Forever-Digital

Graduation

Jenn — Fri, 29 May 2009 00:05:39 +0000

I suppose I should probably write something here to mark my graduation from Cornell, but since it’s still so fresh in my mind and there’s still so much going on around me I really haven’t found time to sit back and let it all sink in just yet. Instead I’ll just post a slideshow of photos from the weekend:

I leave for Madrid in 6 days so my life is pretty much consumed with getting everything in order for that and my move out to San Francisco in August at the moment. Hopefully I’ll have more to say in the coming weeks other than “I’m going to miss the place, but I SURVIVED!!!”

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Commonality

Jenn — Mon, 11 May 2009 04:08:09 +0000

This semester I’ve been working on an independent study project that can loosely be described as “impact and effectiveness of digitizing cultural heritage artifacts (namely photos) in creating a broader sense of culture, informedness, and community.” It’s taken many forms over the course of the last few months as I tried to figure out exactly what I wanted to tackle and what I could feasibly accomplish in one semester.

It came in baby steps. I knew I wanted to do something with the Flickr Commons so the first thing I did was write a few scripts that would pull a bunch of data via the Flickr API and stick it into a database that I could hopefully do something useful with. A few days and a lot of queries later I had a solid database of just about 19,500 photos, over 40,000 unique tags, and nearly 210,000 tag instances. I haven’t worked with that much data before and it was certainly intimidating!

We all know that I’m not a huge fan of having to code anything. And that part was difficult, but not nearly as difficult as narrowing down this giant concept into a few research questions and then devising a way to actually go about testing them. I read everything I could find on the topic in hopes of finding something that piqued my interest yet was specific enough to turn into an actual project - still no luck.

After meeting with Evan Earle, a masters student here who, it turns out, is also working on a project involving digitizing archived photos, specifically with the Cornell University Library (he showed me a bunch of photos from the archives and Ezra Cornell’s wedding socks. Yes, his wedding socks) I walked a way with a bit more direction and a few ideas for things that I wanted to test.

A few nights of coding away until 5AM and I had it: commonality. The system is intentionally vague to avoid priming and bias and all of that fun stuff, but it’s essentially a data collection tool that will hopefully help me to prove (or at least better understand) my hypothesis about tagging these types of images.

The system is pretty straightforward and I like to think that I picked a decent selection of photos that will keep people interested as they tag. It takes about 10 minutes to complete depending on how quickly you click and how thorough you are in filling out the survey afterwards. Have 10 minutes? Give it a shot!

There’s still a lot to do: I need to collect as much data as I can (read: get as many people to use the system as I can) and then I need to actually analyze the data and write a paper about it, but I’m already really happy with having managed to complete this much! Depending on my level of senioritis after finishing the paper I might post it here, or I might just go out and celebrate having finished college. Whichever.

Two finals, this project, and five days to go!
(please please please go try out commonality!)

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Almost There

Jenn — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 21:14:43 +0000

37 days until graduation.
48 days until I fly to Madrid.

Getting down to the very end.

Most of my time these days is spent enjoying what I can of Ithaca before it’s too late. I’ve been out taking photos, just walking around campus, hanging out with friends, and I suppose doing some actual school work too. Actually I lie. Most of my time is spent working on the finer details of my summer adventure. I’ve been blogging pretty consistently at Notes from Abroad a domain that I’d forgotten I’d bought until recently when I was trying to decide what to do about blogging while I’m gone.

I ordered my plane tickets this week and have been doing a lot of logistics type things - looking for a backpack, figuring out what to do about a laptop, finding some decent shoes (I think I’ve decided on the obvious: tevas) and stuff like that. I suppose I should start to decide about my Eurail pass soon…

We’re down to the last few weeks of actual classes here at school. Apart from the weather getting better, it really doesn’t feel like the end of the year (I say this every year). This year every once in a while I realize that not only is it the end of my school year, but it’s the end of my schooling. Period. (Yes, grad school is always an option…). I’ve been in denial for the most part, but have been using the trip and virtual apartment hunting on craigslist to keep my mind on the light at the end of the tunnel. There was one place that I really loved but it was a bit pricey and I would really like to see it in person.

It’s crazy to me that only a few months ago my major concerns were the paper I had due the next week or some sort of Sun-related and now they’ve morphed into things like traveling for 2 months by myself, finding an apartment and moving across the country. Things have gotten a lot more “grown up” around here. It’s about time, too. I’m ready for college to come to an end. I feel like I’ve already moved on, but I’m just here going through the motions so that they’ll hand me my diploma. I’m not exactly ready to part ways with the friends I’ve made and all that, but it’s time for the next chapter.

One month and one week to go!

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on money matters

Jenn — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 23:03:03 +0000

A bunch of the goals in my 101 in 365 are about money. It’s not because I’m necessarily bad with money - in fact I’d say I’m pretty good with it. They’re there because I think I could be much better about it.

In the next few months I’m going to go from tuition-paying student to college grad traveling Europe on a budget to full time employee who now gets to pay off student loans in addition to rent, car insurance, food, taxes, cable, electric, internet, health insurance, 401K and all of that fun stuff. Sure, I’ll have income rather than outgo for the first time ever, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to be sitting pretty just yet.

With this whole new set of bills and lifestyle on the horizon, I’ve recently realized that I need to get my financial act together. I’ve been reading “be better about your money” type blogs for good while now, but since most of them are geared toward people in the real world, I haven’t really been practicing what I read. That is until I read The Money Diaries on I will teach you to be rich. These people are pretty much my age and they have -terrible- spending habits. I don’t want to be like that. I know I have a few leaks in my budget and seeing how just $5 here and $6 there can really add up or how an extra $5 can make my Europe budget all the better, I’ve decided to try to do my own little money diaries. This week I’ve just tried to cut back - not eating out as much and staying off of ebay - but if I find that I can’t stick to it for more than 2 weeks I’m going to do a legitimate diary, tracking each and every purchase and finding where my problems are. I already have mint set up, but I think seeing your transactions in a giant list versus in the context of a given day or week has a very different effect on how you interpret them.

The best part about it so far is that I’ve been cooking dinner more so that I don’t let food go bad as often. It’s teaching me to be a better cook because I’m using what’s around rather than going to out buy meal-specific things from a recipe all the time. Last night’s chicken was quite tasty and it’ll be for leftovers tonight too!

I’ve also begun to love half.com for my reading habits. I used to go to barnes and noble or Amazon.com all the time and just order a bunch of books because I had the reading bug. Then I realized that based on the quality of books that I’ve been selling on half.com, it’s probably true that other people are selling books that are in great shape too and it would be stupid of me to pay $20 for a brand new book that I could probably get on half.com for $15 or even cheaper AND…yes AND… it’s giving money to someone like me - someone who’s trying to offload the excesses to make a few bucks rather than paying into the Amazon piggybank. I love Amazon, but I’m going to love sleeping in a bed instead of a train station every night this summer a whole lot more.

That’s not to say that I’m never going to splurge on anything fun ever again. That wouldn’t be a very good way to live, but especially for these next 2 months, the more I can save now means the more I can enjoy when it really counts. It’s all about mind over matter. At least that’s what I keep telling myself…

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Enter Mild Panic Mode

Jenn — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 05:18:54 +0000

There are 55 days, 1 prelim, 2 finals, and 4 pretty huge projects standing between me and graduation. That’s it.

I’ve been trying to put up a brave face these last few weeks, but truth is, despite all of my counting down and desperate squinting to find the light at the end of the tunnel, as that light grows brighter, I’m getting more and more freaked out about leaving here!

It’s not that I’m scared of going into the “real world” or anything like that. It’s more that I’m scared that I won’t have accomplished everything that I wanted to do in college or that I’ll have found something I really enjoyed or would be interested in when it’s too late. All of a sudden four years just doesn’t seem like long enough. I still have so much to learn and there are still so many things that I want to try, so many classes I want to take, so many people I’m not ready to leave.

On the one hand, I can’t wait to get back out to the West Coast - to reunite with some friends who are already out there, to get myself an apartment, and get this next chapter of my life started already. But, on the other hand, I don’t know that I’m completely ready to let go what very little is left of my “childhood.” Or, I guess it’s probably “pre-real-adult-hood.”

Every once in a while it just sort of smacks me in the face - I’m almost done with college. It feels like yesterday that I was sitting in my high school graduation rehearsal. These four years have gone by in a snap. It’s like I took a quick nap sometime during freshman year and when I woke up here I am smack dab in the middle of my last semester of college. Where the heck did the time go?

I think that most people my age count life in years that go from September - August instead of January - December, and “chapters” are counted in four-year blocks. I can’t think of a time where things weren’t divided into four-year (or even fewer) segments. High school, college, even the way my grammar school years ended up being divided - everything had a definite beginning and ending. I think the thing that’s freaking me out the most about what happens 56 days from now. It’s that there is no clear end. There’s no clear finish line. There’s nothing to countdown to. It’s just the rest of my life. It’s really no small order.

It has me thinking of what I actually want to do with my life. What do I want to be? What do I want to do? Where do I want to go? I’m not a huge fan of jumping out into the abyss with no idea of what’s ahead. I’m a planner. I like to at least have some sort of “big picture” goal in mind, even if it’s not all that defined. I’d rather go in to a situation with a purpose, with a finish line. I feel like I don’t have one right now and that’s really throwing me for a loop.

So now all of a sudden the “only 55 days” has turned into “just 55 days.” Hopefully these 55 days will give me some time to get my act together, to figure some things out and to either develop some sort of plan or come to terms with the unknown. Let’s hope that 1 prelim, 2 finals, and 4 projects don’t get in the way.

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Indulging My Inner Hermit

Jenn — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:22:58 +0000

This week is Spring Break and to many people’s surprise, I decided to stay here in Ithaca. I think I’ve mentioned before that I absolutely loathe the drive back to Ithaca after breaks - not only is it really long and boring, but the thought of driving 5+ hours to return to a life of sleep deprivation and general craziness makes it even more miserable. For the past few breaks I’ve even put off returning for days - I’ve packed up, gotten in the car, and even started my drive on occasion, only to turn around and go back home. I really, really don’t like that drive.

So I decided to stay here. Unless I was going somewhere fun (read: SXSW or SF, or really anywhere besides the tri-state area), it wasn’t worth making the drive home. I could be a lazy bum here.

My mom came to visit last weekend instead. We did the Ithaca thing - gorges, food, etc. and then when she left I began to take advantage of the Netflix Instant View / XBox setup on my 48″ TV. I’ve slept, cooked, taken some photos, watched movies, TV, documentaries, and generally lazed about. It’s been wonderful. I haven’t even been on my computer! -gasp-! I like to think that I’ve learned a lot over break via the documentaries and things I’ve watched. Right now I’m watching a documentary on Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Not to worry, though. I have gone outside. A few times. Margot and I had a girl’s night on Sunday - Chili’s, a movie, popcorn, and all that good stuff, and we also went out with a bunch of people for St. Paddy’s Day. I also went food shopping for the necessaries to make the guacamole that I’ve been craving. It was my first time making it and I have to say it came out pretty spectacularly. I might make some more later.

All in all I’d say this has been a pretty perfect break. Sure, I didn’t go to some tropical locale or London or Europe like a lot of other people, but I think being a complete bum is exactly what I needed. Time to regroup and recharge for this final push. My last bit of college. 65 more days. Holy heck.

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Project 365: February in Review

Jenn — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 03:52:23 +0000

Though February was a much more active month than January, it was still tough to get photos every single day. I found myself getting really burnt out toward the end of the month - with all of the shooting I’ve had to do for the Sun and for my Psych class and being stuck shooting the same things all the time (there are only so many ways to shoot the clocktower) - I’ve lately been scrambling to take a picture of some sort of still-life arrangement in my room or uploading something that I’ve quickly snapped with my phone because I didn’t have anything better. Hopefully with the nicer weather I’ll be more inspired to take some new/better shots.

32/365 - cayuga lake

I think this is how I’m going to remember Ithaca. Ok, well probably not, but it is a cool scene. In the four winters I’ve spent here, I’ve never seen people actually walking on Cayuga Lake. Perhaps it’s just because I don’t find myself down by Stewart Park all that often, but wow. Insane. I wish I had some sort of way to measure how far out the ice actually went, but from the shore, I could barely see the people who were all the way at the edge. There were people running, sledding, skiing, dogs, babies, the works! I was wayyyy too scared to go out there by myself, plus with my camera equipment and no “buddy” to make sure I didn’t fall into the ice, I didn’t think it was the wisest idea. I do kind of regret not going back with a friend to walk out there, but hey, it was 50-something degrees out. Better safe than sorry.

41/365 - lost dog

This shot is here for one reason: I like it. It doesn’t have a particularly strong memory attached to it (though the dinner with Matt and Ann was fun and very tasty), but I really love the lighting.

55/365 - brunch

This shot isn’t all that wonderful, but the omelette was! Natalie came to visit for a few days - our second in-person meeting in about 8 years! We caught up on our lives and pretty much just hung out, cooked, watched TV, movies, walked around campus, etc. Apparently the story of how we met/how we know each other was quite perplexing to the border patrol guy Natalie had to talk to on her way here. I guess I can’t fault him for not grasping how two 13-year olds from different countries met online through a mutual online friend, started an online magazine, and only met in person for the first time 4 years later, when they were in college. It is a rather bizarre story.

59/365 - new and old

I’m not going to beat a dead horse with this one, but this shot was taken at the Sun’s post-elections bar tab at The Nines. It was an incredible night and the perfect way to end an incredible year. I’m pretty sure that these were Peach Kamikaze’s.

That’s it for February! Pretty simple. February was more of a month about the “little things” with a few big things thrown in there. Here’s the rest of the month:

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Back In Action

Jenn — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 03:10:25 +0000

I was right about looking back and saying “WTH was wrong with you?” Sunday was definitely a low point, but I’m not ashamed. It just goes to show how much my time at The Sun meant to me.

But that’s in the past now. This last week was great. It look a bit of getting used to and after my exam on Tuesday I’d say that I fell into a pattern that I’m going to enjoy for the rest of the semester. (holy heck, only 77 days!) In between classes I tend to spend a lot of my time in Libe Cafe doing work or just chatting with the endless stream of Sunnies who wander in and out. It’s great - we don’t even talk to each other most of the time, we just share a table and get our individual work done. It’s like being alone without being alone. Not to mention, having people busily working all around me keeps me focused. Though my large-iced-chai habit has seen its revival in this last week, the fact that I’m not just holing myself up in my room after classes is a good thing, good enough to make the daily and occasionally twice-daily large-iced-chai OK.

In this last week I’ve also picked up a second independent study (no thanks to the College of Arts & Sciences…argh), but that’s OK too, because it’s something I’ve had brewing in my head as a pet project for a while and will now give me some reason to actually do some work on it. It’s nothing spectacular, but it’s something I find interesting and I always do better when I actually enjoy what I’m doing.

I’ve also started to read “leisure” books again. Some are in the paper form and others are via the Stanza iPhone app, but it’s nice to get some new/different information flowing into my brain. I feel like I’ve kind of let it stagnate these last few months. I haven’t actually finished them yet, which is going to be the true test, but I’m optimistic. Especially with good weather and practically zero responsibility? I definitely see a few days of lounging around the Plantations with a book or two in my future.

On Friday I hosted my second pot luck of the year and I think this one was even better! I was beginning to feel a bit on the germy side Thursday afternoon, but decided to push through in hopes that it would just go away. Unfortunately it didn’t and I didn’t have much of an appetite for the pot luck, but everyone loved the food that people brought! The things that I did nibble on were quite tasty! It was also fun to get a bunch of my different groups of friends together in one room. They all hit it off really well which is always a good thing! I’m hoping to have one last pot luck before graduation. Perhaps sometime in April.

I was completely out of commission yesterday. I made myself get up and go out to shoot a few things for a DAZE feature (I’m keeping my Sun commitments to a minimum these days), but after that I was down for the count. I don’t really remember much except for dozing in and out of sleep. I know I had a fever - the thermometer and my ridiculously bizarre dreams are proof of that. I pretty much slept the day away. It’s mostly gone today, but again I made myself get up and go out to be a productive human being (I had a lot of “work” to do at Borders that involved reading about 2 dozen magazines).

That’s about it. I’m settling quite nicely into this post-Sun lifestyle and the days seem to be absolutely flying by. I hope the rest of this semester is as nice as this past week, save for the bad weather and the gross cold. Here’s to the final chapter of college!

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Somewhat Lost

Jenn — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 07:07:00 +0000

After putting out my last paper as the Photo Editor of The Cornell Daily Sun last week, I started to feel a bit out of sorts. At first I thought it was because my sleep schedule was completely thrown off. I hadn’t gone to sleep until after 6AM and ended up sleeping in until 2:20PM on Friday with some attempted wake-ups in between and then, combined with an early wake-up on Saturday and a long, long day of sitting in the same room as we elected the 127th Editorial Board, I figured it was just all of the stress and sleep-deprivation of the last year catching up with me.

I spent literally all day Saturday with Sunnies. We had elections from 10:30AM until about 5:30PM, then I went out to dinner with some of the photo staff, then went home to change and back out to meet everyone at the traditional bar tab. We hung out all night - until about 1-1:30AM. I couldn’t have asked for a better way to end the term. I think it could easily be one of the best nights of my college career.

I woke up late today - sometime around 11 if I recall correctly. I immediately opened up my laptop and pulled up my email. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then it hit me. I only have MY OWN EMAIL to check. That’s it. Just one account. Luckily I had some facebook notifications waiting for me from the night before and that occupied my time for a bit, but the “out of sorts” feeling I’ve had these past few days pretty much turned into a mini state of depression. I IMed some of the editors who were online because I needed to do something and one of them reminded me to post the photos from the night before. I’d had the camera sitting across the room because I kind of felt that if I waited to upload them, I would be able to extend the night - pretend that it never actually ended.

So I grabbed my camera (it was the point and shoot) and downloaded the photos. I was IMing with Emily at the same time and mentioned to her that in each and every one of these shots, every single person - from the main subject to those who are just in the background doing their own thing - has the biggest smiles on their face and look like they’re having the night of their lives. It brought a smile to my face - a desperately needed smile considering the reality that was beginning to set in.

Every Sunday that we’ve been at school for the past year and then some, I’ve had to go to The Sun at 5PM for the weekly edit meeting. I’ve called Sundays my Sun-Days because I literally do nothing but Sun Stuff on Sundays. This Sunday was the first in a very long time where I had literally no responsibilities. I had NO IDEA what to do with myself.

Today pretty much felt like the longest day ever. I really couldn’t tell you what I spent my day doing because I don’t remember at all. Oh wait… I watched a movie. That’s right. I popped in Kate & Leopold (one of my Netflix movies), but kept dozing off. I’m pretty sure I saw the whole thing though. After that I think I just stared at my inbox for a while hitting the refresh button. I also checked my phone every five seconds. Do you know how weird it is not to get any emails or text messages for over an hour, or MORE?! I only got about FIVE emails today. TOTAL. And the only reason I had text messages was because I sent some out and one because a friend felt bad for my sorry state and sent a pity text.

After talking with Sarah (the now-former Managing Editor) and admitting that I felt like there was a giant hole in my life, she said she’d been feeling the same way all day. It seems that the post-elections Identity Crisis is something that happens every year but is something no one warns you about. A little heads-up would have been nice. Because this feeling? It’s not fun. I’ve been moping around all day mourning the loss of something that has consumed my life and has really defined my life for the last year as photo editor and another year before that as a staffer/senior photog. I’ve obviously known this entire time that some day it would come it an end. I even knew when and how it would come to an end, but I don’t think there is anything that could have prepared me for the huge sense of emptiness that comes along with it.

While I don’t particularly miss the whole checking-email-and-staying-up-til-ungodly-hours part of it just yet, I already miss the comfort of knowing that I will see the other editors all the time. I mentioned in my last post that we’d become a family over the course of this last year. I really don’t think I could find words to describe just how much of an impact these people have had on my life and how big of a role they played just by being there. Yeah yeah, so I said that I take comfort in the fact that I know we’ll see each other again throughout life, but there’s something different about a meeting here or there. There’s nothing like the relationship you have with people when you see them on a daily basis. When you spend hours and hours together and are working together toward a common goal for over a year. There’s really nothing that can make up for that.

So Sarah and I decided earlier today that we needed a reason to get up, get dressed, and leave our apartments. We decided to go to Ruloff’s trivia night but ended up going to CTB instead. I think that’s one of the best parts about going through this whole process as a team - we always know there’s someone else who’s feeling the exact same way you do. There’s comfort in numbers and it’s even better when you know you’re not alone in feeling like a pathetic, directionless loser who can’t even keep herself awake through an episode of How I Met Your Mother because you’re just that sad.

Back in my RYLA days we had a term called “RY-withdrawal” and it was used to describe the feeling of emptiness and loneliness that comes after a week at RYLA - when you get home and look around you and realize that your life is about to return to what most people would consider “normal,” but you want nothing more than for it to stay exactly as it has been. I remember getting RY-withdrawal, but it was nothing compared to the withdrawal you get after spending years doing something.

Sarah mentioned that a former EIC had told her earlier in the day that the SunSickness lasts for about 24 hours and then life begins to put itself back together. If that’s true then I should be back to normal in the morning, but considering that Monday was also a Sun-Day for me, I think it might take slightly longer. I think (I hope?) that by this time tomorrow night I’ll be back to my usual chipper self. This all may seem quite melodramatic and exaggeratory, and maybe it is. I might look back on this post in a week, a month, a year, and thing “wow, Jenn, what the hell was your issue? It’s not like it was the end of the world,” but right now it really does feel like the rug was just yanked out from beneath me. It’s the end of life as I’ve known it for almost 3/4 of my time in college. That’s a long time and to go from that to absolutely nothing is going to take a lot of adjusting.

Luckily tomorrow is a class day and I have a lot of work to do so hopefully I’ll be able to put this all out of my mind and get myself to move on. I don’t want to waste my last few months here being sad over what was. It’s just going to take some time.

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Sun Set

Jenn — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 02:56:25 +0000

I’d originally written this post as a long, rambling, somewhat cliche retrospective at 6AM this morning (though it was last night for me). When I woke up and re-read it, it’s not what I wanted to say, so I’ll save it for another day. Instead I’m going to go the route of a recap because, at the end of the day, I think it sums up this last year in a way that the 1000+ words I wrote when most people were just waking up to go to work for the day will never capture. Here goes…

It’s 5AM and I just got home from The Sun. Tonight was the last night of publication for the 126th Editorial Board where I’ve served as Photo Editor for the last 363 days. This Saturday afternoon I will be handing off the Photo Department to Matt.

It was an insane and intense evening. I walked down to the office around 8PM and arrived to an office full of outgoing editors, incoming editors, staffers, music, noise and beer. Though I suppose the only thing that was really different was the beer…

Camera in hand, ready to document the evening, I popped open a bottle of Dos Equis and joined in the fun. It was an interesting dynamic - there were the outgoing editors, myself included, who were absolutely giddy over the fact that we were a mere 40 or so hours from officially handing off our departments and only 6 hours away (in theory at least) from sending our last ever edition of The Cornell Daily Sun to the printer. Then there were the editorial compets, those who are still technically “in training” and will be facing the torture of elections on Saturday. They weren’t nearly as giddy. They were actually kind of scared - heads down, typing away frantically because to them, it’s only the beginning. There’s still a whole year ahead of them and they know they’re only just embarking on the journey of sleepless nights and a deadline-centric existence.

Anyway - we set about the business of actually putting out the paper. We did the usual things, but it was with all of the outgoing editors instead of the compets who have been pretty much running the show for the last six weeks. There was also the matter of our goodbye spread - the page of the paper that we take over as an homage to the outgoing editorial board. We’d been throwing around ideas for it for about a week now but hadn’t settled on anything until someone brought up the idea of using obamaicon.me and making Shepherd Fairey HOPE posters for each of our editors. PERFECT! But then I read the Terms and Conditions and we couldn’t use them in the paper. Not so perfect. I sat down at one of the computers and fired up Photoshop to try to recreate the poster in as few clicks as possible. I ended up settling on using the Cutout filter, some toning, and some pattern-fills to get the “look”. Luckily the page was running in black and white. Normally I would see that as a detriment, but not having color meant that I didn’t have to color-adjust until I could get each and every photo to use just the 4 colors used in the Fairey posters. I could just greyscale them and pray that no one counted the colors.

Then we hit the next hitch - our usual mug shots were way too boring for this page. Who wants to look at an entire page of people just staring straight ahead? Not me, that’s for sure. So now, in addition to having to make 35 or so individual posters, I needed to take and edit about 25 new mug shots. Joyyy. Keep in mind that it’s at least 11PM by this point and the paper is usually due to the printer by 1:30AM. Luckily by this point most of the board had had a good amount of beer and that saved me from having to take 15 shots of each person because they wanted it to be just perfect. Good stuff.

Now we’re around midnight and I’m just loading up the new mug shots. I finished about…3 and it was time for the midnight edit meeting. It’s a Daily Sun tradition and it could not wait until after I finished the other 30 posters. Upstairs we went, alcohol in hand and sleepiness setting in.

We arranged the chairs in a circle and got comfy. Then the bottle of really cheap, disgusting, reminiscent of rubbing alcohol that has been sitting in your medicine cabinet Light Rum came out. It’s also tradition to take a shot out of it once you’ve said your piece. The bottle was passed around the circle as the editors, one-by-one, shared their feelings about The Sun and each other (meanwhile one of the editors was passed out from a bit too much to drink). It was really sad, actually and I found myself on the verge of tears on more than one occasion. The end of my term at The Sun is one of the major “ends” that I will be facing in these next 86 days and let’s face it, I’m the sentimental type.

The midnight edit meeting made me realize, once again, how much of a family we’ve become over this last year. We went from being almost complete strangers to very close friends and will gravitate toward each other even when we’re not at the office. We hang out in Libe Cafe a few times a week and if there’s a completely unrelated event that some of us just happen to be attending, we tend to hang out with each other there, too. We stop to talk to each other in the middle of the road as we’re walking to or from campus. We spend more time with each other than we spend with nearly anyone else in our lives. It’s kind of nice, actually.

So the bottle continued to be passed around with some bathroom breaks in between and a few more breaks to make sure that the passed out editor was still conscious. We reminisced about the fun times we had and the adventures we went on as a group over the course of the year. It’s been truly a great year. It’s nearly 2AM at this point and we’ve pretty much halted production of the paper so that we could get together to reminisce. We knew that we had to get back to work, but leaving our edit room was like acknowledging that it’s almost over. I know I wasn’t ready.

But it had to be done. As soon as the EIC finished his shot, I ran downstairs and sat down in front of the computer to crank out the rest of the HOPE photos. I had the design editors pull old mugs for me to try to streamline the process and I magnetic lassoed, feathered, cropped, scaled, typed, and keyboard shortcutted faster than I’ve ever done before, and ask anyone, I’m a master of keyboard shortcuts.

Enter 3AM and I’d just about finished up. Carol, the outgoing Design Editor, placed the last of the mugshots onto the page as everyone looked on. The page was printed and I had the honor of signing it out. The one and only time. Off to the printer it went. Now all that was left was for Sammy, the Associate Editor compet, to finish the full mast. We all stood around waiting with our coats on and half asleep (though some did actually fall asleep) until he finished and then basically sprinted out of the office and started walking up to the State Street Diner. It’s now 3:45AM.

Another Sun tradition, the State Street Diner has been around since 1936. It’s a few blocks from the office and was frequented by the likes of Kurt Vonnegut and other former Sun editors during the days when the paper was finished at midnight and they all went out to eat after. These days we tend to stick to Shortstop Deli, home of the Poor Man’s Pizza (a.k.a. the PMP). Absolutely starving, we took up the entire back of the diner and inundated the kitchen with orders of bacon, eggs, pancakes, toast, and pretty much every other breakfast food imaginable. I love diners and this meal was just what we needed after a long and somewhat drunken and somewhat emotionally draining evening. There’s really nothing like grease and carbs to make your sorrows, sleepiness and intense hunger disappear. We stacked ourselves six to a table (though we probably could have used 5-6 tables, we decided to go for 3 and we just sat around and talked. I don’t remember what we talked about at all. Time just kind of slipped away as we relished our last moments together as a board and our stacks of pancakes, toast, eggs, and goodness.

I remember thinking at one point that it was funny how we ended up arranging ourselves into tables - it had nothing to do with who our closest friends were on the board or who we hung out with the most, it was just a matter of the order we walked into the diner. We honestly could have arranged ourselves in any combination of six people per table and would have had a great time. We get along that well and that just astonishes me. After an entire year of working together under such intense pressure, we actually came out of it as really close friends instead of wanting to kill each other. That, right there, is a testament to the type of people I had the opportunity to work with.

It’s now just about 5AM and we filed out of the State Street Diner and walk back to the office. Luckily, by this point, everyone had sobered up and we piled into the four cars we had at the office. It was time to go home. It wasn’t sad, it wasn’t happy, it just was. I think by this point we all just wanted to get our heads onto our pillows and not wake up until well after noon. We knew we were going to see each other again. After all, there was still the matter of elections on Saturday.

We just sort of sat in silence as we drove up the hills of Ithaca in the wee hours of the morning. It was an absolutely gorgeous night out - low 40s and unseasonably warm. Just perfect, really. Into the doors of Eddygate we went (a good number of us live in this building) and we parted ways at the elevator. “See ya Saturday.”

As I looked through today’s paper, my last as the Photo Editor, I couldn’t help but think back on how far we’ve come in this last year and the amazing friendships I was able to develop with some of the smartest, most talented people I know (and arguably some of the smartest people around). It’s kind of poetic, though, that despite the changes and passing of time, it all ended in the same way that it began.

And as the twitters and facebook updates streamed in this afternoon, I chuckled at our shared haggardness - we’d all woken up sometime around the 2PM hour and some of us ended up finding each other around campus. So much for “See ya Saturday.” It’s these random meetings that keep me from becoming too sad about this particular ending. I know we’ll see each other again and again as we go through life. Sunnies always find each other. It’s just the way the world works.

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completely shallow and somewhat vain

Jenn — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 06:50:41 +0000

I changed my avatar today. It was a huge deal for me. Why? Oh here’s why:

I’ve had my avatar pretty much since I started college. I took it during my freshman year and it’s been my default avatar on nearly every place I go on the internet ever since. It’s my identity here. Weird, I know, but since I really only started to take the internet seriously once I got to college (it was just an insomnia-inducing hobby before that), it’s really the only one I’ve ever used.

I know that when other people change their avatars it takes me a while to get used to them. I think avatars are a huge part of internet-based interaction and over the years I’ve come to associate certain avatars with certain people. It’s their stand-in for when I can’t see them in person to talk to them. But, this isn’t anything new…

I’ve known for a while now that I needed a new avatar. I don’t look like my avatar anymore and it’s 3 years old. I gave a new one a shot on Twitter, but it was taken with my iPhone and wasn’t really what I wanted. After taking some shots of my haircut today as required by my mom whenever I get it cut away from home, I realized that I should probably just try to take a new avatar photo while I was at it. 80 shots later, I had a decent range to pick from. But I couldn’t make a decision. I picked my top six and sent them to some trusted friends:

I got some differing opinions, but most were for the top, right. After Alex pointed out what had been bothering me about the bottom left (the smile doesn’t look as real), I was set on the top right. After some minor tweaks (it was looking kind of yellow), I was ready to upload. At least in terms of the photo. I wasn’t emotionally ready to click the “Upload” button just yet. Especially not on Flickr. I seriously felt like I was cheating on myself! Like I was officially acknowledging that I’m growing up. I felt like I was about to turn my back on the avatar that had treated me so well.

Imagine that! Feeling sorry and somewhat apprehensive about changing an image! That’s what made me blog this. Because it just blew my mind that I had become so attached to this “identity” online and that I was nervous about replacing some PIXELS! Absurd. But I did it. It had to be done. And I’m happy about this new one. I think it’s accurate and shows that I’m no longer 18 years old. As Natalie pointed out oh so painfully today, “well. we’re old. / jenn, you’re in your MID TWENTIES… / after this bday i mean.” I perish the thought.

So that’s the story of my new avatar. Somewhat boring, somewhat pathetic, but quite telling of how I’ve managed to get myself so embedded in this series of tubes that something as simple as changing the tiny image that appears next to my username caused such a ruckus.

Here’s to my old avatar. It lived a long, fulfilled life.
Goodbye, old friend.

Hello new beginning. :)

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Ordinary Sun-days

Jenn — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 08:45:23 +0000

I’ve missed days like today. It wasn’t an especially extraordinary day. It wasn’t even all that eventful, but it’s the kind of day that I can look back on and say “I love days like today.”

I slept in today. A lot. I’m talking 12 hours of sleep. Do you know what that feels like? It feels like heaven. I woke up AFTER NOON. That never happens. Even though I set my alarm for 10:08 (my birthday, I’m weird like that), I shut it up and went back to sleep. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to just wake up when I wasn’t tired anymore. That time, apparently, is 1:30PM. I think the last time I slept that late was because I was confused by the time zones. It was wonderful.

Anyway, so I woke up and dilly dallied around my room for a bit - I poked around Flickr, caught on my feeds, the usual. The perfect Sunday morning, I think. If I had been thinking I would have made some chai to go with my banana bread, but alas, you live and you learn…

I headed down to The Sun at 4:30PM for the weekly 5PM edit meeting. I wasn’t particularly excited to go down because, to be honest, I’m getting kind of tired of the routine of it all and we’re at that awkward point between editorial boards where I’m pretty much just a lame duck so I feel kind of useless.

The good thing about this interim, though, is that I can focus on some of the cool projects that I’ve wanted to do all year but was too busy managing the day-to-day issues to really focus on many big picture things. There are a lot of things I’ve had on my list - things like figuring out a better system for storing our photos because right now it’s not very searchable. It’s a bit of a mess. The one project that I’ve been dying to do, though, is sifting through and digitizing the many, many thousands of negatives we have filed away around the office. I’d been thinking about it for a while now, but I’d never really had the time or the energy to take some sort of action.

I finally did today. I dusted off the old negative scanner, dug out the old software, and poked around the web looking for updates and drivers so that I could getting working on our computers. After a bit of trial and error, I finally fed in my first strip of negatives. It was just a crappy one that had been lying on the desk for ages, but I figured if there was something wrong with the scanner and it decided to eat or otherwise ruin the negative, losing this one wouldn’t be a huge deal. By golly, it worked! I was so excited!

In between editing photos for tomorrow’s paper, I poked through the oldest negatives we have - beginning in 1967 - until I found one that would be fun to scan in. I decided to look for a photo from around today’s date in 1969, so it would be a “40 years ago today” photo. I wasn’t able to find one for the 16th, but the 17th actually had some photos from a protest outside of Day Hall. Perfect!

I picked a strip from that series and loaded it into the scanner. About 15 minutes later I had one strip scanned in and saved to my new “Scanned Negatives” folder where the digitized archive photos will soon live. Matt, equally excited to see this project beginning to see the light of day, began to dig through the old prints from the 1990s. The candids were amazing and so full of life! This campus looked like a completely different place. It was sunny. People were happy. There seemed to be a better sense of community but at the same time people were very unafraid of being individuals. Fascinating, if you ask me, but the 1990s will have to wait. I want to get through the 60s and 70s first since those negatives would deteriorate sooner than the 90s.

I’ve mentioned before that I love “artifacts” and I think photos are a very big part of that. I would love to spend days and days in the basements of museums just combing through the photos they have filed away for safe keeping. So much history! Luckily for me, I have my own mini museum to play in at The Sun and apart from Matt and I, no one really ever looks through the negatives. Jackpot!

So anyway, after scanning in that one strip of negatives I realized that I would need to come up with some sort of system before I began to scan large quantities of negatives into the computer. Since we don’t have any sort of record or database of exactly what’s in the negatives archives, it’s really just a lot of manual sifting through each drawer or binder. And there are a lot of them. I’d rather focus on major events and things, but at the same time I think being able to have the more candid “life at Cornell” style photos available to us would be equally valuable. Though, I suppose that could just be my own personal nerdiness. I put the scanning on hold until I could figure out some sort of method because otherwise, it will indeed be madness. Instead, I wrote a blog post about my new project.

I ended up staying at The Sun until about 1:30 in the morning. And this is the part that got me thinking about how much I’ve missed days like today, because as I was walking to the parking lot to load my camera gear into my car and head home for the night, I remembered back to this time last year when I was just beginning my term as Photo Editor and would stay at the paper until 1:30am a few nights a week, not because I had to, but because I wanted to. Because I was caught up in something that made me excited and because I was working on something that I thought would make the department better, make the paper better, or just make things a little easier. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to do things like that because it didn’t take long for me to get so bogged down in firefighting and routine and pretty much abandon progress in favor of survival. It’s a shame, really.

As I walked to my car the first overnight flurries began to fall and I drove home with my window cracked and took in the wonderful silence and calm of Ithaca at 1:30AM in the winter. It’s the days like this that I’m going to miss next year. Hopefully I’ll be able to fulfill the exciting projects part, but making my way home from a long night of doing exactly what makes me happiest because I wanted to do it, not because I had to do it, with many hours of homework ahead but perfectly content in the peace and quiet and serenity of an early morning snow flurry with crisp air and a clear, starry sky where the only signs of life are the lights coming from the windows of those burning the midnight oil in the warmth of their apartments? Only in Ithaca, only at Cornell, and only as a Sunnie.

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25 things

Jenn — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 18:03:55 +0000

I know, I know, memetastic, but I’ve been working on this list for a while (over 10 days) and I tried my very hardest to include things that even my closest friends wouldn’t know about me. Enjoy!

When undecided about what I want to eat or drink, I tend to pick the item whose colors complement the colors of what’s around me the best. For example, the other night I made Monterey Chicken and I thought about making lemonade to go with it, but I decided on cranberry apple juice because it would bring out the reds in the salsa.
I generally don’t eat the ends of foods (the “butts”). It started out with just hot dogs, but I also refuse to eat the end of a banana or a pickle. This seems to be a topic my friends love to talk about when I’m not around and will tell their friends at parties.
It seems that a lot of people assume that I drive a VW Beetle. I actually drive a Corolla, but it was my second choice after a Beetle. :)
I have a voyeuristic tendency when it comes to other people using technology. My all-time favorite is watching a group of people simultaneously edit a Google Spreadsheet, but I’m generally fascinated by how people’s use of technology differs from mine.
My childhood ambition was to become the person who colored in the cartoons. I had the 96 box of Crayola crayons memorized and could identify it of you colored a sheet of paper. I thought it would be good to know in order to become a professional colorer.
I’m also fascinated by the evolution of popular culture and I love being able to draw connections between what we do today and where it could have started way back when. I took a class on this for fun and it just reaffirmed that I’m just a huge nerd.
I still regret giving up playing the violin after playing for 9 years. I tried to start up again in high school but got too frustrated by how much I had to relearn.
I’m rather superstitious about the number 8. It’s usually a sign of good things to come.
I got my first “job” when I was in pre-school. I worked at the old fashioned cash register in the deli next door to my dad’s business. I’m pretty sure I only worked in about 5-10 minute shifts with 45 minute breaks in between (I was only 4 after all), but I was paid in candy bars and apple juice.
I slept with around 4-8 cabbage patch/american girl dolls in my bed every single night until sometime during the 6th grade. The first large purchase I remember making with my own money that I had saved up was the Felicity American Girl doll. She and all of the rest of the gang now live in a lovely rubbermaid storage container in the attic.
I’ve had a “business” for as long as I can remember. It started out (typically) with a lemonade stand and babysitting, grew into web design, and who knows what else. I think there was a time during 4th or 5th grade when I sold beads and I sold erasers in the 2nd grade.
My first AOL screenname (circa 1993) was JennV108.
I’m still not entirely sure what I want to be when I grow up.
I really loved being involved in the production of anything - books, websites, music, videos, newspapers, you name it. I like to see how all of the pieces fit together and spend more time watching “behind the scenes” bits from movies than I do the actual movies. I’d love to have a production company some day that lets me dabble in a little of everything.
I’ve been able to keep fewer than 35 emails in my inbox at any given time for at least the last 2 years. I don’t like a cluttered inbox and follow a strict filing/archiving/filtering system. It’s my to-do list, so if there are more than 35 things it means that I’m either being a huge slacker or I’m in a cabin in the middle of the woods with no internet access.
Though the definition of “pulling a Jenn Vargas” has evolved over time, current use can mean one of two things: 1) You went to bed sometime after 3 in the morning even though you had to be up early the next day or 2) you cooked something tasty, took a lot of photos of it, and posted them on flickr.
I’m not really a vegetarian, but I don’t eat very much meat and the meat that I do consume has to be prepared very specifically. For example: I will only eat ham in the form of cold cuts, I will only eat chicken if it is off the bone, and I will only eat beef if it is in the form of a very thin hamburger with a lot of lettuce, ketchup, onions, and pickles. I’m trying to be less picky.
I would much rather spend a day at the beach when it is cool and rainy in my favorite sweatpants and socks rather than when it is sunny and hot. As a matter of fact, you will rarely find me near a beach if it is sunny and hot. Beaches are more interesting and calming when they’re either a) empty, b) cold and rainy, or c) both.
I can’t sleep when it’s quiet. I either need to have the ceiling fan on or my music playing. I sleep much better when the window is open, unless I’m on the first floor.
I bought my first domain, jennweb.com just before midnight on December 31, 1999. My mom tried to convince me to wait until after midnight to see if anything became of the Y2K bug, but I was impatient. Lucky for me, Y2K was a complete joke.
I hated my middle name until sometime near the very end of high school/the beginning of college. Though I don’t love it now, I at least tolerate it and no longer consider dropping it from my name.
If I could avoid one form of communication it would be the telephone. I’ve hated it since I was a kid and would prefer morse code or smoke signals over using the phone. I don’t like how it’s so easy to be deceptive over the phone. I realize it’s possible to be deceptive over other forms of communication, but I could go on for ages about why I avoid phones…
I’ve worn glasses for computer-related eye strain since I was in the 7th grade - about 10 months after I taught myself HTML.
I thought blogs were really annoying and cookie cutter when they first started to gain traction on the web. I was much more a fan of just editing the .html file that ran the front page of my site andrefused to put one on my site because everyone was doing it and they all looked the same (Check my archives. I was pretty adamant about it!) I now see the error of my ways and wonder what the heck I was thinking back then.
I really love music, Real music. Especially purely instrumental music and I’d say a good 65% of my music collection is either classical or instrumental of sorts. I’m a huge fan of string music (violin, cello, etc), but will listen to just about anything. I also love celtic instrumentals and could listen to enya pretty much all day long. I couldn’t tell you what the most current club music is, but I can probably identify the different seasons of the four seasons and beethoven vs. mozart. I’m ok with that.

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completely shallow and somewhat vain

A User Study on Myself

Jenn — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 19:31:51 +0000

(Alternate title: A Completely Un-Scientific Study of More Than You Could Possibly Ever Want To Know)

Some of you may have noticed that this page used to be password protected. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to post this because frankly, I don’t think many people would care except for me and my weird habits of making pie charts on a Saturday night. The more I thought about it though, I realized that I don’t particularly mind posting it since it’ll be really interesting to look back on 5 years from now when most of what I’m doing online today will seem incredibly archaic. Think of this as making the lives of future anthropologists a tiny bit easier :) -JV

The question “what do you do on the computer all day?” is one that I often hear - either from my mom, my friends, or even myself when I wonder where the hours have gone. I often don’t know how to reply. I know I spend some editing photos or on Flickr. I also IM a lot and read through whatever is sitting in my RSS reader, but what I do specifically is a mystery.

Part of my 101 in 365 is to spend less time on the computer. I’ve definitely been spending less time in front of the screen, but mostly by coincidence. I figured that the best thing I could do to convince myself to pull myself away from it would be to do a sort of audit of my use - to track every single website, app, and tool I use in a given day to see where I’m wasting time and what I could do to make myself more efficient and less prone to mindless clicking. I searched around for a while for a good app that would let me track what I do without being really creepy (oh look, more mindless clicking!) and settled on Slife.

I’ve had it running in the background for 9 days now, but I thought I’d just take 7 of those for “a week in the life.” I’d say this was a pretty typical week for me, so this should be a pretty good snapshot. All of these percentages are over an observed time of roughly 58.34 hours (which means that I spend about 37% of my week in front of the computer).

An Average Week

Nothing too out of the ordinary here, though I was quite happy to see that I only spend 37% of my week in front of the (or I should say my) computer. That’s not nearly as bad as I had been anticipating! The fact that I’m only spending 10% of my week doing Sun things now is quite a relief. Last semester that would have been closer to 25-40% depending on the given week.

My Computer Use In a Single Week

The Culprits

The obvious offenders here are pretty standard considering my interests. I spend a good amount of my time in Bridge and Photoshop (both CS3) and IMing, of course. The ones that threw me off, though were Twitter and DVD. I didn’t think I spent all that much time looking at Twitterific but I guess I do! I also watched 3 DVDs this week, so that shot the DVD count up. I’d say an average week would be 1.5 DVDs with movies that are significantly shorter than The Grapes of Wrath. The “others” category is comprised mostly of Evernote, Skitch, Transmit, iCal, Pages, Keynote, and a few other very infrequent ones.

The Biggest Time Sink of Them All

Safari. For the purposes of this list I’m combining my use of Firefox and Safari. The only reason I used Firefox at all was because of the annoying 500 error Gmail was throwing last week. Slife says I spent a total of 29 hours, 52 minutes, and 39 seconds in a web browser. It doesn’t take into account the time I spend watching online view at hulu, abc.com, netflix, etc., which I would estimate as another 5 hours/week. This means that I spend almost 60% of my online time and 22% of my entire week staring at a web browser. That makes me feel really sorry for myself, actually!

Web Habits

Since most of my time is spent in-browser, I thought I’d break that down too. Though I think the blogging number is a bit inflated compared to my regular blogging habits (though the time spent putting this post together would actually increase that number by a lot (and yes, I see the irony in this)), the rest is pretty much what I was expecting. I’m still not sure whether I think Netflix should have been counted in this category since I really just stuck it on full screen and stepped away from the computer, but since it does involve being in-browser and at least in the vicinity of my computer (same for online TV), I don’t think it’s completely out of place. A better breakdown:

Flickr

I consume more Flickr pages than anything else. My rough estimates put it at 608 pages (and this was a slow Flickr week for me) for an estimated 5 hours and 25 minutes this week. I spend an average of 4 seconds on a Flickr photo page page (I make quick decisions about what I like and what I don’t), and 30 seconds - 3 minutes on pages with videos. I also spend an average of 2 minutes in a discussion forum page. I spent a total of 13 minutes this week looking at my contact’s page, but I tend to go from the homepage directly. I spent 31 minutes in Organizr. Not too shabby. I wouldn’t mind spending more time here and less time at facebook or in the everything else category.

Video Things

Since I’m working on the AFI Top 100 Movies list and a good number of those are available on Netflix Instant View, I watch at least one movie/week that way. The Online TV portion is shows such as Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill, The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, and whatever else I missed when it was actually on TV.

RSS

This one is a little tough. The number here represents the time I spent in Google Reader itself. I couldn’t figure out a way to parse all of the individual pages that I visited from clicks in the reader. I tend to do most of my RSS reading in Google Reader, save for things that are in the delicious popular feed or a few others that I prefer to see on the actual site. I would estimate that at least 5% of the Everything Else category could be dedicated to things that I was referred to via RSS.

Everything Else

The Everything Else category is the one that I need to curb a lot. This is the mindless clicking portion. While some of it is made up of Google searches, some random web design things that I was looking into as a redesigned jennvargas.com, and the 20 minutes I spent withdrawing invites from when LinkedIn hijacked my address book, for the most part the pages that fall into this category are ones that I could really do without.

So What’s the Point?

Well the point is I need to peel myself away from my beloved MacBook Pro. I’m going to keep Slife running in the background for another 3 weeks and revisit the data on March 1. The goals are to:

reduce the time I spend in front of the computer in a given week to somewhere under 30%. This means I need to reduce the number of hours I spend on the computer each day by 1.6 hours. 7 hours/day is still a lot, but it’s cold out and there’s not much else to do. It’s a good place to start.
of the less than 30% I spend at the computer, the time lost in “everything else” should be cut down…let’s say to 40% (hey…baby steps!) which means that I need to cut back my mindless browsing from 4.26 hours/day to 2.88 hours/day. Wow, 4 hours/day is actually a lot of mindless browsing. Definitely something to work on.
I’m only getting slightly less sleep than I should. 8 hours/night would be the equivalent of 33% of a week. That sounds like a good number. Hopefully I can distribute it more uniformly, too. 4 hours one night and 12 another isn’t exactly ideal!

That’s not a bad start. It was definitely a great exercise to see where I’m spending all of my time because there’s nothing worse than getting to Friday and having no idea what you accomplished over the course of the week. Hopefully seeing all of these bad habits spelled out right in front of me (in pretty graphs, of course) will help me kick my butt into gear and actually start spending more time offline.

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Photography Wishlist

Jenn — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 06:26:07 +0000

In the last few years photography has grown to be one of my biggest hobbies (after spending inordinate amounts of time on the Internet, of course). I’ve amassed a pretty respectable collection of gear since I got my first dSLR in 2001 (I had a film SLR with 2 lenses before that), but there are still a few bits missing here and there that I’d love to add to my arsenal. The good news is that I’ve managed to get a good number of the things that I had on my Geek Wishlist in 2007, but it’s time for an update. Some of these are completely ridiculous things that I would never be able to afford, others don’t exist, but I’d like them to, and then there are the more realistic ones. Why do I need all of this stuff, you ask? Well for one, I’m addicted to gadgets. But I also think that having the right tools at your disposal is the best way to get better at what you’re trying to do (I mean really, how would I have become an internet addict if I didn’t have a computer when I was 5?!).

So anyway…on with the list:

Gear for Capturing

Sigma 30mm f/1.4

I only recently discovered this lens and I’ve fallen in love with it. A few of my favorite flickr photographers use it as their primary lens and their photos are fantastic. Yes, it’s the photographer, not the lens, but it would be nice to have a shorter prime lens, and f/1.4 would make me a very happy camper. Take a look at some of the best shots on Flickr tagged with sigma 30mm. This is probably the item I covet the most at the moment. The Damage: Currently $384.24 (on sale) at Amazon.

Canon 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5

I used this lens once over the summer and I absolutely loved it. It doesn’t distort very much and it gets a great wide shot. My current wide is 11-18mm, which isn’t so bad, but it’s an f/4.5-5.6 and the glass isn’t very high quality. I’m a big fan of wide angle shots so it’d be nice to have some quality glass for it. I’d be willing to sell my current one for this one! The Damage: $710 [Amazon]

Sigma 8mm f/3.5

I got to try this lens a few months ago and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. According to the person who let me try it out, it gives a 180º view. I got my own feet in the shot! This is definitely more of a toy lens than anything else, but I think it’s a good option for a fisheye lens. I would say it’s lower on the priority list, but hey, this is a wishlist after all! The Damage: $689
[Amazon]

Canon EOS 5D Mark II

Who doesn’t want a 5D? OK, I’d be perfectly happy with a 1D Mark III, I think it’s due for an upgrade sometime soon. The 5D has gotten some great reviews and everyone I know who has one loves it to death. Ever since I shot with the Nikon D700 and D3, both of which have full-frame sensors, I’ve been dying to have a camera that doesn’t require me to take crop factor into account. I’ve been warned that it’s not the greatest lens for shooting sports, but considering I only have another few months where that is a major concern, I’m OK with that minor issue. The Damage: $3,449.99 (body only) [Amazon]

Gear for Processing

Adobe Creative Suite CS4 (Design Premium)

When I first downloaded the trial for CS4 I was really angry with it. Adobe had moved around the keyboard shortcuts and it was killing my workflow. I hadn’t gotten used to it before the trial expired, but when I went back to CS3 I found myself wishing I had some of the CS4 features back, especially when it came to processing RAW photos. The options there are so much better in CS4 including such simple things like previewing your crop or vignetting after the crop rather than the image as a whole. It’s the little things that count! And hey, I’m sure it won’t be that difficult to remap the keyboard shortcuts back to where I like them! The Damage: $1,699.49 (Cheaper at The Cornell Store with student discount) [Amazon]

Photo Mechanic

We use Photo Mechanic to organize our photos at The Sun and I’ve gotten so used to the workflow that I find it difficult to work with other organization tools. I’ve tried Bridge, and it’s what I use primarily now, but I don’t really like the organization of the tagging/keywording features. They’re too clunky and unfriendly. Photo Mechanic is simplistic but it lets me organize and retreive my files the way I want them. The Damage: $135 [Camera Bits]

30″ ACD or 30″ Dell LCD

This one was on my original list and it’s still there. My current monitor is 20″, which is fine, but I’d love to view my photos at 100% if I could! I’ve read/heard that the Dell’s colors are actually better than the Apple 30″, but I’d be perfectly fine with either. The Damage: $1,772.36 for the ACD. [Amazon]

Wishful Thinking

Any Leica, really

With a 50mm 1.0 lens lens. I think that if I were ever to acquire a Leica it would make the most sense to get a film one because that’s what makes Leica’s special, but the more pragmatic part of my brain is telling me to get a digital body so that I don’t have to pay for photo processing. I’m not picky. I’ll take any of them! The Damage: A painful $3995 for the digital body, $4395+ for the film body.

A collection of antique cameras

A long time ago I decided that if I were to start any sort of collection of objects it would be antique cameras. I think it’s the perfect fit for me - I love photography, I love technology, I love “artifacts” of the pre-digital days, and cameras are generally smaller than a collection of old Apple products. Right now my collection only consists of this really random video camera that I found in my gram’s house from circa 1960-70 and my first digital camera - a 1.3MP Sony Cybershot (yes, it’s an antique!). They’re nifty, but not as cool as an old camera with a bellow and medium format film. Oh and I’d also love an original Kodak Brownie.

Openness

This one sounds really weird, but I think it’s important so it’s going on my list. Yes, we all know that I spend a lot of time on Flickr, but the one thing that irritates the heck out of me is people who don’t share their EXIF data! I mean really, is it that private? When I see a shot I like, the first thing I do is scroll down to see what type of camera the person used and then I’ll click on “More properties” to check out their focal length, aperture, and all of that good stuff. I think it’s the best way to learn apart from actually taking photos and it saddens me that a lot of the best photographers on Flickr don’t share that information. It’s not like it devalues their work and it would be a great help to people who want to become better photographers! The Damage: A few clicks of the mouse. (Ok, I’ll step off of my soap box now and continue the list..)

Miscellany

Apart from all of this, there’s the obvious: More CF cards, lens cleaner, a second camera bag, a trip around the world, extra batteries, a battery pack with a second shutter release, a remote shutter release, flash accessories like a diffuser or pocket wizards, the lifetime Flickr Pro membership I asked for in my original list, and well, I could go on all day.