According to my visitor logs, I got my first viewer from the leading Japanese social network (Mixi.jp) today... how cool is that? :-)

The person viewed my blog article about "TwoDaLoo" - the double-toilet for people who like to share everything.

 

Well, I hope they enjoyed or found it useful :-)

Since Obama just won the South Carolina primary by a huge margin, I just wanted to share a little political cartoon with you... I thought it was pretty funny. The thing is, any good leader needs charisma. Charisma can be a very powerful thing. But ultimately, charisma alone is not enough.

 

 

Saw this on Jay Leno's Headlines tonight, and went to look for it online. You know you've always wanted to take a dump with your significant other, haven't you? Remove that last bastion of privacy and peace in the household, and bask in each other's sounds and smells... Yours for a mere US $1,400 here.

Yesterday I almost wrote that I was starting work on a new, unannounced product - but then I decided not to even hint at it, and wrote about something else insstead. I was surprised today to find that news of this product has leaked - Mary-Jo Foley talked about it a few days ago. In this day and age, maybe it's truly impossible to keep something a secret... Well, I'm still not going to talk about it even if it has leaked, nor am I going to link to the MJ Foley article in question, or even describe the topic of her article in which it was mentioned. You'll just have to do your own legwork if you want to know what I'm working on!

I have owned two SLR (single lens reflex) cameras in my life, almost 30 years apart. My first serious camera was an Olympus OM10 SLR, pictured on the left. It went on sale in 1979, but I bought it used in my teenage years, I'm guessing somewhere around 1985. It was a fine camera, although nothing particularly special. I had 24mm, 50mm and 80-200mm lenses, a tripod, cable shutter release device, various filters and so on, and amongst other adventures, I lugged the entire kit with me on a bicycle tour of the west of Ireland in 1987, on my first trip to USA and Canada in 1988, and backpacking around Europe in the summer of 1989.

 

It's hard to believe that the camera came out almost 30 years ago, and it's also hard to believe that those vacations were about 20 years ago. Glorious summers of my youth. This Christmas, I got a multi-function printer which includes a scanner, and I have started the laborious task of scanning my old photos and slides into the computer, so they can be archived in a form which won't deteriorate over time. It's been very nostalgic to look back at those photos as I'm scanning them in. It's remarkable how well some of the photos have stood up to the ravages of time, but I'm glad to scan them now rather than waiting another 20 years...

 

In my 20s, probably due to having a regular job, I got out of photography for several years. I always had a camera but not a "proper" one - an SLR. Fast forward to 2007, and after a too-long hiatus, I got myself a Nikon D80 with a 80-300mm lens (35mm equivalent). So far though I've only used it as a "tourist and family event" camera rather than trying to do anything creative with it... I would like to get back into photography more seriously but it takes effort and isn't easy with a career, a wife and various other interests to occupy my time. But maybe one of these days I'll get the impetus I need to pick up the camera in earnest. In any event, my D80 is a D-SLR (digital single lens reflex), and perhaps the whole point of my blog post today was to compare the design of my first and second SLRs, almost 30 years apart in terms of design and features.

 

But, truth be told, it's not the camera which really matters. It's the photographs and the memories that they capture that are truly important.

Two months from now, I will be eligible to apply for US citizenship. This looming event makes me reflect on how I perceive my sense of nationality.

 

Until shortly before I left Ireland for the US, in 1998, I had grown up in a monoculture - everyone you met was Irish. You might occasionally run into an English person or an elderly American tourist of Irish ancestry, but that was about as exotic as it got. After joining Microsoft, however, I went through a phase where I liked to think of myself as a citizen of Europe rather than merely a citizen of Ireland - a quasi-Irish-European, if you will. The EU was coming ever closer together, removing restrictions on living and working in any of the original member countries (the EU had only 12 member states at that point), and the extensive cultural mingling of the various European nationalities that I found at Microsoft was a revelation. Daily, I sat at lunch with friends and colleagues from so many different countries, and I was exposed to French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, Spanish attitudes, beliefs and cultures... and many more besides. It was a wonderful and eye-opening experience, and one that prepared me for the even greater cultural melting pot of Microsoft in Redmond and West-Coast America.

 

I feel like I haven't been blogging here much recently, and I think Facebook is to blame! Because Facebook is more interactive than Spaces on the social networking side, if Facebook added proper blogging capabilities I might give up Spaces altogether. Why? Because I am not motivated by blogging for some random people to read by finding my blog through a Google search (I reckon 95% of my "audience" arrives from Google). I'm more motivated by blogging for my friends. I know that my friends could read this blog if they wanted to, but Facebook is where everyone turns to when they want to find out what's up with their friends. I import my Space's blog articles into Facebook already, but if Facebook offered it's own blogging solution I'd probably move in a heartbeat.

 

Hopefully Spaces moves more in the direction of social networking (I love the new homepage listing what all of my friends posted, a la Facebook's), but it needs to go even further, and quickly. As it stands, I'm 100% more likely to go to Facebook than to Spaces' homepage listing.

Nothing personal, I'm sure...  well, ok, to be honest I'm sure it was just a random IE crash which just happened to occur as my friend Karen's Space was loading in the browser window. But it's more fun to blame Karen. (insert evil laugh here).

 

yeah, you guessed right - I have nothing better or more important to talk about right now! It's been a slow start to the new year.

The fireworks at the Space Needle didn't really happen. Or they kinda-sorta happened. And then stopped. And started again. And stopped again. And then finally, in silence (no more music) someone just manually shot off all the fireworks in order until they were done - not in any kind of pattern, and no crescendo or finale, just ending like a damp squib, just as it began. It was very disappointing and embarrassing to watch, but at least I was watching from the comfort of my couch instead of having waited for hours in freezing temperatures to see the non-show live.

 

Computer glitch, they said. Predictably, the Mac zealots are already blaming it on Windows Vista.

 

Whose idea was it to start the show with the theme from the movie Jaws, anyway? That was surely ominous and foreboding from the start. Maybe they should reconsider that for next year. "Best show ever" the fireworks-chief said on TV right before the fiasco started, live in high definition. Eat your words, whoever you are. Oh and don't expect to be hired again next year, in Seattle or anywhere else.

 

I don't believe in fate or superstitions, but if the very first moment of 2008 goes terribly wrong, then the people who do believe in fate or superstitions must be imagining all kinds of disasters throughout 2008. What might be in store for Seattle during the rest of the year? Seahawks will lose in the first round of the Playoffs on Saturday, tech stocks will plummet, the housing market will crash and the 'big one' earthquake or Mt Rainier will erupt and destroy the city?

 

Well, look at it another way. The first 8 minutes of Seattle's 2008 were screwed up beyond belief, so we can only get better from here! Right?