Recently in Personal Category

Taken before Allie's birthday party at Antarctica, down in the Village.

I'm going to probably take this over to Ebay sooner or later, but in case anyone is interested, I'm about to sell my Nikon 18-200 VR DX lens. This is a _great_ lens, especially if you want to only carry one lens (perfect for travel) since it goes from fairly wide (about 28mm equiv) to telephoto (300mm equiv) when on a Nikon DX digital SLR. Let me know if you're interested.

A set with a few samples of shots from this lens is here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/karlo/sets/72157615079059784/

I'll add more photos to that set over the next day or two.

Why am I selling it? I have at least 4 weddings this summer (one in my immediate family) and I'd like to have a faster, medium range zoom like a 24-70 f/2.8 to use at those events. Also, since I don't have kids (and hence rarely shoot sports or arts events) I have found that I don't tend to use the longer end of the zoom range on this lens very often.

So there's about 4 photos of me at the event, and I think I'm staring into my laptop in 2 of them (I'd point out this one was taken _between_ speakers.) In my defense, everyone else in the shots is staring at the ir laptops too.

My first experiences with email were all server-side applications. Bulletin boards, Compuserve and dialup Internet, then the Athena Unix terminals of my years at MIT. At the time, it made sense - modems were slow, downloading messages took time, and there weren't attachments.

In the interim, I've been a die-hard user of desktop email clients. At my old finance job, I regularly received 100-150 emails a day, which sounds like a lot until you realize that if you're working on 10-12 projects or pitches, that's only 10 emails between team members per day. (Bankers tend to use CC: reflexively, but you are expected to be up to speed on all the threads even if you're not the direct recipient.) I was an Outlook power user by day and a Mozilla Thunderbird wonk by night, plus I carried (and still carry) a Blackberry that gets checked compulsively. (The dog, mind you, gets jealous about how much attention the berry gets.)

Even when not connected to the net, I want access to my email - it's not just a communications tool, it's also a major database of filed information I need when working. But with the addition of offline Gmail access via Google Gears last week, the final issue tying me to desktop clients has been resolved - I can now read and write emails on flights and away from wifi using Gmail.

For the next week, I'm going to try using Gmail's web interface exclusively when at my computer, a MacBook. I've removed Thunderbird from my application dock so I don't open it by mistake, and I've installed Google Notifier in my menu bar so I can see when a new message has arrived. There's a printout of the cheat sheet for Google Mail keyboard shortcuts and I'm going to to my best to force myself to use them so I can get up the learning curve faster. And I'm going to see how using a web-only interface to my email box works out.

I'll admit I'm skeptical... I have a hard time seeing how a web-based app can outperform a "sovereign" application like Thunderbird or Outlook. (Although I was never really happy with the keyboard shortcut support in Thunderbird, relative to Outlook.) But there are a lot of obvious benefits as well, including the ability to get the same interface wherever I can access a web browser. I'll post in a week how it's been, and whether I'll be able to remove Thunderbird from my MacBook permanently.

I'm a huge fan of using patterns when designing web services, especially when it comes to user interaction and non-core tasks. There's a number of reasons why:

1. You can focus on what differentiates your service, rather than re-designing what others have already worked out through trial and error
   
2. Users are happier with interaction flows they expect -- and generally, they expect what they've seen before when using other products
3. If you're working with a team, they'll generally understand and build a known pattern faster  and more correctly than a totally new design, even if the new one might be marginally better
   

Sometimes though, using patterns can get you into trouble even if they do fit the immediate requirements. As part of building IsAlternateSideParkingInEffect.com, I utilized a very standard pattern for validating new users -- sending an email to a user with a unique token, then requiring that they provide the token from the email to the system in order to fully activate their subscription.

Frankly, it worked well -- too well. Only about 50% of users would complete the validation (and I assume that the number of spurious submissions is well below half.) For a service where the risk of a faked registration is almost nothing, the pattern was costing me way too many users in the process of guarding against them. The guards were protecting the front gate, but they were eating all of the villagers' food.

I've since changed the process to an "opt-out" model - when a user submits their email to the site, they are immediately "activated", but every message they receive from then on has an unsubscribe link at the bottom. Making this relatively simply change from the established pattern immediately doubled the yield rate of subscribed users per unique visitor to the web site. It was simply a case where the "best practice" pattern didn't fit with the realities of a very specific service design, and acknowledging that reality.

As much as I love posting my photos here on my blog and on Flickr, I find that I get a lot more out of them when I have them properly printed, framed and hung in my house. I moved into my current apartment in July but I'm just now getting around to hanging a whole new set of photos on the wall. Part of the fun is changing out most if not all of the images when I move to a new place.

You'd think it would be a trivial project to hang a couple of photos on the wall. But I learned this morning that things can get a little more complicated when you're trying to hang a group in an orderly fashion.

Here's what I found out the hard way, maybe it will help you avoid my mistakes:

• Hang the middle photo first, then place the other photos by seeing how they look with that center photo placed.
• If you're marking the horizontal location for that center photo with tape, make sure your dog doesn't eat the tape while you're facing away.
• If you're hanging for people who will view the photos standing, hang with the center 60 inches off the ground. Especially pay attention to this rule if you're taller than normal -- if you try to eyeball it, you're going to be too high. Mine are at 62 inches and I still think they're probably a little too high.
• If you have vertical and horizontal photos, put the hook for the vertical photos higher by exactly half the amount the longer dimension extends past the shorter (i.e., for 11x14 frames, 3/2 inches). Sounds obvious, but it will save you time versus eyeballing it.
• Use picture wires behind the frames rather than the built-in hanging holes. But don't put much slack in the wires... if they get enough upwards angle, they may start dragging the frame clips up the inside of the frame.
• Measure twice... then measure again. Once you've marked the location of the outside pictures, re-measure their distance to the nail or hook for the middle frame, or measure across both and see if the middle matches up with that nail. I found an error of about 1/2 inch when I did this.

(And for the record, the leftmost photo in this image is definitely not one of mine. It's a famous photographer - points for anyone who knows who it is.)

It's the little pooper's 1st birthday today. We've had him in the house for about 8 months, and it's hard to believe how much he's grown since his puppy days. He's more than doubled in weight (from 12 lbs to 25 lbs) but his favorite morning routine remains finding a patch of sun and sleeping in for an extra hour or two after breakfast.

...that even on the Internet, your mom still calls you "tommy"... but does she really even have to have me in her address book that way too?

(Mom also doesn't believe in subject lines. The day I get a message from her that is a one-line subject with "n/t", I'll know it's time to prepare for the reckoning.)

I've finally gotten around to the long-overdue task of properly linking to the sprawling reaches of my little Web 2.0 empire from the main page on Karlo.Org. From now on, if you're looking for my Flickr page, or my Facebook profile, or whatever, you can find it in the link of lists on the Karlo.Org home page. If you run into any problem using the new links, let me know -- they seem to work for me, but some services can be a little funny about profile links (I'm looking at you, Facebook.)