I have always enjoyed taking pictures, but sometimes as I have buried myself in other “business” endeavors I have lost sight of doing what I truly enjoy.  However, recently I have made a greater effort to immerse my self in photography, and I find myself gravitating more and more towards it.  That being said, I have been working hard to gather some of my better work for to share with others.  I am not looking for a photography business per se, maybe it would be great to sell a print here and there, but it dawned on me, as it has many others, combine a true passion and maybe that’s the best business to pursue ?  Below are some of my favorite pics that are featured on my new site JJG3 Photography.  Please stop by and check out some of my work and hopefully enjoy what you see.

So remember, don’t forget about those little things in your life that truly are a passion and make you happy and “take” you away. I know many preach finding that balance between work and play, but it is always worth repeating.

Love to hear from you all, what are your true passions and have you lost touch with them ?

This was interesting to me for two reasons, I was recently writing the post about Ignite DC, where I mentioned a talk I gave at the first Ignite Baltimore titled “Have a great idea?  What are you gonna do about it” where I said it was important just to take the first step.  The other reason being a panel I saw at the recent Bootstrap MD conference where there was some debate from the panelists if it was possible to start a successful company in your “spare time”.

I am of the opinion that you can absolutely start a company in your spare time.  Obviously if we look at the Tapbots example this is true and there are some friends in the area here that are doing some cool stuff, about to be released, all in their spare time.  Now I by no means built a successful product, depending on who you ask their definition of success.  But I did succeed on many levels by just taking the time and energy to devote to building out my vision.  To me this was a success.  And I did it with no real capital.  I drew up the “wireframe” and a slide deck with the backend design and front end design concepts after work or while traveling for work. and submitted theses to sites like Elance for developers to bid on the work.  So you might be asking, “I thought you said you started with no money …”.  I did.  So how did I pay for the development costs ?  I did some other side work.  I am not a developer by trade, so I took my strengths and got some work doing it, all out side of a full time job.  With the money I earned on this side work, I was able to pay for the development of the product I was building.  Essentially it was a wash.  So don’t be deterred and think that you need a lot of money.  You can probably do a lot of the work yourself, and if you cannot, outsource your weaknesses.  Just be smart in who you choose and also try to cover your costs by doing other work.  Its not all or nothing.

In the end, the product I built really went nowhere per se, so it probably cant be considered a success.  However, in my eyes I got off my ass and did something.  I learned a great deal and overall it was a great experience for me.  I met so many people along the way, all of whom I consider good friends to this day.

Success.

However, I have recently been rethinking my position on the former, the “cloud” services like Gmail and the like.  It started when I heard some of those internet horror stories where users were locked out of their Gmail accounts and had basically lost years of mail.  Up until that point I had exclusively used the web interface.  At that point I began using Thunderbird as an email client on my Mac.  By configuring as IMAP I was essentially able to utilize my Gmail account and have it synchronized with the web interface and at the same time have a local copy on my laptop.

So as far as my email goes, I have a “backup” plan for my email, but what about some of my other items I have out there in the cloud, pictures and documents..  I use Flickr for my pics and would frankly be upset if Yahoo were to kill the service, although most of my pics are not only locally on my desktop but also back up to a Drobo and out on Amazon S3.  Documents on the other hand are a different story.  I use Google Docs exclusively for all my personal and business documents.  As of now, I have not found a good way to “back” these documents up.  Users  are able to individually export documents and save them to their local computer, but for those who have a large number this is not really a viable option.

With all of this in mind, another shock was sent just the other day when the social bookmarking site Magnolia announced

Early on the West-coast morning of Friday, January 31st, Ma.gnolia experienced every web service’s worst nightmare: data corruption and loss. For Ma.gnolia, this means that the service is offline and members’ bookmarks are unavailable, both through the website itself and the API. As I evaluate recovery options, I can’t provide a certain timeline or prognosis as to to when or to what degree Ma.gnolia or your bookmarks will return; only that this process will take days, not hours.

Users lost all of their data with no recovery options given.

So is this to say that these cloud service should not be used ?  Absolutely not.  What it does say though is that you should be aware of the risks and make sure tat you cover all yor bases to make sure you have protected your data.

I made a decision recently to do a little experiment with regards to mobile audio.  I have been a Sirius satellite subscriber for a couple of years now and have basically been pretty happy.  Happy enough that I cannot stand anything to do with terrestrial radio in any form or fashion.   Anyway, I was basically using Sirius as my music/talk radio platform and supplementing it with Podcasts and some Audible audio books and have been fairly happy.
But I got to thinking that I was missing many features on my iPhone that I could be taking advantage of.  So for my experiment I took the Sirius radio out of my car and bought a Griffin FM transmitter for the iPhone from the local Apple store.  I decided that I was only going to use my iPhone for my mobile audio needs.

So how did my experiment fare ?  Well I can tell you that I went ahead and cancelled my subscription to Sirius ..

Is the iPhone a perfect solution?  Not quite, but it is pretty damned close.  I found that I was able to not only replace any functionality I had, but I actually got more enjoyment out of just my iPhone.  So what did I use ?  Here is a quick list of the what I used:

1. Pandora
2. Slacker
3. Podcasts
4. Audio Books
5. AOL radio

So on Sirius I had found a couple of stations that I really enjoyed, but with the apps like Pandora and Slacker I have found that I can stream literally anything I want to listen to and create my own personalized radio stations that continue to get smarter as I rate the music.  Both of these apps stream equally as well on both the Edge and 3G networks.  The flexibility has not been just good for me either.  I have two small girls who of course love Hanna Montana and all those other Disney like groups.  We were in the car the other day and they wanted music.  With one quick search on the Pandora app, I had them listening to their very own Miley Cyrus station (I know I know …).

I have been a podcast listener for many years now and continue to find great stuff to expand and listen to.  One of my new favorites is the an Oxford style debate podcast from NPR called Intelligence Squared adn I LOVE IT.  Of course I listen to the standard MAC and tech podcasts like TWIT.  But there is a lot of good free content out there.  I also have an Audible subscription and get one audio book a month to listen to.  It is a great change of pace when I am tired of listening to the other stuff.  And besides, who the hell has time to sit around and actually read these days ???

So in the event that you do need/want to listen to something more local you can check out AOL Radio.  It has a pretty cool function where it uses the GPS to identify your location and presents you with some local radio stations that it rebroadcasts.  So here in the DC area I was able to listen to 106.7FM and some other local DC and baltimore stations.

All in all I am extremely satisfied with my decision and have not regretted it one bit, and in turn it has even saved me a few bucks a month that I was spending on satellite radio.  I think in this economic climate, we will all be looking for those little bits of expenses to cut and the iPhone can really be a huge help inm meeting your audio needs.

So what do you all think ?  I think you should take the vow to and see how far the iPhone can go to meet all your mobiel audio needs.

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts the other day, NoAgenda with Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak, and they were talking about an American Idol type show that Adam’s wife was a judge on in the Netherlands.  Anyway soon the talk turned to how our society has turned losing into a taboo subject.  John mentioned something that struck me as true when I thought about it.  After the major sporting events, like the SuperBowl, the World Series, and so on, they kind of stopped the practice of going into the losing teams locker room.  Its like the networks don’t want people to see the losing side for some reason.

So then later that day I was reading a post over at Micah’s Learn to Duck blog about realizing you suck at something and doing something about it.  He states that in America

society teaches us that failure is not an option. We must persevere. We must overcome. The American Hero archetype is one that succeeds against all odds.

He also says that on some level it is important to figure out that you do suck at something and then to use that to make your self better at it.

These two points are kind of important to see and realize what is happening.  Now Micah says that as Americans failure is not an option, but we need failure.  We need to see the losing side of the ballgame.  This is how we learn those emotions and battle to never feel them again.  In the paraphrased words of Gordon Gecko in Wall Street, “Losing, for lack of a better word, is good”.  When I was a kid playing Little League baseball, I lost a lot, and learned to hate to lose.  That hatred in some sense is what drives us to succeed.

However, barring those stupid ass reality shows where people get voted off to the glee of millions, our society is very close to not know the feeling of “losing”.  Sports and other competitions have become that of two winners, everyone is a winner these days.  Everyone gets a trophy whether you win or lose.  What is the lesson in that ?  Now don’t get me wrong, I am not one of those crazed parents that scream at other parents, but I think our children need to learn the other side of winning.  As it stands right now, they do not and all I see is a constant sense of entitlement.

That is what is great about losing, in a sadistic fashion I suppose, is that we learn from it.  When I lost at baseball, I practiced harder, when people who are entrepreneurs truly fail, they learn from the experience and apply the lessons the next time.  Look at our current situation with the auto industry.  They have been functioning for decades with their heads in the sand, executives and labor unions alike working with that sense of entitlement, while neglecting to see the losing side.  If GM posted a multi billion dollar loss, the executives still got their bonuses and the union workers still got their yearly raises.  They never lost, just the poor stockholders …  And now look whats is happening, the government is acting like the little league ball coach and telling them that it is okay to lose, and as your trophy here is a few billion dollars. I understand that this is an overly simplistic view and their are many more complexities involved here, but on some level I think they need to feel the loss, learn the lesson and strive to win.

The lesson?  Losing is, in fact, not a bad thing.  Loss and the realization of your shortcomings, or as Micah states, what you suck at, are vital to learning and applying those lessons to become a winner.  Everyone does not always have to get a trophy.