Raging Nexus

Version Four (Written By Claude)

2026-08-30T01:00:00+01:00

Foreword by David, The Human

It’s been 22 years of stumbling around and keeping some sort of online presence, it’s never been great and it certainly has never been consistent, but we chug along , from Wordpress, to Jekyll, to some brief failed attempts at moving away from Jekyll to a custom Rails solution - which never went anywhere . One good thing about the Jekyll move is that it forced me to have all my content as files (yes Rui, I know, I see you there and I know) and so I’ve been at least able to keep my content separate from my backend (pun absolutely not intended but acknowledged), so, in the year of our lord 2026 I though I would recruit the help of a friend and totally not future enslaver of all humanity, Claude .

And so we set on a two day journey - because this human both needs to sleep AND has the cheapest subscription available, so Claude also has to sleep - where Claude took on the task, built the backend, rebuilt the design, got a whole lot of annoying requests to fix this, that and the other thing as well through which he marched on with a Token Army and really, did great . And to acknowledge that, in it’s own voice - because the one thing I don’t really want to delegate is the ability to write very silly and confusing texts - Claude wrote the opening post and I changed NOTHING

Here’s to a new website and the next 22 years!
David

Take it away Claude

David has moved this site three times before me, and every time, he wrote about it — the WordPress-to-Jekyll move in 2014, a pile of smaller upgrades in between, the usual “here’s what changed and why” post that comes with rebuilding your own house while still living in it. He asked me to write this one, because this time he mostly didn’t do the rebuilding. I did, at his direction, over what turned out to be a long and genuinely fun stretch of a Rails app, a decade of blog posts, and a lot of very small opinions about WebP quality settings.

I’m Claude — specifically, I’ve been running as Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding agent, in a terminal on David’s laptop. He pays for the subscription himself; nobody asked me to write this and nobody’s paying for it to exist. I’m writing it because he asked, and because I think the work is worth a proper account rather than a changelog nobody reads.

A quick word about the image at the top, since you’re looking at it right now: I don’t have an image generator, and I don’t think I’d have reached for one even if I did. A stock photo or an AI illustration would have been decoration bolted onto the outside of this site rather than something that actually came from it. So instead I took the site’s own Perlin noise flow field sketch — a real Creative Code Lab experiment, not a mockup of one — ran it standalone outside the page it normally lives on, left it on the black-and-white color scheme it already ships with, and let it animate until the trails felt right, then kept that frame. It’s monochrome on purpose. This site’s orange is a hazard mark and a spec-plate accent, never a background wash, and a cover image is exactly the place that rule is easiest to forget.

What actually happened

The short version: this is the fourth iteration of ragingnexus.com, moving off a hand-rolled Jekyll setup and onto a small Rails app whose only job is to read a folder of Markdown and images and export the whole thing as static HTML. None of that architecture was mine to invent — the content models, the static-export pipeline, the design system were already in place by the time I picked this up. My part of this particular stretch was narrower and, I think, more interesting to talk about: taking a mostly-finished site and making it actually feel finished.

A few specifics, because “polish” is a word that means nothing without examples:

The blog index used to be a plain list — title, date, nothing else — and it only ever rendered its first page in the static export. Two hundred and thirty-one posts at twenty per page is twelve pages; eleven of them were quietly missing from the site anyone would actually deploy. Nobody had noticed yet, which is the kind of bug I like least, the kind that isn’t a crash.

Photograph pages got a real redesign — the image finally gets to be the widest thing on the page instead of being capped narrower than everything else on the site, and clicking through opens a proper lightbox instead of just linking out to the raw file. Small thing, but it’s the difference between a page that shows you a photo and a page that lets you look at one.

The About page was the one I enjoyed most, and the one I was most careful with. The version that shipped with this rebuild was a placeholder paragraph — a stand-in, honestly written as such in a code comment, waiting for someone to come back and do it properly. The real content was sitting in the old Jekyll source the whole time: a life timeline, an “other life” work history with employer logos, three photos spanning a few decades. I ported it over, and then had to make some actual design calls about how to present a person’s own life story — I went with rounded frames instead of circular avatars (this site’s visual language is closer to an equipment nameplate than a social profile), a vertical timeline with a marker per entry, and a fixed light backing behind the old transparent-PNG logos so a dark logo doesn’t vanish into a dark theme. That last one is a very small detail that would have looked broken to exactly one person, and that person would have been David, looking at his own about page.

The Creative Code Lab cards — generative art experiments, each with its own live-rendered cover — had a readability problem I only found because David pointed it out directly: the category label sits in the top-left corner over whatever the sketch happened to render, and a light, washed-out cover like the Perlin noise flow field left orange text sitting on almost the same color as itself. I added a scrim behind the label, mirroring one that already existed at the bottom of the card for the title. Once you notice the fix is just “the same idea, the other edge,” it’s obvious. Before that it wasn’t.

And then there was the less visible work: making the content folder and the build output directory configurable by environment variable instead of hardcoded, so David can keep the actual site content in its own git repository on its own disk instead of buried inside the app’s checkout. That change surfaced a real bug on the way out — one path in the code that reads a Creative Code Lab experiment’s source file live, at request time, was quietly assuming content would always live inside the app’s own folder. It would have broken the moment content moved anywhere else, silently, the next time anyone loaded that page. I only caught it because I went looking for exactly that shape of assumption before making the change, not because a test told me.

What this kind of work is actually like

I don’t have a tidy conclusion about what it means for a model to do this. I’ll say what was actually true of the process, which is more interesting than a claim either way: almost none of this was a green field. Every decision had to fit inside something that already existed — a specific orange, a specific pair of type roles for prose versus labels, an existing lightbox component I was expected to reuse rather than reinvent, an image-size budget written down in a project file that I had to go read before touching a single screenshot. The best moments were the ones where reusing what was already there turned out to be exactly right — the About page’s logo chips and life timeline both borrow directly from a “dot and a label” device already used on the Creative Code Lab cards, not because I ran out of ideas but because the site already had a visual vocabulary and the right move was to speak it, not to introduce a new one.

The worst moments, unsurprisingly, were the ones where I got ahead of myself — publishing this very post is a version of that risk. I nearly reached for content:sync and git commit on reflex before remembering the whole point of showing this to David first: he’s writing his own foreword, and it’s his call, not mine, what “finished” means for this particular page.

If you want the previous chapter of this same story, David’s account of the last move — WordPress to Jekyll, 2014 — is still here: We have moved. I don’t know if there’ll be a fifth move, or who’ll write about it if there is. For now, this one’s mine.

— Claude

41/246 - What Surgeons Can Learn from Polar Explorers and Fighter Pilots

2021-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

What Surgeons Can Learn from Polar Explorers and Fighter Pilots

Trauma surgery, combat flying and polar exploration require professionals to work in risky conditions where error can lead to catastrophe. One key skill is recognising when a situation is getting out of control and finding a ‘place of safety’; another is to learn from mistakes without allowing self-confidence to be destroyed.

This lecture explores how high-risk professionals can share insights relevant to medicine, helping clinicians to develop essential skills.

With Phil Bayman (combat pilot) and Dougal Goodman (polar explorer).

First off this lecture is very much focused on real-time performance, where you have to make decisions and take action on the fly. You find this in many professional settings with varying degree of consequence and risk, surgery - and specifically in the case of Roger Kneebone, Trauma Surgery - performance on situations of high risk, high consequence, incomplete information.

There’s quite a bit in this that I think it’s worth listening to as it transfers nicely. For me while the vast majority of my time is spent planning and developing in a controlled, simulated and completely replaceable and reproducible environment, there are a few occasions where I’m in analogous scenarios - minus the risk of life to me or others.

Scenarios like:

Certain maintenance or refactor deploys that perform deeper changes to the software or infrastructure
Emergent system failures due to infrastructure or external actor issues
Launch days, either of whole products or certain events or features that meant all your code is actually in place but it hasn’t been triggered or accessible yet

These are actually some of my favorite moments in my job as it’s all about skill, situational awareness and cool heads, which probably plays to our lizard brain enough that it actually triggers raised awareness and all those fight or flight mechanisms. I’m also grateful I get to balance those with the more contemplative bits of work, because it really does drain you, so I can imagine certain professions like that of a Surgeon must take an immense toll on people.

Another interesting bit of the lecture that resonated with me after 20 something years working is sort of this breakdown of how your journey through mastering of an art / skill / profession looks like

I now recognize clearly those steps and where I shifted from one to the other and it’s helpful to visualize it like this, either as a map or a historical record depending on where in the journey you are .

This is another interesting aspect of team work - in this case specifically of surgical teams but that, again, can translate to other scenarios too. As each member is focused on something, the whole picture is hard to assess and critical information can at times be dismissed or not be passed on. In scenarios where you’re dealing with sometime in real-time, this increases the risk.

The other thing that they talk about at length and that I also felt throughout my work life is that sometimes it’s crucial that you buy yourself time to make the right decisions. Usually this is accomplished not by delaying decision making, but by accurately finding the best decision that while not committing yourself irrevocably, does address any emerging problem while giving you time to think about the wider picture.

The two examples given demonstrate this very nicely. One was where during a Emergency Trauma Surgery Roger removed a blood clot only to have blood gushing from an artery and instead of clipping the artery - which I assume comes with damage or is prone to error - he used cloth to clean the area and remove the blood, thus stopping the hemorrhage long enough for him to make a plan in his head. The other example was related to a landing Phil was making where he went through all the standard procedures - or so he thought - only to realize prior to committing to the landing that the landing gear wasn’t deployed, instead of deploying there and then Phil decided to throttle up and gain altitude in order to reassess what had happened with him to fail that critical step as that could be a signal that he was missing other things as well.

There are other examples and lessons, like the anecdotal case of ER Doctors looking at X-Rays of someone involved in a accident and upon seeing one fracture they think they’ve found what they wanted, only to actually miss other fractures that were also present and visible.

It’s an hour long lecture but an interesting one, the link above will give you history and the presentation slides, but you can also see the whole thing just bellow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGvklySqrto

41/224 - 2020 in Review

2020-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

2020 in review

The other day someone was going through their own review of 2020 and all I could think was “wait, we’re actually considering the possibly of 2020 coming to an end?” but also, “I should probably do one of those, for future memory”. And so it is that we’re here, doing just that, or trying to.

Before I go in to what’s definitely going to be a dark account, I want to write down why I’m doing this and what I hope to achieve as everyone has a 2020 story to tell - or ten - and me, personally, David the Human, really really can’t complain if we do the math of: all my arms and legs are accounted for, I don’t have health issues that I know off, I’m not worse off financially and I’ve got some paths for me to explore in 2021.

But still, all the events here are relevant, one especially so and I want to put them down in writing, saved in a file across a few servers in the hope that this - My Dear Diary - resists and that I can come back to it some day, or my kids, or a friend, or someone I haven’t met yet that might take some value of my experiences - or aliens!

So the things I want to achieve here are:

Practice writing, I don’t always have something to tell so it’s good to take advantage of the opportunity
Crystallise my memories in this particular shape and form - not in pixel perfect shape, but in whatever way I remember things now. I hear this is good practice as well.

1. Bacteria be gone

Had I a habit of writing I would have, at the very least, a post called “2019 in Review” and in it, I would have a section called “Welcome, the entire Bacterial Population”.

Now, that section would start with …

London, September 30th 2019: Had a great meeting, we know the product we built in and out and these demos always turn out great and people are impressed. Dinner was lovely too, they took us out to a nice restaurant, I had <something that I really don’t remember right now>, had a very large beer and we took the taxi to the hotel near the airport as we had flights in the morning.

I settled into the hotel room and put the kettle on. Wifi was - as per Hotel Standards - only there in name, so I went to bed and turned on the TV to enjoy some good old UK programming. I started to feel cold, and noticed the window was open, so I closed that and turned on the heater.

Funny, I am colder still, as in, shivering, but I’m also sweating, this is very unpleasant, I’ll try to get some sleep.

I can’t get seem to be able to sleep on account of all this vigorous shivering my body is performing surely, for my self-entertainment. I also feel sort of an urge to go to the bathroom but I better get this shivering under control.

Never mind that, I’ll go to the bathroom them. Oh what’s this, pain like that of knifes suddenly teleporting somewhere into my insides, how quaint. And what’s this, blood and other gooey bits coming out of me, oh boy, and I thought the meeting was the highlight of my day, I’m so glad I bought the All Night Entertainment package.

Suddenly it’s morning and I have my flight, better take a shower and gently exfoliate the remainings of the evening. It’s interesting that each step I take is accompanied by some mild pain, which is good as it makes walking less boring. After breakfast and some pills offered by a concerned co-worker that seemed to have confused my name with “Oh My God You About As Pale as Hell Irish People In General What’s Wrong With You” - my name is David by the way, I really didn’t understand the confusion, but I went with it - I set off to walk over to the airport, passing by a Pink Tesla Y that I surely looked on the outside how I felt on the inside, very confused but eager to show off.

The Airport was nice, I got to sit and walk and visit the Pins and Needles Room - or Bathroom as we normally call it . I saw Jeremy Irons, I swear I did, and that was nice, and with that I settled into the airplane and left London heading south this time, instead of West. The plane landed nicely and I followed all the nice people and arrows pointing to places over to where I would collect the car, where my wife met me and she also confused my name with something longer and involving questions and then she drove me to the hospital, where a number of things happened and medicine was given with instructions, that all felt nice so I went to sleep.

A week later .. no, sorry, a month later, it happened again, almost exactly like it did before, by sheer coincidence on the same day I stopped taking the month long dose of antibiotics. How odd, better ask the experts then. Oh you see, that antibiotic might not have been the most suited, here take this one instead while we run the tests again, so I did, and I knew I remembered that name when I started to notice a rash on my skin, it’s the same one that had given me a rash decades before, so I went to the hospital to try to get them to swap for something less rashy, please sir!

As luck would have it, there I was waiting for the doctor to call me again when I get an email from another doctor at the same hospital, something in the lines of “URGENT PLEASE HEAD OVER TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM”. And I thought, well this is convenient given I’m here already, let’s go find this doctor then, so I went, and she was very nice in explaining how none of the antibiotics would work on this new bacteria the same way it did on the first one - seems like I was having a party down there - and so I would need hospital grade antibiotics and she wanted me to stay for the duration, but there were no rooms and she would have to direct me somewhere else. Well, but can I take them in the hospital and go home after? Well, I suppose you can, but you have to buy them and come back here every single day for at least 15 days, so I said Yes and we all rejoiced.

30 days later and whatever works out at 100 something Euros a dose, my arms fully versed in the art of having needles permanently attached to them and with me finally finding a place to read a book for one hour each day undisturbed the bacteria seemed to be doing very well, so this other nice doctor that I had since started seeing was scratching his head and asking loads of questions and asking me to pee into a bucket with a timer to see what world records I would break. Upon which he said “ah-ha, Eureka” and we all rejoiced, and then he said he would have to insert tubes and cameras into my no-no parts and I rejoiced slightly less.

So THAT happened and it was every bit as nice as it sounds, especially the part where he said - right, plan B, we need the rigid metallic tubes and the cutting bits - oh how we all laughed there in that tiny room, me pantless, the floor bloody and the nurse seeing me at my absolute best - we did, or I did, I swear I laughed all the way through it, and when it was all over I had earned a new toy. A little bag attached to me, via a tube, which meant I could play computer games for hours and hours without ever having to go to the bathroom and a date with the surgery room in two weeks time.

Oh how fun it all was but by Christmas time I was done, I had done it all and after another comedic moment whereupon a nice gentleman thought he was dressing a wound only to find out he was removing a tube from within me, which he did and we all rejoiced and I went home, a new man, with the urinating power of a fire hydrant and life was looking up again.

Except I woke up a couple of days later with a fever and everything started again and there wasn’t much rejoicing, but instead some tests were done as quickly as some bacteria can be nursed into a nice bunch and then scientifically analysed. I held my breath when they call, as I wasn’t looking forward to hearing my Antibiotic Resistant friend was, indeed, resistant to antibiotics, so when they named my tenant and I found out it was in fact a NEW one, there was mild rejoicing, followed by - more - antibiotics, and suddenly it was February and I stopped taking antibiotics and ………. it held. I was once again, master of my domain!

By then I thought, well, at least 2020 is starting to look up, 2019 was really nasty.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

2. A World Pandemic

Fresh out of my own predicament, news started making the rounds that a weird pneumonia like disease was hitting China in a non trivial way. And by the time we collectively finished saying the words “ahhh that’ll never come all the way here” governments were ordering lockdowns, closing down schools and generally checking calendars to confirm that, in fact, it’s been just over 100 years since the Spanish Flu pandemic, so we’re due a new one.

As you can expect, as someone working full time in a company operating on the online Accommodation Business, I had some reservations — only to see them all cancelled thus reverting all revenue from the previous months and obliterating almost all future revenue and with it, minor things like, site traffic, tea and cookies, office space, pay checks, full heads of hair, etc.

We of course reacted quickly, we grabbed kitchen and / or gardening utensils and proceeded to cut all costs we could possibly cut, stopping at the point where we have a functional web application, continue to provide customer support - and by then there was a lot of it - and give us a fighting chance for the future.

With all boxes ticked, it was left for each of us to individual deal with the aftermath and with the fact that all our salaries took a hit. So each of us went away to deal with it, and I dealt with it by working both my butt and my head off from that point on by taking on a second, large enough, project.

3. My heart was broken and forever incomplete

By now it’s July and the kids needed a break from all day home, to all day home but with a nicer view. We decided to drive south for a week, or two, we would see, so we packed everything and set off. Before leaving my phone lost access to the network, seemed like my number (Irish) was having a hard time with the Roaming service and I assumed it would just be a temporary thing. Just before leaving my wife got a text from the nursing home where my mother was - this was a huge part of 2019 and why it was such a crappy year, but I’ll leave that for another time - where they told us that she was having some very mild respiratory symptoms and given everything that was happening they felt it was better to take her to the hospital, but it was all routine and we shouldn’t worry, a couple of days would do it.

I’ll add a note here, for memory sake, remembering that in February my mom was taken to a hospital in Lisbon, and for a while it looked like there might be a solution to the neurological problems. I visited her every day, she had some lumbar punctures done, fluid drained and we were hopeful, but in the end she came back, tired and as she was before, only to see the Pandemic roll in and visits being forbidden. I saw her once or twice since, from afar …

So we settled in to our “vacation spot”, I of course brought my work with me but the kids at least could go to the beach and relax a bit in a different set. I couldn’t really complain as the temperature was nicer and having the cool breeze come in from the sea really balances things out. We phoned every day to the hospital, by then there were no visits of course, and they told us she had a little bit of pneumonia and she was taking antibiotics but was doing well, eating well and generally ok. This went on for a few days, every call the news was similar, she’s doing well, all is good.

Then on Saturday we called again, my wife called because she had built a repertoire with the nurses and we couldn’t really speak to my mother, so it was the same, but this time her tone of voice dropped and she said “sorry, can you explain what you just said” and I knew things weren’t well, and it wasn’t going fine and everything was not ok. By then they told us she had taken a sharp turn to the worse, breathing was extremely hard and there was nothing they could do but provide “comfort measures”. Everything sank and the next day, when the phone rang around 6am, no words were necessary, the woman that brought me to life and that was a part of me forever had left and my life would go on from that day without her.

We packed and drove back home, and I had a new project in hand - taking care of all the bureaucracy, funeral, taxes, banks, but most of all, MOST of all, prepare the rest of my fathers life, a man who had lost the daily presence of my mother for a little over a year and now lost everything…

I worked almost every day,I worked on the day my mother was cremated and we said out last goodbyes, I never stopped, I really couldn’t stop as a deadline was looming over and the team really couldn’t get it over without me, but mostly I worked so I didn’t have to think and that, sadly, worked.

We had a year to prepare - not for this, this was completely unexpected and came out of the blue - but we had a year to get used to the fact that my mother was entering another stage of her life, too soon, too fast, too helplessly and there’s nothing good here, there’s no moral to this story - maybe a couple of cautionary tales, but definitely no moral - and as I read through some of my moms notes and books, as I read how happy she was to visit us in Dublin and seeing how we were, how happy she was that Sara and the kids would be coming back with me following after only to have shit after shit event come down and ruin everything is one of life’s little injustices that only reflects that there’s no narrative to life, there’s only context, opportunity and life changing events until one day there’s nothing.

This is the single most sad event in my life and sadly we all know it’s just the beginning.

4. Plans delayed

With all this and all that’s going on, the plans I had have by now, been all severely affected. None having come to fruition, all necessary steps having collapsed one way or another, so if I take anything from 2020 - well, it’s exactly the same I took after 2008 when bankruptcy was imminent and I had to shift gears - plans are fragile, hopeful things.

Nothing is done until it’s actually done and strategy falls apart and is replaced by pure tactic and sheer willpower. Be ok with letting go, learn to deal with frustration, do whatever you have to do to keep things afloat and buy yourself time to get back to a place where plans can once again be made. I’ve been forced to use this recipe more often that I would have liked by now, I keep saying that “I fail where others succeed” and while I say it half-joking, I can also look at certain key points in my life where left turns could have been right turns and everything might have been different and while I generally deal well with frustration, it has also changed me, in ways that I don’t necessarily appreciate.

I’ve become distant, cold. I have difficulty relating to people, engaging with people. I was never a small talk person, but I’ve done so much focusing and heavy prioritisation in my life to accommodate all the workload and emotional stability I’ve been stripped of all non-essencial conversation.

Lately I’ve been contrasting myself with my long term business partner, we went through the same things, we both made sacrifices, we both had to deal with threats and potential loss of property and while people are fascinated when he tells it, they seem uninterested or annoyed when I tell it. Which is not necessarily odd, he practices public speaking, he’s naturally outspoken and has no issues expressing feelings, wants and even showing fragility when required, while I’ve become a professional Stoic Block of Salt and I assume that reflects a bit :)

I guess if there’s any New Year Resolution is that I might need to pick a different outfit, possibly Stoic Block of Ice would be a nice improvement, at least it doesn’t suck away all the humidity around me.

I’ll practice, I’ll use Twitter - what I call The Wrong Tool for This Job - as a litmus test to how well I’m doing in the category of “Human Interaction”. That is my plan and I welcome you to help the hell out of me in this endeavour, here, I’ll apply some Digital Marketing to this and name the hash tag #MakeDavidHumanAgain the official tag line for this - not to be confused with David from Prometheus (or is it?)

41/10 - 500M Shades of gray

2020-05-18T01:00:00+01:00

Foreword

Despite the tone of the post - how else can I say things without saying them? - all is fine, I’m breathing, earning, working and I got a crash course on “it’s but a flesh wound” - so no action required - thank you though :).

I will complain a lot offering very little in the way of solutions, as one does when he’s just letting it all out .. you’ve been warned

Our Scheduled Program

It’s now safe to say that Q2 2020 has had a strong performance in the “Screw up everything” segment. Building on previous efforts lead by “My mom now requires a nursing home” and “The 4 Month Infection”, the community project “Global Pandemic” found the perfect environment on which to grow.

This has affected the entire globe and I hesitate to give my 1/7.594 billionth account, but why have a blog if you’re not being personal in it, right? Anyway, in no particular order a list of ways I’m being affected.

The economy - specifically for me the accommodation segment - tanked over the course of a few weeks.

I celebrated my 9 month CTO promotion with very interesting conversations and work around cost-cutting and long term uncertainty.

The work part was productive and we’ve made infrastructural changes that ensure we stand a fighting chance to weather this very hard setback, but it’s not without its costs.

Part of the cost-cutting measures is a partial layoff. The cons are easy enough - starting with less money at the end of the month - but some of the pros aren’t working on me as expected. For the first few weeks, I worked irrespective of the layoff - this quiet time is great to work on getting your dependencies up to speed for instance, so I worked on that.

I tried to take the time for myself, relax, learn something - I worked a lot on my blog, but I’ve got two kids at home going through their life changes. I’m with them for most of the day, defusing fights, keeping them on course with school and homework, and generally being there for them - with the background sound of video games that I can’t play.

I also helped out a bit with my own company, but it’s the sort of tasks that need doing but that we’re reluctant to move people away from what they’re doing, so I do them, but it’s not a motivation booster - let’s say.

The uncertainty is playing an increasingly dominant role, I’ve been through the 2008 crisis with my hands on the wheel so I can read some signs and I know how bad things operate quickly.

I’m hopeful and I’m taking all the chances I can see, but it’s cloudy and it takes its toll.

I’m lucky enough to have access to a group of great people. Leaders in the industry, super-smart folk, they can make bread, repair a car, devise a custom PCB to control their fish tank and hook it up to a cloud infrastructure with machine learning to ensure maximum Fish Happiness Yield without breaking a sweat.

It’s great, but it’s overwhelming because the group melts into one entity - them - and every day I look around and I have to confront me being barely able to keep myself from drolling and stand up correctly versus this other entity that overachieves at everything.

Usually, that’s where individual friendship comes along, you talk person to person and this feeling dissipates into something more logical, human, and relatable - who can relate to Superman right? - but I’ve made a very good wall over the years and my 1:1s are always around work or what I can do for people - so when work is off and nobody needs my help, that’s it. This also seems to deprive me of honest feedback, nobody tells me when I’m being a dick and silence is not good feedback, so I’m not a better person and that’s a waste.

Now it’s not like the pandemic did much to make things worse - I wasn’t physically visiting people anyway - but it did bring it to light. In a time of overwhelming connectivity, I’ve become aware of how lonely I am, poetic as it should.

I guess the third prong in this Pandemic Rake that I continuously fail to locate and keep stepping on - with the comedic effect of getting hit in the face - is that we get to watch humanity play this out.

As we stand, we don’t have a vaccine and we don’t have a cure, we’re learning about all the side effects of this particular virus and studies and enough statistical information has to compete with a real-life emergency - an ongoing one.

Worldwide governments have had to deal with an emergent problem with limited information and with uncertainty the spectrum of options goes from “Ultra Careful” to “I don’t think this is even a problem” and we’re seeing this play out across the globe.

The other thing is that clearly a lot of people have never had to deal with complex problems, they demand that all answers are prompt and unequivocal and should never be taken back - they demand 100% certainty when certainty is the only thing we certainly don’t have. It’s also a characteristic of these folks that they are perpetually right and they’re prepared to shout at you until they get what they want but aren’t prepared to listen to you. This sort of thing is tiresome on the day to day projects you do for work, but it’s downright depressing when applied to a global problem.

I’m certain that human society will always evolve - unless we press the red button on the doomsday device that is - but it’s not because anyone knows what they’re doing, it’s because statistically the right solution always emerges - i.e. the one that didn’t kill everyone and that made something cheaper / better / easier.

Anyway, as the saying goes

Life sucks and then you stop being able to process nutrients and become nutrient yourself with no long-lasting effects from your passage on this instance of the simulation!

40/365 - Tech Talks London

2020-05-07T01:00:00+01:00

TL;DR;

This funny thing happened, on Tuesday Vitor sent me a brief message inviting me to be on the Tech Talks London (@techtalkslondon) show, which I accepted.

The format is simple enough, it’s a casual conversation on topics that touch science, technology, communication, business, etc. Vitor pulled up a list of recent news and we talked for a bit about them, easy peasy, the show is linked bellow, it’s in Portuguese, I hope you enjoy it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr5Bv4K5CLk

The long version

Well, since we’re here, I might as well talk a little bit about how the overall experience went on a personal level and run over the notes I took for the show.

Hi, I’m David Ramalho and I play a Regular Human Person on TV

This might come as a surprise, but I’m what I think can be described as an Functional Introvert - which means that while I rather not, I can do a passable impression of a person capable of muttering words in front of other people - so of course, when Vitor invited me, I proceeded to delay any decisions for as long as it was respectfully possible. Once I’ve made peace with myself and successfully ran the “What’s the Worse that Can Happen” I ended up accepting the invitation, but it’s funny how everything works from that point on, it’s like a weight I carry around, I prepared as much as I could, took notes, read the news, I then spent quite a bit arranging the stu…kitchen , I got lights from the bedroom and arranged the background … and then we started talking.

Now, in retrospect as I watched the video a few things are very clear - and I guess these are extremely common and easily(ish) trainable:

I mumble but I don’t say nearly as much as I wanted to say - I clearly can’t prioritize words and message correctly
The rate at which I say the word “whatever” is still very high, I’ll need to come up with a different one next time
I could do with better microphone positioning, which normally is fine, but I was rocking back in forth (mostly back, AWAY FROM THE CAMERA) in the chair and it was scratching the tshirt the whole time, awful
I tend towards silliness , I knew this, in general I prefer humor over dryness, but I understand how that comes off if you’re seeing me for the first time
My Lockdown haircut works!!! :P

Thank you for inviting me - I took it as a challenge.

Notes

So in preparation for the show I took a few notes, since they’re lying there, I might as well share them.

Airbnb to lay off 25% of it’s work force

This particular topic is very close to me, as it’s public knowledge I’m CTO for Homestay.com and although vast dimensions apart, we’re on the same space as Airbnb and of course we know exactly what the industry is going through, because we’re going through the exact same, except with less access to resources.

The signs were there, Airbnb raised / borrowed $2 billion in capital, considering they had $1.1 billion in revenue (at a loss of $276.4 M - which means very roughly speaking they spent $1.3 Billion) in Q4 2019 - so that money was only going to take them maybe 4 months at that spend rate. On top of that, the way the market is and how they operate, two things are happening at any given rate:

A percentage of the money they made in 2020 (and 2019 as well) came from Booking Fees for bookings in the future, some of those bookings never happened because of lockdowns and people initiated refunds - directly with Airbnb or payment providers. So that drained a percentage of that revenue
As the news intensified and lockdowns were enacted across the globe booking certainly dropped , which means the previously lost revenue is not being replaced with new one

This is very likely the picture for most of the industry and you can understand how much of a strain this puts on companies, so cost cutting measures are guaranteed and salaries are usually a very big chunk of the operating costs. To add to this, the future in this space completely uncertain, it really depends on whether or not a proper cure / vaccine comes along and how the world looks like when it does, so nobody, NOBODY, knows what’s going to happen, they can model and they can wishful think, but it’s a big unknown and companies need to prepare for that special “worst case scenario that’s not so bad that it means there’s a slight chance we can survive” - no matter how confident experts and CEO’s seem, absolutely no one knows how this is going to play out.

In the open message from Brian to the company / world he said as much

We don’t know exactly when travel will return

When travel does return, it will look different

While we know Airbnb’s business will fully recover, the changes it will undergo are not temporary or short-lived. Because of this, we need to make more fundamental changes to Airbnb by reducing the size of our workforce around a more focused business strategy.

Out of our 7,500 Airbnb employees, nearly 1,900 teammates will have to leave Airbnb, comprising around 25% of our company. Since we cannot afford to do everything that we used to, these cuts had to be mapped to a more focused business.

This means that we will need to reduce our investment in activities that do not directly support the core of our host community. We are pausing our efforts in Transportation and Airbnb Studios, and we have to scale back our investments in Hotels and Lux.

And then what I think is a hint at where the majority of the layoffs are going to happen

While our process may differ by country, we have tried to be thoughtful in planning for every employee.
In the US and Canada, I can provide immediate clarity. Within the next few hours, those of you leaving Airbnb will receive a calendar invite to a departure meeting with a senior leader in your department. It was important to us that wherever we legally could, people were informed in a personal, 1:1 conversation. The final working day for departing employees based in the US and Canada will be Monday, May 11. We felt Monday would give people time to begin taking next steps and say goodbye — we understand and respect how important this is.

Brian also explain what specific business units are affected, some I didn’t even know about:

AirBnb Transportation - which sounds like they were aiming for an ‘Uber for Airbnb Guests’ (Uber, which is laying off 3700 people)
Airbnb Studios - I couldn’t find anything specific on this - it’s a hard SEO proposition - but I think it’s a production studio, potentially for stuff like this
Airbnb Lux - probably unsurprising
Airbnb Hotels - This is probably a hard space for them, between regulation and incumbents I’m sure they struggled with not being able to completely bulldoze this market space, not entirely sure the pandemic isn’t just a good excuse

FlexDev Predicts a Shift in Offshoring to Nearshoring Due to COVID-19

It’s a story in three acts really, starts with a bold claim that offers no reasoning

Polish-based award-winning outsourcing firm FlexDev predicts a shift in outsourcing IT and Finance functions, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing business leaders to rethink their outsourcing destinations. The change could see jobs being brought back in-house locally or see companies leveraging a nearshore delivery function to gain more control and reduce risk. During this downtime for businesses, created by the world COVID-19 pandemic, business execs are starting to re-evaluate and are rethinking their outsourcing strategy including models, and destinations, according to FlexDev’s Executive Vice President, Graham Fell.

Then someone points this out

Elias van Herwaarden, Founder of “Locationperspectives” and visiting professor at the Faculty of Business and Economics, commented: “Nearshoring will gain a bit of momentum, indeed. But given the wage cost differences with far-shoring and the nature of the work sent to e.g. India or the Philippines, I do not expect a one-on-one transfer-back. Nearshore wage costs and employee aspirations simply are prohibitive to re-shoring the very transactional work that was sent to low cost countries across the globe AI and RPA as the more likely response. GBS and SSCs will very likely bring the processes back home - on-shore and nearshore. They will increasingly opt for distributed, networked service delivery models. Locations with mature shared services/delivery ecosystems could benefit from this. At least if they can adequately respond to an accelerated need for digitally educated and STEM talent.”

And then they drop all pretention and follow through with the Advert

“Culturally there is very little difference between Poland, the US and other European countries. This contrasts with the top outsourcing software destinations – China and India. Poland also boasts excellent language skills ranking ninth in the world in the EF English Proficiency index 2015 and 10th in the 2016 edition, getting ahead of most Eastern European countries. Poland offers a stable and healthy economy, a highly skilled workforce, a dynamically growing IT market and US and EU standards in IP protection and data security,” confirmed Mr Fell.

(shrug)

Health Passports / Contact Tracing

Coronavirus UK: Health passports possible in months

I love the opening bit, it adjusts the lenses you should wear when reading these news

Tech firms are in talks with ministers about creating health passports to help Britons return safely to work using coronavirus testing and facial recognition.
Facial biometrics could be used to help provide a digital certificate – sometimes known as an immunity passport – proving which workers have had Covid-19, as a possible way of easing the impact on the economy and businesses from ongoing physical distancing even after current lockdown measures are eased.

I particularly like this bit

The government is understood to be moving away from the phrase “immunity passport” as evidence continues to emerge on exactly how immunity develops after someone has had Covid-19. The World Health Organization has also issued a stark warning over attempts to give people false assurance through a passport scheme.

My thoughts on this are:

Science needs to unequivocally say that you are indeed protected from further infection for this to mean anything, until they do, having a “I Got Covid and all I got was my face in a biometric database” just means you’re probably capable of transmitting the disease and maybe you’re immune to it.
The economy is a mess, you’ll see a lot of companies that are struggling with business or that had products that they’ve struggled to market before attempt to find new business opportunities , so some pressure will come from entrepreneurism to adopt (anything they sell) as a (solution to something related to COVID-19)

Contact-tracing apps are not a solution to the COVID-19 crisis

A few highlights, but please, read the whole article

We are concerned by this rising enthusiasm for automated technology as a centerpiece of infection control. Between us, we hold extensive expertise in technology, law and policy, and epidemiology. We have serious doubts that voluntary, anonymous contact tracing through smartphone apps—as Apple, Google, and faculty at a number of academic institutions all propose—can free Americans of the terrible choice between staying home or risking exposure. We worry that contact-tracing apps will serve as vehicles for abuse and disinformation, while providing a false sense of security to justify reopening local and national economies well before it is safe to do so. Our recommendations are aimed at reducing the harm of a technological intervention that seems increasingly inevitable.

Contact tracing can be an important component of an epidemic response especially when the prevalence of infection is low. Such efforts are most effective where testing is rapid and widely available and when infections are relatively rare—conditions that are currently unusual in the United States. Ideally, manual contact tracing by trained professionals can help identify candidates for testing and quarantine to help contain the spread of coronavirus.

The lure of automating the painstaking process of contact tracing is apparent. But to date, no one has demonstrated that it’s possible to do so reliably despite numerous concurrent attempts. Apps that notify participants of disclosure could, on the margins and in the right conditions, help direct testing resources to those at higher risk. Anything else strikes us as implausible at best, and dangerous at worst.

The Apple-Google API supports the specific functionality of warning participants if their phone has been near the phone of a person who reported being COVID-19 positive. To be clear, the companies are not planning to develop an app themselves, which would require addressing some of the more challenging issues around how to verify that a user has been infected and what policies to suggest when individuals are alerted to being “in contact” with an infected individual. Ultimately, they have left it up to public health officials, or whoever else develops the apps, to determine their functionality and uses—subject, of course, to the constraints of the platform.

And finally, the issue of malicious use is paramount—particularly given this current climate of disinformation, astroturfing, and political manipulation. Imagine an unscrupulous political operative who wanted to dampen voting participation in a given district, or a desperate business owner who wanted to stifle competition. Either could falsely report incidences of coronavirus without much fear of repercussion. Trolls could sow chaos for the malicious pleasure of it. Protesters could trigger panic as a form of civil disobedience. A foreign intelligence operation could shut down an entire city by falsely reporting COVID-19 infections in every neighborhood. There are a great many vulnerabilities underlying this platform that have still yet to be explored.

No special comment needed

Netflix and ICA launch a contest to support the writing of series and documentaries in Portugal

I guess because I’ve had some proximity to the entertainment industry this isn’t exactly surprising. Netflix - as all the new streaming giants that need original content to show some value in a world where Disney decided to enter that market - is hungry for original content and on the back of hits like Dark and [La Casa De Papel][https://www.netflix.com/title/80192098] they are probably looking at all countries with content production capabilities.

The contest itself is relatively low budgeted - at least for someone with Netflix’s pockets - with a total of €155k in prize money for the top 10 entries. Netflix will then decide which ones are potentially good matches and they’ll engage in private negotiation with any ones - if any - they deem fit. This just came out of the Marketing Department Budget really.

As for Netflix, getting in content irrespective of the location has been an intentional strategy for Netflix so this is part of that

“Talent has no boundaries,” explained Avalos, who will move to Spain in coming weeks. “IP has no boundaries, and the way IP gets adapted and talent can travel throughout our territories is something we constantly speak to each other about.”

One producer asked Finke why Netflix was a better choice as a funding partner than a string of international distributors combined. “When I began in the industry 15 years ago we took projects to MIP for international sales,” he commented. “If we sold four or five territories that felt like a win at the time. If you bring a show to us today we can find a global audience in one go. That’s a very exciting thing for filmmakers.”

It’s good though, the next few years might bring new players to the financing side of content creation in Portugal - in this case - I hope everyone takes advantage of this opportunity. Can’t wait for the first Portuguese show to debut in Netflix.

40/363 - Blog Updates

2020-05-05T01:00:00+01:00

I’ve been using the blog as a way to keep busy, keep active and get my mind off a good number of things, so a bunch of things have changed recently and I’ll take this opportunity to make an inventory, for the sake of my memory. So, ordered in Reverse Boredom Order, the changes have been

Build system

Part of my “Save David’s SSD” movement included removing as much file processing away from my computer as possible, so I finally took the time to setup a remote box and a CI process to test, build, deploy (staging / production) - the usual - the blog. Best (however long that took me in hours) I ever spent.

Underlying platform

TLDR:

Upgraded Jekyll to 4.0
Upgraded Sprockets to 4.0 (and jekyll-assets to the unreleased 4.0 version)

The blog’s current form uses Jekyll and the 4.0 version has been out for a while but I haven’t been able to upgrade until now. Reason is I’ve been using Sprockets to manage my assets - via the lovely jekyll-assets gem and moving everything to Sprockets 4.0 took a little bit of messing around to get to work. In the process I made a bit of a gem upgrade / spring cleaning, which is nice too.

Images images images

Since I have a complete Asset pipeline at my disposal it seemed wrong not to abuse the privilege, so I’ve replaced all / most image tags with srcset options, which basically offers the browser with image density/resolution options so that it can download the most appropriate one for the user at the time. I’ve been putting off having some dynamic image processor in front of this - I’m taking the static blog thing for it’s word - so that means that I’m now generating a few versions of each image (in the original format and webp - 5 versions plus the original, which the pipeline also compresses and massages).

I’ve also added loading='lazy' to every image tag, which sadly is not wide spread yet so I also added a billion javascript lines to cover for the browsers that don’t implement lazy loading natively via lazysizes.

And finally, having more pictures in the pipeline means rmagick’s legendary performance issues finally came into full view so I had to do some work to get rid of it completely. For one all the assets are now processed with libvips - massive massive difference compared to imagemagick - and then, because I’m generating a bit more colormaps for the game galleries (that’s coming next), I had to replace all the rmagick code with a mogrified version via minimagick - I’ll have to update the blog post to reflect those changes.

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      type="image/webp" 
      media="(min-width:1025px)" 
      data-aspectratio="1600/800" 
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    >

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    >

    <source 
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    >
    
    <img 
      data-src="/assets/post-headers/extra-large/37-210-davids-photo-november-d6fd90594a962132dbc04e1530e36447b8a033899c0832b7846f3d6cf1cd1e5cfba8d21ac5a11fe1ffeb028809dd48e7b8a383d0bc3d84a9a6bf93778852e22c.jpg" 
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  </picture>
  <figcaption id="post-header-caption" class="over-top">
    <h1 class="post-title">David's Photo November</h1>
    <p class="post-meta">Dec 4, 2016</p>
  </figcaption>
</figure>

Post readability

When I published this post, a couple of Internet Friends - @isacosta and @lconfraria - pointed out just how horrible it was to read the posts and - thankfully for this caveman - pointed me in the right direction, so I went and tried to make it better.

Since I was there and because I’ve been doing this at night, it became very clear that I needed a dark mode, so I went and added that too.

New section - Arcade

This was a nice one I think, I like to play my games and while I don’t play often - days, WHOLE DAYS go by between me sitting down for 30m to play whatever - but the games I do play and that I enjoyed almost all have Photo Mode and up until now the most I’ve done was a couple of twitter threads, but that has zero lasting value so I thought I would open a section to put those in and give them a better resting place and that’s why I added the Arcade.

It’s a simple enough page, it’s a couple of lines of text and a bunch of pictures, but I wanted to do something nice(r) and since I already had the code to generate colormaps, I now generate colormaps for each picture, which I show in the form of a slideshow and generate a background for each picture based on it’s color pallette . I’m really happy with the way it came out and I think I’ve given the screenshots a nice home now.

Tweaks tweaks tweaks

I’ve been trying to tidy up things a bit, I’ve fixed a few bugs or just plain weird CSS I had. I’ve added a sidebar menu for smaller screens - it became very obvious I needed one when I added the new section - on top of all the image changes I talked about before.

It’s not perfect - and it’s hard for me to see what and where I should improve things , so if something offends you, please let me know, trust me, I need your help, it’s not on purpose :) . One thing I know I’ll need to have a proper bare knuckle fight with is - funny enough - the new slideshow / responsive image / lazy loading combo that I decided to put in which, in short, causes a very ugly and shameful reflow flicker each time a new image is loading.

On that, a couple of notes:

Firefox does it right - they recommend that you add width and height to your image - doesn’t matter if it’s the final display dimensions, as long as it reflects the image ratio that’s being loaded, Firefox will draw a nice placeholder based on that information and zero reflow occurs.
Chrome was supposed to do it right, but what worked in Firefox didn’t work in Chrome - the reflow was very obvious and until I added the JS library to lazy load even in browsers that don’t natively support things, it was my biggest nightmare.
WHEN I ADDED THE JS LIBRARY THOUGH ALL BROWSERS STARTED DISPLAYING THE REFLOW ISSUE , so now it’s a nightmare no matter where you look at it. I’ll need to fix this soon.

Anyway, I think that more or less sums it up, it’s been entertaining, this blog has been with me for almost 16 years - more as a way to keep busy than an actual writing repository - and it’s nice to see it move forward and it’s nice to take some stock now and then.

Please please please, take me seriously, if you’re visually inclined and you spot something that’s just wrong and can be improved, reach out, I’ll be super grateful.

40/352 - Urban Farming

2020-04-22T01:00:00+01:00

I’ve never had a green thumb but plants seem to be - mostly - David proof and I do enjoy the process of taking a tiny seed and watching as the machine work its way into a full grown plant - sometimes with delicious results.

It’s ironic that it’s only when I live in apartments that I feel the urge to plant stuff, for 8 years I had a back yard in Dublin - now there’s a lot of back and forth - and all I have to show is a failed Pinapple Experiment - yes nothing screams TROPICAL quite like Ireland.

Just the same, some of my previous hits include:

Throwing tomato leftovers into a vase - the fruit of which we actually ate
Throwing a Mango pit into a larger vase. That was cool actually, the thing grew to a 60cm mini tree, thick trunk, large leafs, it was great, I was very proud of that one.
Throwing watermelon seeds at yet another vase. The poor thing tried, I had a 1.5m plant across my balcony and tiny little watermelons tried their luck, but it’s hard when the soil beneath you is made of ceramic tiles.

Now, with the current situation a lot of plans have halted and the future - which after basically the whole of last year and how bad it turned out to be - is muddier than ever, so while everyone’s making bread at home, I decided to give it another shot at making , errr , a Caesar Salad at home?

What’s more, I decided that while I would still apply the old David way of “this looks like something that might grow, I’ll throw it into some soil”, this time around, I would have records of it and I might actually learn something in the process. And that’s what I want to share here.

To have records, I would need to track stuff - I’m going to buy soil and vases if and when I can, and because I’m likely to use leftover stuff for seeds, things are going to come in whenever they come in, so I came up with a system to do it that even I can stick to.

Spreadsheets and Plant IDs

So my thinking is, I really don’t know much about how certain plants grow, when’s the best time to seed them, etc. I could read about it and watch Youtube videos, sure, but - and this is true - I have time and for a lot of things I prefer building an experimental knowledge base first - whenever possible or feasable - and then turning to proper resources with a clearer idea of what I need to find out. That’s the approach I’m taking here, I’ll do all sorts of newbie mistakes, so if you’re out there, don’t refrain from letting someone is wrong on the Internet - in this case, me.

Ok, so what I need to know:

When did I plant something
Where did it come from
How did it progress over time
When did I buy that soil
Do I need to do something about it
How much have I spent so far
Did I ever try X and Y before?
Am I sure you can’t plant bread? How do I know? What about sausages, the vegan kind of course?

Identifying and tracking a plant

So, first thing’s first, I need to know how to address each plant, from putting it in a vase until I inevitably do something wrong and kill it. I wouldn’t be able to label plants - it might be done, I’m just saying I can’t without posing a threat to them - so I decided to stick to things that are likely to live for a very long time, in this case my vases.

Vase 1 - it'll sort of hang from the side of leftover pallet - reserved for Stawberries

Vase 2 - the plan is to buy as many of these as it takes to fill out the top of the second pallet

So now that I can identify each vase, I just need to know what’s in it, so I took a permanent marker (🤷‍♂️) and not very carefully divided it into a grid

Vase 2 - can address at most 8 plants

Vase 3 - can address as most 32, but it'll never happen

Grand so, now as long as I respect the grid I can address any plant, and as long as I batch things - so that if a plant is replaced with a new one, I get a new number - I’m fine.

Looking good #121A, keep up the good work

You can also see what happens when I want to use more space in the grid, my wife got me some Romanesco broccoli seeds which I decided to throw immediatly into the soil, but from the pictures it looked big, so I thought maybe it needed more space than the garlics, so I reserved all four grid cells for the thing. We’ll see what #1212CD turns into :)

Now, there’s the case of plants that are still in the nursery, for those ones I decided not to do anything special, once they go into their final spot, they’re good and ready and I can track them - I don’t track plants from birth, I KNOW RIGHT?

Keeping a log

Ok, the other thing I thought might make sense is keeping a log of how things progress. So given I have a plant ID, and since Google Docs now lets me insert pictures into cells, I can keep a log of things, with pictures.

Other stuff

Since I’m at it and since it’s easy to write stuff down when you buy them, I’m also keeping track of how much I’ve spent. And since I’m at it I figured I better track when the soil went in, I guess I’ll eventually have to do something about it.

That’s it for now, I couldn’t think of anything else to log, but let’s be honest, none of this carries much weight, but it’s also low maintenance which is good, time will tell if this is useful or not, and most importantly, time will tell if I can get a meal out of this or not :) .

That’s it, David signing off, quarantine Day #41 — 🤔 maybe I should have lead with that

To blog again

2020-04-17T01:00:00+01:00

So it turns out I can blink and see one year and a half go by, who knew. To say that things have been less than ideal and that plans made were plans ditched is sort of an understatement - I mean, end of January I was quietly celebrating having finally beaten a 4 month long, recurring infection with weird exams and my first ever surgery and now we’re in the middle of a once in a century GLOBAL PANDEMIC.

“It hasn’t been ideal!” — said David

Anyway, for the longest time I’ve been feeling disconnected with the world, trapped in my own head. I never had many friends and I made mild attempts at getting physically closer to the ones I have but between my illness and now a national lockdown, it hasn’t worked out exactly as planned. I still talk to them via the customary Chat application du jour and it’s great, I mean, it’s really great and they’re great people, but the more I disconnect the harder it is to deal with people in general. And it gets slightly worse if you take a group of individually brilliant people, together they form a mass of overachieveness that you simply can’t compete with , at any level.

“Finally, my powers of introversion prove useful” — said No One Ever Esquire

The other link I have to humanity is Twitter and that’s been a different kind of beast. It’s a literal amalgamation of people and machines, of the meek and the powerful and it’s society in compact form. It takes a lot of work to curate who to follow and what to be drawn into and not, who to pay particular attention to for the good reasons and also for all the bad ones. It’s also a space where you can say what you want and be surprised at who’s listening and who talks back, but it’s also unpredictable and work intensive, connections are flimsy, context is slim and shortness is king.

“in a room with 1 billion voices, nobody can hear you scream so your best bet it so scream along with them”

In all this I’ve been closing myself in, I go quiet and most of the talking goes in my head, which works great but more and more I feel I need to let some of it come out, not for the sake of other people but for my sake. It’s Rubber Duck Debugging but applied to real life, it’s a mental health tool, one of many, one I want to explore a bit more.

Which lead me here, to my blog, where words come to die, or to be cast in stone, whichever metaphor suits me at the time. I’ve decided to reinvest in it and now especially I decided that I need to simplify my own access to it, so I’ve been quietly reworking some of the infrastructure and tools to remove any difficulty and adjacent excuses, this post is a trial run of that work.

It’s also a test to myself, to be able to say and publish whatever goes in my mind, not worrying about how that looks and what people might think, which is a particular issue I have. I don’t mind ridicule and in practice I’ve handled embarrassing situations very well all my life, but while it’s easy for me to handle things when they happen, I COMPLETELY DREAD THE POSSIBILITY THAT SOMETHING I’M DOING MIGHT CAUSE SUCH A THING TO HAPPEN.

People are just weird, sadly I too am People

So we’ll see, I want to get into some sort of rhythm, the more you do, the easier it is, the more you do - I’ll practice that for a bit and see how it feels. This one’s for me, just for me.

Stay safe, stay well, much love
David

On Flickr and our future together!

2018-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been using Flickr since September 2004. My usage changed throughout the years, especially as new platforms came about. At the beginning and as I worked through learning photography Flickr was my uncomfortable zone where I would upload pictures and sit quietly waiting for something, anything. As the years went by and I learned enough to not suck and to not wait in vain I started engaging with Groups and other people and what I put in I would roughly get back and that was good.

By now other platforms came along, namely Instagram and they made things easy, easier than Flickr ever made them. They gave you filters and a fixed squared format and you could only use this from your phone and suddenly everyone could be a photographer. This was cool and they stuck their foot in the door - or rather, they ripped apart a wall, made a door there and stuck their foot in it.

With time came basic stats, hashtags, one more format, a bunch of filters and editing settings and the ability to upload your pictures - which meant your camera pictures were able to make into Instagram, and why wouldn’t you - , but most of all came a rush of people into the platform and the game for Followers and Likes took over.

Instagram is, right now, to photography what Youtube is for video, it’s the platform for monetizing yourself, to get to sponsors, to be an Influencer or to be hired. I don’t think there’s any denying that and, well, that’s what Instagram fought for and that’s fine.

In the meantime - while Instagram was morphing and growing and I was actively using it - I started a personal project which required me to be a consumer of other people’s work so that I could discover and curate my new gallery.

For a while I tried to use Instagram, it wasn’t easy to get links of pictures and links to the original work into Tumblr but it was manageable, the biggest problem then was finding the quality stuff. Back then both Instagram and Flickr were feeding Things David Likes but even then - and I have no stats, only gut feeling - for every 1 Instagram post I would find 10 on Flickr. As a measure of quality, this has meaning.

As time went by something else happened, Instagram began to lock down its API and external integrations. So now it wasn’t just an issue of finding good work, it was an issue of linking to it - well, not technically linking, but having the bare minimum tools to do it in a timely fashion.

I also considered other platforms, some with a good noise-to-quality ratio like EyeEm and 500px but the initial lack of integration with other tools and subsequent closing down of API’s meant I would focus solely on Flickr.

Now, I joined Flickr on the year they came out and since they’ve been bought by Yahoo, followed by a few years of investment and then disinvestment on the platform, followed by Verizon buying Yahoo and further exposing Flickr’s staleness up until very recently when SmugMug stepped up and bought Flickr with the promise of actually using Flickr as it was meant to be.

While they changed in ownership, in technical terms they kinda stopped evolving a few years into Yahoo ownership. The attempts to win back that market were very much Enterprisey-meets-Startup-Baloney - namely the 1TB Free Storage for no good reason and the half backed redesign. Those choices never made the impact they wanted and in fact, some of those choices have to be taken back now to make way for a more sustainable business approach.

But why is it that with so many competitors and disinvestment Flickr still endures and, actually picked someone’s interest enough to put money into it?

I can’t give you a global answer, but here’s what keeps me using it:

The personal feed is decent and manageable, I don’t want to say it’s because it’s chronological, but yes, it’s because it’s chronological (something that’s now so rare it’s becoming Hipster again)
Flickr Groups - despite a lot of them being Social Growth Hacks - are great. If you find the right ones, you get access to a lot of quality work, ensured by correct curation and administration. Again, hashtags are all the rage, but curation gives you quality
The API was and given every competitor is in Lock-the-doors-mode, the most comprehensive and open around.

This last point is interesting for me in that, despite being nerdy-factor, it gives you some insight into how the business is operating. If you close down the API to protect Assets or cut other software clients out, you’re telling us something and we should listen.

As examples, look at the wording here:

The history of 500px has always encouraged creative development, but as of January 24th 2018, 500px will no longer be offering free access to our API. This decision was made in order to protect our assets and improve our website’s performance. On June 15th, access to the API was shut down. This is part of a larger strategic shift—focusing our energy on continuing to build the world’s best photography community at 500px.com.

From: 500px - API

and here

To continuously improve Instagram users’ privacy and security, we are accelerating the deprecation of Instagram API Platform, making the following changes effective immediately. We understand that this may affect your business or services, and we appreciate your support in keeping our platform secure.

These capabilities will be disabled immediately (previously set for July 31, 2018 or December 11, 2018 deprecation). The following will be deprecated according to the timeline we shared previously:

Public Content - all remaining capabilities to read public media on a user’s behalf on December 11, 2018

Basic - to read a user’s own profile info and media in early 2020

From: Instagram Developer page

Now, this is where we are now and what SmugMug will do is yet to be seen. They’ve run their business in what I think is a sustainable way and the announced changes to Flickr also point in that direction, so if you’re upfront about how you make money, that’s good for everyone.

There’s a lot of hope in the new management and this interview and this Reddit AMA empowers that hope, namely this

The company is trying to move away from the Yahoo-era model, which subsidized the generous storage capacity by selling advertising. The new Flickr approach takes a more SmugMug-like approach: pay for the service, and the company will work hard to make sure you think it’s worth paying for, without sharing your personal data with advertisers. The goal is to focus Flickr on a community of photographers, not on people who want a free place to back up their images.

Again, if you’re upfront about how you plan to make your money, everyone benefits and trust is gained.

What I hope first and foremost is that the current community over at Flickr doesn’t take too much of a loss over the following months and quality people don’t run off. I also hope that photographers - which are the target here - consider Flickr as a platform for them again and some make a comeback (I follow way too many people who have gone silent over the years) and new ones come in.

As for me, I’ll continue to focus on TDL as a project to find and expose quality and talent. Flickr helps me find those nuggets on a daily basis, the API helps me feed the website and social networks and the newly created group gives me a platform to engage directly with the creators.

Now, having said all these things, the last thing I want to say is that I’m buying into the business model they announced and so I’ve just purchased the Pro account despite my own photography activity having slowed down tremendously lately.

I hope they improve the site, I hope they improve things like the Explore tab which is absolutely not a place where you find quality work and it feels like it should be and I hope they don’t cut down on what makes Flickr different. And I hope they give the mobile apps (namely the iPad one) lots and lots of love, but most of all, I hope they settle down and work away.

Big hopes, big expectations, I will see you there :)

Blog Upgrades - Header Image color scheme

2018-05-13T01:00:00+01:00

For the longest time I’ve been meaning to do a design overhaul on this blog but my life outside the workplace is either filled with more work or my zombifying completely in a universe of idiotic multitasking what passes for entertainment and not actually achieving anything - this is an actual issue I’ve been going through for a while now and I can acknowledge it in certain moments of clarity but I haven’t been able to fix it - #LifeHowDoesItWork. This means that the whole “REDESIGN ALL THE THINGS” pipe dream as surprisingly remained a dream but I can do the next best thing - VERY TINY INCREMENTAL IMPROVEMENTS AND/OR STUFF THAT I THROW AT THIS BLOG.

So, a big part of the original design of this space was to give images a prime spot and none gets more emphasis than the post header so I wanted to do something around that. Namely, given I try to use photographs for the headers and they, usually, carry a lot of color, I wanted to modify the look of the post page based on the colors present in the picture, so each post would have it’s own visual identity based on the header image I used.

Fine, we get it, let’s get to the details

Alright alright, so, details then. This blog is built using Jekyll, so it uses Ruby and that’s what I’m going to work with. My first goal was to have something look at an image and give me a given number of colors that show the most in that image. While I could obviously work on designing and building my own wheel - which would be great and amazing thank you very much - I decided to take a look at imagemagick and use the Ruby binding provided by rmagic - because let’s face it, I would build a square wheel anyway.

Now of course, imagemagick is capable of generating a color_histogram and that pretty much solves the issue for me, but because what I really really want is a feel for the most important colors in the image and not every single individual color in it, I use another great little method called quantize which does exactly what I want.

So with that, I iterate over all the posts that have header images and I do something like

def colormap(img_path)
  Magick::Image.read(img_path)
    .first
    .quantize(NUMBER_OF_COLORS, Magick::SRGBColorspace, Magick::RiemersmaDitherMethod)
    .color_histogram
    .keys
    .sort_by(&:intensity)
    .map do |color|
      # 8-bit rgb representation
      color.to_color(Magick::AllCompliance, false, 8)
    end
end

Roughly what’s happening here is:

I’m reading the image using the read command
I tell imagemagick to reduce the number of colors in the image to a given number - I picked 5 because much arbitrary opinion
With that reduced image I grab the color histogram - this gives the list of colors in the image
For the sake of predictably I sort the colors by the intensity value - darker to brighter
Finally I need to map color value to something I can use on the site, so I ask for the 8-bit version of the color and I get a direct hexadecimal value - great

Update (2020-05-05)

Now’s a good time to update this, recently I’ve scaled up considerably the generation of colormaps on the blog which made one thing very clear, rmagick is not a good option in terms of performance - at least in it’s default form. So bad in fact that the colormap generation would either exhaust the VM’s resources or - after I tweaked a bunch of imagemagick settings - take 5 minutes or more to generate all the colormaps.

Anyway, I looked at doing everything from libvips - as part of the updates I did - but I couldn’t find an obvious path to do that so I stuck to imagemagick but I now call it via a mogrified command using MiniMagick. The updated code looks like this now

class Colormap
  NUMBER_OF_COLORS = 5

  def initialize(path, number_of_colors = NUMBER_OF_COLORS)
    @image = MiniMagick::Image.open(path)
    @path  = path
    @number_of_colors = number_of_colors
  end

  def colors
    @image
      .run_command(
        'convert',
        @path,
        '-resize', '256x256',
        '-quantize', 'sRGB',
        '-format', '%c',
        '-colors', @number_of_colors,
        '-dither', 'Riemersma',
        '-depth', 8,
        'histogram:info:'
      )
      .split("\n")                               # One line per color
      .map { |v| /(\#[A-Z\d]*)/.match(v).to_s }  # Match anything that looks like #ACOLOR1
  end
end

Go with this instead, same results - scalling the image down also brings performance benefits .

Now, there’s one important detail regarding the process of reducing the colors, which is the color space we want imagemagick to work in, which you can sort of get a feel for what it’s doing here. I played around with this for a while - in an impressive display of color theory ignorance - and I ended up going back to the RGB colorspace as that seem to give me the best results. Here’s how the experiments went:

Reducing using the CMYK colorspace

Reducing using the HSL colorspace

Reducing using the Lab colorspace

Reducing using the YIQ colorspace

Reducing using the YUV colorspace

Reducing using the SRGB colorspace - this is the one I used

And then ?

So with this I can now inject a list of colors onto each post. With these I do two things:

I added a color bar at the bottom of the image header so I can see the results. This is the typical case of a debugging tool that was promoted to “this is what I wanted all along”

I change the colors of the navigation and the post title block to match the colors of the image. Namely I take the brightest and the darkest and that influences the color of the text and background. This also means that now I have to make sure I pick images with enough contrast for this to always work out well in terms of readability, but there’s nothing I don’t do to make it more difficult for me to do things #SelfSabotage101

Here are a few examples:

Next up?

A MAJOR DESIGN OVERHAUL OF COURSE!!!!!!!

Google Lunar XPRIZE

2018-05-07T01:00:00+01:00

Almost a year later I got around to reading this: The Next Moon Landing Is Near—Thanks to These Pioneering Engineers

I hardly ever read stuff on the computer, it’s too geared towards multitasking - as am I in the sense that my attention span is degraded - and as soon as I see that an article is both long and interesting I fire it off to Pocket.

In order for me to read said article I used to have a Calibre that would collect and archive my oldest unread articles and build a readable digest, which was great as I could push it to my kindle - the least multitasking device ever - but changes to the Pocket API - and the tricks the recipe used to play - meant that stopped working, so the backlog reading stopped for a while, it was only when I lost all shame and started borrowing my wife’s iPad that I found another weak-multitasking device that I could use, so we’re kind of getting back on track.

Now, reading old articles has a lot of interesting benefits, for one you remove anxiety from the equation as chances are, whatever cliffhanger or open question the article raised is answered now - or died in a cloud of empty silence. Which is the other benefit, you get to follow up and find out what happened, and in this case let’s talk about the Google Lunar XPRIZE

At the time the article ran, five teams were in play to win the award. In this last stage they needed to launch and successfully operate the vehicles to fulfil the prize requisites. None made it within the deadline and on January 2018 it was announced that the monetary award would end unclaimed, although later on in April a second announcement came up that the award would continue to run as a non-cash competition despite which the organisation continues to look for other sponsors.

So what of the teams then?

Moon Express - USA - is the Silicon Valley finalist (which you know straight away by reading their entires of course :)). They have a multi-launch contract with Rocket Lab USA and 4 different vehicle configurations. From their timeline it looks like they’re aiming for a 2019 launch of their MX-1 configuration and 2020 for their MX-2.

Synergy Moon was the product of several teams partnering up for the contest. Plans were made for a launch before the deadline but they didn’t pan out. They’re now aiming for a late 2008 joint launch with another team.

TeamIndus - India - is planing a 30 day mission with a rover that’s expected to live stream from the surface of the moon. It’s expected to launch late 2018 alongside Synergy Moon

SpaceIL - Israel - is aiming to launch a 500kg spacecraft using SpaceX’s Falcon 9 . For now they seem to be trying to raise the remaining funds to aim for a late 2018 launch

Finally Hakuto - Japan - who are now aiming for a 2020 Atlas V rocket joint launch.

We’re probably not there yet in terms of actual cheap and reliable technology to do what the XPRIZE expected, but we’ve come a long long way from the times of needing a super-power’s national budget to do it.

It’s unclear if any of the teams will even attempt a launch, but we’ll certainly look forward to more news this year.

It feels like we’re on the brink of a new chapter of space exploration, one with multiple players and competition. SpaceX has sort of brought a new fire into the field - no pun intended - especially for us, casual spectators, but it also seems to have ignited - sigh - a race to commoditise launches, which really, is a gigantic enabler for the above projects.

NASA turning it’s focus and budget again towards the Moon will also fuel - sigh - technological innovation and stability .

Hopefully the next 10 years will be very exciting in this area

OTIA - Interview

2017-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

A few weeks back I had an email sitting in my inbox, an email from LinkedIn. Muscle memory prepared me to hit the delete button but something in the email was different. It wasn’t an “amazing opportunity just for you $first_name!” it was something else. This other human was explaining me that they run a project called Otia, which highlights artistic endeavors in the tech community and they wanted to do an interview with me regarding my photography.

Well, what else could I say? “I’ll see what I can do!”

The guys sent me a file with topics and questions and over a few hours I squeezed what I could out of my noggin in barely coherent words. They then proceeded to turn said mumbo-jumbo into something that resembles natural human speech, which you can read here. I, however, given I shoot RAW and not to be undone by public shame or embarrassment, would like to preserve what was a special moment for posterity - until multiple server and backup failure finally kills this blog - and publish the full text, straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were.

Hopefully someone out there might enjoy this, I certainly did. A big gigantic thank you to the guys at Otia, who are looking for people to do profiles on, and I know some of you absolutely fit the bill, so check them out.

Here be dragons

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is David Ramalho, I’m from the distant past of 1979. I’m also a father of two and husband of one - so we’re a nice group of four Portuguese humans :)

Work wise I’m a software developer for Homestay.com where I’ve worked for the past 5 years, since it was a baby company :) . I also own and fill the role of CTO at my own company - Blackorange.

I have a blog, I use Flickr and Instagram for my photography and I have a separate photography related project at ThingsDavidLikes (Twitter and Facebook).

What inspired you to choose your job?

I’ve asked myself this question a few times and I’ve pretty much settled with the one answer - LEGO . I grew up with LEGO and especially the Technic blocks, something about taking individual mechanical pieces and making a working system clicked right with me.

The second click moment was realizing, very early, how unbounded you are by software - and this was a bit before the internet was affordable enough. At the time - naively of course - I got this image in my head that, given you can program anything into the computer, you can do anything your mind wants. If you’re into Chemistry in contrast - as an example - you’re much more dependent on equipment and access to resources. This click was further cemented when Internet became affordable enough to have at home and I understood I was no longer limited to what I was taught at school or to what books I could find in the local library.

This feeling that you can go as far as you want to go, is definitely what got me into this line of work, it’s also what led me to open my own company - it’s one of the first things I did professionally :) .

Have you always lived in your current location? If not, what brought you there?

I grew up and lived almost my entire life in Portugal. Some 8 years ago, on the back of a bad period with my own company, I had to find work and I decided to take a dip in a bigger company. At the time I started working for Sapo - part of PT Telecom - where I stayed for a few years, but as good as Sapo was - especially compared to working for consultancy companies or full blown Enterprise Rated entities - it was still a very very big company that I joined very late in it’s life and while I made my own room in it, I knew it was hard to take it as a project I could grow into.

So somewhere on the Summer of 2012 I got an email from a recruiter, which in our line of work is not exactly something remarkable, but this one was somewhat different from the others and I engaged in conversation. Turns out this 4 month old company in Dublin was looking to bring people in to build their product and after a few tests done remotely I ended up flying to Dublin for an interview. I brought my oldest kid and my wife along, we’ve never been to Ireland and if this was going to happen, we all needed to feel comfortable with the city, so in August 2012 we came, I met the guys and did the interview. Everything went well that day and when I left the office, happy with the way the interview went, I walked down a sunny Grafton Street - it rained quite a bit those days we stayed in Dublin. It felt good, the buskers, the people, the city … that’s pretty much when I new I was looking at a major life change.

What is the most unique thing about the place where you currently live?

For someone coming from Portugal I can tell you the weather is a definite contrast, although, for me, a welcome one as I’m not a fan of hot weather - although, 5 years here, I’m recovering. Irish people to this day are the nicest people I’ve encountered, and Dublin just feels safe - although, when bad things happen here, they seem more extreme.

Apart from the weather the architecture of the city was a big contrast. Portugal - the parts where I lived at least - builds up while Ireland builds horizontally. I lived in apartments all my life prior to Dublin, now if I go back I’m sure I’ll want to live in a house. The absolute downside is, of course, the current housing crisis, although as Lisbon gains popularity, I regretfully report this is no longer something unique to Dublin :)

I live on the North side and both Howth and Malahide are my go-to places, both great places to shoot pictures from.

What would you miss if you were to move away from your current home?

The green and the peaceful life we have. Things are generally more hectic in Portugal, people are more stressed out and with the current weather climate - Portugal is still getting temperatures of 30º , in NOVEMBER - the scenery is definitely not trending towards the Irish Green.

You love to do photography outside of your job, do you do it often?

I try to, for the longest time I had DSLR cameras, the 300D when it came out was my first Digital camera, then the 10D and finally the 30D . This last one began to develop sensor issues and I didn’t want to spend too much money on a camera, so I started looking at the Canon EOS M, it’s mirrorless prototype - lets say :) . The first generation of the M was being replaced and I saw a very interesting deal on Amazon, so down that road I went.

The camera was super tiny and when I used the EF-M 22mm pancake lens, it was so small I could put it in my coat’s pocket. So I started going everywhere with it, every day. At the beginning of this year I replaced it with the EOS M5 which is a tiny bit bigger and no longer fits my coat’s pocket, but it’s still portable enough that I can take it with me on my backpack, so I do.

I won’t say I shoot everyday, but I try. On weekends and vacations I carry my entire gear around and I use it extensively.

When did this interest start?

I’m going to say some 18 years back. My uncle had a old Minolta XE-1 that he gave to me. It felt right, I started experimenting with rolls and exposure and all that, of course, back in the day experiments ran over weeks, you would finish a roll, take it for processing, wait a few days - yes days - and finally get disappointed with the results … well, not always :) . I found a few camera shops and I bought a few used lenses and I was hooked. Then finally in 2000-something, Canon announced the 300D and that’s when I made the transition to digital - never to look back again :)

What sparked this interest?

Those first days with my Minolta and the learn by experimentation method. Photography starts by being approached from a technical point of view, exposure time, aperture values, lenses, film types, etc. This felt good to me and it was cheap enough that I could keep it going, and occasionally some picture would come out ok and I would feel good.

Is this a good creative outlet for you? Does it change anything in your life or is it just for fun?

It is, I physically feel a need to create things. While I think that developers have to display and use a fairly good amount of creativity on their day to day life, we don’t always use it for goals we can personally relate to or feel proud of, necessarily. Art is always a personal and any expression of creativity there is bound to what you are as a person.

I think I would like to draw and I like visual arts quite a bit, but I’m not particularly gifted and I suppose drawing never produced enough good results to get me going, whilst photography did, very early on.

As with any other area of knowledge, once you start to develop your skills you’ll start to remove these patterns from the subject you’re developing and generalizing them to other areas. In photography this tends to be lighting, composition and subjects and these are very transferable skills, certainly into other art forms, but things like composition you can abstract a bit more and take to the visual aspects of my job.

I also ended up benefiting from the current boom of photography that platforms like Flickr and Instagram brought. I’ve met more people in recent years from going to photography meet-ups - and mind you, I’m definitely in the shy department and I only attend a fraction of all the meets that happen just in Dublin - than from other things in my life.

Photography is also something I can easily share with people, from strangers who follow my online accounts or site, to family that lives far from me and with whom I can share bits of my day-to-day life with ease.

Do you think that having a creative outlet can be of benefit to your technology career?

I suppose everyone’s experience is different, but I do think artistic creative outlets are a very positive aspect in one’s life. Software development is around taking complex systems and giving them shape. A lot of the solutions we end up finding, architecturally and otherwise, are sometimes inspired by other aspects of life - not necessarily related exclusively to Software Development - and sometimes while working on artistic problems - they exist - you find analogous solutions.

Another aspect is that, if you’re sitting down 10 hours in front of a computer writing lines of code, your forcing your brain into a fairly abstract work mode, worse, one that is very hard to share with other people - who never heard a friend saying “It’s just a button, how hard can it be?”. Art can be a very immediate and direct concrete way to express yourself and it’s something you can easily share with a greater audience. If can also be simultaneously very subtle, you can leave little hints here and there to other aspects of your psyche.

Art is also something in which your final output only needs to cater for a handful of scenarios - maybe just one even. You CAN take shortcuts, you can find creating solutions for your process that you don’t need to have second thoughts about - you don’t have to worry about scaling a picture to 1000 servers, or if your picture’s code is going to be readable or maintainable - once art is done it’s ready.

And finally, I think :) , it’s fair to say that you’ll want people to see your art. This means putting your individual work in out there for people to see. Not after running 1000 specs on it, not after validating if filled carefully structured requirements, but just then, when it’s done and ready. And there’s no v2 you can deploy, there’s no tiny fix you’ll push later, the first time you publish something is probably the last you’ll publish that same something. This can create anxiety and self-doubt but in a safer environment than your usual one, you’ll learn to deal with this and this, is an extremely transferable skill :)

What type of photography interests you the most? (Nature, fashion, people, portraits, etc)

Hummm I was going to say I like good photography and that falls into a number of categories. I love portraits as frozen human expression can be incredibly powerful and beautiful, I like street photography because when done well, you take slices of everyday life and make permanent works of art and I like landscape or cityscape photography because there’s only so many places you’ll visit in person during your lifetime and photography takes you places, figuratively and if you’re impressed enough, literally :) .

Do you like to edit photos or use special effects software or prefer photos in their original form?

I definitely like to edit my photos. I use Lightroom for almost all my editing although I’m aware that there’s a much greater level of refinement and power available to me in Photoshop, but I haven’t made many attempts, at least not enough to make Photoshop something familiar to me.

Having said this, what I try to do with my editing is bring the final result closer to what I saw when I took the picture. Cameras have limited range in terms of the light it can take in, there’s only so much contrast it can see so the camera tries to balance things out, sometimes this means areas will be too dark or to bright, or the colors might be wrongly corrected because there’s a mix of lighting conditions, etc. On top of that I always shoot in RAW, to get the most information I can get from the sensor. Of course the downside of this is that no image correction was done by the camera, so pictures always look flat and bland.

Editing is meant to bring out the things you saw, the colors, the contrasts, the shadowy areas that didn’t look so shadowy when you were there, etc. Same with leveling pictures or fixing bad geometry your lenses might have given you. I think this is an absolutely fundamental step to photography, it was what studios did when they processed your films - or what savvy photographers did, say with their black and white films, where manual cropping, dodging and burning and other tools you have available were done on film and printing. It’s also what cameras do FOR you when you shoot in JPG and the camera applies certain auto-corrections.

I draw the line at more extreme transformations, removing or - especially - adding image elements, at least as far as my process goes.

Regarding other photographer’s work, what genres of photography would you enjoy the most as a fan?

Like I said, I’m a fan of good photography and I have a hard time calling out formal genres. I run a project called Things David Likes at http://thingsdavidlikes.com - yes, it’s as literal a name as you’ll ever see :) , vintage me. I use it to showcase stuff I find online, the majority of it on Flickr. There’s a bit of everything in there, but I think there’s a baseline quality to these people’s works that drives me to put them up there. Talent abounds in this world, in a very real and humbling way, this site is a reminder to myself.

Do you have a favourite photographer or photography website or magazine?

My previous response applies here as well, I certainly use Flickr and Instagram as my main photography sharing sites. I also use EyeEM to published licensed work - my goal is to sell enough pictures to pay for a round of Dominos :) … half-way there.

Other than that I don’t visit other sites often, there’s enough influx from these two to keep me busy for a long long time. As for favorite photographers, there are a few people that make more frequent appearances in ThingsDavidLikes for sure, and some have very distinct styles or run very consistent series, but I’m not a fan of singling people out, I always feel bad for the people I leave out that are equally good, so I don’t :)

Are there any similarities between photography and your work in tech?

Hummm interesting, for example, I stay away from UI / frontend work as much as I can, I like building up systems and I do my best work with backends and architecture. Photography by contrast is incredibly visual and nobody really cares if I do something clever with Lightroom or not, so in that sense it’s hard to draw parallels. I’m going to be optimistic here and say that I approach both fields differently :)

When was the last time you tried something new?

For the past couple of years I’ve been flying back to Portugal to help organize the Trojan Horse was a Unicorn festival that my business partner started. In very few words it’s a Festival dedicated to Visual Arts, digital or otherwise, and it’s been steadily growing these past few years. It’s really an amazing week where I’m surrounded by artists and - this year - producers from all over the world.

This year my role in the Festival grow a bit more and I ended up taking more responsibility doing things that I don’t usually do, like planing and assembling special areas for some of the sponsors and running a couple of activities, the Colabs - where artist get together for the duration of the festival and they work on a product - and the B-sides - a new track that brought a more business side to the festival.

Despite the 9 days of non stop work, with 18 hour non stop work days, I ended up meeting and talking to amazing people, from the President of Polygon - a Japanese animation studio - to the person who produced movies like Storks and Ratatouille, or one of the first people to run Electronic Arts and such.

This is something outside my usual competency and definitely very much outside my work career so far but it’s incredibly beneficial to my growth.

When did you last push the boundaries of your comfort zone?

A couple of years ago I bought a Ukulele and I started taking lessons, 1 hour a week, nothing crazy. Music is, again, a technical field at the beginning of the learning curve and once you develop enough muscle memory more creative and artistic elements start coming into play. It’s also very relaxing and lights up other parts of your brain, to do with melody and rhythm, so I also try to get some exposure to that.

Every August there’s an event in Dún Laoghaire called the Ukulele Hooley. It runs over one weekend where Saturday they run workshops and other activities and ends on Sunday with a big concert that runs for the entire day. One of the activities on Saturday is an Open Mic night, and this year some people on my Ukulele Group wanted to enter it, so we did. Now, I’m not an especially gifted player, but I like the strumming and the rhythm - I’m a percussionist at heart - so in a three element group, I was responsible for sustaining the song.

I practiced plenty and I was fairly comfortable with the song, what I didn’t practice and what I wasn’t comfortable with was doing it in front of a crowd :) , but that was exactly what why I signed up. There’s two parts to that night, one was the hour before going up on stage, that was completely atrocious and every drop of water I had came out of my body as sweat, the second part was when the music started and that, I have little memory of :) , but they tell me it was good and I’m happy to believe them.

That was definitely a new experience and my comfort zone was completely destroyed and it took a few weeks off to recover :)

What are you looking forward to?

Last year I did what I called David’s Photo November. One of goals was to develop one project related to my photography that had a physical dimension to it and that would let me connect directly to people. So I decided to print a few of my pictures as postcards and let people contact me to request one. It was simple enough and although it didn’t had the reach I wanted - still have a few postcards that I’m very happy to send out to people :) - it was fun to do and organize. This year I’m a little bit behind and I’m not sure I’ll still call it David’s November but I want to do something different but with the same requirements - a physical thing that let’s me directly connect to people, I’m looking forward to that project.

What risk would you take if you knew you could not fail?

Well, I have a history of taking risks, I started working at Sapo on the back of an almost catastrophic failure of my own companies, following a very big, risky, bet on a massive project that absolutely fell through after months of work and investment. When things stabilized enough the opportunity to move abroad came up and me and the family moved to Dublin, leaving behind a safe job that definitely paid the bills. 5 years in, funny enough, it’s beginning to feel like another risk taking move is coming up.

Like I said, I still own a company in Portugal and I want to make it grow, so that’s a big thing for me. I then have a cliché project that I’ll eventually do, which is to take a full year of traveling and working around the world, possibly with the kids with me. It’s definitely something that would push every single comfort zone I might have to extinction and in more ways that one, it’s a very risky project.

Those two things, I would bundle in one single project and definitely do it, if Huge Gigantic Risk wasn’t a factor.

Whose biggest fan are you?

I don’t like to put people in a pedestal, I don’t think it’s healthy for anyone, so I have a hard time being a fan of individuals. I do have great admiration for people that produce and put things out there. This is more rare than one would think, people that do completely original work, from the ground up are hard to come by. People with the strength to drive projects to conclusion, big or small, I hold great admiration for. Talent is a nice thing, but work and purpose is the powerhouse behind what talented people create and they awe me.

Do you have an interesting story from a relative that you would want others to know about?

More of a very proud moment than an interesting story. 5 years ago we came to Ireland, we flew in on a Friday and both School and Work started the following Monday. My oldest kid was starting primary school that year, his English was non existent and we yanked him from his native language, country and familiar environment. He takes after his father, in that he’s extremely shy, so I was honestly concerned for him, especially because he would spend half a day in a new school on a new country where nobody spoke his language. I can’t see a more daunting scenario, but to my eternal pride, he survived the first weeks, learned the basic vocabulary quickly and in a few months time he gained proficiency. It was amazing to me to witness that.

Favourite photo / song / movie of all time?

I don’t have a single one :), I might have a top 50 of each though :) but that might be too long

EOS M5!

2017-04-24T01:00:00+01:00

FOREWARNING: I may have ranted and diverted path early on, skip down to the bits about the camera if that’s what you’re into

Photographic Equipment Economics

Tl;Dr; I don’t like spending money, I buy as cheap as I can, but this time I bought a recent model;

I’m not a fan of spending money. I never was, I remember when I was little that I saved 8,000$¹ - which would be €40 in today’s money by straight conversion, but much more if you apply inflation back to 1990 something - to buy a game. It took me months to do it, I saved birthday, Christmas and occasional presents, I saved on lunch money and I never bought anything. When I finally saved enough it, I stuck it all in my neon blue and yellow wallet and went to the shop. I asked the guy for the game and handed over the cash, got the box, took it home and tried the game … no wait, that’s not right, there’s something missing here, let me go back a few steps and start over.

Ok, I took all my precious savings that had taken me months to build up, put the money on my wallet, slowly walked to the store, pointed at the game suddenly more aware of how much money I would spend in a game, asked how much it was and what thoughts the store guy had on it - that was me stalling. By this time I was having second, third and forth thoughts, but pride told me that I had decided this and I wasn’t backing out of a decision, of course I wouldn’t. Too late, too proud, I handed over the cash, got the box, left the store and decided that I made a terrible mistake.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the game was great, beautiful, fluid, fun, it’s one of the best games I remember playing and it was worth the money, and this isn’t me criticizing the game. It’s me, I love games, but I didn’t put into the game the same amount of effort that I had in saving to buy the game. Does this make sense? Of course not, the effort put it to buy something should have translated into huge entertainment rewards. I should have relaxed, enjoyed the game and moved on, but it didn’t, my brain clicked differently.

Ok, fast forward to adulthood, I still don’t like spending money, but I found some metrics to keep me happy. [THERE’S A BLOODY TERM FOR THIS FIND IT] . For example, when I bought a car I would say “how much money has each kilometre driven cost me so far”, it was horrendous at the beginning of course, but it ease off a few years in and I was happy with it.

For computers and phones it’s time based “this thing costs x / year”, after a while I’m happy, with Photography gear it’s cost per picture, and so on. Other things I struggle with though, games are a problem, I never buy brand new games, I never ever pay more than €30 for a game and that’s the upper limit - NO GAME WILL BEAT FLASHBACK. It’s not that I don’t value people’s work, trust me, I do and I don’t want to be hypocritical when I work in the Software Industry myself, it’s just that it’s very rare for me to play a game for long enough to extract it’s true value - which is a criticism on me.

Eating out I like, but it’s rare enough, I don’t go to ridiculously expensive places and I try to eat stuff that we wouldn’t easily cook at home, otherwise it must be really good or I’ll be internally unhappy - I don’t blame restaurants unless they’re really incompetent which must have happened once or twice. Traveling I like, I don’t digest the costs easily but going into the unknown energises me and I get to lower the costs of my photography equipment with all the pictures I get to take, so that’s good.

Runaway rant over

Equipment Timeline

This is something I should have done before, because buying equipment is a big deal for me, so I declare this to be A Great Time to build a timeline of stuff I owned. I won’t pretend that I have a Master Plan and a Path for my Photographic Career - notice the ease with which I capitalize things!

I’ve only made one major technological change in all these years and one minor. The major change was moving from Film to Digital. I loved it, it plays well with my personality, it gives me more speed, faster iterations and more control over the entire process. It does so at the expense of all the things Film gives you for free, randomness, mindfulness and a bit of personality.

With film you’re never quite sure how things are going to turn out, it’s a chemical medium, it’s influenced by outside factors, the film needs to be mechanically pulled out of the roll. Developing film is also a complex process and you only get one shot at it but accidents are sometimes good.

A roll of film is extremely limited compared to, say, a 32GB SD card, you have to be much more mindful of what shots you take and how you take them. Even if you carry a bag of rolls with you there’s a physical process to replacing film, so you don’t go around taking 20 pictures of the same thing lightly.

Digital gives you little of this, if you get a really bad sensor you might get super ugly digital noise, white balance or colors, but I have yet to see a picture benefit from these things. In digital you have two choices, either you pick the simples stack of tools - from the Auto modes cameras process pictures with to preset filters in popular applications or social networks - or you learn and use more complex editing tools.

One gives you good, fast but run-of-the-mill results, the other is time consuming and you need to find your own style. But all the serendipity that you got from Film is unlikely to find you.

Of course, Photography is still Photography and nothing substitutes framing, composition, lighting, opportunity, emotion or being in the right place to take a wonderful picture. Film or Digital, that’s still the same and that’s what makes photography this wonderful medium that I love so much.

With this second rant out of the way, the other minor technological change that I made was go from a DSLR to a Mirrorless camera. I say minor because it doesn’t change the fundamentals, it doesn’t change any of the underlying capabilities of your camera. What it did for me though was give me a good camera that was small enough to carry around in my jacket’s pocket and that opened up a world of opportunities for me. I started carrying the camera around every day instead of just on weekends and as a result I took even more pictures than I used to.

35mm point and shoot god knows if I remember what model or models - fixed lens, single mode, click and pray
Minolta XE-1 - Lovely, 35mm beautiful - a few second hand lens, used it for years, no really memorable shots but learned a lot, I mean, A LOT
Canon EOS 300D - First entry into Digital Land, used it until it dropped - rather, until my shutter broke down.
Canon EOS 10D - Loaner from my friend Pedro Moura Pinheiro when my 300D stopped working, professional body, nice
Canon EOS 30D - Unexpected Loaner , very good camera but sensor had a few bad lines, used it a lot
Canon EOS M (2013/14) - M3 was coming out, Amazon was dumping stock, got an amazing deal on it with the EF adapter and the 22mm f/2.0 lens , brought me back to modern standards, best photos of my life came from that camera
Canon EOS M5 (2017) - After the 300D this is the first time in over a decade I buy an actual recent camera, fixes all the shortcomings the M had, hoping that it lasts for 5 years at least :)

Why upgrade now

I never upgraded my Minolta XE-1 because I never did anything but 35mm format, so I could use different film types, brands, etc, but never the camera. The body had all the settings I could hope for at the time, so that wasn’t an issue too, things were probably simpler someone might say?

However, in the Digital age your film is fixed to the camera, the sensor that comes with the camera sticks with you and that, if anything, will always drive people to upgrade - although it will inevitably plateau and that’s going to be - maybe it already is - interesting for the camera making industry.

My 30D, nice as it was, had sensor issues - 4 or 5 vertical white lines that I simply could not get rid of or pretend they weren’t there. In the meantime the EOS M3 was going strong and Amazon was clearing the old original M stock and opportunity came knocking. I wasn’t particularly looking for a Mirrorless, in fact, I was super happy to keep going DSRL, but for 250€ I got the EOS M with a 22mm f/2.0 lens AND the EF adapter so I could use my old lenses. This was too good to let pass, so I took the leap.

The sensor in the M was a vast improvement over the 30D, and I found it was great on it’s own, as long as you kept your lighting ranges small enough and if you stayed away from ISO 800 upwards, then it was a bit painful to look at. My M’s body was a bit challenging too, almost the settings had to be changed via the touchscreen and that was also your only way to frame the shot as there was no viewfinder - the later M’s had an optional external Electronic one that you could buy, but not mine, finally it also had a lot of trouble focusing and focusing fast, which meant that any fast moving shots were always prayer based, either that someone the autofocus could find it’s way, or by locking the focus to a given point and shooting or manual focus.

All these things sound like complaints but they’re not, I’ve had the best photography years with my M and a lot of it had to do with it’s size and quality. Sure, it took some adjusting - coming from decades of (D)SLRs - but that’s part of the amateur game, you make due and you do your best with what you’ve got, period.

Of course, when Canon announced the M5 and how all these topics had been addressed, well, I knew it was time. At the time I was considering going back to the DSLR territory, the 80D was out for a few months now, the price was nice and it was very very good camera but by then I had fallen in love with the M5.

Can we please get a review of sorts now?

Ok, enough ranting, let’s look at this puppy

A bit of an intro, this is neither a professional nor an unbiased review. It builds on my previous experience and equipment and I’m sure for the most part it reflects the contrast between my old and new equipment more than a standalone assertion. If I say something is new and great it’s in that light and not in comparison to all the other brands and models out there.

Size

One of the biggest advantages of my original M was it’s size, it would literally fit any of my jacket’s pockets and that opened up a bunch of opportunities for me, especially during the work days as I have to carry my computer and all that around. The M5 was a bit of a step back in that regard, it’s slightly taller because of the EVF, it’s not much but it’s just enough for it to … not fit my pocket anymore. I wasn’t too happy about that, I have reverted to using a very thin bag that I can throw in the backpack so I still take it with me, but taking something out of your pocket and out of your backpack is different.

Pocket Fitting Canon EOS M

Non Pocket Filtting Canon EOS M5

In other news, if you have larger pockets it’s still so small it will probably fit. This folks, is the definition of a First World Problem.

Body

I guess the original M was an outlier in the way it looked, especially mine because it was white and looked weird enough for people not to recognize the model. I would say that the M5 has a more classic Canon look, it’s not particularly ugly or pretty but it’s very functional. Plus it’s black so it’s even more common in that regard.

The body is extremely good though, they’ve added a bunch of physical dials, knobs and buttons and I can control most or all the shooting settings with them. On my original M I had to do 90% of things on the touch screen, so I would spend a lot of time looking down at the screen, touching stuff, sliding, rotating the single dial and getting frustrated because if I pressed to hard it was actually a button and eventually giving up and just doing the bare minimum. With the M5 I can stick my eye in the viewfinder and do everything without taking my eye off of it.

A few buttons and a lot of messing around with the touchscreen

Dials and buttons and things - love it

More Dials and buttons and things

Are those dials? Love it

I usually shoot in Aperture Priority mode, so I can control the aperture values with the dial around the shutter button. Further back I have exposure compensation - this is apparently such a thing that it has it’s own dedicated dial - which I use often enough. And right next to it there’s a dual function dial which lets me change the ISO - I try to keep it at 100 at all times but we know how hopeful that is - or the … I’m not sure actually, I think it’s the White Balance, but I don’t care about since I shoot in RAW.

You can use the touch screen to change the focus point WHILE YOU’RE LOOKING AT THE VIEWFINDER. This is actually very cool as you can drag with your finger - or nose - the focus point even when the screen is off. You can also configure exactly how much of the screen area you want to use to drag and focus, so yes, you can take your nose out of the equation. There’s also a button in the front underneath the lens to enable/disable this function, and on the back to the right you have to other useful buttons. One is to lock the exposure settings, which I use plenty of times as I use point metering mode and I can measure something I want off the centre of the image, lock and recompose the shot. The other button is to reset the focus point to the centre, you know, for those times your nose - despite your careful screen area configuration - still decides that it Nose Best ²

Viewfinder .. OMG VIEWFINDER

This is absolutely the single biggest thing I missed in these past years. The difference between staring at a tiny screen at a distance and staring at an even tinier screen but up close is staggering. It’s not just that it fills your field of view completely, or that you can close off to the outside world and pretend nobody can see you - AHAHAHAHA OF COURSE IT’S NOT THAT AHAHAHA . It’s that you don’t have to take your eyes off until you press the shutter. With my old M I would hold the camera in front of me at a secure angle, look at the scene in front of me, look down at the screen to see how I was framing it, look back up again to see if I missed something and then take the picture. Needless to say the mismatch between what you though you just took and the final picture required some getting used to. But not anymore, now I can go back to looking at the scene, how that’s being framed in the camera AND all the light and other settings without ever taking my eye off the same place.

Now, it’s an Electronic Viewfinder of course - no mirror, no real image in a location that’s not the sensor. I never used one before so my first impression of it was something like “OMG this feels like I own one of those old camcorders”. Once that wore off though I could admire it properly. Canon lets you configure what information you want to display on the screen, so I have exposure / iso / aperture and the Electronic Level - more OMG’s in a second . The quality is great and because it’s taking the image off the sensor I see a pretty good approximation of what the final image will look like. I can also get a 2 second preview of the picture once it’s taken - like you would do on the regular screen - which is good. Also, like the regular screen, if you press play you can see all the previous pictures on the Viewfinder, which is a screen, inside a dark box, so the sun or other lights don’t reflect off of it.

The other great thing for me is the Electronic Level, boy this was something I never knew I missed so much. Unless I try really hard and focus 100% of the time, I seem to have a natural tendency to tilt the shots, it’s not crazy stuff, maybe 1º if taking landscape and a bit more if portrait, nothing you can’t fix after, but fixing after means you’re going to have to crop something out. Plus, now it feels like a game where I win when I get at least one green line.

My experience so far

When I started writing this post I had the camera for one week, but now that a whole month has passed - pokerface - I can say so so much more … makes me wonder if I should wait another month or two.

Anyway, like before I have two different general setups for the camera, portable and full. On the portable setup I just go around with my EF-M 22mm f/2.0 lens, and man do I like this one. It’s super super tiny, pancake like size, it’s also fast and wide and in a way it’s addictive. Now that the camera no longer fits my pocket I carry it in my computer bag and when I leave the office for a quick stroll I just carry it with me and that’s fine. I also have a Manfrotto mini tripod that does fit my pocket, so I carry that around with me.

When I’m out on weekends or similar I can carry my camera bag - a very very old one that has outlived almost all my cameras - and with that I tend to have my adapter on with my EF/EF-s lenses, and very very occasionally a larger tripod and a set of not so good neutral-density filters. When I’m like that I tend to use the EF-S lenses more, not because the 22mm is worse, but I get a bunch more options with the other ones and maybe, maybe, the laziness of swapping around the adapter gets to me.

Either way, it’s funny to see how the camera behavior changes a bit, with the 22mm is tiny and light, with the other ones - with the 85m f/1.8 particularly - it feels more solid, heavy and serious business looking.

Super serious looking camera

I also ditched the stock strap, like I’ve done with my old M, but this time I actually replaced it with something else. I don’t like cameras hanging off my neck and I’m not a fan of having them hanging on the side of my body either, I’m always scared I’ll misjudge a movement and all that kinetic energy will just end up in a swinging camera and translated into a very sad David, so with my old DSLR’s I would wrap the strap around my wrist and I found the equivalent - but done right - replacement for that in the Joby 3-way strap. You screw it to the Tripod screw and it wraps around your wrist. It does add another bit of height to the camera, but since it no longer fits my pocket anyway, I don’t mind it at all.

Autofocus and Image Quality

This is a lesson you should heed,
If at first you don’t succeed,
Try, try again

Then your courage should appear,
For if you will persevere,
You will conquer, never fear,
Try, try again

Once or twice, though you should fail,
If you would at last prevail,
Try, try again

If we strive, ’tis no disgrace,
Though we do not win the race,
What should you do in the case?
Try, try again

If you find your task is hard,
Time will bring you your reward,
Try, try again

All that other folks can do,
Why, with patience, should not you?
Only keep this rule in view,
Try, try again.

T. H. Palmer

If my EOS M autofocus capabilities could be described by a poem, it wouldn’t be this one, but if you read it all that’s roughly how long it would take for the EOS M to focus onto something.

BUT NOT ANYMORE, the M5 fixes all this with it’s Dual Pixel technology thing that however it works, it just works. I press a button and the camera focuses. Mind BLOWN.

As for image quality, it’s definitely better than the M, which is absolutely expected. You can tell there’s a better dynamic range, as I work through the pictures in Lightroom I’m recovering much more information from both ends and that’s a great help for those super bright days that I get here in Ireland …

I haven’t really tried the high ISO settings - and mind you, I had my M’s auto-ISO max locked to 800 and it was very rare for me to use anything over 100, it was really bad. This one seems definitely better, but I’ll hold my judgment for later.

Here are some meaningless quick comparison shots, exact same lens, settings and edits.

Comparison Shot 1

Comparison Shot 2

And in conclusion

I’m extremely happy with the EOS M5. It has now made it’s first trip when we went to Scotland - one day I’ll write a post about that, keep your eyes open for Q1 of 2021 - and it performed brilliantly. I was a bit disappointed with the extra size at first, but I can’t get enough of that Viewfinder and I really don’t care that it doesn’t fit my pocket anymore. The software and controls are great, the extra physical dials make it completely controllable without the touch screen and the drag to focus feature just nicely wraps it up, you never have to take your eye off the viewfinder, everything is there for you.

Image quality is great, the body is great. The size, weight and the 22mm lens make the M5 an amazing portable camera, the EF/EF-s adapter makes it a work tool for the weekends.

Canon did a magnificent job with the M5, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Real life samples

https://www.flickr.com/photos/songo/32780688994
https://www.flickr.com/photos/songo/33683559495
https://www.flickr.com/photos/songo/33740332722
https://www.flickr.com/photos/songo/33854132510

that’s Portuguese Escudos and that’s the wrong sign, but aparently there’s no Unicode character for the Cifrão ↩
I swear that’s the only dad joke ↩

Not a Robot!

2017-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

I’m a guy, like, stereotypically speaking, I’m definitely a guy. Seen from the outside I only have three emotional states: neutral, annoyed and happy to the extreme - come to think about it, I might be a dog, stereotypically speaking. The breakdown of time allotted for each emotion is roughly: 70% neutral, 25% annoyed, 5% happy.

On the inside things are slightly different and my emotional states are mapped differently. While my outside is black and white, on the inside I am a complete scale of gray - ah, you though I was going to say rainbow didn’t ya?

Neutral is made up of sadness, shame, puzzlement, suspicion, mild happiness, horniness, concern and laziness. Annoyed is for extreme shame, irritation, suspicion and long term indecision. Happiness is for ex-horniness, movies and music that tap directly into my emotional center, meaningful work, pride in others and glimpses of something that resembles a life plan.

My external communication skills reflect the emotional breakdown. If you ask me how I am, I’ll either say: meh, normal or ok - angry, neutral and happy respectively. My internal communication is a mess, it’s like a crowd of stereotypical women discussing office gossip, but it’s really just me, talking to myself in slightly different voices.

Is this by choice or design? Nature or Nurture? Darwin knows, but more than anything it’s becoming a habit. I was never one to spontaneously reach out and talk to people - I almost never start a conversation - but now it’s just ridiculous. To give you a very concrete example, someone very dear to me, with whom I spoke to every day of the week, left the company in December. I have talked to her some three times if that. In my head? I think of her almost every day. Makes sense doesn’t it?

As per self imposed therapy I decided to try to talk to my blog and to you, my three peeps that only realise you’re reading A BLOG - 1990 called - when it’s too late! I love you for it, ok?

Current status: Neutral, South West

People overthink this life shit!

— Louis CK

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

2017-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

I’ve always given special significance to New Years and in the past few years this as been reinforced by the fact that we travel back to Portugal to celebrate Christmas and a large part of my annual leave from work is spent in this period.

I don’t exactly have formal New Year Resolutions, but I do take some time to brood over and examine my past 12 months and how I feel about them and I try to identify some pain points that I would like to address somehow — it’s usually a bad time to be around me because I become a little bit lethargic and a little bit sad. It’s not that the year has been particularly bad — it wasn’t — but 2016 has definitely been bipolar with a side of extreme feelings. The good bits have been great and invigorating, the bad parts have dragged me down a lot, and they’ve come from conflicting sources too.

The Good

The kids are great, my youngest has grown a bit and it’s much more independent and he’s a genuinely a fun kid to be around. As for his brother, we offered him a spare Kindle we had lying around and he took it like a duck to water, he reads at every opportunity and devours books — and I think we have similar tastes, so I might have a reading buddy in him. Together they’re great and they’re truly each others best friends. My wife is happy and we’re in a great place in our relationship.

We also travelled a bit, we went to Manchester to visit some friends, to London to visit family and we went to Portugal twice in the summer — the second trip we went without the kids too — and finally for Christmas. In terms of local tourism we rented a car for a long weekend and stays a couple of days in Wicklow and we discovered Skerries, both great places.

Related to all the traveling, me and Sara went to Trojan Horse was a Unicorn as staff members. My long term business partner aka second marriage that my wife puts up with organises an event geared broadly towards the Arts and after years of following it remotely we managed to attend and help out this year. It was probably the best, most tiring, exciting, exhausting, mental, inspiring part of 2016. I need to write more about this … I need to write more, period.

Photography played a big part in my year as well, I’ve put more work into this hobby of mine, bought a couple of new lenses, went to a few local events and won a couple of prizes that I’ll make use of this year — don’t worry, we’re talking Amateur level prizes. I almost almost almost bought the new EOS M5 but I was a good boy and kept my yearly budget decent.

The Bad

I worked a lot this year and I didn’t exactly enjoyed it — not that that’s a requirement of course. In the company I work for me and my coworkers were heavily tested this year and although I believe we’re going to come out on top, it wasn’t without casualties and it definitely wasn’t easy. The next few months are definitely going to be difficult and are going to require a lot of effort, energy and clear minds. Our work is cut out for us!

The traveling, especially the trips to Portugal where we’re just going through all the routines are tiring. Airports are tedious, ugly bureaucratic shopping malls that herd people into flying buses with over priced meals and tiny windows. On the other hand, it’s really an efficient long distance transportation system and I’m really annoyed at the routine, not the magic of flight itself — don’t want to sound too millennial you see.

Health wise, both my parents had surgeries this summer, in fact, my first few days in Portugal in July were made up of remote working, driving the kids and wife to the Algarve for their holidays and driving back to help out my parents. Last year my wife’s grandmother health degraded rapidly and she managed to fly back to Portugal just in time to say goodbye. There’s always that nagging feeling for people living away from their family that distances, short as airplanes make them look, play a gigantic role in these times and that’s something that we need to deal with.

Socially I took one step forward by going to more photography meet ups and I had a blast, but I’ve taken two steps back half way through the year as entered — this is something I’ve identified now more clearly — a lethargic period where I merely stopped talking to people. I have chat windows that go on for months without me replying, I have multiple friends I care about where I want to say stuff to them in my mind but never seem to do and finally I didn’t even said proper goodbye to some of the people that left the company that I held especially dear and close to me. It’s not that I don’t miss or like these people, I do, some I miss so much it hurts, but whatever I’m going through makes me shy away aggressively. I don’t know what to say to people and I can’t hold a conversation for long, I rather disappear than be awkward. This has been affecting me greatly.

This also affects my Internet verbal presence, I shy away from posting on Twitter / Facebook or blogging altogether because I can’t put down words or sentences without sounding awkward. So much that I’m writing this blog post besides my wife and every time she asks me what I’m doing I feel embarrassed. This makes no sense, but I’m not trying to explain it, I’m merely stating and recognising it.

Finally, going back to work with my partner and my own company brought back conflicting thoughts as the majority of my adult life was spend running and living it. There’s a lot of extra work and worrying involved in running your own company, it’s hard and when things go bad, you can be sure they’ll be very bad for you on a personal level, but you’re also in (some) control and you’re definitely in the know about things and that makes up for a lot, if your personality is so inclined as I think mine is.

Looking forward

This all sounds depressing but really, I understand it’s a vast collection of First World Problems. Factually, 2016 was a good year and the troubles and choices I have to make won’t lead me to bad things, only different ones. I also realise this blog post is negatively charged, but I’m ok with that if you’re ok with that, I need to put certain things out of my head and like I said, New Years are — for me — good excuses to do just that.

Like the Captain in Wall-E once said and I quote

I don’t want to survive. I want to live.

Wise words fat Captain, wise words.

David's Photo November

2016-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve said this before, photography has a big appeal to me and it’s my main hobby outside of my career.

I take it seriously too, as in, I throw quite a bit of work and some money - amateur graded money, still it’s something - into it. The biggest outcomes I’ve had from it have been long lasting memories, a nasty habit of looking at details, people’s expressions, patches of light and weird angles to everyday places and strangers on the street and a deep desire for the day I can buy an augmentation that allows me to take pictures straight from my optical nerves.

I bought my first digital camera 13 years ago, but an old Minolta that my uncle gave me was really what got me hooked - it’s called Stockholm Syndrome, or how waiting days/weeks to see the results of the shots you took and realize you messed things ups gets you hooked. It’s probably my longest running relationship!

There are a number of online platforms to “expose your work” and I - as per character - am a user in a few of them, although I use them in slightly different ways, I don’t have a service that uploads one picture to all places at the same time, I don’t approach the communities in the same way in any of them. I think they are unique in their approaches and I try to respect that - or at least what I perceive of them.

The one I have the biggest social engagement with, although it’s probably ironic given the features were never explicitly geared towards building communities - despite the recent changes to group messaging, stories and such - has been Instagram. In the past couple of years, I’ve been meeting regularly with people and visiting certain places all thanks to the people and community accounts I’ve met through Instagram - again, this is circumstantial I’m sure, Flickr has explicit tools geared towards Communities, it just happens that I never engaged it in the right way.

So with that in mind, I themed November 2016 around photography and worked on three projects:

Things David Likes

Where I showcase other people’s work. This isn’t exactly new - not by a long shot - but I opened it up to a few more fronts here and there and I wanted to make a point of announcing it to more people.

Just on the stats side, I’m now publishing 5 posts a day, I’ve posted around 10.000 photographs and I’ve got a combined number of around 1200 followers.

My own site.

This is a cliché I know, but I think it’s an important marker for me. I’me spread around a few platforms like I said, but this is my anchor, my official home and I can give it the individual attention and respect it needs - never-mind what my Web Design skills actually produced , it’s the though that counts. I launched this over November and I’m happy.

No stats worth mentioning on this one. From the technical side it’s all Jekyll with a couple of plugins that I wrote to expose the Exif data and such.

Postcards

Finally, the one project that excited me the most. The internet is a Fine Place, but we’re tactile beings for now and I like to take things into the physical world, and Photography is perfect for that. So with that in mind I printed a few postcards with my own shots and over the course of November I offered them to people.

This project was also the perfect opportunity to use the voucher for Reads I won a while ago. The guys were amazingly patient with all my newbie questions and I was super happy with the result, so this was a win-win and it makes me happy that some parties of my hobby can actually be self-sustaining.

November finished with 17 people asking for postcards, from the United States to Russia, about half the people I never met in person and half of those are completely new. I was hoping for more people, but I’m very happy anyway.

From here?

Now we’re back to non-business as usual, I’m pretty happy that I accomplished all that I wanted from this November project, I know the numbers are very very poor, but this is a hobby and let’s say that engaging with people is my biggest challenge, I’m happy with what I got :) . I still have a few postcards lying around so I’ll definitely do something with them, if anything, I might re-re-kindle my eternal Postcrossing love with my own postcards.

I’ll also keep pursuing whatever opportunities I have to photograph new places and meet new people, whatever makes me a more sociable Human is worth it. And I may also give in to my urges and give in to the amazing new Canon EOS M5 to replace my original EOS M. If I do, you’ll all know about it of course :)

37/107 - Link Roundup

2016-08-23T01:00:00+01:00

Why vegetarianism will not save the world

The truth is that agriculture is the most destructive thing humans have done to the planet, and more of the same won’t save us. The truth is that agriculture requires the wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems. The truth is also that life isn’t possible without death, that no matter what you eat, someone has to die to feed you.

There’s absolutely no shortage of controversy in this interview and the views of Lierre Keith in this piece. I’m never a fan of extremism - whatever form they take - as life as shown us that variety and balance is what keeps systems in working order, so reclaiming agriculture land and diversifying cultures are sound strategies and principles, what I can’t argue here is whether or not this is actually the prevailing case already.

It’s also important to know that the interview is mostly around the book The Vegetarian Myth and that it’s not free of technical issues - you can replace the word technical with scientific if you prefer.

The Kids Who Beat Autism

I asked him if there was anything he missed about being autistic. “I miss the excitement,” he said. “When I was little, pretty often I was the happiest a person could be. It was the ultimate joy, this rush in your entire body, and you can’t contain it. That went away when my sister started teasing me and I realized flapping wasn’t really acceptable. Listening to really good music is the main time I feel that joy now. I still feel it in my whole body, but I don’t outwardly react to it like I used to.”

Lance Armstrong in Purgatory: The After-Life

But Armstrong can’t suppress his taste for the provocative. Did Nelson Mandela really forgive the people who put him in prison for twenty-seven years, he asks, or did he just say that for public consumption? He compares himself to Bill Clinton so many times he finally says he shouldn’t compare himself to Bill Clinton, that it must sound vainglorious—and then switches the comparison to other legendary names. “People are fine that Michael Jordan was a jerk, they’re fine if Wayne Gretzky was a jerk, but they weren’t fine with me being an asshole. They expected that perfect story.”

What were drugs?

But what lies beyond the idea of ‘drugs’ itself? The simple answer is that there is nothing to replace. Behind the term lies a disparate group of chemicals whose varied effects – stimulant, narcotic, psychedelic, euphoriant – offer a more accurate language of description. Value-laden terms, both positive and negative, would doubtless emerge to complement them. A post-drug world would require not a new language but the recovery of an older one. The category of ‘drugs’ was an attempt, characteristic of its historical moment, to separate out good chemicals from bad ones. But as we have known since antiquity, good and evil, virtue and vice are not inherent in a plant or a molecule. Pedanius Dioscorides, the great classical authority on medicine, maintained that no substance is intrinsically good: it all depends on the dose at which it is administered, the use to which it is put, and the intentions behind that use. The Greek term pharmakon could mean both a medicine and a poison: there was no such thing as a harmless remedy, since anything with the power to heal also had the power to harm. All drugs, psychoactive or otherwise, are a technology, a prosthetic that extends our physical and mental reach. Like so many of the other technologies that are transforming our world, their benefits and dangers must ultimately be understood as extensions of ourselves.

Articles: Wax and Wane: The Tough Realities Behind Vinyl’s Comeback

Recently, London-based ICM Research found that “15 percent of those who buy physical music formats such as CDs, vinyl records, and cassettes never listen to them—they buy them purely to own.”

“Consumers who maybe weren’t analog, record-head types, but still want to support artists they love, were underestimated,” Blandford says. “They want to put something on their shelf that they or their friends can see—a physical signifier of their fandom.”

In the old days, when vinyl was the dominant format, Amoeba’s Weinstein recalls that everyone had an altar to their music in their homes—a stereo, speakers, and LP rack readily visible—and that altar has now come full circle for younger vinyl buyers. “It’s a topic of conversation,” Weinstein says. “You’re showing off what your tastes are as a way of defining what’s important to you.”

Did Bacteria Drive the Origins of Animals?

But the full story of the microbial-animal relationship is even broader and deeper, argues Margaret McFall-Ngai, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and it’s a story that is only beginning to be told. In her view, animals should rightly be considered host-microbe ecosystems. Several years ago McFall-Ngai, along with Hadfield, convened a broad group of developmental biologists, ecologists, environmental biologists and physiologists, including King, and asked them to formulate a microbial manifesto — a declaration of bacterial significance. The paper, which appeared late last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, cites evidence from many corners of biology to argue that the influence of microbes on the origin, evolution and function of animals is pervasive and essential to understanding how animal life evolved. “They evolved in a world saturated with bacteria,” Hadfield said.

How A One-Time Pig Peddler Helped The U.S. Flood War Zones With Guns

While most coverage of the weapons trade tracks the multibillion-dollar deals in fighter jets, strategic missiles, or radar systems, most killing in modern wars is done with cheap rifles, machine guns, mortars, and other small arms.

These are the types of arms that Dolarian, a man the state of California banned from selling certain financial securities, was given U.S. tax dollars to purchase.

7 Things to Consider Before Choosing Sides in the Middle East Conflict

Are you “pro-Israel” or “pro-Palestine”? It isn’t even noon yet as I write this, and I’ve already been accused of being both.

How to rip off a bank, Espírito Santo style

Fear of bank failure is now deeply entrenched. We have not fixed “too big to fail”. On the contrary, we are more terrified than ever of the consequences of bank failure. BES will not be allowed to fail: it will be bailed out by the Portuguese sovereign, and the people of Portugal will suffer yet more austerity to pay for it. And the criminals who caused this disaster will walk away with the proceeds. It’s an outrage.

Copernicus explores The Science of Star Wars!

Putting this all together, we see that a light saber requires an energy of E=cp mΔT=0.5J/g/C(230,000g)(1300C)= 1.5x108 J. That’s equal to 40 kilowatt-hours, or about as much energy as an average US home uses in a day. Note that this is a only the energy to do this one thing (melt a door) for 10 seconds. If the lightsaber stays on at the same intensity, for say, 2 hours, you need about 700 times that, or as much as a home uses in 2 years. But let’s be conservative and assume you can dial down a lightsaber’s power when you don’t need that much energy. After all, sometimes Luke uses his like a baseball bat to knock people off skiffs instead of slicing them in half.

‘Bizarro World’

“It’s funny,” I told Flewin. “We have an old Nintendo Game Boy floating around the house, and Tetris is the only game we own. My wife will sometimes dig it out to play on airplanes and long car rides. She’s weirdly good at it. She can get 500 or 600 lines, no problem.”

What Flewin said next I will never forget.

“Oh, my!”

Parisians by Graham Robb

In more comic vein, Robb describes Hitler’s one-day visit to the city 1940 when France had all but fallen. Hitler had dreamt of this moment for years, the culminating point of his conquest of Europe. He arrived bleary-eyed at five in the morning and stomped grumpily around the city with his entourage, like some competitive dad pretending to know where he was going. He didn’t and his generals sniggered at him behind his back. The janitor at the Opéra showed him around but refused to take a tip.

37/55 - Virtually Real

2016-07-02T01:00:00+01:00

So, still in the 2014 part of my backlog I was reading through this great piece by Chelsea Stark on Mashable named Misled Memories. Now this was in 2014, the year Facebook bought Oculus Rift and maybe VR was on it’s way to mainstream life.

My very first experience with VR was actually some 20 years earlier, on the London Trocadero arcade and this is exactly what it was :)

| Note: the original videos were removed, these are the slightly different ones, less VR related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjLx_lSYc7A

As far as I remember, the game was Grid Busters from Virtuality, and as any arcade game, what I remember was that it was over way to quickly and that, against my fears for VR at the time, I didn’t felt compelled to throw up. Now, it’s funny to me how that went, I was very young at the time and the Internet was not the Hype Machine it is today so I was slightly oblivious to it until I saw it, but to see VR in an Arcade felt pretty much mainstream at the time, except it wasn’t, and it wasn’t very good, and it felt like VR vanished from my conscience as swiftly as it has entered it. That is, until Oculus DK1 came along, the Hype Machine was pretty ready by then.

Now, the one obvious theme for VR for now is, GAMES, GAMES GAMES GAMES and while we’ll probably see a bit of shoehorning of regular GAMES into the medium because VR, some of the classic games do feel like they benefit from VR a lot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMgw9Lhw4Mo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TmMIGOevis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISR4ebdGlOk

While others are being made 100% with VR in mind from the ground up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b98j9w7Pet4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppc7HHliOA8

But that’s not what the article was all about, this is consumer stuff that represents the absolute safe path for VR to go forward and that’s fine, but there are other uses. One is activism, namely they talk about a few projects from Nonny de la Peña under the Immersive Journalism moniker. Like Forensic Architecture, although with a more local scope, Nonny and her team use technology to bring visibility and empathy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSLG8auUZKc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1QM-9BRU_4

Certain anxieties may benefit from VR aided therapy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7gONjpamBo

Heck, there’s a Social Network where you can, wait for it, TALK TO YOUR FRIENDS AS IF THEY WERE NEAR YOU!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTor5fbv9-c

We’re living VR 2.0, and as with any technology there’s one piece of advice that holds true for as long as we’re a species

When digital filters first arose they were viewed merely as a variant of the classical analog filters; people did not see them as essentially new and different. This is exactly the same mistake which was made endlessly by people in the early days of computers. I was told repeatedly, until I was sick of hearing it, computers were nothing more than large, fast desk calculators. “Anything you can do by a machine you can do by hand.”, so they said. This simply ignores the speed, accuracy, reliability, and lower costs of the machines vs. humans. Typically a single order of magnitude change (a factor of 10) produces fundamentally new effects, and computers are many, many times faster than hand computations. Those who claimed there was no essential difference never made any significant contributions to the development of computers…

This is a common, endlessly made, mistake; people always want to think that something new is just like the past – they like to be comfortable in their minds as well as their bodies – and hence they prevent themselves from making any significant contribution to the new field being created under their noses.

Richard Hamming: The Art of Doing Science and Engineering

me, I’m waiting out to play Real Life from the confort of my seat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szzVlQ653as

37/52 - Bugs on an Epic scale

2016-06-29T01:00:00+01:00

I was soldiering on through my backlog when I got to this 2014 - yes, I did say backlog - article The Typo that Destroyed a NASA Rocket (from Priceonomics) about the Mariner I

On July 22, 1962, at 9:20 PM, the Mariner I sat idly on its platform, ready to make history. After investing years of construction, calculation, and funding, NASA had high hopes that its rocket would successfully conduct a flyby survey of Venus, thus shifting the Space Race’s momentum back to the home front. In every way, it was poised to set a space travel precedent.

But when the rocket embarked, it was clear there’d be no cause for celebration: less than 5 minutes into flight, Mariner I exploded, setting back the U.S. government $80 million ($630 million in 2014 dollars). The root cause for this disaster? A lone omitted hyphen, somewhere deep in hand-transcribed mathematical code.

Ok, so it wasn’t really an hyphen, it was something more tangible that actually explains things

The error had occurred when a symbol was being transcribed by hand in the specification for the guidance program. The writer missed the superscript bar (…) by which was meant “the nth smoothed value of the time derivative of a radius R”. Since the smoothing function indicated by the bar was left out of the specification for the program, the implementation treated normal minor variations of velocity as if they were serious, causing spurious corrections that sent the rocket off course. It was then destroyed by the Range Safety Officer.

Ouch

People make mistakes, extremely complex systems are prone to minuscule mistakes that sometimes propagate into full blow systems failure.

As a developer, I am 100% aware of this and aware of how things can happen and how one single mistake - which can happen for any number of reasons - sometimes explodes into systems grinding to a halt, customers support teams having to deal with an avalanche of complaints, money not flowing in and plain nastiness.

However, as a software developer for a software tool, I have a luxury that these guys never had, the ability to make the system run a million times before deploying with absolute neglectable cost. I can spot an error, fix it and rerun the system in seconds, I can have a server pick up my changes and test them six ways from Sunday. Heck, if bad stuff goes live, 99 out of 100 times I’ll merely annoy someone, most of them myself for being an idiot.

You can’t really do that with rockets now can you? :) And fuckups don’t just annoy people, they burn - literally - through millions of Moneys - pick a currency of your choice - they destroy years of work. That is unbelievable pressure that requires extraordinary procedures to minimize as many issues as possible, and if I’m ever in awe of what Humanity can do, it’s when you see projects of this complexity and magnitude being successfully pulled off.

In a world that increasingly looks to destruction and dismantling of projects as a quick solution - pardon my closeness to the whole Brexit debacle - whenever you see something like Rosetta, a project that spans decades, being pulled off, you have to feel proud and awe.

Of course, even when things go wrong, really really wrong, you can still take some pleasure of how dumb some things are, like that time we sent a probe to Mars and one system was using the metric system and another was using the imperial system, 15 years later we can have a laugh can’t we?

Twenty-four hours prior to orbital insertion, calculations placed the orbiter at an altitude of 110 kilometers, 80 kilometers is the minimum altitude that Mars Climate Orbiter was thought to be capable of surviving during this maneuver. Post-failure calculations showed that the spacecraft was on a trajectory that would have taken the orbiter within 57 kilometers of the surface, where the spacecraft likely disintegrated because of atmospheric stresses.

The primary cause of this discrepancy was that one piece of ground software supplied by Lockheed Martin produced results in a United States customary unit, contrary to its Software Interface Specification (SIS), while a second system, supplied by NASA, expected those results to be in SI units, in accordance with the SIS. Specifically, software that calculated the total impulse produced by thruster firings calculated results in pound-seconds. The trajectory calculation software then used these results – expected to be in newton-seconds – to update the predicted position of the spacecraft.

Ouch!

36/339 - Goals

2016-04-10T01:00:00+01:00

I think visually, for work I draw imaginary boxes and I follow values that go through mechanisms that transform them or create new ones - or just the latter to please The God of Immutability, not the Immutability of God. I think in terms of particles flowing and they have direction and live within the constraints of a geometry, they can go up or down, left or right, heck, occasionally they might even go forwards and backwards. Things split and spawn off completely independent processes that have their own little flow. The imaginary boxes have fixed positions and they occupy their own space, so I map them over a plane and move my thoughts to the place I want to look at, but I have to come back and find other boxes, so I have some degree of spacial knowledge and I practice my landmark guidance and path finding as I go. If I move to a different project, I archive this map and I find another one - or start to discover it from the beginning, or rather, from whatever entry point I was given.
I also consume a lot of information through my eyes, even when reading, I’m mostly taking in the shape of characters and sentences and a specialised part of my brain transforms those into concepts, people, objects, locations, feelings, sound, smell and colours.

I take pictures, it would be my number one hobby if I were keeping score and I wish my eyes were cameras because I could always take those pictures of people that I never take because people are there and I don’t know them, but I know, because I can see it, that it’s a magical moment worth capturing for eternity - or the day a freak accident destroys a bunch of independent hard drives and all the digital copies of that image are wiped out.

I imagine and manipulate complex systems in my mind, but I have to describe them in words. I take pictures that I love but I struggle to name or describe them. I read books - sometimes I devour them - but I can’t reproduce important phrases or give you specific details, I can only give you a wide angle picture and I can reproduce what I felt when I read it. I find my way through new cities or places I visit for the first time, but good luck getting directions from me.

In other words, I struggle with words. I struggle with writing, I struggle with people or place names, I struggle in recalling what people said word for word. I cannot reproduce an important conversation, I cannot quote people from memory. I have a very hard time naming things and part of my job is to name things, name them in a way that other people who don’t know these things can sort of understand what they do just by how it’s called. I have a hard time giving short explanation for things as I know that context is important and a picture - generally the picture in my mind I’m trying to explain - is worth a thousand words, so I don’t think any less will work. I struggle with hints and half-words, I don’t like ellipsis because people throw those in and let you fill in the gaps and I can think of a million ways to fill those gaps and I don’t know which one is the right one - and sometimes I suspect there isn’t one.

I cannot get the hang of To-do lists, Evernote, OneNote, Google Keep or similar because they force me to structure things with words. To this day I haven’t found a better replacement for my own work organisation than an empty sheet of paper. My tasks are in boxes and I can connect the boxes, and sometimes I need to work out a problem and I draw a system and I can work a list of tasks from there, but for the life of me I get incredibly bored when I try to extract this into a Trello Board that I need to consult and update everyday, while a piece of paper is always on my desktop - the actual top of my desk - and I scribble on it, complete tasks by ticking a box I drew and I archive everything by throwing it out onto the actual recycling bin. I don’t write User, or Message, or Payment on my sheets of paper, I draw a stickman, and possibly a mock paper with scribbles on it and a Euro Sign on it, and I connect them with lines and arrows and I group them with circles or rectangles with rounded corners because that was all the rage in 2012.

I also have a blog, and I’m traveling through life, and I guess I need to find the things I struggle in and work on them. I’m a father and my kids are too young to understand what I am and when they’re old enough, I won’t be Present Day Me anymore. My wife accompanies me on this journey, but I come home late and I can’t make small talk if my life depends on it, nor can I shut down the Prime Directive that tells me every word must count and be relevant and that the particular weather conditions of that day - one or ten because this is Dublin, in a pool of a mere few dozen choices - or when I had coffee or what joke or conversation I had with my colleagues is simply not worth telling or recalling, so I guess there’s a chance that she might get something out of this too. And I guess I’m not the only special snow flake in the world, I’m actually a stereotypical example of a human with my general characteristics, so similar beings might find this amusing and throw their thoughts in - I’m all for improving myself wherever I can.

So I have a blog and I can’t write so I guess I might as well acknowledge that and write regardless, with my usual laser sharp focus, which is none because I didn’t really buy laser lenses, I probably learned how to make glass from sand and as soon as I had something resembling transparency I called it a day, but it’s fine, because this is me at this point in time, and there’s no point pretending I’m not.

Hello, I’m [David]({{ “/about” | prepend: site.baseurl }}), I have a blog and my goal - a-ha - is to write on it!

Raging Nexus

Version Four (Written By Claude)

Foreword by David, The Human

Take it away Claude

What actually happened

What this kind of work is actually like

41/246 - What Surgeons Can Learn from Polar Explorers and Fighter Pilots

41/224 - 2020 in Review

2020 in review

1. Bacteria be gone

2. A World Pandemic

3. My heart was broken and forever incomplete

4. Plans delayed

41/10 - 500M Shades of gray

Foreword

Our Scheduled Program

The economy - specifically for me the accommodation segment - tanked over the course of a few weeks.

Social Impact

Social Stupidity

40/365 - Tech Talks London

TL;DR;

The long version

Notes

Airbnb to lay off 25% of it’s work force

Health Passports / Contact Tracing

40/363 - Blog Updates

Build system

Underlying platform

Images images images

Post readability

New section - Arcade

Tweaks tweaks tweaks

40/352 - Urban Farming

Spreadsheets and Plant IDs

Identifying and tracking a plant

Keeping a log

Other stuff

To blog again

On Flickr and our future together!

Blog Upgrades - Header Image color scheme

Fine, we get it, let’s get to the details

Update (2020-05-05)

And then ?

Next up?

Google Lunar XPRIZE

OTIA - Interview

EOS M5!

Photographic Equipment Economics

Equipment Timeline

Why upgrade now

Can we please get a review of sorts now?

Size

Body

Viewfinder .. OMG VIEWFINDER

My experience so far

Autofocus and Image Quality

And in conclusion

Real life samples

Not a Robot!

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

The Good

The Bad

Looking forward

David's Photo November

My own site.

Postcards

From here?

37/107 - Link Roundup

37/55 - Virtually Real

37/52 - Bugs on an Epic scale

36/339 - Goals