the photography of brian boyko: 2010

Not dead!

I am not dead; I just haven't blog posted because I'm looking for work.

I haven't been posting much to this blog lately - well, at least the public blog. (Friends of mine can access my LiveJournal, and every post on the main blog gets copied there.) There are two reasons for this.

First, until today, it's typically been either rainy or dark on the evenings and weekends. This is the first real sunny day I've seen in weeks, and the main blog is primarily a photo blog.

The other is depression and decision.

I switched medications form Setraline to Fluoxitine. Both do the same thing, but Setraline costs $150 a month while Fluoxitine, which is government subsidized even for people who don’t have residency, costs $15 a month. This is a no-brainer – except that the past two weeks have been hell while I’ve been going through withdrawal for Setraline, plus the underlying depression, plus waiting for the other to kick in.

I was so depressed, I considered leaving New Zealand and coming back to Austin. Both have advantages and disadvantages, but I have a support network of friends to help me through bad times in Austin – in Wellington, I haven’t developed them yet.

I’ve started to feel better about midweek. And I know what depression feels like and I know what sadness feels like – they’re two different emotions. Everyone gets sad at some point, but not everybody gets depressed.

And I’m sad.

Making friends in Wellington has not been easy. I got invited to a party on Friday, for example, by Woody – a good friend, but the exception that proves the rule. I showed up about a half an hour into the party, and everyone was, well, drinking.

By that, I don’t mean that people were drinking while enjoying other social activities. I mean, the entire focus of the evening was drinking. They played drinking games for a full hour; I waited that long for them to move on to something else but they never did. I would have drank as well, but I had to drive home. Which made me, once again, the wallflower.

Woody, by the way, didn’t show up until I left, a good 90 minutes after the party started – so I didn’t know anyone at the party, either.

I remember the last party I went to in Austin. I was slightly uncomfortable there, as always, and there was alcohol, but people talked about other things as well, and played games… I had never seen so much focus on drinking and getting drunk since my days in college in New Jersey.

What’s the point of this story?

The point is that I finally realize what’s bugging me – why I’m not fitting into the New Zealand culture. There really isn’t a whole lot of room for geeks and nerds here. That’s why there’s such a “brain drain” to Australia, I think.

Which means that I want to go home.

Of course, if you ask me on any single day whether I want to stay or go home, you’re likely to get yet another flip-flop on the answer. But what it comes down to is that the reason I’m *currently* staying in New Zealand is that I have a job here, and I don’t in Austin. I’m fairly sure that if I were to be given a job offer in Austin, I’d fly over and move immediately, but… and doesn’t irony have a cruel demeanor… nobody in Austin is going to hire anybody who can’t afford to come in for a face-to-face interview. Not in this climate. So I find myself in the EXACT same situation I’ve found myself in years ago when I wanted to move to New Zealand.

So far as I can tell, my options are to continue working until I’ve paid off all my debt, save up a little bit of money, then head back to Austin and start looking for work. This may take another 6 months to do, and I’m not happy about that. I think I finally know what I want, and now I feel trapped by my own decisions.

Rocky Horror at Embassy Theatre, Sat 29 May, 2010

This waterfall… is in my backyard!

From rain

The New Place

Finally got Internet! WOOT!

Here’s some pictures of the place.

From newplace

The place can’t be seen from the road, so it’s pretty safe from
”boy racers” and “p-heads.” Not that there’s tons of either
in Wellington. However, there are the occasional Ringwraiths.
From newplace

From newplace

My room. Small but functional.
From newplace

From newplace

This is my backyard.
Admit it. You’re jealous.
From newplace

From newplace

I know it’s been a while but…

As always, Internet in New Zealand is hard to come by unless you’ve got a permanent residence.

But my absence from the ‘net should not be confused with inactivity.

I started my first week of work the Monday after I landed (on Saturday) so I booked a hotel through Travelocity until Saturday morning. I figured that it shouldn’t take me more than a week to find a place, right?

Wrong. Trademe might be the Craigslist of New Zealand but there is quite a demand for housing in the city (especially the city proper) and a shortage of actual flats.

I did find a place – much further out than I had anticipated in Mornington, a surburb about 30 minutes by public transport from my workplace, about 15 minutes by car, and about an hour walking. Considering the massive difficulty parking in the city is, the public transport option seems to be the way to go – though if I just can’t handle bus-riding, I can always rent a parking space downtown for $40/wk.

And this place is beautiful and perfect for someone like me. It’s fully furnished, everything from the bed to the television, I’ll get pictures next time I’m down there and have more reliable internet. (Right now I’m at the Moana lodge again, which is awesome but charges .10c per megabyte, so text only for right now.)

It really is stunningly beautiful, and only pictures can do it justice. When I say fully furnished, I pretty much mean fully – bed, couches, an HDTV, a DVD player, and even dishes in the cupboard and a washing machine onsite. (Sadly, the dryer will remain Mr. Sun). The house itself is in a valley. Which is interesting because the road leading to the house isn’t – you climb down some steep stairs to get to the house. This makes it sheltered from the wind however. Best part – the backyard looks like something out of The Lord of the Rings (which probably isn’t that far off, actually) and maybe I’ll do some video podcasting from there.

I pay $175NZD/wk, with 3 other (TBD) roommates, though I’m assured they’ll all be professionals, not students. The room also comes – or more accurately came – with free Internet, but because that Internet was capped at 10 GB/mo, and $3/GB over that, (plus with three roommates) I’m going to get a 120GB plan, which will cost about two and a half times as much – though the landlord is willing to chip in what he would have paid under the 10 GB plan.

That’s 30 GB for roommate if we all split evenly, though it’s more likely I’ll pay the brunt of the costs; I’ll have to set up some sort of firmware on the router to keep track of which IP addresses use what bandwidth and split up the bill according to what we use. (See, this is why I fought so hard to keep bandwidth caps OUT of Austin…)

But forgetting about the details for a moment, this will be the first time in about two months that I will have had a permanent address and some stability in my life. Not that I’m sick of adventure, by a long shot, but it really is nice to be something less than nomadic.

Now, here’s the bad news.

I’m out of money. I needed to pay two weeks bond and two weeks rent upfront; I couldn’t put it on the credit card, so I had to withdraw it from my Kiwibank account. Which was my LAST bit of money.

Until I get paid on Tuesday, I am living off my credit card, and the debt on that is climbing… so much so that it might make sense for me to reconsolidate the credit card debt onto a more stable loan and just set up automatic payments here. It’s not anything I can’t handle, but flying back and forth across the Pacific, staying in hotels, and not having income for a month all take their toll.

Mom & Dad read this blog (or at least, the e-mails sent to them by the automated blog software) so they’ll be worried. Relax… this is only a cashflow problem, this is not a debt-outstripping assets problem. In the absolute worst case scenario, I could get some quick cash from selling my car, which is now no longer strictly necessary (and in fact, is proving to be more of a hassle than a boon.) But we’re a far off way from that.

Meantime, things are much better this time around. :) Will catch you with some photos and video soon. :D

Safely in Wellington! :-D

Why did no one tell me?

I’m in LAX, and my flight, set to leave at 9:30, has been delayed to 11:30. It’s now 3:20.

So, I have some time to kill. Just popping my head into the Koru club to ask them if there’s anyone I should contact because my connecting flight is delayed, they said, “no.” I then made an offhand comment about how I wished I could afford business class so I could use the club. They mentioned that they sold day passes for $55, which included free Internet, free food, shower facilities, toilets with the soft, absorbent toilet paper, nice seats, free computers for use if you don’t have your own, free games to play if you don’t have your own, and even an open bar. An OPEN BAR.

Since I normally spend about $55 between meals and Internet normally in LAX, I have to ask myself, why didn’t I know about this before?

Anyway, I’m torn between working on my book and playing Final Fantasy IV for my new Nintendo DS I got because, well, long waits in terminals are interminable, as is the flight I’m making (which is my 7th time across the Pacific, for those of you counting.)

This is my last post before I leave again for Wellington; I’ll see you on the flip-hemisphere.

Thoughts on Apple

Re: "Thoughts on Flash," by Steve Jobs

Apple has no business complaining about "open" when the only reason Flash cannot work on iPhones and iPads is because Apple has so closed off the hardware that it doesn't allow third party applications; Flash may be proprietary, but at least Adobe doesn't tell you what Flash animations will or will not run on the platform; permitting Weebl and Bob but banning Homestar Runner.

If Apple calls Adobe 100% proprietary, Apple is beyond that 100% mark to around 200% - proprietary software may prevent third party additions to the source code and an exclusive monopoly on selling the product itself, but they don't prevent you from running other people's software! Microsoft Word is 100% proprietary, but Open Office will run on any system where MS Word resides. Microsoft and Apple are fierce competitors, but Safari and iTunes Player will run on Windows.

In fact, I can't think of a major player in the tech market so determined to tie software to hardware sales. Apple's Macintosh OS is applauded for it's stability and UI; but is limited to the overpriced Apple hardware. There's no technical reason for this - enthusiasts have been running Macintosh OS on standard hardware - but it requires circumvention of the Apple firmware which does nothing but check that MacOS is running on Apple hardware.

On top of this, Apple used to have a customizable "PowerMac" line of desktop computers, with interchangeable hardware, including graphics cards, monitors, RAM, hard drives, etc. (A good thing too, because the graphics card in my PowerMac back in 2003 burnt out after 18 months!) This left only the Imac, MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacPro lines - of the four, only MacPro has any sort of customizable (or repairable!) hardware.

What really gets me is the ultimate gall of Apple in suggesting that "Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open."

This is a bald-faced lie.

The reason that Flash became the de-facto standard for Web video is mostly because Adobe didn't limit what people could do with Flash, nor charge extra for Flash-servers or flash-embedding technology. You bought the software and you could do whatever you want with it. Flash provided a technical solution to the problem of "how to embed video on the Web." Indeed, the open standards of HTML5 were established in response to the previously unknown demands for Web video that Flash uncovered simply by being "open" enough to not limit programmers from solving that problem!

But there was another program, I remember, before Flash, that sought to bring video to the Internet. I believe it was called "QuickTime." And it was proprietary as hell, requiring expensive server hardware to stream effectively. Additionally, all it did was play video; one of the advantages of Flash over Quicktime was that it enabled video to interact with animation, hyperlinks, Web commands, Javascript - it was far, far more "open" than Quicktime ever was.

Quicktime never took off for Web video except on Apple's own trailer page, despite, it seems, being one of the de facto standards for video in the professional market at the time Web video was taking off. In fact, any embedding Web site, such as YouTube, Vimeo, ExposureRoom, etc., will *convert* files uploaded in QuickTime to a more open format of H.264.

This is not to say that Flash is without flaws. It is proprietary software and thus is a poor standard for the Web. As it stands, however, it *is* a standard, precisely because Flash came to the scene first and in many ways, developed the demand. The best HTML5/Canvas can do is play catch-up, as developers of Web animation already know how to use Flash - and use it quite well. In fact, the main problem with HTML5/Canvas is that Flash comes with quite an awesome *visual tool for editing Flash* - the Flash application.

In fact, the Flash development application could, with relatively minor changes, be used to export HTML5/Canvas instead of Flash format animations. Maybe that'll be in CS5 or CS6 - I don't know. I do know that if Adobe thought there was demand for it, they'd put it in before someone else made an HTML5/Canvas visual editing tool - lest it cut into Adobe's Creative Suite sales.

For Apple, Final Cut Pro is a standard in filmmaking and video editing; simply because Cinelerra isn't good enough yet. For Adobe, The Gimp can do photo editing and photo manipulation as well as Photoshop in 95% of cases; it's that other 5% that keeps Photoshop on top. On the other hand, sometimes open standards dominate proprietary ones - such as the ubiqutous LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stacks for Web development, rather than Apple's ridiculous "Xserve" computers. The reason for one platform's dominance over another has nothing to do with whether the software is open or not - it is entirely due to whether the software is demonstrably "better" according to the most important criteria. You'll choose GIMP over Photoshop every time if your most important criteria is "cheaper" but for most professional image editors, that's not the case.

So what makes Flash "better" than HTML5? First, Flash is compatible with more Web browsers in use, barring the slim minority on the iPod devices. It's also easier to develop for, first, with many Flash developers having up to 7 years of experience with the language and visual tools. Third, and this is the biggie - Flash has it's own visual tools for development.

Which is why Apple's complaining about Flash not being an open standard rings absolutely hollow. If you control less than 2% of the market, blocking a de facto standard to try to replace it for one of your own doesn't harm the standard, it just makes your own products much less desirable.

This is the classic mistake that Sony makes every time they try to produce some new proprietary format in their electronics products. For example, I bought a Canon video camera instead of a Sony video camera when I got into filmmaking because Canon included a Mic-in port, while Sony's cameras only included proprietary ports for Sony microphones. Another example - pushing BluRay and causing the price of the PS3 to hit the ceiling in doing so is the primary reason that the once dominant line of Sony gaming consoles now has major challenge from Microsoft and Nintendo. Sure, BluRay did become the HD disk standard eventually, though it was mainly because of studio support - which Sony would have gotten anyway had they just developed a better console. Even so, my mom owns a blu-ray player, sure. Everyone else I know just streams high-def movies from the Internet.

Instead, if Flash is a big player because Flash has it's own development tools, why hasn't Apple, with one of the world's largest software development houses, created their own visual animation development studio for HTML5/Canvas, and open-sourced the sucker. (Let's ignore for a second that if Apple did develop such a program, they'd likely include it in the Final Cut Studio Suite, limit it to Macintosh users on Apple hardware, and charge $1000 for it.

If Apple cared one whit about open standards, why doesn't it allow Chrome on the iPhone? Why doesn't it allow Google Phone on the iPhone, or allow someone to develop an application that can record calls? Why doesn't it allow anyone to develop for the iPhone/iPad?

As for Apple's security and performance complaints, there, they might have had a point. Flash does introduce security vulnerabilities and drains battery life. Had they limited their argument to that point, I might have conceded it; however, and this is the big one... shouldn't it be the end-user's choice whether to risk the battery drain and the software vulnerabilities? Couldn't you, say, have Safari for iPhone pop up a little window saying: "This site uses Flash, which can introduce security vulnerabilities, stability problems, and drain battery life. Would you like to (Never Enable Flash/Do Not Enable Flash for this Session/Enable Flash for this Session/Always Enable Flash?)"

Finally, Apple claims the most important reason is that "letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and and progress of the platform."

This. Is. Bullshit.

If Apple believed that shit, they'd code exclusively in assembly language. Yes, sometimes third party layers of development software do limit programmers - but in the other 99% percent of cases, they enable programmers to code easily. A working, less-than-100% efficient program is better than a non-working or non-existent one. This is why you code for functionality first, then optimize for efficiency.

Apple also claims that cross-platform development tools are less efficient than single-platform development tools. This is true, but the purpose and the appeal of a cross-platform development tool is the idea that you only need to program an application once and be done with it. The demand for Flash on the iPhone isn't coming from people who want more efficient apps; it's coming from the developers who suddenly have to recode their apps if they want to work on the iPhone, and from end-users who wonder why the applications they have been using that work on 98% of all the world's devices don't work on the 2% that Apple controls. If your platform does not support a widely established, nearly ubiquitous cross-platform programming language, the problem is not with the programming language - it's with the platform.