My first blog was about how I suffered the misfortune of having a hard disk with all my photos crash on me. To make it worse I had to suffer the ignomony of not having done any backups for 3 months... (read about it if you want to here).

After a few months of trying to read and recover whatever I could from the defective drive, I gave up and called in the cavalry. I have to say that I have had my moments, that I have rallied against the cause, that I have moaned and criticised... and I guess some on the DT team know that I can be a pain in the neck when I put my mind to it. But I also believe that I am a fair person, and definitely big enough (despite my frail and fragile frame of a ...

I am terrible with dates... The most embarrassing moment was when I forgot my wife's birthday. The whole day the phone didn't stop ringing... and I kept wondering why so many people were calling her. All day long she kept giving me funny expectant looks and nothing went ding-dong in my head. She was spending an amazing amount of time at the computer and whenever I asked her what she was up to, she would say "I'm reading my e-mails.", and then would glance at me again with that totally mysterious (at least to me it was very puzzling) look in her eyes. Even when I looked over her shoulder and saw at least 4 e-mails with the subject "Happy Birthday"... well, I don't think of myself as

someone who is deficient in the "intelligence" area, but it still took ...

I had quite a few months of fairly decent sales (well, relative to my past sales, nothing comparable to other people's sales on this site though), October seems determined to cut me down to size... only 3 sales so far this month. Oh well... maybe next month my sales will soar once again.

I was actually talking to one of my referrals yesterday... he is a professional photographer so I have high hopes that his stuff is going to have a lot more success... As he's new to Dreamstime he had quite a few questions... and I found myself expounding on a few theories as to how he could do better on Dreamstime (of course I realized almost immediately that I'm not actually putting into practice my own advice, oooops).

After explaining the upload methods (he ...

As is my wont, I was just checking out the latest keyword searches that users have been conducting and was immediately drawn to "quit smoking", as I am myself in the midst of this exercise. I wondered what kind of images could portray such a concept. So I launched my own search, and have to say that I am pretty impressed by some of the ideas that came up. In the great tradition of Tonygers and others, I am going to show a few of the images that have not had any sales yet, but in my opinion should do very well indeed.

So I've been to quite a few interviews since sending out my CV. And man, is there a lot of preparation work required up front.

First of all, I needed to come up with a two minute recap of why I'm there in the first place... basically trying to summarize my career and personality in 120 seconds and explain why my CV got out there and why I accepted to be grilled by the person. Let me tell you, it ain't all that easy.

Secondly, I had but a few days to absorb as much info as I could about whoever was going to be interviewing me. Happily, the internet is around. But then I would also go out and see if anyone I know has had any dealings with the organization as well, just to get their impressions and any other info I could about the corporate culture ...

After more than a decade, I am on the job market again (unfortunately am not shifting anywhere near enough photography to stay out of an office). It is a rather interesting experience and not as intimidating as one may have thought (or that the picture to the left may suggest).

But of course, even before getting to the interview stage, there's the small matter of sparking some interest in someone's head to get offered an interview. I had of course been keeping my CV up to date during all this time, but hadn't really thought that maybe the presentation and the lay-out should have been refreshed. It was brought home to me, when I interviewed with a head hunter, who for the first 15 minutes tore my CV apart and pointed out to me that while in itself ...

A blog about nothing, the mad ramblings of a bored mind.

I am counting the weeks... till such a time that I can start counting days... till such a time that I can start counting hours... till the moment that I can walk out of this place knowing that I never have to walk back in here again.

...

After 3 years of having to accept the sluggish performance of my aging machine, I took the plunge and ordered a brand new computer. And against my gut instincts I even went for Vista (usually not a good idea to get such a young OS as the bugs and kinks haven't all been ironed out yet), but I was curious.

Well this new acquisition has confirmed two traits of my personality.

First that I have a very addictive personality... after having spent that last week or so in front of the beast every spare waking moment and delving deep into the mysteries of the new brainwave of Bill's boys, the lack of sleep is getting to me...

And second, that I shall always have a tendency to jump before I have absolutely thought (or rather research) things through ...

A group of photographers in Orange County have created what is the largest camera and biggest photo ever taken. They used a hangar as a camera with a hole in one of the walls to light in and modeled the whole thing on the concept of camera obscura.

For a negative they used a large piece of muslin fabric specially ordered from Germany. The photo measures 107.5 x 31.5 feet!!!!

The Legacy Photo Project.

[link=http://media.www.cychron.com/media/storage/paper910/news/2006/09/19/TheGreatPicture/The-Great.Picture-2283123.shtml]...

Eons ago (OK only 6 years ago then) I used to work in the IT Security domain. People thought of me as "the policeman". It was a most irritating label, because that was only a tiny part of the job. The biggest challenge was trying to make sure no one "broke into the house", and that meant staying ahead of the game. It also means covering ALL the bases... think about it, the so-called "bad guys" need to find only one entry point, the "white hats" have to make sure that every potential weakness is covered. People say there is no such thing as a 100% secure system. I always laugh at that and reply "Yes there is. Disconnect your computer from any sort of network, turn off the machine, put it in a safe, lock it in the vault, and then throw the key in the Atlantic". Problem ...