Transamerica

Photo from August 30, 2007

Transamerica
North Beach, San Francisco, California

Panasonic DMC-LX1
1/500 sec at f/4.0, iso 80, 15.6mm (70mm)

Part of the same photo roll as this photograph, I ended up processing it also before I noticed the error.

It’s a “tourist snapshot” of the Transamerica Pyramid. From a photographic standpoint there is nothing to write about because I took it the same way any tourist might. Even though the camera shoots RAW, the dynamic range of small camera CCDs back then were just not up to the task of recording anything useable in the shadows. All I could do is use the “pump the blues” trick that any nature photographer knows to do for outdoor photos.

…

Even though Transamerica has long since moved to the East Coast, because it was built by them and its still in their logo, it’s still called the Transamerica Building and has been a the salient fixture of the San Francisco skyline for my entire life. I read somewhere that when it was built it was considered the ugliest building in the city until the Mariott “Jukebox” was built in 1989. I guess after that the One Rincon Tower Fan were built, San Franciscans were like, “You know, the Transamerica pyramid actually looks kind of nice.”

I snapped this photo outside my favorite sandwich shop at the time, Giordano Bros, which, like Transamerica, has moved to a different location.

A lot of people don’t “get” the All-in-One sandwich because they didn’t grow up in Pittsburgh, but putting french fries and coleslaw in a sandwich seems the most natural thing to do. Before I even ate at Primati’s I used to put Snyders of Berlin BBQ potato chips in my chipped ham sandwiches when I ran out of Isaly’s BBQ sauce.

Ever wonder why it took a Pittsburgh franchise to popularize the Bob’s Big Boy sandwich as the McDonald’s Big Mac? Go eat an All-In-One and then go eat a Big Mac and your culinary mind will be blown.

I may not have the tastebuds of a foodie, but to make up for it when I eat, with a single bite into a sandwich, my mind can travel trans-america from San Francisco, to Oak Brook, to Pittsburgh, to Los Angeles and back again. And that’s why my favorite sandwich in San Francisco when I snapped this photo was Giordano Bros’s Coppa All-in-One.

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Executive Decisions

Some changes are happening at my last company and someone pointed me to this timeline a Wikipedian compiled of it, on which, I’m an early entry.

Despite understandable omissions and commissions , what a huge effort that must have been! I continue to be impressed with the dedication of the Wikipedian community.

The other day, a friend and co-worker wondered, “Could you imagine what would it’d be like if we were still there?” I responded, “I don’t since I would have resigned long before.” So I had only enough overlap with the outgoing Executive Director to form some suspicion, but not enough to say anything beyond what I’ve already said.

Instead I want to use this moment to comment on her predecessor, someone I did work long enough under long enough to form an opinion, Sue Gardner. I’ve never met anyone who can read so much about an organizational issue from such a small clue as Sue to the point where I chose intentionally each of my interactions with her. She was extremely thoughtful—as in putting a lot of thought into something—and expected and appreciated the same from others. Sometimes she’d make an observation in an area that I, who was working daily on it, had missed. When you are a chief executive who has less time for anything than anyone else, I learned from her these are essential skills to being a good one.

When she left she spent a number of hours with us to discuss hiring practices. One thing she said then was you should check yourself in a new hire because there will be no time you’ll feel better about your hire than the day you hire them.

That’s something that can be applied directly to replacing someone and indirectly through the ripples created by any hire. Too often people get excited about what a new person brings or might bring instead of wondering what will be lost by people leaving or being displaced. Instead of focusing in what you’ll be gaining with a new hire, ask, “What skills did the outgoing person have that they were great at?” Those are the ones your organization will definitely be losing with the person incoming.

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Not every Apple product is for you

(An article I started in May of 2015)

“The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.”
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

In 1992, one of my first postings on Usenet was an article on comp.sys.mac.* titled “Zen and the Art of Buying a Macintosh.” As someone whose first computer was an Apple ][+ in 1979, used Macs since they came out in 1984, and owned them since the “Fat Mac” in 1985, I was the very definition of an Apple-lover. In writing that post, I wanted to express the confusion and helplessness I felt when recommending a Macintosh to anyone. There were PowerBooks, Performas, LCs, Centrises, and Quadras, some of which were the same exact computer with different names. If a Mac fanboy like me couldn’t make heads-or-tails of it, something was seriously wrong for the Macintosh. It was clear to me that Apple had lost the very quality that attracted people like me to it in the first place. That post became popular enough that a number of Mac user group newsletters asked to republish it.

That Apple, the one that made infomercials, is no more. Steve Jobs retook the helm in 1997 and radically simplified its line into a quadrant based on two questions: Do you want a laptop or desktop computer? Are you a professional or consumer?

Those days are gone, but I can’t help but feel that Steve Jobs embedded in the DNA of Apple something to ensure they’d never again lose the very quality of “Apple” that would take it in a wrong direction. Apple became a company that stopped making something just because some business analyst said that they need to because it was “disruptive” or ” would protect their market share,” but rather a company that would only introduce a product when they had an idea who that product would be for.

Now to you kids, I want to tell you this: not every Apple product is for you.

Continue reading to have your bubble burst after the jump

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Rethinking rituals for a new workforce

Cross-posted from the Tink Tank.

Yesterday, I came across this article on the economic and political impact of job automation on FiveThirtyEight. Their analysis was done by looking at the percentage of non-“routine” jobs, under the theory that those jobs are most at-risk for automation. It mentioned that these jobs accounted for all job growth in the United States since 2000, with the Bay Area, where I live, occupying two out of the top three metropolitan areas in smallest share of routine jobs, largest job growth, and largest average wage growth.

Let’s focus on the the discussion of “non-routine jobs.” Given that job growth is pretty much only in this sector, it is just another term for what is a clear change in the workforce of America. Consider that in 2002, sociologist Richard Florida referred to “no collar workers” in his book, The Rise of the Creative Class—a distinction he drew up between the dress code of creatives from the blue collar and white collar workers of the previous generations. In 2006, business writer Daniel H Pink said that these new jobs were either “high-concept” or “high-touch” requiring right-brained thinking.

Notice the similarity in non-routine work of a no-collar worker that is either high-concept or high-touch doing work that is not-automateable because it requires right-brained, creative thinking. Ignoring the social and political implications, the reality is that this is a different workforce than the generations that preceded it.

And yet, the rituals that surround that work are firmly grounded in the past.

Our grandparents had their blue-collar wages negotiated under collective bargaining. Our parents had their white-collar salaries determined by performance reviews that were later modernized into 360 degree feedback. What do we have in our no-collar jobs?

As an engineering director with thirty direct reports in my final year at a top 10 internet company, I had to do 360-degree annual review. It was the most tedious part of being a manager and one of the most dreaded thing among my people. Doing a good job with it felt like a constant fight against the natural order of what motivated and inspired my engineers.

And yet, the cutting-edge job performance idea is taking that same process and increasing its frequency and adding big data-esque quantitative metrics. They believe that if you take incentives designed for a non-creative work, automate its application to evaluate non-automateable jobs, have them suffer this dread on a routine basis instead of once a year, and apply arbitrary qualitatively evaluations of right-brained, non-routine, high-concept/high-touch work that this will magically inspire these non-collar wearing creatives to perform better, and not the opposite.

That’s some serious wrong-thinking.

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The Seagull 1963

If I keep processing only old photos, I’ll never get ahead, so I thought I’d process some photos I took recently with four different cameras . They’re all of the same subject so you can see how camera/lens choice affect composition and processing. But since this article is not about photography, I’ll put that discussion the the photo captions.

Instead I’ll talk about a watch I “splurged” on: the Seagull 1963 Re-issue. Here it is after I just opened the box (taken with a Nikon D810):

Seagull 1963 just opened
The Richmond, San Francisco, California

Nikon D810, Nikkor 24-80mm f/2.8G
0.4sec @ ƒ14, iso 100, 62mm

Since I already set up my tripod and lightbox for a different shoot, I used the same setup to photograph the unboxing of my newly purchased watched. This image is nothing to write home about as I only take unboxing photos to document how to return something to its original packaging.The nice thing about a tripod photo is that long exposure times don’t matter (as long as the watch isn’t running). The only adjustment I had to do was in exposure and contrast.

I guess they ran out of commemorative tins.

Continue reading mabout this watch (and more photos) after the jump

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On being a beginner (again)

Compiled from three separate discussions on IRC, twitter, and in person:

“Whatcha do with your time these days? Learning Rails? ?”

I did pick up Objective-C again after an aborted attempt at learning Swift. Mostly I’m trying to catch up on the javascript frameworks that have come out since I stopped coding. Right now it’s AngularJS—I figure I can jury-rig React into it if performance becomes an issue.

On the non-programming side, I’ve been messing with Ansible because I just got tired of doing things by hand—and I never needed to learn this because I’ve always had operations engineers working with me.

The ripping on Rails thing is over with me because there’s no point in arguing over how to solve a solved problem—today, the web problem is the easy part. What I find strange is people still feel the need to defend Ruby on Rails. I mean who the fuck cares what your middle layer code is written in when everything is an API to something written in Javascript?

“I don’t like that everything is an API to something in Javascript. As a user, the Web feels slower and flakier than it used to.”

I don’t like that everything on the front-end is pushed toward a single-page application. The reason for this is that the DOM-based model of front-end javascript (e.g. jQuery) gets so taxing when the application gets big because you’re bolting feature-on-feature, library-on-library to get it to work as smoothly as you envision. At a certain point, a true MV(VM) javascript framework (e.g. AngularJS) gives you much more because it abstracts all that in a consistent manner.

As soon as you buy into one of these, you’re invested into a huge initial javascript payload which causes you to not want the user to leave the page to unload anything, which then forces you into an API-based model with HTML partials and a client-side route/sitemap and more crap in the payload until you have a single-page application.

And then pretty soon your website is like Flickr where I swear every tenth click I’ve got to reload the page because the UI became non-responsive and I’m deciding to open the app in my iPhone just to do something without that frustration. How fucked up is that?

But then I look at Bootstrap and I figure, I’d rather have a SPA than everything looking like it was designed by some Apple-loving hipster (and this coming from a person who has used and loved Apple products longer than they’ve been alive).

“I’ve always enjoyed your talks and lamented that you didn’t remain on the PHP speaking circuit.”

Maybe I’ll start speaking when I have something to say. Like I’ve said before, PHP solves the “web problem” very well, but the web-problem is not a hard problem anymore.

Remember, it’s been four years since I’ve done any UI programming so everything is new to me. Basically, I’m a newbie, and I don’t think anyone wants to hear from someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

But I did notice this from managing engineers: the worst problem a coder can get into is fear of having to start over. You get good at what you’re good at and when things pass you by, you feel the need to protect what you have because its what you know.

That’s how I feel about Ruby on Rails and that’s how I feel about me and PHP.

So, I’m a beginner again.

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A.J.

Photo from February 28, 2015

I had just written an article mentioning my old high school, when a classmate of mine messaged me on Twitter when he realized why he friended me. It turned out he was in Mountain View on business, so I drove down to visit him. The last time I saw him was 25 years ago!

We picked him up at his hotel and I suggested Clarke’s because it’s one of the best burger joints around. While waiting for food, I snapped this photo.

A.J.
Clarkes Charcoal Broiler
Mountain View, California

Leica M8, Cosina-Voigtländer NOKTON 35mm F1.2
1/350sec, iso 160, 35mm (47mm)

I keep forgetting the razor-thin depth-of-field, so though one eye was in focus, the other one wasn’t. As I mentioned, I prefer monochrome images when I shoot with my Leica, so I used nik Silver Efex Pro. Control points helped me separate his hair from the background and add some sharpening in the blurry eye.

Continue reading another story after the jump

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Top Gun

Photo from May 18, 2008

My friend Andrei called me and said that today was Bay to Breakers. A friend of ours, Kara, invited us to Orange Photography which back then was on the race route and would set up a free photo booth. But by the time we got there the race was long gone.

Kara introduced me to Gene Hwang, one of the co-founders, and after helping them clean up, we drove to the panhandle to see if we could catch the tail end of Bay to Breakers.

One of the great things about this event is that every stranger enjoyed their photo taken. Thus, armed with my Leica and Nikon, I started snapping away. At one point, this pilot in a sick costume started to salute me until I snapped her photo.

My only criticism is that it looks like she’s piloting an F4, but the mirrorshade aviators really are a great touch.

At that point her commander, Lt. Thurston, noticed me too and they allowed me to take a portrait of them.

Top Gun
Bay to Breakers
Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California

Nikon D3, Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G
1/1250sec @ ƒ2.8, iso 200, 24mm

Now I didn’t realize the Navy flew any F-117s and I’m not sure why a lieutenant is sporting captain’s bars, but from the naked people I saw, I’m sure everything is okay on Bay to Breakers day.

Continue reading about how this photo was processed after the jump

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Xmas at SFO

Photo from December 20, 2014

Sometimes there not much to a photo, because it’s just a snapshot:

Xmas at SFO
San Francisco International Airport, San Mateo County, California

iPhone 6
1/17 sec @ f/2.2, iso 250, 4.15mm (35mm)/caption]

When dropping my friend off at SFO, I noticed the Christmas lighting and Golden Gate Bridge decorations at the airport and snapped this.

It’s impressive how good the cameras in mobile phones are nowadays. The only issue is JPEG processing means that Lightroom noise reduction + sharpening posterizes the image somewhat (look at the embankment to the right).

I wonder what SFO looks like now that the Super Bowl is in town.

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