Tag: 1aDay

Taking the long way home
Originally uploaded by Dave Traynor

I shot this while the Dixie Chicks’ song The Long Way Around was playing on my Ipod. It’s usually still light when I head home from the office but I worked late tonight. 

The old workhorse
Originally uploaded by Dave Traynor

If you’re going to set yourself up to post 1 picture each day on Flickr and write about it, you’d better consider a few things. Most important – make sure you carry your camera with you!

It’s been so long since I thought much about taking photos that I left the house this morning without my camera – then again at noon – and finally after supper. By the time I got home again, I was running out of time to capture something – anything!

This is only day 3 of my 1aDay project and already things are looking a little shaky around the edges. (Hmmm….I haven’t posted any real rules that I’m supposed to be following, so maybe I can make some of my own.)

Maybe I just need to post a picture each day and write about it. It might or might not be a photo that I’ve shot. Or it might be one that I’ve taken another day and put up to illustrate my story. That sounds reasonable. I’m going to have to think about that.

After all, the point of this exercise is really to help get my creative juices flowing and help my blog live up to its name.

The photo today (and yes, I just took it, in case you’re wondering) is my trusty Apple Macintosh Powerbook G4 12″. It’s been a reliable companion for nearly 5 years now and I’ve been giving serious consideration to upgrading. But my finances suggest that extending its life makes more sense right now, so I continue to depend on it.

This past weekend at the Northern Voice blogging conference in Vancouver, I appeared to be the only person in the room with an old Powerbook. Everyone seemed to have MacBooks or MacBook Pros (except for the odd Windows machine – but there weren’t many of them either.) Two years ago at the same conference, there were dozens of the Powerbooks, but times have changed and my machine is now officially classed as “obsolete” by Apple.

I like this pic because it pretty much sums up the state of my office these days. There’s a lot of stuff everywhere waiting to be tidied up. Sort of my life, when you think about it. More tomorrow.

Clearing Deadfall
Originally uploaded by Dave Traynor

The winter has been hard on the park where I walk the dogs. They’re clearing the paths and cutting down dangerous trees throughout the area. Maybe it’s because I’m from the Prairies but I have difficulty seeing these big trees get cut down. Where I come from, we don’t do that. Trees are precious on the bare prairie and if they ever got this big, we kept them around. But things are different in a real forest. And where people and animals are walking a lot, there’s a safety factor as well.

This photo was taken in Cuthbert Holmes park, not too far from our house in Victoria. Click on the photo for a larger view on my Flickr site. The dogs and I usually wander through the park two or three times a day.

I created a Google Map (just for the heck of it) so you can see where I took the photo.

View Larger Map

A new beginning
Originally uploaded by Dave Traynor

When I started The Daily Upload way back in April,2004 I was a bit optimistic about the “Daily” part. But here we are, nearly five years later and I’m still plugging away.

The blog has evolved over time. When I started, I had just started my own freelance writing business and I figured that a lot of my posts would relate to the PR and communications world. And that’s sort of what happened. But I also found that I liked having an online place to talk about some of the stuff that I saw going on around me. It was also a place to post some of my own opinions on current events and puff up with pride when I talked about my kids and what they were up to.

Every so often, the well would be a bit dry and I’d struggle to come up with something to add. I posted funny links to videos or strange things I came across on the net. But I tried to keep things interesting without becoming trivial.

In the last few months, my post have been few and far between. My motivation seemed to have disappeared. We were busy organizing ourselves to get a new house and I could always claim being busy. But the truth is that I just didn’t feel like blogging. I was lacking ideas and motivation. I was getting depressed and it just seemed like too much of an effort.

This past weekend, I was at Northern Voice 2009, a blogging conference in Vancouver. I attended the same event back in 2007 but I missed it last year. It was a great weekend. I got to hang out with a lot of really smart, enthusiastic and talented people who shared a passion for sharing information. Blogging has matured into a lot more than just posting thoughts on a website. Today, we’ve got podcasts and video and Facebook and Flickr and Twitter and dozens of other ways to post information and share it with people you know and people you’ve never met. It’s an exciting time to be involved in this revolution.

I was energized by the excitement of the people around me. And I’ve decided to take some of that excitement and find something that will make me excited about my blog – and photography – and writing. So I’ve decided to start a project. I’m calling it 1aDay. I’m going to post a photo every day for the next year up on my Flickr site, in a set called 1aDay. And then I’ll write a blog entry about it here in The Daily Upload.

That’s it. There are no other rules. I’m going to do my best to keep to the 1aDay and see what comes of it.

Today’s photo is up at the top of the page. (Click on the photo to go to my Flickr site.) It’s my office here in the new House. I’ve got my computers back up and running. I dug my old Nikon out of the corner and I’ve charged the batteries, ready for whatever is ahead. I’m looking forward to it. I feel a bit like my office these days. I’m sort of together, but I’m a bit frayed around the edges. I need a bit of tidying up and the 1aDay project is just the kind of thing I need to pull everything back together.

But of course, this will be better if you come along with me. My comments page is always open and I hope that you’ll add your thoughts to these posts. Maybe you’ve been feeling a bit frayed lately too. Long winters seem to have a way of doing that, don’t they?

Here we go…