grahambinns.com

It's interesting how the number of people subscribing to this blog dropped by almost half after I published this mosiac of my photos from the anti Prop8 protest in Boston and this rant about the Bishop of Lancaster. In actual fact it looks like FeedBurner can no longer see the number of Livejournal-based subscribers to this feed (whether LJ reports them correctly or not I don't know without seeing a sample request), but the correlation is amusing (and a nice way to illustrate how you can prove anything, including the stick-up-the-arse-ness of people, with statistics).

Anyway...

I had entirely intended to write this as a 2008 end-of-year ooh-look-what-I-did post. Then 2008 stopped happening and 2009 started happening and I thought I could write it as a ooh-look-what-I'm-going-to-do post. Then I decided that it was too much fun having a holiday from work and blogging and, well, pretty much everything else, and I stopped trying to write it and enjoyed not doing much for a week or so.

Of course, that doesn't get anything done in the end, so I figured I'd better finish this off before it got even more out of date and I came back to it wondering what on earth I'd been on about in the first place.

As one year rolls inexorably into another I've been thinking, for the most part, at least, about identity, specifically mine: where I am with certain aspects of my identity (which I'm using as a high-falutin' way of saying "what I'm doing with my life") and where I want them to go.

Identity as a writer

When it comes to writing I think I've had a pretty good year, though I've written very little compared to previous years. I'm less frustrated with my writing than I was, perhaps because I've focussed less upon it than in the past. For the first time ever I've published a story, The Girl, Death (albiet on my own website, true) for all and sundry to read. Now that that particularly silly mental obstacle is out of the way I can think more about actually writing things than about whether or not people will like them.

I don't expect to have a huge amount of time to write in the coming year, mainly because there are so many other things that I want to do (on which subjects more shortly) but I do expect that, when I write, I'll be more relaxed about telling the story I want to tell; I certainly won't be worrying every second about how I can never finish the story because everyone will hate it (nobody, so far, has hated the last one).

Identity as a photographer

Roughly this time last year I started my Three hundred and sixty-odd days of 2008 photography project. Like all similarly-named projects the idea was to take (and post) one photo for each day of 2008 (or near enough anyway, given that I started a couple of days late). Whilst I haven't managed to get round to uploading all of the photos to my Flickr stream (partly because I'm lazy, partly because I fell behind in the processing of them) I did manage to capture the majority of, or at least bits of the where-I-was-at-the-time-ness of 2008, on camera. It was an exhausting exercise, and since this year I'd like to do things that are more and varied (quite aside from arranging my wedding) I don't think I'll be attempting anything on nearly as grand a scale in 2009. There will be something photography-project wise this year; I just don't know what it is yet (though I have some ideas).

Separately from the idea of some kind of overarching project, I want to push myself further as a photographer. I blogged a while back about wanting to photograph more people. Whilst my request for subjects didn't yield many responses (probably because it didn't get read by many people for starters) it did yield some, and I intend to take the people who offered their services as models up on their offers some time in the next year.

I've been viewing and loving the work of people like Bert Stephani, LIME, Katie Lee and Dave Hobby for much of the last year, and I think it's about time that I did something with all the inspiration and ideas that they've given me. Even if the work that I produce from that inspiration is derivative in the beginning it will, hopefully at least, eventually lead to a style of my own as time goes by (in much the same way as emulating your writing heroes eventually leads to you finding your own voice). As usual, I'll post the results of my experiments in trying-to-be-good-at-what-I-do to Flickr or somewhere similar. As much as possible I'll make them available under a Creative Commons license, though depending on who's in the images the licenses may vary.

People have asked me whether I want to start moving into the realm of the semi-pro photographer, and I suppose that in some ways I do (for example, I bought myself an insanely expensive Nikon 70-200mm lens as an end-of-year present; I'd like to at least pay for some of its value through using it). Truthfully, though, I'm more interested in becoming a better artist than I am in becoming rich through my photography. Money is nice, but it's a means to an end; having money for the sake of having money is a silly game to play, especially in this day and age. I may consider selling some of my work as prints in the future, but I don't think I'm at that level yet (and besides, I think I'd need a bigger audience for that to really work).

As far as the quality of my photography goes, I know I'm getting better. I'm more comfortable behind the camera and I'm happier with the results than I was in January 2008. I want to continue to grow and learn, though - otherwise what's the point?

Identity as a software developer

Let's face it, being a Launchpad developer is the best job I've ever had. I've been with Canonical for eighteen months now and I'm loving every minute of it. Launchpad is going from strength to strength and (as I've said to just about anyone who's ever asked me) you couldn't ask to work with better bunch of developers.

Launchpad will be open sourced in July, and I'm both happy about it (because after all I love freedom) and a little scared (because a part of me keeps thinking that once we go open source I'll no longer be necessary, though I suspect that's nonsense).

I honestly and genuinely want Launchpad to be the best that it can be and I can only see Open Sourcing it being a great help in continuing that. The Launchpad user community has some phenomenal brains in it; I can only see that having some of them looking at the code will make our work that much easier (even if they don't contribute patches; having someone going "WTF?" at odd code can be a great help, which is why I love code reviews so much).

I'm really looking forward to what we have in store for Launchpad in 2009. I think the users will love it, too.

Identity as a FOSS contributor

This has been growing on my mind for most of the past year. Although I'm working for a company that backs one of the most popular Linux distributions I don't contribute an enormous amount to open source projects, besides filing the occasional bug.

If there's one thing that working with people like Daniel, Jorge and Jono (besides that it's a good idea to practice before you play a gig - or indeed to know the songs you're going to play) is that all OSS projects need help, not just with bug hunting but with documentation, too.

I'm hoping that I'll be able to step up my contributions to the various FOSS projects that I use this year. I don't know that I'll always have enough domain nouse to be able to contribute a patch to fix a bug but at least I can help with triaging and isolating the bugs.

Identity as a human being

I'm getting married in 347 days(!). I can't imagine at the moment just how crazy things are going to get as we go through the year, but I'd like to think that my fiancée and I can deal with it.

When it comes to this time next year and I'm writing the next iteration of this post I want to look back and be able to say that I every hour of 2009 full of minutes.

Of course, only time will tell.

Graham Binns posted a photo:

Three Hundred and sixty-odd days of 2008, day 359

One of my fiancée's bears, Rosie, playing guinea pig in my strobist experimentation.

Strobist info: Vivitar 285HV on 1/16th power through a black straw grid to camera left.

The presents are delivered, the food is bought, the tree is decorated, the TV is showing Family Guy after Family Guy and I've blown an immense amount of money on a lens.

It must be christmas, or something like it.

So happy whatever-you-want-to-celebrate. Hope you have a good one.

Jono Bacon posted a challenge of sorts to members of the Ubuntu community recently, which was this:

If you have a blog or use Twitter or identi.ca, I would like to ask you to take five minutes to write down why Ubuntu is important to you, and what aspect of our ethos attracts you and motivates you about Ubuntu.

It wasn't until this morning - just now in fact - that I knew what my particular answer to this question was, and I was starting to worry that maybe I wouldn't be able to articulate why I care as much as I do about Ubuntu. But now I know. What matters to me most about Ubuntu can be boiled down to two words:

Daniel Holbach.

Now, I'm being glib, of course. Much as I love the happiest German who ever lived, he's not the only reason that I'm involved in Ubuntu. However, Daniel illustrates what I mean so fantastically that I couldn't not name-check him.

What I actually mean is the ethos, espoused especially by Herr Holbach, of "Be excellent to one another."

Sometimes, software development can be a thankless task, especially in the open source world. You spend hours toiling away at a project as a labour of love so as to get it as right as possible and then what happens? People find bugs in it, that's what.

You want to be grateful to the bug filers, of course. You need them to file bugs because you'd never find all of them yourself and because, like a proud parent, you want your application to be the best it can possibly be, which means learning from its (and your) mistakes.

But it's not always that easy. The people who file bugs aren't always going to sandwich the bad news between two slices of awesome. They can be passive-aggressive, whining, thoughtless morons at times, starting bug reports with "this project sucks" and ending it with "I only use your application because there's nothing better available." In any other community you'd be sorely tempted to tell them to fuck off, thank you very much, and take their attitude somewhere else.

But people like Daniel Holbach mitigate all this. Just this morning, when I, tired and more than a little crotchety, saw the style with which a particular set of bugs had been filed against Launchpad, I was pretty much ready to throttle the bug reporter. At the time, Daniel was talking about having some Launchpad sessions at the next Ubuntu Open Week, and the following exchange took place.

<gmb> dholbach: Can we include something about requiring them not to be arseholes, even when they find security bugs?

gmb just woke up and is punchy.

...

dholbach hugs gmb

dholbach adds gmb to the schedule: "Graham Binns: Being excellent to each other... hugging developers when it's most difficult"

And there it was. In two seconds flat, Daniel had made me go from annoyed, tiny-fists-of-fury Graham to cheerful, well-theres-a-bug-there-to-fix Graham with one virtual IRC hug (incidentally, if you've never been hugged by Daniel in real life you should give it a shot some time).

The Ubuntu community is full of people like Daniel Holbach (though there is only one Holy Holy Holbach, of course). The Ubuntu ethos of "Humanity Towards Others" is one of the most important reasons for my being involved in Ubuntu. Is it an excellent distro? Of course. Does it have some of the best people working to make each release better than the last? Sure. Does it have its share of detractors and complainers, even within the community? Of course it does; that's what happens when you write software. But the difference between the Ubuntu community and the others I've been part of, the reason why I love working with this group of people so much, is that at the end of the day the vast majority of us do our utmost to be excellent to each other with each and every passing moment.

That's not something you get for free with a community, and I for one count myself bloody lucky to be a part of it.

I've been getting more and more serious about this photography lark for quite a while now, and one of the sites that I've been enjoying most is that of Belgian pro photographer Bert Stephani, particularly his video series Confessions of a Photographer.

Today, Bert and his friend Pieter Van Impe have announced their new project "by photographers, for photographers:" LIME, which stands for Learn, Inspire, Motivate and Experience. The site, www.squeezethelime.com, contains articles (well, just one at the moment), videos and links to photo sets on the LIME project's Flickr photostream. There's also details there about upcoming workshops that Pieter and Bert will be running in 2009. Whilst these seem a bit pricey (Bert's I've seen the light all day workshop has a special introductory price of €180 inc VAT, plus whatever the cost of travelling to the venue in Belgium) I'm sure they're worthwhile; I may even contemplate attending one of them myself.

Aspiring pro photographers (me included) might do well to take a look at LIME; I suspect it's going to produce some really cool stuff and I'm really looking forward to what comes out of it.