Mike Fullerton's blog

Miami Skyline

August 8, 2009 – 9:48 pm

Miami, from my hotel room balcony.

share this post:

It’s 12:30 am in Miami. It’s about 85 degrees and about 80% humidity. Saturday night means all the clubbers are heading out to the hotspots about now. I shot this picture from my balcony on the 15th floor in the W Hotel in the famous South Beach. This is the entrance to the club here at the hotel.

Keep in mind it’s frickin’ dark out and these people are down 15 floors and on the other side of the hotel! You can see way more in this picture than you can with your eyeballs. This is with a Nikon d700 and a 70-200 2.8 Zoom lens, hand held, with VR on.

This camera is unbelievable. I can’t believe this came close to coming out. I have a couple like this.

share this post:

Is this thing on? Tap, tap, tap? Cough.

June 22, 2009 – 12:15 am

Hello Cleveland!

Or not.

A lot has happened in the last few months. My apologies for ignoring you – you pack of snarling, vicious interwebulitees. Yes, that’s my word. Print it out in a really big sans-serif font. Study it. Learn to spell it. Scan it back in. Make it your desktop picture. Print it out again. Frame it. Repeat.

Here’s what’s up with me. The short version.

I quit Microsoft and started a new company.

Well, two companies.

First, GreenTongue Software. See that wheeled contraption over there? That’s the iPhone app bandwagon. See that goofy guy climbing hand over hand up the wagon wheel and perching himself on top of it? That’s me. I will now proceed to drink a Mai-Tai and start complaining about XCode.

Second, Slam Dunk Consulting. We help micro businesses get on the web. Fast. A micro business is a very small company. Like one to five people. Or less. Yes, less than zero, wise ass. The company has negative one people. Can I continue now? Anyway… lots of these micro business have no expertise in internet technology, and they don’t know how to get it, or don’t want to get it, or they don’t know who to trust. Many of these folks can barely get their e-mail, much less know what SEO or social networking is. And they’ve likely had bad experiences and lost lots of money with shady goombas and shysters selling .com juice. And, of course, everyone needs to be on the web. Now. And likely they need to be on the first page of google or bing or yahoo searches. They depend on it. What Slam Dunk Consulting offers is prepackaged solutions to solve all these problems at reasonable prices, with quick delivery, all done by trustworthy and ethical people, e.g. me and other folks I’m working with. Including my dogs, who are getting pretty good at editing MX records (cheap labor paid in bacon strips per hour).

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Timmy got stuck in a well. Er, I mean, since I left the mothership, the stock price has gone up. Random uncorrelated fact. Also, I’ve been working hard under contract writing a really really cool iPhone app. I can’t tell you what it is, but I will. At some point. And you’ll want it. And you’ll get it.

Of course also I’ve been learning about running a small business. Lot’s to learn. Who knew accounting was so annoying?

Stay tuned. Radio silence has now be broken, and stay tuned for regular broadcasts on this frequency. Frequency Mike.

Over and out.

(Yeah, yeah, photography blog FAIL. Move on.)

share this post:

Still working through my pictures from Maui…

January 30, 2009 – 11:23 pm

I’ve worked my way through most of my pictures from Hawaii. I’ve pulled about 1100 out of of the 3700 that are great shots for remembering the trip. After that I’ll narrow it down to my photography favorites. I’ve been lagging so far behind on everything but now I’m starting to feel a bit more like I’m catching up. Kinda. Not there yet, but the light has been spotted. You know, the one at the end of the tunnel. It’s still a bit dim. But hey, whadayagonnado?

Here’s a shot of Julia’s banana bread stand on north Maui. Home of the best banana bread on the planet. And I had some. And it’s pretty damn good. My mouth is getting frisky remembering it. Saliva glands activating. I think I’ll go eat a banana. I have a sudden craving. For a banana.

1: By
Reeves Little on April 2, 2009 at 10:49 am:

They should be ready in time for your 25th anniversary.
2: By
Mike Fullerton on May 13, 2009 at 1:06 pm:

Haw haw. It’s funny because it’s true.

share this post:

Schnikeys that’s a lot o pixels

January 19, 2009 – 9:50 pm

I’ve been working on getting my photo library, um, organized and available for viewing. Sigh. I’m rapidly approaching twenty five thousand pictures. Compared with the pros it’s not that many, I know, but it’s hard enough managing this many that it makes me cry like a little girl. I pity the fool who has ten times this number. At this point, every other sentence from Bunny is “are the wedding pictures done yet?” Can’t blame her, but this shiznit takes me forever. I’m trying. I really really is.

This is interesting – here’s how many pictures I’ve taken broken down by year:

1998: 5 (this is how many digital pictures I have from that year, though I shot some film).
1999: 89 (started going digital with a Nikon something or other. I think it was 10 pixels. That’s right. No mega.)
2000: 719
2001: 334
2002: 2006
2003: 759
2004: 289
2005: 1684
2006: 3087
2007: 2533
2008: 13038 (no, that ain’t a typo)

I’m trying to go through them, choose a minimum bar for quality, keyword them (I’ve done a lot already), at least make sure the white balance is correct, and upload them to our pictures site. I’ve also renamed them and organized them on disk.

Now I have so much data that my 1TB disk for my Time Machine backups isn’t big enough for a single Time Machine backup. Damn. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that yet.

In the short term I’ve turned off Time Machine, which I’m not happy about, and I’m mirroring everything to my server (a homemade Windows Home Server box) using Synchronize Pro. I still have 2.5tb free there and everything is duplicated so I’m not worried for the moment. It does worry me, though, that I don’t have versioned backups.

If only Time Machine (reliably) worked with SMB mounted volumes (Mike shakes fist in direction of Cupertino) so I could use Time Machine with my server…

I’m now eyeing the new HP MediaSmart Server. They’ve fixed this problem (so you can back up to it with Time Machine). I want one but I have to spend my money on other mildly important things like food. (Did you know that weddings are expensive? Who knew!?) I figure I’ll eventually get one (unless Apple fixes this problem in Snow Leopard) and use it for my Mac backups and use the current Server as a file share and PC backup.

I also don’t have a good, eh, any offsite backup at the moment. God forbid my house implodes because I built it on a Indian burial ground. (I hate it when that happens.) Not many things I own are irreplaceable. My pictures are pretty much at the top of this list. This includes all the slides and analog photographs I have in boxes in the garage.

I think it’s best not to think too hard about this or I’ll have to start breathing rapidly in and out into a paper bag and pound some sort of conscious reducing substance. And that wouldn’t be pretty.

By Mike Fullerton | Posted in Photography | | no comments |

share this post:

You. Yes you. I am now going to experiment on you. So quit squirming.

January 10, 2009 – 1:32 pm

After five years of blogging I’ve decided to publish all my blog posts as a graphic novel with me as caped superhero. My superpower would be the perfectly timed wisecrack. Just kidding. I do want to make a change though. I’m going to focus my blog more on photography and see what happens.

There are three things I’m passionate and deeply interested in. (These, of course, do not include the really important things in life like my new wife and family and friends. Just to be clear.)

These three things are:

Writing software (my day job)
Reading (both Fiction and Non-Fiction)
Writing
Photography

Ok, that’s four things. Notice that math isn’t one of those three things.

And then there’s blogging. Where does that fall in this list? Certainly number three. But where else? All. None. Some. Which is exactly the problem.

Everything I’ve read about creating a successful blog (usually on a successful blog) suggests that the blog should specialize in something. Pick a topic. Any topic. And run with it. Right there, Mike’s blog equals blogging fail. My blog is too schizophrenic.

Here’s a great post on writing a blog by Penelope Trunk (whom I’m a big fan of).

I’m not sure how this will work out, but as I said it’s an experiment. I’m going to leave my posting of whacky youtube videos and random links to my twittering and try to write about where my life intersects with photography. That said, I’m going to try to do it in a way that doesn’t bore those of you not so interested in photography.

I hope you stick with me and keep reading, thanks.

Thanks Reeves for the photo.

By Mike Fullerton | Posted in Blogging, Photography | | 5 comments |

1: By
Reeves Little on January 10, 2009 at 9:05 pm:

You’re welcome for the photo… now where’s my freakin’ royalty check?
2: By
Mike Fullerton on January 11, 2009 at 12:26 pm:

Check is in the mail.
3: By
Penelope Trunk on January 11, 2009 at 3:32 pm:

I love watching how peoples’ blogs change. Usually people talk about how their blog is changing because they are changing. But you have a twist on things where you deicide that some stuff you post is better on Twitter (I think I agree) and so you make room for experimenting with new stuff. Change is so hard. And we should all be so honest and brave about what stuff belongs where in our own lives.

Penelope
4: By
Daniel Kokott on January 13, 2009 at 11:17 am:

I totally agree with your change. It only makes sense to be more focused on your blog. I struggling at that too.
I started out by doing my blog about computing and developing (also my day-time job – and at that time more my hobby than it is now). I wanted a blog to publish my articles about open source software. Then it started to be about music. Now there almost no computing, the music is still there but almost outdone by photography. But it’s still not very focused. On top of that, I have to do it in different languages, so that the german part of my family can read it too.

Now most of my random links about music and gadgets and other shared news, is being shared via delicious.com and Google Reader. (Twitter is also a very good medium for random things.) Hopefully that will make my blog more personal.

/Daniel
5: By
Mike Fullerton on January 24, 2009 at 1:35 pm:

Thanks for the comments everyone, they inspire me to get off my buttish region and post more!

share this post:

Go to top of page

Miami Skyline

Watching the beautiful people

Is this thing on? Tap, tap, tap? Cough.

Still working through my pictures from Maui…

Schnikeys that’s a lot o pixels

You. Yes you. I am now going to experiment on you. So quit squirming.

Pages

Categories

Archives

blogroll

RSS Feeds

Meta