Adolf Gasser – The Photography Company

At some point; I think it was the trip back from Alcatraz; I managed to get dirt on the sensor of the DSLR camera. I headed to the largest camera store in town to try and get it cleaned maybe only a year after this happened expecting a $300 fee and maybe just to be told that nobody did that anymore.

On the contrary, Scott in the repair department at Adolf Gasser was extremely helpful, and I was able to pay about $45 for a sensor cleaning, since I didn’t need it done in a hurry (you can pay more for faster, which is an excellent pricing model IMHO). They also were able to handle getting Susan’s compact sony camera fixed; which had a broken sensor and a dented and slightly crooked lens fixture. I’m a very happy customer – we got both things done and we were ready to write off the compact.

I had to ask Scott about the name “Adolf Gasser”; turns out the business is named after it’s founder, who unfortunately passed away about 2 years ago. The store started out as a toy repair store before Adolf’s good friend (and best man) Ansel Adams persuaded him that there was a gap in the market for camera repair, which apparently was a good call on Mr Adams part since the business still seems to be doing well. I’m told there is an original Ansel Adams print in Adolf’s son’s office, who now runs the company.

I’m told Mr Gasser also prepared the cameras in the Enola Gay that took the pictures of the bombs that were dropped on Japan in WWII.

Scott spoke very fondly of Mr Gasser and told me they would call his wife when he left work in the evening since he looked like Mr Magoo driving his Chrylser back to Marin in the evenings to make sure he got home alright. He worked right up to the end of his life; and it’s confirmed was named well before WWII. He’s missed; and I kind of wish I’d been able to meet him too.

Joe Bloggs

My friend Joe Russack has started a really nice blog dealing with architecture, building design and implementation and furniture types of things: it’s at http://www.nothingugly.com. LOL – When was the last time you “implemented” a building . Joe is working on a building put together with shipping containers.

What’s going on with my website?

I’ve struggled for a while on the topic of what to do with my website. Some time ago I switched the site over to the WordPress blog software and made a half-hearted attempt to blog mixed thoughts and opinions on a semi regular basis. I don’t believe this has been particularly successful since I haven’t actually started writing more content, and I don’t think the site is any more interesting to people.
It’s become obvious that since I’m not writing on a regular basis, and the site is a confused mix of various things I should move the goalposts a little bit. I decided to split my interests up into different blogs so that they can be more freestanding.

• I am a software developer, and I’m working on software related innovations all the time. I think it’s useful to focus the main website on that, and work on being more diligent about documenting my discoveries and innovations for others to share. I think the increased purpose and usefulness of the content will hopefully drive the site to being more useful for more people, which may lead to a revenue stream.
• Since not many people are reading the site, and most of those people are probably family and friends, it’s probably not much use me having so much political whining on there, so I should focus the personal section of the site on more personal news that friends and family may be more interested in reading.

The drive for a more businesslike section of the website is somewhat driven by some posts I’ve been reading on Steve Pavlina on his personal development blog. He has talked a great deal about the value of passive income streams, and has been so successful with his own blog that it is his primary revenue stream. Personally, I’m mostly interested in being more effective at sharing information and knowledge, and that is the main driver for this change.

RSS, Blog, Podcast, bzzzzzzzz

I had until recently thought that all this hoopla about blogging, pod-casting, RSS, news aggregators et al was all hype and not particularly useful. Having spent a little more time looking at the kinds of tools that are available, I have to say I am pretty impressed.

I have been using PHP-nuke to manage my website. It’s becoming obvious that it’s not working particularly well since the comments section get spammed. I find this really annoying. Also – nuke has a lot of features that I just wasn’t using, and the complexity of it kept me from addition additional content.

I started messing around with NewsFire a little while ago, and found that aggregating news together in one place is really useful… now I am able to get some of my friend’s blogs, and slashdot and some other news in one places, and I get notified when it updates. Very civilized. I have since switched to NetNewsWire, which is better still IMHO since it has a built-in minibrowser with a tab interface, and it is friends with MarsEdit (you can register them together for reduced $$$).

MarsEdit is nice because it’s a desktop app – which makes it easier to put a larger posting together and post it up on the site. So now I have a better and easier workflow, and I think the site looks better. So that would be good. Hopefully this will enable me to post more as well .