Quite a few years ago, I set an annual goal for myself to complete all the outstanding things I had to do by the end of the year. The reasoning behind the goal was to start out the new year fresh and hopefully stay on top of things throughout the year.
This year will not be one of those years. I don’t like goals.
This past year was tough for me in some ways, and it was great in others. Overall, it was a year spent trying to figure out who I am, what I enjoy, and how I should be who I want to be. I made some progress, but a lot of the year was just spent thinking.
I have a lot to do on my day off tomorrow, but I’ll hopefully have a chance to write a fairly extensive post about the things I want to focus on in 2008. (Call them resolutions if you want… I don’t want to.) I really don’t want to spend a lot of time dwelling on the past year instead of moving onward and (hopefully) upward, so I’ll just end this last post of 2007 with a few of my very-very-favorite photos out of the approximately 4,500 save-able shots from the last twelve months (for comparison, I took just about 2,000 in 2006 and 1,800 in 2005). Some have deep emotional attachments; others are just cool shots.
Happy New Year, everyone!
We have a lot of traditions in my family, and I enjoy them all: holiday baking, whale watching in the summer, apple picking in the fall, a hike up Mount Battie in Camden in the spring. We’ve done them for more years than I can remember.
Two years ago I started another tradition: a Christmas Eve trip to South Paris, Maine. I’ve spent the last two Christmas Eves with my friend Melody. We usually grab a bite to eat and catch up on what’s happening in our lives. We also visit the elk farm in West Paris.
The elk at the farm are amazing. They’re beautiful animals, and they’re used to being fed grains by people. They walk right up to the fence and will lick the grain out of your hand if you so choose; you can also throw it into a feeding trough. They seem to like being patted, and they’re lots of fun overall.
The other highlight of the trip is the drive back home. I stay in South Paris until around five, and then I make the three-hour drive back through Rumford, Farmington, and Skowhegan, stopping at the Irving station in Farmington for a cup of hot chocolate and admiring the Route 2 Christmas decorations along the way. On the radio for the trip is WHOM‘s “Home for the Holidays.” The leisurely drive on Christmas Eve with Christmas music in my ear makes me smile for the whole trip home.
On Monday I’ll continue my South Paris elk trip tradition. It’s one of the few new traditions I’ve started recently, and it really makes me realize what’s so special about doing the same things year after year: it evokes emotion. The drive back is a quintessential Christmas season experience for me.
Merry Christmas to you all. No matter what you practice, enjoy the season.
Yes… I’m videoblogging. I made this video right after the big snowstorm, and because my PowerShot SD600, blip.tv, and the Internets in general are awesome, I can share it with you now.
Any future videoblogs will, of course, be part of Collage.
I felt like it was time to do some tweaking this morning, so I changed some stuff on my blog and on Collage.
Let me say this right off the bat: Subscribe to or bookmark Collage instead of this blog. Collage reads in EVERYTHING I do – not just blog posts. You’ll get all of my pictures from Flickr, any YouTube vids I post, and a ton more. More sources will be added soon-ish. Of course, if you read my posts through Facebook or something like that, it doesn’t really apply to you. I’d love to have you read or subscribe to Collage anyway!
In fact, here are the only links you need: Read Collage | Subscribe to Collage
I wanted to make Collage even more appealing. Two Cents and a Thousand Words has kind of gone by the wayside as far as usefulness is concerned, and I’ve pretty much used it only as an outlet to inject Collage with content that won’t fit anywhere else. You won’t miss a thing if you subscribe to Collage instead of this blog; everything here ends up there. I added a list of sources to each Collage section, and I also added a little description of what each page shows. I think I finally squashed the time bug, too, that’s been showing incorrect times since I moved my site to a different server (in California) this summer. I now understand why lots of Web apps use relative time instead of absolute time.
At the same time, I didn’t want to lose all faith in the blog. If you’re coming to comment on a post or if you just find the blog in a search engine, I’ve scaled down the number of categories I use to be more content-driven than topic-driven. In other words, if you want to see my “photoblog” (stories and events that revolve around the photos I take), check out the Photography category. For project updates, check My Work. I may go back and re-associate everything, but don’t hold your breath. You’re on your own for older posts. I almost have 700 blog posts, after all.
Questions or comments? Get in touch with me. More to come soon, of course.
60 Minutes did a report on our generation. I read about it at 37signals, where Matt summed it up well: “What a crock of shit.”
This is the letter I wrote CBS after I read and watched the piece:
I’ll be bluntly honest: I was offended by your 60 Minutes “Millienials” piece. As a 24-year-old Web developer, I find it outrageous that you stereotyped a whole generation based largely on the accounts of two twenty-somethings who make a living coaching its least productive workers.
Why, in a piece covering 12- to 27-year-olds, were a large majority of the interviewees not contained within that age range? Why was all the video footage of our generation illustrating the carefree, priority-lacking members of our generation instead of showing some of us who are passionate about the work that we do or individuals who have already had great success starting their own businesses and companies?
While watching the piece, I couldn’t help but think of those old sitcoms with a grandfather whose only line in the show was “kids these days” or “get off my lawn, you scoundrels.” I can only imagine what older generations would have said as the Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers entered the workforce for the first time. I imagine they lacked the faith in you that you obviously lack in our generation.
There’s no question why the people of our generation don’t watch much television – especially shows like 60 Minutes. Your “Millenials” piece makes it tragically clear that these kinds of shows are not for us. These kinds of shows can’t stand us.
Time to go back to YouTube.
A pair of questions for everyone who has interacted with me in any way over an extended period of time:
Out of all your interactions with me, when was I the most passionate about something (and what was it)? What would you say I’m the most passionate about in general?
I’d really appreciate a response via any means (comment, e-mail, Facebook message, 206-350-HI-JR, etc. etc.).
By far my favorite photo project of 2006 was a little effort I coined 30holidays. The idea is quite simple: take one holiday or winter-related photo each day from November 26 through December 25, then upload the photos to Flickr. After the holidays passed, I had been a part of a strange coincidence, documented my holiday season, and just had a better appreciation of how we celebrate such a wonderful time of the year. I loved it.
As hard as it is to believe, November 26 is just over two weeks away. Starting that Monday, I will once again be bringing along my cameras everywhere I go to capture a single photo each day until Christmas. (This year, I hopefully won’t miss a day like I did on December 21, 2006.)
Here’s the thing: I don’t want to do this alone. If you like photography or if you just like the holiday season, please try this out, too. It’s a lot of fun. It’s as simple as registering for a free Flickr account, taking photos, and then uploading them to the site.
Get more details on the 30holidays group page. If you’d like, you can see a calendar of my collection from last year.
I really can’t wait to get started.
When you let me loose in a city like Boston, strange things will happen.
On Saturday, Kelley and Ian took me to a fantastic restaurant called FiRE + iCE. This place was about the closest thing to a new media grill as one could get; you fill a bowl full of raw meat, pasta, veggies, rice, or whatever else you’d like, fill a smaller bowl with any of about a dozen sauces, and take it to a grill at the center of the restaurant. The cooks grill the contents of the large bowl, throw on the sauce, and you have a customized meal. It’s a next-generation buffet. It never gets boring. And man, was it tasty. I’ll definitely be going back.
On Saturday night, I realized that I could spend Sunday doing more than just PodCamp in the big city. I e-mailed a few of my friends in the greater Boston area, and my good friend Laura called to invite me out to her church the next morning.
For many people, church on a Sunday morning wouldn’t be a big deal. For me, though, it was quite the change of pace; I hadn’t been to a Sunday service in about a decade. (I’m not really that much of an organized religion guy, and I religion is one of the topics I consciously don’t talk much about on this blog.)
So to the complete disbelief of anyone who knows me well, I spent Sunday morning at Vineyard in Cambridge. Like FiRE + iCE, it was a type of establishment I could never imagine taking hold in Bangor; it was the first church service I’d ever attended with plain-clothes pastors and references to YouTube and the Red Sox (it is Boston, after all). I told Laura after the service that I found it to be refreshing, and I was very glad I attended. The church did a wonderful job of delivering a message while leaving the sermon open to some interpretation; unlike some other congregations, it really seemed as though Vineyard was trying consciously to be open to a lot of people. The fact that the sermon included video clips and contemporary music definitely appealed to the new media part of me.
I’m not doing the church justice with my brief explanation, but I wanted to mention both it and the restaurant due to the differences they both showed from traditional institutions of their types. Boston definitely seems like a place that appeals to a younger, more creative population.
If you’re interested in a bit of audio to illustrate my points, Vineyard provides an MP3 of the oddly-relevant creativity-themed sermon on their site.
I love Boston. Whether it was the excitement surrounding a looming World Series victory or just the normal hustle and bustle of the city, Beantown just has a higher level of constant energy than I’ve seen anywhere else.
“But Justin,” you ask, “you’ve always said that you don’t want to live in Boston.” That’s true. As much as I like the city, it’s just too busy for my taste as a rural/”suburban” Maine guy. I’ve started to enjoy each visit to the city more, and I do like spending time in it.
I managed to become somewhat of a subway master on this trip. I’ve always loved the T (and trains in general); the concept of having a speedy underground train racing around a city has always fascinated me. Sure, the system isn’t perfect – there were shuttle buses for one part of the Orange Line last weekend, and then there was that time where I had to get out of the car and walk to the closest station when the train didn’t work correctly on a previous trip – but it’s a very efficient method of transit overall.
I also had the pleasure of riding the Silver Line for the first time. The Silver Line is a 5-year-old section of Boston public transportation that uses underground electric buses instead of trains. I loved it.
The star of the weekend for public transportation was the Red Line, my favorite leg of the T. The Red Line has become familiar to me since most of my Boston area friends have lived in Cambridge; the Harvard station is one of two (along with North Station) that I feel familiar with. On Sunday I parked at Alewife at the end of the Red Line and rode from there to South Station with a couple stops along the way. I was really impressed with the ease of the new CharlieCard stored value system as well.
Thanks to my friends Kelley and Ian, I was able to stay in Manchester, NH for the weekend. I’ve really started to appreciate Manchester after the two BarCamps there and this last trip; if I was to move away from Bangor, I’d probably end up there. It’s tough for me to think that I might leave Maine since I really love it here, but it’s always good to have options, right?
The trip made me want to explore places outside of Maine more. When I get some time, I might just do that.
Check out a few of my photos from Boston on Flickr. I also uploaded a video from the Red Line.
