Or not.

A lot has happened in the last few months. My apologies for ignoring you – you pack of snarling, vicious interwebulitees. Yes, that’s my word. Print it out in a really big sans-serif font. Study it. Learn to spell it. Scan it back in. Make it your desktop picture. Print it out again. Frame it. Repeat.

Here’s what’s up with me. The short version.

I quit Microsoft and started a new company.

Well, two companies.

First, GreenTongue Software. See that wheeled contraption over there? That’s the iPhone app bandwagon. See that goofy guy climbing hand over hand up the wagon wheel and perching himself on top of it? That’s me. I will now proceed to drink a Mai-Tai and start complaining about XCode.

Second, Slam Dunk Consulting. We help micro businesses get on the web. Fast. A micro business is a very small company. Like one to five people. Or less. Yes, less than zero, wise ass. The company has negative one people. Can I continue now? Anyway… lots of these micro business have no expertise in internet technology, and they don’t know how to get it, or don’t want to get it, or they don’t know who to trust. Many of these folks can barely get their e-mail, much less know what SEO or social networking is. And they’ve likely had bad experiences and lost lots of money with shady goombas and shysters selling .com juice. And, of course, everyone needs to be on the web. Now. And likely they need to be on the first page of google or bing or yahoo searches. They depend on it. What Slam Dunk Consulting offers is prepackaged solutions to solve all these problems at reasonable prices, with quick delivery, all done by trustworthy and ethical people, e.g. me and other folks I’m working with. Including my dogs, who are getting pretty good at editing MX records (cheap labor paid in bacon strips per hour).

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Timmy got stuck in a well. Er, I mean, since I left the mothership, the stock price has gone up. Random uncorrelated fact. Also, I’ve been working hard under contract writing a really really cool iPhone app. I can’t tell you what it is, but I will. At some point. And you’ll want it. And you’ll get it.

Of course also I’ve been learning about running a small business. Lot’s to learn. Who knew accounting was so annoying?

Stay tuned. Radio silence has now be broken, and stay tuned for regular broadcasts on this frequency. Frequency Mike.

Over and out.

(Yeah, yeah, photography blog FAIL. Move on.)

Here’s a shot of Julia’s banana bread stand on north Maui. Home of the best banana bread on the planet. And I had some. And it’s pretty damn good. My mouth is getting frisky remembering it. Saliva glands activating. I think I’ll go eat a banana. I have a sudden craving. For a banana.

This is interesting – here’s how many pictures I’ve taken broken down by year:

• 1998: 5 (this is how many digital pictures I have from that year, though I shot some film).
• 1999: 89 (started going digital with a Nikon something or other. I think it was 10 pixels. That’s right. No mega.)
• 2000: 719
• 2001: 334
• 2002: 2006
• 2003: 759
• 2004: 289
• 2005: 1684
• 2006: 3087
• 2007: 2533
• 2008: 13038 (no, that ain’t a typo)

I’m trying to go through them, choose a minimum bar for quality, keyword them (I’ve done a lot already), at least make sure the white balance is correct, and upload them to our pictures site. I’ve also renamed them and organized them on disk.

Now I have so much data that my 1TB disk for my Time Machine backups isn’t big enough for a single Time Machine backup. Damn. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that yet.

In the short term I’ve turned off Time Machine, which I’m not happy about, and I’m mirroring everything to my server (a homemade Windows Home Server box) using Synchronize Pro. I still have 2.5tb free there and everything is duplicated so I’m not worried for the moment. It does worry me, though, that I don’t have versioned backups.

If only Time Machine (reliably) worked with SMB mounted volumes (Mike shakes fist in direction of Cupertino) so I could use Time Machine with my server…

I’m now eyeing the new HP MediaSmart Server. They’ve fixed this problem (so you can back up to it with Time Machine). I want one but I have to spend my money on other mildly important things like food. (Did you know that weddings are expensive? Who knew!?) I figure I’ll eventually get one (unless Apple fixes this problem in Snow Leopard) and use it for my Mac backups and use the current Server as a file share and PC backup.

I also don’t have a good, eh, any offsite backup at the moment. God forbid my house implodes because I built it on a Indian burial ground. (I hate it when that happens.) Not many things I own are irreplaceable. My pictures are pretty much at the top of this list. This includes all the slides and analog photographs I have in boxes in the garage.

I think it’s best not to think too hard about this or I’ll have to start breathing rapidly in and out into a paper bag and pound some sort of conscious reducing substance. And that wouldn’t be pretty.

There are three things I’m passionate and deeply interested in. (These, of course, do not include the really important things in life like my new wife and family and friends. Just to be clear.)

These three things are:

1. Writing software (my day job)
2. Reading (both Fiction and Non-Fiction)
3. Writing
4. Photography

Ok, that’s four things. Notice that math isn’t one of those three things.

And then there’s blogging. Where does that fall in this list? Certainly number three. But where else? All. None. Some. Which is exactly the problem.

Everything I’ve read about creating a successful blog (usually on a successful blog) suggests that the blog should specialize in something. Pick a topic. Any topic. And run with it. Right there, Mike’s blog equals blogging fail. My blog is too schizophrenic.

Here’s a great post on writing a blog by Penelope Trunk (whom I’m a big fan of).

I’m not sure how this will work out, but as I said it’s an experiment. I’m going to leave my posting of whacky youtube videos and random links to my twittering and try to write about where my life intersects with photography. That said, I’m going to try to do it in a way that doesn’t bore those of you not so interested in photography.

I hope you stick with me and keep reading, thanks.

Thanks Reeves for the photo.

I went to Maui and got married.

I know, I know, real original. Worked for me though. What can I say? It was fantastic and I’m quite the happy fellow. Complete with a jaunty spring in my step and a cocky gleam in my monocle.

The above picture was taken in Makena Cove (also called the “Secret Cove”) in Wailea, Maui. Our photographers were Gordon Nash and his assistant Ian Shepherd. As you can see, they have no idea what they’re doing whatsoever. Hah. Irony. I actually meant the opposite of what I just said. See how that works?

This beach is pretty much why we got married in Maui. We stumbled on it in 2006 and thought it would be the perfect place to get married. And it was so. Well, sort of…

We were actually married on Poolenalena beach, which is just a surfboard ride down the coast. This is where the above picture was taken.

Poolenalena beach is okay, but its not as good as it used to be since they paved the whole thing and built a Starbucks, Jamba Juice, Noah’s Bagel’s combo mall. We did the ceremony there instead of at Makena Cove because we had too many people with all their beer kegs and ATVs and whatnot. See, my peeps like to fire off their double pumps and do wheelies to celebrate this kind of thing, and there’s just not room for this at the cove.

More later.

Anyway, try getting this shot with a point and shoot. Results like this make it all worth it. The mocking. The heavy gear. The frustrations of trying to get the camera to do what I want it to do.

Steve Walsh is rolling over in his grave. Actually, he’s probably at his castle on top of mountain playing his pipe organ and wearing a black cape, and can’t be bothered at the moment. But if he was paying attention, I’m pretty sure he’d fist pump a few times and do a handstand on his korg for old times sake. If you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about then, well, you’re not as old as me. Either that or you grew up listening to Abba and Olivia Newton John.

The audience doesn’t deserve to be watching her though, with that flaccid response. I’d be hollerin’, flicking my bic above my head, and passing around the spliff.

Rock the f#$k on, girl.

I wish Hollywood would make something this cool, instead of movies like Norbitt or Spiderman III.

Rendezvous with Rama from Aaron Ross on Vimeo.

The reason that everything looks like miniature models is because of the unique and very shallow depth of field – if you look closely you’ll see that only a horizontal band in the middle of the shots are in focus.

Bathtub III from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

This should be a fast machine. Right? You’d think? Am I nuts to think this?

The experience of Vista itself is fine, I’ve come to grips with the look and feel (after making some tweaks to it), but here’s the thing – performance and sleep both suck chocolate salty balls. What I mean by this is performance ranges from sluggish to horrible (sorry about the juvenile balls reference, btw). Sleep has never worked properly on this thing and I’ve tweaked every Power option and spent a good hour going through the BIOS on my machine. Read that again. I spent an hour in my BIOS. Warning, Bill Gatesenson! Warning Bill Gateseson! (Mike waves arms around and scares all the dogs and small children in the vicinity).

Soooo…..

You can pretty much string together every curse word you know into novel and obscene combinations and you’ll only approximate an infinitesimal portion of the frustration that shot out of my nose (and elsewhere that shall not be mentioned) like coke mixed with pop rocks.

Sir, we’ve gone to defcon 1. Get the keys and standby. We’ve opened the missile silos. Big expensive stuff is steaming and vibrating.

I endured this because I want to get my machine to go to sleep after like twenty minutes. All the way asleep. No fans, no nothing. A tiny trickle away from dead as a doornail. My power bill is shockingly expensive. Trust me, shock would be experienced in its genuine form here. By you, pal. I don’t need another electronic gizmo pegging the power meter. Really. This is not needed.

To give you an idea of what I’m up against, here’s a little story. I was sitting next to it while it was sleeping (because I put the thing to sleep and hour before) and it kept waking up and then it would put itself under again. I was sitting at my Mac Pro, which I had just woken up. Because it was asleep. Ahem.

Anyway, the fans would spin up. Spin down. The monitor power light turned yellow then green then yellow then green. It would click on. Click off. There was loud clicking. Clicking was heard as far away as Juneau Alaska. Alaskans looked around and at each other – all the this clicking is a-boot to drive me a crazy as a bear in honey farm a-boot to overdose on a-boot two tons of honey… Ya’ll.  

I sat there looking at this machine, with my coffee cup half way to my mouth, said mouth quite open and catching the proverbial fly, in utter and complete horror. I voided my bladder and forgot to keep breathing. Ok, that last part didn’t happen, but I was traumatized. 

So what I did in the BIOS was pretty much turn off every goddamn thing that could possibly interfere with the machine sleeping. Same with the system power settings. It helped some. I think. Maybe.

By the way there smarty smart, yes, I installed the latest drivers and BIOS and all the updates. I actually have done this before. Once or twice or thirty times… (Feel free to insert your own banging head on wall joke here.)

The other problem is performance. The machine just goes away sometimes. Right now I’m running Outlook and Windows Live Writer (our Windows Live client applications rock, btw). Vista is in the midst of copying about 200gb of music from a drive on the computer to my server and I’m loosing keystrokes and Outlook stops responding (and turns white) for long periods of time. A-boot thirty seconds or a-boot a minute. And then it comes back.

The thing is staggering along like an intoxicated one legged pirate chasing an intoxicated three legged Yorkshire Terrier. A really mean, doubloon hunting, whale harpooning, piratey Yorky. Hop, sniff, shuffle, hop, yelp, yaaaaaar.

Sigh.

Should I add another 4gb of RAM? Would this help? I don’t think I really need it. Or, rephrased, I don’t think I should need it.

It chaps my hide that I might actually need eight gigabytes of RAM to make this flatulent tub handle like it should. Yes. My hide is chapped. Out back. My caribou and bear skins I’ve stretched out in the sun to dry. I’m making a leathery cape and a cod piece for my wedding if you just have to know there Nosy Nelly.

There, I’m done. For now.

P.S. There are no small children in the vicinity in case you were wondering. Which you weren’t. Until I mentioned it here, and now you’re wondering what’s up with the children thing? What’s he really saying? Just let it go… Just. Let. It. Go.