Tag Archives: people

Thoughts

Beauty redefined?

I received an email from JPG Magazine yesterday, where I’m a registered user. Apparently they’re putting photos together for a new theme, called Beauty Redefined. Quoting from their email:

“Every generation redefines what is beautiful, but ours has taken it to a whole new level. This theme invites you to throw out traditional notions of beauty and start over from scratch, redefining beauty for yourself. This theme is sponsored by SuicideGirls. SuicideGirls mixes the smarts, enthusiasm and DIY attitude of the best music and alternative culture sites with an unapologetic, grassroots approach to sexuality.”

Call me conservative, call me traditional, call me what you will, but I didn’t know immoral women posting naked photos of themselves on the internet is the new beauty standard. I thought that was called porn. But hey, what do I know, I’m only 30 years old and I’m happily married, right? I’m not “with the times”, whatever that means. This message from JPG Magazine really rubbed me the wrong way. Whether these girls realize it or not, when they post their provocative photos on the internet, they open themselves to all sorts of unwelcome treatment. Not only do they lose any sort of expectation of privacy, (since everyone’s seen just about everything they’ve got, and will automatically picture them naked when they see them,) but they attract ridicule and name-calling as well. Be honest, what would your parents or elders call a girl like that? I’ve heard words like slut and hussy before, and I doubt I’m alone in this. If you weren’t drooling over the photos and were in a healthy, committed relationship, what would you call them? I think the term misguided applies very well. Instead of baring their bodies to their lovers, in privacy, they bare them for every moron that’s out there.

Generally speaking, it’s bothersome to me that all kinds of subversive ideas like this are getting pushed around these days. Whatever happened to healthy, loving relationships? Whatever happened to common decency? How about NOT posting naked pictures of ourselves on the internet? What exactly is wrong with covering up our private parts, and only letting our spouses see our naked bodies? And what about NOT piercing various parts of our bodies, including the nether regions, or tattooing every spare inch of skin? Or what about NOT sleeping around? How about waiting for the right person?

But no, in our stupid quest for the extreme, for the fringe, for the alternative, we have to torture our bodies by piercing and tattooing them in all sorts of stupid places, we have to somehow keep an open mind to all the trash that’s out there, we should accept abusive, disrespectful or non-standard relationships as the norm — for example, “open marriage” is probably the biggest oxymoron I’ve ever heard.

Well, if the immoral, the fringe and the bizarre is the new beauty, I want none of it. I’ll stick with the tried and true classics, thank you very much.

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Thoughts

Amazing survivor of parachute malfunction

A parachutist from New Zealand by the name of Michael Holmes somehow survived a major parachute malfunction from several thousand feet with only a broken ankle, a collapsed lung, and a broken nose. And on top of it all, he wanted to keep jumping afterwards… Talk about not learning your lesson. The first part is raw video from his helmet cam, and the second part is a follow-up TV interview.

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Thoughts

Keeping up with the news

It’s so easy to spread yourself thin these modern times… You’ve got news up the wazoo, 24×7, from a gazillion sources. On top of that, you’ve got blogs, with experts expounding on the virtues of this and that, and why it should matter to you, and you’ve got feeds of all sorts you can subscribe to, and podcasts you can listen to, and videos you can watch on these humongous video sites like YouTube and Google Video and Revver and plenty more. If that’s not enough, you can watch tens, if not hundreds, of TV channels, and the programming variety just boggles the mind.

Trouble is, most of this is garbage, and you can’t keep up with all of it. As addictive as it is to read a ridiculous amount of news, and be at the top of the game on many subjects, it’s wearisome, stressful and exhausting. It’s not seldom that I found myself bleary-eyed and listless after catching up on the news these past several years. And yet, I still didn’t learn my lesson, and wanted more, more, more. Well, you can’t have it all. It’s humanly impossible to stay plugged into many sources at once, and expect to get anything else done. You end up becoming part of the pipe, unable to contribute, overwhelmed by the information, receptive but useless, a consumer, not a producer.

I suppose if that’s all you want to be, that’s fine, but I’d rather make content, not consume it. I want to leave a mark, not go through life eating, sleeping and watching TV or reading the news. More than that, and I suppose on a more basic level as well, I want to get some work done, not waste my day away. So, for the umpteenth time, I’ve come to the realization that I need to cut down on my news addiction. It’s good to stay informed, but it’s better to stay alert. And it’s even better to get my plans accomplished. Which for me includes work, consulting, photography and blogging on weekdays. On weekends, more consulting, photography and blogging, reviews and sometimes, podcasts. And somewhere in there, I’ve got to squeeze in downtime with my lovely wife and a movie then and now. Not to mention that I’ve got other projects waiting on the back burner.

The thing is, reading the news in itself doesn’t take that much time. At most, it takes one to one and half hours per day. I don’t think that’s a lot of time. But, it IS a lot of information. And information processing wears you down, particularly when it comes from many sources. If you don’t believe me, try picking up a few tens of books, and rapid-read a few pages from each. See how you feel at the end of that little power session! When we read the news, it’s the same thing. We don’t notice it these days because it’s so easy to subscribe to a ridiculous number of various sources in news or feed readers. They aggregate all of that content for us in one place, and we just browse through and read. But it’s all written by different people, on different subjects, in different styles, with differing levels of emotion. Our brain has to adapt to each style of writing and process all of that information in a short amount of time.

Add to that the emotion we spend if we get worked up about an article. I’m guilty of that a lot. If I read someone’s getting abused somewhere, I’ll get mad at that injustice. Some days that anger will affect me for more than half a days, and truth be told, there isn’t a darned thing I can do to help that person or people other than share that article with my friends or on my blog. The amount of help that provides is questionable and depends on the situations. Some are helped by more media attention, and some aren’t. So what’s the good of getting worked up over them? I don’t know. I do know I can’t help it, so the only way for me to stay focused on what I need to do is to avoid those articles. Otherwise, I end up shooting myself in the foot and I can’t meet my goals.

So while it’s not about the time, although it’s nice to gain an extra hour here and there, it’s about the effect of the news on you or me. That’s why I’ve already started to pare down on the amount of news sources I read. I’ve cut a few out today, and will continue to cut them down till I arrive at a good balance between quality of information and time spent reading it. And I encourage you to do the same. Don’t think I hold myself immune from this. If you find that I don’t add value to your day, then unsubscribe. Far be it from me to waste your time and keep you from doing something useful.

Here’s to a productive use of our time here on earth, brief as it is!

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Events

DC FAN Meetup last night

Ligia and I attended the DC FAN (FeedBurner Ad Network) meetup last night. It took place in downtown DC, at Capitol City Brewery. It started around 6:00 pm and lasted well after 8:30 pm. It was lots of fun and we really enjoyed it. Got to meet the cool folks from FeedBurner, without which my site wouldn’t be where it is today.

I use all of their services, and love them. I burn my feeds through them, I offer email subscriptions to my various content, I repackage my feed content and display it on various web pages like this one or this one for example. I use their ads, of course, which is how I monetize my site and feed content, along with Google’s AdSense. I use and love their feed stats, and I’m really excited they recently introduced site stats as well. I also use something they call feed flares, which are the little snippets you see at the end of every one of my posts. They let you do things like subscribe to my feed, email me, add a post to del.icio.us or submit it to Digg, etc. It’s really, really cool stuff.

I covered FeedBurner on my blog in the past as well. If you’re interested, you can read more here, here, and here. And of course, let’s not forget the time when Rick Klau, VP of Biz Dev at FeedBurner, stepped in and stopped me from making a feed gaffe early last year. Rick was at last night’s meetup, so I was really glad to meet him.

Rick Klau

So, who attended? The folks at FeedBurner were well represented. There was Rick of course, and Eric Olson and Jake Parillo.

Eric Olson

Jake Parillo

Eric coordinated the event and invited me, so a big thank you goes out to him. Various folks showed up throughout the evening. Sphere CEO Tony Conrad and VP of Biz Dev Jeff Yolen were there.

Rick Klau, Tony Conrad and Jeff Yolen

A few people from AOL’s content division showed up. George from Fat Pitch Financials was there as well. As we left, more people showed up.

Sitting at the table

George (Fat Pitch Financials)

I really liked being able to interact directly with the FeedBurner folks. I got to hear about some cool upcoming features like blog networks, got the scoop on how Site Stats hit the ground running, had a chance to give some direct feedback about the Ad Network, and of course, the highlight was that Rick Klau loves photography. We had fun chatting about that!

Shutterbug meta

There was an interesting mural on the wall above our table.

More beer

Beer

There was plenty of food, and of course there were pretzels as well. 🙂

FeedBurner pretzels

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Thoughts

Parish Kohanim: the pursuit of beauty

Apple Pro Profiles currently features eminent photographer Parish Kohanim. With an impressive career that spans 30 years, his photographs speak for themselves. Here’s a quote:

“Every image he shoots is animated by a single urge. ‘My obsession is to capture the beauty life offers,’ says Kohanim. And despite the way contemporary critics often measure artistic significance on a scale that ranges from the merely controversial to the outright disturbing, Kohanim staunchly defends the pursuit of the beautiful.”

His philosophy strikes a chord in me. It’s what I try to do in my photography. I don’t want to focus on the ugly, the negative. I want to try and find the beauty in everything I photograph, and in my personal life as well. There’s so much ugliness to life, so much misery, that focusing on it the way some artists do is just too much.

Here’s what he believes about portraits:

“‘There’s something beautiful about everyone, whether exterior or interior,’ continues Kohanim. ‘What I love to do is draw out the beauty that is there.'”

This is what I strive for as well. Obviously, I have a ways to go in my photography, but at least I know what I want.

As for his work philosophy, I love this quote:

“‘What I admire is someone’s devotion and commitment to his or her craft,’ he muses. ‘These are the winners in our society: the people who take pride in what they do. And it could be anything. Whatever you do, do it with 100 percent of yourself.'”

Mr. Kohanim uses Aperture to manage his photo library. I’ve got to give it a try one of these days. I’ve been using iPhoto, and on the whole, I like it, although it has certain limitations, such as the inability to move photos between film roles that are months/years apart (scrolling becomes uncontrollable and drag and drop won’t work), and the impossibility of editing the EXIF data in the photographs. Another photographer whose work I love, Thomas Hawk, has just recently started using Aperture, so I look forward to seeing what he has to say about it.

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