This lead me to ask myself a question; what is my string? In other words, what do I get excited about? What would I rather be working on or doing than anything else? What would I sacrifice just about anything to be able to do?

Once you answer those questions and figure out what your string is you should immediately start to plan how you can spend more time doing it.

I know a lot of business books say “Do what you love!” but that isn’t the point of this post. I don’t think you have to make money at something that you love doing in order to enjoy it. In fact, I’d wager that for most things we enjoy in life money can actually lessen the joy of doing it. Especially if it becomes your main way of making a living. When you have to make money doing something it isn’t nearly as enjoyable as doing it simply because you want to. My cat gets nothing out of chasing the string. Actually, in most cases he doesn’t even get the string!

I’m still in the process of truly figuring out what my string is but when I figure it out I’m going to try do spend more time doing that activity. Maybe you could do the same.

He’s a good lookin’ dude. Hard to believe this was four years ago and that, next month, he’ll be 8.

Waiting for the coffee to finish brewing with my buddy.

This is all Eliza’s fault. She has created a monster. But a cute monster.

Right in front of the TV.

Silouette of my bud.

Eliza trapped him in the office due to bad behaviour. He made the best of it by watching birds out the window.

Date taken: November 3, 2007 | Somehow he looks even cooler through a 50mm lens.

One of the good examples of scaling communities mentioned was Flickr. Obviously they’ve become the community poster-child and rightly so. They’ve put a lot of thought and hard work into making their communities thrive, grow, and in some ways scale very nicely. However, there is still a limit that any community will hit and then it is forced to divide regardless of the feature-set that the service offers.

Online communities reflect their real-world counterparts so lets use New York City as an example of community division. Everyone that lives in New York City is part of a community. They all feel it. They all take pride in it. And in some way or another they all take part in it. However, none of them are familiar with everyone inside of their community. Most of them will never meet face to face. But each one of them has their own much smaller communities that they belong to. Maybe they work at a company, or visit the same coffee shop everyday, or play basketball with their same five friends in the park on Saturdays. Regardless, they’ve divided themselves from the much larger community and created or taken part in a much smaller community inside of the one that surrounds them.

Flickr has given some really great features to its group administrators allowing them to setup their own communities under the much larger Flickr community. That’s the first divide. Flickr has worked really hard to make those communities work well whether there are only two members of that group or ten thousand. But, is there a limit? I feel there is and it might be different for every community.

Once a group gets too large, other groups begin to emerge that may do things very much in the same way as the much larger group – yet they divide in order to find elbow room. To help themselves separate the signal from the noise or even just to pull their friends along. I’ve done this myself. I belong to both the 365days group and the MeToday group. However I’m far more active as a MeToday group member than I am a 365day group member because the MeToday group seems like its my friends getting together and posting their 365day shots. I’m a member of the enormous Macintosh group but I also belong to the Macbook and Apple symbol groups.

On Viddler I’ve noticed other divisions occurring too. We’ve not released any group type features, though we plan to, and yet already groups of people are banding together to create their own social groups. This is done a combination of ways and obviously marking each other as friends is one way, or tagging videos the same way is another. But then we have our forums where small grass roots efforts to form communities (like our newly formed Viral Marketing Team, which is too freaking cool) are taking place. This is the first divide. I’m sure we’ll begin to see others in the near future and I can’t wait for those days to come.

When you put people into the same place with similar interests they all band together with common goals. When that group reaches “the community limit”, they begin to divide while still being loyal to the larger group. I do not think that any set of features can help to stop this and I don’t think too much time should be put into trying to stop it either.

Pickles just chillin’

Before I get questions about his nails, we use soft nails on both of our cats and I personally can not recommend them enough. The cats are not subjected to the pain of removing part of their bodies (which is obviously less traumatic to the cats at an early age) and your furniture is not subjected to the habits of cats.

Although I’ve mentioned my cat Pickles a few times in the past I’ve definitely not mentioned him enough to consider this a “blog”.

Pickles is “my cat” in that I picked him out and that my wife has “her cat” Pookers. I found him online through some classifieds, went to meet the owner (who happened to be the husband of an ex-VP of a company I had worked for previously), and chose Pickles out of a pile of kittens in a box.

Since then, we’ve been close friends. He’s my bud. There are more photos of Pickles on Flickr if you’re interested.

[tags]animals, cat, pickles, pookers, soft paws, photos[/tags]
[slug]picklestoday[/slug]

My gift: a dead field mouse

There is a funny story behind this mouse. Shortly after moving into the new apartment my cat, Pickles (photos), has been transfixed on one of our baseboard heaters. We’d all be having a great time in the living room (our other cat Pookers included) and he’d be in the dining area, with both eyes focused on this heater. At first, I thought that he was looking at a pipe that was under the heater and was mistaking it for an animal. We’d kid about their being a mouse or something that he is watching, but even when I’d sit with him for a few minutes we never saw anything. So, I guess we just chocked it up to him being a psycho.

Well, we (mostly me) were proved wrong this morning. And man was he happy about it. I woke up, opened the bedroom door, and he was all over me. He normally is very nice in the morning but he was being absolutely insane. He was very proud of his gift.

[tags]pickles, animals, cat, field mouse, rodents, gifts, photos[/tags]
[slug]pickles-gift[/slug]

Pickles inspecting the floor

After the cats approved of our floors, we put them away. Now I’m just waiting to do one final sweep and mop before we start putting on the coats of wax.

9:48 AM – What do you do when you’re waiting to wax the floor? Tag photos in iPhoto of course. I’m still playing catch-up on this front and I have a little over 8,500 photos that still need tagging. At least 15,000 that still need to be cataloged by event. And over 20,000 that need to be rated. Have you caught up?

9:52 AM – A quick question for all of you. I just came across roughly 1,000 photos that have the wrong date/time from the camera. This may have happened because the camera was set to 1/1/1999 for some reason after changing the batteries once. I am not sure exactly what date they were taken, but I’d really like to have them appear correctly chronologically.

What I’ve done, for now, is tag them with the keyword “wrongdate” so that I can get back to them later. Any ideas as to how best to figure out what date they were taken?

10:27 AM – My new way of getting caught up on assigning keywords to my photos has been tag layering. What I do is a first pass of tagging only people that appear in the photos. Then, I go back through and create albums for each “event”. Once that is done, I assign the appropriate geo tags, location tags, and even event tags.

I’ve found it is much more rewarding to do this in layers to help to keep moving forward, rather than only getting a few hundred photos done a day.

12:03 PM – Just finished mopping the entire floor. I did the best job I could, using Joy dish detergent (which is highly recommended to remove any oils from tile flooring), to make sure that the wax can make a good bond with the tile.

Now I’m just waiting for Mark (our friend who knows how to do this stuff) to get here so we can go pick up the materials needed to pull this off. What to do in the meantime?! *opens iPhoto again*

Rebuilding cache

12:16 PM – iPhoto has been asking me to rebuild my thumbnail cache for quite sometime, so I finally gave in and selected to allow it to go ahead and do just that. Maybe this will give me a little better performance. My main question I guess is why iPhoto doesn’t build thumbnails on import, and if it does, why does it need to rebuild the cache? Oh, and why can’t it be more like the way iMovie or iDVD handles video compression and rendering and build the thumbnail caches in the background while still allowing me to do other things within iPhoto? I mean, I have “two processors” do I not?

7:37 PM – Three coats, and one chinese buffet later, we’re done. Now we just have to let the last coat cure before we start putting everything back onto the tile. It looks good, and should do well to protect the floor for years to come.

[tags]photos, pickles, animals, cat, floor, wax, keywords, tagging, iphoto, apple, macintosh, applications, software[/tags]

We had been wanting to get new couches for quite awhile, and have been unable since we feared the cats instantly clawing them to shreds ^#. Our couches, as they were, were torn up quite a bit – and we didn’t want to spend money to just have the same result. So, we were left with the following options.

• Get rid of the cats
• Keep the cats quarantined in a single room
• Get them de-clawed
• Try out soft nails

We had considered all of these options for several weeks actually, and finally settled on giving the soft nails a try – and I think we’re both very happy that we did.

For the last week and half (since we got our new couches delivered), our cats have been in the office only, away from the couches. We let them out occasionally while we could supervise them, but we sat there watching their every move paranoid that they’d scratch up the couches again. Within minutes of having them out Pickles went crazy on them. So, we tossed them back into their “dungeon” and there they stayed until the soft nails were delivered and put on.

Yesterday, we got them in the mail. Our next challenge was putting them on. If you knew our cats, you’d know that Pickles would be a very little challenge while Pookers (my wife’s cat coincidentally) would be the ultimate test of this product. Actually, to be fair, it went much better than expected. We got a system down of how to handle the task, and within a few minutes both cats were walking around with their soft nails on.

Pookers with Packers colored nails

Eliza chose to outfit her cat with the colors of her favorite football team, The Green Bay Packers. You can’t see the yellow really, but we know it is there, and that is all that counts.

Pickles with blood red colored nails

Pickles, my little boy and the professional hunter that he is, looks like he just took down a wildebeest. I figured this would be more fitting than buying a color that would simply blend in and disappear.

Also, picking brighter colors will make it much easier for us to see if the cats have chewed off or grown out of any of their nails. Since we are going to have to put them back on about once per month.

Now, we can play with our cats without fear of laceration. They can play all over the couches without tearing them into little pieces. And, they look so cool while doing all of it.

[tags]cats, animals, pickles, pookers, soft nails, green bay packers[/tags]