This is the chest plate from a robot Spun got for me. This particular component is made in India, one of my favorite countries in the world, and has KT on the opposite side of the dial. It’s almost as if it were some sort of “heart gauge” with her initials. Perhaps if we both hold onto either one of the plugs he has for hands, we can launch it up to 300+ V. I think it’s feasible.

oxoxo Baby!

Black ice is a funny thing. You can’t see it until you know you’ve felt it. At that point you probably have a macro view of the ground because … well you’re laying on it.

This morning I almost slipped about a half dozen times on my way to the light rail. Were it not for Spun’s early morning exploration in driving to and from Southside Booty Camp, I would have likely just hauled down the sidewalk unknowingly preparing for some great acrobatics. Instead I stayed off the sidewalks as much as possible, hiking alongside in the grass, crunchy fallen leaves and clover.

This one clover leaf stood out to me as it cradled another below it. The veins of the underside were coated with tiny crystals of ice. Gorgeous to see leaves looking out for each other.

This morning was frosty. Since the sun hadn’t taken its rightful place in the sky as it is now (gorgeous sunny day) I busted out the macro lens and shot some grass and leaves in the shadows.

Looking forward to the sun melting away the icy bits. It’s still by no means warm out there, but it’s not raining either. That is a big Friday win.

This morning I’m working from home. While enjoying breakfast with Spun, we finished off a grapefruit that had been in our fruit bin for a while. Since my commute involves PJs today, I had to get a bit creative about shooting something in the house.

The eaten grapefruit at first reminded me of the opening of Dexter, kind of mangled, a rind that has a vastly different color than the meat, etc. However, the monotone flesh itself of the grapefruit was stunning with the macro lens. Yes, it looks like a Georgia O’Keeffe type painting. Yes, it’s not the standard graffiti, sunrise, reflection, leaf, style that I normally shoot. It’s much more sensual and intense … even though it’s a couple of ridges on a deliciously empty grapefruit.

I should have posted this waaaay earlier in the day, but … well I was too busy coding.

We had some amazing fog this morning. The first big puffy blanket of the year. It rolled through in such a way that made the spider webs glisten. Perfectly distributed micro-droplets clung on and were illuminated by the sun low on the horizon, intent on freeing these pearls of H₂O. Pure beauty.

Media evolves. This is fact. Often, there is one company who draws a line in the sand and forces America to shake off the old and embrace the new. This is not easy and many more companies fail at this than those who succeed. I will concede this one point to Hastings from his open post to members. AOL, Real, Classmates, Starbucks Hear Music (personally a sad one for me), IBM, Amway (oh wait, they’re Quixtar now … even worse than Netflix’s Quickster name ), dare I say GM, and yes hundreds of other businesses have fallen on their faces because they chose to (in the spirit of making movie references) hold the line one moment longer than Mel Gibson would have in Braveheart or jumped too early. Hell, even the mothership took a detour for a stint before getting Steve Jobs back on board to point them in the right direction. They could be going off to … ahem … a galaxy far far away for all we know with his recent decision to step down. But I digress, this is about Netflix, not the primordial soup of mutated, deceased, thriving or soon to be consumed companies around them.

Netflix, you’ve had something that very few companies have and all companies dream of … a loyal following who love being your marketing arm. I’d even go so far as to say they’re evangelists for your cause. We love movies. We love convenience. We loved Netflix.

So lets get down to the nitty gritty for a quick second here, shall we? This more or less shakes down to a few things: evolution of media, arrogance, poor communication, and entitlement. Like I said before, media evolves. When I was at Starbucks we fought to create a CD burning kiosk that was on the downward slope of the CD industry. It was great technology, worked seamlessly, etc, but iTunes Music Store killed the business model. The Concorde met the same fate due to video chat, email, higher gas prices and a more connected world. Technology dies so that new technology can live. [ can you hear Elton John's Circle of Life now? ] There is a natural order to this, one that requires the public to be generally ok with having things change. When change is imposed and the waters are overly disturbed … bad things happen. Nothing is clearer than seeing more than twenty three thousand comments to a post about this imposed change. Which brings us to arrogance. You have a business model that has some secret sauce the layperson isn’t privy to. Fine, that’s why we all don’t have our own Netflix companies. We can’t always know what you have up your sleeve (clearly), but we have grown accustomed to a standard display of reciprocal trust. We pay you for movies we love. You provide a service for said movies … be it physical media or streaming. This has gone really well for some time now. You grossly underestimated the public’s temperature when it came to digital vs physical media. This saddens me for a number of reasons; the largest being that we loved you and you didn’t listen. Girly, I know, but hey, I’m that dude in that role for this instance. A ton of us were ok with the price hike, not all, but we backed you up. We’re getting more now than we were before and we rationalized paying for it. But this? This shows you really don’t know your customers at all … and furthermore, that we don’t really know you Netflix. [ insert scene in movie where the jilted lover sends a friend to go get their DVDs back from his ex's house ] I’m ok with shelling out a few extra bucks for a service that works seamlessly across the board. As far as the frustration of having two accounts, or two payments, or two queues, or any of that crap … I’m going to let Bryan Thompson say it, because he said it best:

This is great news! My dentist just did the same thing. It’s so much better. Now when I have cavities on my top row of teeth I go to one dentist, and when I have cavities on the bottom row, I go to the other dentist across town. Sure it’s frustrating that sometimes they can’t access my dental records that used to all be in one place, and yes I admit that it seems strange that they now charge me almost twice as much for the exact same dental care I received six months ago…but they are innovators! Besides, what choice do I have? They’re the only two dentists around. Well done Netflix! If it ain’t broke then don’t fix it. Simply hike the price, alienate your customer base and complicate your user interface under the guise of “progress”. Kudos.

Your arrogance shows a one sided approach and poor business understanding. Your customers make your business. Now when they see a red envelope, they see red. We will not just perpetually take your antics with a spoonful of sugar to help this “medicine” go down. However, moving on to entitlement, we really don’t have any say as to what you want to do with your business. This is the hardest part and likely where my metaphors will start getting really mixed up. [ queue sappy music where the guy realizes that she needs to be free, remixed with a soundtrack for a baby walking for the first time and that scene where Scar kills Mufasa in the wildebeest stampede ] You need to sow your seeds apparently. You’re young and naïve. You’re going to fall on your face. I am your father… [ man the wheels are falling off ... wrap it up, wrap it up ] We feel entitled to this service, but we aren’t. We just pay for it. It’s a give/take relationship and you can choose to exit it on your own accord. Which it seems like, for some reason or another, you’re choosing to do. We’ll be pissed. We’ll eat chocolate cake and cry a tear or two as we sit in front of our VHS player we found in the garage or Hulu Plus. But we’ll always remember the good times where we all got along.

We await your next move Netflix. Like a magician, had better be a good prestige or I fear you’ll watch your theatre clear faster than if someone yelled “fire.” Don’t screw this next step up Netflix. [ queue Inception massive horn sound or crickets ... it can be your movie too ]

I was skating along … I’ll be honest … I was sitting on my board going down a decent hill and spotted this guy after stopping to hop up on to my feet for the flat land. Still not the greatest skater ever, but it’s fun and I’ve got a career to look after that requires my hands and noggin. In any case, I recall seeing these sorts of centipedes back in the day, but they were always darting from one shadow or to another. Pretty sure he was on his last leg. After scooping him up and putting him in the bushes I was on my way. Here’s to a good life sir (wish I had a montage, instead I’ll add another shallow focus macro photo at the end of the post) hopefully you did what you needed to do and maybe just had indigestion instead of something more death related.

I have to say as well, I’ve shot a lot of macro photos with this Photojojo Lens Pack for my iPhone, and I’m perpetually impressed by the super shallow depth of field, level of clarity of the subject, and well, that it’s from my phone. Looking forward to the next thing I snag from your store.

Pretty grateful for headway on things. Even if it’s just making small wakes, it’s still forward progress. Hopefully I don’t run into salt flats any time soon. Nah, Clear vision, perseverance, patience and some help from Spun will get this slug across the finish line … hopefully before some other sneaky monopod gets there.

Our cat Endo loves these tiny 3/4″ glitter balls from Mud Bay in Belltown. Unfortunately he gets a bit overzealous when chasing them about the house and often launches them under the couch, whereby we’re forced to lift it up and excavate them to freedom. Today, as I was pulling out a dozen or so, we found this guy: a dead yellowjacket. Generally I’m trying to keep them off my burger or away from watermelon but this was amazing to just see it up close. I was befuddled by the amount of hair, length of antennae, and thinness of the connecting bit between the thorax and the abdomen. Super cool.

Shortly thereafter our neighborhood got into action, well 7 of us, to rip out blackberry bushes and preserve the greenbelt. Three hours as a worker bee and I’m ready for an afternoon BBQ and a fiesta this evening. Good little Saturday.