Photography

1) Flickr > Coppermine

Flickr is totally sweet; it has the cool features and low price of a crazy startup with the backing of an internet giant. I will be moving all the content available on my coppermine album to my flickr over the next few days. Check out the photos from my trips, feel free to add comments/tags and add me as a flickr contact. Searching for the "bestof" tag will save you from wading through a bunch of crap.

2) New camera in the mail

I am excited about my new camera coming. After my camera broke on Thailand (the last picture it took) I thought I’d get a digital SLR. The drawbacks of DSLRs (bulky, expensive, attention drawing) made me rethink and I opted for another Canon S-Series (S70), it should be super awesome.

3) Fundraising

One of my goals after returning from Cambodia is to raise money for the Sankheum Center for Children in Siam Reap, Cambodia (my photos). I learned about the center through the good people at Earthwalkers Hotel/Hostel who are involved in doing work there. I found it to be an extremely worthwhile place with dedicated staff/volunteers and heartbreakingly upbeat kids. One of my ideas was to have a photo charity auction and/or make prints in exchange for donations. I have been making prints since I returned and found several of my photos come across very well when printed. I hope to tackle this in the near future, please let me know if you have any ideas or are interested in being involved.

take that early twenties... you're done!

thanks for the birthday wishes everyone - you made me feel incredibly fortunate as usual.

my "holiday 2005" letter was going to be my "25th birthday" newsletter but scope creep kicked in (you know, pictures and all) and i've been pretty busy, so i'm shooting for sometime before the 1 year anniversary of leaving my last job.

My spam count is pretty low at the moment and identifying spam is pretty easy thus I don't read it often. However, when you get a message with the subject "Fucking St. Valentine" at 3:56 am from "Edgardo Reagan" (who even google can't find) you can tell it's spam, but you gotta wonder what it's about.

Playing a game alters your state of mind by freeing it from concerns that are unrelated to the game. When playing a game, meta-questions like "why am I playing", "what is this for", etc. do not come up. You focus on the game and maximizing your heuristic be it winning (chess), maximizing profit (poker, backgammon), learning, experimentation or whatever. The other questions really don’t come into your mind once a game has started. Not having to think about those meta-questions a great escape from real life. It’s easy to see how addicted to games I have been at times in my life, it's a wonderful escape.

It was brought to my attention that sub-setting certain areas of your life to being "games" often yields improved performance eg: dating, academics/career. Once the goal is set and there are no-meta questions hanging around then you can focus more intently on your goals.

I wonder at what cost that comes – pop movies bring this up all the time: when dating becomes a game the "why you are playing" can be lost or twisted for example. The same with your career. If you enter your career as a game with the objective to reach a goal, will you lose sight of why you’re doing it? What is it for? Is it worth the sacrifices you make or the associated opportunity costs?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I’ve always had some big questions about what I want my career to be and sometimes it totally fucks my productivity. I have actually been applying a bit of the "Scrum process" to help with this. The idea is to define goals for a short period of time (say a month), focus on the goals with meta-questions out the way for that time and then evaluate when the period is over. We’ll have to see how it goes.