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A Photo Meme

I was tagged (as in “you’re it”) some time ago by at least one person to participate in a meme going around the blogosphere. This one is the “6th photo on your 6th page of Flickr photos.” There seems to be a pretty broad overlap between Flickr’s demographic (not just photographers, but people who take tons of digital photos and want to share them) and bloggers who tag each other in memes.

To the left is an image I compiled using photos I took in Mesa, AZ on the night of July 4, 2006. I don’t think I ever finished processing all of the photos. Those were the first 160 I selected.

That night, I was surprised and pleased with how well the photos came out while looking at the preview screen on my camera. I figured a few of them would be good enough to post online. Later on, while at my computer going through them. I was surprised to find so many of them turned out as good as they did.

A few quick tips if you want to take some shots like these:

– Get close. I was about 100 feet from the launching area, closer than the closest paying spectators. It was a parking lot off to the side. I had to point my tripod almost straight up to catch the fireworks.

– Use manual focus. Find a point past the launching area that will be about as far away as the peak of the fireworks and focus on that. Set it and forget it.

– The longer your shutter speed, the longer the fireworks’ streaks will be and the higher likelihood of catching them. However, if the streaks are too long, it stops looking like fireworks and looks more abstract. Start at half a second and try not to exceed one second.

– Use aperture for exposure. Start with it wide open (smallest number) and close it down if you’re losing color from overexposure.

– Don’t use shutter speed for exposure. By adjusting the shutter speed, you may inadvertently change the look and shape of the fireworks.

– Anticipate. Don’t watch the explosions. Watch very closely for the projectiles on their way up and open the shutter just before they get to their peak.

– Post-production. For the most part, you’ll just want to use curves to darken the darks. Then add some color saturation.

In 2007, I think I forgot a piece of my tripod at home, so I was unable to take any good photos. I was also more in the mood to hang out and watch the show.

In 2008, I was at the fireworks show but neither took photos nor watched the show. I was too busy jumping up and down over and over again.

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What I’m looking for in my next registrar

I have been a Go Daddy customer for about 5 years (wild guess). Somehow, I have managed to buy dozens of domain names through them, despite their constant efforts to prevent me from doing so. Their prices seem fine and their service seems good (I also have hosting, which seems to have excellent up-time and does fairly remarkable under traffic bursts). Their web site sucks, though.

The web site does more than suck. It slaps you in the face and tries to steal your lunch money. It pokes you in the eye, stands in your way, and then grabs onto your legs as you try to walk past.

Amazingly, the web site doesn’t lure you in before treating you like this. It does it from the second you walk in the door to the finish line, where the resilient somehow find a way to buy a product from them. If you go to the GoDaddy.com home page, you’re overwhelmed with one of the most cluttered and confusing landing pages on the planet. It takes a state-of-the-art computer with a state-of-the-art broadband connection to load the page without any hiccups.

The ordering process is the worst, though it seems like it might be one less step than it was 5 years ago. They fill up pages with hundreds of dollars of add-ons they want you to buy to go with the $10 domain. If you don’t scroll down to find the small “No thanks, continue to checkout” link at the bottom, you are unable to purchase the domain. If I’m logged in and have a PayPal account on-file, I should be able to search for a domain and buy with a few quick mouse clicks. Not so much with Go Daddy.

I know there are better registrars out there. People tell me about them all the time. However, I’m not going to jump ship until I find one that meets a few conditions.

My next registrar will need to be reputable. I need to be able to trust it. It needs to have a history and needs to come recommended.

My next registrar will need to have a good user experience. That’s why I will be leaving Go Daddy. Pages should load quickly and not strain my computer.

My next registrar will need to be accessible from my phone. Go Daddy’s site is too much for my iPhone’s CPU and cellular connectivity. Go Daddy has a mobile version, but it is crap. The deal breaker with it is that my saved accounts do not show up. I am not typing my credit card number on my phone with every purchase.

My next registrar will need to have competitive pricing. I’m not going to pay over $10/year for a .com domain. Period.

I would like for my next registrar to allow me to set default nameservers for new domains. I don’t know if any registrars have this. I usually forget to set the nameservers during the (cluttered and confusing) checkout process with Go Daddy, so I’m stuck with an ad-filled Go Daddy parked page until the second set of nameservers get propagated. And depending on where I’m hosting the site, I may have to enter as many as 4 nameservers. It would be nice not to have to do this every time.

My question to you is this: Who will/should my next registrar be?

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Sharing is Caring

I did something interesting to this blog. And by “interesting” I mean it’s interesting to me, but mostly because I’m a developer.

In the sidebar, at the bottom, there is a widget sharing cool blog posts from Phoenix-area bloggers. I use Google Reader and decided to start “sharing” items I liked. Google Reader provides widgets to share public feeds and it’s easy to create a feed and a widget for your “shared items.”

That is cool and I could have used it as-is, but the way it works is you drop some JavaScript code on your site and it will dynamically pull in the recent items when the page loads. To the end-user, this is fine, but what if I want search engines to reward those bloggers when I share their posts? It would also help, SEO-wise, to have pages on the blog updating more actively, however in a very minuscule way.

Time for the nerd talk…
To do this, I took the URL used by the JavaScript widget code, noticed the feed data is formatted in JSON in that file. I wrote a simple PHP script that runs on the server, fetches that file, finds the JSON part of it, decodes the JSON, builds the HTML presentation of the items, and caches that output in a file.

When a user requests a page on this blog, it serves it from the local file and reconnects to Google at most once per hour to update the text. That way, I’m actually decreasing the number of times Google is queried and not hitting it a bunch of times from one location (who knows, maybe they would block my IP).

So when you visit my blog, make sure to glance at that section of the sidebar to see what’s happening elsewhere in the Phoenix blogosphere!

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Bucking the Trend

Every few days, I read something new about start-ups going under or being acquired (but not in a good way). Pownce.com, iwantsandy.com, and (maybe) jpgmag.com are examples of sites I used shutting down. In the last few weeks, a few of my friends have pointed out sites they used getting shut down. Companies that are not throwing in the towel are tightening up. Many people are being struck by lay-offs. I read about rumors that large companies and start-ups alike are cutting people to try to stay lean during this weak economy.

My employer, BitGravity, is changing just as rapidly as many of these companies I read about. To be honest, it’s hard for me to keep track of how many people are at the company. When I landed at SFO on my way to our Burlingame headquarters, I checked my email on my phone finding several emails starting with “Re: Welcome ____” where “____” was one of three different names. I visit the main office once a month and it seems every time I show up, there are 1-4 new employees. We would probably be growing even faster if the start-up community wasn’t struggling to stay afloat.

Seeing the company thrive despite the difficulties of a recession is great. Of course, there is a focus on staying lean, watching expenses, and every effort is being made to make sure we only hire people who will be a good fit.

A project I worked on during 2008 was called Multiview, which is featured on our site at BitGravity.com/Interactive. It was a challenging project, and in some ways, surprisingly grueling, but the community reaction was amazing and made the whole thing worth it. As a Flash developer and a tinkerer, the thought of working for a company that will invest in ideas like Multiview is extremely appealing. Since we launched Multiview, I have been trying to come up with ideas for new ways to interact with video using a high performance CDN like BitGravity. If you have any thoughts, feel free to drop me an email!

It really is a joy working for BitGravity. One thing I have noticed my coworkers and bosses do very well that I personally need to work on is giving positive feedback and complimenting others. Sometimes I’m taken by surprise when someone seems blown away by something by something I made. When asked if I enjoy working there, I don’t hesitate to say yes. However, I haven’t — and feel like I should have — proactively given them positive feedback. Part of the motivation for this blog post was the desire to share with the world how I feel about the company, which is in some ways more of an endorsement of the company than a one-on-one conversation with the same feedback.