Category: life

Can Flickr Make You Famous?

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My amateur status as a photographer has now been set, and I wasn’t even trying that hard. Here are the details of what happened with a few parting ideas on how to “get famous”via Flickr. To start, I was contacted by an online travel guide, asking for permission to publish one of my Flickr pics in their latest version on London. Here’s the link where the pic is published, which includes my name and a link to my Flickr pic. Granted, it’s nothing fancy, but it has become my most popular photo by over twofold. This is the 3rd request I’ve received to use my Flickr pics in other’s material over the past year or so, and while I’m far from famous, it’s been an unexpected upside to publishing my pics on the Internet.

Old Steam Engine

Guidelines for a good Flickr presence:

  • Always give photos tags, a title, and a description. A nature shot is good, but it’s 10X better when you know where and/or why it was taken.
  • Make the good pics public, and keep the duplicates private. A few snapshots of your dog is good, but clicking through 100 speed shots can get tiresome.
  • Post your best pics on your blog along with a post. This will give your post some nice spice while publicizing your pics.
  • Add a Flickr “badge” to your Web site. This is a nice way for visitors to see random samplings.
  • Use photo sets whenever possible. This allows photos to be grouped with one description, and a photo set can have a separate link.
  • Turn on Flickr stats. This is a manual process, but it gives you an idea of what photos were more popular and when.

Scary management

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Have you recently told someone on your team to do something? If so, there’s a good chance that some management training may be in your future. (Disclaimer: This blog post doesn’t just apply to software development.) We often hear that the command-and-control style of management is the “old way”, and removing roadblocks is the “agile way”. While this sounds like a good thing every time we hear it, there isn’t a quick and easy way to determine how to adjust. I often find that it’s difficult to take many of these self improvement suggestions and act on them, so I prefer internal triggers that can shape behavior in an ad hoc manner.

Trick or treat

In this case, the key trigger is simple asking/telling someone to do something. What?! Our internal voices may find this proclamation to be borderline-insane as this is method by which we get almost everything done. But wait, there is a better way that creates self-empowering teams and removes the management dependence. The alternative approach, simple and elegant, involves explaining the expected result and trusting the teams to accomplish the resulting tasks. In some cases, the difference is a subtle change in the wording and intentions, and in others, there may be political reasons why specific commands are given. In the later, this is a trigger in itself that the political issues (often elephants in the room) should be tackled head-on instead of being obfuscated.

It’s true that since childhood none of us have liked being told what to do, and each of us wants to feel that we had some say in the planning. Using the method above solves both of these common psychological dilemmas. The bottom line is that if you can’t trust people on a team to know the intended result, there could be a problem with having the right people on the team or managing the team.

Fitness and the National Do Not Call Registry

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Picture, pictures everywhere, but not a one to find…

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If you are like me and capture digital pictures in almost every circumstance, the frustration of organizing all of these has crossed your mind once or twice. Two common options are (1) installing software on your computer to help keep track or (2) uploading all your pictures to an Internet site like Flickr. With the first option, the software to organize your pictures is likely to require you to open its user interface (i.e. application) to manage your pictures, and you will be responsible for transferring this application to another computer when you upgrade. With the Internet upload option, which I partially use, the idea of having all your pictures labeled, grouped, and constantly backed up does have its advantages; however, I’m not a big fan of uploading every picture I’ve ever taken out on the Internet. (Call me old-fashioned.) In both cases, there’s likely to be a license or subscription to purchase.

To alleviate this image nightmare, I’ve created a simple and free system for organizing and tagging pictures that allows for easy searching and backing up. This involves creating a directory/folder structure in Explorer similar to the following.

Directory structure for pictures

Each year has a folder, and within each year, there are groups of pictures with keywords as the name of the sub folder. Note that the beginning of each sub folder is a number, which indicates the month the picture was taken. This provides chronological searching, since the folders are sorted in order.

Setting thumbnails in Explorer

To group the pictures in Explorer, you can see a small preview of the picture on your hard drive or the memory chip from your camera by setting Explorer to show the Thumbnails view. If the preview isn’t enough to determine which folder to place the picture, moving your mouse pointer over the picture in question will provide additional details. If you are like me, I often have a set of pictures with the same date and relative time, which makes it easy to figure what goes where.

Picture properties via mouse-over

The benefits of this system are that it’s super easy to do while moving the pictures from the camera’s memory chip to your computer. Just create the folder on your hard drive with some memorable words, and drag the pictures into the folder. In addition, it makes backing up the pictures easy as well, since you can backup via the date/year. This is especially important once you have more pictures than can fit on one DVD. What’s best about this model is the ability to take the system to different computers without additional software or Internet access.

Confrontation meets capitalism

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Can the simple rules of capitalism help you with life’s predicaments? In both family and business, all of us are forced into situations where we have reached an impasse with someone else. Often the “facts” favor each party’s perception of the conflict. Before entering into a conversation that can become heated, one simple rule of thumb to remember is the supply and demand mindset. On the demand front, it’s important to never demand anything during the conversation. The goal should be to determine what the goal is and work towards an action plan that is acceptable to both sides. This is not easy to do when we think we are “right”, but it’s a simple rule to remember once the emotions start flaring.

Lake Travis 2006 - Turtle Cove

On the supply front, it’s a good idea to start the conversation by admitting what part of the conflict you have supplied. This is the most difficult but most important part of resolving the problem because we often think in terms of facts and evidence, but the only reality is that both sides have contributed some part of the awkward stalemate. This also requires serious self-examination as the contribution may have been doing or saying nothing for too long of a time. When having difficulty identifying what your contribution may be, viewing the situation from the other person’s point-of-view can often help. In many cases, the admission of what one person supplied to the problem will result in other person following the same course, and in the end, the conversation has a much better chance of both parties having their demands met.

Workout wisdom

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No, this is not the beginning of a multilevel marketing pitch. In fact, the pitch is an old story with a different twist, and it begins with the old adage that exercise is good for you. Shocker!? Here are a couple of facts that the local health club rarely mentions.

Port Aransas 2002 - Deep Sea Fishing

It’s now and has been a proven fact that exercise will make you smarter. Simple blood flow and increased nerve growth in the brain improve cognition and decrease the amount of degeneration of brain cells. In other words, exercising isn’t about being vain; it’s about being smart.

An additional item rarely mentioned is that exercise helps with sleep. When someone sleeps more sound, they need fewer hours of sleep, which could result in doing something much more productive like being awake. In addition, exercise helps wear out the body physically, which allows one to fall asleep faster and decrease insomnia.

The combination of these two improvements could very well provide a business justification for 45-60 minutes at the gym. An alternative take on this is that regular exercise will prolong a person’s ability to think and focus as they age, which is a bonus that needs little salesmanship.

Food: A necessary evil?

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As any personal trainer or dietitian will attest, the best way to increase general fitness for most people is to cut back on the food, but can cutting back on the calories increase your lifespan and healthy years besides just losing a few pounds? While most associate healthy eating with a lack of obesity diseases, there is a substantial amount of research that says a lack of eating actually decreases the aging process.

Rules of the road...

One article goes so far as to say that every unnecessary calorie avoided increases your lifespan by 30 seconds. While this statistic might be a little hard to believe, there is hard evidence that reducing calories will slow the metabolism. Unfortunately, eating a lot and exercising it off doesn’t seem to result in the same life extending aspects, even though exercising has its own benefits. Interestingly enough, both of these theories seem to hold true to the health adage that fitness is 80% diet and 20% exercise.

Blogs – dying or in transition?

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It seems that many bloggers are doing fewer posts these days, and I’m not the only one to notice the situation, which many would be quick to tag as a fad. The Austin American Statesman recently had a front page article about how the number of new blogs is slowing and the number of dead blogs is increasing. In the article, Gallaga suggests that easily unloadable photos, video, and audio are where future bloggers will spend most of their time. It’s hard to argue with this notion as Flickr integration has been a part of my blog since inception, and the popularity of YouTube is undeniable.

But, the question remains as to whether plain old blog posts will go the way of the dinosaur. There’s no doubt that I’ve had fewer posts over the course of the past 3 or so years, including a one year hiatus where I only posted 1 or 2 times. From my point of view, the blogging world appears to be in a consolidation mode with bloggers grouping together to keep readers coming or with a few bloggers who have figured out ways to make money. For many other casual bloggers, the motivation to keep going just isn’t there.

Old Steam Engine

The other slant on this story is whether the readers of blogs have become information inundated, causing a reversal of the chicken and egg. For instance, the motivation to write for many is knowing the content is being read, and as readers have become bored with weak content or too much content, they have slacked off on subscribing entirely. While a decent percentage of my techie friends actively maintain a blog and/or read blogs, 90% of my non-techie acquaintances have never blogged and claim that reading blogs takes too much time.

Blogging may not be going away any time soon, but as a Darwinistic consolidation increases, those who are left will most likely be the ones with the best content, which should lead to a resurgence in subscriptions. As for myself, I cannot yet image a situation where audio and video completely capture the market for freeform expression; thus, I predict a long life for blogs or some similar format.