My coworker Joel announced a few months ago that his wife was pregnant with their first children. I already had one of these projects underway with no intended recipient, so I actually managed to finish both of them within a couple of weeks of the children’s birth. I’ve been doing projects for children with these dogs for over 20 years. I think I’ll retire it. If I do more newborn projects, I’ll just have to come up with a different design.

A writer from MEL Magazine contacted me via a comment that I had made on a reddit question about whether men should run shirtless. My whole email interview got included in the article.

After I graduated high school in 1982, I spent the following school year as an AFS high school exchange student in Austria. This past weekend, I started scanning the hundreds of slides that I took during my year abroad, including the photo in this post of the village sign. Yes, I spent the year in a village called Großklein. For those of you who don’t speak German, groß = large, klein = small. Yes, I lived in big-little. Note that in Austria it’s common that if a new village springs up next to an existing one, they use the prefixes groß and klein to distinguish them. In the case, the existing village was named Klein.

I was a pretty early adopter of Gmail, and I got the username ‘stantaylor.’ Over the years, however, I have discovered that at least 3 or 4 other people in the world who share my name also think they have the my Gmail address–or at least people who are sending email to them think that they have it: one in Australia, one in the UK and at least one in the US. The latest is the one who signed up for Publisher’s Clearing House (TIL that PCL still exists). Or, based on the large volume of email that PCH has sent to this person at my email address, maybe someone who hates him signed him up, mistakenly using my email address. (I’m pretty sure it wasn’t someone who hates me because the emails are addressed to a different first name that shortens to Stan than my full first name). Another Gmail feature–filters–is saving me from the spam.

Last Saturday, Katie and I had a great time at the 56th annual Eeyore’s Birthday party, one of Austin’s most awesome traditions.

At work we celebrated Holi this year. A good time was had by all.

This reddit comment succinctly describes my experiences working in commercial software startups and, to a lesser degree, in established commercial software companies:

I’ve been in HCIT/Software for twenty years, and every time there was a major bug that caused a fiscal impact to the company when doing RCA, it always, 100% of the time happened because someone up on the food chain overwrote the decisions of the people who knew what the fuck they were doing.

I explained to him like this:

Salesman goes to a client and asks, “what will get you to buy this widget from me?”

Client replies “it has to do everything”

Salesman agrees.

Sales then delivers the requirement of everything to the product/project manager. PM then asks their team, “how long will it take to do all this?” The team will respond “eleventy years.”

PM goes back to sales to state it will take eleventy years, which of course isn’t good enough. PM asks sales then when do they need it by, which is always “immediately.”

PM goes back to their team, “What can you do by this date?” They respond with a much truncated list. PM provides it to Sales saying this is all they can deliver in that timeframe.

Sales then loses their shit, bitches to senior leadership if not all the way up to the C Levels, “We are gonna lose this huge ass sale because they cannot deliver everything by this date!”

So then the COO or SVP over development/production forces the team to just put out as much as they can by that date, so in order to do that and keep their jobs, corners are cut, QA is skimped, and you get a pile of widgets with an unacceptable defect percentage.

Then something breaks, everyone has to scramble to clean the mess, all the while the C Levels are blaming the development and operational teams and the sales guy is jerking off with the piles of cash from his commission and doesn’t give a shit, cause once the contract is signed it’s not his fucking problem anymore.

All the while the client really only wanted a widget that was affordable and worked.

Pentax MX SLR camera

Recently I’ve been reflecting on my history as an amateur photographer. I spent 1982-3 as a high school exchange student in Austria (for you German speakers, I really lived in a village called Großklein). Before I left, I decided that I wanted to buy myself a good camera. A friend had a Canon AE-1, which was the consumer-grade pinnacle of SLR technology at the time with shutter-priority auto-exposure. My dad, however, asked a professional photographer for camera buying advice, and he recommended a Pentax MX SLR camera. The only technology on the MX was a built-in light meter. As you manipulated shutter speed and aperture size, a row of LEDs along the bottom of the viewfinder indicated whether the light level was good (red – yellow – green – yellow – red).

Film photography had two big constraints that are unknown to digital photographers. The first is delayed gratification; you don’t get to see your photo until after the film is developed and printed–which was a matter of days at the very least (hence the eventual popularity of same-day photo processing). The other limitation was cost; there were three separate expenses related to film photography: the film itself, and the costs of developing the film and printing photos.

Candid portrait of my maternal grandmother taken with my Pentax MX, 1982

The constraints of film photography with an all-manual camera forced me to really learn the basics of photography–the interaction of film speed, aperture size and shutter speed–and to become a disciplined shooter in order to get the shot that I wanted. Taking multiple photos with different settings was prohibitively expensive;  there were essentially no do-overs; and post-processing was expensive and limited only to professional photography.

I’ve been taking photographs with a digital SLR for well over a decade now, and post-processing gets easier all the time. Yet I remain a mediocre and ambivalent post-processor of my photos. I reflected on this recently and realized that this attitude is due to my long history with film photography: I still consider getting the photo to be 90% of photography, whereas photographers who grew up on digital consider post-editing a much larger and more important part of the process.

Katie and Duncan, 1984

When I lived in Austria, I shot slide film mostly–it had better color and was somewhat cheaper since you didn’t get prints. All this reminds me that I still need to get my slides from that period scanned. I think I’ll work on that today.

It’s a very good year for Texas wildflowers.

My [relative] is definitely not a huge “influencer” but she has a pretty strong following and what she and her friends do is beyond bullshit and is like a continual eye-roll. Some great examples: buying books she will self-admittedly never open just to take photos with them, posing with somebody else’s Louis Vuitton luggage without asking them acting as if it was hers (it was left in the hallway of a hotel for some reason and they pounced on it to take photos before the owners came back out to get it), etc.
This year we were on another family vacation with her in [country] over [holiday] and it’s exhausting. The “photo shoots” are never ceasing, they happen all the time, she takes hundreds of photos a day and the whole group is supposed to wait for her. And the photo shoots become extremely rude (ie, she took a 6-7 minute “shoot” in a [place] once we were done eating that was blocking any of the [staff] from moving around the tiny place or [doing their job], I was so embarrassed I walked out). She hates her life pretty much and complained the entire vacation about how much she hated [the cities] but on her Instagram…[insert witty pun or hashtag based on the city and how much she loves it].

Any meal or museum or whatever she was on her phone updating and editing and filtering and airbrushing photos for a never-ending parade of Instagram Story updates. And on top of that she would demand (family ignored most of them thank God) to traverse across the cities to go to certain spaces or restaurants not because she wanted to experience the space, but because she wanted the photo. For example there was a restaurant in [city] she was dying to go to because they give you a balloon to hold while you wait and she thought it would make a fantastic Instagram story post. She couldn’t tell you what type of food this place served or what they were known for. She just wanted the photo. We denied the demand.

She’s totally lost touch with reality and lives her life on her feed. She has no ability to comprehend the enormous cognitive dissonance between what she is actually experiencing and how she portrays her life to her followers (like I said, she’d hate a meal because it wasn’t some basic American food but then act as if it was the best thing she’s ever eaten on Instagram). Or the fact that she is barely scraping by in life and most of the nice things in her life are gifts from my in-laws, but she portrays her life as this incredible luxurious parade of objects and spaces, and on wayyyy more than one occasion has tried to make a house or item look like hers when it is not. Not to mention there is not a shard of intellectual curiosity or personal passion left in her life at this point…every situation is assessed simply on “how will this make my feed look better/can this make my feed look better”. Places are not “experienced” they are just exploited for photos. The rest of the group would discuss the “place” itself (breakfast menu, painting, whatever) and she would only be able to talk strategy about how to photograph it and would seem genuinely confused when this wasn’t the priority for others as well (not our own photos mind you, but hers).

If you can’t tell I have strong feelings about this….