So let me just say that what I’m doing is not healthy.

I keep on accepting more and more august weddings.
You say… now that’s not really that bad at least you get lots of money.
Yes, I suppose you’re right, I might not have to work the rest of the winter… or at least pay stuff off.

But let me give you a run down.
2 weddings is a decent month… you can stay afloat on that, specially when you’re young and single.
3 is a busy month

My busiest month prior to august has been May = 6 weddings
I felt like i was going crazy trying to get everything done… way into july.

now let’s skip to 8! That’s crazy stuff!

That’s about the time I said… “No More”

Then a friend calls… someone I’ve been teaching and working with to help her be a wedding photographer herself. She’s getting married… and I say… yes. Plus it will be one of the few travel weddings for me in August. (Texas and San Diego) She even kinda rearanges the time to fit around another wedding I have that day and the other reception I have in San Diego the next week. Cool stuff.

Then I get another one… and another one… and another one…

And I keep saying yes.
I really have stopped counting… suffice it to say… Buy stock in Caffienated sodas, because it’s gonna be a crazy month!

Hello mid-September I’m waiting for you!

I’m doing this for Technorati purposes but feel free to fan me or whatever
Technorati Profile

For Sure

Pandora - Free
This one is per darn excitin’

Remote - Free
I hear it’s cool and I believe them

SmugShot - Free
I use smugmug a lot and the GPS addition to it will be swell.
Take a picture with the iPhone during your photo shoot and you’ll be able to look back and know where exactly you were when you took all those other pictures with your big camera.

MLB.com At Bat - $5
I love my baseball… even though the padres aren’t doing so well.

MPG - $1 or CarStat $2
The price is right and i try to keep track of this stuff anyway… specially with all the traveling I tend to do.

Facebook - Free
I use facebook a lot and this is free… no brainer i’d think.

Twitteriffic or other
I’ll do some research to see which twitter app is the best.
One version is free

eReader - Free
Seems like a logical thing to get

WeatherBug -Free
Handy to know the forecast
Price is right

Considering Highly

Super Monkey Ball - $10
I need a game or two

Another Game of some sort
Options cro-mag rally or some type of solitair game

Baseball - Free
I like stats and I like baseball and i like free stuff

Box Office - Free
Would be nice to have a list of what’s playing nearbye

List program of some sort
Need to see which of the many will be the best option… or perhaps there’s a built in one that will be just fine. Possibles: Todo, lists, To Do(Free)

Linguo $3
It doesn’t have to be this program but I’d like a translator program

Yelp - Whrrls and Loopt
To see what it’s like and because they’re free. I’ve been hearing about these

Band $10
I’d like to play it first before i get it.

A voice recorder of some type

Am I missing anything?

A friend of mine did something fun on her blog and listed her most influential and I’m supposing favorite albums of all time.

I shall do the same but I would say check out her blog for her list along with lots of other people’s lists.

Even though I will say right now my picks are obviously the best and or coolest eclectic mix out there.

Romanza - Andrea Bocelli
This is my favorite album one of the first I listened to, by one of my favorite artists.

Lost and Found - Will Smith
Not too much into rap but this album was clean thoughtful and very inspiring. I think it is a demonstration of the potential that Rap and Hip Hop hold. The song by the same name (Lost & Found) is probably my second favorite song of all time, it has a great, powerful, strong, meaningful, message.

Closer - Josh Groban
Another of my favorite artists and my favorite of his albums.

Pop 20! - Erasure
Man I grew up with this stuff. My sisters listened to it and i liked it. This is by far the best album of their old stuff. It’s their greatest Hits… the stuff everyone knows and loves.

Nightbird - Erasure
This is a fairly new album by an old favorite. I think it came out about 4 years ago and I love the feel to it.

Eyes Open -Snow Patrol
This is a testament to the fact that the older I get the more I am tending to like some newer music.
I used to like classic rock when I was young. I prefer the newer stuff now days.

Beautiful World - Take That
Random, Random find. I didn’t know who they were and for that matter I still don’t. I hear they were popular back in the day… well this was just released a couple of years ago and it’s awesome.

Calogero - Calogero
I listen to so much foreign music that it was a hard decision on a album that was great all the way through. This one is. It’s French rock.

Gli Anni - 883
As far as influential this one is importat, because it was one of the first Italian albums I fell in love with.
It has good songs but it’s mostly about the influence to the point that I love french and italian music. The CD was a big black and yellow soccer ball… and that was pretty darn cool.

Flood - They Might be Giants
This takes me back… great, funny, goofy… and this was the album that made me love them.
I can’t listen for hours on end, but from time to time there’s nothing quite the same!

Division Bell - Pink Floyd
This was the music I listened to in high school. I still absolutely love some of the music. But this album was specially appealing to me then and still my choice of all their music today.

Best Of - Def Leppard
Probably my favorite music from “My Era” that i never actually listened to. I thought they were a really hard group because of the name and the rap… but when I finally got around to listening to them and in particular this album I understood what I missed. Great stuff

Honorable Mention:
Insieme a Te - Alessandro Safina,
L’anno zero - Nek,
Centoundici - Tiziano Ferro,
Notting Hill - Soundtrack
Parce Qu’on Vient De Loin - Corneille
The Mission - Soundtrack
In your Honor - Foo Fighters
Je te serai fidèle - Roch Voisine
Seal - Seal
Donde estan los ladrones - Shakira

I forgot to mention that I did have one proud moment… and that was installing
InstantRails… and I even got it to work via their instructions.

It wasn’t terribly easy… and I’m not sure what i actually do with it now.
But that’s not the point.

The point is I was successful at something, and that almost makes all this effort worth it.

I think I’d rather pay someone to come to my computer and set it all up for me. Give me the nice user interface of rails and just make it all nice and neat and ready to go… so then I can start dinking around.

Even better make me my application and I can study how it went and pretend I might be able to know what’s going on. In fact why don’t i just stick to photography?

Maybe i’ll try again later.

So i played with this site and it let you experiment with doing code in a tutorial format.

This was nice because I didn’t have to  set up all that crap that I was trying to figure out.

Try out the “Try Ruby App”

Maybe it’s late… or maybe this is too much trouble than it’s worth.
But I haven’t enjoyed my experience with Ruby so far.

I’ll try more tomorrow…. maybe

Eureka! Have I found it?

74 Quality Ruby on Rail Resources

Initial thoughts: It looks well organized. It approaches many of my concerns, it gives me automatic install sites and seems to go down the list of things I might need later.

Basically I will take a look and see if i can Unconfuse myself of all the junk i’ve looked at so far.

I change my mind…

I don’t think figuring out how to get things running on bluehost really should be my first step.
After all I’m a long ways away from creating an app that will be runnable enough to put online.

So now I think I either need to figure out how to install things on Vista to get it running.
Or maybe just get the old computer running some form of Ubuntu again.

We’ll see.

I wish someone out there just would tell me what’s up and why

Don’t know if this is the best way to go about it…

But i was watching the training videos on Lynda.com
I had a hard time paying attention and he was using a Mac (I am not)

And I didn’t really get around to installing RoR on the computer.

Ruby on Bluehost

I’ve notice that Bluehost.com, My webhost… has lots of helps for Ruby.
So i decided that maybe the best option is to see what other people using Ruby on Bluehost were doing.

Looks like I’m not the only one going down this path… seems to be a requested topic.
But if it’s so requested maybe these are all old posts and bluehost has just gotten it fixed and made it super easy…. like click a button and it’s done.

My Search

A google search came up with the following.

John Shea’s BlueHost Ruby on Rails Guide

Outlook: Looks like it’s exactly what I asked for
Result: Umm… Nope… wasn’t what I expected or helpful at all for my needs.

Getting Ruby on Rails running on Bluehost

Result: Ummm not for Neophytes like myself. I think it’s more for Ruby fans already running and using ruby. But they did hint at the fact that RoR might not gel with bluehost too well. Let’s just hope it was an old post and things have changed since then.

Bluehost Help Desk Doc

Outlook: Coming straight from the horses mouth… this ought to be good.
Result: Not beginning level… but helpful information. Then I tuned out when it started going really technical. Do I really have to do it all… or is this article old as well?

What I learned:

Don’t use Script Sever:
Secondly, you’ll see a lot of tutorials referring to a program called “script/server” or “webrick”. This is NOT NECESSARY on a bluehost account, and you should never have to use it. This is designed for people who are developing their rails application on their own computer where there is no apache install which is pre-configured to use ruby on rails. However, you do have access to such a server on bluehost, so you do not need to worry about script/server. Do not run it, as it will not even work.

Suggested Tutorial:
They suggested a tutorial.
http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/GettingStartedWithRails

Checklist for Running ROR

Result: Better layout… seems to be better.
I’m wishing there was a video tutorial of getting things going on bluehost

Techie Tips Tutorial for RoR on Bluehost

Result: The last three tutorials have looked very similar… that’s a good thing. To me that means they’re on to something and it’s definetly what I’ll probably need to do.

Lynda.Com

I have used Lynda.com extensively in the past for help learning about photoshop and several other programs.
It helped when I was getting better at photo editing…
And also when I was creating my own simple photography website

Lynda.com is an online database of video tutorials.

It presently costs $25 a month… and though I had it for a long time on the first experience I only have 2-3 weeks of decently free time this time around.

Why start there?

Well i enjoy the organized good quality videos they offer.
And though I know that there are many other people out there offering training videos on RoR I didn’t want to spend the time searching for them… because that can sometimes take you down a track that takes hours and hours of not well spend time. I want to jump into it…
Besides I’ve already given myself a big enough of a distraction by blogging about this all.

Videos Available

Ruby on Rails Essential Training

Ruby on Rails Beyond the Basics

Setting Up Ruby on Rails 1.x for Windows

Other Video series

Please feel free to inform us of other possibly better and certainly more free options for training videos.

Long time Coming

So I’ve hear of and been interested in Ruby on Rails for quite some time now.

I have a week or two of more or less free time until I start getting overloaded with photo shoots again.

I thought about documenting my steps and things I did to help and if you feel so inclined tell me what I should have done instead or what could be my next steps.

Maybe CakePHP

I must say that I don’t know why I insist on Ruby on Rails.
I do like the idea of how easy it might be to learn… I’m not dumb and I understand computers alright, but I just don’t have the time for hardcore programming. It’s not my field, not my job and it will never be.

But recently I’ve been hearing talk about CakePHP being another viable solution.

For one thing (the biggest thing) my programmers who are working on the Envision Project are PHP people… I’m sure I could get more help if I went with a PHP option. And they are even considering porting the project to CakePHP.

What For?

Well if I learn it well enough I thought I could help maintain another photographic online web project that I hope to have finished and running by the end of August or mid september.
I would like it to be done in RubyOnRails and if I know some stuff i could perhaps help with maintainance.

LINKS

I thought it would be a place I could store some of my sources and webpages I found along the way.
Maybe even write some summaries and my experiences with each.

If there’s anyone out there with a good deal of Data Base creation knowledge me and a couple of actual programmers are trying to figure out a pretty complex puzzle.

We’re interacting with what will be a database of many millions of pictures each connected to tons of info.

That’s where the fun starts… because we want to do some pretty cool filters, searches, displays.
Maybe a little Ajax action going on… we’re dealing with PHP and MySQL

So if you’re interested let me know and we’ll chat about it and I’ll give you actual specifics.

On a seperate note I have another DB question for another smaller project. (RoR and MySQL)

• If you’re really into it… I am a full time professional photographer and I’m more than willing to trade for your efforts.
• (Money could even be an option… but I don’t have the cash that a really good DB guy would usually get)

So what does one do to avoid headaches or eye aches from staring at a screen all day?

I probably should have my 3 screens setup in a more orderly fashion and refrain from watching video on one and switching back and forth so often as I edit pictures on the other.

Are there better setups than others for this kinda thing?

These are the things I wonder about.

On a happier note… I might be done with photo shoot edits by the end of the weekend.

Then what?… Well I suppose I go take more pictures that I need to edit.

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” – Henry Ford

I guess it depends on what you’re doing

Here’s a couple of cases in the photoshop world. Written by John Nack

What I think we’re going to be doing at the Envision The World project might be better than what most customers even could have thought of. And yet there are some things they can think of in other areas that I’m sure we’d love to know. So it can both ways just like with most industries.

I’d like to know if anyone has some time to spare and wants to look for famous photographers for me to meet with along the path of my trip: http://tinyurl.com/6rupcx.

Main spots I’ll be stopping hoping to do an interview with people are

Interviews are for my podcast found on the envision blog

• Tetons
• rexburg ID
• Yellowstone
• Glacier national park (missoula, whitefish)
• Banff (canada)
• Jasper (canada)
• Vancouver
• Seattle
• Olympia
• Portland
• Oregon coast
• redwoods
• crater lake area

Just figured someone might have some time and wanted to look at different photography sites.

scott

The “Don’t spam twitter” debate is off track

People should know that I love it when you tell me when your new blogs and podcasts are up! I’m afraid the backlash will make twitter devoid of use… But obviously don’t overdo it or actually spam… such as direct message people. Because unwanted messages are spam.

When I follow someone I expect to hear about what they’re doing… including what they’re writing!!

By the way  i’m using twitter… i should probably add a plugin for it and stuff. @jarvie

I took some time to find some good wordpress plugins for the Envision Blog

I’ll share my finds

This blog post had tons of links to blogs that had their top 10 top 20 plugins to use.

I like to see the list of real world people and which plugins they’re using so this link was good in addition
It’s the comments section that is actually the most helpful

Hope that helps and perhaps just reduplicates the efforts done by everyone else… so more eyes see things.

Tip 1

If you’re interested in showing off your photography there’s lots of ways.
Some are hard and some are easy and some are spendy.

People wonder how to make a website to show off their work.
I don’t think straight to a new unique website should be your first step.

Try a blog for starters… show off your work as it comes little by little.
Blogger is fun and a lot of people use it… but it sucks if you want to put pictures and words.
You basically have to choose between the two.

WordPress is heaps better in my opinion… but I don’t know if it’s easier per se.
But don’t go the dumb route… invest a little time and get wordpress.

Here are my wordpress blogs
This One
PimpMyPictures
My official Photo Blog

You can change the layout and so many other things.
You can also see the amount of traffic coming to your blog and where it’s coming from.

A Photo Blog is a great way to start out.

You could also just keep on posting new pictures in facebook of all your new work.

Avoid posting bad pictures.
Meaning stay away from mediocre and blurry pictures.

Basically don’t post (blog, facebook, website) any pictures that isn’t a representation of the work you’d do for someone.

So as much as I try to do these big long road trips and take thousands of pictures of new places.

I decided that I should try to explore more of my own backyard.

Places nearer to home.

A photographer that used to live around the area gave some good suggestions
Anyone else have some thoughts on the subject

His short list

• Backside of Timp
• Cascade Springs road
• Albion Basin (near snowbird)
• Timp Basin
• American Fork Canyon
• Silver Lake Flats
• Big Springs (S. Fork Canyon)
• Deer Creek Resevoir (Up on a ridge)

I want to make sure I hit these bigger spots as well, Further Away

• Great Basin National Park
• Some Trips to The Great Salt Lake
• Bryce
• Full Narrows Hike (Zions)
• Capitol Reef
• Tetons
• Glacier Nat. Park

Write in suggestions… Near and Far (not too far)… I already know lots of far away places i want to go.

So as much as I find it hard to keep up with my Blogs (This one and the photo Blog)

But, I’ve been twittering like crazy.

What is twitter?
Well I suppose it’s a little difficult to explain.
What is to me is a little more easy.

I use it to update people as to what I’ve been doing.
(A more consistent-powerful facebook status line)

To ask questions… and get a quick fast response from knowledgable people.
(Twitter users are the type that are vocal and consistantly check the people they follow)

Make suggestions… tell people about great sites and other finds.

See suggestions… in the same respect I usually enjoy all of the suggestions that people I respect make.
(I’ve found some really great sites and kept to date on important news notes as they break)

Network… A great way to connect yourself to people that might be beneficial to know.
(And to get people to know about the stuff that you do)

Recently I’ve been refering people to my twitter page when they ask what I’ve been up to… because I went on a week long trip and there was so much that I did it was easier than repeating myself a dozen times. In a way it was to help them get familiar with the service… not that I would have minded too much talking with them on the phone and sharing some of the highlights.

So use it… or at least check my feed from time to time.