I’d like to apologize to regular and occasional Two Cents readers for my hiatus over the last month and a half. I’ve been busy (big surprise), and my mind has been in so many places that I just haven’t grounded here in a while. For the people who read the blog instead of Collage (or for the people who read everything and are wondering what the heck all these releases are about), I’d like to give you an update on the so-called Justin Russell Network. It’s fairly lengthy, but it’s hopefully at least marginally informative.
Web development
Sephone
I head to a place called Sephone for around 40 hours each week. A majority of my time is doing custom work for area businesses that I unfortunately can rarely share, but my favorite part of the job is what I like to call our content products. These applications and services give people the ability to control their own sites without having to call us up to make changes.
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been really fortunate to have some time to devote to our best-known products, datAvenger and datAvenger lite, and we’ve released a new version of both this week. (I posted about the datAvenger release on our blog.) I’ve also been able to write a podcast management service called SephoneCast that I’m excited to see in use pretty soon.
thinglobe
A couple of weeks ago I released thinglobe.com, a geo-based service for user-generated media. Quite simply it maps where videos, photos, and thoughts were created on a map. I have a ton of stuff that I want to do with it, and as of now I’d call it my flagship project by far. I’m really, really excited to see where it leads, and it’s just a cool service that I like to use myself.
Microreviewer
A week before thinglobe came out I coded up microreviewer.com, a service for giving short (very short) reviews of local businesses via Twitter. Microreviewer was, in short, a way for me to try a few things out, and I’m quite happy just letting it sit for a while. I’d rather focus my attention on other projects (thinglobe).
Collage
And no, I haven’t forgotten about Collage and justinrussell.com. I’d love to switch Collage over to run off of a service like FriendFeed at some point, and the very preliminary stages of a justinrussell.com redesign are in the works. That’s pretty much it for now, though.
Photography
justinrussell.com/photography
I recently released version 2.0 of justinrussell.com/photography, my photography portfolio site (and the winner of the “Did You Know There Was a 1.0″ award). jr/photo has a couple of purposes. First, I have a link to send to people who ask if they can see some of my photos. Second, it boosts my confidence that I occasionally take good photos. Third, it’s a home base for my photography no matter where it ends up going in the future.
But really, if you want to see what I consider to be my best photos, head there. It’s also the home to the snazzy new justinrussell brand logo.
Pine Tree Photography
Remember Pine Tree Photography? PTP is my showcase site for nature and landscape photography. I have big plans (really big, actually) for PTP, but frankly they’re just not on the top of the list right now. At some point I want to build it up, but it’s just not there right now. Still, it’s a good place to explore some of my best photos in my most popular genre as of yet.
flickr.com/justinrussell
In order to make use of the $25/year I pay to Yahoo! for Flickr, I occasionally post photos there as well. To be honest I haven’t taken that many photos lately, but when I do the best ones will most likely end up on Flickr.
Writing
Another New World
Another New World is my passion about technology put into words; you just wouldn’t know it by the frequency of the posts. Out of all of my projects, I’d really like to devote more time to ANW, but I’m just now getting back into a writing mood. (Doing code for forty or more hours a week is sort of draining when it comes to text on a computer screen.) I really hope this picks back up.
Two Cents and a Thousand Words
I’m sort of unsure about the future of Two Cents; everything seems to be covered pretty well by other services (Twitter, individual blogs), so the posts here won’t be very frequent. If you want to stay in touch, I’d really recommend Collage instead.
The Small Steps Podcast
Small Steps is at a standstill. I love doing it, but the interest I was hoping for just wasn’t there. Also, there are a number of other podcasts doing the same kind of thing really well; I’d rather not reinvent the wheel. Search around; there are some great podcasts out there!
Thanks for sticking around. With the new stars of the top three (jr/photo, thinglobe, and Another New World), I’m really looking forward to the future. Be sure to let me know what you think about the current status, too!
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!
I enjoy keeping my friends and family in the loop about up-and-coming technologies. In that spirit, learn about three in this week’s Edge tekk article, Groups, Tweets, and Avatars.
If you follow my Collage, you may have noticed that photos have been strangely absent from my work lately. Tonight I uploaded a few photos I took downtown today along the Kenduskeag Stream. It was hard to capture the magnitude of the water level in photos.
John Clarke Russ, assistant photo editor and photojournalist at the Bangor Daily News:
If you are a photographer and you take photographs for a living, you don’t do it for the money and you don’t do it for the glory. You do it because, somewhere along the line, in the course of any single day, you find yourself saying, “I need a camera to look at that.” And there’s a point in your life when you find that you’re stuck with it and you only look at life through that rectangle. Hopefully, you see life in a way that is different from how others see it.
My good friend Jess just sent me my first birthday present of the year. On September 16, 2004, I sent her a few pictures of lighthouses from around Maine for a project. One of the ones I sent was the photo of Portland Head Light to the right. Little did I know that two and a half years later, she’d return the picture to me – as a painting.
That… that just made me feel… special. I’m staring at a rendering of a photo I took created by one of my best friends. I can’t help but smile.
The title of this post (and the painting) is in reference to the wonderful song on Nickel Creek‘s self-titled CD.
So what was all of that Virginia schwag about, anyway? Well, last month I was contacted by the Virginia Tourism Corporation to ask for permission to use a few of my images from the Folk Festival last year. They’re doing a new project down there to promote the Crooked Road. You can go to the site and have a customized song delivered to your friends based on some options you select on the site.
And best of all, it’s performed by none other than No Speed Limit and sung by the wonderfully talented Amber Collins. The melody sounds strikingly familiar to the title track of their latest CD, Sweet Virginia. I really can’t say enough about both No Speed Limit and Amber herself; the band gave one of the best musical performances I’ve seen last year, and Amber has such power and range in her voice. There’s a reason why they’re one of my favorite bands.
So if you have a few spare minutes, check out the Build-a-Lyric Song Generator; Amber will sing a song for you. While you’re there, you can learn about one of the richest musical regions in the country. One of my favorite songs was first recorded down that way around 1923 about a now-famous Virginia train wreck.
Great job to everyone who worked on the site – I’m glad I could help with a small part of it.
Well, we’re here. Best wishes to you and everyone you care about this year.
I’ve been doing some identity updating already this year, and I’ve decided to try some new stuff, too; I can now say that I’m officially a YouTuber. For the second year in a row, I went downtown to the ball drop. Last year I had photos. This year I have, well, photos again, of course… but there’s video, too!
Happy new year. I’m excited.
I’m doing a little end-of-the-year Flickring.
One of my goals next year is to spend more time cruising around Flickr. It’s a remarkable concept and a remarkable site; I could easily spend hours there any day of the week. After completing my 30holidays (well, 29holidays… you don’t realize how difficult it can be to take a themed photo a day until you actually try it) project, I’ve really come to respect the quality and diversity of the photos on the site.
My primary interest (as any participant to BarCamp Manchester can attest) is the integration of time and location into a photograph. I found two examples just tonight of how this can really bring out some interesting relationships.
Flickr user Lolisa attended the Penobscot Narrows Bridgewalk. She took some pictures that day. I took some pictures that day. Apparently we both really liked the cables (hers, mine).
I took my first 30holidays photo on November 26 at 10:47 AM. The subject was a lamppost on Central Street in Bangor. Molbl0g, a user who appears to be from somwhere around Boston, took a picture directly across the street… on November 26… at 11:31 AM. The lamppost I shot is probably right out of view. (She also visited Bagel Central, where I’ll be tomorrow morning.)
Can you believe it? 10 days left until Christmas! That means that the 30holidays project is 2/3 complete. See the latest over at the 30holidays Flickr group, see a map of photos, or check out the 30holidays calendar at justinrussell.com/projects/30holidays/.
Through the last few years, I’ve known that I have three main focuses in life: writing, photography, and Web development. The challenge for me has been finding the proper balance between them.
Before you suggest that I start an online newspaper at which I do photojournalism, realize that there are certain conditions to my interests. I wouldn’t be interested in photojournalism in its purest sense, for instance, because though I like the research, writing, and photography aspects of it, I really wouldn’t want to have to interview people when they have just gone through a crisis or other momentous event. Because of this I’ve decided to offer a quick summary of what I enjoy about each of the three areas. (In all honesty I’m doing this as much for my own good as I am for the interest and/or keeping-in-the-loop of whoever may read this.)
I love to write. This blog has been an amazing outlet for my writing, but once again the pendulum of indecisiveness swings. I’ve decided to create a new blog focused on technology and the future (one of my top interests); once I pin down a name, I’ll be sure to supply a few links.
This year has also been great for my photographic interests. I’ve taken more kinds of photos (sports, performance, portrait, nature) than any year in the past. I had the wonderful opportunity to head to a few of my favorite Marsh Island spots with my friend Jenn on Saturday, and I took a couple hundred photos of her. I’d love to do that again, both with her and with others; it’s such a great experience to see how people appear in the photos that you’ve taken. It’s gotten to a point where I’m frustrated attending any concert or performance at which I can’t shoot. I’ve come to find experiences richer when I partially experience them through a viewfinder.
And then there’s Web development. I’ve often tried to explain to people why my main interest lies on the Web, and how my interest in it spans far beyond lines of code and a few pretty graphics. Since the beginning of college, I’ve wanted to connect people in new ways. I’ve also wanted to solve some of the world’s problems by making different sorts of information easier to access (sound familiar?). I enjoy that. I enjoy receiving e-mails from people asking me to revive gre.gario.us. I’m not afraid to admit that I love it when I see multi-lingual reviews. More importantly, though, I want to help people. I want to make a difference. I don’t care if I become rich, famous, or “popular.” I’d rather be known as a guy who helped solve a problem. And yes, I’m one of the crazy ones who still knows it’s possible.
Jessie calls this a quarter-life crisis. Maybe it is. I dunno. I just want to get started.
