I studied photography at college and a cinematography module at university, consequently gaining a good grasp of the technical and theoretical principles of taking photos, lighting composition and subject matter.

Personally I learn best by doing, so something that made me frustrated using film was the time delay from shot to print, I wanted to see the developed picture instantly. This was where digital entered my radar.

I entered the world of digital photography with my trusty Panasonic DMC-FZ5 a semi digital SLR. This was fine but didn’t offer swappable lenses and was, at the end of the day, a point and shoot camera with a big lens, never really achieving great results.

Flickr has traditionally been my dumping ground for photos, almost a backup solution for my snaps. Things have now changed and I use it to upload selective shots that I am proud of and think that other people will appreciate. Sharing my photos online has thus far been highly rewarding from the yield of feedback and the social aspects associated with sharing in an interest.

My advice to you if you are intending on getting into photography is to get yourself a beginners digital SLR (Nikon d40 – d80 or Canon 350d – 450d) with a kit lens (18 – 55mm) and/or a 50mm prime lens. With this kit, get yourself set up on Flickr and sign up to a few groups related to your equipment to see what results are achievable.

Now get out and about experimenting with aperture settings, shutter timings, white balance, time-lapse photographs and framing subject matters, after all, it is free to take as many shots, however you like.

You can find my photos at flickr.com/photos/kulor

Work out what range of lines to select

:set number

Find the lines you wish to modify

35 #Hosts per intl
36 192.168.0.22 uk.dev.site.com
37 192.168.0.22 de.dev.site.com
38 192.168.0.22 es.dev.site.com
39 192.168.1.92 it.dev.site.com
40 192.168.0.21 fr.dev.site.com


Do the replacement

:36,40s/patternToReplace/replacementText/gc

Tips

• If your looking to do a lot of replacements, take out the ‘c’ at the end of the substitution (if your confident on what your changing), this is the confirmation option
• If your unfamiliar with all the commands in vi, simply type ‘u’ (undo) if you mess up
• Like the command line, vi has a history so type ‘:’ and use the up and down arrows to retrieve your previous text replacements
• To turn line numbering off, type :set nonumber

What i took from the presentation

It all finally hit home, the message that Jason and 37signals were trying to make; keeping things simple. I realise things should be simple anyway, just having it spoken, made a whole lot of sense, and the general idea is to avoid over-complicating tasks. As humans we strive to make our lives more efficient, but in the process we inadvertently make more distractions resulting in a poor productivity.

Getting things done for me is a hard task. My process in doing things usually involves first thinking:

• Is there is a better way of doing something?
• If i do not find some magical batch task solution, i will usually ponder on the best way of tackling the matter, again taking up time that could otherwise be spent doing stuff.

Why is this, man it gets annoying as i like to see results, and fast!

Tapping into my thoughts on task execution efficiency

I set myself some kind of mental note now (not a todo/task as that would be too constrained and definite), to try and hit the task on the head and get it done. This is the only way i managed to get this very blog live, by just doing it, instead of worrying on the design, the mark-up on the front end, the way i will market it etc… Its here and it may or may work but at least it got done.

Moving on from the talk

One of the subjects covered in the talk was to avoid certain things, such as avoiding talking to people, which can be considered a distraction, but instead use email/IM/etc. to leave communication to a passive mode, to allow productivity. This is a hard task and i think if taken to literally, could be bad for picking up inspiration, relevant information, and not forgetting you may be conceived as a recluse!

I will do stuff, i will create those apps that i have been meaning to release, i will blog more, i will get more stuff done at work, or maybe not?