Our time in Goa has come to an end, and truthfully it was fairly uneventful here. We expected much more partying to happen than actually took place and I’m currently sick which doesn’t help matters. However, I do have to say that the sunsets are gorgeous here, and being on the water it’s not as hot as it could be (which is always a plus in my book!).

New Year’s Eve was marked with attempting to get into various parties unsuccessfully with one threat of getting arrested (long, long story). But the good news is that we avoided foreign police capture, had a great meal at this restaurant called ‘Over the Flames” and marked the coming of 2008 with a toast and talking about our goals for 2008. Here are some of mine:

1. Sell 3 photos to people I don’t know (2007’s goal was to sell 1, which happened in November!)
2. Bike one 50-miler (this is much less a fitness goal and more of a mental one).
3. Ship the new product I’m working on for Microsoft by the end of the year.
4. Take the bus to work at least 4 times a week on average.
5. Go home to visit my family at least 5 times. 2007 was marred with severe out of country travel restrictions due to my Green Card, but that has now passed. I’m anxious to see more of my niece and nephew!

I have some other more personal goals that I’ll opt not so share Hopefully everyone has thought about the coming year and has some goals set as well.
We fly out of Goa tommorow afternoon and, after 2 layovers, will end up in Cochin early evening. Well be spending 3 days there followed by 2 days in the backwaters of Kerala living on a house boat.

Happy New Year everyone!

Thomas Hawk wrote an interesting piece the other day about his goal to publish 500,000 photos in his lifetime. At his current rate of taking 200 photos per day and publish 20 of them, he approximates this to take him another 66 years to achieve the magical 500k goal.

I read this and was utterly shocked at this goal. 500,000 photos at first seemed like a tenable achievement, but thinking about that and doing the math, this is almost absurd to me. It’s not that I couldn’t take more than 20 photos per day, every day. It’s that I find it hard to believe anyone could take that many quality photographs at that rate. Thomas presumes that his rate of photos per day will increase as he gets older because (a) he’ll retire one day which will allow him to take more photos and (b) technology will get better allowing him to be more productive.

After thinking about it more, I’m not sure I’d even want to set this goal. It seems artificial and the value would be begging to be watered down just to meet the sheer quantity of photos required.

What do you think?

I’m excited to announce that I’m showing my photographs for the first time publicly.  I fortunately met the owner of a coffee shop in Belltown a few weeks ago, and it turns out he loved my photographs.  

The onwer of Bellino Coffee has graciously allowed me to show some of my photographs for the next few months.  It was pretty nerve racking choosing which photographs to show, but I settled on 4 of my absolute favorites and hope everyone else will enjoy them as well.

Bellino Coffee is on 2nd Ave in Belltown between Battery and Wall St.  If you’re in the area, I’d love for you to stop by and let me know what you think.  Even better, show some love by ordering a coffee and mention you’re coming by to see the photos

I’m nearly finished my customization of my photo portofolio and uploading a whack of images.  I was previously using Flickr, but it didn’t give me a good way to sell my photos directly to people without having some wonky experience where the buyer would be kicked out to a third party website. Additionally, I couldn’t customize my page as much as I could with Smugmug so I could never achieve a really unique look and store-front.

The last 2 months have been filled with post-processing of photos when I’m able to squeeze time outside of my busy work schedule.  I’ve been able to kick in some volunteer time with the American Diabetes Association.  While I’ve never been too keen on doing event photography, I was the site photographer for the ADA’s family night at the Seattle Aquarium and had a complete blast.  I couldn’t help but continually smile throughout the night with families and kids eager at the change to jump in front of my lens.  I managed to squeeze out a bunch of great photos that I’m sure the ADA will be able to use for promotional material.  Other than my time helping the ADA out, the other upside is that I’m able to get Microsoft to match the hours I volunteered as a separate donation to the ADA. 

I still haven’t sold a single photo yet, but admittedly I haven’t done much promoting of my work outside of telling a few friends and writings on my blog.  I figure I still have a good 8 months left in the year to achieve my 2007 goal of selling a photo to someone I don’t know, so I still have time to get my act together. Wish me luck, and while you’re at it, check out my photos and let me know what you think

For those using RSS Readers, you can use this feed to keep updated on new photos as I add them.

Over the holidays, one of the 2007 goals I set for myself was to complete the Seattle-to-Portland (STP) bike ride this summer over the July 14th weekend. 

Last sunday, I took one step closer in my quest to complete this seemingly impossible task.  I get tired driving 200 miles, and now I’m thinking of biking it?! 

My training started the second week of January with spinning classes at my gym to increase my aerobic fitness level and to see if I liked biking enough to actually complete STP this year.  It was far cheaper to buy a 10-class punch card for spinning classes than to buy a bike just to decide I hated biking :)  Besides, I think I’m a glutton for punishment with all my coworkers ridiculing me due to the padded spandex shorts.

After deciding I liked biking enough, I started on a quest for researching road bikes.  I’m usually a research nut when it comes to PCs and gadgets, but road bikes were a completely new world to me.  What made it worse is that there wasn’t a ton of online references, so I had to resort to asking friends and visiting bike shops in person to understand what I was getting myself into.  This helped me realize how much easy my life is when I’m researching other topics — I fire up Live Search (it really does return relevant results) or Wikipedia, and after 15-20 mins, I normally have a ton of information at my finger tips for me to dive into.  With road bikes, I was getting search results leading me to online stores fo various bike shops with no good objective information.  Wikipedia had a smattering of information about different bike components, but not much on the topic of buying a road bike.

After over a month of researching and shopping around, I finally settled on a 2007 Scott S-20 road bike.  It was pricier than I originally budgeted but after doing a bunch of research and test rides, this was definitley the bike for me.  Not only does the frame fit my body geometry the best, it has components that are of sufficiently high grade, that I can “grow” into the bike as I get better.

I was deliberating between a 2006 S10 and the 2007 S20 models, with the ‘06 S-10 discounted quite a bit (~$400) due to it being an ‘outdated’ model.   The biggest differences between the 2 were that the S10 has full Ultegra components whereas the S20 is full 105.  The S10 also has a different front fork (still carbon, but better quality and lighter). 

I really loved the S10 as I could surprisingly tell the difference between Ultegra and 105 components (though not the front fork), especially in the shifting of the gears.  The shifting was just that much smoother on the S10.  However, I couldn’t justify the extra $350 since I still had to fork out cash for a biking computer, patch kits, spare tubes and other accessories to just even begin riding on the road.

My spinning classes are completely whipping my butt every week.  Anyone that thinks that pedaling on a bike indoors at the gym is an easy task, I challenge you to try out a spinning class and be prepared to re-define the meaning of ‘tiring’.

This type of training is different than what I’ll experience for STP since spinning classes are more about simulating bike races with hill climbs and sprints, where STP is really an endurance event covering mainly flat roads.  I’m anxious to get on the road and start pedaling.

My bike has to be special ordered, but apparantly shipping is lightning quick since it should be ready for pickup this weekend. For anyone buying a bike, I highly recommend Sammamish Cycle in Redmond. Not only do they know their stuff about both mountain and road biking, but they are willing to take the time to really set you up for substantial test rides.  This is a stark contrast to many other bike shops in town, including the famous Gregg’s Cycles in Greenlake, which wouldn’t even put on SPD SL pedals onto the bikes so I could ride with my own biking shoes that I previously purchases. Image trying to buy a bike for a 200 mile biking event based only on a test ride in sneakers.

Now that the weather is starting to clear up, I should be able to get on the road pretty soon.  In my spinning classes I’m doing 20-25 miles a week, and I figure I should be able to do 30-40 miles a week once the weather gets consistently better and ramp up from there as I get closer to STP.

I’m currently shopping for a biking computer, so if anyone knows about these things and has a recommendation, shoot them my way!