More professional sellers on eBay seem to be loading up their item descriptions with their own terms and processes. This flowchart takes the cake, though, and gets bonus points for not rendering correctly in Firefox:
The Japanese ritual of taking a business card with both hands and carefully examining it seems like an outdated practice in our modern, digital world, but business cards still have their place. Cost-minded companies often hesitate to print them for the rank and file, prompting one new hire I started with years ago to ask, “Can I have some business cards? My friends and family don’t beleive I have a real job!”
My cards from that same company bore an impressive logo and corporate name, though they quickly became outdated as the company name changed twice and my own title shifted. The new batch for my new job prominently feature their logo and information, with my own name and title relegated to the very bottom.
Of course, neither hold a candle to the cards I recently printed for my own photography business, which feature my color and black and white photos on both sides. I hope it’ll be more memorable to people than just rattling off my web address.
Do you still find business cards useful, and what makes your own or others stand out?
No matter how much space you have, you manage to fill it. This old maxim applies equally to the physical and digital realms, as I learned while cleaning up my computers yesterday. With bigger internal and external drives, it’s easy to keep accumulating photos, videos, and downloads until your drive, backup solution, or both run out of room.
In my own case, mirroring data between computers as well as to an external backup drive is one of the culprits, though for as long as it’s feasible, this provides a nice redunancy. The growing threat to that extra space is my photos. It’s not so much the good, “published” photos in my gallery, which grow modestly as I become more discriminating, but the outtakes, which are larger and more numerous with the new camera. These don’t seem worth sorting through or deleting given how plentiful storage space is and the small but non-zero chance I’ll actually have use for some of them. (In practice, I don’t revisit the good shots that often, let alone the ones that didnt’ make the cut.)
Along with some other data like emails and documents more than a year old, it’d be nice to relegate them to a lower tier of backup with perhaps less redunancy, frequency, and accessiblity. Apple’s Time Machine does a bit of this based on age; will a more user-defined extension of this idea ease our perpetual storage crunch?
You can now view my blog in an iPhone-friendly format thanks to the iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme by ContentRobot. I also installed the WPhone Admin Plugin so that I can post from my iPhone. Both plugins were easy enough to install, though is iWPhone theme does require you to disable the WP Cache plugin.
I added a link to my photos to the iPhone theme, though the gallery will still render in normal format. The special theme is triggered by the iPhone browser user-agent string instead of the CSS rule recommended by A List Apart, so it didn’t show up in any of the iPhone emulators I tried. Even if you can’t enjoy the iPhone theme, hopefully this will enable me to post more frequently!
An op-ed this week in the Wall Street Journal argued that The Next Sexual Revolution is better technology for freezing eggs and later pregnancies. The new plan for ambitious, career-oriented women is apparently to freeze your young eggs, throw yourself into your career, and then have a child alone at 50.
I have a tough time seeing that actually work. My younger friends who are having kids find it’s an exhausting enterprise even with two parents, and I can’t imagine it gets easier with age or while you’re trying to maintain a career and a family on your own. There’s also an important distinction between “having a child” and “raising a family”.
Overall, it seems like a lot of people have forgotten that life is a balance and its different phases have different priorities. As the author notes, compromises are possible, even in more competitive fields like medicine.
The younger generation (Gen X, Y, and the Millenials) are supposedly more focused on this balance, though the self-described passions of my online and offline dates are more split. About half are passionate about their careers, the other half their family and friends, and ostensibly starting families of their own. My own passions are still listed as travel and photography, though in practice I devote more time to looking for the right person to start that next phase of life - and a family.
Mark Cuban has some interesting thoughts in My New Facebook Strategy and the FB Power Level on managing large social networks and the opportunity - and limits - of using those connections:
The 3rd layer is emerging as a very unique and interesting network in FB. Its what I will call “The Power Layer.” These are people who in whatever industry they are in , retain some level of power. Having them as FB friends, although very simple and non committal, gives me some level of access to them, and them to me. These are people that if they sent me a FB mail, i would certainly read and respond to , and I think they would do the same.
Its what I could also call the one shot layer. If you have an idea or thought, you get 1 shot, per year to get their attention. Anything more than that probably could and would get me deleted. Everyone at this layer gets pitched continuously. Myself included. If you abuse it, you lose it.
Starting a new job gave me the clearest look at retirement savings I’ve had in a while. Rules of thumb and estimates always seem to change, but this one-page calculation was pleasantly simple:
Sadly, the calulator is missing from Prinicipal’s online offerings, but perhaps there’s a similar one out there. For me, the results were encouraging. Saving early puts me about halfway there, leaving modest contributions going forward. And a few extra precent as a hedge against social security collapsing. 
Good news and bad news from the Wall Street Journal on marriage and money:
The matrimonial price tag varies by gender and age. Asked how much a potential spouse would need to have to be money-marriage material, women in their 20s said $2.5 million. The going rate fell to $1.1 million for women in their 30s, and rose again to $2.2 million for women in their 40s.
Of course, when the mercenary marriage proves disappointing, there’s always divorce. Among the women in their twenties who said they would marry for money, 71% said they expected to get divorced — the highest of any demographic. Only 27% of men in their 40s expected to divorce. Says Mr. Prince: “For these women, it’s just another step on their journey to the good life. They want to be paid what they think they’re worth and then move on.”
I’m trying to figure out which new lens to ask Santa for this Christmas, so I took a look at what lenses and settings I’ve been using since getting my DSLR in July. Here are the results for the 300 or so published photos from the 2800 taken.
Focal lengths are concentrated at 50 mm for my prime lens and 55 mm with the kit lens, often for macro work. The remaining third are wider landscapes with the kit lens zoomed out.
Aperture has spikes at f5.6 as the fastest stop on my 55mm kit lens, f8 as a lazy aperture-priority landscape setting, and various lower f-stops from indoors and low-light prime usage. I did notice some softness in the Belize landscapes at f8 and should really spin the dial higher or just use the automatic landscape mode.
ISO is perhaps the least interesting; I try to stay at 100, but frequently need 400 indoors or in lower light, and sometimes go higher to avoid using the flash.
This analysis somewhat supports one choice of a wider prime lens like a Sigma 30mm f1.4 or Canon 28mm f1.8. I’d get some wider indoor shots and sharper landscapes, while solving the current problem of my 50mm feeling too “long” due to the camera’s smaller sensor making it more of an 80mm.
On the other hand, the time I spend with the kit lens zoom maxed at 55mm also supports getting a longer zoom lens with image stabilization like the Canon 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS. It’d be heavy, but offer more wildlife, macro, and general outdoor flexibility. Of course, new lenses will do me little good if I contintue spending my time crunching metadata statistics instead of actually shooting
I was initially pretty disappointed in my Belize diving photos since I couldn’t get good color correction afterwards. My dad did some digging, though, and found an excellent video tutorial on another technique:
By using green and blue light in place of the missing red light, you can get a much more balanced photo. If you use GIMP instead of Photoshop, the Channel Mixer can be found under Colors > Components. There’s still a certain tint to the photos, but overall it’s a vast improvement!
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