A Mixed Bag Post for Today

I real­ized that I have a few things that I wanted to dis­cuss, but they’re just short items that weren’t wor­thy of their own post. So here’s a few tid­bits in a mixed bag post for today.

I’m Back on Flickr

My Flickr “Pro” account expired back in April and I hon­estly had no inten­tion of renew­ing it. In fact, I was dis­turbed that Flickr wanted to hold my pho­tos hostage until I paid up again, as it only dis­plays the most recent 200 images that I uploaded. The rest were held in purgatory.

I have to give RC Con­cep­cion credit for my change of mind. Dur­ing Pho­to­shop World, he made a good case as to why it’s still use­ful to be on Flickr. Plenty of peo­ple go there to search for images that they want to buy or license for use. I knew he was right, because that’s how the guy from the United States Con­gress found me to request use of my image. After I signed up, I noticed that I had a mes­sage from some­one else — three months ago — ask­ing to buy one of my images for a com­mer­cial project. By not being on Flickr, I lost out on that busi­ness. So kids, I’m a Flickr-​er again. You can find me at http://​flickr​.com/​w​b​eem.

I’m Bummed

In most cases, I hate jump­ing on the band­wagon of posts repeat­ing news that we’ve all heard. Many of you may know that Google bought Nik Soft­ware. I see that a lot of my friends are thrilled by this devel­op­ment. Not me. This news sent a cold shiver down my spine. While the news head­lines are about Snapseed, Nik makes some out­stand­ing tools for post pro­cess­ing. I love Color Efex Prpo, Viveza and Sil­ver Efex Pro. Unfor­tu­nately, I fear for the future of those products.

Google, and many other tech com­pa­nies, often have spe­cific ideas in mind when they acquire a smaller com­pany. Some­times they incor­po­rate the acqui­si­tion into a new prod­uct or ser­vice. Many times they kill it off because they wanted the tech­nol­ogy or tal­ented devel­op­ment staff. Here’s a list of Google Merg­ers and Acqui­si­tions kept on Wikipedia. The table has a col­umn to show where the tech­nol­ogy went into a Google ser­vice. Unfor­tu­nately, it’s often not a one for one adap­ta­tion. Some great prod­ucts have gone to Google and died as a result, with just bits and pieces imple­mented in an exist­ing service.

Many of my online friends are rife with ideas about pro­cess­ing images in the cloud and things like that. I’m dubi­ous. Some of my images are sev­eral hun­dred megabytes in Pho­to­shop. I don’t really envi­sion that much data mov­ing back and forth between my iMac and Google’s servers as a viable plan or speed improve­ment, as some have pos­tu­lated. Will it just be instruc­tions mov­ing back and forth, or does my image have to live in the cloud to get around band­width issues? What if I don’t want my image or my pro­gram liv­ing on another server because I need to develop an image with­out avail­able con­nec­tiv­ity? There are many ques­tions and no answers at this point. When the infor­ma­tion isn’t forth­com­ing, I have a hard time trust­ing dubi­ous ideas. Call me when you can explain just what the hell is going to happen.

In short, I think this really sucks. I use Google, but I don’t trust Google. I’m not a Google fan boy, so I’ll wait to see what hap­pens. Nei­ther Google or Nik is talk­ing yet about what’s going to hap­pen to the Nik prod­ucts. Maybe some­thing good will come of it, but I doubt it.

I’m Fat!

When I got back from Pho­to­shop World, I knew that it was time to change things because I was unhappy with my weight and appear­ance. That meant exer­cise six days a week, revis­ing my diet, and get­ting back on a healthy track. At the end of the first week of my pro­gram, I got an email from NAPP with this photo in it. I’m the fat bas­tard in the cen­ter. Bloody hell! My face doesn’t look that fat in my bath­room mir­ror. On the other hand, just look how white they got my teeth!

There are magic mir­rors in my bath­room. I look great in those mir­rors. I still have a jaw­line in those mir­rors. Nev­er­the­less, I’ve gained much more weight than I ever wanted and already knew it was time for a change. Then this pic­ture hit my inbox. Although a small part of me was pleased that the nice folks at NAPP fea­tured a photo of me with my friends Kevin Stohl and Michelle Hed­strom, a larger (no pun intended) part of me was just severely depressed. This is not the reflec­tion I see in my magic mirrors.

No mat­ter. I’m lift­ing weights Mon­day, Wednes­day & Fri­day. I’m cycling Sun­day, Tues­day and Thurs­day. Every Mon­day, I meet with a reg­is­tered dieti­cian and she’s really help­ing to improve my nutri­tion. My old trainer is review­ing my work­out logs and help­ing me make adjust­ments. Basi­cally, she tells me to lift heav­ier objects. That’s OK, I’ve learned that I need account­abil­ity. Both of these women are really cool and do a great job of help­ing me stay on track.

Believe it or not, this isn’t about weight loss. It’s about how I live my life. If I do that right, I think the weight will take care of itself. Hav­ing that mind­set helps me do this day by day. If I were try­ing to hit a spe­cific weight, then my mind would explode as I tracked and mea­sured myself to death. This way, all I have to do is make sure that I’m doing the right thing at the moment with­out wor­ry­ing about some dead­line or objec­tive. It’s less stress­ful for me and still yields good results.

If I never see such an atro­cious photo of me again, that will be worth the change in lifestyle.