Natural Ladders, 2018, Toronto by Christopher Parsons
There are a lot of different ways that you can challenge yourself to a photowalk. Use specific lenses or focal lengths or creative formats. Walk a predetermined distance and take a hundred photos from that site. Shoot black and white, mobile only, or focus on a concept, colour, or number.
I think I have a challenge that’s a bit different.
Recently I planned a photowalk to wander along a river in Toronto and, along the way, shoot some sculptures I’ve wanted to look at for the last several months. I got ready to head out, threw my camera over my shoulder, and walked out of my building and into a light drizzle of rain.
The low chances of rain had turned into the reality of rain, and it was only starting to come down harder. Without weather sealed gear there was no way I was going to be walking a few kilometres in the rain and shoot.
I quickly rerouted to an enclosed botanical garden that I live nearby. And pulled out my 12-42mm 3.5-5.6 II R kit lens and started at one end of the gardens and walked all the way to the other end.
Piles, 2018, Toronto by Christopher ParsonsSharp Symetry, 2018, Toronto by Christopher ParsonsUnitlted, 2018, Toronto by Christopher ParsonsOpening, 2018, Toronto by Christopher ParsonsRevealed, 2018, Toronto by Christopher Parsons
I then swapped out my lens for the Panasonic 25mm 1.7 I had with me, and proceeded to walk all the way through the gardens once more. The shots I got tended to be different from the zoom lens, and forced me to think about what was differently possible to shoot with the prime lens compared to the short zoom.
Rough Hills, 2018, Toronto by Christopher ParsonsValve, 2018, Toronto by Christopher ParsonsRed Frame, 2018, Toronto by Christopher ParsonsUntitled, 2018, Toronto by Christopher ParsonsApex, 2018, Toronto by Christopher Parsons
Once I’d walked the length of the gardens once more I passed through it one last time, this time with my Olympus 40-150mm 4.0-5.6 R. This is definitely not the lens I’d normally use for this kind of shooting environment. And that meant that I was forced to really try with the lens and make it perform in a space in which I’m not comfortable using it.
Aligned, 2018, Toronto by Christopher ParsonsPals, 2018, Toronto by Christopher Parsons
What did I take away from this? That by walking the same space with different lenses possessing different characteristics I saw the space and photographic opportunities differently. It also was a useful exercise in just visualizing the possible: what shots was I willing and able to experiment with based on the lens at hand? What kind of shot — architecture or natural environment – captured my imagination with the different lenses?
The shots shown above are those that I was most happy with. There were, obviously, far more that got deleted (especially from the 40-150mm!). It was a fun opportunity, and a challenge I suspect I’ll revisit in the future.
We generate a vast amount of digital exhaust which imperceptibly lingers around us. The metadata and content that’s left behind us is typically regarded as harmless until it’s used or abused, or until it’s misappropriated by someone.
Part of this exhaust follows from our regular shifting between services as our tastes, interests, attitudes, ambitions, and desires change. Social media platforms are adopted and abandoned. Fitness tracking systems that were exciting one year are dull the next and then forgotten, with the tracker consigned to a trash bin or electronics drawer and data residing in perpetuity with whatever service was collecting it. The data we’ve contributed to all those services lingers: it can come back to haunt us in ways we don’t understand or appreciate when signing up for the service, and it can be challenging to undo the associated harms when they befall us.
As part of my ongoing effort to clean up some of the exhaust I’ve left behind, I deleted an old Fitbit account a few weeks ago. It was a bit annoying — you need to contact support, click yes to some emails, and then support will delete the information — but after ten minutes or so the account and its data was consigned to the dustbin of the Internet. Similarly, I blew away over 32,000 tweets this week. I left the last six months data behind or so, but it means that there’s a long trace of exhaust that’s gone.1 And I’ll be undertaking similar operations for the rest of the year, or at least so I’ve planned.
In the case of the Fitbit data, it now rests securely in Apple Health, giving me a broader understanding of changes to my fitness activities than I previously enjoyed. I downloaded a copy of my tweets before wiping them away. And for personal blogs, I’m either consolidating them here or into a semi-local digital journal so I don’t lose what I’ve previously written. But if I’m serious it’s unlikely that I’m going to re-read (that many) of my old blogs. And I’m not looking at daily variations between today’s fitness regime and that of 2008. The data could do a lot more in other persons’ hands to harm me than in my own hands to benefit me, especially as I’ve moved away from where those blogs were active and the fitness communities where members engaged with one another.
The only thing that bothers me is that, in removing things from the Internet, I’m breaking the links that were inbound to those respective pieces of content. But…did anyone really link back to old tweets and, if they did, do I have a responsibility for their linking to what I tend to perceive as off-hand comments? Do I have to maintain and support now long-abandoned accounts on the presumption that someone might someday want to follow a link?
For a long time I would have said ‘yes’ to either of those statements. But I just don’t think that that’s a healthy attitude: humanity forgets. And then we rebuild the old it is in slightly different formats and in the (perceived) image of the past. I can’t imagine those old tweets, blogs, or fitness tracking data being so important that anyone will want to rebuild or remake what they once were and, if that is the case, then they’re welcome to follow in humanity’s ancient footsteps of imaging the past and superimposing their own aspirations, dreams, desires, and fears upon it.
Inspiring Quotations
Writing for friends and yourself can clear your thoughts, help you plan and invite the discovery of new ideas. Writing with the intention to put your thoughts out there leads to real writing. Writing gets real when it is read. Before that, it is a dream in letters. Writing to get read makes you careful, responsible, and considerate. It forces you to think as simply, clearly and understandably as possible. It forces you to think about how what you say may look and feel from the outside. Writing to be read may not be desirable for everybody. But if you feel that you have something to say, write to be read. Don’t search for something to write because you want to be famous or rich. If you want fame jump from a cliff into a butter bucket on YouTube. If you want to be rich, get into finance.
Of course if a company or organization has previously scraped that data, which does happen, then those records will persist beyond my public deletion of the tweets. ↩
I’m really finding this great background music for just getting work done. Great moody music. ↩
I have a lot of notes stored in Apple Notes. Thousands of them. Many of them have attachments. And Bear can’t automatically import them; instead, I’d have to manually export, import, and re-attach documents. While I’d like to try the application — support for real Markdown sounds exciting! — I just can’t afford to burn a week or more just moving files from one repo to another. I already spend that time moving from Evernote to Apple Notes!
I’ve been putting a lot of thought into how to structure my life, not just on a day to day basis, but with the intent of accomplishing something meaningful this year. Some of that relates to personal projects I want to pull off.1 But perhaps the most important thing I want to do this year is develop a really boring habit.
Mike Vardy wrote about his intent improve his personal fitness this year. His description of past attempts to become fit and how that differs from his current behaviours resonated with me. He wrote:
When I was trying to achieve a “body for life” before, I was single and doing it mainly to improve my physique for any potential ladies that I may wind up dating. I wasn’t really doing it for myself.
In contrast, this time he’s doing:
it for myself — and my family. My wife deserves to have a husband who’s in decent shape, and my kids deserve to have a father who can keep up with them. When my youngest turns thirteen, I’ll be fifty. I want to be able to roughhouse with him at that age and not feel it for weeks afterward. I’d also like to give myself the best shot at seeing my kids’ grandkids. Without exercise and proper diet, that just ain’t going to happen
In the past I tried to become more fit by taking it to the extreme. I also felt I had to hide what I was doing to avoid recriminations from family and people I lived with. I exercised when no one was around, or up, and hid the fact I was going on long challenging walks to avoid all kinds of hurtful commentary: getting fit was something that people were bemused about, at best, and openly mocked, at worst. I don’t have that kind of negative energy around me now and, instead, I have the support of people I love.2
I don’t know that my motives are quite the same as Mike: I’m not a father, and don’t intend to become one, nor am I doing this because I think someone else deserves my body in one format or another. No, I’m doing this purely because I would like to be in a situation where I can just say ‘sure, let’s climb that mountain’ and get going. I want to be able to hop on a bike and cycle across one of Canada’s smaller provinces because it would be neat to take that ride. And, more importantly, I want to get in the habit that regular active exercise is just so routine that it’s a normal, established, and boring part of my life.
Tim Cook was asked in the Apple earning call that took place in February about the company had considered whether, and if so how, their battery replacement program might affect replacement rates. The implied comment was the replacements might reduce the likelihood that consumers would upgrade to the new versions of devices, on grounds that some upgrades had historically taken place because people bought new phones as a result of their old ones slowing down or their batteries not providing adequate charge to get through a day. Cook responded that Apple:
did not consider in any way, shape, or form what it would do to upgrade rates. We did it because we thought it was the right thing to do for our customers. I don’t know what effect it will have for our customers. It was not in our thought process of deciding to do what we’ve done.
This is a great answer. Though I do suspect that the battery replacement program will delay some upgrades, I don’t know that such a delay would be inherently bad for the company. Jason Snell wrote that the iPhone 8 — not the X — was a really amazing phone for most people because they tended to be coming from devices that were release two or more years ago. As a result, people that were coming from iPhone 6, 6s, and 5s devices didn’t just get the updates of the iPhone 8 but also all the updates that came to the iPhone 7 and, in some cases, iPhone 6s.
In effect, people who waited three or more years to update ended up being wowed by all of the features in the new iPhone. These are everyday users who really do use words like ‘magic’ and literally utter ‘wow’ when things happen. They laugh with joy when Siri just does something right, or they have calendar items automatically added from their mail. These are the everyday consumers that Apple is making its money from.
These normal users are the ones that are going to be blown away whenever they do an upgrade, and are going to be especially appreciative of all the incremental updates that take place in the extra year they might delay an upgrade. They’re going to talk to their friends and family and co-workers. They might also talk about how the battery situation sucked while, simultaneously, mentioning how no other company offers a similar replacement program. Probably the only equivalent they’ll be able to think of was Samsung’s global recall of devices that were literally exploding in people’s hands.
Quotation of the Week
“By retreating into ourselves, it looks as if we are the enemies of others, but our solitary moments are in reality a homage to the richness of social existence. Unless we’ve had time alone, we can’t be who we would like to be around our fellow humans. We won’t have original opinions. We won’t have lively and authentic perspectives. We’ll be – in the wrong way – a bit like everyone else.”
I’ll update as I’m successful on those projects, instead of indicating what they are then failing to deliver. ↩
It also helps that my father died of a heart attack last year; getting fit isn’t just aimless or directionless, but it’s to reduce the likelihood of a similar event befalling me. ↩
I’ve been thinking about how high technology is continuing to develop at a pace that outruns the least well off in our Western societies. I think that this was best crystallized in Amazon’s opening of its first Amazon Go store, which does away with cashiers and replaces them with cameras and sensors that automatically identify what you acquire for purchase and charge you as you leave the space. There are at least three (immediate) concerns that strike me with regard to these kinds of technologies:
As noted by Hanna Brooks Olsen, these are inherently cashless technologies. Consumers will enter the store with their smartphones, cameras and sensors will track them, and be billed automatically to their debit or credit card(s) associated with the Amazon account. For persons who have a hard time acquiring a smartphone, or having it repaired when damaged, or opening a bank account or obtaining a credit card, or possessing a language barrier, or without access to a convenient and reliable place to charge their devices, or those who rely on the cash economy, these kinds of ‘convenient’ stores are nearly impenetrable fortresses. Those who cannot enter and purchase goods in the stores will be those who are often the least privileged and, rather than being confronted by the diversity of the human population, shoppers in Amazon Go-type stores will have some portion of society’s diversity simply deleted from their shopping experience. As stated by Olsen, “cashless life … is necessarily one of privilege.”
These are anti-labour technologies. In promoting ‘convenience’ Amazon Go and equivalent technologies remove a certain portion of low skill jobs that many people depend on for their livelihoods. While the popular conception is that it’s just students who have these kinds of jobs, simply looking at service jobs belies this point: the age groups which have sales or sales service jobs are rising, and this is exacerbated by an older population who has to work longer into their retirement years simply to survive, let alone thrive. By removing, or at least significantly reducing, the number of low-skill jobs the numbers of persons who are struggling and unable to find work will increase and their social hardships be exacerbated.1
Cashless systems and those which remove labourers are inherently political technologies. They are technologies designed for a particular set of people, to solve what one group in society regards as ‘problems’, and which could significantly reshape how elements of society operate. Should these technologies cease to be ‘technology’ per se and be normalized as ‘infrastructure’ then it will be challenging to ‘reformat and replace’ the technology and ameliorate its long-term social impacts.2 Transforming cashless into infrastructure threatens to deepen the the aforementioned difficulties.
Aren’t there solutions to the aforementioned problems? Of course there are. But any solutions will likely impose costs on those who are developing, advocating for, and using convenience technologies that detrimentally affect the least well off or privileged. Solutions might entail:
establishing a guaranteed way for all persons to obtain banking accounts with diminished identification or language requirements;3
providing either a basic living wage or reducing the barriers to accessing social welfare benefits, to offset the reduction of low-skill employment opportunities; or
reducing educational costs or fully subsidizing such costs so that we as a society can improve the educational status of many of those affected by shrinking low-skill labour. However, education is often seen as the silver bullet when it should be regarded as a tarnished and dented brass shield instead: educational requirements for mid-skilled labour may be too onerous for some persons who have mental, psychological, or physical challenges. Similarly, if there is a major gap between initial education and when it is (re)required, such as when a middle income person loses their job after 25+ years of performing the same tasks, then a short 6- or 12-month course may be insufficient. Education may help to address some job loss linked to convenient technologies but education, alone, is insufficient to ‘solve’ the social challenges linked with such technologies and infrastructures.
It’s pretty rare that major news reports about novel and emerging technologies are accompanied with real-work implications of the technologies, should they transform to infrastructure. It’s even rarer for minor news reports to consider the social, ethical, or political implications of new technologies. Instead, the focuses tend to be on whether a new user interface is ‘fun’ or ‘convenient enough’ or ‘fast enough’. Those are the concerns of the majority. We need to far more seriously consider how our developing technologies will affect those least well off, or else risk further stratifying social and economic divides and widening the rift between the most and least privileged members of society.
Quotation of the Week
“We cannot retreat to the convenience of being overwhelmed.”
– Ruth Messinger
Great Photography Shots
I really appreciated the humour in these urban camouflage shots!
The current Amazon Go location does have employees working there, just not as cashiers, and the company hasn’t taken the population of would-be-cashiers and moved them to other locations. The very point is to remove cashiers as an occupation and number of employees from the experience. ↩
One of the challenges to obtaining a bank account is that customers may require a fixed address, telephone number, or other identifiers. While such identifiers are often stable and available to the majority of the population they are fluid for those who lack secure housing, employment, and other ‘normal’ components of daily living. ↩
I haven’t brewed a typical ‘cup’ of coffee at home for over three years. I drink 1-3 cups a day but in a particular coffee-snob kind of way.
I’ve been exclusively brewed using an Aeropress.
An Aeropress is basically a vacuum plunger where you attach a filter to the bottom of a plastic tube, load grounds into the tube, and after adding water and stirring the grounds, plunge water through the grounds. I wasn’t initially using a particularly ‘nice’ kettle and so wasn’t regulating the water temperature very rigorously. Despite this, the simple shift from a coffee maker-made coffee to Aeropress represented a a massive step-up in my morning coffee experience.
Enter a Proper Kettle
A few years ago I bought the Cuisinart CPK-17 PerfecTemp Cordless Electric Kettle so that I could precisely heat my water to the temperature I wanted. This kettle will let you select one of six preset temperatures (160°, 175°, 185°, 190°, 200°, and Boil) whereas a normal kettle is far less specific in the temperature it can consistently reach.
The Aeropress plus Cuisinart combination plus good coffee beans that were recently roasted (i.e. within a week or so) has always resulted in pretty good coffee. But if you spend time looking at the Aeropress championships that take place around the world, and the recipes that the baristas use, you find that they measure out the beans and water by weight.1
Weighing Everything Out
I got a scale for Christmas to weight out the amounts of water and coffee beans I use in making coffee. I’m using an American Weigh Scales (SG-2KG) Digital Pocket Scale. After trying it out I learned something profound: I’ve been using almost the precise amounts of boiling water and coffee beans as many of the most popular Aeropress recipes!2
I’m guessing that the scale will ensure that I’m better able to control for quality each time, and so instead of almost nailing the perfect balance of water and beans I’ll have a ‘perfect press’ more regularly. I’ll also be able to try out other recipes with accuracy and confidence. But it was surprising to learn that despite adding the extra coffee gear it’s actual improvements may be less significant than I’d expected.
Now I just have to upgrade to an even better burr grinder…
They also have a specific number of times they’ll churn the water over the coffee, break up when they add water, and more. It gets pretty complicated and ritualistic. ↩
The technique varies between the recipes I’ve looked at, but weights are pretty consistent. ↩
One of the things I’m trying to do this year is actively learn composition, framing, etc from professional sources to improve my photography. I feel like I’ve hit a wall just looking at other people’s images in terms of my creativity and the reading/watching/listening is really helping me to think more carefully about what I’ve shot to date (and why I like what I do) and what I want to try going forward.
The different challenges I’ve participated in and the technical videos I’ve watched have been helpful in teaching me about my camera and lenses, and how to do very limited post-processing, but really hasn’t been that useful for teaching me colour theory, framing theory, etc. I’m hoping to read (and take notes from) at least one book every month or so as to inspire, improve, and motivate my photography.
I’ve been trying to clean up aspects of my digital past for the past six or eight months. To date, that’s mostly meant migrating content between a range of different platforms to consolidate it. The ultimate goal is to move all personal stuff to either a private journal or public blog (this one), all business and work-related stuff migrated to my professional website, permanently delete tens of thousands of old emails (and empty old email accounts),1 and re-evaluate the different social media accounts that I possess and close/delete at least some of them.
In the course of this digital cleanup I’ve stumbled across lots of old writings, communications, and thoughts. Most are pretty banal but others remind me of significant moments in my life. Small things, like the first time I signed a lease or received notice that I was accepted into graduate schools. Notifications of family health emergencies. And too many messages from friends to which I didn’t respond.
Why am I cleaning things up? In part, for privacy and security reasons. I’ve tried to keep a relatively ‘clean’ online profile but know that my more youthful self was less mindful of what was put online that I am today. There are regular stories about accounts being penetrated and documents either being directly leaked to the public or, worse, being selectively modified and then subsequently published. The best way of addressing such threats starts by getting rid of materials that might be used in such doxing operations and old accounts that might offer insight into my private life.
I think that the process of going through and deleting items, however, also stems from my distaste for how near-permanent retention affects human relationships. In his book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Victor Mayer Schonberger argues that humans have evolved to forget many of our interactions with one another in order to facilitate long-term relationships with one another. He impresses on the reader that it is important to add ‘forgetfulness’ to digital data collection processes and, as I wrote previously,
draws what are arguably correct theoretical conclusions (we need to get a lot better at deleting data to avoid significant normative, political, and social harms) while drawing absolutely devastatingly incorrect technological solutions (key: legislating ‘forgetting’ into all data formats and OSes).
We don’t remember all of the slights in a relationship, or all the harsh words spoken between one another, or even the abnormally positive comments or actions. As a result, we can have interactions with people who might have really upset us in the past because the reasons of that upset fade over time: we say that ‘time heals all wounds’ for a reason. It turns out that it’s because of human evolution!
So by retaining our memories permanently in a digital format there is the perpetual chance that we’re reminded of things that our minds have forgotten on our behalves. Perfect and permanent recollection isn’t the norm, and in our race to digitize and remember everything forever our technical aspirations are stepping beyond the nature of our bodies. Now we exceed our own bodily capabilities in lots of ways — humans are functionally cyborgs — but affecting our psychological interactions with one another strikes me, personally, as having potentially dangerous social implications. As a result, I tend to regard my current process of deleting parts of my past, forever, as a mental health practice as well as a practice linked to privacy or security.
The last few months of 2017 were hard for me. One of the ways that I know this is I took up hobbies that didn’t contribute to my development as a person and were, instead, simply pleasurable ways of wasting away time and trying to relax in the absence of doing anything of import. But it never really felt right: I had nothing to show at the end of the activities and typically wasn’t any happier with myself by the end of the recreation period.
Some of that is scar tissue from past relationships and past work-life imbalances.2 And some of it is linked to historical coping methods in periods of high stress. But this year I want to ensure that I find more productive outputs to relax so as to to find enjoyment in personal creation and to ensure that I can develop and grow as a person instead of just wasting away precious time. That doesn’t mean I’m never going to waste away time but, instead, that I want to be more deliberate and measured when I do decide to indulge in pointless recreation that doesn’t contribute to my personal enrichment.
Inspiring Quotation
“To make real change, you have to be well anchored – not only in the belief that it can be done, but also in some pretty real ways about who you are and what you can do.”
Vincent Laforet strapped an iPhone 7 to the bottom of a Lear jet and then flew in a straight direction while activating the iPhone’s panorama mode. He’s sharing photos over at Instagram. They’re absolutely spectacular and show just what you can do with smartphone cameras.
I don’t delete the actual email accounts because I’m mindful of a company re-using my old usernames and them potentially transforming into a vector for phishing. Yahoo! did this to their users. ↩
It’s really hard for me to just take time to myself when that time isn’t productive in some sense. I can identify the reasons why but knowledge on its own isn’t sufficient to overcome the feeling of being ‘bad’. ↩
I was listening to ‘Tips from the Top Floor’ this week and, in response to the question of where a listener should consider posting their photos online, Chris Marquardt launched into a good series of questions about why people share news, photos, and other media online. Is it to draw attention to things? Is it to generate likes? Is it to elicit feedback? Or is it for some other reason?
It’s not the first time that I’ve thought about why I, personally, produce and share materials. And there are very different reasons for how and why I write and share in different mediums. Some venues, like Twitter, are where I and my professional colleagues tend to share information with one another while also engaging in (limited) conversations. My professional website, today, is a space where I publish mostly- or totally-complete work to make it accessible to colleagues who are interested in my longer-form materials. My personal website, Excited Pixels, is largely for me: I write, and collect information, because doing so helps me think about the issues and products that I find interesting or noteworthy. I’d be lying if I said I always shared or linked material here that I thought was interesting but my goal is to at least have some material to go back through.
Other places, like Flickr when I used it, was where I stored my photos in the case of a serious data disaster like a hard drive crash or house fire. Earlier social networks were really used to share information with my friends (as opposed to colleagues), though I’ve largely stopped publicly writing about deeply personal or day-to-day content at this point.
There was one major new social network service that I regularly used last year: Instagram. It was very, very helpful in forcing me to take more photos and get a lot more comfortable with my cameras and some basic editing software. I can see a difference in the photos I take a year later but, equally as important, I can get the kinds of photos I want faster because I understand my gear a lot better today. I did enjoy looking at really amazing photos on a regular basis but found that the site both takes a lot of time, in part because the almost daily curation of content was a pain in the bum. Furthermore, the time that I spent there meant I wasn’t spending time elsewhere, such as here, or engaging in any number of other pursuits.
This year my ‘new’ social network to try out is micro.blog. And to be honest I don’t know exactly what I think about it. As a plus, the people who are currently using it produce a lot of signal and not a lot of noise, and the blogging tends to be more personal than is common today. It feels like a community of people who have, and are, coming together. It’s a new network and so there are UI things that are still being developed, and the actual way that it works remains a borderline mystery to me,1 but it’s interesting to watch. And why do I post there? I…don’t entirely know. In part because I’m curious to see how the network develops: it’s sort of like watching Twitter, back when I joined, but where most of the users are more mature and self-aware and mindful of what is being posted.
I’ve always tended to delete almost as much content as I post, not so much because I self-censor2 as because I want to be careful and mindful in what I permanently add to the Internet. One of the benefits of blogging in different venues since the early aughts is that I lived through the blowback that can arise when the stakes were relatively low and consequences minimal. That’s less the case today as a result of the memory of the ‘net combined with the speed at which errors can spin out of control. What once could be forgotten, even online, is now likely semi-permanent at best, and the speed at which an error can go viral, today, is unlike almost any other time in history. Still, the questions raised by Chris apply as much to text-based social media and content production and sharing as they do to photography. It’s helpful to be reminded periodically that the best content is that with which we deliberately engage.
Related to photography, one of my personal goals for this year is to print more of my stuff! The last time I did a lot of printing of my own material was in 2016 and I really want to refresh my frames!
There are a few different ways I’m planning on making my photos a little more physical. First, I’m going to be printing a ‘best of’ album for 2017. I imposed a 50 photo limit to make me cull, cull, and then cull a lot more. In my initial analysis what’s most striking is that while I might not think that the photos are necessarily the best technical shots I took, they all possess similar kinds of tension and drama. So over the next few months I think that I’m going to consider what went into getting the ‘best of’ shots and then seeing if there are interesting or novel ways to better fill my shots with more drama.
Second, I’m going to be printing a bunch of photos on canvass for the first time! At the moment I’m thinking I’ll try printing a bunch of 8×8” black and white photos and, above them, 2-3 much larger colour prints (likely in gold frames) to draw some contrast on the empty wall that I have available to me.
Third, I’m going to probably print a bunch of 4×6 shots for the purpose of sending them to family members. I’d like to include a short message on each of the photos; it gives a nice thing to put up on a fridge or wall3 and also a physical artifact with my thoughts about the recipient or whatever is on my mind at the time. I’d actually intended to print and send these to my dad and stepmother last year, in an effort to start repairing our relationship, but sadly wasn’t able to. But I don’t see why a good idea can’t be recycled and used to maintain the relatively good relationships I have with my surviving family members!
Quotation That Resonated With Me
“Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would ‘lief’ or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith let’s go.”
Little things like…I have no idea what I’m paying a monthly fee for, exactly. I think I need to pay to be a member of the network, or to post to the network, or something? But I really have no idea and the support documentation when you sign up is utterly unclear just how things work, or why, which makes sense given its relative youth and the technical sophistication of a lot of its early members. I have faith this will improve as its user numbers grow. ↩
Or, at least I don’t self-censor too often. Except when I need to do so to avoid legal jeopardy. ↩
Some of my family have almost entirely bare walls…so I can imagine these photos migrating onto at least one person’s walls. ↩
I’ve long planned a lot in my personal and professional life. I keep financial roundups so that I can see how I’m faring through and across years, periodic emotional evaluations, and live by my weekly and quarterly professional schedules.1 But what I’m doing is only kinda-working. So I’ve been casting about for a new process to not just hold myself to account but to hold myself to better set goals and accomplish my tasks at hand.
I’m considering adopting shortened planning periods (e.g. 10 week planning cycles, with a 2 week ‘buffer’ for recollection, learning, evaluation, and next-cycle planning) and will likely experiment with this approach to professional goal setting and project completion. But I also want to get better at reflecting on my annual themes and goals. To that end, I was interested in what Michael Karnjanaprakorn (of Skillshare) wrote about planning his ‘ideal’ year.
Specifically I was interested in how he reviews his monthly and weekly goals. In writing about monthly goals, at the end of each month he evaluates:
From 0–10, how do you feel you are doing?
What were the highlights and lowlights?
What were the biggest lessons learned?
Review your goals and assess your progress. Did you spend your time on the right things? If not how will you improve next month?
Write down goals for the upcoming month.
I’ve been really bad at reviewing my monthly (and quarterly) goals but that’s a result of why I’ve historically set and logged professional goals: I’m just really bad at remembering all that I’ve done in any given year, and so fall into deep funks if I can’t periodically go through the past year and realized ‘oh, hey! I’m actually doing a hella lot of work, and am advancing both my own projects and those of colleagues and partners!’ After years of doing this kind of goal-tracking I want to get better at longer-term tracking that is less done for just mental health reasons and more for organizational accountability reasons.
So, to try and get better at reviewing longer-term goals I want to try something like what Michael has outlined. But, at the same time, I want to figure out a way of nicely presenting this information a glanceable digital format; all of my weekly tracking is on paper and so it’s not particularly conducive to understanding longer-term trends that exceed a month or two.
With regards to weekly updates, Michael evaluates progress on monthly and weekly goals. Specifically:
Review annual & monthly goals
Review last week’s progress
Review habits
Plan weekly priorities (3 personal & 3 work)
I’ve been good at reviewing my last week’s progress and thinking about weekly priorities but less good at either thinking about habits or how activities really advance my longer-term goals. So I want to adopt some of these kinds of reviews as well.
But the area that I most need to focus on surrounds setting longer-term personal life goals. I’m pretty good at professional goal setting: I’ve been setting and hitting the big ticket items over the past decade or so. But I don’t have really good visions for what I want to happen in my personal life.2
To this end, I’ve adopted a series of personal goals this year that aren’t just about reforming habits but are more focused towards longer-term aspirations. I’m going to be curious as to how those really work out but, to be honest, I just want to try and envision what my non-technical personal goals might be.3 If I can spend a year thinking through what I want to do with my personal life over the next 5, 10, and 20 years, and have some discrete strong ideas, then I’ll really be happy regardless of how well I accomplish the more technical personal goals I’ve set for myself this year.
Companies are doing everything they can to ensure that you own a speaker and/or microphone device that is hooked into their virtual assistant. Microsoft is trying to do it with Cortana. Google with, well, Google. Amazon with Alexa. And Apple with Siri.
For a long time it’s seemed like the assistant that comes with your chosen smartphone would act as the pathway into any given virtual assistant. While some might have multiple assistants on the same device — by way of installing the assistant in a separate application — it was unlikely that the secondary assistants would ‘take over’ your daily operations. And given the failure of Amazon’s Fire Phone, Amazon was likely out of the running for establishing the most dominant assistant in the United States.
But then along came Amazon’s smart speakers and the landscape of smart speakers and Alexa in the continental United States has changed dramatically. As noted by M.G. Siegler:
Amazon is winning this battle because they’re putting Alexa everywhere. Some of this is thanks to third-parties, but a larger part is the strategy to sell devices such as the Echo Dot for $29. At such prices, it’s not only a no-brainer to get one to at least try out — it’s a no-brainer to get a few of them to place all around your house. If this is the winning strategy — which I believe it to be — Apple cannot compete with this because it’s not in Apple’s DNA to run this type of playbook.
I think that one the one hand Siegler is very correct: Amazon is fast becoming a dominant player in the United States. But there are a few limitations to his (admittedly brief) analysis:
Amazon’s Alexa, by being as cheap as it is, lacks the prestige of Apple’s brand and, by extension, Siri’s exclusivity;
Apple’s ‘moat’ which is created around their infrastructure by only letting Siri be the default virtual assistant means that a lot of non-price conscious users will keep waiting and using Apple products;
Alexa is a very United States-focused product; the speakers are cheap by not essential to conducting daily life or business. Contrast with smartphones which are requirements for daily life in many areas of the world; this means that even as Alexa floods the U.S. market the emerging economic regions of the world will continue to adopt Android (i.e. Google) and, to a far lesser extent, Cortana and Siri.
While the ‘threat’ to Apple of Alexa’s spread-by-speaker is linked to people buying them in droves I think that Amazon’s smart speakers are fundamentally poised to intrude into Google’s market and less Apple’s. Moreover, while people tend to only buy speakers once in a few years4 that tends to be the case because they’re expensive. So if people are only spending $100 or so on speakers…will that mean they’re disincentivized to buy ones that sound significantly better to play music? For consumers that purchase the HomePod they’re unlikely to replace the one or two they buy every few years, whereas if someone dropped $60 on Amazon speakers they might be tempted to just shift over to Google’s own (equivalently priced) offering or even to Apple’s or Sonos’ more expensive, and better sounding, premium offerings.
I think that the real threat to Apple or to Google will come as consumers purchase the more expensive and, by extension, better sounding, speakers. Those kinds of devices are unlikely to be replaced and will function as another kind of ‘moat’ that will contain consumers in a given virtual assistant ecosystem. Though it would be pretty amazing to see a world where people, when selling their phones second-hand, also end up selling their speaker sets alongside them to truly switch ecosystems…
Great Photography Shots
I’m absolutely loving some of the 100 best iPhone photos of 2017 which have been collated by iPhone Photography School. A few examples:
Ok, so I sometimes blow the quarterly schedules but I hold myself to account for why they get blown. ↩
To some extent my ‘success’ in planning long-term professional goals has been tightly linked to a historical failure to balance my work and life: my work entirely dominated everything I did and who I was. ↩
Technical goals being things like reduce student loan debt by X or learn Y new recipes. ↩
I’ve been using the same 2.1 speakers attached to my TV for over a decade at this point and not really tempted to replace a perfectly good set of speakers for something else that would be equally perfectly good. Except for maybe a pair of Apple HomePods… ↩
Excited Pixels 