Zombie Blog!

Well, it's important to be realistic - I doubt this blog will see much in the way of regular updates in the future. There should be current information professionally on studiokumar.com and personally on devandsummer.

springtime in Shanghai

Magnolia on Tree, Shanghai

Spring is here, sort-of, and some flowers are blooming. This magnolia is on a tiny tree in our housing compound. The tree is completely covered with these amazing blossoms. No leaves yet, just flowers.

I experimented with different illumination schemes but used a classic diffuse white umbrella key light with some hard, snooted rimlight to help separate it from the not-perfectly dark background. Setup shot is here.

The front petal blew out a little bit. I had to up the flash power and stop down the lens to get the depth of field I needed - the wind was blowing and I got lots of focus errors with the lens wide open.

I used a spray bottle to enhance the dew. I used my flashlight to help the autofocus work in the dark, as well as for composition.

banner ads, animated GIFs

The Foghorn Magazine, Banner Ad

This week I had a nice chance to do some graphic design. This is my first effort at a banner ad for my wife's wonderful and hilarious web magazine, The Foghorn. She plans to feature the ad on Dinosaur Comics, among other places. Powered by the economically interesting Project Wonderful ad service.

The ad is only 117x30 pixels in the "button" size, which is minuscule. To have more content and to seem more attractive, I decided to make an animated GIF instead of a static picture.

It was an interesting process to make an animated GIF. I used The GIMP and layers to create the animation. There are over 60 frames of animation. I have a renewed respect for animators and I appreciate the tedium and effort required to make cartoons. The dynamics of bouncing were interesting to play with to make it look good - I have linear starts and sweeps, but after bouncing the graphics decelerate in a quasi-quadratic fashion, which looks pretty good.

It plays at proper speed in Firefox but not in Internet Explorer. IE seems to cap out at about 10fps. I suspect this is not a performance thing, I think it is probably a CYA liability thing for Microsoft - at 15Hz or so one might be able to create a pathological animated GIF that could induce seizures in some people, ala Pokemon.

published in CRAFT!

CRAFT Article Cover Photo

For those of you DIY/crafty types, you will be able to see an article in CRAFT volume 06 that my wonderful wife Summer wrote here. It was a collaborative effort; I was the photographer. I recommend CRAFT and its nerdier brother MAKE for excellent projects, page design, and yes, photography. This article teaches you how to make your own coloring book using Photoshop. So this is a meta-picture, with the original photo here. I took this cover photo using my small-flash setup and a homebrew light tent made of PVC pipes, fittings, and an IKEA shower curtain.

small-flash photography

Cromwell - My Small Dog

I have recently become interested in using small hot-shoe flashes for improvised studio-style photography. The model is my inimitable if annoying dog. Shot with a single Nikon SB-80DX and an umbrella. Inspired by David Hobby's excellent Strobist.

flickr tags complete

Hello! After a long process all weekend, all my pictures on flickr are tagged and described. Please take a look through them through my website, or on my flickr page. Let me know if you see any typos or errors in the tags or captions. There are travel photos, flash photos, as well as my published photos.

With that out of the way, it should be a good, productive week for blogging!

flickr updated

As you probably have not noticed, I have updated the design of the blog. I could not follow my own advice... But I think it looks nicer, more consistent with my website and less like a default blogger template.

In more important news, I have uploaded all of my 2007-present photos to my flickr site and I am in the process of adding tags and organizing them. I am trying to be a picky photo editor and it is hard to choose: technical quality and content quality are often weakly correlated. In addition to my best photos, I also archive all my published photos here as well as photos of projects.

Once the photos are tagged, I will have time for some new essays, and hopefully soon, my first how-to article.

do a shoddy job

Hello! This will be the first in a series of short essays I will write to muse on different technical and philosophical subjects as they relate to product design, technology, and life in general.

why you should do a shoddy job
or, "when good enough is best"
March 2008 by Dev Kumar
studiokumar

I am a perfectionist. While this may be a cute answer to an interviewer's question, "What is your greatest weakness?" it is actually a serious problem and not an accolade in disguise. Perfectionism is a compulsive obsession that is every bit as damaging and destructive as other personality problems like procrastination or inability to focus. (I have those problems, too, but that is the subject of another essay. They are certainly related.) I want all my shirts to face the same way in the closet and I want all my tools to be in the right drawers of my roll-away. Stickers and price tags enrage me. At the same time, I am kind of a slob. Piles of papers and wires and components always litter my desk. What gives?

In the late '80s, slick hardback books read by executives in business class were abuzz with a new Japanese management philosophy called kaizen, or "continual improvement." Sounds great. Who doesn't want to improve, and improve all the time? But the key word here is CONTINUAL. Improvement comes as a continuous series of very small steps. Perfectionism is just the opposite. By becoming obsessed with a final result, perfectionism robs us of the moment. Perfectionism is punctuated improvement.

When I was a teenager, a good friend of mine was obsessed with having the perfect car. He was an archetypal fanboy, reading technical specifications, magazines, and chatting with other enthusiasts on automotive websites. As a perfectionist, he had it all planned out. He knew exactly what kind of car he was going to get. He could name every component in it and could recite all of their manufacturing histories. Man, it was gonna be a tricked out ride. He would wax it daily, and keep detailed records of its maintenance. When his tire budget permitted, he might smoke the tires or practice J-turns.

Did he end up getting his 300 horsepower turbocharged dragster? Of course not. He finally learned to drive when he was about 22, and the last time I drove with him he was a clueless motorist puttering around in a rusted-out car that would look perfectly at home among the "Ambassador" taxis in India. We drove around LA for several hours trying to find the rare SAE 50-weight oil that this heap would burn slightly less quickly than a less burly lubricant.

My friend was completely focused on his dream car, so he did not notice that he wasted years of his life in a automobile that sucked. Perfectionism leads us to accept significant compromises most of the time in the hope of future improvement. Continual improvement means that we accept small sacrifices all of the time in order to focus on the present. It would be awesome if I could find the will to shave every single day instead of having two- or three-day lapses followed by two hours in the bathroom.

In engineering, design, and business, perfectionism is particularly damaging. Speed of execution is typically critical to success, and obsessing about unimportant details destroys one of the most powerful design tools at your disposal: iteration. I believe that great ideas can spring fully-formed from a fertile mind, but also recognize that even the best concepts have some rough edges. You will never come up with a great product if you spend months focus-grouping, conceptualizing, simulating, and second-guessing yourself. It is much better to get your product or website or painting out there and polish it in the harsh reality of a competitive market. If you are fast enough, you might have completed two or three projects while your competition is still obsessing about their first. The lessons you learn in the real world are far more valuable than any focus group or simulation.

In college, friends would joke that "D" stands for "done." While we should certainly strive for excellence, they make a good point. An unfinished project that "has a lot of potential" is still just junk in the corner or cluttering your hard drive. It is a complete waste. The engineer in me wants to quantify, so I think 80% is about the right level of completion for any project. A B-minus. When you are 80% complete, 80% perfect, just get it out there. Then you can worry about the next big thing.

Clearly, this is easier said than done. I admire and envy those who can easily complete a task and move on to a new one.

As for me, I worry that the links in my blog entries are not highlighted properly. Or that the unjustified text layout looks sloppy and amateurish. How might it look at all screen sizes? How about the typefaces? Are they stylistically consistent? Do they fail over elegantly in legacy computer environments? Maybe I need to go back and make sure that I am using simple, declarative sentences free of the passive voice where possible?

These concerns, among others, are why this post has been sitting in an open editor window all afternoon, and not on my blog. Finally, I have decided that am not going to worry about any of this. I will hit the "publish" button now. That is the discipline.

website updated

Hello! I have completed a major website update with the help of my wonderful wife Summer. All of the major sections are functional and have some content. These sort of projects are when I pay dearly for disorganization - photos and project descriptions on dozens of hard drives and CDs (some of which are failing or semi-functional); thousands of files heaped together in great festering piles. Well, some missing data aside (in my buddy's attic as well as in my shipping container) I think there are some cool pictures and a good overview of the last decade or so, from a fun-loving and semi-professional viewpoint.

This last year (2007) has been a great one for photography. With lots of travel, careful study, new equipment, and mostly lots and lots of practice, I have taken tens of thousands of pictures. So there are tens of thousands of junk photos I need to wade through. But among those are a few hundred good ones and a handful of great ones. My wife, being punctual and organized in all things, has had all of them online for months. Right now, they are sitting patiently on our family flickr account, sucking up all the praise and commentary that should rightly be going to my studiokumar account! Over the next few days I will be putting the best photos onto my account and the photo section of my website should fill out accordingly.

Please look through the website and photos and provide comments and corrections. If you are family or a close friend, this part is obligatory!

new blog and website

Welcome to studiokumar! This blog is a companion to studiokumar.com and serves to provide supplementary news and commentary to the more static content on my main web site. Thanks for visiting, and please feel free to contact me for comments, questions, and the like.