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Oh Can I?

Canada - Clean & Exposed
Canada, Clean & Exposed

Last night I walked outside, the air was nice – warm, clean, with a breeze. I was headed to Safeway, a block away. I picked up some fresh blueberries, some cleaning supplies and a few other things, and bought a piece of pizza for dinner on my way home. I skipped a coffee – enough to eat already.

On the walk home, I started to relax. Not the little “this is nice” relax, but the big, “I’ve found a home” relax. The people on Commercial Drive are interesting. The guy at the pizza place was intriguing – didn’t know how to use a Visa machine, probably a recent immigrant, had a fire to him that I liked. The houses are small, interesting, not cookie cutter. The streets have lots of trees and plants, and there are nice views to the mountains. People are interested in each other. People I want to get to know.

I have a cool flat, that’s “me” in the furniture, the artwork, the messiness, the order, the little tricks that make a big difference, the one-of-a-kind layout, the air, the light. I have a few people in my life whom I love, who I want to be with… and they are there for me as well.

I’ve worked the edge off a lot of the angst and anger and frustration I’ve held, me vs. them, my dependant independence and lack of emotional IQ. I’m still me, quirky and weird and not good at a lot of things… just without the edge, the neediness, the fear and anger dissipated by growing up a little bit (or maybe growing younger :)

And I have a job. One that I like, that I’m good at. Filmmaking. Photography. Storytelling.

I’ve made it.

That was the feeling. I’ve achieved all the things I really wanted to have in my life. Not like it’s a task complete and I’m moving on. More like, I’ve moved into my neighbourhood. The things I want and like and am interested in are nearby, within my reach. I can see them… some I have. I can ask for others and get them if I want or need, through a friend or my own effort.

And I can’t help but be thankful. That I’m created. That I live in Canada. That I have friends and good things. That I’ve been cared for in big and small ways.

I rarely have days like this, so I’m revelling in the enjoyment of being at peace.

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Sidenotes

Responsibility Project

Check out some well-made short films at The Responsibility Project.

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Stuff I Use: The Drobo

Drobo

I’m a bit of a backup freak. My current house-transition aside, I consistently have two or three backups of just about every piece of data I consider precious (which is most of it). When I first started contemplating moving around the continent, I began to look for an affordable & portable storage solution for all my masses of files.

I’d been here before… I have only my laptop (a Macbook Pro), which eliminates several options. I wanted something with redundancy, so it could handle a failed hard drive – which, with their spinning platters moving several thousand rotations per second fractions of a millimetre from the read head, are not known for their reliability – while still being fast enough to be usable. In previous searches I’d discovered you had to pick one of safety or speed, or be prepared to pay 4-5 times more to keep your stuff safe.

Then I ran across the Drobo, short for ‘data robot’. It uses block-level redundancy (instead of disk-level), which means it can handle any single drive failing, but the drives don’t all have to be the same. You can stuff it with whatever SATA drives you have on hand (or can afford), and expand it as your storage needs grow.

So I bought two.

And then I bought a third six months ago for a project I’m working on, along with a DroboShare, which lets you access the drives over a network. In all, 10 Terabytes of hard drives are spinning in my Drobos.

They’ve been great. They work without any management or thinking required, chugging away in the background. I use them to back up my cheap-but-speedy striped SATA RAIDs – which are fast, but not saf. So in the end I ended up with two copies of everything, one on fast local drives, the other on Drobos for backup with their redundancy and set-and-forget working style.

The only downside has been that they’re not particularly fast – 15-20 MB/s is a reasonable expectation. Better than the competition, but 10 TB takes a long time to backup at that speed.

So today, I was happy to see that they’ve released Drobo V.2, with Firewire 800 and greatly improved read & write speeds – almost triple the performance in some cases. In my mind this takes the Drobos from being mostly for backup, to being a good primary drive solution for many uses.

So if you’re in the market for some safe, speedy, affordable storage… take a look.

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Updates

Ten-Thousand and Sixty Three

At the pump

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Updates

Real-World Working REDs

Did a post on Reduser.net about my experiences working with the RED One… mostly shop talk, but if you’re interested:

Real-world Working REDs

Plus some other RED-related news that I’m not allowed to post :)

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Gone in a Flash

Gone in a Flash from Chris Crutchfield on Vimeo.

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Plane Spotting


Photos by KWMeier.

Kevin, Jacob and I took some boy time today to watch the planes come in on YVR’s North runway. You can view the whole Flickr set here.

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Articles

The Future of News

The world of news is changing fast. The capture, editing, and dissemination of what is newsworthy is becoming flatter, in that fewer barriers remain between the event and the reporting of the event. A few examples I’ve noted recently:

  • APNews.com (and a forthcoming iPhone application) that gives you location- and preference-based news, and allows you to directly submit text and photos back to the Associated Press, direct from your iPhone.
  • The BBC’s newly re-vamped news site, and their refreshing use of video: uncommented, barely edited, and often backed up with the BBC’s excellent reporting in the text of the article: (An example from their front page)
  • Many discussions on the future of photojournalism, and the use of video as it relates to the still image. Here’s one video.

Technology is removing barriers to communication, reshaping our culture by changing the values behind what is reported: what is newsworthy becomes more closely tied to what is important to us.

Habari?

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Coffee Cups

This post sums up my approach to my work pretty well: Life as Coffee.

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A life in keys

keys

There’s something about the keys in my pocket that say where I’m at in life. For almost a year, I had two keys: the key to my car, and the key to my door. The key to my car was used constantly; the key to my door, almost never.

Now, I have a big wad of keys. I’ve gone from key-pauperdom to a key-king, with fourteen pounds of metal necessitating a tighter belt when I walk.

Keys for the shop; keys for the house, my apartment, the storage shed; keys for friends; keys on loan for the show I’m on… They’re all someone else’s keys.