return, Motorola will destroy third party interest in Android and Chrome OS, while doing nothing to provide Google with the retail stores, PC platform, and local software experience it lacks.
I don’t think the platform is doomed. I think Google just lit the fire for HTC and Samsung to develop competing operating systems that really can compete with Android and iOS. So far, they’ve gone with Android because it’s “free” and “open”. Now, there is new reason to innovate. It’s arguably a more competitive landscape today than it was this time last week, and while the acquisition may hurt Google in the short-to-medium term though integration confusion, this is likely a win for innovation in the market.
Push Pop Press acquired by Facebook
Al Gore’s Our Choice will remain available for purchase, and we’ve decided that our future profits from the book will be donated to The Climate Reality Project. There are no plans to continue publishing new titles or building out our publishing platform that was in private beta. We are incredibly grateful to everyone who has supported and expressed interest in Push Pop Press.
This is disappointing. These guys are at the core of the best of design legacies, and applying that sort of aestheticism to publishing was something worth getting excited over. That Facebook becomes the beneficiary of such talent is great for them, and I’m sure the team made out well. But I can’t help but feel like getting swallowed up was a cosmic loss to betterment of a field that really needed a push in a new direction. Anyhow, congratulations; I’m raising a glass to the what-could-have-beens.
Mafia snitches overstated corpse-dissolving properties of sulfuric acid – Boing Boing
Though informants had claimed that the acid used by crime boss Filippo Marchese in his “lupara bianca” (“white shotgun”) torture chambers would liquify a corpse in 15 or 20 minutes, researchers working with pig carcasses concluded that, at a minimum, a bath of sulfuric acid and water (which accelerates the acid’s effects) would take two days.
If I had a dime for every time I run into this old saw. …
The Worst Failure of All Is Wasting a Failure
Vijay Govindarajan:
The CEO and CFO responded with, “A failure to hit ROI and NPV targets.” The head of R&D remembered it as a failure to properly market the innovation. The Chief Marketing Officer recalled that sales and distribution did not achieve planned market presence. The disturbing pattern here wasn’t that the failure had occurred, but that there was no consensus at all, no common understanding from which to learn. The company had never analyzed the failure, learned from it, and socialized that learning.
I’m finding myself thinking about this a lot lately. I need to be better at understanding and integrating failure constructively.
It’s been over 100 days since I started this daily photo thing. Seems like 100 years.
Wait. That didn’t come out right. I should start again.
It’s been 100 days since I started this daily photo thing. No one’s dead yet.
Gad.
The point is, it’s still going. I’m not good at regular things like this so I count this as a real accomplishment, frankly. And, it happened in the face of a few photo-related bumps in the road.
Bump 1: Process
I have yet to figure out how to reliably edit and post while traveling. Yes, the technology is there. It’s the gumption that appears to be missing. I’m really lazy when I travel and as soon as the work of whateveritis I’m doing is done, I tend to fall right to sleep.
Compounding this, the big photo trip in this last 100 days took me to Coalmont, Colorado and Eagle’s Wing Ranch to shoot a growing herd of bison. The story is around this working ranch at the end of the road from anything USA as they end their 5-year building stage and transition into ethical working production stage. I’d gone for the births — they were expecting 120 calves. I got one baby. One. Babies are born when they are born, no matter what the species.
Bump 2: Technology
I made the decision to migrate from my photo software partner of choice for the last six years (Apple’s Aperture), to a new partner, Adobe’s Lightroom. It took me over a year to make this call thanks to the sheer magnitude of the move. See, each application handles images in a different way once you make edits to them. Crop an image, change it to black and white, whatever, and Aperture makes a copy of the image and applies your changes to it. In that way, your original file is saved in case you ever want to go back and do something different to it down the road. That also means that when you make a move like I did, you end up having to export first your original masters, the files that have been copied to make changes to, and the finished versions, the published images with effects applied.
Lightroom handles this whole process very differently than Aperture, part of the reason for my move, and making all this line up in my head was tricky.
Why the big pain, Pete? I know you’re asking yourself this. I did, too. The answer is scale. It isn’t hard to move a few hundred images. Maybe even easy to move a few thousand. But I moved 47,851 images from Aperture to Lightroom and frankly, that number stressed me out.
Upside, as long as I’m ranting: Lightroom is screamingly fast. Scrolling through my nearly-50k image database, with originals stored on a network drive, is simply unbelievable. I feel like I’ve just been jostled awake with smelling salts after being beaten in my sleep for 6 years by comparison.
Second, the way Lightroom handles non-destructive editing is a dream.
Third: DNG. I made the move and converted my RAW images to DNG and so far I’ve been very impressed. Color interpretation is right on with how I remember shooting the images and file activities are very fast and efficient.
Fourth: Oh my god PUBLISHING SERVICES. That Aperture doesn’t offer some comparable feature for what Lightroom got SO RIGHT here is something that should make Apple Aperture devs stay up all night.
Bump 3: Gear
When I switched from Canon to Nikon, I did it with the first full-frame Nikon, the day that camera hit the streets of Portland. Literally. I’m still shooting with that camera regularly and I love it.
Last month, I made the call to switch from a traditional video camera to dSLR video, which my D3 does not do. So I had to add gear.
I went with another VERY new camera in the Nikon line, the D7000. It does so, so much of what the D3 does, and it does it so very well, in a much smaller package. The early video projects I’ve taken on using this camera have been superb experiences. It’s no RED, but for the stuff I do it’s absolutely perfect.
So these bumps, right? They all slow me down in their own special way. Whether I’m just looking for more sleep, dealing with new tools or new gear, they’re all forces acting in the way of me doing the things I generally want to do, after all the things I need to do are done.
And yet, I’m still celebrating. The Daily Photo thing is a project I put on my own plate just to keep moving forward. To keep looking at images in a new way. And without a specific daily goal (photo-365 for a year and all that whatnot), I’m finding I’m getting far more joy out of the process of processing than I ever have before, and that’s been a driver all by itself.
If you haven’t discovered the Daily Photo, here’s how you find it:
- Sign up for the mailing list. This is by far the preferred way of getting the daily pic, particularly preferred if you’re me since that means I get your email address and can send you love notes, and maybe a cake someday.
- Like me on Facebook. Yes, I have a Pete Wright Photo “artist” page on Facebook where I post the Daily Photo as soon as it hits my site.
- Follow me on Twitter. Links post there, too. Added benefit of Twitter is that you get more me, with other links to things that are fully awesome.
- Visit petewright.co every single day. Yeah, I like my own site, but who are we kidding? You’re not going to do that. Just go sign up for the list and call it good.
That’s all for this update. Now, back to legos.
AppleInsider | Lodsys explains its legal threats: Apple is licensed, iOS developers are not
“Lodsys’ patent portfolio is being used as part of an overall solution and we are seeking to be paid for the use of patent rights by the accountable party.”
I have a really hard time seeing how it’s not in Apple’s best interest to step in here somehow.
In 30 seconds, an absolutely pitch-perfect message and execution. These machines are simply not about “specs” anymore. Apple defined this category, and it’s a key reason behind why so many others continue to struggle.
Colin Hay to Bob Lefsetz:
In 1983, I played with Men At Work to 150,000 people at the US Festival. We broke up shortly thereafter. After a few years of swanning around, thinking I was quite important, and drinking for Scotland and Australia, I realized I was slowly doing myself in, with the single malts and guinness chasers. Occasionally I had noticed my steel string acoustic in the corner, mocking me with it’s eternal patience and optimism. Eventually I picked it up, and ran away to live in California, to start again. I have been gainfully self- employed ever since.
Thirty-one days ago today I started posting my daily photo. I’ve never been great at these daily things for anything longer than thirty-one days, so we’ll see if it keeps up. So far, it’s been an exercise in patience and tolerance of my own work – work not produced for a particular client, but a more simple celebration of the stuff I happen to like looking at.
Curt Siffert sent me the link to the Hay letter quoted above. We go round and round, me and Curt, about the nature of self-employment and freelancing and whatnot. And in all our late night mason jar wine talks, we’ve never gotten to the language that hit me so squarely above. “Occasionally I had noticed my steel string acoustic in the corner, mocking me with it’s eternal patience and optimism. Eventually, I picked it up and ran away to live in California, to start again.”
That’s what it felt like for me, at least, August 1, 2007, when I quit the corporate job, finally succumbing to the call of the gear, the cameras, the computers. It felt like running away, somewhere new, to start again.
Last year, the fantastic Jake Oken-berg invited me to photograph his show at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland. I didn’t know when I agreed to shoot that Jake was opening for Hay that night. I’ve had Colin Hay’s music in my head since I was about 8 years old, so it’s no stretch when I say I nearly swallowed my tongue at the opportunity, the chance to meet the guy, to snap a picture maybe.
Thanks to Jake, I made the picture. It’s today’s daily photo. I obviously can’t begin to speculate what’s going on in his head in this picture, but the look on his face? It captures every bit of what’s going on in mine. I didn’t know it at the time, but I like to think that had you asked me when I was 8 what picture I’d like to make of Colin Hay one day, this is the picture I would have described.
I also got this picture with Hay, in which I look like a goofy South Park kid, the one who hasn’t bathed, standing next to a celebrity who has taken note of the stench and is quite uncomfortable as a result.
Dammit.
A Note to Our Readers on the Times Pay Model and the Economics of Reporting – NYTimes.com
Nate Silver on the FiveThirtyEight blog on the NYTimes:
I’m less sympathetic to the notion, however, which I’ve heard in some quarters, that there are a lot of good substitutes for The New York Times. Certainly there are some good substitutes: depending on the type of coverage you’re looking for, The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal or CNN or ESPN.com. Of course, some of these substitutes already charge for digital access, are also having trouble balancing their budgets, or both.
Maybe that’s an issue in some quarters. That’s certainly not my issue. There is little question that the Times is the Paper of Record for original reporting in the US. From Silver’s own tally, that’s pretty clear. My problem is that the pricing model provides incentive to support the status quo: if you take the dead-tree paper, you get the digital edition comped. To get the digital edition only, it generally costs a little bit more.
For example, to get the digital edition exclusively, it’s $15 every four weeks. To get the digital edition comped, I have to pay for the Monday-Friday subscription plan at $3.70 per week, or $14.80 every four weeks. The Sunday Edition is $3.75 per week, or $15 every four weeks.
There’s a really good argument to be made that the times is spot on in their pricing – that for $15 every four weeks, if you’re a Sunday subscriber – you’re getting significantly more value digitally by getting 100% of the Times content every day on your mobile or tablet device. That’s a good thing, to be sure.
But, the thing is, there’s no “Five Easy Pieces” solution. What I want is the digital edition, all the time, every day, and I want them to hold the paper. I do an awful lot, I’m sure, that is not pro environment. I don’t recycle every carton that comes across my kitchen. I probably flush the toilet too often. But there’s little out there to compare with destroying tens of thousands of trees every day to present information when another viable approach exists. I’m not keen on paying into that model anymore when an alternative choice exists.
I wish the Times offered a solution that supported guys like me, a progressive pricing model that encouraged digital consumption with no paper requirement.
Daring Fireball Linked List: The Daily’s Pricing
One more thought on The Times’s pricing: What’s the thinking behind charging more to use their iPad app than their smartphone apps? If I’m paying for the content, what difference does it make how big my screen is? To me, the extra $5/month they’re charging for iPad app access indicates that they see iPad users as suckers to be fleeced.
Insane. They’re back-pocketing failure here. If the Times digital initiative fails, it’s because they can’t afford – or refuse – to admit that they’ll have to destroy their print production infrastructure to make digital succeed absolutely. It will suck. People will lose their jobs. But at some point, the change will happen, and either the Times will be at the heart of it, or they won’t. The problem with the latter is that they end up looking dumb and irrelevant, and all their best reporters will go to work for HuffPo. Worlds collide, indeed.
Go turn this on. Twitter > Settings > Account > then scroll all the way to the bottom and make sure “Always use HTTPS. is checked.
While I’m at it, you can now do the same thing with Facebook. Select Account > Account Settings > and scroll down until you see Account Security. Make sure ”Browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) whenever possible" is checked.
The Daily Maverick :: Internet kills the PR star: The all-new DIY churnalism detector
Now, eight decades or so later, we have churnalism.com. A non-commercial site funded by the Media Standards Trust, it allows users to paste in press releases and compare them with all the news in the UK’s national papers, as well as with stories on the BBC site and Sky News online. The word “churnalism” comes from Nick Davies’s book “Flat Earth News,” and means exactly what it appears to mean – an item in a newspaper published as journalism that is, in fact, a barely reworked press release.
Churnalism.com. Handy tool, that.
Aol To Journalists: You Be The Rock Star, We’ll Be Mark Chapman
Paul Carr with strategies for Aol to improve the bottom line.
- Only completely restructuring the entire company three times a week, instead of five.
- Ending the company’s popular “let’s burn all our money” Fridays.
- Increasing the cost of AOL dial-up and broadband to $10,000 a month “because those fucking idiots will buy anything.”
- …
- Making all potential editorial hires take a Turing test and rejecting any who pass.
There’s more. Worth a quick read.
AOL to Cut Up to 900 Jobs as It Integrates Huffington Post – Bloomberg
Says the man who brought us “The Aol Way:”
“AOL will invest more heavily in our in-house editorial team and transition away from a reliance on freelance journalists,” he said. “Journalists are the heart and soul of a media company.”