Eric Warmenhoven

A few weeks ago, Lisa and I were in Barnes&Noble, and I decided to buy a few photography books:

The Digital Photography Book by Scott Kelby: This book is, as advertised, not a book about concepts and theories but rather about practical advice and tips. If you already know some of the theory, it’s pretty easy to see how it plays out in practice in this book.

Composition Photo Workshop by Blue Fier: I love the name “Blue Fier”, even though I’m probably pronouncing “Fier” wrong (“Fire”). Anyway, this book started off a little slow for me because he covers things like aperture and depth of field and focus, and shutter speed and ISO and other things I’m already fairly familiar with. When he started getting into framing and rule-of-thirds type stuff it got more interesting. He also covered several different styles of photography (landscape, macro, portrait, etc.) and so it was a pretty good introductory book.

Digital Portrait Photography and Lighting by Catherine Jamieson and Sean McCormick: I’m only half way through this book so far, and already it’s prompted me to spend hundreds of dollars on a new flash, and gotten me thinking about getting lights and umbrellas and reflectors and setting up my own miniature studio. I’ve spent the past few days trying to take portraits of Pixel and Lisa and myself, and haven’t had much success, mainly due to poor lighting (hence the flash and the dreams of better lighting equipment). When taking self portraits I’ve had such trouble getting the camera placement and focus and lighting right that I haven’t even gotten to really working on posing much. Which is fine, since I haven’t gotten to that chapter yet anyway.

There’s a portrait workshop being held in Los Gatos at the end of September that I think I’m going to enroll in, but I’m worried based on the description that I’ll have already heard most of it from the portrait book I bought. In the spring I may enroll for a photography class at the local community college as well.

I’ve been thinking about what I’m able to write about TiVo without upsetting anyone, and so I’ve been doing a bit of research about what’s already been written. Surprisingly, a lot.

So I decided that there really wasn’t a whole lot that I could say that isn’t already somewhere else on the web, and figured I’d just add in some technical explanations to questions that are likely to come up.

For example, the remote that we will ship has the thumbs buttons, but the Comcast remote [pdf] doesn’t. If you compare the remotes closely (there’s a picture of the TiVo remote in the article linked above), you’ll see the Comcast remote has two buttons that the TiVo remote doesn’t: Page Up and Page Down. There you go. The TiVo UI uses Channel Up/Channel Down as Page Up/Page Down in lists, so we don’t need separate Page Up/Page Down buttons, and use them for Thumbs buttons instead.

Also, to confirm what was written in that article linked to above, we really did rewrite our software in Java. Sort of. As the article states, we run on top of TVWorks’ TV Navigator middleware. It’s not a full OCAP implementation, but rather an implementation of OnRamp To OCAP, which is (from Informitv) not a precursor but “a subset of OCAP so that applications will be forward-compatible with the full OCAP specification.” In other words, we didn’t write the OCAP layer, nor the OS. And the Java-based software so far only runs on the Motorola hardware.

Lately I’ve been thinking that I’d like to buy a tripod, for a variety of reasons. I’ve been doing some research into them and decided that I’d really like to try a few out in the store before I consider buying one (especially since head and legs together will possibly cost $600). So today Lisa and I went out driving around to a bunch of different camera stores.

Or at least, we tried to go to a bunch of different stores. Los Gatos Camera closed, and we weren’t able to find a couple other of the stores on my list.

The Wolf Cameras that I’ve been to have had an extremely limited variety of tripods, and I wouldn’t consider buying any of the ones that they have.

Are there any decent camera shops in the San Jose area?

Apparently there’s lots of interest in the TiVo-Comcast product that I took a picture of. Already that picture has nearly 350 views, and the blog entry got a couple questions about it. And it’s a crap photo of something that was seen at CES.

The two questions that were asked were:

When can I get it?

I have no idea. All I know is that we got 1.0 done and Comcast currently has it. Most likely they’re going to be doing some testing of it privately, and then start market trials in select areas, but I don’t know when or where. (It’s also going to be available for Cox customers, but I have even less information about that.)

Should I wait for it or get a Series 3?

I can’t really answer that question. I have a Series 3 at home and it’s awesome. For me, if the choice were between this or a Series 3, I’d take the Series 3, despite the several hundred dollar price tag (especially since it’s currently available). Before I got the Series 3, I had the old Comcast DVR; and if I had to choose between that and the TiVo, I’d definitely choose the TiVo. (I’m biased, but I was a TiVo fan even before I got hired. That’s part of the reason I wanted to work here.)

Disclaimer

Please keep in mind that I’m not speaking on behalf of TiVo. I only work here.

TiVo!

Originally uploaded by warmenhoven

This is my desk. I’m planning on blogging about working at TiVo. I’m also testing phone-Flickr-blog.

I’ve been playing with my camera a bit more lately. The Wikipedia articles on photography and related topics are so much clearer now that I’ve had my camera for a few months. I got a new lens, an EF 50mm f/1.4 USM, and tormented Pixel with that for a while. I’m also thinking about eventually getting a tripod and a telephoto zoom lens, but probably not anytime soon.

And, as was probably inevitable, I set up a Flickr account and actually uploaded some photos to it:

I’m not really happy with most of the photos that I take though, and I think a lot of it is my framing. I just don’t have a real good feel for how to set up a shot. I guess the only things I can really do about that are to look through other people’s pictures, and experiment on my own.

About eight months ago or so, Lisa and I decided to get a new laptop that both of us could use. I decided I didn’t want to buy a Windows computer, so we “compromised” (she gave in) and we got a 17″ MacBook Pro. I was pretty impressed with it, and she found it usable enough (though Quicken for Mac is quite different from the Windows version, and she still doesn’t like it much).

Two weeks ago, we started having problems booting it. Problems like, the Apple logo on the boot screen would turn into a no sign and not boot. Or sometimes it would turn into a black screen and start printing console error messages before dropping me into a root shell. Or sometimes it would boot fine but then Finder would get into an infinite crash loop. Or sometimes it would boot fine and not have any problems at all for days.

I backed up most of my data and took it to the Apple store this afternoon, where they had pretty severe problems just trying to boot from an external disk. They took it and said that they’d try replacing the logic board and possibly the hard disk, and give me a call in a week or so when it’s ready.

I’ve been seriously thinking about leaving Brocade for a few months now. They’ve always been great to me, and I’ve enjoyed working there. But I’ve been there for nearly five years, and it was my first real job out of college, so I’ve decided I want to try something different. I especially want to get out of the storage sector; even though Brocade is really a networking company, their primary business (and everything I’ve ever worked on here) has been Fibre Channel, which is really only used for storage.

I’ve been monitoring jobs.joelonsoftware.com, and in early January (just after I had gotten Lisa a new Series 3 for Christmas) I saw a listing for TiVo. So I decided to apply. After a phone screen and two on-site interviews with a variety of people, they offered me a job, and last Wednesday, I accepted. My last day at Brocade will be next Friday, March 2, and my first day at TiVo will be Thursday, March 8. It’s finally been announced at Brocade; otherwise I would have posted this sooner.

It’ll be nice to work on something that I actually use again. (I’ll be working on the TiVo service for Comcast DVRs.) It’s easier for me to be self-motivated when I’m working on something that is potentially going to benefit me, outside of just the usual compensation. That’s the whole motivating factor of open source, at least in theory, right? I know it’s why I worked on gaim. Also, it’s a lot easier to explain to people. Telling people I work on a Fibre Channel Router, if they don’t know anything about storage, is just gibberish, and trying to explain it is aggravatingly time-consuming.

Anyway, wish me luck.

Partly in preparation for an upcoming baby, and partly by watching mid, I started thinking about cameras. I’ve decided that my little old Canon PowerShot S230 is getting a little worn out (its second battery can’t hold a charge that lasts longer than a few dozen photos). So, after a lot of advice from mid, I decided to get a Canon Digital Rebel XTi (also known as the EOS 400D). Also, partly on his advice and partly on the advice of a few Amazon reviews, I decided not to get the kit lens (EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6; not the one with the USM), and instead got another lens that sometimes is sold along with the XTi body (EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM). I also got a 2GB compact flash card.

As someone who’s always had point-and-shoot cameras, this is a really awesome camera. Part of it is that all of my cameras up until now have been 3.2MP or less and this one is 10.1MP. But a lot of it is that I get to control things like shutter time, and that the lens has image stabilization (IS), so I don’t get nearly as many blurry pictures. But I’ve had the most fun playing with the aperture, which creates some really neat effects that just weren’t possible with my point-and-shoot.

Pixel, however, was unimpressed:

Anyway, I can see now why people spend so much money on cameras, and especially on lenses. And I can tell already that I’m going to want a tripod. Also, I understand now why mid has a 4GB CF. My 2GB CF holds about 200 RAW images, which would be plenty with a point-and-shoot. But with this camera, it goes quickly, since it’s so easy to take multiple pictures in quick succession. Thus far, I haven’t really run into any problems with the camera itself, other than feeling like I need or want more accessories.

As I said a while back, Lisa and I had been in the process of finding and buying a new house. A few months ago, we found one, and moved. We left behind a bit of our furniture that we have had since we were in college, and since then have been in a rather involved process of finding furniture that we’re willing to live with for the next few decades or so. It’s been a rather painless process for me, since Lisa’s been doing all of it. I just have to stay alert for when new things show up. I still tend to miss lamps.

We were in the process of selling our townhouse; but after a few months we only had two offers, and both were significantly below our asking price. So we’ve taken it off the market for now, but will list it again in the spring. Fortunately for us it’s paid off, so other than property tax, it isn’t too big of an expense. We considered renting it but have friends who did that and their experience has convinced us that we’ll never rent anything ever.

Also, a couple months ago, after we moved, we found out that Lisa’s pregnant. We’re both really excited about it. We had been married for just less than a year when we found out, which doesn’t seem like a long enough time, but we had been together for seven years prior to that. So it seemed like a good time for us. We have our third ultrasound in a couple weeks when hopefully we’ll find out the baby’s gender. Lisa’s hoping for a girl, but she thinks it’s going to be a boy; I think it’s going to be a girl. Everything seems to be going well so far, and Lisa’s starting to show a little.

We haven’t started doing any of the baby-related things yet, like picking names, or setting up a nursery and buying a ton of crap that will probably end up being mostly unused. We did receive our first baby-related gift from my grandmother though, and Lisa’s grandmother is busy knitting booties and blankets. One of these days we’ll probably head over to Babies R Us and set up a baby registry, but probably not until after the new year.

Update 12/10: Lisa has clarified her position for me. She wants a girl eventually, but doesn’t care if the current one is a boy or girl.