A couple months ago, I found a beautiful vintage camera at a thrift store. I had no idea how to even open it, or if film was still available…and the $50 price tag was just outside of my impulse buy zone. I copied down all the info I could and went home to research, and by research I mean that I asked twitter for permission.

Dieter has seen this play out before, so of course he immediately told me to buy the damn thing and get it over with, but I wanted to make a rational decision here. Yes, I could get film, but the price was a little high, especially for something that may or may not even work. But once dear friend and smart gadget nerd Greg told me to go for it, I apparently bolted out the door immediately to go snag it.

Once it was mine and the acquisition adrenaline wore off, then I started really appraising my new toy. My Land camera turned out to have a few flaws, but thankfully nothing that seems to impact operation. If you find yourself in the same adrenaline-fueled situation, here’s a handy list of what you should check:

Inspect the bellows
Turn the camera upside down and flip the little switchy thing on the right side to open the back. Inside, the first thing you should notice is the nice, neat folds for the bellows. If there’s a metal cartridge thing in the way, remove it but don’t throw it away. If the bellows are rumpled in any way, most experts recommend passing on the camera since they’re a real pain in the humps to fix. However, mine are moderately crushed and will probably get worse with time, but they aren’t a problem so far.

Check for roller corrosion
Check the silver roller on the inside of the back. When pulling out prints, this roller squeezes chemicals over the paper and can get corroded.

Extend the bellows
Now look at the front of the camera and find the white arrow pointing up. From this angle it’ll be right below the red shutter button. Push this piece up to release the bellows and gently slide them out until you hear a click. This piece is also labeled with the number 1, and is your focus mechanism. Move it left and right with your index fingers to adjust the bellows and focus.

Check for light leaks
With the back open, point the bellows towards a light source and look inside for light leaks. If you see holes but the bellows are otherwise sound, then this is an easy fix.

Meet the viewfinder
Now finally, look through the viewfinder! It’ll be dimmer than a modern camera, but that’s ok. There are actually two viewfinders, the big square one for framing and a small circle for focus. Look through the circle and move the focus levers back and forth to align your subject.

Test the battery
Land cameras have an “electronic eye” to calculate automatic exposure, so that means there’s a battery in there somewhere! Pull up on the left side of the back of the camera and you’ll probably find a big corroded mess. This is easy to clean as long as the connector and wires are still sound. Land cameras take funky batteries, but you can get the No. 531 used in the 100 from Amazon, or you can modify it to use AA batteries.

Fire the shutter
This step will probably fail on thrift store cameras, but it’s worth a shot. To test the shutter, push down the white #3 lever to cock it, look through the circle viewfinder and move the #1 levers to focus, then look through the square viewfinder and press the red #2 button to fire the shutter. No, these instructions don’t follow the clearly numbered sequence, but trust me, it’s a better habit to get into. Anyway, if you hear one click that means the shutter mechanics are probably ok but the battery is dead, if you hear two clicks then you lucked into finding a working battery, and if you hear no clicks, then…well, there’s probably something broken and unless you’re a genius tinker type, I don’t recommend buying the camera.

If your camera passes these tests and is $50 or less, then buy it. It’s still an unproven gadget until you pull out a successful image, but this should be good enough verification to give it a shot. If you want to skip the uncertainty and throw down for a known working camera, you can try ebay (although most are untested) or buy a fully reconditioned and/or upgraded camera from the up and coming landcameras.com.

In my next post, I’ll walk you through your first image and share what I learned while shooting my first pack. I suggest starting with Fuji FP-3000B black and white film (I buy from B&H or Amazon) since it works well in most indoor light situations, but you can also buy Fuji FP-100C color film if you know you’ll be shooting with plenty of light (for scale, FP-3000B is 3000 speed film, and FP-100C is 100 speed film). You can also get film from The Impossible Project and other sources, but save the special film for when you know what you’re doing.

I have a one-week opportunity to pre-order a Lytro light-field camera. It’s a revolutionary way of thinking about focus, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions, and I haven’t decided yet if I’m willing to bet $400 on Lytro having the right answers.

They’re pitching their product as a solution for the focus problem, framing the technology to make the camera seem more accessible to the everyman. This is all wrong. Auto-focus is smarter than the everyman, and there is no focus problem. Fortunately for Lytro’s marketing team, this product has landed squarely in the sights of the hardcore photography enthusiast (and based on comments on Lytro’s blog today, looks like they weren’t prepared for that). Hardcore enthusiasts understand that the point of this technology is to create a new photographic genre, to use interactive focus to tell a story.

I’m approaching this format moreso like video. Single images tell a story, but interactive images develop as you explore them. These storylines could consist of unexpected objects in the fore/background, different expressions on people’s faces as they react to an event, a sense of moving through a scene, accentuating infinity…and I can guarantee that there will be Lytro porn.

The hardware, in this case, isn’t enough. To nurture their niche userbase, Lytro also needs to create a system that connects users to share techniques and inspiration. Enthusiasts just want a creative outlet and recognition, so this could be very compelling. When outsiders stumble across this energy, they’ll be drawn in and want to belong.

But there are considerable downsides. Lytro’s v1 product offers no control of the image. I could live with auto exposure, maybe, but it gives me pause that these images won’t be compatible with conventional photo editing tools. No brightness, no levels, no color balance, no pixel destroying Instagram filters. As much as I would love to see a revival of doing that shit with glass, Lytro would do well to release an image processing library and give 3rd party developers a place in their community, too. This has an added benefit of maintaining momentum by giving users new tools to play with after the initial novelty wears off.

And in a few years, Adobe will be able to do this with photos from your existing camera. At the Adobe Max conference last week, engineers gave a sneak peek into technology that can take a blurry image taken from any camera, apply motion sensing algorithms that detect exactly how you wiggled when you took the photo, then line those pixels back up again to create a sharp image. It’s still no small feat to compile this data into an interactive file format, but the company who extends photographers’ existing toolsets with a pure software play will ultimately win.

I’m eager to explore a new creative format NOW, but $400 could also buy an iPhone 4S or the Galaxy Nexus next month. Or half a Nikon 1. Like most other gadget purchases, I’ll probably spend several days trying to talk myself out of it, then go ahead and buy one just so I’ll stop wasting my time dwelling on it.

TechCrunch is on the precipice. As soon as tomorrow, Mike may be thrown out of the company he founded. Or he may not. No one knows. And if he is, he will be replaced by — well, again, no one knows. No one knows much of anything. Certainly no one at TechCrunch. This site is about to change forever and we’re in the total fucking dark.

Don’t you hate it when that happens?

I still too freshly remember the anxiety of waiting for news to unfold while the house you’ve poured your heart into suddenly comes crashing down, the frustration of wanting to take matters in your own hands, to DO something, say something, reach out to the people who care and ask for their help to make your story known, to say how much you MATTER…

Unfortunately, companies rarely have approved messaging ready for this kind of situation.

Emotions are high over at TechCrunch right now, and the team clearly isn’t going for the standard radio silence PR play and waiting for the situation to play out. Because politics and bad decisions aside, for the people on the front lines, the world they know is fucking solid. I respect the hell out of them for standing up to their critics and saying that, raw emotions and all. Especially so.

My sage advice for TechCrunch? Focus. They will never break you if you stick together and keep telling your story.

Edited to add a comment from Scoble:

Several years ago Arrington and I were headed to some conference and I asked him about how he sees himself. Did he consider himself a blogger or a journalist, I asked. His answer stuck with me all this time: “I’m an entertainer.”

After finishing this post, I was sitting here in the dark of my office thinking the same thing (but without the real life story to back it up). The web responds well to showmanship. Not that anyone should be over dramatic or start shit just for attention — Internet showmanship is a realistic balance of emotional highs and lows, and few are able to take their readers on a journey quite like Michael Arrington. I leave the discussion of whether journalism is an appropriate environment for that kind of theatrics as an exercise for the reader.

I’m having trouble finding words right now, so I’ll let the post speak for itself:

“Openly admitting on her website that she is “passionate about sharing life’s little details,” Lisa Brewster proves her dedication with the microflashes of her life that spill out via Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter, and her personal wiki. Now she has to convince those making apps to become passionate about webOS, as HP and Palm try to jumpstart the platform. With the tech world impatiently awaiting webOS tablets and a wave of new smart phones to compete against iOS and Android, Brewster’s goal of making developers “feel like they’re part of something awesome” will be key.”

This same page consists of an Intel fellow, a startup founder, a professor…and then me, that webOS girl on twitter. I could understand if this were a post about interesting tech women in social media, but these people are making serious change in the world. Mind = blown.

The world is watching us, guys. Everybody on.

Tools are as creative as the minds using them, and the best tools get out of the way to help us live better (inspired, connected) lives. And for all it’s pixel destroying flaws, Instagram is great at that.

Since I couldn’t actually use the app without an iPhone (which I later bought just so I could continue this experiment), I was racking my brain trying to figure out why everyone found it so compelling. I got in a discussion with Patrick about it during my last trip to San Diego, and he thinks it’s because constraining everyone to the same set of tools essentially gives us all the same camera, and constraints fuel creativity. I feared it was an anti-web conspiracy, something about how Instagram was making itself to be a first class sharing mechanism rather than the web (which is a Thing these days, aka Path). I think both of these hypotheses play a part in Instagram’s success, but what it really boils down to is the simple fact that this is the only app that nails the mobile photography workflow.

Before really letting myself get sucked in to Instagram, I tried all the other iOS photography apps I’d heard of — many, many more than I mention here. Hipstamatic is great if you’re in a fiddly mood, but it’s also slow and you risk losing the moment you wanted to capture in the first place. Camera+ is powerful, but I find the editing step unnecessarily complicated for mobile, I think because it offers a plethora of options but none of the ones I want. I realize this is an ironic criticism for a pro-Instagram post, but most of the time I just want to bump the sharpness and contrast instead of plastering my photos with a “look.”

On Instagram, the workflow is to either take or select an image, choose one of a few filters that are way more heavy handed than I’d care for (but are defining the photographic zeitgeist of 2011), then one more screen to enter optional location, description, and toggle sharing services. Shoot, edit, share…done. I capture a moments without taking myself out of them, which leads to much more introspective results and therefore better photos.

That’s what I love about cameras on Android. I can add a little punch within the camera app itself and immediately see how the settings are affecting my scene before I take the photo — 99% of the time I just leave it on +1 sharpness, contrast, and saturation. Auto white balance with the Evo is spot on. Getting basic settings out of the way allows me to focus on composition, which is the ideal way to start taking better photos instead of knowing I can rely on a vignette or leaky filter to cover up the boring spots. I don’t really need sharing settings, because I email my photos to flickr and have flickr configured to post them to twitter.

webOS doesn’t have a lot of play in this area yet since the camera APIs are still in private beta, but so far developers have come up with creative solutions like doing the image processing on a remote server. MOLO‘s filter set really stands out, and I hope that by evaluating other experiences my guys burst out of the gate with some of the best mobile photo apps on the market. PS: Even without editing apps, Palm’s exposure and white balance algorithms are smarter than the average bear. Now if we could just get rid of all these fixed focus lenses…

I’m still gonna hold Instagram’s feet to the fire about building a stronger web presence (and an api), but at least now I understand why they made the tradeoff to first perfect their core functionality and build an audience. In the meantime, you can check my flickr stream to see all the moments I otherwise wouldn’t have captured.

9:30 pm – “On the ground in San Francisco. Nights here really are quite cool and windy. This excites me for some reason.”

I wrote those words in my journal (yes, on paper) on July 19, 2007, when I decided to fly up for Wordcamp on a bit of a whim. Although my journal entry was brief, it marks a pivotal moment in my life. I remember I was in the airport and going up an escalator to get to the BART station. As I reached the top and looked out over the city for the first time, it was like I’d taken my first breath full of energy and life and possibilities, and I immediately knew that something in this city was waiting for me. The moment was so intense, the memory of it can bring tears to my eyes.

Dear friends, I am pleased to announce that I have found the opportunity I sensed that day. In just a few short weeks, I will be leaving San Diego to join Palm’s Developer Relations team. PreDevCamp was the most humbling and exciting project I’ve ever undertaken, and I’m honored to be in an even better position to serve this new community of developers. As an application reviewer, my priorities are now to help you guys develop the highest quality apps possible, and ensure the review process treats all developers with the respect they deserve.

I’ll be joining Chuq, the community manager that we already know and love, new directors Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, and a host of other crazy talented folks. What I’m looking forward to the most about working for Dion and Ben is that they’re so passionate about driving the future of the Open Web in a mobile environment. I’ve merely dabbled with the idea before (and listened to many of @hober’s infamous drunken rants), and I’m excited to have a chance to become a participating member of this community.

As eager as I am to join Palm, departure is bittersweet. San Diego is where I discovered myself, and with the help of some really awesome friends I’ve learned that my truest source of happiness is to be active and genuine in my communities, and never be afraid to follow my passions. As Barcamp San Diego and twitter empowered San Diego with a thriving new community, I was empowered myself and decided what I wanted to do with my life. For that reason, San Diego — and the people here — will always have a special place in my heart.

The next two weeks will be a whirlwind of activity to wrap up my last obligations, see as many friends as possible, and ship me and my cat up to Sunnyvale ASAP. The realization that I’m really doing this comes in waves, so I’m doing everything I can to cherish my remaining time here. You will be greatly missed, San Diego, but be proud that it is your legacy that will carry me through this next adventure.

Crack your knuckles and grab your caffeinated beverage of choice, because PreDevCamp is only a week away!

When: August 8, 2009 at 10:30 am

Where: theHIVE, 777 11^th Avenue [map]

Cost: Free, but please bring $5 to chip in for lunch

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER NOW!

I’m pleased to announce that preDevCamp San Diego will be hosted at theHIVE, downtown’s most fashionable co-working space. Jason and the team have made a huge contribution to the SD tech scene by graciously hosting events such as SD Ruby, Django SD, SD Tech Founders, and the upcoming Ignite event. Check their website to learn about the space and the creative professionals who work there, or stop by for the next free Jelly co-working day and say hi.
 

Survey
What do YOU want to learn at preDevCamp? We’ve created a survey to get a feel for your background and what you’d rather focus on. It’s also a dang good way to get an idea of what the event will be like. Click here to take the survey!

Schedule
As always, keep in mind that this schedule can and probably will change.

• 10:00 – Doors open
• 10:30 – Introductions: Who you are, what you do, and what you’d like to build
• 10:45 to 12:30 – Intro to Pre development, SDK installfest, hello world, HTML5, services api, frameworks
• 12:30 to 1:30 – Lunch
• 1:30 to 5:30 – Open hacking and group discussion: website optimization, mobile UX, webOS internals hacking (running servers, homebrew apps, etc), whatever else comes up
• 6:00 to 6:30 – Demo your app, prizes
• 6:30 – Closing remarks
• 7:00 – Cleanup
• 8:00 – Afterparty at one of downtown’s fine drinking establishments

What you can do
The conference might be a week away, but here’s what you should start doing now.

• Brainstorm for app ideas. PreDevCamp San Diego will be very hands on, so start thinking about what app you’d like to build. I’ll be announcing at least two contests in the next week, so make it good.

• Install the SDK, which is conveniently available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. We can help you get this set up if you need it, but it’ll save a lot of time if everyone can get this done before the event. And remember to update to the latest version if you have the beta SDK installed!
• Play with the emulator. If you don’t have a Pre, spend a few minutes with the emulator to get a feel for how webOS handles multi-tasking and notifications. Be warned that the gestures are rather addictive!
• Connect with other attendees. There are over 1000 people registered for preDevCamp around the world, and they’re all as awesome as you are. Get to know them on Facebook or our irc backchannel at #predevcamp on irc.freenode.net.
• Help get the word out. Post about preDevCamp on your blog or send a message to your favorite mailing list. There’s also a Facebook event you can use to invite your friends.

That’s it for now! If you have any questions, please catch me or Dave on twitter or shoot me an email. Happy hacking!

In all fairness…I’ve been a Palm fan for years, but I’m not too brainwashed to say that there’s a place in the market for both. Pre and the iPhone each have pros and cons, and the Pre meets my needs the best. For me, having a physical keyboard, carrier availability, and choice of development platform are high priorities. YMMV.

Now with that said, WebOS and Synergy are amazing new technologies that are full of possibilities, but I fairly and lovingly admit that certain aspects of the Pre reinforce the fact that it’s a v1.02 device. Things you’ll love: everything about the hardware, how easily it integrates with online services, beautiful multitasking, gps navigation, and push email. Things you might not like: unoptimized calendar experience, short battery life, and limited application selection. The people currently best suited for the Pre are early adopters, users without advanced requirements, and linux hackers (I’m trying to find a way to SSH into my phone as I write this). Since there are so many people excited about this device, I hope to see Palm engaging the community to incorporate our feedback into future updates (which I expect within a month or two).

…that got a bit too involved, didn’t it? The Pre’s a great phone. Buy it, bitches.

Meet your new organizing team
To fill in for whurley‘s and Giovanni‘s unfortunate departures, Greg Stevenson and myself will be stepping in to help co-ordinate the various preDevCamp events around the globe.  Greg has already been hosting some webOS training sessions (pre-preDevCamps, if you will), and will be invaluable bringing this knowledge to the community.  And while I’ve helped plan a barcamp or two, I’m positively giddy for the chance to help build a stronger community and facilitate knowledge transfer on such a massive scale.  Combined with Dan’s experience bringing preDevCamp where it is today, I think we’re going to make a wonderful team.

New target date:  August 8th
The second major announcement is regarding preDevCamp’s target date.  Several cities have expressed concern about organizing events on such short notice and without guarantee that the SDK will be available.  Palm hears our cries about the SDK loud and clear, but there’s a lot more involved than just making sure everyone has a copy of the software.  We still don’t have a confirmed SDK release date, but I’m very optimistic that pushing the date back to August 8th will give Palm time to finalize these issues.  And while August is later than the expectation that was originally set, it’s still only 9 weeks after the launch of the phone (recall that the iPhone SDK was released 9 MONTHS later).  Also, 9 weeks is the same amount of time it takes to make kittens.  Coincidence?  I think not.

More content coming soon
Momentum since the phone’s announcement has ebbed due to a lack of developer-related news, but now that the cone of silence is being lifted we can start featuring content created by Palm and other preDevCamp members.  The goal here is to provide maximum visibility to emerging community leaders and create a repository of reusable presentations, therefore lowering the barrier to entry for someone interested in talking about webOS but might not be sure where to begin.  Plus, I plan on releasing a series of articles on how to recruit developers in your community, how to sell the event to sponsors, and share other experience I’ve gathered on how to host a successful conference.  Now that we have a target to shoot for, expect to see a lot more activity on the preDevCamp blog!

What you can do
Some cities are still moving forward with June 13th events, and my personal opinion on this is kudos to you for getting a head start.  There’s a lot of learning to be done in the next few months, so I encourage you to use this time to help create our public knowledge base.  Write a blog post on something you’ve learned.  Record a presentation and upload it to the preDevCamp slideshare group.  Get to know other developers and provide feedback for each other.  And don’t forget to keep your city’s preDevCamp blog updated!

Learning as publicly as possible will show the world that the preDevCamp community is leading the way to webOS enlightenment.  Are you ready?  Let’s begin.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the direction of social media and what it means to me, and I’ve found myself uninterested at best. So we share stuff. Big damn deal. There’s so much content being shared to me that I ignore almost all of it now, at least compared to what I was consuming a year ago. No offense to any of my contacts, but I’ve reached the point where enough is enough, and while all that firehose of content is still in my input stream, I’ve altered my patterns to only consume what’s relevant to my interests at that moment.

For example, tweets are skimmed while walking up the stairs (Confession #1: Or when I’m in the restroom. Hey, just being honest), but hundreds of messages may be ignored if I decide to do something more interesting for a weekend. Neglected RSS feeds pile up to the dreaded 1000+ mark. I used to have a level of background stress because I was “behind,” but after learning that I’m no worse off without this information, I now have no regrets using the “mark all as read” button with reckless abandon.

The content’s there, now make it relevant.

While too much content isn’t a bad thing (until you reach the point where you’re so unable to manage it that it becomes easier to ignore), I didn’t bring up the previous rant and confession to focus on content filtering. I think that’s a problem to be solved with some sort of relevancy engine, something that reads in your context, available resources, and attention profile, and feeds you the data that’s most useful to you at that moment. But even that intelligently consumed content can be made much more useful if I have a highly customized layer to help me organize my own meaning for that data.

But there’s bookmarking tools, you might say. And tags. With these tools, you can organize content however you want. To be honest, I could never get started using bookmarking services until just a few months ago when I started using Mento.info, because it has a nice balance between the metadata robustness of a bookmarking service and the relevant content highlighting of a tumblelog. (Confession #2:  the first service was actually ma.gnolia, but only for a few heavily-frequented topics. And all those links are gone now, bless ma.gnolia’s heart.)

Bookmarking services are flexible, but that also means they’re very generic. Their biggest flaw is that even when given the option of clipping content, you’re recording a copy of what someone else said or likes or thinks is useful. What if I like the author’s advice, but find that it doesn’t work for me 100%? Feedback can be shared publicly in comments, but they’re merely a footnote to the original content.

The first step of social media was to make everything public; the next step is to make it more applicable to your individual situation.

I’ve come up with an idea I call a personal information layer. This data layer is a different concept than annotation as found in services like Diigo, where users’ adjustments float like post it notes. The personal information layer should look and interact just like the original content, but customized to the preferences for an individual user. Recipes are a good example. I may like much more sage than the original author called for, or perhaps my oven requires an additional 10 minutes cooking time. The content is way more valuable to me when I can alter it according to my taste and needs.

Remixing is hard enough now. What happens to copyright in an Internet like this?

This question felt a lot easier to deal with when I was trying to keep the data in the personal information layer truly personal (read: private), but it just won’t work that way (Confession #3:  also, I loathe the idea of building another social graph). Even individual adjustments to public content is useful data, so there’s value in sharing it. But this will be harder to defend than deep linking and reblogging…this is making potentially minor changes to someone else’s otherwise verbatim content and collecting it all under your own name. Simultaneously collecting and customizing data is another step towards the ideal Internet, but at what point does Emeril’s pie recipe become Brittany’s pie recipe? What’s the significance if it was Kathy’s version before Brittany saw it?

I can’t predict how the Internet community will respond to any of these challenges; I don’t think anyone can until a demo is released in the wild to see how people react. And of course, I wouldn’t go through the trouble of documenting all these questions and ideas if I didn’t have a hell of a use case I hope Dave and I have time to experiment with over the summer.

What’s a DevCamp?
We haven’t had many developer camps in San Diego, but they’re like a BarCamp centered around creating applications on a common platform or language.  Users just like you will lead sessions covering everything from basic functionality, differences between the Pre and existing Palm devices (and the iPhone!), brainstorming sessions, and lots of group hacking time.  From what we know about the Pre’s webOS so far, applications are written in super easy HTML and CSS, so just about anyone should be able to get up and running after an intro session to the webOS SDK.  But even if HTML ain’t your style, we’ll need people to come up with application ideas and help test the code other people create.  Palm will also be releasing an emulator, so you can still participate even if you can’t buy the hardware before the event.  If you’re a creative type and have been getting excited about the Pre, you need to sign up now!

Help wanted!
If you’re interested in throwing conventional organization out the window and helping find a venue and some sponsors, don’t forget to check that pretty little volunteer box on the registration page so I’ll know to get in touch with you.  If you’re interested in sponsoring, contact me and Giovanni Gallucci.

Watch the preDevCamp San Diego blog and the @preDevCamp twitter account for further information, and start spreading the word now that San Diego’s going to kick some webOS development ass sometime in the next five months!

It all started when I received a message on Flickr inviting me to participate in a photography contest on a saltwater aquarium site.  I have a ton of great images from the California Academy of Sciences that I could submit, so decided to check it out.  The rules are pretty standard, but the following declaration they requested gave me cause for alarm:

I YOUR NAME certify that I am the author and sole owner of the material I am submitting to Aquariumslife.com. I understand and agree that Aquariumslife.com may use my material anywhere on Aquariumslife.com. I understand and agree that Aquariumslife.com may resize my material if needed. I understand and agree that I remain the owner of the Copyright of all material submited [sic] to Aquariumslife.com and that a Copyright notice will be add [sic] to my picture.

Copyright notice will be added this way: ⓒ YOUR NAME 2008.

This immediately reminded me of Flickr users who go out of their way to add those copyright notices to their photos and specify that all rights are reserved, do not use without permission, etc.  I respect that some people need to maintain extremely tight control, but being so limited in how I can share these works (and link back to them) drastically reduces their art’s value to me.  The copyright symbol is a mark of disgrace, and I want nothing to do with it.

I mentioned my predicament on Twitter and got some enlightening (and memory jogging) responses.  I remember now how copyright is automatic and exists for all creative works.  It means that you have control of the work, but the copyright (and the copyright symbol) isn’t what makes someone a creative dictator or anarchist.  The license is what specifies how others can use the work.  That license can be all rights reserved or one of the Creative Commons licenses, but the copyright still exists.

I think why this was a point of confusion for me is because I’ve never seen ⓒ specified on a photo without the intent of all rights reserved, and I didn’t want the stigma of a more restrictive license just because of this contest.  I wrote the organizer back to say that I would prefer that my photos not be watermarked at all, or to use CC-BY-SA if they must add something.  I may be over-drawing the line, but there’s no shame in defending your principles.

What is @sdjobs?
@sdjobs is a Twitter account that publicizes Internet technology jobs in the San Diego area, keeps the community updated on the job market and layoff announcements, and offers general job hunting tips.  I’ll also provide some much needed sanity checks by pointing out how unreasonable some job descriptions are.  Searching for a new job is never easy,  and I want to help keep San Diego’s spirits up and let people know that they’re not alone.

Why Twitter?  Why not just start a mailing list?
Because Twitter is a notification system built inside a social network.  With Twitter, users have more options for where and when they receive updates.  A casual job hunter may only want to check the web page every once in a while, but someone trying to get an interview for a competitive position may want to be updated as soon as possible.  Mailing lists only send email, requiring the user to search for third party tools to get this kind of flexibility.

How you can help
Even if you’re not looking for a new job, one of your friends probably is or will be in the near future.  The best way you can help is to be prepared with leads and advice…and let me tell ya, it’s way hella cool to watch someone’s face light up when you send them a job lead.  And I am but a cat herder, so I can only do so much without you cats sending in job openings at your company and relevant content that you stumble upon.

I picked Rosie the Riveter as my icon to communicate a very specific message.  As the global economy begins it’s death spiral, local communities will have to band together tighter than ever before to support ourselves during the impending collapse.  No government bailouts can help us more than we can help each other.

We can do it, San Diego.

When I came home from work tonight, I noticed a strange burning smell. It got stronger as I walked towards my apartment, and soon I heard a smoke detector going off. I walked around a bit to pinpoint the source, and sure enough I found an apartment that had a funny burning smell (no smoke or flames).

I knew I had to do something but wasn’t sure what the appropriate course of action was, so I called Dave and asked him to txt me the number of the San Diego fire department. But that number only works during business hours, so I decided I had no choice to go ahead and dial 911 (which I’ve never had to do before). I told the dispatcher what was going on, and just a few minutes later there were SIX fire trucks pulling up. I didn’t say it was an emergency when the 911 system prompted me and told the dispatcher there wasn’t even any smoke, but apparently the fire department doesn’t mess around.

Turns out there had been a pot left on the stove, so they turned it off, squirted some stuff to help “eat” the smoke, and vented the apartment out with a fairly big gas powered fan. No harm done.

What bothers me though, is that while talking with the other neighbors who came to see what was going on, a couple of them had heard the alarm and smelled smoke, but didn’t take action. Middle-aged, seemingly intelligent adults. Now I admit I didn’t know exactly what to do at first, but at least I knew not to ignore it.

Tomorrow I’m going to mention this incident to the onsite manager, and ask that they send out a flyer that outlines who to call in different kinds of situations, what constitutes an emergency, list of phone numbers, etc. I used to have recurring nightmares of my house burning down when I was a kid, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to live in a complex where neighbors are too uneducated or too apathetic to show stewardship for the building we all share.

PS: What’s foreshadowingly creepy is that I just remembered that I was listening to NPR’s Performance Today show on the drive home, which happened to be a fire-themed episode (and had some great covers of Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire).

The premise for I Did Stuff lies in the belief that we’re tracking so many aspects of our life now that computers need to not only make sense of this data for our own use, but also use it to deliver status on demand. One common example I’ve used is that of the “reverse twitter”…basically to combine Google calendar, IM status, and whole host of other data sources into one remotely queryable interface. And anyone can ask this interface “Where is Dave?” and receive a response like “Well he isn’t in front of IM, but he has class in 10 minutes, so he might be in transit. But his phone is on the charger, so he either forgot his phone or is oversleeping.”

Which was a great idea a year ago, and as far as I know still hasn’t been done. But since then, this idea has grown into so much more. Not only do we want to create an AI who can infer status for others, we want it to learn more about us than we know ourselves.

A few months ago I decided to try a little experiment, which was inspired by a conversation with Tantek in which he stated that RSS feeds aren’t even a part of his personal communication stack…everything he needs to know he hears from his social graph via twitter. Frustrated that I had just declared RSS bankruptcy, I wondered if I was spending too much time keeping up with what other people were doing…time that could instead be invested into bringing my own ideas to fruition. Although all blogs other than those of a few close friends were cut out of my daily reads, what came to be known as the TechCrunch Experiment was born. And although initially liberating, I quickly found that my particular social graph wasn’t feeding me enough of the right kind of data items to keep me motivated; after a few months, I found my new idea generation rate (or at least my idea improvement rate) went almost to zero. My creative juices ran dry when operating in an RSS free vacuum.

This makes sense because I then realized I build my Twitter contacts around keeping up with peoples’ lives, and had built my RSS feeds around keeping up with news. So even though I didn’t end up being able to save time, I’d say it’s still pretty good to know what fuels you, right?

For a more recent example (recent = correlated today), I occasionally have a problem with not eating. More along the lines of forgetting to rather than an eating disorder, but we all have our vices. I’ll not eat well for a few days and get lethargic and depressed and wonder wtf is wrong. Now this sounds like a fairly simple correlation, but with everything else going on in life it can be hard to notice if you’re not paying close attention. So I today I purchased a cheap glucose monitor (along with not-so-cheap test strips, jeez) to track this one dimension of how my diet affects my energy and moods. All I’ve learned over the past 24 hours is that I just need to EAT, but seeing concrete evidence of this reinforces the consequence of my actions, plus gives me a scale to rate how well I’m doing.

Something like this could be tracked in the personal unit testing system, but the value in this data is more than just binary passing or failing. Lifetracking, lifestats, personal informatics, lifestreaming 2.0…call it what you will, these are MBO’s for life.

These examples represent only a few possibilities, just imagine how many factors influence your mood and performance! Diet, weight and exercise, weather, what time you went to bed, where you are, who you’re spending time with, the projects you’re working on, your social connections (and growth rate), what blogs you’re reading, the music you’re listening to, what applications you’re using, the conferences you’re going to, how long it is until payday…or if you’re Brynn and Chris, the last time you had sex.

This data is already being recorded, we just need a smarter way to use it.

Which is, as they say, a bigger algorithm.

More and more I’m noticing health-conscious people say “I don’t eat soy” with the same self-righteousness with which vegans inform their more barbaric friends that they don’t eat meat, saying that something in soy mimics estrogen and can have noticeable effects on the development of children, especially males. Being as distrustful as I am of the American food system, I bookmarked this snippet for further research.

A quick search informed me that the concern is caused by phytoestrogens, which are plant compounds that are molecularly similar to and therefore can have similar effects as estrogen. Flax seed and other oilseeds contain the highest total phytoestrogen content, followed by soy bean and tofu. The benefits of these foods have been touted in the health food circuit for years, and soybeans have been a major staple of the Chinese diet for oh, five thousand years. And they seem to be doing just fine.

Yes, “science works, bitches,” but the history of nutrition science has proven time and time again that it cannot match the knowledge and efficiency of thousands of years of eating. Any Michael Pollan reader can tell you that the problem with nutrition science lies within the name of the practice itself — based on the way scientists need to remove or control every variable besides the one they are testing, they are forced to take nutrients out of the context of food and food out of the context of culture, removing systems that have evolved with us ever since humans started eating. Why should I suddenly (and by suddenly, I mean within the last 100 years) need a scientist to tell me what to eat?

Now here’s where I confess that this post started as a simple tumblelog link to the wikipedia page on phytoestrogens that grew into a rant too long for Tumblr’s description field. I don’t have the answer that could explain why our recent scientific development has never slowed the Chinese down, but I think the point I’m trying to make here is that I don’t care.

Or maybe I’m just trying to validate why I shouldn’t feel guilty about my brand new soymilk maker.

Edit: Further research has uncovered that Kaayla T. Daniel, the author of the “answer” article linked above, has also written a book with the same title. A number of helpful amazon reviewers have uncovered that Daniel and her publisher are both very closely associated with the Weston A. Price association, which includes raw milks and high meat consumption among their advocacies. The reviewers are quite critical of the author’s apparent lack of objectivity, but I found the site to be largely in line with a lot of my current ideologies (avoid products of food science, choose local organic etc etc etc). A number of reviewers also replied that Daniel has cited poorly formulated and cherry picked studies to create a very one-sided argument against soy. Reader beware.

This is the joy of Creative Commons for me…artists helping artists who only want to make people happy. Remix and enjoy!

Edit: Just noticed that another photo from the same set was published as well. Wow. :)

Individually wrapped awesome on a stick, originally uploaded by Lisa Brewster.

So ever since Dr. Horrible’s SingAlong Blog came out, Dave‘s been flouncing around like a hero singing “A Man’s Gotta Do What A Man’s Gotta Do.” So much that I decided it was going to be his birthday theme. At first my plan was to order a Dr. Horrible themed cake, but that proved rather problematic to arrange from San Diego. Fortunately, I found an awesome website called Veronica’s Treats that will print whatever you want on cakes, brownies, and cookies and ship anywhere in the US. The only shippable cakes were rather small, and I wanted something he could share, so the sugar cookies on a stick were perfect.

Ordering was really easy. Select the item you want, customize a few color choices for icing, ribbons, and sprinkles, then checkout. Reply to the order confirmation email with your image attached. I finalized my design in photoshop first, but you can also send in a photo that they can spruce up and add text to. A live preview would have been nice, but I have no complains with my results trusting a human to tweak for best cookie-printing results.

Shipping was true to schedule (I picked standard UPS ground), but best to submit an order a couple of weeks before you need them if you’re trying to have them in time for an important event.

And the cookies tasted awesome, so as long as you can bear watching someone eat your precious design, you can be comfortable actually serving these to guests who still value taste over novelty.

Since I’m still in withdrawal from having to send back my N95 that got me addicted to Qik, I’ve been squirming like crazy ever since new mobile vlogging service 12seconds.tv went into public alpha yesterday morning. I got my invite today, and immediately fell in love. While Qik is great for interacting with viewers while streaming live events, 12seconds really is an easy, mobile twitter for video. As someone who has interesting content to create but no time to muck around with video editing, 12seconds takes the pressure off even more by only allowing “12 seconds” of content. The brief time limit also has the benefit of removing inhibitions to vlogging, since posters don’t feel intimidated by the need to engage someone’s attention for minutes at a time.

Oh, and you don’t have to have any kind of special software to record video. If you’re using the website, a standard flash application will allow you to record from your webcam. But what’s cool is that when you’re out and about, any Internet enabled cell phone that records video can send your update to a special email address. Everyone can use this.

So even though you only have to be interesting in 12 second bursts now, you still want people to watch these vidlets. You can follow friends within the system and automatically update twitter when you’ve posted a new video, plus there’s pages for all recent and popular videos. Users can leave comments, but there’s no way to reply with your own video (yet, I assume). But 12seconds already understands that the more people use these posts off their site, the happier their users will be and the faster their site will grow. They’ve developed two sizes of blog widgets that you can use now, and one would assume FriendFeed integration is coming soon. I’m trying to pull my 12seconds RSS feed into my recently resumed tumblelog, but not having luck yet…I’m sure I can hack something up. =]

Verdict: There’s definitely room for both Qik and 12seconds, at least in my mobile toolkit.

To spare you the drama of wondering what happens in the video above…I didn’t make it to the next round.  But that’s ok!  As I’ve said before, in the past few weeks I’ve learned so much about myself, my abilities, and where I thought my limits were that I wouldn’t trade that knowledge for all the followers on twitter.

This experience has changed how I approach my life, and for that reason alone this contest is a personal success for me.

And support!  God, I would have turned around and went home before even making it to the Mahalo offices on the first day if it wasn’t for my dear friends who really and truly make me feel like I’m selling myself short for not following my dreams (yes, that’s quite cheesy…deal with it).  Specifically, I couldn’t have done anything without my partner in crime and vegan ice cream hunter David Horn (actually, he’s the sole reason why I’ve eaten anything since April), Brynn Evans for being one of my favorite people on the planet, Alex Kawas because months ago he planted the first seed of thought that I should shoot for an opportunity like this if it ever came up, my amazing role model and mentor Cyan Banister, Patrick Crowley for keeping me sane, Declan Fleming for being the absolute best at finding something nice to say about me, Larry aka ConnectedGeek for stepping in as my Chief Strategy Officer, and my mother for keeping me more informed on how the contest is progressing than even the Mahalo production staff.  You all mean the world to me.

You know you can count on your friends, but what I never counted on was the support from hundreds of people who were activated to form the Lisa Nation.  My twitter follower count has gone up by something like 200 people, there are 57 people in the fan club ConnectedGeek started, at some point my website went up from PR4 to PR5, and my original contestant photo got almost 70 responses all in my favor.  This is many orders of magnitude more attention than any other contestant has generated so far, which has left me both shocked and flattered.  I mean, really…wow.  Thank you.

So now we’re all left with a bit of a problem.  A lot of people were rooting for me in this contest, but I don’t want anyone to feel let down or lose interest just because I’m out of the running.  Someone else still has to win, and from what I know public opinion will matter for the final round in some capacity.  So who should we vote for instead?

If you spend any length of time around me at all, you’ll quickly learn that I care a lot about this little concept called community, especially in San Diego.  Community means nothing if you’re not supporting and promoting those in your network, so my choice for the next host is an easy decision to make.  Kristina Allison also comes to Mahalo with no podcasting experience, but she’s a rockstar so that’s ok.  Referred to as the “dark horse” in previous rounds, the judges saw a fight in her that was worth investing in to see what she could do in the next round.  And as you can see in the video above, Kristina has pulled to the lead and definitely started to kick some ass.  San Diegans and netizens alike, I encourage you to join me in supporting Kristina as she produces her own Mahalo Daily episode this week.  Stay tuned for updates on where the voting will take place!

As for my own plans, seeing that people are inspired by the ideas I want to evangelize has in turn inspired me to seek out other opportunities to connect on this level even more.  The whole reason I joined this contest was to take my career in a drastically new direction, and because of you guys I can see that future starting to take shape.  I may not be materializing at Mahalo, but this girl still has a few good cards tucked in her stocking.