Well, Kelli is off to California to attend the nuptuals of people I don’t know and I’m hanging here in the 100+ heat. For some reason, the heat really just doesn’t seem that bad this year. We’ve been to 114 already, but it hasn’t been bothering me. Part of that may be that I drink insane amounts of water now, and another is probably that I’m rarely outdoors enough to be bothered by it. Probably that second one.
This weekend should be another busy one. Friday holds my promotion to Blue/black and a midsummer swedish extravaganza at the Big Swede’s house. While there is also a Kusari Fundo seminar on saturday, I’ll probably be heading north to do some photography instead. I’ve been wanting to get some shooting in for over a month now, and have had little opportunity so it’s definitely time. I’ll probably hit Sedona and Oak Creek on Saturday and then try and get to Walnut creek on Sunday.
Ideas have been formulating in my head for a consulting business, basically for getting photographers on the web. Amazingly enough, the intersection between computer nerds and photo nerds is surprisingly small and there is definitely a gap. Currently kicking around the idea of tweaking wordpress or drupal into a photo website content management system, and offering consulting and hosting to photographers who don’t want to deal with the technical issues. There are a lot of things to consider given the varied nature of the photography business. Portrait photographers will sell photos differently than landscape photographers and so on and so forth. Finding time to work on this stuff is another matter.
Looking at dropping Apple’s .Mac and moving all of my general purpose e-mail to Gmail. I currently only use it for mail since my work firewall kills webdav used by the iDisk service. Even if I bought it from Amazon for $77, it’s still $6.50 a month for something I already get for free from Google. If I could maintain an e-mail address only for something like $10 a year, I would be all over it, but that is not currently possible.
Reading an interview with Drunkenbatman over at Under the Iron has really solidified this for me. Apple’s slow creep of moving operating system services into .mac is getting tiring and it’s a pitiful grab for recurring revenues. I’m tired of subsidizing it. I’m told that with the new .mac APIs, there’s going to be some impressive new functionality from 3rd party vendors, but up until now, almost none of those services work for me anyway since they don’t happen over HTTP.
My biggest issue here is moving over all the logins and data accounts that rely on that e-mail address to one of my domains or to Gmail. That will be a colossal pain in the ass. On the other hand, I will probably go to a catch-all format on one of the domains and start using a return e-mail of something like “mybank@myname.com” or “carloan@myname.com” so I can track people who are selling my information to others and stop doing business with them. That’s a plus.
So really it comes down to: “is it worth $6.50 a month to move all this info to a new address?” Ultimately, yes. But it will definitely hurt.