This is a project I was keen on completing for many years.
In my childhood days in California (late seventies and early eighties), my dad would document us with his 8mm camera. These films were categorized by my Historian mom and kept in a safe closet for years, yet we only watched them once, about 15 years ago. The technicalities of installing the projector, and manually going through every roll were just too cumbersome.
So, finally, I decided to spend the small fortune needed ($1,000+) to convert 3 hours worth of childhood treasures to a digital format.
Debenham Media Group did a great job converting the films to full HD format.
Work is not done yet. I need to edit now 3 hours worth of footageto a 10-15 minute clip and add nice soundtrack. That project will probably wait until I come back from my travels.
1998
Destination: South East Asia
Documenting: A pocket Panasonic camera (analog, 35mm-80mm zoom). Biggest worry: losing your negatives. Backup method: Develop film locally, send picture copies back home, keep negatives with you; have a minor heart attack every time your film goes through airport x-ray machines.
Writing to friends and family: letters and postcards. I kept in touch with about 7 friends. In many cases, I had to write the same stories in a couple of different letters, resulting in an aching hand.
The most effective way of showing you care: sending a postcards. Space is limited so you don’t need to write too much.
Way to receive letters: none. Communication is one-way.
Email just started. Method: Write email offline, Internet café operator connects via dialup and sends to destination. Cost: ~$0.5 per Kilobyte (this post, without the images: 4K). The problem: most of my friends did not have emails, so I could only email my parents. End of 1998: Helping early adopters create their first Hotmail accounts. Surfing the web: ~$8/hour in Internet cafes that connected via a s-l-o-w dialup.
Sharing online: Have a friend’s employee convert my emails to HTML and manually upload to my website. A few weeks later, pictures I sent will be scanned and added to the relevant pages.
Communicating with fellow travelers: leave notes in prominent traveler meeting places (on the wall of the German bakery in Nepal; Chabad house in Bangkok; selected guesthouses).
Music: Sony walkman; 18 hours of battery life. 12 cassettes with music. Sony MD (mini-disc) starts to become popular among Israeli travelers. Purchased Sony MD-55 in Tokyo Center in Bangkok ($300); spent full nights awake copying music from other travelers.
2001
Destination: Andean countries (Equador, Peru, Bolivia)
Documenting: An analog pocket camera (forgot which brand). One digital camera spotted in the wild: Sony (2 mega-pixel?) that burns images directly to a mini-CD. It wasn’t too exciting.
Writing to friends and family: Webmail. Mass distribution list of funny (and not-so-funny) stories sent to an extended group of friends. Postcards still sent to family and top friends.
Sharing online: Same as before (although Blogger did exist back then, it was too basic and missed some key features).
Communicating with fellow travelers: email.
Music: Still a walkman. Sony MD didn’t catch on.
2010
Destination: Argentina and Brazil.
Documenting: Panasonic Lumix Gf1 + 20mm “pancake” lens + 14mm-45mm zoom lens; additional Lumix camera for casual snapshots.
Writing to friends and family: So 2001. Sharing on Facebook is king. Photos will be uploaded once a week to Flickr/Facebook. Postcard days are long over. Long emails with stories? If I write more than 140 characters I feel as if it should be published as a multi-volume novel.
Communicating with fellow travelers: Facebook, SMS. I have 2 iphones with me (US number + local sim to avoid roaming costs).
Entertainment (music is so 2001): 2 ipod nanos (2nd generation with 4gb; 5th generation with 16gb) with 3000+ songs, Eee PC netbook (on which this post is written now), portable hard-drive (500gb) with all the catching up I need to do (Sopranos seasons 4-6; Dexter seasons 3-4; a dozen movies – perfect for long bus rides at night), portable capsule speakers.
What hasn’t changed:
The love of mountains. My outdoors gear (refreshed over the years, but at the core a tent is a tent and hiking boots are hiking boots). The joy of crawling into your sleeping bag as temperatures drop. The difficulty of getting out of the sleeping bag in the morning. The fresh air. The vistas. The good people you meet. My priorities.
Harding Ice Field, Seward Alaska 2009
I watched this clip way too many times over the last 12 hours. It’s hilarious. What I love about this guy is how candid he is in front of the camera, and his great attitude to repetitive misfortunes.
An interesting presentation by Steve Blank and Eric Ries. Key slide is on page 20 -> the rapid advancement and maturity of strong open-source products allow for such lean&mean startups to operate today.
What is missing from the presentation is a slide that talks about what types of products and target markets fit such a model. While a paradigm of fast iterations is favorable to older waterfall models, the ‘lean startup’ paradigm works best in web projects which allow for such fast iterations. If your business is developing consumer hardware, you want to make sure you got the product design right before you pay for a full assembly line in China, just to find out that you have to iterate.
Similarly, developing enterprise software faces challenges that may prevent startups from being ‘lean’. In a world of 6-9 months sales cycle, the feedback cycle becomes too long for comfort; you need a much better understanding of the problem before you start developing a solution.
Anyway, lean startups are a topic that I am thinking about often lately, and the above presentation offers valuable insights.
A chart from a recent Times UK article (Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing?) shows an interesting trend. As revenues of record labels go down (can’t hear that many tear drops in the audience), artists revenues from live performances go significantly up.
In a world of digital music that can be easily replicated illegally, there still exists one music experience worth paying for: live music.
I am constantly working on improving my management skills. Some tips are invaluable.
(Thanks Dilbert)
The Corporation (Mark Achbar & Jennifer Abbott, 2003) – an eye-opening look at the global effects of corporate actions.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Alex Gibney, 2005) – American capitalism at its best. An inspiring story, but they got caught, so I guess they were just not smart enough.
Sicko (Michael Moore, 2007). The joys of America’s Health-Care system.
Bonus: a Wall-Street special -
American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000) – Christian Bale lives the investment bankers dream.
1. Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997)
2. Insomnia (Erik Skjoldbjærg, 1997)
3. The Machinist (Brad Anderson, 2004)
4. Spider (David Cronenberg, 2002)
Techcrunch noted earlier this week that Google is monetizing over a billion video views a week.
I bet they do it by having highly relevant ads embedded in their videos, such as the one below. Classy.
