Shooting people at work

There has been a movement in Plaxo recently to make the blog “more edgy” and less bland corporate PR crap. I can only say that’s a good thing.

One little gem of that outgrowth is a wonderful entry by my co-worker Michael Rowley on photographing people at work. Actually, yesterday we had a “Haxo” day where we spend our time working on a project not related to my current work. Michael spent his Haxo Day photographing at Plaxo so in many ways this blog entry was an outgrowth of his Haxo project.

If you are curious as to Michael’s style, here is a candid he took of me:

Terry 0277

“Terry 0277” by Mnemonix
(Sony Cybershot DSC-F717) f/2.2 at 1/100 second, iso 400, 7.2mm (69mm)

(Note, I may have arrived at the effective focal length calculation incorrectly. The Sony DSC-F717 is a 2/3″ CCD sensor, so I figure the multiplier is 4x.)

Haxo is Plaxo’s version of “Google 20% time” or rather, Haxo and 20% time are a version of something that has been around in the Bay Area for quite a while. But the employees objected to 20% time. For some at Google, 20% time has becomes 120% time, since you still have to finish all your work before taking it. From a personal/business standpoint, it is obvious that 20% time is a ploy to take your creative energy and funnel it into Google-related and Google-owned projects instead of those going off and forming your own company with your own idea on your own time (a la Yahoo! or Microsoft).

But I digress.

The original idea was a day to work on your own idea, and Haxo harks back to that. Since I missed the first one (it fell on a mandatory week off I was given after working on eCards), I spent my first Haxo day working on a few projects others wanted, none of which I can talk about here.

But it was very cool. I managed to sneak one of them in as an undocumented easter egg in the next release of eCards. 🙂

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