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I talked about past lives in a previous post, available here.

1997 was the summer before my senior year of high school. My junior year was the only year of high school where I felt like I fit in, and that I had real friends. I was comfortable with myself, and who I was turning into. I had basically no prospects for post-high school education, I was disinterested in academia, and just wanted to be left with my cameras in peace.

I worked at a Camera Shop (now owned by Ritz… I think they eventually just dismantled the Camera Shop Inc brand…) and for that particular summer, I had the pleasure of working with my brother at the Painter’s Crossing store on many, many occasions. He was the manager, so he was sort of also my ride to work. This was the summer that I “woke up” and realized that photography was awesome and it was something I wanted to do all the time. It captured my imagination, since after all it was equal parts craft, science and art – three things that have basically always appealed to me. All rolled into one hobby! One extremely expensive hobby.

Also during this summer, I took on a full time role at the Longwood Camera Shop. See, my brother had left the Longwood store to go work at the Painter’s Crossing store as the manager. I sort of… “filled in” for him after he left, though I was often reminded that I had big shoes to fill. And while I never broke the record of 13,500 prints in a single day, I *was* able to get the best Noritsu Paper Cartridge Changing time: 29 seconds from when the darkroom door closed to when I emerged with the changed drum. I was badass, what can I say?

Anyway, I also got to work with some other awesome people. I learned an awful lot about light, chemicals, film, glass and technique. From a lot of people. A lot of people. It was this summer that made me eventually decide that I wanted to pursue learning photography after high school in a more official capacity.

I met my first girlfriend this summer. Actually, I met her mom. Her mom, while picking up her prints one day, got my number “because her daughter needed some help with her portfolio” or something. What can I say? Moms have a thing for me? It must have been the vintage plaid suit jacket that didn’t fit me properly.

(Well, that’s not true. I had met the girl in question before, but for about 5 minutes. In her giant station wagon. With her brother. She played Milli Vanilli via cassette tape. This was 1997, like, 8 years after Girl You Know It’s True came out, and definitely well after their careers had been totally destroyed. Thinking about it now, I think they took all their stuff out of print because of the lip-synching scandal. I wonder if she still has that tape.)

So 1997. I think back on it as one of those ‘endless summers’ that people tend to get misty about. Staying up until 4AM doing my first oil painting. Going on photographic expeditions with my brother. We got pics of Hale-Bopp using his 500mm reflex lens on his Minolta X700. I think he used a 2X teleconverter, too. And like, Tri-X pushed to 6400. It was the year I reclaimed his old darkroom from entropy.

I would spend my whole paycheck on chemicals and paper and sink whole days at a time in the darkroom that summer. I fell in love with latent silver images, rapidly revealing themselves in the tray.

It was this year that I stopped hating pictures of myself. I met some new friends and said goodbye to others. It was the first year after many without, that I had hope. Hope that the world out there would be easier, and for a long time it turned out to really be much easier.

I’ve been thinking about 1997 a lot lately. In the past couple years, I’ve had existential crises, been depressed, lost some hair, changed careers, grew the missing hair back, stressed myself the fuck out, and a handful of other terrible things for my body and psyche. I remember 1997 as the year when I knew myself. When the worst kind of stress I could have revolved around whether I could afford some RC paper and maybe some Rodinal to play around with.

Is it weird to ask yourself regularly: what would my 17 year old self do in this situation? Because that thought crosses my mind two or three times a week.

I’m stressed out. My job, it is stressful.

For some background: anytime someone asks me “What do you do?” I find the easiest thing to do is tell them that I have Chandler’s Job. In fact, they actually are probably the same job. People usually say, “… What was Candler’s job?” and I reply that is exactly the point; I have a generic knowledge-worker job, in a cubicle for a big company: the details aren’t so important in casual conversation.

My official title is “Information Manager” which is to say, I manage information. As anyone knows, information is the life blood of an organization: you need info to make decisions, you need info to move the process forward.

Let’s say you make a mistake. That’s bad. But not knowing how large the impact of the mistake will be? Well, that’s worse. You need information.

So I work for this company, for some real smarties. The best in the particular industry in which my company is known. I’ve learned a ton from them. I learn new stuff every day, without exception.

I actually started there as a temp back in 2004. Doing data entry. I had just left Educom and was basically getting paid the same money to do like, 30% of the work, and 20% of the thinking.

They had a Rube Goldberg style setup for getting data from the client’s system to ours. It wasn’t really my job, but I somehow took ownership of getting this process more organized. Ultimately, this extra work made it easier for me and the 10 other temps on the team to actually do the work and get stuff done. Since so many hands were touching the process, a single person (me, by default) had to exert constant vigilance on the process to ensure we were meeting our deliverables and that nothing “got lost in the cracks” or whatever we used to say back then.

To keep track of it all, I made my very first Excel spreadsheet. I was 24 years old and had never used Excel. Ahem. I spent a good deal of time in that file, made it look nice, made it easy to read. I basically applied anything I knew from web development (most of which wasn’t applicable, but still)

Since the process to which I was attached was under some scrutiny by the client, I was involved in some meetings or conversations with folks that normally wouldn’t “deal” with a temp. During the course of reviewing the process with the client and my superiors, someone recognized that I was doing all this extra organizing, and they moved me to a team of people just like me: anal retentive, detail oriented, and technically inclined. The Information Management Team. The guy in charge of the team took a chance on me, I’ll admit, since I didn’t really have much on paper to show anyone the things of which I was capable.

I got started with Office. I had never used Access before, so I grabbed some basic survival skills. Same with Excel, Word. In web development, these weren’t really file formats I had used, nor software I had needed. Also, I used Macs and anything Microsoft just felt icky to me. But now it was every day stuff. Within a year, I had a reputation for being “that guy” to go to when you have an Excel or Office question.

Over the past 7 years there, I’ve been promoted, gotten raises, moved between 4 major clients. Between 2006 and 2010, I’ve built reports covering over $150 Million. In 2010 alone, I reported on $60 Million.

So the stress. Back to the stress.

Lately, on any given workday, I receive maybe two or four ad-hoc report requests. This is in addition to the normal day to day tasks that constitute my job. Weekly and daily regular reports, monthly stuff that takes a ton of time, year-end summaries, ENDLESS slide decks, conference calls, emails, traveling to the client’s onsite location, etc.

I interact with third party vendors and perform a QC on information that they feed back to us. If anything is wrong, I have to go back to them for conflict resolution. I report on their ability to meet goals set by our client.

We’re also at a particularly sensitive time of the year where we focus heavily on meeting market share commitments to certain preferred partners in the marketplace. I refresh a projection in service of this at least once a day, though often twice or more.

I also conduct QC on our internal team and the data they influence.

And there’s always a random project going on. A semi-annual or semi-quarterly internal team review. Internal task forces get assigned frequently to tackle larger issues or organizational problems in the process.

Oh and add to all this: a common misconception is that I work in IT. I do not; it’s just a coincidence that I have the word “Information” in my title, and also that I’m a giant computer nerd and love to know how stuff works. Something that occurs quite frequently is that as soon as someone knows I’m “good with a computer”, they immediately ask me to do something that is not really my job.

So, all this stress? I’m going on vacation. Far, far away. We leave this Friday. Can’t wait.

Warning: the following post is some seriously specific and nerdy stuff. If you couldn’t care less about iPhones or clipboard managers then you can stop reading right now.

Still there?

So, Pastebot. From Tapbots, the makers of Weightbot and Convertbot.

I should mention that I’ve used Weightbot pretty consistently since August, and I love it. It’s chock full of little visual touches that add up to make a very polished product. They have perfect sound design – most actions are accompanied by some audio clip that sounds robotic or hi tech. I think the way I’m describing it makes it sound more annoying than anything, but the effect is that the app conveys a feeling of responsiveness, hi-techness, and fun.

I’ve also used Convertbot. A similarly high level of attention to detail went into this app as well. Though I much prefer Convert for my unit converting needs, Convertbot has an intuitive and creative interface, excellent auditory and visual feedback and it’s obvious that a lot of time and thought went into its design.

With these apps in mind, I would often wax poetic about any forthcoming ‘bots from Tapbots. To my utter astonishment last week, John Gruber at Daring Fireball dropped a link to the newly released Pastebot.

What is Pastebot? It’s a clipboard manager. When iPhone OS 3.0 was released, Apple finally provided a system-wide mechanism allowing users to copy and paste text and images. Pastebot extends this functionality in extremely useful ways.

Text. To use Pastebot, you must first copy something. In this case, say you’ve copied some text from an email or a webpage. When you first launch Pastebot, it will import whatever is currently on the system clipboard into the Pastebot clipboard. In it, you can store a maximum of 99 items. As you add more than this limit, the oldest items will drop off to make room for the new. So that text you copied? Well, now that it’s in Pastebot, you can do interesting things to, and with, it.

Pastebot offers something called ‘Filters’; as of this writing, they’re available in two flavors: text filters and image filters. For text, you can do things like wrap the text in HTML tags that you specify, encode or decode entities for URLs, and my personal favorite, Find and Replace text (the effect of replacing the text ‘live’ as you manipulate the ‘find’ and ‘replace with’ boxes is very cool).

The image filters allow you to rotate the image, adjust brightness, convert to black and white, adjust saturation, invert colors (negative) or turn the image sepia. Pastebot also offers an intuitive image cropping function.

Tapbots has indicated that more filters are on the way. A Contrast filter for images would be a great one to include, ahem.

Once you have doctored your clippings, simply tapping on them in the clipping list will copy it back to your system clipboard for pasting into any other app. The currently selected item will have a bright blue “LED” light to indicate its status as the item currently occupying the system clipboard. Aside from this, you can do other things with your clippings. Like send them via email, save them into your photo library (in the case of an image clipping), perform a google search (in the case of a text clipping), and finally, move the item to a folder.

What? Oh yeah. The app offers folders. If the 99 clipping limit for the built in clipboard seems a little anemic to you, you can create your own arbitrary number of folders into which you can store whatever clippings you want, permanently. The app allows you to customize the folder icons from a pre-defined set of six types, like “Documents”, “Settings”, “Email” etc.

And this feature, the folders, is where Pastebot veers into interesting territory. In this regard, the app seems to mirror features found in other note-taking or mind-mapping apps such as Simplenote or Evernote. After all, you can create new text clippings from directly within Pastebot, and it offers the full text editing interface found in other apps like Notes or Simplenote (or really, ANY apps where you can edit text) – much like Evernote, you can create a hierarchy of clippings for use as mind-mapping. As a on/off user of both Simplenote and Evernote, I find myself coming up short on reasons to not consolidate down to just one app.

But wait, there’s more. Seriously. Tapbots has released a free companion Mac app, Pastebot Sync, which allows Pastebot from the iPhone to paste items directly to your Mac and vice versa, via wifi. After the process of pairing the phone to your Mac, you simply tap and hold on any item in Pastebot, and it will be pasted to the position of the cursor in whatever the currently open application is on your Mac. It’s really cool.

So far, I’ve been focusing on the good things. To be fair, there are an overwhelming number of good things to say about this app. However, I have one gripe, which is something that is probably outside of Tapbots control. The need to open the app in order for an item to be imported into the Pastebot clipboard feels stunted. If this were automatic for EVERYTHING copied to the system clipboard, this app would be unstoppable. It would be such icing on the cake, such a smooth flow to go with such a well designed app. Perhaps some enterprising jailbreak enthusiast could hobble together an automatic bridge between the system clipboard and Pastebot?

So, it’s been about a week with this thing. My thoughts thusfar:

(As a general disclaimer, I upgraded from a 1st generation iPhone.)

1.) PLUS: Way, way faster: Way faster. Since I’m hearing that the processor in the 1st gen and 2nd gen (the 3G) were identical, the guts in this thing are clearly much speedier. Apps open and close much more quickly. Overall, everything feels more responsive. Games with large environments load much more quickly, which really adds to the whole ‘casual gaming’ aspect. It’s never fun to be in line and start to play something, but by the time it’s loaded and ready to play, you’re first in line and ready to be waited on. That may be a thing of the past given the horsepower in the new hardware.

2.) PLUS: Feels better in hand: The 3G struck me the same way: the edges are tapered, the backing is high-gloss. Since it’s so shiny, it sticks to your hand much more firmly. I always felt like I had to hold on extra tight to the 1st gen handset because it had that slippery back. The downside to the high-gloss is that it’s a super fingerprint magnet. I ordered a case and am waiting for it to arrive so I can evaluate whether I’ll actually use it. I usually leave the phone naked, but maybe I can shield it from some body scratches…

3.) MINUS: Stupid minor flaw: the increased bezel size at the screen edges. This bugged me about the 3G, too. It’s so minor that it’s almost stupid to complain, but like, the 1st gen’s screen went all the way to the edges. it looked so nice. I guess this new configuration allows more space for cases, but I still prefer the “screen-to-the-edges” design.

4.) ZERO: Home button: the clickiness of the home button feels weird. I’m so used to the exact minimum amount of pressure required to activate the old button, that this new one is taking a lot of getting used to. I don’t know if they used a different switch/button on the new model, or if the button on the old phone was just well worn.

5.) PLUS: Speakers / Microphones: Much improved. The speakers now have grilles (introduced with the 3G) that are slightly inset. I know I clogged up the speaker punch holes on the first model, so this is a good change. It should hopefully keep some debris and dust from clogging up the speakers/mic. Overall, the speakers feel much louder. The speakerphone now picks up my voice MUCH better. The mic on the included headphones also works very well. Which reminds me…

6.) PLUS: New-fangled Headphones: The included headphones now include a mic assembly with volume up and volume down. In addition, the old main button is there for skipping or pausing tracks, or answering a call. The speakers aren’t perfect, but good enough for most folks. You can also buy third-party headphones with the track skip button/mic that may better suit your needs.

7.) HALF PLUS: The camera: Finally. I was really disappointed when the 3G camera did not receive any attention. I believe that for a premium phone, there should be some crazy megapixels. In my opinion, the iPhone should be more in the 5 MP range by now. With those caveats in mind, it is much improved over the previous model. The addition of auto-focus brings the images into a whole new realm of sharpness. Tap to focus is also a totally intuitive feature. And fun. Video capture is also really fun. Surprisingly, the little, teeny microphone at the bottom of the handset does an excellent job of picking up audio for the videos you shoot.

8.) ZERO: Compass: This is cool and all, and maybe I’ll change my mind after I see some more apps that leverage the compass in interesting ways, but for now I’m kinda “eh” on the compass. Layar looks very, very intriguing, and wouldn’t really be possible without a magnetic compass, so… hm.

9.) PLUS: Voice control: Yeah, a lot of cheaper phones do this. Yeah, it took a long time to get it on the iPhone. But, now that it’s here, I can’t help but be amazed at how simple and easy it is to use. I recall programming voice command features on previous phones and always ending in frustration and never using the feature again. On the iPhone it requires no programming: you just talk. I have dialed into a ton of conference calls for work using only my voice. It’s really neat. Sadly, the iPod Voice controls get a little confused when you have a very large set of music to deal with. Sometimes requests for Bohannon end up playing Queen. Overall, this is a very cool feature, and I hope it eventually becomes as pervasive and accessible as the spoken commands interface on the Mac. With any luck, the accuracy and performance of this feature will improve over time.

10.) PLUS: iPhone OS 3.0: This is a big one. Landscape keyboard in more apps is majorly awesome. I’m intrigued by the smaller scaled “back” buttons at the tops of the screen when in landscape mode. I never noticed them being that small in OS 2.2.1 and prior. It just stands out a teeny little bit too much – it doesn’t quite fit. Copy/Paste is also a huge deal. This will make my mobile computing life so much easier. The new Spotlight phone search is so amazing, it makes me poop my pants. I think they could add a few more controls for this in the settings, but it’s off to a really great start. I can only assume it will improve over time.

The biggest thing that’s bugging me about the new rig: no jailbreak for 3GSs yet. I never realized how much I hated the chrome dock, and I can only theme it away with Winterboard, which is jailbreak-only. Also, SBSettings alone is MORE than enough reason to jailbreak: being able to toggle wifi and edge/3G and brightness, all from the home screen? It’s so convenient and natural, I almost can’t believe Apple hasn’t built something similar. I also really miss the taskbar notifier daemon: it would put a little phone, envelope or speech bubble if I had any missed calls/voicemail, new emails or unread text messages. Again, I can’t believe Apple hasn’t done this themselves already. I know the Dev Team will probably release a 3GS jailbreak in the coming weeks, so this is hopefully a minor and temporary inconvenience.

As an aside, I had a chance to play with an Android G1 from T-Mobile today for the first time. All in all, I was very impressed, and it made me more certain of my earlier statement: if not for the iPhone, I would have an Android phone or a Pre.

So yeah; I’m feelin’ the love.

As some of you may know, Meg and I have been on a several month long journey of buying a home. During this time we have experienced a range of emotions with regard to our finances, our self esteem, our ability to cope with stress, and how we feel about each other. This range of emotions includes, but surely is not limited to: comfort, annoyance, excitement, terror, anxiety, anticipation, hopefulness, hopelessness, depression and elation. Really, it has run the gamut.

About 7 weeks ago, we thought we had found THE house for us. We made an offer. Unfortunately, they got other offers, too. They didn’t take ours. Being first time home buyers, and not being super familiar with this whole process, we were a little crushed. But, it was probably good for us. “We’ll find our house,” we said.

About 3 weeks ago, we actually did find THE house. This time, we were sure of it. In private, we told ourselves that we wouldn’t get our hopes up, lest we jinx something and have a repeat performance. We proceeded with the various form-signing, the multiple visits to the property, the multiple visits to the mortgage lady, the multiple visits to the realtor. We downplayed every new development as we explained it to our friends and family, because we simply were too emotionally exhausted and stressed out to let ourselves hope beyond hope that this dream of ours would finally come true.

When they told us that our offer was the front-runner, and was likely to be accepted, we were absolutely over the moon. We freaked out. We may have had a tiny bit too much to drink. We were psyched. They countered, we countered. We signed our name (and lives, and heirs) on a million pieces of paper. We were scrutinized from every angle: credit, income, debt, employment history, etc. To see your whole adult life, drawn out and organized on a piece of paper is a little startling.

Fairly recently, now that things seem a lot more certain, we’re catching ourselves getting very excited. Meg has a scrapbook of magazine clippings and other random pieces of paper with design patterns for how the rooms will be decorated. I’ve got my eyes on some antique shutters for the facade. We’re telling our friends and family. We’re planning sleepovers and parties and dinners.

So yeah; I’m feelin’ the love. The Love, actually. With a capital L.

I honestly can’t tell you how much it has meant to me, how much it has meant to both of us, the kind words and support from all of you, our friends and family.

To our friends and family: Thank You. For those of you reading this, you know who you are: you know the role you have played in this epic tale, and how we are just overwhelmed by your gestures. We’re touched by your genuine desire to see us succeed and be successful. At this point, words don’t really adequately express our deepest and most sincere gratitude for your contributions to our general well being over these last 30 years.

When we’re all moved in, the first round of drinks is on us. Though, it might not be top shelf stuff. You like Evan Williams more than Jack Daniels anyway, right?