- Looking Back at Career Decisions
I’m currently doing a massive export of all of my Gmail messages, dating back to mid 2004, and it has been a bit of a trip down memory lane. The export isn’t even done yet but as I watch subject lines fly by in the console, sometimes something jumps out at me.
For instance, I’ve been working at very small startups since around 2007 (after I decided pro photography wasn’t the career for me). And at one point in 2008 I explored working for a more established, profitable and growing technology company. I interviewed with them for the position of Software Architect which would have been a leadership position in the company, reporting directly to the CTO and taking over direction of two product development teams. It would have been an opportunity for me to shape the future of the company and how they used technology to achieve their goals.
The email I just noticed was the offer letter.
- Why I Buy Music – Part One
Sometime in 2003 I changed. Previously I was just like all of my Georgia Tech classmates and I would use a variety of post-Napster software tools to procure any music that I wanted (and plenty that I didn’t really want, but it was free, so why not download it??). At that time, how many gigs of music you had was really more important than how many songs and it was definitely more important than whether the music was any good or not.
Sure, I owned some actual CDs but those were from my pre-Internet2-connection days at Tech. Looking back, I didn’t think anybody saw downloading music as “illegal”. The excuses for downloading music instead of buying it – “I don’t want all the whole album, just one track”, “$16 CDs are way overpriced and I’m not going to pay that much” – were more like explanations since there wasn’t anything wrong with it. Certainly it wasn’t like pirating software – that was bad and even though everyone did it, pirating a $600 copy of Photoshop just felt different than downloading a song.
So what changed? I discovered the value of Intellectual Property and I realized why copyright law was kind of a big deal… thanks to photography.
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