Absurd Singularity

Hope everyone had a rockin' New Year! Mine was very low key as my lil' one came down with his first cold of the year. Whoo hoo! =p Ah well, we'll make up for it in the future. =) Anyway, I figured it'd be a good day to start out my own 365 Project and see how far I can take it. Might as well put all this equipment to some use. ;-p But since I'm an ol' married and toddler-beholden fogy right now, this may be a pretty short project as my daily and weekend routines are pretty well, rote. But I'll give it a shot.

I'm hoping this will help me get over my photo-taking shyness when I'm not with family. I carry a camera around with me pretty much daily but always feel self-conscious when it comes to actually taking it out to shoot with. Which makes no sense since the majority of my daily life is spent in NYC which is overrun by camera-toting tourists. Oddly, once the camera is out and I start clickin', the feeling goes away but I find it tough to actually get to that point. So we'll see how it goes. Plus this will force me to pay attention again to the scenery that I pass by day in and day out and I guess anyone who takes a look at my project will get a glimpse of the stuff that I see on a daily basis. Which is the main reason I like going through other people's 365 projects. So anyway, wish me luck and while this isn't really a New Year's resolution or anything, I'll try to stick to it like it is one. =)

So I've been futzing around with Web 2.0 social media sites within the past year, sites like Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. Now I'm used to individuals owning accounts in social media sites, but it never occurred to me that corporations would have them too. Not only own the accounts but actually hire someone to actively engage the community in their name.

The first time I ran into this was back in December when I tweeted about TurboTax. Just an offhand, flippant remark that I expected to be just read and ignored by my paltry few subscribers just like most of my other tweets. So I was completely floored when I actually received a reply. My first thought was, damn, that's kinda creepy. But then I thought about it a bit longer and decided that ok, that's actually pretty cool. Kudos to these companies hip enough to engage their customers/detractors in such a fashion.

Similarly, last night I posted the photo above to my Flickr account as my daily 365 Project photo (which, after 12 days is still going strong thank you very much. ;-p) and within a few hours, I get a notice that I was just added as a contact by SanDisk Corp. For what nefarious purposes, they have not yet revealed but pretty interesting nevertheless.

[UPDATE]: A few hours after posting this entry, I was added as a contact on Flickr by the e-Commerce Manager for The New Yorker Hotel and then received an email from him thanking me for taking pictures of his hotel, namely this photo. I should ask him for a discount. ;-p

So, a bit Big Brother-ish somewhat but overall it's interesting to see that an increasing number of companies either see value in these social media sites or are at least willing to feel around to see how they can work it to their favor.

So I finally decided to bite the bullet and get a Drobo to help with my photo archive needs. That $50 rebate was the straw that broke the camels back. Decided to go with it instead of a NAS because I still prefer the speed of a direct, physical connection between storage device and computer. I guess if I ever change my mind I could also pick up a DroboShare. Anyway, it arrived late last week and I pretty much had it up and running in half an hour. Would have been less if I didn't spend the time to take photos.