We took the Canadian Thanksgiving off and went down the Oregon coast after spending some time at the Great Wolf Lodge in Centralia, Washington.
Here are a few of the pictures:
Tag - photography
While in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, I took some pics in the shower … of the shower curtain.
Backlit, with a translucent inner layer spotted with water droplets and a patterned back layer, the curtain reminded me of Jupiter or Saturn.
Voila:
After the MobileBeat conference day 1, Zynga invited us over to their San Francisco headquarters for a party. And there are few corporate HQs as awesome as Zynga’s.
Here’s a few of my shots from the evening:
It’s always exciting to get new Moo cards. New business cards are cool, but new Moo cards are awesome.
Moo cards are personalized business cards. I’ve loaded mine up with my own photography, which is easily imported from Flickr. This time I decided to get full-size cards – here’s a quick peek:
Notice the nicely curved edges? And, of course, the stunning images 🙂
It’s always fun to give out a card with some personality. And to ask someone to choose which one they want … and then tell them the story of the photograph: where it was taken, when, why, what it is. That makes the act of handing over a business card so much more personal, so much more meaningful, so much more fun, and so much more creative.
And here’s the back:
There’s a pic of me on the back, which matches up with my profile pic around the web. So it should be easy to remember who I am. Notice, however that I messed up and instead of intelligently cropping, there’s only a piece of my left eye showing. I should have either cropped it out entirely, or included it entirely.
Ah well, perfection will have to wait.
Three years ago I was in Portugal, working with Intel on solutions for educational technology in emerging markets. Portugal, of course, is in some ways leading the charge in terms of providing computers for students, having provided millions of netbooks in Portuguese schools.
It was a wonderful trip, including time in both Porto in the north, and Lisbon itself. And it was a great opportunity for photography.
Some of my memories, via Flickr:
On my recent vacation we went to Death Valley in California and Nevada, among other places. Amazing!
Here are a few of the images I captured:
I’m taking a bit of a break in Nevada and Arizona. Here are a few of the fruits, from Valley of Fire state park in Nevada, USA:
I guess all of us in the industry are pretty familiar with the mobile-first development philosophy prevalent these days.
However, as mobile-optimized everything and not-so-plain-old-web just kinda seem to get closer and closer week by week, I’m not so sure that mobile only is a great strategy. Last I checked, Facebook had a website.
I’m talking, of course, about Instagram, the mobile social network based on photos. The official blurb is:
A fun & quirky way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures. Snap a photo, then choose a filter to transform the look and feel of the shot into a memory to keep around forever.
I’m really not sure about the “forever” part, and I don’t do a ton of filters … sorta preferring reality to be filtered by my perception of it rather than my machine-aided reinterpretation of it … but I love using Instagram. It’s a great way to take and share pix you snap throughout the day.
I’d just so dearly love to be able to have a place to point to online where all my Instagram photos live. And there ain’t no such animal.
You can do precisely 3 things on Instagram’s website.
One
You can visit the home page. Yay.
Two
You can visit an individual photo, lonely and proud in its isolation:
Three
You can click through to iTunes and download the app.
. . .
. . .
But actually, #3 is cheating because it’s not really on the Instagram website. So there’s only two things you can do.
So the question becomes: when is Instagram going to take all that wonderful, beautiful, socially-related content and post it online?
One would thing they are missing some opportunities here, even if they are mostly pre-revenue. And one would think they could provide a better user experience for Instagram devotees.
Agree?
I was in Montreal for a week recently for meetings. Fortunately I also had the opportunity to do some photo walks in the afternoons and evenings.
Here’s a few of the fruits of my labor:
I was in Toronto a week or so ago, talking to some of our new media consultants. I had some time to explore a little, and here’s what I saw:
I’d been in Toronto previously, but never really had the time or opportunity to explore the downtown core or check out the CN Tower. This trip I finally got the opportunity … and had a nice steak dinner with a former colleague and current friend at Wayne Gretzky’s restaurant.
The photos I’ve taken so far during South by Southwest 2011, in Austin, Texas:
There are (probably) thousands of iPad 2 unboxing photo sets across the interwebs by now. This one is mine:
The box (with plastic wrap still on):
The box (without the plastic wrap):
My iPad 2 sees the light of day (or, at least, of my hotel room):
Free at last! Free at last!
It’s alive!
It’s on, and comes with lots of stuff … but it wants mommy NOW:
All growed up and synced already:
It even has a new cover-not-case:
And thus ends the saga of the unboxing of the iPad (2).
If you’re wondering how to sync the movies from your digital camera to iPad, you’re not alone. I thought I had enabled everything necessary … only to find one little detail undone.
Check this screen in iTunes:
Make sure the “include videos” option is checked … otherwise you’ll sync and sync without – actually – syncing.
Be aware, however, that iPad does not support MPEG movie files … so unless you’re saving in .mov file formats, you’re out of luck.
I made this little movie of my Flickr photos, then added some music that I composed in GarageBand a while back.
Can’t tell where the photos are from? The answers are here.
The dogs are barking and the birds are singing. First light hasn’t yet hit Porto, Portugal today, but I’m awake, a victim of jet lag and an inability to sleep in spite of being dead tired.
Ah well … gives me a chance to catch up on my blogging!
I flew into Lisbon, Portugal yesterday, planning to take the train up the coast to Porto, where I’m attending an Intel eLearning conference. Unfortunately, the flight was delayed, causing me to miss the last train … so I had to rent a car, with interesting challenges:
At about 3AM local time I was finally 300 km farther north and in my Porto hotel room – ready to sleep about 4 hours and then get down to the conference, which is being held in the Alfandega, a converted riverside warehouse. Getting there in my rented car was a little enjoyable, too:
In any case, I’m here, the conference is great, and Porto is an amazing city. Here are just a few photos of things that caught my eye – hopefully there will be many more over the next few days:
Some pictures from my recent trip to Portland, OR …
We were meeting a group of people at Intel, which has a fairly major presence in Portland. It was my third visit to an Intel office – head office in Santa Clara (Silicon Valley), Intel Shanghai offices, and now one of their Portland offices. I had a 4-hour presentation (!!!) which went extremely well, thankfully.
And, as you can see above, I was fortunate enough to have an afternoon in Portland to do a brief photowalk. The side-benefit? It was the first Thursday in the month … and every first Thursday Portland art galleries stay open late. So it was very enjoyable to stroll downtown and stop by at least 15 different galleries.
My favorite painting of the night was this one by Claudio Tschopp:
I’m in Taipei with a colleague for meetings with Asus.
Fortunately, through a combination of good timing and good luck we’ve been able to see and do a few things while here, including visiting the Taipei 101 (currently the tallest building in the world) and parts of the city.
Here are a couple of the highlights:
Note, if you check the photoset on Flickr, you’ll get the full titles and descriptions …
I recently traveled to Cairo to speak at the Intel Learning Alliance summit.
The conference was great, and I met many, many wonderful people. So was the city, and I made sure to take an extra day or so to ensure I could see at least a few of the sights.
Here’s what my lense captured:
Here’s a small selection of photos that I took on my recent visit to London:
Here’s a selection of my photos from Bucharest.
The first few are people, and if you want the details on who they are and what they do, you might want to go to Flickr to see all the notes. The majority of the photos, however, are of the city and architecture …
Click the expand button to go fullscreen.
Yesterday I had a meeting in Victoria, BC. Here are a few photos I took on the trip:
It’s been tough re-adjusting to normal life after our Hawaii trip.
This morning was cold, wet, and punctuated by the arrival of 200+ stampeding emails flooding my work in-box. Ah well … it was great while it lasted.
Every so often, I’m going to post pictures of what we did and saw in Hawaii … and here’s the first one. It’s a photo I took on the deck of the USS Missouri, the ship on which General Douglas MacArthur accepted the Japanese surrender in Tokyo bay. This was the surrender that formally ended World War II.
And here’s the exact spot it happened:
The Missouri is now docked in Pearl Harbor, overlooking the last resting place of the USS Arizona. Ironically, that’s where the WWII began for America, when Japan launched a surprise attack on December 7, 1941, the “date that will live in infamy.”
From the somewhat cool and gently gratifying department: I’m in the Shmap.
What is the Shmap, you ask?
Exploring a Schmap Guide is a uniquely interactive experience: maps and guide content are dynamically integrated, allowing intuitive, real-time access to reviews and photo slideshows for places of interest.
They’re available for iPhone and iPod touch, and they use photos that amateurs like myself have taken. Here are the two places my photos are being used:
As you’ve undoubtedly noticed if you’ve been reading my blog lately, I’ve been in Nashville attending the NAESP conference. Great city, great conference, and this is a great opportunity to check out the new WordPress gallery feature.
Some of my Nashville photos, after the link … click on any to see larger versions (and again to get a full-size version.) Oddly, the multi-file upload feature promised in WordPress 2.5 did not work.
I love this pic from my recent trip to New Orleans:
I’m in New Orleans for the week for a conference.
The big easy is an amazing place, to say the least. It’s my first time, and I’m enjoying it immensely.
Any city that prioritizes walkers over drivers can’t be all bad, and New Orleans is a great walking city. The art galleries are many, varied, and wonderful, as are the antiques stores.
New Orleans has distinctive smells, too. The ripe musk of the bayou nearby, the cooking spilling out from multiple restaurants in the French Quarter, the alcohol in a thousand hands on Bourbon street … and yes, the vomit on the sidewalk outside on of the thousand bars.
I’ve only started exploring the city in some of the hours not allocated to the conference, and I look forward to more over the next couple of days.
A co-worker had her Mac display go nuts a couple of months ago …
This is Ethan on Sunday earlier this week, climbing on park equipment.
We’ve been having wonderful weather lately … sunny, warm, clear.
I’m hoping it lasts!
It’s been ages since the latest outage, but yes, Flickr is down right now.
Naturally it’s right after I come back from a nature walk by the Fraser River. I’ve never, ever seen it so calm as I saw it today … hardly a ripple anywhere. The biggest disturbance on the surface of the water was caused by a solitary seagull.
Unbelievable. I’ve never seen a river so calm – as calm as a mountain lake sheltered by surrounding peaks on a calm day.
[ update: Flickr’s back up, and here’s one of the photos ]
I’ve sort of made a New Year’s resolution. Silly of me, I know.
But it’s not a real New Year’s resolution. It’s not like I solemnly stated it or something at the stroke of midnight on December 31st. It’s just something I think I want to do.
I’d like to take at least one picture, every day of 2008, that I’m happy enough with to upload to my account at Flickr. (Which automatically updates, by the way, via the magic of widgets, my photos blog page.)
I’ve already missed a day … but only one day. And I think I’m going to keep trying.
Here’s today’s effort … a detail of a painting by my brother-in-law, Jeroen Vermeulen.