Auswanderer Quatsch

One year, 365 pictures and a whole baggage of experiences added on my back later, I’m back, proud to have finally closed this important project that flew me across that strange year 2011. The year was incredible for a lot of personal reasons, top of which stands of course MlleV. becoming MrsV. All in all, I’m happy to have this year summarized in 365 pictures.

This project was really interesting. I started out bluntly, still a bit dozed from the new-years-eve party, maybe not fully realizing what I was putting myself into. But retrospectively, what I really wanted to do with this 365 was to try and get rid of the “opportunist-photographer” in me, the one that takes pretty landscape pictures and frame nice monuments and instead start improvising with less funky subjects, start being creative.

Somebody once told me something like An amateur photographer can take marvelous pictures, sometimes way better than a professional but mostly out of sheer luck. A professional will know how to create such an image and his pictures will be at least constantly good. This is exactly what – I think – the 365 is doing to its photographer: put him in a state of mind where he doesn’t know anymore what he should or could take ; where every object around him has been taken once and he doesn’t see his next move anymore. Then he will start considering new angles, make new things out of old and start being creative, not just opportunist.

The first wording I used for my intro was “… this important project I decided to inflict on myself”. While this sentence was too harsh – and that’s why I removed it - I wanted to use “inflict” because it was not fun everyday. Some days I had ideas, some days I went to bed to suddenly get up again realizing in a flash that I did not have my picture yet. And sometimes I went to bed to realize it’s past-midnight already ; so I posted a picture taken a couple days before or one I took the next day.

On the other hand, at many occasions I reached this state of mind I was looking for, a real lust to look around through those photographer eyes and see the world as a succession of potential pictures. When this happened, I surfed on this wave for as long as I could and gathered as many images as possible. But more often than not, it was the multiple reminders I set for myself that were the ones to push this state of mind on me. I wish I had created a little permanent studio in our flat to be able to play with light on a subject I have always at hand (myself) like a lot of 365-ers do.

This 365 made me realize some things about my cameras as well. I barely took the reflex out “just not convenient enough”. I used the Lx3 quite a lot, but not as much as my iPhone. This is really something that stuck me hard: mobile photography has helped me express myself throughout the whole day, take pictures of irrelevant day-to-day-things and try to make something out of it. On the other hand, I used a lot of filters from Camera+, not always for the best (huhu what did I have in mind taking such a pic?). I guess the camera will be a very important part of the decision-making process for my next phone after all (for the french readers, lense.fr published a very nice article going in this direction called “Photophonie, les 5 lecons à en tirer“).

Well, that wraps it up for 2011 ; you can have a look at all the pictures on flickr. Obviously I didn’t start a 365 for 2012, but I’ll be sure to plan a PADC with Ghusse this year. Thanks for watching, thanks for commenting, thanks for reading and happy photo-crafting in 2012!

I recently resigned from my position at Siemens and yesterday way my last day on the job. In order for my former colleagues to keep in touch with me, I updated my about.me page to sum up my profiles and contact information.

It sure feels weird to leave all those colleagues and friends behind. But I’m really looking forward to my new job as I’ll be joining a small – human size – company beginning of February, coming back to the core of my business, creating software solutions full time myself.

To all my former RO colleagues still working on our Radiotherapy solutions, I wish good luck and a strong back wind for the time being. The world is damn small, we’ll sure see each other again!

This tweet appeared today in my timeline and made me think a lot about the words we use day-in day-out without really having thought of their true meaning and the effect of their usage on our subconscious.

I like this idea of openly stating that the “mistakes” are the responsibility of the programmers, not some kind of insect, misfortune or destiny.

In many a company, “bugs” are called differently ; “defects” for instance. This is not better as it signifies something not right in the product ; no programmer involved in here. “Issue”? Not better… No, I really like the sound of “mistake” (I could settle on “screw-ups” if you insist)!!!

Now what about “Technical debt” which is in fact pure garbage that we intentionnaly leave aside, like a pile of dirty dishes that we know we should wash but we don’t. Naming it “debt” simply says that it will have to be paid back later (and potentially at a higher price) but it does not make it obvious that we conscientiously left it rot. Any idea how we could name it to make it obvious? Any other word that we should tackle?

Having a deep interest in learning, I quite often talk about this with my teacher of a father. Not so long ago, we had a long discussion about the balance shift that started happening in the last decade from a content (brute) learning education to an analytical comparative learning. In other word, you don’t need to know every answer but be talented at finding them where they are ; and with the obvious increasing availability of online materials, the later is growing exponentially. The point we discussed was that the major task for youngsters nowadays is more to be able to crawl their way through a massive content ocean to find a pearl based on their analytical skills than to know the answer to a question in the first place. A data mining era it is baby!

RSS feeds have been around for so long that I cannot imagine how we lived with it before. Well actually I do, it was like taking your bike to pay a visit to all your friends, only to realize at the end of the trip that none of them were actually at home and that you just did a 50km bicycle tour for free… well… sort of. RSS feeds act like a signal telling you beforehand that your friends are home and have something to say. Neat, huh?

I’ve been using them heavily since 2004 or 2005 and since then you should imagine them being widely used… but not quite. For some reasons I ignore and cannot understand, they’re not used as much as they could be with this always increasing demand for data crawling possibilities. Somehow, all websites are not born quite equal under this Oracle (pardon the pun).

To give you an idea, I picture websites in 3 categories:

First, the ones that use RSS feeds correctly, publish all their content on it and expose the link at an obvious place, for anyone to use. Those websites are the ones I like most. I can aggregate their data and read them from an external software. Most of the time, it gets rid of part of the formatting (which is still a good thing for a lot of websites) and helps crawl to the content faster.

Then, the ones that publish only the first paragraph of their articles or hide their feed so well that the only way to find it is to search in the source code of the page. If I can pretend to see the point in publishing only the first paragraph of an article (but in fact I really cannot), I sure fail to understand why one would hide their link so well that it is hardly possible to find in the page. If you care to create a RSS feed, then at least publish it correctly.

Finally the ones that don’t use RSS at all or worse, just publish the title of their feeds… I cannot understand. If I find a website I like but cannot find a feed, the chances are high that I’ll simply walk away. Same goes if you’re forcing me to open your page based on a single title… I’ll classify you right away in the visitor statistic self masturbatory asshole category and be on my way, believe me!

Even with a regular cleanup of my aggregator, I can barely go under the 200 feeds limit. And this number has the tendency to increase overtime. But that’s not my point. With something like one or two hundred new articles per day, I barely finish a day with more than 10 or 15 unread articles. Not bad of a data crawling technique don’t you think?

My questions to you would be the following: why the fuck are RSS feeds not used more intensively? Do you have an idea? And with this ever increasing data mining needs, where do you see the whole story going?

I have been thinking about this for quite a long time ; and I am not the only one. Since I keep on coming back to it, I feel I have to put it on paper once for good, just for the sake of clarifying my thoughts.

It’s a mystery for no-one here, I am quite active on internet ; and not just as a consumer but also as a publisher. I tweet, blog, update both my Facebook and Google+ status more or less regularly (and sometime do the same on LinkedIn and Xing). I also publish pictures on Picasa and of course Flickr. And that’s just the tip-of-the-iceberg.

Of course, the public using each medium is different, so one cannot expect somebody to follow – say – both my blog and my Facebook account. That means double information… pretty much everywhere. And that’s why I use some ‘cross-posting’ features to automagically import my Flickr photos in my blog or notify my new blog posts on Twitter & Facebook… but this is – to be honest – starting to kill me (and probably my geeky followers who see my updates show up at 2 or 3 places).

Each new trendy website claims to be the One that will unite them all. I believed tumblr could do that for a while… but it did not. I believed I could do it on my own blog, but I cannot even manage to gather all the ‘me’s of the web on my own website in a coherent manner… (a side bar with my tweets and another one for my Facebook status is not coherent enough for me)! Google seems to be good on its way with the junction of Buzz, G+, Picasa etc. but even if they managed to get their concurrents down, the cross-integration as it is now do not reflect the ‘me’ I picture, it is merely a disparate patchwork of ponctual feelings (twitter, fb & g+), of more or less reflected thoughts (my blog) and visual captures (flickr & picasa) with no link between them. Although somehow, none of those can go without the other…

In a time when anonymity is really questionned (see the growing story regarding the interdiction of pseudonyms on Google+), I find it strangely interesting that it’s important for my name to stant out when it can only be linked with an artificial portion of my personality. I don’t know what I’d like to see… but surely something else than what we have now…