Photography as a coincidental art…

It has been a long time since I followed up on some of blogs on my blogroll. I just happened open up Tommy’s blog and read his post about photography, his frustration as he points it out, and point-shoot art. In fact, his post made me write something about it as I get excited when I hear or read about photography. I am just a beginner with photography and started my hobby with point and shoot camera and I still use a point and shoot to picture anything I find interesting. Anyways, talking about

“… try to frame it, think about the light, think about the composition, think, and think, and think …”

  –> I guess we usually keep such expectations in a mode of taking great pictures. I have to admit here, it was after my (now 2 yr old) daughter starting crawling around was when I completely realized that I can’t set expectations on quality of my pictures at least when I shoot them. So, I would turn off the flash, go to a brighter spot on a sunny day and have her crawl around and sit up and then take series of pictures.

At the end, I would find 3 or 5 good pictures out of about 80+ pictures during that session. I had also tried having her sit up and keep her on certain position and then go back to my camera tripod, adjust the focus, set the blinds, re-adjust the lens, turn on the flash, etc etc and by then, she would be moving away from the spot. Though I would think I take 10 good pictures, but ended up  with blurry, shaky pictures and not achieving anything for that session

On a related note, I had once read on one of my friend’s blog “what makes you click?” It is profounding especially if a hobby is photography and if you have a working camera in hand.

{tag: photography}

wordpress and other editors

I usually use MS Word or outlook email to compose my post before publishing here. I have a challenge of keeping the paragraphs as they were in word. My write up looks ok when I copy and Paste in wordpress editor and even upon save but loses its formatting once I publish it. I don’t like to edit my posts once published, but it forces me to edit to fix the paragraph line spaces and re-save it.

I am probably doing something wrong while I copy and paste.

Kanban system of project management

David Anderson shares about using Kanban system at Corbis for their project management. First, I had never heard about kanban system. Reading the description on David’s blog, it may although look like agile system, he clarifies that providing key differences between kanban system and the agile management.  

Kanban, per wikipedia, “is a concept related to Lean or Just In Time (JIT) production” – search on live provides many results and most of them point me to the manufacturing industries.  

I have been part of sustaining projects for couple of years now, a drawback I had noticed was each set of change requests were treated as projects by themselves. Change requests were of course prioritized as what was absolute requirement for each such quarterly release. However, I did find the pros in that as the budgeting and the controlling projects were streamlined although we had 3 or 4 parallel efforts going on at any point of time on isolated pieces and at times on the same codeline that would have to be merged at some point. On the same line, I am wondering how the project management with respect to budgeting and being in control works with kanban system as described by David. Agreed, I am yet to learn more about kanban system before I make any such comments, but this was my initial thought reading the post. 

The other concern I have per the blog post is with respect to biweekly release. I am hoping TFS is helping in better source code management; and at the same time keep the teams focused and not randomized on different change request requirements. One of the challenges we had faced was randomization of team members while mixing up change requests and improper prioritizing at times.  Well, I need to read further to understand kanban system further.

{tags: project management, agile }

DST around the corner…

March 11 – the day light savings time starts – 3 weeks early this year on. There is probably a lot to prepare for, you think. I found the following resources helpful in understanding and be prep for the changes.

chatroom on Microsoft site
Details here
Livemeetings and webcasts available here on support site
and this blog has some resources pointed to.

DST: March 11, 2007 through Nov 04, 2007