Ryan's Blog

A week after I returned to the U.S. last November was attend my friends Chris and Kate’s wedding. At the reception one of the things that astonished me was that nearly every guest brought a digital camera.

Most people hire a professional photographer for their weddings, but I thought you would see some great shots from guests simply because there are so many more of them. Besides, it often takes professionals weeks before you actually see their photos. Having immediate access to candid shots from the day would be nice for the couple.

But when everyone returned home, I found that there was no good way for all the guests to give Kate and Chris their photos. Email can’t accomodate such large files; posting them to Facebook or a free photos sharing site like Kodak doesn’t allow you access to the original files; and recording everything on a CD-R and dropping it in the mail is a hassle. What’s a solution?

I tried an active approach: a few weeks ago I went to my friends Maureen and Matías’s wedding and I brought a laptop to the reception where I asked guests with digital cameras to let me download their photos to put on a CD for the bride and groom. At the end of the night I had over 2 gigs of photos.

As I reviewed the photos I noticed two things. First, the vast majority of pictures weren’t good. Most pictures suffered from technical problems, like red-eye, noise, blurriness, and improper focus. Camera makers still have plenty of areas for improvement. In low-end point-and-shoot cameras it seems like everything could be better. Here are a few typical shots:

A wedding is presents a difficult environment for good pictures—there’s low light, you may be far away—but it’s also prototypical example of when people want to use their cameras.

Spending more money on a better camera may help: one guest was using a Nikon D200, a high-end digital SLR (in consumer terms), and looking at her pictures was like a breath of fresh air. Nearly every photo was in focus and few were blurry.

The high frequency of poor shots might be discouraging, but the odds are on your side when you have a large quantity of photos. My second point is that almost every set of pictures had some excellent images. Not excellent as in publish-in-National-Geographic, but still meaningful pictures of an important day. A professional photographer can’t take pictures of all the guests all the time, and you get a wider spectrum of photos with crowd-sourcing.

From what I’ve seen, professional photographers don’t have to worry about being replaced at weddings by an army of amateurs; You want someone who is highly skilled to take the most important pictures at your wedding. It’s a nice addition, however, to have the extra pictures your guests take. Who knows—maybe downloading guest photos is a service some professionals will provide one day.

One final esoteric note: Most people have the date set correctly in their cameras; next to nobody has the time set correctly, even adjusting for time-zome differences.

Posted by Ryan at 1:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I made a whirlwind trip to California a month ago to find an apartment. Within 48 hours of landing, I signed a lease for my new place. I’m told these results may not be typical.

The next time I would see the place would be when I arrived with all my belongings and furniture, so I wanted a way to size up the apartment to determine what would fit. I took a couple dozen measurements and made a rough sketch of the rooms in the house. The next day I turned these into a blueprint of the house using InDesign. Once I printed out this blueprint I could cut out paper rectangles to represent my furniture to see what would fit.

My girlfriend Caitlin suggested that this seemed painfully low-tech for me, which got me wondering about how long it would take to make an interactive version of my apartment layout. I threw together some furniture in Photoshop, made a web page, and I started working with the Prototype and Scriptaculous Javascript libraries. I was completely floored when I found myself with a working product about 15 minutes later. I decided to implement some kind of saving so I could reload past furniture arrangements. That took another another 5 minutes. I prettied up the CSS and called it quits at half an hour, which isn’t so much a testament to my skill as to the power of well-written frameworks.

The end product was nifty enough that I think it’s worth sharing: feng shui my apartment. Take the place for a whirl. How can I set up the bed and nightstand together with that furnace in the way? Will I have room for a media center when I actually get one? And maybe you can let me know how the sofa looks over there.

Note: Don’t take the “my” in “Feng shui my apartment” too literally. I wasn’t crazy about posting the actual layout of my home online, so this blueprint is actually that of a fictitious house with about the same amount of floorspace as mine.

Posted by Ryan at 9:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I left Chile several months ago I was sad to say goodbye to my home in a now not-so-foreign land, but I was also ready to return to the U.S. Now, after being home since November, I find myself trying to recover pieces of my life away. After living off two suitcases for two years, I’m into downsizing: if I don’t use it actively or treasure it, it’s time to give it away.

One of the things I miss most about Chile is the ability to walk and take public transportation almost anywhere. People probably arranged the system from necessity. I didn’t have a car, and most of the people I knew didn’t either. I didn’t drive for over two years and as my return date approached, I was itching to get back into the driver’s seat. I realized quickly that I had to be in the driver’s seat, or at least in a car; the area where I live is in Utah is just built for driving. Sure, there’s a supermarket just two miles away, but you have to brave a four-lane road without a sidewalk to get there. In one of those ironic twists, I realized shortly after I got back to my car that I didn’t want it.

In Ogden, Utah I didn’t have much of a choice, but now I do. I just finished moving to Berkeley, California to start grad school in a few weeks. I’m in a small house close to two main streets with restaurants, grocery stores, the public library, a laundromat, the BART, and school all within walking distance. I can come close to duplicating my Chilean experience of missing an ingredient in the kitchen and crossing the street to get it. I also added a new tool to my transportation kit: a Kona Dew Deluxe commuter bike.

I should have taken this photo on the road instead of indoors, but I’m waiting for my helmet to arrive so this baby’s parked for now.

How much more walkable is my new home? You might have to content yourself with my qualitative description if it weren’t for Walk Score, a Google Maps mashup that uses a set of criteria to rank the walkability of your home. Here’s my score:

Using whatever metric Walk Score has in place, my home in Utah scored 15 of 100 on the scale, “Car Dependent.”

My new home scores near the top of the scale at 91 of 100, a “Walkers’ Paradise.” I’m not sure what I need to break into the 95th percentile, but I’m content with 91. What’s your home’s score?

I still have my car for weekend getaways, which is a nice luxury. The rest of the time, I’m taking a page from Frankie Valli’s playbook and walkin’ like a man.

Posted by Ryan at 3:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I did my undergraduate studies at Notre Dame in Indiana, and a few years after graduation I’m starting a graduate program at UC Berkeley this fall. A number of people have asked me how I got from a place like Notre Dame to a place like Berkeley. Notre Dame isn’t as conservative as some people suspect, and although liberalism at Berkeley is infamous, it’s not unchanged since the 1960s. But as for how I got from one place to the next I tell people the answer is simple: I-80.

Both schools are just a few blocks from the same highway, it’s just 2200 miles between them.

Fortunately I just drove the leg from Salt Lake City to Berkeley this time. My dad and I spent all day Wednesday and Thursday morning on the road. Now I’m unpacking and getting set up in my new home.

Posted by Ryan at 5:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)