The Secret To A Lifetime Of Productivity - And Five Ways To Find It via TerryStarbucker.com

Simple steps to be more productive. After looking again at the "Eat that frog" process the other day I've added a daily prioritisation step to my method. This idea of a Top 5 fits in to that well giving a starting point of how many higher priority items are on my list. Another thing I really need to get better at is focussing or stopping trying to multitask so much - a year or so ago I used to turn off email, close down my chat client and focus. When writing documents, I still reduce distraction using tools like ommwriter or writeroom and this has worked well for producing some of the NVQ evidence. When coding I find it much harder as I almost always have to have a browser open to test what I'm working on and it is then I am just one small step from distraction. Anyone got any tips?

In other, unrelated, news this is a post emailed via the Instapaper iPhone app to my posterous account.

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Another NVQ meeting today, they're happening every 2 weeks at the moment which is really keeping me focussed and busy.  Dawn (my NVQ assessor) told me that my first 2 modules were with the External Verifier today (they'd previously been passed by the Internal Verifier), so I should get final confirmation next time she visits.  Over the last couple of weeks I have gathered and written all the remaining pieces of evidence needed for UNIT A2 - Manage your own resources and professional development and so this has now all gone with Dawn to be mapped and finally cross referenced in preparation for submission.  Next up is UNIT E6 - Ensure health and safety requirements are met in your area of responsibility which sounds like a barrel of laughs! The plan is to prepare this as if it was another Professional Discussion, but without it having to be recorded this time. So, over the next couple of weeks I'm going to be getting out my mind mapping tool again, and putting together the framework for a conversation about Health & Safety within my team. I think that these meetings happening more often, fortnightly as opposed to monthly, is really working well for me and helping me to keep on top of the tasks as it is more frequently on my mind. I realised today during my meeting that I'm actually starting to enjoy this process, and it has stopped feeling quite like such an evidence gathering exercise and more useful and relevant.

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via flickr.com

A few weeks ago I briefly mentioned hipstamatic and said I'd come back to it. Well, here I am and I have to say I love this application. It makes iPhone photography so much fun. The interface is lovely, especially changing the lens (see this video for an idea, but do turn the sound down - the song is frightful) and the upload to flickr feature (new to version 150) works really nicely, even doing some basic tagging for me.

My original concerns were, as I posted last time:

Up until now I've liked taking the photos on a "normal" camera application and applying filters afterwards - this is a change as I'll have to get it right first time.

Getting it right first time is no bad thing to get used to, and it goes along with my recent thoughts about creativity through limitations. I am trying to get into the habit of visualising the resulting image first, and then taking the photo, and given the time that the app needs to develop the image this is a good habit to get in to. I'm still definitely practicing this technique, but I'm hopeful that the improvements will be visible across any medium I photograph in - whether I'm using an iPhone, a DSLR, Mum's old Balda Baldiexette or any of the other film cameras which I own.

I do still use the normal iPhone camera sometimes, and if I'm indoors, or its dark, then I'll use night camera almost exclusively and combine it with one of the editing packages I mentioned last time (still exclusively on the iPhone though). I've enjoyed getting familiar with the different lens and film options (and I've bought all the hipstapaks), but definitely have a preference (at least at the moment) for the John S lens which I love for its vibrant colours and mottled age effect.

The photo above is my most interesting hipstamatic photo (according to the flickr interesting algorithm) but feel free to take a look at the rest of my hipstamatic photos on flickr.

Some additional sample photos:

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Today Nick and I spent some of the day at the Wired Sussex Media Jobs & Skills fair manning the Madgex stand.  This is a new event for me, having missed previous years, and I have to say I rather enjoyed it.  There was a good presence of local companies, and some good representation of support for freelancers (such as the Farm, the Werks and the Skiff), and of course Wired Sussex were out in force.

Madgex are currently only recruiting for a Global Sales Director and so we weren't really present from a recruitment perspective, more from the position of reminding the local community that we are still around and active, and to share our experiences of working in the media sector, and what the various job roles we have actually involve on a day-to-day basis.  Weekly, internally to Madgex (although hopefully coming soon to the lab site), I produce a newsletter listing all of the community events I've tracked down from around Brighton, Sussex and London which seem to be relevant to the team.  Today we produced a special list of these for the next 7 days to distribute to anyone interested, which allowed us to introduce people to some of the more active, and frequent local events like Flash Brighton, UX Brighton etc

I spoke to a wide variety of different people today, from sixth form college students, to people finishing their MAs in Digital Media, to java developers, to freelance designers, to Adam from Garage Studios (who taught my flash course), to one of the ladies from City College who oversees the NVQ I'm doing, to a business coach, to creative writers and film-makers.  I enjoyed talking to them all, suggesting events, or people that they could or should talk to, and I even managed to get a few plugs in for my Brighton Bloggers site, so am hopeful I'll see a flurry of new add requests soon.

All in all it felt like a good event, enabling me to practice my networking skills with a more diverse group of people than I usually meet.  Of particular benefit to me was the opportunity to talk to Sixth Form students, and BA/MA students and get feedback from them on how they see the world of media evolving and understand more about what their various courses actually involve.  Thanks Wired Sussex, I hope to be back next year.

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I've been refactoring one of our projects today, and one of the areas I've been working on has been reducing 5 or 6 similar stored procedures into 1 more generic version.  In doing this, I've had to add a couple of nullable parameters, one of which is a GUID.  

If it is specified, then I need to set an AssignedToUser column to be the GUID, and I also need to record the date of the assignment.  I can do this all within the UPDATE statement, but I needed to only affect the assignment date when the GUID is specified.  Enter the ISNULL function, but what do I set my default value to when it is null? I really wanted to create a known GUID without hardcoding a fixed GUID - a SQL equivalent of Guid.Empty.  A quick bit of googling and I came up with

SELECT CAST(CAST(0 as BINARY) AS UNIQUEIDENTIFIER)

which evaluates to 

00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000

Job done, and recorded here so I can find it next time I need it

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via flickr.com

In February I uploaded 247 photos.

This photo was taken at Paddington Reservoir, Paddington, Sydney. It was taken on my Nikon d80, and processed using Lightroom where I converted it to black and white.

The reason I've chosen this as my favourite photo of the month is because I love the sense of depth. The pattern of the fence in the foreground crosses with the pattern of the steps in the background. The graffiti on the wall gives another set of patterns.

Jono took us to Paddington, originally because we wanted to go to the Blender gallery. On this day the gallery was shut as it was still the Christmas period - we did later go and visit. Instead we strolled around Paddington, and I found the old reservoir to be an excellent location for photography. Well recommended if you have some spare time, and your camera.

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Another meeting with Dawn, my NVQ assessor today.  I'd completely forgotten about it until 15 minutes before she was due to arrive so spent a frantic 10 minutes formatting and printing out the reflective accounts and descriptions I'd written - thankfully I'd spent a couple of hours the other week doing some preparation so I didn't have to write things on the fly.  She greeted me with some great news - the first 2 of my modules D1 and D6 have been approved and are officially completed.  Hurrah!

My evidence for module A2 is amassing, and apart from the fact that I forgot to print out one of my descriptions, and didn't finish another I'm well on the way to getting that completed.  With a bit of luck, and another few hours work I should be able to send another one if for assessing.  The most useful aspect of this module was sitting down and doing a SWOT analysis.  I've never been very good at setting myself goals, and haven't prioritised it so being forced/encouraged to do one was really good.  No big surprises in it really, but good to see all of it down on paper to help me to improve myself to get over my weaknesses and play to my strengths.  As Dawn said it comes in really handy in an interview situation to have a really well thought out answer to the inevitable "what are your biggest strengths and weaknesses" question.  It'll stop me having to fall back on my age old, answer of "biggest weakness is interviews".

All in all, a really positive meeting.

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At Madgex I have the opportunity to talk to people about photography, even though it isn't related to my day job.  I occasionally run training sessions or workshops to share my passion with others.  I enjoy doing this as it makes me think in a different way - I often find explaining needs a deeper understanding than just doing.  I'm not the most talented photographer in the company, but I want to learn more, and by teaching I do just that.  In November I ran the first of a new style of workshop - this was challenge based.  It consisted of 2 parts, the first setting the scene, and issuing a challenge (in this case taking photos where the main colour of the image was one of the Madgex colours - you can see Kevin's submissions here) and the second reviewing the submissions.  Amongst the feedback from the attendees of the session was that there was too large a gap between the people who had high end cameras, and those using their iPhones or low end digital cameras, and also that those who had an aptitude for photoshop had an advantage.  When I started thinking about my 2nd workshop, and what the challenge would be I took these into account. 

Today, I issued the new challenge, this was partially inspired by this blog post which I read some point last year.  I'd bought 2 identical disposable cameras (Kodak Fun Flash 27+12 for those who want the exact details) to be shared between the 8 attendees (somewhere between 9 and 10 shots each).  I then issued them with a list of 8 items to take photographs of (inspired by lomokev's hot shots course) and as they like an element of competition, some scoring element.  

So, the photos:

1. a number
2. something taken from ground level
3. a Brighton landmark
4. something red
5. a dog
6. shoes (this one is in tribute to lomokev and his fine collection of shoes and feet photographs)
7. street art
8. the person you're handing the camera over to

And the scoring:

Basics:

• 1 point per picture that matches the brief

Bonus Points:

• 1 bonus points for doing them all in order
• 2 bonus points if you can manage a theme that runs through all 8 of your images
• 1 bonus point if your picture is judged to be the best of that category by me
• 1 bonus point if you use only 8 exposures rather than the allowed 9

Penalty Points:

• Lose 1 point per day you're late handing your camera over to the next person
• Lose 1 point if the last photo of your set isn't the person you're handing over to
• Lose 1 point per extra exposure over your allotted 9 you use
• Lose 20 points if you break or lose the camera

The intention is to get everyone thinking more before they press the shutter, to really commit to the image they are attempting to capture.  Having been "playing with" film cameras for the past year I've begun to appreciate how much more focussed I am in what I take with film than when shooting digitally.  I also hope that this takes away the concern about equipment and allows them to focus on composition and colours rather than technicalities.  I'm really excited to see what they come up with and manage to produce, and despite the initial look of mild shock on their faces, I'm hoping that they really engage with it and enjoy this challenge.

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As a fervent photographer of my dog, Skitters, I was interested to stumble across the article How to take amazing photos of your dog the other day.  It covers both recommended equipment, and a selection of shots to try.  Some of these I've got examples of amongst my 305 Skitters photos.  Others I have yet to try.  For my own reference I thought I'd list the recommended positions, and post example Skitters photos where I have them.  All of them are useful and good techniques for getting a more unusual shot of your 4 legged friend.

Position yourself low

Fill the frame by getting closer

Use a wide aperture

Take lots of shots

Forget standard camera-holding techniques

I need to work on this one!

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As with my review of the eyemodule, this review was originally on the janeandrichard site and dates from early 2001.

The Review

During our trip to the Maldives, we used underwater disposable cameras to take photos of fishes. These came out reasonably well, but weren't of wonderful quality. So, we decided to invest in a proper underwater camera. We'd also been carrying a small panoramic camera around with us, which again didn't produce all that good quality images. So, an APS camera appeared to be the ideal solution. Ironically, we haven't had the opportunity to take it snorkelling since.

We bought the Weathermatic camera at Heathrow Airport as we left the UK for a long weekend in Iceland. It was the only waterproof APS camera we could find at the time. Although for the trip to Iceland we didn't need a waterproof camera, one that was weatherproof and didn't object to being dropped in the snow was a good idea.

The photos it produces are of a pretty high standard, and we've had no problems with it in the 2 years we've had the camera.

The specification claims that it can go underwater to a depth of around 10 metres (we've taken it down in swimming pools, and lakes and things to 3 or so metres and it has been okay).

The controls are designed to be easy to use underwater, and this also makes them quite easy to use with gloved hands. Of course, this makes the camera quite bulky (and also, being bright yellow it isn't subtle).

We're in no rush to replace this camera, and it is used as our main camera for all events.

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via 1x.com

Spotted via the AmazingPics tweet

I love the crispness of the end shot with the beautiful, almost cloudlike, flow of the ballerina from left to right.

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As I may have mentioned before, I've been suffering with RSI in my left (non-mouse) wrist.  I thought it would be useful to put a few links down to advice/tools/services that I've found handy.

At work:

Madgex got the lovely people at Posture People, a local company, to come in and visit me at my desk and do a workspace assessment.  This involved recommendations, such as reorganise my desk, move my monitors, as well as the more practical element of adjusting my chair so that if offers support in all the right places. They also brought me an Ergo Rest wrist rest which I use on my left harm to support my wrist and keep my arm in the correct position.

I also ordered an ergonomic keyboard for the office.

As we use windows at work, I use workrave to monitor my use of the computer. It tells me when I should have a micro-break, or a rest-break, even providing optional exercises to do during the rest.  The settings for how often are configurable, but it provides a good method of ensuring I don't get too carried away when I should be stepping away from the keyboard.

At home:

At home I use a laptop, but do at least have desk space for it.  I bought an external keyboard, and a laptop stand to enable me to raise the laptop to approximately the right height.

In a similar vein to workrave, there is a tool called AntiRSI for the mac world.  It doesn't provide exercises, but it does still offer the concept of micro and rest breaks.

I have also been visiting an osteopath which, combined with all of the above, has made a difference to both my wrist issue, and a persistent ache just behind my right shoulder blade.

General advice:

There are some excellent blog posts, and advice sites out there, just search google.  The blog post 10 ergonomic tips for setting up your home workstation gives some good, and generally easy to implement, suggestions and deserves a read even if you currently don't have any symptoms at all.  Prevention is better than cure and all that.

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via hipstamatic.strutta.com

Life in LoFi mentioned a competition for the best photo taken using the hipstamatic iPhone app. The prize is

for a chance to be one of three featured iPhoneographers on iPhoneography.org

I've been enjoying using hipstamatic, and so thought I'd submit my image and see if anything comes of it. You can always help me out by heading over and voting for me :-) (although I think you need to have an account to do so)

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Via the iPhone app

So, this tells me that I can't trust the date/time stamp on my images uploaded via the iPhone application to tell me when I really took the photo.  Mildly annoying, but better to know for sure than to be guessing that is the case.

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via flickr.com

This morning I took the dog out for a walk and was struck by the quality of the light. Golden light shone off all the buildings, and everything looked clean.

This photo was taken at around 7:20am (the EXIF says 1pm or so but that is when it was uploaded via the iPhone flickr app), a time when even just a week ago the sun wouldn't have risen. In fact, the sun apparently only rose at 7:13am today, so this truly was the golden hour.

It was a beautiful time to be out and about on the Brighton seafront and the recently restored bandstand stood out against the still blue sea and the blue sky looking magnificent.

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