Once upon a time — you might even remember when — going on vacation meant waiting . . . and waiting . . . for photographs to come back from the lab. I would put exposed rolls of 36-exposure slide film into mailers, write my name on the return label, affix postage, go to a mailbox, and hope nothing got lost or poorly processed. That wasn’t exactly fast; I didn’t even start to get nervous until two weeks after sending my film away. After getting the slides back, I would open them right away to find the very best ones. Was there anybody who could wait a long time to see their photographs?

Eventually, I would put as many slides as I could on my big lightbox and cull the overexposed, underexposed, out-of-focus, blurry, and plain-ole uninteresting ones. I suspect I kept a larger number of the “uninteresting” ones than I should. I have a big box in the closet of slides, just in case they might be more interesting to me after I’ve gotten over the initial disappointment of them not mirroring the memory I had in my mind of the scene. Of course, they’re in there with a whole bunch of slides that I haven’t properly sorted yet. The process of culling — when I did it right away — would take a while. Adding information to the slide about where the scene was and when I made the exposure, that made the process take even longer.

Back then a really, really big haul of photographs was fifteen rolls of film, or about 550 slides. Because I bracketed my exposures, about 1/2 of those could just be thrown out without looking too closely; they were obviously the wrong exposure, and film was unforgiving. A two-week photography vacation could be pared down to about 250 slides. The best of these (maybe 10-20%) found their way into clear, archival sleeves that still hang in my filing cabinet. Over the following weeks or months, I scanned the very, very best of these. It took a while because getting one slide ready for the web or print usually took me about 30 minutes to an hour. And if there was one that I really liked? I seem to remember working on one particular photograph from Ipswich for six hours spread over a few evenings.

But that was then. . . .

I no longer need to bracket my exposures with my dSLR. Instead, I have almost instant feedback, leading me to press the shutter another two or three times until what I see is what I want. Unless they’re patently bad, I don’t always delete the other photographs off my camera, preferring to see what they look like on a better display and wondering whether it’s possible to use the tools in the develop module in Lightroom to turn a middling photo into a better one. Furthermore, since Lisa and I go the same places together, we tend to come back with two slightly different interpretations of the same scenes. Plus, we had some amazing experiences and saw some beautiful scenery; we find each other very photogenic; and snapping away is just so mindlessly effortless.

Add it all up: We came back from Australia with 5,900 photographs from three cameras.

We’ve been sorting through these — picking, culling, cropping, adjusting RAW conversions, and adding metadata to help us with sorting. We don’t usually do this while we’re on our trips — though I know lots of people who do — for a couple of reasons. First off, our little 10″ netbook made a convenient place to store the photos, but it wasn’t powerful at all, and the monitor had a distinctly blue cast. But more to the point, we had a lot of other stuff to do on our vacation: reading, swimming, walking around, watching “Master Chef Australia,” spending lots of time at restaurants, etc. So while I did spend about eight hours of our trans-Pacific flight adding metadata and while we did look through the photos during the trip to help identify the 55 new-to-us bird species we saw, we didn’t really spend much more time than what it took to download the photographs and to pick one a day to post to Facebook.

Late yesterday evening, we finally finished the first pass through the 5,900 photos from the trip. We deleted about a thousand photographs and picked an equal number that we liked well enough to say that we liked them. Some of those are duplicates, and we need to make another pass through those 1,010 to whittle the collection down to a number that we would consider sharing. We’ve already decided that we need to present them in themed groups, since we don’t expect anyone — even the people who love us — wants to click through that many pictures; and no one would really get much out of such an enormous collection anyway. After that, we need to select a key set of photographs that we can share with people as totems of our trip.

So, have patience, little grasshoppers. We’ll post pictures very soon.

Living with Diabetes: Sarah has a really great piece on her site about growing up with the “bad kind” of diabetes. At least that’s how people differentiated type 1 and 2 while she was growing up. But really, all diabetes sucks, especially if you try to ignore it.

Software Development: Keith Swenson’s article 26 Hints for Successful Agile Development is full of good advice about how to do software development effectively — even if you’re not really doing Agile development. (via Infoq)

Functional Programming: Here’s a really l-o-n-g article about functional programming. It’s good, but . . . damn!

Risk and Oil Spills: You would think that a company like BP, whose contractors deal with potentially deadly situations on a daily basis, would have a better handle on risk. Even if BP engaged in neutral cost-benefit analysis, as this NY Times article suggests, it should have chosen the option that lowered its risk exposure. Remember: risk is cost of vulnerability times likelihood of vulnerability. In the case of deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, we’re seeing that the cost of an oil spill is astronomical. The probability of failure would have to be completely zero to make it worth choosing a less expensive option.

Time Machines: Stephen Hawking tells you how to build one using wormholes. He also advises against creating paradoxes where you kill yourself.

The Artificial Pancreas: So what’s this “artificial pancreas” that people with type 1 diabetes keep talking about? Let Wired magazine or Aaron Kowalski tell you. It’s not a cure, but (if done correctly) it will hopefully lower a lot of the variability that we see in our blood glucose levels. Basically, it’s an expert system built into a pump plus continuous glucose monitoring combo. It’s also a bundle of assumptions and heuristics. I find it somewhere between amazing and hella scary.

A lot has happened in my life in the five years since that first post just before our trip to India. I thought you were a goner during my last year of grad school, when I didn’t post anything for more than a month, but National Blog Post Month last November seems to have restarted a more regular rhythm.

I never really knew what you were going to be about. That’s fine with me. I’m a multifaceted individual, who is easily distracted. So, instead of mining the same vein of subjects to gather a steady stream of loyal readers, I’ve written about anything and not quite everything. For a little while I thought about getting you, my weblog, a little brother or sister, turning one of you into a single-subject weblog, and keeping the other one for random stuff. But I never did, because I know you like being an only child, and I don’t have enough time to devote to two.

As a result, you, my little weblog, are always meeting lots of new readers who are drawn in by the Google, stay but a brief while, and then move on. In fact, well over half of your visitors come from Google searches. You’re most popular when you’re unique and nerdy. Here are the top 10 most popular pages over the last five years:

1. The JPEG Family Circus (2008)
2. Fifteen is an Eternity in Photography Years (2007)
3. Ask Dr. Color’s Assistant: Tone-mapping in MATLAB (2007)
4. The Cognitive Style of Microsoft Project (2007)
5. Book Notes: The Looming Tower (2006)
6. Four Days in London (2007)
7. Deconstructing an Image (2007)
8. How a Digital Camera Works (2006)
9. Grandes Expectations, a.k.a. Four Days in Paris (2009)
10. Tractors (2008)

Okay, I don’t get that last one either. I guess there are a lot of people who, like me, enjoy 1/64-scale tractors. And almost 80% of the views of the JPEG article happened in the first week it was published, when Steve posted a link to it, which got a couple hundred views and was then Stumbled, garnering 30 times more readers. You, my little weblog, were almost famous.

But those things aren’t really what you’re about. Over the last five years, we’ve traveled a lot, started to talk a bit about diabetes, visited many cemeteries, thought about software engineering during and after grad school, played with a large format camera, worried about health care, learned many lessons, taken and posted tons of photographs, and tried to deconstruct the American experience. (Lisa, who is perpetually awesome, helped with some of the posts and many of the photos.)

So what next? What will happen in the next five years?

Given the randomness of posts over the last five years, it’s dangerous to guess, but I bet it looks like the last five years. Without a doubt there will be more travel: In two weeks we’re going a Australia for a month; next year, my mom and I plan to go cycling in Provence; and in 2012, we’re going to England and France with my in-laws. Unless amazing things happen, I’ll still have diabetes and will continue to write about that. No doubt, I’ll also visit some additional technical subjects, which will appeal mostly to the long tail.

You, my little weblog, were born near the beginning of an online historical moment when it seemed everyone was getting a “blog.”* A lot of people moved on — to MySpace and Facebook and Twitter — and let their online journaling end. Meanwhile the idea of the weblog became the basis for a lot of mainstream media and corporate sites. The weblog became the scaffolding for interactive, moderated, medium-to-long-form medium.

I’m excited to see the re-emergence of “microblogging” sites like Tumblr, where people post short things: videos, links to other pages, excerpts from articles with reactions, etc. It’s bringing the social back into “social media.” Now, instead of thinking about getting you a weblog sibling, I’m trying to figure out the right way to integrate shorter snippits with my regular fare.

Because what I really want is to have something like a magazine, with its mixture of time-relevant mini-articles and long-form features: something that combines what has traditionally appeared here with some of the stuff that I’ve offloaded to Delicious or Facebook or Twitter. But that’s all in the future.

Once again, happy fifth birthday, weblog!

p.s. — I haven’t gotten you a present yet, but I know you want a new theme so that you can look a little more hip. And I think I heard you say that you want better comment management, too. I’ll see what I can do.

* — Five years later, I still can’t stand that word “blog.” It’s just too ugly sounding. Like “atheist,” there’s just no happy-sounding, value-neutral way to say it. Of course, you who don’t have my hangups can call this site whatever you’d like. :^)

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This envelope came in the mail yesterday. I don’t know who put me onto this mailing list, but I’m pretty sure it’s related to the work I’ve done over the last few years supporting the NITF file format, whose users are an interesting lot. They don’t really like to talk about what they do or what they keep in their files: secret stuff mostly.

I’m not one to judge. I’ll just say that I’m very glad that I was also responsible for adding support for the DICOM medical imaging format to MATLAB.

• bagnole — voiture (a car)
• virée — petit rendre-visite (a small trip, a hike, etc.)
• revendiquer — to claim
• raté — failed, attempted, missed, abortive (adj./pp.) or failure, misfire, backfire (n.)
• portiques — gates, turnstiles
• rien que… — just…
• jeu de mot — pun
• étonnant — amazing, enormous
• touche — un clef sur le clavier de l’ordinateur (keybord key)

Sometime in February I decided to try using as few plastic bags as I could. I don’t know why I decided then, it just seemed like it was time. In my mind it sounded easy enough — after all, we’ve been using them for grocery shopping for more than a year. It wasn’t quite as effortless as I had imagined, but it wasn’t very difficult either. And it has worked, too. We only have a couple disposable bags left in the house for our recycling and cleaning up after the kitty.

So what have I learned?

• The flat bottom nylon fabric bags are where it’s at. They cost about $1. They’re really sturdy. You can put 20 pounds of whatnot in them, they won’t tip over in the trunk or on the counter, and you don’t have to worry about pulling off the handles. And I think they’re easier to fill than other kinds of reusable sacks.
• If the bags aren’t with you, they won’t do you any good. Keep at least one in each car. Getting them back into the car from the house. . . . oy!
• A family of two needs 3-4 bags to shop at the supermarket for 1-2 weeks.
• When you’re sending your groceries down the belt, try to group the things you want in the same bag. (For example, send all of the cold things together.)
• Cashiers/baggers are all pretty accustomed to reusable bags; but I find that you have to give the bags to them first thing, otherwise they default to plastic.
• If you’re going to multiple stores (other than the grocery store), you don’t need one bag for each store. I’ve found that I can usually get by with two or so: one for the store I’m visiting and one (or more) that I keep in the car and transfer the stuff I just bought into. This leaves me with an empty bag for the next store, and fewer half-empty bags when I get home.

Well, that’s probably enough more-or-less obvious ramblings about how to use a shopping bag. Now just go and do it.

Well, I can stop searching. Yesterday at REI, I found this: a medium-sized “Pack-It System” travel bag from Eagle Creek.

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It’s great! It packs flat without needing to have the air squeezed out of it. It comfortably holds 5-7 days of insulin pump supplies, a spare pump, glucagon, “just in case” syringes, prescriptions, etc. It looks nice. It fits well into my bag. And it seems pretty sturdy, so I shouldn’t have to replace it every few months like that Ziplock bag.

Oh, and that little blue thing in the upper left? That’s a pancreas pin from I Heart Guts. Lisa — who can be as geeky as I can — gave it to me as a Christmas gift. The T-shirt is pretty sweet, too.

Meanwhile, the weather has turned lovely here. Over the last few weeks, spring arrived all at once. Torrential rains, sunshine, a couple 85-90ºF days, and flowering trees and gardens. I’ve been out on the bike a lot, too. (Today I put in more than 65 hilly miles around Worcester and Middlesex counties.) Here are a few pictures from the flower bed.

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But I have to mention the letter from Rep. Richard Neal (MA-2) that arrived in the mail today. About a month ago, Lisa — my lovely wife and the sobering yin to my raging yang — took my angry rant, gave it focus, and made it more moderate and constructive. We sent a copy to each member of our congressional delegation in the hopes that it would convey some public support for reform. This was the first time I’ve actually sent a letter to a representative or senator, though I have sent some e-mails and made a phone call.

I honestly didn’t expect to hear back from anyone, and we were both really excited to receive a letter that showed that Mr. Neal (or someone on his staff) actually read our letter and took the time to write a personalized, non-form letter back to us after the legislation passed.

Anyway, that’s enough self-indulgence — for now, at least.