It's me, Pete... from the podcast.

Andy Ihnatko on writer’s block

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS WRITERS’ BLOCK. – Andy Ihnatko’s Celestial Waste of Bandwidth (BETA)

But don’t say you’re “blocked,” ever. And for the love of almighty God, don’t seek answers from the sort of madmen who insist and reinforce the idea that “writer’s block” is a real thing.

Your brain is highly malleable. If you train it to believe that you need to pull over to the side of the road and stop moving forward the instant a “Writer’s Block” indicator on the dashboard turns red, then over time, that’s the only solution it’ll ever offer you.

Writing is hard. That’s why so few people stick to it and actually finish things. And why you have a right to be immensely proud when you finish something.

And he should know. This guy turns out more word-shaped pixels than just about anyone I [don’t actually] know.

Marco Arment on the new Kindle

Review: The 2011 $79 Kindle with ads and buttons:

The Kindle 1 and 2 felt like high-quality items, while the 3 and the new Kindle feel disposable. But they’re priced accordingly. The Kindle 1 was $400. This one’s $79 with ads.

Even the ads fit in more than I expected because this doesn’t feel like a high-end device that commands respect, for better and for worse. Again, cheap, disposable.

Sounds about right. Too bad.

On losing Ben Franklin

The day Steve Jobs called Walter Isaacson – Apple 2.0 – Fortune Tech

That seemed a bit odd. I didn’t yet know that taking a long walk was his preferred way to have a serious conversation. It turned out that he wanted me to write a biography of him. I had recently published one on Benjamin Franklin and was writing one about Albert Einstein, and my initial reaction was to wonder, half-jokingly, whether he saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence. Because I assumed that he was still in the middle of an oscillating career that had many more ups and downs left, I demurred. Not now, I said. Maybe in a decade or two, when you retire.

When Ben Franklin died, it was a loss, I have to imagine. But did they know, back then, that they’d lost Ben Franklin? Albert Einstein? Thomas Jefferson? Nikola Tesla?

It feels like that’s something of substance this morning as I tap away on my MacBook Pro because we know that yesterday, in so many ways, we lost our Ben Franklin. Albert Einstein. Thomas Jefferson. Nikola Tesla.

Steve picked me

On June 10, 2002, an Apple commercial with my face on it first aired on Comedy Central after the first block of South Park. It hit CNN the next morning, and my phone started ringing with calls from people I hadn’t heard from in years. “Do you have a twin brother?” they asked. No, no twin. Just me. Steve picked me.

And put me on the front of Apple.com with a small group of like-minded Apple users.

I was in the first round of “Switchers,” the short-run campaign that offered stories of real users of Apple products. Me, Aaron Adams, Dave Haxton, Dianne Druyff, Liza Richardson, Mark Frauenfelder, and Patrick Gant made up the first run of regular users, Will Ferrell, Yo-Yo Ma, De La Soul, and Tony Hawk making up some of the celebrity users.

Apple flew us to Boston and LA and handed us over to Errol Morris, who filmed us for hours and hours talking into the camera in that hot-as-the-sun white warehouse. And then we finished. They took the film (yes, film), carted it back to Cupertino, and shipped us home.

I switched back to Macs in March of 2002. That’s when I started using media again. I was a mid-level director at a big company, stuck in a monumental rut. But I switched to Mac and found a way out. I discovered what I could do with technology again, what it meant to create.

On August 1, 2007 I quit that job to freelance. And I did it because Apple software and hardware became a catalyst for me to take renewed control over my career. And every time I think about that, not so deep in the back of my mind, I thank Steve Jobs. He represents something bigger than a man, a leader, and an inventor. He’s a representation of what we can become when confronted with tragedy and evolve through it. Watching Steve Jobs taught me not only to ask “what if…” but to find the courage to act on the answer.

The folks I worked with in Apple advertising were very kind. They had told me time and again that all these were subject to “Apple approval.” I’d asked if that meant that the footage would cross Steve’s desk. “All of it,” they said.

That morning in 2002, Patrick Gant called me on the phone and said, “Go check out apple.com. Prepare to be blown away.” For some reason, out of all the switchers to cross that white warehouse stage, of all the stories of how people use these tools, of all the posing and preening and crowing about the gear, for some reason, Steve picked me.

I never got to meet Steve Jobs. I wish, more than anything, I’d had a chance to shake his hand and say all this to his face. In some small part, I think I’ve been holding out hope that one day I’d still get the chance to do so. Now, I’ll just have to trust that this message, along with messages from the rest of us Switchers, and the millions and millions of people around the world sharing their own thoughts, will reach those who need to hear it.

Steve, what you brought to the world changed my life. What you leave in your wake is a fantastic canvas. I’ll do my best never to stop asking “what if,” and to find the courage to create.

The woes of the .co domain – I’m sorry Columbia.

I’m changing my name. Again. It used to be PeteWright.co. That was then.

Now, it’s RashPixel.com.

See the twist there? It’s subtle, and it happens right after the “o” in the “.co…” … … that’s right: I’ve added an “m”. Let me tell you why.

Late last week, I got a call from Linda Bonder, the fantastic director of marketing for The International School. I do some support and web work for the school, so it’s not wholly unusual for Linda to be calling me.

“Do you have a second?” she asks me. “This one is so strange I don’t know how to write it out in email.”

“Yeah. Go ahead,” I say.

“There’s a woman in California who is receiving our emails. Random emails. From the teachers.”

I was sure this random woman in California was on the school’s mailing list somewhere. That’s how these things happen. Even smart people can go cross-eyed looking at long lists of names.

“And she’s not on the list. Anywhere.”

Hrm. So I asked Linda to forward me a few of the messages. The California woman had been receiving them for some time, but the frequency had picked up in the last few weeks, since school started.

I ended up in an unrelated meeting for the next hour, but Linda had taken the liberty of sending me a few samples that Ms. California had passed on. Then, toward the end of the hour, she texted me.

“Isn’t Sophie in Ann’s class?”

“Yeah… why?” I asked.

One of the emails she had forwarded, which I had yet to see, was from Sophie’s teacher. I cracked open my laptop and checked mail. Sure enough, there were two messages from Linda containing messages from Ann to the parents of my daughter’s class, which I’d never seen. Next in the list, a message from my son’s teacher, same deal.

Last, a message from the Chautauqua Institution Special Studies office confirming receipt of my pitch to teach for them this summer. I hadn’t received that either.

These things trigger the Sherlock Holmes vibe in me. And in hindsight, I wish the resolution to this mess hadn’t been so obvious. This is where we get back to the “m” in .com.

In looking at the expanded headers on each message, sure enough, the address for yours truly was pete@petewright.com.

My email address was supposed to be @petewright.co. When I registered the domain, a year ago, I’d thought optimistically that the world was ready for the .co domain, that variants on top level domains had permeated through Internet culture and .co would be included in the canon of Internet reflex. Amazon, Google, Twitter, they’ve all gone with a .co for their products. And it is, after all, the top level domain for the proud Republic of Columbia.

As it turns out, sadly for the Republic of Columbia, most of the world sees .co as a typo.

Sophie’s teacher did. As did my son’s. And so it was with the Chautauqua institution. All had corrected my address to @petewright.com, an address which does not exist … for me. Any time they had sent an email to me at my address@petewright.com, any address @petewright.com, it would miss me completely. Today, I have the benefit of knowing that this email was arriving in the inbox of my new friend, Ms. California. But Ms. California was not the owner of petewright.com. She hadn’t heard of it, doesn’t know any Wrights, and has been using the same email address for more than 15 years. So, for as long as this issue had been happening, she’d been deleting it, marking it junk.

The domain is actually registered by a nice family in California. I know this because as any enterprising citizen of the Internet would do, I looked them up in WHOIS and called them directly. Visiting the site shows it at the registrar’s landing page – clearly they weren’t actually using it for anything. So, I had two objectives: 1) make sure they know that there is a redirect problem and that *@petewright.com email is being redirected to Ms. California. 2) If they really weren’t doing anything with it, might they be interested in letting me have a go with it for a few ducats?

No. They’d registered it for their son when he was born and were sitting on it until he was “of age.” As for the email redirect, they said they might get to it. The nice woman who answered said that it was her husband that handled all the “net stuff” and that I should leave my name and he would call me back. No calls yet.

This weekend, I ended up at a meeting with a group of clients wondering why I hadn’t written them back. They hadn’t heard from me in months. Turns out, Ms. California had been deleting their messages, too.

And my bills, statements, friend’s messages, the works. I don’t know how much mail ended up in Ms. California’s inbox as a result of this snafu, but that any of it missed me because of this typo creates a failing system – one I can’t trust.

So, for now, petewright.co will be retired in favor of rashpixel.com. There’s a story to be told about the new name, one that, I think, represents more of who I am as a service provider, and who I’ve become over the last half-decade of work. I look forward to telling it, as this site evolves over the coming months. I’ll be retiring the original name of my business in this whole messy process, so with this I bid farewell to fifthandmain.com, too. It was fun while it lasted. But I’m really looking forward to what’s next.

TWiT.tv show Triangulation with Cory Doctorow

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.

Daniel Eran Dilger on Google’s acquisition of Motorola: They’ve doomed the platform

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 guys moving to Facebook – unrealized potential in ebook publishing now up for grabs

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

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. …

We can all be better at failure

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.

100 Days

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.

Lodsys sues iOS devs for implementing Apple’s licensed in-app purchasing system

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.

Apple “I Believe” ad for iPad 2

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 on going indie

Lefsetz Letter from Colin Hay

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.

Nate Silver weighs in on the NYTimes pricing messiness

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.