May
25
An Elph is my new Leica bicycle
Filed Under Personal, Photography, gadget thoughts | Leave a Comment
I was a photojournalism student at the University of Missouri in the early ’90s when I discovered the Leica M. In contrast to the massive steel Canon and Nikon bricks we all used at the time, Leicas were small, elegant and unimposing.
Image from a fantastic New Yorker article on the Leica mystique
Despite my lavish $4,000 annual income, I vowed to acquire one. Luck would smile upon me (in the guise of a friend’s crazy photographer boyfriend) and I soon had not one, but a pair of well-used M2s.
My big Nikons (and later Canons) were the workhorses, with their choice of wide-angle and telephoto lenses, motor drives and fancy light-meters. Framing in an SLR was precise, showing you exactly where your focus was and what you would be capturing on film.
But I always had one of those little Leicas tucked away under my arm, loaded with forgiving Tri-X black-and-white film. In the large, bright viewfinder, everything appeared in sharp focus with transparent lines to show you *about* where the edges of your frame were. Focus was fast, but not precise- that’s why God made Depth of Field. There was no built-in light meter. Most of the time I’d set exposure by experience and let the film’s latitude take care of the details.
The Leicas were all about shooting fast and loose, ideal for catching quick, unguarded moments at unexpected times; the perfect tool for making pictures when you weren’t Making Pictures.
Fast forward about 10 years. Digital had finally stopped sucking and I bought a pair of Canon EOS 10d SLRs. Instantly in love with the ease of digital, my old Leicas were immediately relegated to the closet. I’ve been an digital SLR user for years now, but I’ve continued to long for that fast and loose, go-anywhere camera in digital form.
Feb
21
A lazy man’s successful war on email
Filed Under GTD | Leave a Comment
(reposted from my old blog to maintain a copy…)
Like essentially everyone I know, I have struggled under the weight of an overflowing inbox for almost as long as I’ve had an email account (something like 15 years now). Like my smoking habit, I’ve tried countless times to wrestle email into submission using an endless stream of productivity strategies, tools and gizmos: GTD, ‘Take Back Your Life’, Good Experience/Bit Literacy, Gootodo,Logitech IO pens, Hipster PDAs, Moleskines, and the good ole “Leaving Emails I Need To Work On as Unread” system. None of them have really stuck, mainly because there have always been key pieces that take more effort than my lazy ass is willing to put into them.
After a lot of thought (I’m intensely diligent when it comes to enabling my own laziness) I’ve come up with a system that works for me. It borrows bits and pieces from most of the things I’ve tried, but far and away the closest to what I do is Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero. I’ve been using it successfully for about 6 months (including the massive email task of returning from two separate vacations) which is huge for me.
Aug
31
A lazy man’s successful war on email
Filed Under GTD | Leave a Comment
(This post has been updated here, but is left in place for those who might have it linked)
Like essentially everyone I know, I have struggled under the weight of an overflowing inbox for almost as long as I’ve had an email account (something like 15 years now). Like my smoking habit, I’ve tried countless times to wrestle email into submission using an endless stream of productivity strategies, tools and gizmos: GTD, ‘Take Back Your Life’, Good Experience/Bit Literacy, Gootodo, Logitech IO pens, Hipster PDAs, Moleskines, and the good ole “Leaving Emails I Need To Work On as Unread” system. None of them have really stuck, mainly because there have always been key pieces that take more effort than my lazy ass is willing to put into them.
After a lot of thought (I’m intensely diligent when it comes to enabling my own laziness) I’ve come up with a system that works for me. It borrows bits and pieces from most of the things I’ve tried, but far and away the closest to what I do is Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero. I’ve been using it successfully for about 6 months (including the massive email task of returning from two separate vacations) which is huge for me.
Read on, MacDuff….
Nov
6
Reading in reader
Filed Under GTD | Leave a Comment
After being a Newsgator user for a couple of years, I’ve started using Google Reader for feed reading. Even though Newsgator has great client apps for all of the platforms I use each day (OS X, Vista and Windows Mobile), I just got tired of having to pay for this, that and the other thing. I am a cheap bastard.
I’ve been really impressed with the latest release of Reader (especially the keyboard shortcuts for navigation) and it’s nice not having to worry about syncing all of my various feed reader clients as I move from work, to mobile, to home. It does NOT get along with IE7, which is a real bummer since IE7 on my Vista tablet pc is REALLY slick otherwise. The mobile site is good (in that there is one) but is really limited by it’s inability to “Mark all read”, and a pain to navigate with one hand on the Pocket PC phone.
Another result of using GR is that I’m tagging items a lot less to del.icio.us, and a lot more using the built in ’starring’ mechanism. I stumbled around and found rssmix.com, which I’m using to combine my Google Reader starred items and my del.icio.us feed. Things I tag/star will now show up over on the right in the “Recently interesting” box.
If for some bizarre reason you have a burning desire to subscribe to that hybrid feed, the url is: http://www.rssmix.com/u/16743/rss.xml
Oct
9
Go team
Filed Under Multimedia | Leave a Comment
MSNBC.com wins General Excellence in Online Journalism (Large) and Outstanding Use of Multiple Media (Large) for Rising from Ruin.
I LOVE the fact that NOLA.com was honored too. I’m proud of what we did but their effort was freakin’ heroic.
