Google, here we go!

While I must admit to a little bit of ambivalence about returning to the work in the tech industry, and certain other little nibbling concerns, the fact remains that mostly I'm excited about the prospect of working at Google. The amount of time I have for my photography will surely decrease, which saddens me a bit, yet on the other hand, I've been feeling frustrated for a while by inability to make a few key equipment purchases, and having a salary again should help out quite a bit with such things, not to mention having health insurance again, etc., etc. So we'll see. Who knows, it may even re-invigorate me in ways that will leave me doing more photography. Or at least more of my art in that realm. That'd be nice. We'll see...

Anyway, yeah. I've accepted a job at Google, and I'm due to start on January 7th. There'll be two weeks of training down in Mountain View, CA, in the buildings I once worked in when they belonged to SGI. That'll take me back. (And my recollection of that place goes back further than that, as well -- I remember going with my mom to the little produce stand on the edge of the field that once occupied that same land. That was when I was in high school, and my mom worked at SGI, in a group a later worked in. Hmmm, there seems to be some circularity to my life, eh? ;-)

So, I'd love to try to get together with old friends from the bay area, so if you have any time free between January 5th or 6th and say the 20th, let me know, and we'll see if we can make something happen.

I shall do my best to keep to the "don't be evil". :-) Wish me luck.

I believe Amazon Kindle... will kindle a fire

So, I just saw Amazon Kindle the other day, while randomly visiting the Amazon main page. It caught my attention. I watched some of the videos. Pretty interesting, really.

For anyone who hasn't already clicked the link, here's the basic premise: it's a device which will allow you to read e-books, electronic newspapers, magazines, and blogs. It downloads the content wirelessly, and you can carry it with you everywhere. So it's like a book, only it's all the books you might want, all at once. Or at least that's the idea.

My take (not having seen one in person yet, or anything)? It will indeed kindle the fire of people wanting devices like this, but it won't be that fire. I could easily be mistaken, of course, but here's my reasoning:

Basically, my impression is that this device gets a number of things Right, and a number of things... well, let's just say Less Right:

Some of the things they get Right:

• It's using "electronic ink" instead of traditional LCD. In theory, at least, this means a crisper image, that's more like paper, and thus much happier to read than a regular LCD.
• It uses the cell networks (EVDO), for broad coverage (at least in the U.S. -- does it work internationally, though? Perhaps, but it looks doubtful, since they won't ship it out of the U.S.), but without charging any sort of monthly fee (of course, that just means the price of each title you download is higher, but I would still say that's the better option).
• It has expandable memory (just add an SD card).
• It doesn't use backlighting, which means you should be able to read it nice and easily in any good lighting situation.
• It keeps track of where you left off.
• There's a built-in dictionary for looking up words in the text you're reading.

Some of the things they get Less Right:

• Clunky interface -- they seem to have done a half-way decent job with the interface, but only half-way. You can't touch the screen and have that mean something, so even though you can annotate certain pages, lines, and even words in the text, the way to do that is going to be moderately annoying. Not horrible, mind you, but annoying enough that I'm sure this won't be the final word in this technology space.
• It only does cell networks. It should do wifi, too, so you can use it in places with wifi but no cell coverage (e.g. internationally, or in large metallic buildings or whatever).
• As far as I can tell, there's no way to add arbitrary blogs to it. If this thing could be my RSS reader, that'd be killer (as in "killer app").
• Of course, if it's going to be my RSS reader, I'd want it to be able to show me color, too -- e.g. for viewing images from my contacts on flickr.
• The dictionary looks limited. It'll help when there's a word you just don't know, but the true word geeks (let alone the lexicographers) will not be satisfied.
• More interface clunkiness: there are buttons to "turn the page" (in either direction), and thus it would seem it's page-oriented, and yet, at least with certain font sizes, it seems clear that one "page" does not always fit on the screen at once. This is certain to be highly annoying in some cases, even if only mildly annoying in others.

Anyway, that's what's springing to mind for the moment. Perhaps if/when I ever get my hands on one of the things, I'll be able to say more.

My impression, though, definitely boils down to this: I'm really glad someone's doing this kind of thing, and I think in the future there'll be lots more of it. And that's the thing. I don't know what will follow -- new revisions under this name, or competing products, or both, or what, but I fully expect that the current iteration of Kindle will not be the final word.

Still, I would recommend that folks check it out, and maybe even buy one if you've got the cash.

I'm trying out Etsy...

Well, I figured I'd give Etsy a try, as a way to sell my photos. I've been meaning to do this for a while. Well, I finally did it. Rowing Home is my first listing there. If it sells in a reasonable amount of time, I'll list more.

Enjoy!

Time for a day job?

I got this little tidbit in an e-mail last night:

"Congratulations!! Hiring committee recommended to move forward with references and offer."

It's from a company you've all heard of. A company that most everybody who uses, or hears about, the Internet has heard of. A company that owns the site this blog is on. You know the one.

So, the next step is that they check my references, and then the recruiter guy and the compensation team work together to figure out what sort of offer I should get, and then that goes through an approval process, etc. And then I'll get an offer. First verbally over the phone, then in e-mail, and then perhaps a FedEx package, as well.

So now the big question is: do I actually want to take it?

There are numerous factors on both sides of the equation. Not all of them are things I'm comfortable talking about on a blog, for some reason, though I am interested in talking with folks about them. I will mention one of the negatives, though, since I'm guessing that a lot of folks would be hard pressed to imagine any, and see lots of positives with the idea. So, I'm a little bit frustrated at the notion that:

If I accept this job, I'll be going back to full-time work. This will significantly reduce the time, and likely the energy as well (though my hope would be that the job would be exciting enough that maybe it'll mostly just be time), that I could spend on photography.

Of course, the flip side is that I've been having trouble getting inspired with photography lately anyway, so maybe that's OK. Certainly I expect the pay to be helpful in buying some sorely wanted equipment upgrades and such... I know they say it's the photographer and not the equipment that makes the photos, and I very largely agree with that... still, there are certain types of photography, some of which happen to interest me greatly, that require specialized equipment. So... maybe it'll be good for my photography in the long run.

I do also see this job as an opportunity on a variety of levels, some of them profoundly meaningful to me, so... Chances are quite high that I'll accept. I just somehow feel like sharing the fact that it's not completely a no-brainer decision. In fact, I've been thinking about it quite a bit and for quite a while.

Wish me luck.

More evidence that it's time for a (bloody?) revolution

This had fucking better not be happening at the federal level:



If I find out that any legislator that represents me is engaging in this sort of tactic... Well, I don't know what I'll do, but I'll want their head.

Not. Fucking. Acceptable.

Is it wrong?

Is it wrong that I want one of these? Probably the coolest electric car in existence right now. It's not at all likely that I'll come up with the hundred grand to actually buy one (let alone insurance costs, etc.) any time soon (if even ever), but still, I want one. :-)

And it's electric! No *(&@#$'n gasoline!

Measure What Matters

A bit of wisdom, which I can back up from my own observations of the world, from Alan Durning*, of The Sightline Institute (when talking at a "Seattle Sustainability" presentation at City Hall, 2007-09-12):

Measure what matters -- or you'll end up valuing what you can measure.

What gets measured gets fixed.

In my own observations, e.g. from working in groups where metrics played a roll in management review of employee performance, people would change their behaviors in ways which would make whatever metrics they were having applied to them look good. Often, this was a good thing: e.g. quicker completion of trouble tickets. Often, though, it was a good thing on the surface, with a corresponding loss of something else that was valuable: e.g. quicker close of tickets may just have meant that tickets were being closed without the underlying issue actually being fixed.

So if we take the time to figure out what actually matters, and measure those things, then those things can get fixed, instead of just "valuing" something which happens to be getting measured.


One metric I'd like to see getting measured and having attention paid to it, which very clearly (in my mind) relates to "sustainability" of all kinds, is the birth:death ratio (i.e. population growth). I think we need to have this ratio be no greater than 1 (i.e. zero growth) in order to be sustainable. How we convince people to stop procreating is something I don't have an answer for. For my part, I intend to perhaps not have kids, and certainly if I do have kids, keep the number of them very low (1, maybe 2), and perhaps tie that to deaths in my immediate family or something. As medical advances let us live longer and longer, we need to be having fewer and fewer kids to keep this ratio at 1. Not that it's been anything close to that in recent memory, mind you... sigh.

* note: possibly paraphrased.