01st Oct 2004
Shred the past, Weave the future
So I’m out in California, getting our house ready to lease out. A big part of that is putting a lot of personal stuff in storage.
That’s where the shredder is so handy. 1980’s parking ticket? Nah, never happened. So says the shredder!
Without getting into details, it’s really hard to go through so much “life paperwork” at once and not get bogged down. Some things are uplifting, and some things elicit a “oh man, what I wouldn’t give for a time machine” response. When you hit your 40’s, you have a good 20+ years of “might be important” paperwork built up. Skimming through it is like scrubbing through a huge video - Rolling Stones London Seattle Almost bought that house Car accident This Film That Job This Idiot That Fun Time and so on.
So in other words, I’m pretty focused on getting through this, and that means no FlexiPhoto, no photography, and… just no no no. It’s a bit like being a bowling ball with the bumpers turned on. You can’t cruise along in the gutter. You gotta keep bouncing back to the alley, heading for the pins.
Man, that’s a lame analogy :-) But I don’t have time to think of a really good one.
But soon I will. The weaving part is this:
* FlexiPhoto is open source now. If you’re so inclined, you can attempt to install it, get your own photo db going, and tell me that it needs this or that
* SnapSmith will be my own personal photography site, driven by FlexiPhoto. It’ll be my example of something that concentrates on the photos, the navigation amongst them, and so on. My way of showing potential clients what an end-result will look like.
* ThereThen addresses will get tied into FlexiPhoto. I think the idea of searching not only by location, but by location and time, is very important. Not only that, but I believe in being able to bookmark, email, and IM the searches themselves. I think that those who are strictly focused on strictly XML-based Location ideas are paying so much attention to what THEY want to do, that they are missing the point of what everyday users will want. We’ll see :-)
For a long time I’ve had an idea in mind of how I would tie together 3 projects, and now I’m on the cusp of that. Added to the mix is that I am increasingly New York City based, and I am in search of a gig.
But somehow, shredding the past (literally and figuratively) is a good exercise. It’s great to get rid of a lot of stuff (throw out give away sell).
