My photo site is the most active online property I do have. I decided up update the design a little bit and gave it a name Flashing Apertures, a companion to my YouTube channel, Flashing Neurons.

I’ve also been working on the kid’s Soccer channel on Youtube.

In addition to cheering from the sidelines, I also record and livestream all the games using a Veo 2 camera system. Last week, I created a short video of some of my favorite examples of his midfield play through the season.

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

- John F. Kennedy

Sometimes I feel it is convenient to tell yourself that change is a good thing. It is also true that I happen to believe that staying static is not a good place to be and usually ends up with a life less rewarding. Over the past year I’ve made a few changes to how I manage my photo and video projects. Some of these changes are more aspirational or a work in progress while others have been around for a while and I have a workflow that works.

On the video side, I started the year using Premiere Pro for all my work. Now I am all about using Da Vinci Resolve. It works for me, and the color grading capabilities are just a joy to work with. I am no expert but compared to Premiere, I found myself more engaged in the editing and grading process. With the former it felt like something that had to be done.

The other big change I am in the process of making is switching to Capture One. I am very intrigued by Sessions. That fits how I work, especially across two machines. While I have not yet tried that at scale, the early results are promising. The current plan is to use Capture One as my main editor/catalog for 3 more months and at the end of it switch over completely and end my Premiere Pro license. The one piece of software I plan to keep around is Photoshop. Tough to beat that.

March 8, 2024. I switched back to Lightroom. While Capture One has its benefits, they didn’t outweigh years of knowledge and some of the more modern masking features that Lightroom has. I am trying to use Lightroom Classic + Lightroom to try and get some of the same results as I was with sesssions.

The third is making more use of Milanote. The hope is to be more structured about projects, make more specific, focused content, better plans, etc. Still hasn’t really happened, but as I edit pictures and footage from our vacation to Hawaii, I am using Milanote for contact sheets and workflows. Let’s see how it goes.

This picture was taken 6 years ago (Ed. Now 11 years ago). That particular view has changed a lot since then. While the city changes around us, I have essentially the same view from my office window (just with a lot more cranes and high rises, and less of the Needle). Just a shade over 10 years ago I walked through the doors of PacMed wondering how long I’d work at Amazon Web Services. It was my first day, and during orientation almost no one in the room knew what AWS was. I had been a fanboy pretty much from the day that S3 was announced; perhaps why someone took a chance on the the theoretical chemist whose career till that point had been in molecular modeling/drug discovery and bioinformatics. It was a job in business development for Amazon EC2. In addition to never actually working at a tech company, I barely understood what business development was (I had spent most of my career either writing algorithms or as a product manager). The very fact that I had applied for the job was a random event. I had run into Jeff Barr at a few events (notably Gnomedex) and during one late night Twitter conversation, he convinced me to send him my resume in “140 characters or less”.

Well that was 10 years ago. These are 10 years that I wouldn’t trade for anything. I get into work every morning just as excited and optimistic about the future as I did a decadeago, even though my job is very different. In fact, it is that opportunity to do different things that is one of the best parts about working here. In the past, after 2–3 years, doing the “next thing” often meant going elsewhere. Here it has always been around the corner, even though I’ve essentially stayed with EC2 my entire career at AWS. First in business development, then in product management (mostly on EC2 instances), to starting the container services org, to working on multiple product and business areas, it’s been a phenomenal ride. AWS is bigger, Seattle is bigger, and my waistline is definitely bigger. Along the way I’ve become a dad, developed interesting new hobbies, and moved houses, but some things have not changed, the things that make this the best place I could ever imagine working

• That famed customer obsession. It is real. It is the mindset that allows us to build products that don’t focus on the how, but the why.

• The ability to drive ideas. I’ve had the opportunity to present new ideas to leadership multiple times and, even better, the opportunity to bring some of those ideas to fruition.

• Documents. I love writing and reviewing PR/FAQs, I love writing and reviewing 6-pagers. I can’t imagine working any other way.

• The people. I’ve effectively worked for and with a small group of people for a decade. They’re awesome and insanely smart. From them I have learnt most of what I know about operational excellence, leadership, big thinking, and how to ignore the noise and focus on what’s important. I’ve made friendships that will last a lifetime.

• My team. Their dedication, discipline, customer focus, and operational chops are humbling. More than anything else knowing that I get to work with this group of people keeps me inspired and motivated.

• Our customers. Some have become friends, all push us to be better. There would be no AWS without the customers we have and trying (sometimes multiple times) to build something that solves their problems makes the most frustrating days worth the effort.

This last decade has been full of so many memorable things. I’ll list list a few of my favorites

• CC1 — my first real product launch at AWS. The best part. A lot of the ideas we played around with (HVM, processor and processor topology visibility, a 10 gig network, etc) all became standard EC2 features a few years later.

• CC2 — The follow up to CC1 and the time a cluster of EC2 instances entered the top 50 in the Top500.

• C3 — Apparently I like my compute instances, but this one had enhanced networking.

• The first re:Invent. That’s when the impact that AWS was making in the technology industry really hit me.

• ECS — Who knew containers would become a thing, but this one will forever be special because of how it came to be and because it was the first time I got to build an entire business and org from the ground up.

• Batch — I’ve always been the HPC and batch computing person at AWS, so it was great to get asked to go build a dedicated service for batch computing.

• Nitro. I was involved a lot in the early days, but had moved on to container land by the time it shipped. It was great being able to finally talk about the amazing work that the collective team had done.

• Fargate — I wrote the product definition for Fargate before I wrote the one for what became ECS. It took a few years and a lot of learning to figure out how exactly we wanted to build it and what it should look like. I am glad we waited.

• EKS. It’s another great example of just listening to your customers.

There are so many more. Can’t wait for what’s next.

… experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen.

— Jeff Bezos

This time round it was very rainy, but that didn’t dampen our spirits because there the refuge was chock full of birds. While we didn’t see any sandhill cranes like last time, we got to see a whole host of waterfowl, herons, and birds of prey. The River “S” Unit is not walkable (in winter it isn’t allowed), but rather a circuit that you have to drive. Around the half way point there is a place to get off and walk to a blind. That area can be worth the trip in itself and we make it a point to stop off and spend some time there.

As has become the trend I spent more time taking video than pictures, even though I still suck at shooting for the edit. Here’s a montage from the trip.

While I have a fairly high end home studio setup with a pair of Adams (and an Adam subwoofer) connected to a Focurite Scarlett 18i20 audio interface, for my music listening I have leaned towards convenience over the best quality. In 2014 I invested in a Sonos 5.1 home theater system that also functioned as a music system and added a pair of Sonos Play:5’s that sat as a stereo pair in the living room. The lack of cables was a huge attraction. Since then I added a nice Audio Technica turntable (a birthday gift actually) but for the most part listening has been on the Sonos system, the many Echo speakers around the house and Apple Airpods. Over the last year though I’ve had a bit of a music revival with more exploration and ended up with a Tidal subscription in addition to an existing Spotify one to take advantage of the higher quality audio. More recently I added Roon to my setup to combine my CD collection and Tidal. I am a fan of the UX

High end audio systems have always been a bit of a conundrum for me. I appreciate high quality sound, but also know that convenience trumps that slightly better audio experience all the time. That’s not helped by all the snake oil that’s peddled in the high end audio world where some of the language and discussion ends up with a multitude of eye rolls. For years that world had been kept at an arms length, and I’ve focused on incremental improvements to the existing system (e.g. replacing the Sonos Connect:Amp with the Sonos Amp (more on that later) and upgrading to the newer Sonos Five’s for the living room. Recently I got a chance to listen to a speaker system I’ve always wanted to listen to, Magnepans. And the sound was wonderful. So wonderful that I ended up ordering a pair or Magnepan LRS+ speakers after reading some reviews (part of the reason I got the Sonos Amp was that they should be able to drive the LRS+). It will be another 3-4 months before the Maggies show up but they count as my first true audiophile purchase since college (not counting my recording gear). I also ended up investing in a dongle DAC and a pair of Focal end open-backed headphones. The Airpods Pro 2 are great but I’ve never been a fan of the Airpods Max, so getting a set of wired headphones for late night or early morning listening was something I’d been thinking about. I also ended up ordering a streaming player/headphone to pair with the Focal headphones (a Naim Uniti Atom Headphone Edition). The Roon integration and the pre-amp capabilities were what put me over the edge on this one.

That’s quite a bit of upgrading in a short period of time, which is how I roll every few years. Still a practical system that integrates a pair of high end stereo speaks with a multi-room Sonos system and upgraded headphones for late night/early morning listening. Upgraded my amps (let’s see how the Sonos Amp holds up). So, most definitely fell into the audiophile trap I’ve avoided for a very long time. The one thing I am not doing is moving away from the convenience of Sonos or investing in $1000 speaker cables.

This year, following a long conversation with my dentist who had three kids go through Seattle United, we decided to try out. Tryouts were intimidating but he got into the Seattle United regional select team, and even managed to get his chosen number 8 (inspired by Andres Iniesta and Pedri). Over the summer the team, none of whom had played together before, ended up winning one of the tournaments they played in. During the Fall he ended up playing rec league with his friends and the North Puget Sound League (NPSL) with his Seattle United team. Practice during the week and two matches every weekend meant that our life became full of soccer. That it was a World Cup year made it even more of a soccer year (Vamos Argentina!). Getting formal coaching, learning how to play as part of a team (mostly as a left midfield player in a 2-3-1 formation), and playing against quality opposition was a great experience. He ended the NPSL season more confident than he started. Seeing him get better every week was a very satisfying experience.

I’ve been taking pictures and recording his games for a while, and ended up recording all his Seattle United games. During the Fall, almost all my photography and video was soccer with birds and other activities taking a back seat. What started as hand held video transformed to an R5c in a cage with a monitor, shotgun mic, and battery pack, and eventually a Veo2 camera to get proper soccer video from a height with automatic highlights and the ability to live stream. At the end of every match I send a highlights package to the other parents. Switching to the Veo has really cut down on my editing time although I am no longer shooting in 4K. The ability to live stream is a huge bonus, especially for grandparents and those who live farther away. All in all a worthy investment.

The following clips were taken from his last rec game (red shirt, number 2) and last NPSL game (light blue shirt, number 8) this Fall season. With the Founders cup coming up, try outs in spring, and World Cup induced soccer mania, it looks like soccer parenting is going to remain a big part of our lives.

The one type of video where I have had some coherence is birding vlogs. They are more work since you need a theme, have to think a little bit ahead of time about the kinds of shots you want, and tie in B-roll to the talk track. Over the past year I’ve become a lot better at editing and grading, which means I have started going back to older footage that I had set aside because I was having a hard time putting it all together. One of those was my third vlog attempt and while I can see obvious flaws in how the content comes together, it was fun going through all the footage and picking out the right edit. The end result, Ep 3 of the birding vlog series, is now up on YouTube. I hope you enjoy it and I look forward to your comments and feedback

I’ve recorded a couple of vlogs from prior trips

You can find more of our bird photography and videos on various places on the interwebs

• Smugmug

• Instagram

• My son’s Instagram

• YouTube

This is at least my third attempt to restart blogging since the original business|byes|genes|molecules got p0wned and I had to shut it down. The previous ones didn’t quite take off because I was tweeting and the things I used to blog about often conflict with my day job. I may blog more about photography and music here, but I suspect that my interest in technology, product management, running teams, and science will show up from time to time.

Let’s see where this goes.