Three questions I love asking

September 14, 2009

I love to meet new people. I talk with a lot of people online as a result of comments on blogs, photos, videos, and more, and I’ve had the chance to meet some great people through this kind of exchange.

Over the years I’ve tried to find questions to ask new people that don’t follow the normal “where are you from”/”how’s the weather there” flow. Here are three of the questions I ask just about everyone I meet, why I think they’re important to know, and how I’d answer them.

What’s your passion?

Passion is a weird beast. I’ve found that people often don’t even mention their passion outside of their close relationships, and it’s often something you wouldn’t expect. (I think it’s really unfortunate that people don’t follow their passion more; I mean, I can understand if it’s not your main job in life, but I don’t think you should hide your passion.)

I have two major passions, really. The first is pretty obvious: photography. The second is a little deeper: I enjoy looking at how new advances in technology are affecting society, and I like attempting to explain and use that in a way that people can understand. (That’s why I love working on datAvenger, and that’s why I occasionally keep up with writing at Another New World.)

Which photo of yourself do you like best?

When I first started asking this question, I was afraid people wouldn’t really want to answer; I thought it’d be limited to people who actually did photography themselves. I was surprised, though, that people really seem to think about the question and look for a photo they really like.

The choice really reveals a lot about the person. Do they like the photo because they look really good in it? (That happens a lot.) Is it because of the people with them in the photograph? Is it because of where they are? Photos speak to memories, and I think that tells a lot about a person without having to explain every detail about the choice.

Here are three of my favorites:

Portrait 1 Portrait 2 Portrait 3

The first was taken by my good friend Cait on our trip to the Rockland Breakwater. The second is the work of Jeff at the AFF, and the third is my own right around college graduation time.

What do you like most about yourself?

This, ladies and gentlemen, is my go-to question. I ask this to everyone. It’s such a simple question, but it often makes people think much more than I expect.

The two most common responses? “I don’t know” and “physically or personality-wise?” I don’t accept “I don’t know;” I keep asking until I get a real answer. At the same time, I purposefully leave the question completely open; I don’t put any limits on it. It’s amazing what you learn about a person from the response, and it’s amazing how some people really do start to fit into a couple of pretty broad categories after you ask the question enough.

Personally, I like that I’m a good listener. I might not be the most talkative (more on that later), but I’m always there. I also like that my mind’s always active and thinking about what else is possible.

What are your thoughts? Do you have any questions you tend to ask new people you meet? How would you answer my three? I’d be interested to know. If you haven’t answered them already, tell me what you think sometime!

Folk fantastique

September 1, 2009
Railroad Stage

Say what you will about the 2009 American Folk Festival: it was rainy on Saturday, it messed up traffic, there weren’t as many people… I thought it was amazing. This year, instead of learning just about music and culture, I also happened to learn a bunch about people and myself.

I’d volunteered for the Festival in 2007 as one of the people who set up the stages and food areas. I had a lot of fun, and it allowed me to feel more like I was really a part of the festival I attend every year. Unfortunately, my pesky hernia prevented me from volunteering last year, and I didn’t really want to do any heavy lifting this time around. Instead, I decided to push my own boundaries a bit: I volunteered for the public survey and for the legendary Bucket Brigade.

The public survey is an interesting gig. UMaine’s Center for Tourism Research and Outreach produces a 10-ish question survey that combines demographic and festival information. Volunteers from the festival (as well as CenTRO researchers) hit the crowd individually and find people to take the survey by doing nothing more scientific than asking people if they mind being surveyed. The process takes about 5-10 minutes, and the participant is entered to win a festival t-shirt. If they provide their email address for a follow-up survey, they’re entered to win one of six L.L. Bean gift certificates at the completion of the follow-up survey.

Those who know me well may be saying, “wait, Justin did that?” Although I don’t seem it from my presence online, I’m a pretty strong introvert in person. I have trouble joining conversations, and I can never go up to someone randomly and ask a question for fear of interrupting whatever they’re doing or of being denied. But yes, I signed up to be a surveyor, and I found that people were overwhelmingly receptive to going through the process with me. I met some great people of all ages and of all walks of life, and I was able to see a view of the festival that I had never seen before.

Unfortunately, by the end of my shift on Saturday morning, I was so soaked by the remnant rains of Hurricane Danny that I decided to call it a day and go home. Over the course of the festival I put my body through a lot – too much, really – and I’m still somewhat sore from the weekend.

For the past few years, the highlight of the festival for me has been the photographic opportunity it presents. There are tons of great shots just waiting to be taken there, and I love to see how many I can capture. I didn’t take as many photos this year, and I took even fewer photos of the artists than I’d expected. I’d taken some shots on Friday night (including some fun chances to capture some of my favorite UMaine dancers in the parade), but I scheduled Sunday as my best chance to take some good festival photos.

After doing the surveying, I’d decided to push myself just a little bit more and ask people attending if I could take their portrait. That limitation had been the one thing I’d always thought held me back from being the best photographer I could be; I’ve passed up a lot of opportunities because I was too shy or apprehensive to ask if I could take a picture. The surveying changed everything. On Sunday it was easy for me to go up to someone and ask if I could take a portrait, and to my surprise nobody I asked refused. I ended up with some photos that make me quite happy, and the knowledge that I’d grown as a photographer pleased me as well.

(After the festival I received some wonderful compliments about my photography by both old and new friends. I’ve never been able to accept compliments well, but I really do appreciate everything that people say about my work. I’m so glad that people enjoy it.)

For the final hours of the festival, I’d signed up to be part of the Bucket Brigade, the volunteer force that goes around the crowd with buckets asking for donations. This was the highlight of my weekend. The generosity of the people there was overwhelming for me, especially considering the economic situation we’ve experienced lately. As people dropped $1’s, $5’s, $20’s, and checks into my bucket, I smiled and thanked them for coming to the festival. It was incredibly rewarding to watch everyone – everyone – there contribute to the festival’s success, from toddlers in strollers with money from their parents to elderly people determined to move their trembling hands close enough to put a couple of bills in the bucket’s hole.

As I swam against the current of the sea of people walking on Front Street, I noticed the rainbow of blue, yellow, orange, and purple “I kicked in!” stickers dabbling almost every shirt I passed. Over the last few years I’ve had the opportunity to attend the festival, donate to it, volunteer for it, take photos of it, create websites for it, work for a sponsor company of it, and sing its praises anywhere I can. This weekend I realized for the first time that this festival really is about much, much more than just the music that graces the Bangor waterfront each year.

There’s more as you go deeper

August 3, 2009

I’ve discovered a guideline for my photography lately: it’s not all about what you intend to photograph. The most interesting pictures may well come from the unexpected or the generally unseen.

It turns out that applies to more than just photography. My mom and I headed out on our annual whale watching trip from Bar Harbor yesterday on the Bar Harbor Whale Watch Company‘s Friendship V. It was a beautiful day for landlubbers, but as soon as we drove down to the dock we could see the fog planted firmly atop the cold Gulf of Maine waters. Anyone who had done a similar trip in the past (including the ship’s captain) knew that the chance of actually seeing a whale was next to none. Most whales are discovered from a distant blow on the horizon, and in yesterday’s fog there was little or no chance of seeing a whale in the distance.

For me it’s not about seeing whales anymore; we’ve taken at least a dozen trips out to that region of the ocean, and I’ve seen my share of Sonograms and Siphons. The goal is to move into the vast expanse that is the Gulf of Maine, cruising at thirty miles an hour over rollercoaster-like swells until you reach a destination dozens of miles offshore. Yesterday’s trip had a little extra magic: as the boat idled in the offshore water, we all sat silent, listening for the sound of a spout from a whale. The only sounds we could hear were the waves passing and the rhythmic foghorn from a close but not yet visible Mount Desert Rock. The crew members closed their eyes and listened for the familiar mammalian sound. I closed my eyes and just listened to the ocean. I was experiencing a dream, a soundscape I’d tried to replicate hundreds of times in the past.

Explaining at sea

While out at sea I took a picture of two of the ship’s crew members, Kaitlyn and Laura. I’ve found that I enjoy taking pictures that tell a story, even if the story isn’t visible directly through the picture. Kaitlyn and Laura both study whales and were showing the ship’s passengers how whales are tagged for tracking purposes. In the background is Mount Desert Rock, a remote island 26 miles offshore used primarily as a research base by Bar Harbor-based Allied Whale. Both Kaitlyn and Laura have spent time living on the island for an opportunity to further study their passion.

On the way back to land I took some time to speak with Laura Kennedy, a seabird researcher on the ship who has the rare combination of being from Oklahoma (bonus points) and a UMaine graduate student (mega bonus points). She showed me how the GPS-linked tracking software on her laptop worked and explained what sort of data she hoped to cull from her research. She told me how much she loved what she did as she yelled over the deafening offshore winds while surveying the water for avian life, but her explanation was no match for the smile and tone she used as she spoke.

You may think that a whale watching trip with no whale sightings is a failure. I couldn’t disagree more. The intent of something you do isn’t always what’s most valuable; there’s more as you go deeper.

Interruption vs. socialization

May 21, 2009

If you regularly follow my Twitter stream, you may be confused by what appear to be contradictory tweets about wanting to have uninterrupted periods of time at work and wanting to move off the computer and socialize more. I admit that it is quite confusing, so I thought I’d go into a bit more detail here.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m one half of the “development team” at Sephone. (There are more than two people who do development at the company, but I’m one of the two people who don’t split their time between dev and design.) As the company has grown, more and more people take part in the development process. I have to say, it’s great to see fellow employees learning and growing with their experience. At the same time, though, this inevitably leads to an increase in the number of questions directed at the two of us, both because we have the most dev experience in the company and because we’re fairly well versed in the projects that are currently active.

Development is one of those jobs that requires a lot of concentration. An increase in the number of interruptions and distractions greatly affects the productivity of a developer (and I’m not the only one who believes this). As an informal supervisor of anywhere between five and ten other people with various levels of development knowledge, these interruptions add up quickly. We’ve tried a number of ways to remedy this situation: devoted blocks of time during the day for questions (“office hours”), weekly development meetings, lunch ‘n learn educational sessions.

These communication limitations lead to a pretty noticeable consequence: isolation. Isolation can be wonderful for productivity, but it leads to an atmosphere of untouchability and unapproachability. Due partially to the fact that we’ve been fortunate enough to have a fairly full workload and partially to the limits we’ve attempted to set in place, I haven’t felt as though I’ve been part of the *other* parts of the development process for quite some time. And I’ll openly admit that I really miss that interaction with the other people in the company.

Over the past couple of days I’ve been discussing some options for the future with my co-workers over lunch. We’re going to have a few new interns once we move to our new office in a couple of weeks, and we wanted to do some preemptive brainstorming to discover ways that we could maintain some amount of productivity while still having a relaxed, friendly, and sociable environment between employees. Here are some of our ideas.

  • Use the tools. Over the past couple of years, we’ve really made great progress in our internal documentation for projects. Many of the questions a developer or intern may have about a project are answered in the project’s documentation page or in our past task records. The first lifeline should always be the documentation we already have (as well as a simple Google search for pure development questions).
  • Schedule it. It’s difficult to change gears. For some questions, though, an immediate answer isn’t necessary. Saving questions until less active parts of the workday (ie, first thing in the morning or right after lunch) goes a long way to increase productivity.
  • Work from home. Working from home can be a great option, especially with larger projects. We trade off out-of-the-office days and find that productivity often rockets through the roof on these days.
  • Always be available. While it may decrease productivity, it’s very important to have an environment in which everyone is approachable if necessary. Co-workers should be respectful, though, of any requests to come back at a more convenient time.

It’s important to me to be productive yet sociable; in fact, most of my best experiences at Sephone have been while interacting and brainstorming with other employees. How have you tackled the interruption versus socialization conundrum where you work?

And then there’s the blog

May 11, 2009

As you may have noticed, this blog – justinrussell.com/blog – has sort of become the odd man out as far as my online presence is concerned. With all the other services in the landscape today, specialized blogs like Another New World and the Pine Tree Photography blog, and especially with the advent of Twitter and my own Twitter account, I don’t feel the need to have a personal blog to the extent that I did two or five years ago.

Here’s the kicker: I love to write. I feel like I haven’t been writing as much as I want lately. Sure, some of my thoughts fit nicely into 140-character tweets, and others fit in well over at ANW or PTP. But to be honest, I’m a lot more complex than that.

I’ve decided that my goal for this blog will be as a catch-all to everything that doesn’t fit anywhere else. Yes, that’s sort of a vague guideline, but if you look at my Twitterstream, that’s pretty random as well. This blog will turn into a collection of thoughts that just don’t fit into 140 characters. (And be forewarned: some of these posts are going to be long. I like to write, dammit, and that’s what I intend to do.)

I know that I’m pretty spread out across the web, so I want to make it easy for you to stay on top of the posts here even if you don’t subscribe to this blog individually. The posts here will be shown on justinrussell.com home, of course, and they’ll also be syndicated at on my Facebook profile. I’ll also put links in my Twitterstream to the posts I think are most notable (or those for which I want feedback). And maybe – if we’re lucky – this site will get a bit of a theme upgrade, too.

Shorten me, please

April 24, 2009

With all the URL shortener opinions lately, there’s been a lot of discussion of the usefulness of these services. Do they degrade the value of links and the Internet? Do they destroy usability? Will they cause an LHC-style black hole? What’s a Twitter-loving guy to do?

Build your own, of course.

Today I’m introducing jusr.us, the newest and only officially-sanctioned Justin Russell URL shortener. (Officially-sanctioned means that I’ll be the only one creating jusr.us URLs.)

Check out some of the best links ever!

Is there any real use in doing something like this? On the technical side of things, sure, there are a few advantages. But really, it’s just a reminder that we live and work in a great space on the web and have to remember to have fun every once in a while.

I’m Justin Russell

April 22, 2009

Back in the summer of 1999, “JRuss2001’s Home Page” was put online for the first time. The site featured a directory of calculator programs, song parodies, web site suggestions (including AltaVista as the best search engine), and a recommendation to use MSIE 5.

Eight redesigns and almost ten years later, I’m now publishing the newest revision of justinrussell.com. Given that the focus of the web has moved away from personal home pages to social web services, this new version serves as a launch point into these external sites and provides a listing of the latest content and favorites I’ve gathered on those sites. (Think of it as Collage 2.0.)

This is my first home page redesign in over two years, and I’ve had some help with this one. After inviting comments and feedback on Twitter, a bunch of people – including Caitlin, Lyndsy, Gary, Amy, and Hans – helped me work out some bugs and spruce the site up a bit. It’s still a work in progress, but it’s my favorite home page revision to date.

Now it’s off to BarCampBoston!

BarCampManchester3

December 10, 2008

On Saturday I headed down to Manchester, NH, to attend BarCampManchester3. There were a ton of great conversations going on, and as always, I really enjoyed the low-key atmosphere that a BarCamp provides. The new venue at UNH Manchester was amazing, and I think we have a great home for BarCampManchester going forward.

This year, I really felt as though I could relate with the other developers there. (I’ll be honest: in the past, I’ve felt as though the Maine development community lagged behind the communities in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. This year it seemed more on par.) There was a ton of great discussion about project management, agile development, client communication, and more.

I brought along my nifty Flip camera and recorded three sessions. Each is approximately 45 minutes long.

It was great to meet everyone at BCM! Hope to see you all again next time around.

I bought a pair of pants today

November 6, 2008
Receipt 1
Receipt 2
Receipt 3
shown at approximately 50% of actual size

My costume

October 31, 2008

It happens to be Halloween. It also just so happens to be the day I introduced a new, secret project I’ve been working on to my co-workers at Sephone.

Do the geeks see where this is going?

Thanks to a $6 clothing and $3 eyewear sale at Ocean State Job Lot last night, it just seemed appropriate.

Justin Jobs 1 Justin Jobs 2

The geeks will get it.