September 23, 2005

Well, it looks like I haven't left the NYC area entirely behind me. I've recently accepted a project based in Jersey City. I'll be dividing my time between there and Hancock for the next several months. I'm delighted to be working with Jane Lindner, Steve Schwartz, John Frisch, and Jason Fried again. Were it not for the fantastic team involved, the commute would not be worth it.

I found a roommate so that I can spend a few days a week in Jersey City without having to get a hotel room each time. I look forward to moving in with David Tobin on the weekend of October 1.

August 4, 2005

This journal goes back to June 1, 2003. Recently, I've gotten involved in preparations for my 20th high school class reunion, and consequently I'm hearing from friends who lost touch with me long before 2003. For their benefit, this entry is a highly condensed (but not brief) record of my life path from 1985 through 2003.

Part I: Before

After graduating, I moved to Orono, ME where my father was working at the University of Maine. As the son of a professor, I was entitled to free tuition for a limited number of credits, which I used gladly. But I did not enroll full time at first. I didn't have a clear idea of what I wanted to major in, and I wanted to do some traveling before life's responsibilities descended. Among other things, I visited HB in Denmark and had a great time -- thanks again, HB!

At the start of the next school year, I enrolled full time as an education major. Two years later, I switched to Sociology. Around that time, my father left the university, and I took a full time job at the campus library. It was an evening shift which permitted me to finish my degree part time, which I did in 1992.

A slight digression at this point: some of my classmates may remember my affinity to computers and wonder why I didn't major in computer science. I did take some compsci courses, but never considered the major very seriously. I had been programming since the age of 12, and taking it as a major felt like the intellectual equivalent of a native English speaker majoring in English as a second language. I preferred to learn something new.

I met Cathy Carr nee Wang in 1989. Cathy is from Beijing, China and by the time we left Orono she had accumulated two masters degrees in engineering to go with the bachelors she had from Peking University. We married in June of 1990 and had John Christopher Carr, V ("Jake") in December of 1991. My April entry in this journal goes into a bit more detail concerning our lifestyle during those years.

I was undecided as to whether to enroll in law school or library school at first, but Jake's birth tipped the scales toward law school.

I was accepted from the waiting list by Vermont Law School late in the summer of 1992, possibly the last of my law school class to gain admission. Cathy took a job at the New Hampshire DOT in Concord and looked after Jake. I lived in Vermont and commuted to Concord on weekends. It was a difficult time, but I really enjoyed the school.

Late in my first year at VLS, I felt remorse at not pursuing library science. I decided to become a law librarian and enrolled in Simmons College's Graduate School of Library and Information Science in Boston where I took summer and evening courses concurrently with my law studies. That was a difficult commute indeed!

Upon finishing my law school program, I began looking for law librarian positions in 1995. According to the American Association of Law Libraries Directory for that year, the entire state of New Hampshire had six law libraries. With three degrees worth of student loans, I couldn't afford to wait for an opening near Concord. I wound up taking a job at Darby & Darby in September of 1995. Darby & Darby is in midtown Manhattan. The building they occupy had three entries in the AALL Directory, and the city block for that building probably had more than all of northern New England. I lived in Harlem for a few months until Cathy could find a job in the region. We then moved to New Jersey. Not long after, there was an opening for a law librarian at the New Hampshire Supreme Court, the next building over from where Cathy had worked at the DOT. But that ship had sailed, and I didn't apply.

I left Darby for another firm in late 1997. In late 1998, I was again in the job market. (I'm under a contractual obligation not to discuss the specific circumstances which led to my brief joblessness.) I took a three-day web development contract with Grey Direct, a very large advertising firm, as a means of tiding me over till my next "real" job. Grey liked me and asked me to come back on the fourth day. This was January 1999, and the dot com boom was just getting off the ground. Before long, Grey was giving me all the work I could handle. Grey's turnover rate (as all web development agencies in those days) was very fast, and I developed a network of contacts who gave me additional work. Before long I had a good-sized client list and was running my own business.

However, the bulk of my work was on-site at Grey's offices, and I was scrupulous about not working for anyone else while on Grey's time. Grey was very good to me and still sends me occasional contract work to this day.

Meanwhile, during 1997, Cathy had become disenchanted with civil engineering and learned Oracle Database administration. She rapidly advanced in the field serving, among other things, as the head DBA for the New York Times' online division NYT Digital. (You know that annoying form you have to fill out before you can view NYT's web content? That feeds into her database.)

When a Sociology major in his seventh year as an undergraduate married a Chinese student working on her second masters degree in engineering, who would have thought that in a few years they'd be working on the same projects? But a web developer and a database expert are a natural combination and hardly a day went by when we didn't help each other out. And there were even a few contracts where we were formally part of the same team.

Part II: September 11, 2001

I remember Bob Marshall telling a class that the defining moment for his generation was the assassination of JFK. Everyone old enough to remember that event could say exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. For us, there can be no doubt that September 11, 2001 is that moment.

Cathy and I dropped Jake off at his school as usual that day and took a bus into the city via the Lincoln Tunnel. Just about half-way through the tunnel, my boss at Grey called my cell phone. (Yes, there actually is good cell phone reception in the Lincoln Tunnel.) She had been riding her bike up Sixth Avenue to work when a low-flying plane passed overhead; she turned to observe it and saw it smash into the north tower of the World Trade Center. I don't know why she chose to call me first -- I suppose it was because she felt compelled to share the horror with someone and I was on her speed dial list.

I related this information to Cathy. It seemed likely that it was just an accident (we knew something similar had happened to the Empire State Building decades before) and in any event, turning the bus around was clearly not an option, so we proceeded to our clients. As the bus emerged from the tunnel and climbed the ramp into the Port Authority bus terminal, I looked south and caught the barest glimpse of the top west corner of the north tower with smoke pouring out of it.

By the time I arrived at Grey, the city's economy had ground to a halt. Everyone was glued to the TV. The second plane had struck, and with it the horrible realization that this was no accident.

Phone circuits were quickly overloaded. I contacted Cathy by our usual means: instant messaging. I advised her we had no way of knowing whether further attacks were imminent, and cautioned that she and I should remain separate until we had a better understanding of the situation. I did not (obviously!) want us to fall victim to another attack, but more than that, I didn't want the two of us to be in the same place during another attack and in that way make Jake an orphan.

The New York Times, Cathy's client, was of course exceedingly busy on that day, but Grey essentially shut down. We agreed that Cathy would stay on the job while I returned across the river to New Jersey to pick up Jake.

It quickly became apparent that IM was the only reliable mode of communication. There are differing opinions on whether the Internet could survive a nuclear strike as it was purportedly designed to do, but I can tell you from first hand experience that it is a remarkably robust medium. I did not know how difficult it would be for me to return to New Jersey, and wanted very much to get a message to Jake. He doubtless would have heard about the disaster and would be wondering whether his parents were OK. (I later learned that he not only had heard about it but had witnessed first hand the smoke plume.) But my efforts to spare him this anxiety were thwarted. I could not call the school directly. I IM'ed a friend in New Jersey and asked him to call the school for me, but he also could not reach them. I eventually settled for replacing my home page with a message saying that we were OK, but I had little hope that Jake would see it (and in fact he didn't).

Returning to New Jersey turned out to be impossible. Busses and subways had shut down. I walked to the commuter train station (the PATH for those of you familiar with the area) to find it closed. From there, I walked to the Port Authority bus terminal to find it locked down. Then I walked several miles north to the George Washington Bridge intent on crossing on foot. Had I been able to cross, I then would have faced a very long walk south to Jake's school. In the event, though, it was guarded against pedestrian crossings. I briefly contemplated trying to escape Manhattan via a Harlem or East river crossing, but it was becoming obvious that all crossings were closed and doing so would be taking me in the opposite direction to what I wanted. Having no better option, I retraced my steps southward to try the commuter train again.

By luck, I arrived at the commuter train station just as they were re-opening it. I finally got to Jake's school at 5:15. The after-school day care had closed at 5:00 with Jake and one other boy still not picked up. I tracked Jake to the after-school counselor's apartment in Jersey City, a significant walk from Jake's Hoboken school. I began that walk when my cell phone rang. It was the parent of the other child. He had his car with him and offered to pick Jake up and take him to me. We were reunited at the border between Jersey City and Hoboken at 5:30. It was only after the other parent picked up Jake that he finally learned that his parents were OK.

(Incidentally, that other child was Cody Davis. Cody and his father continue to keep in touch with us, and they occasionally visit. If you scroll past this entry, you can see pictures of Cody and Jake in my last journal entry.)

Of course, my personal drama was nothing to what many suffered on that day.

Part III: After

Cathy and I had been looking for a more rural dwelling for years. In December of 2001 we finally bought a house in Hancock. This house had been placed on the market on September 11, 2001.

We did not move in right away. Our plan was to ride out whatever was left of the dot com boom in the New York City area. I had worried that we would disagree on when this criterion was met, but it turns out that I needn't have. Whether because of September 11, or whether it was destined to burst, that time came abruptly for us on May 6th 2002. Cathy was told by the New York Times, her largest client, that they were outsourcing her position. By complete coincidence, Grey, my largest client, told me on that very same day that they were discontinuing my contract. (As I mentioned above, Grey continues to send me work occasionally. On May 6th, they told me that they would no longer need me on site on a daily basis.) There was no mistaking these signs: the dot com bubble had burst; it was time to move.

We did so on June 1, 2002. I continued to serve my remaining clients and built a business around a photo agency web-site application that I license. Cathy found work as an Oracle DBA at Smiths Medical in Keene.

The rest, notably the birth of our second son Tristan, is well canvassed in the earlier entries in this journal. If you're still reading, you must have an unnatural curiosity about my doings, so you won't want to leave the story unfinished!

July 25, 2005

Cody Davis is visiting us for a couple of weeks. It's amazing how much he and Jake have grown in a mere three years. I've created a special section of the site to hold photo galleries of his visit. Next month, we're anticipating visits from Thomas and Allen Takeshita and Chris Johnson.

July 15, 2005

Back in May, I wrote about my efforts to combat spam by issuing unique addresses to each of my many correspondents. I have completed that process today. If you have not received an email from me with your new address, please contact me. And please accept my apologies for overlooking you. I will be disabling my old email address within a month.

June 23, 2005

Brainpix just launched a new Ximagi-powered web site: ITS Press. ITS Press is Brainpix Group's hard news and special features extension. The original Brainpix site has received a face lift and an upgrade. Thanks to Chris Johnson for the skin work!

Speaking of upgrades, I upgraded to a Cannon PowerShot Pro1 recently. I'm still exploring the features, but I got a fantastic close-up of a spider in super macro mode. Contrast this with a similar composition from a negative scanned from our old analog camera under less challenging lighting. (The spider in the bottom photo is yellow and has captured a dark-colored horse fly. The two spiders are approximately the same size.) I'm not naming the old camera because I'm neither a laboratory technician nor a professional photographer and I don't want give the impression that the difference in quality is mainly or even partially the fault of the camera. But I do know that it's a lot easier to take good looking photos with the Canon. :-)

[Update 7-25: Since this entry, I've taken an even better photo for the spider comparison. The new photo is of a spider very similar in size and color to the yellow spider in the bottom photo. Click here to see the new photo. Though the two spiders are the same size, it is possible to enlarge the Cannon photo much more without sacrificing sharp detail.]

On the other side of the quality spectrum, I also recently upgraded my mobile phone to a model with a built in camera. I didn't get the phone for the camera feature, but it's nice to have the ability to snap a quick photo when the need presents itself. The image quality sucks but it's good enough to enjoy the composition. The image on the left illustrates what I mean perfectly; I'm delighted that I was able to capture this moment between Jake and Tristan, but the image resolution, color fidelity, and light balance are terrible.

The phone is a Treo 650. I've been waiting to upgrade my old Kyocera 6135 for years. The Kyocera was a Palm OS device, and I've been using Palm devices for my personal organizer since early 1998. Kyocera has a "better" Palm phone, the 7135, but the primary improvements for that phone over the 6135 were a color screen and more memory -- neither of which I needed. The Treo line are also Palm phones. I purchased the Treo 600 last year and sent it back in disgust when it proved unusable as an external modem for my laptop. The ability to use the 6135 as an external modem was its most compelling feature for me and it's a pretty basic item for data-capable mobile phones. I need to be able to access my servers when away from my home or office in order to provide support to my clients. The Treo 650 has the ability to act as an external bluetooth modem, so I just had to wait for my mobile carrier, Verizon, to certify the 650 on their network. Imagine my dismay when I learned that Verizon had deliberately crippled the device's bluetooth feature so that it was useful only for bluetooth headsets. Verizon's version of the 650 STILL cannot be used as an external modem! This is a very expensive phone and it can't perform a basic function that much cheaper data phones are capable of! Fortunately, reversing Verizon's dastardly hobble job proved trivial. There are also software applications available that permit use of the USB cable for a modem connection, but they are either Windows-only or unsupported. The hack to remove the bluetooth block is of course also not supported but it's so trivial that I don't loose sleep over it.

May 27, 2005

Some of you recently received a form letter from me with a new email address. I'm in the process of issuing unique addresses to all clients, vendors, family members, and friends. I'm doing this in clusters of 20 or so, and it will be weeks before I reach everyone, so don't worry if you haven't gotten one yet. I'll post an update here when I'm finished; if you haven't gotten one by then, please contact me.

The new addresses are in the form chris_carr@your_name.ccarr.com for personal correspondence, and chris_carr@your_company.twobirches.com for clients and vendors. Many of you fall into both categories. I generally have tried to avoid duplication, so if you have a twobirches.com address, I have not bothered to create a ccarr.com address for you; but if you'd like one anyway, let me know.

The reason for this move is that my current address, after years of spam-free operation, has finally made it into the hands of spammers. I can't abide that. This new system has several advantages. First, and most obvious, if any one of these addresses get's compromised by spammers, it's a simple matter to destroy it and issue a new one; the damage is contained to one company or family. Second, and more subtle, is that the unique portion of the address is in the domain. Thus, if I revoke an address, the domain no longer exists, and any spam destined for it can't be sent. In other words, the spam is stopped before it leaves the sending node, and my mail server does not have to waste resources rejecting it.

After this transition is complete, I'll wait a couple of months and then destroy my current mail domain. Watch this log for updates.

April 7, 2005

A couple of weeks ago, I found a veritable treasure trove of old negatives in our basement. I've finally gotten around to scanning them. A few were in pretty bad shape, but you can still appreciate the subject matter.

The photo on the right is from our first date. Damn, was I thin or what? Cathy and I weighed almost exactly the same in this picture; I know because we weighed ourselves on a public scale that very day. I'm not saying how much.

In seeing how badly these old negatives have deteriorated, it gave me pause to reflect on how differently Tristan and Jake's childhoods will be recorded and remembered. Tristan's photos were either digital originals or were digitized within days of development, thus assuring perfect preservation for as long as I or my decendants maintain backups of this site; Jake's photos, only 12 years older than Tristan's, are incomplete and of much poorer quality. I'm glad I found them before it was too late!

Here's a guide to some of the more meaningful of the newly uploaded galleries:

Life at the Patch House

Cathy and I met while living at the Edith Patch House. The Patch House was owned by the University of Maine and at the time was rented by a non-profit corporation consisting of the residents. It was nominally under the auspices of the campus residential administration, but in practice it was very independant.

Road Trip I: Boston

For our first date, Cathy and I took a road trip to Boston; she had never been there. We spent a couple of nights with my aunt Cathy Carr-Glynn and passed through Canaan on the way back to Maine where Cathy was able to meet my parents.

Road Trip II: The Camp

Long before it was fashionable, John C. Carr, Sr. owned a summer home on Lake Winnipesaukee in Meredith NH which we called, simply, "The Camp". It was inherited by my Great Aunt Florance "Sister" Burns, who later sold it. It was in the family for decades and we spent at least a week there every summer throughout my childhood. Cathy and I paid a visit in the summer of 1990. We later spent our honeymoon at The Camp, but we took no photos on that occasion ;-).

Road Trip III: New York City and Vernon CT

To celebrate our engagement, Cathy and I took yet a third road trip, this time to New York City. Cathy had been to NYC only once, when she had first come to America, and had not at the time stayed to do any sight seeing. I had not been to NYC since childhood. During this trip we stopped in Vernon CT to visit the Nutts and participate in the last of the Nutts' annual pig roasts. Many of my college friends showed up. If any of you guys are reading this, I'd love to hear from you. I no longer remember with certainty whether we hit Vernon on the way to or from NYC; I think it was the former.

Christmas 1991

Since Cathy was due to give birth around Christmas time, my parents visited us in Maine for Christmas, bucking the usual tradition of traveling to Medford MA. This turned out to be an eventful visit...

Birth of Jake Carr

...for at midnight, as Christmas was drawing to a close, Cathy experienced the first contraction of what was to be a very short labor. John C. Carr, V "Jake" was born at 4:41 that morning in the Eastern Maine Medical Center.

Jake as a baby

There are several new galleries of Jake as a baby. Read on for instructions on accessing them.

I've reorganized the site a little. In the top navigation, there are now links to galleries by event date which shows the events ordered from most recent to least recent -- this is the original "Latest" page -- and to galleries by upload date which show the most recently uploaded photos first regardless of how old the event pictured might be. This latter page is useful if you want to see recent additions to the photo galleries. Check it out now, because there's lots more from the old negatives I discovered beyond what I've summarized above!

A more subtle change I've made is to make the watermark on the preview-sized photos a bit more demure. They're more transparant and positioned near the lower right corner instead of near the center.

January 13, 2005

Happy New Year!

For my first journal entry of 2005, I request your indulgence in a rant. If you're not feeling indulgent, please read something else.

If a stranger asked you for my phone number, I trust that you would not give it to them. Even if it were a reputable company asking, you'd probably want my go-ahead first. Right?

Yet, strangely, many of my dearest friends and relations seem to have no such reluctance concerning my email address, in spite of my being much more concerned about its disemination than I am about my (unlisted) phone number, and in spite of this note which appears at the end of all my emails:

IMPORTANT NOTE: By emailing you, I am entrusting you with my private email address. Kindly do not disclose this address to any third party. This restriction applies to all web forms, including online greeting cards, send-to-a-friend functions, and web-based email.

The problem is ignorance. When you visit a web site that invites you to "send this page to a friend" or to send an online greeting card, the act of typing my email address into a web page form seems no different than typing it into your own email application. But please understand that the two acts are very different. When you use your own email program (Thunderbird, Eudora, or, if you're unwise, Outlook) only your ISP sees my email address. But when you type my address into a web form such as a send-to-a-friend page, you are in effect telling the opperator of that web site to send a copy of the page to me on your behalf.

Few web site opperators offer to send things merely out of kindness. They do it because they want to collect email addresses. And in doing so, they are in my opinion, committing a great rudeness. They are deliberately exploiting the ignorance of their visitors so as to trick them into ratting on their friends and relatives.

If you must put my email address into a web form, please contact me first. I will provide you with a unique address for that purpose.

Peace,
Chris

2004 Archives | 2003 Archives.