For me, 2010 started off a strong photography year. I signed a year contract with Yerba Buena Center for Arts (YBCA) to cover their opening events through the year. I made a connection with the Institute on Aging (IOA) as well, and covered a few shoots for them. On a personal level, I started a new photography project, The Dying Breed.

Around the middle of the year, I slowed down with photography and keeping up with this blog, mostly due to a higher demand at work, traveling for several weddings, as well as purchasing a new condo. From there on, I was a bit sporadic with blog updates and have been bringing my camera with me everywhere I go a bit less.

As the final quarter of 2010 came around, I found myself concentrating more and more on beefing up my development skills, particularly with WordPress and PHP. At work, we were relaunching our website on WordPress and I found myself with a desire to learn more and wanting to help others utilize the power of WordPress. Along with the launch of my company’s website, I also launched DRS650.com and Love2LiveCare.com on my own time. And that leads me into my next adventure…I do not plan on dropping photography at all, however, I do expect 2011 to be more concentrated on development work. Within the first month of 2011, keep an eye on TheContractingPost.com, my first big solo project.

It has certainty been a great year and I’m looking forward to 2011.

Happy New Year!

Till next time…

It’s been a fun 2 years and I look forward to another 2 more!

Till next time…

I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus and it looks like it is going to be that way for another few weeks.  I’m hoping to get back into the swing of things come June.  To give those that are interested a bit of an insight as to what I’ve been up to…

1. March 30 – closed escrow on a new condo
2. April 9 – moved into new condo with my special lady
3. Rest of April – complete chaos with getting the new condo all set-up
4. April 30 – May 2 – San Diego, California
5. May 7 – 10 – Las Vegas, Nevada
6. May 14 – 16 – Grandparents in town
7. May 26 – 31 – Savannah, Georgia

To top it all off, work has been quit busy.  I received a promotion mid-March and have been dealing with a few projects that have taken up quite a bit of time.  So, needless to say, I’ve been busy.

Hope you don’t miss me too much, I certainly miss you!

Till next time…

I am extremely excited to announce my first attempt at providing some of my fine art images for sale.  I have integrated FotoMoto into the blog portion of the site (Korn on the Blog) so that with only a few clicks, anyone can be a proud owner of one or more of my photographs.  I am pretty sure FotoMoto will not be my only source for providing prints, but since it was so easy to get up and get running, I thought I would give it shot.  Please note that prints through FotoMoto will not be signed and are open editions (unlimited prints).  I do have plans to provide some Special Editions on select prints with my signature of approval in the near future.

So, without further ado, here is what the new links look like:

If you are viewing this post directly on the website (not via RSS reader or Email), you should see a “Buy Print” and “Buy Card” link as well as an option to “Send as E-card”.  Almost all of the images within the Photo Share Category should now be available and ready for printing.

And, as a special offer, I have setup a discount code for 10% off, but the code is only available to the first 10 people that use it.  So, what are you waiting for?!?!

Discount Code: 1DBD7D

Till next time…

“When you are young, your years seem to last longer and you can’t wait to grow up.  As you get older, your years fly by and you start dragging your feet to slow them down.”

Well, I’m not quite dragging my feet yet, but it really is amazing how quickly the years go by these days.

Okay, enough rambling, what happened this year?  Well, for starters, I’ve been much less active online (on FriendFeed, Twitter, Flickr, etc.) as well as less active in my personal photography.  Why?  In January, I was swiftly promoted at work to Technology Manager.  From there, my workload quadrupled almost instantaneously and my social life, online life, and photography life all took a decent hit.  Over the past year, I’ve managed to control my workload and delegate properly.  It’s been a rough year for the economy, the company I work for included, but we are still alive and kicking strong!

At the beginning of the year, I started the 52 Weeks: My Surrounding Neighborhoods project.  I was quite impressed with some of the other people that joined in with me and stuck with it.  Unfortunately, I only made it to Week 8 of the project.  In February, I managed to get published in Special Events Magazine, and at the end of March, I was asked to display some of my photos at Papyrus.  Then, in April, one of my images was used as an advertisement on BART.  Come July, I made a claim I’d offer some of my prints for sale, however, that plan has yet to come to fruition.  I’m making it a goal for 2010.

In all, it was a good year for my photography, but I seemed to have neglected some personal projects.  For 2010, I am hoping to continue to find the perfect balance, posting to this blog, continuing to check-in with Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, and Flickr, get out with my camera more on a personal level, all while thriving and improving upon myself at work, with my photography and in my social life.

Have a happy and safe New Year and I’ll see you in 2010!

Till next time…

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I managed to finally migrate my WordPress installation off of my home server.  I’m now officially hosting with an external service.  If time permits, I may make further changes to the site, but for now, everything will continue to remain the same.

For those interested, I decided to move off my home server for the following reasons:

1. The physical hard drive which housed the website was returning errors in the event logs.  It is only a matter of time before the drive died completely.
2. Due to #1 (or possibly other reasons), my website had been loading extremely slow over the past few weeks.
3. Despite #2, it was time to upgrade to a location with higher upload bandwidth.

Through all of my testing so far, I have not found any glitches or issues, however, that does not mean they do not exist.  If you come across any, please let me know in the comments or by contacting me directly.

Thank you for your continued support!

Till next time…

Till next time…

I first turned my head and started paying attention last year when DISQUS introduced version 2.0 which integrated syncing comments with the local WordPress database.  Then, most recently, DISQUS announced syncing of comments with FriendFeed and I was sold. On top of the incredible feature set DISQUS keeps pumping out, I kept hearing positive story after story about their customer support and friendly staff.  Well, I had the chance to put those stories to the test, and I must say, I’m quite impressed.

Installing the plug-in went as smooth as a baby’s bottom, but when I went to import my WordPress comments, I received the following error:

There was an error exporting your comments. If your forum API key has changed, you may need to reinstall DISQUS. If you are still having issues, please contact help@disqus.com.

I double checked my settings to insure the API key was inserted and then uninstalled and reinstalled the plug-in.  Still no luck.  I sent an email to the help email address provided and went to sleep.  I didn’t hear from DISQUS all day, so I sent out the following tweet:

Tried to get @disqus working on my blog last night, but ran into issues with importing current comments. Waiting to hear back from support

Within about an hour of my tweet, I received an email from Jason.  After a few email exchanges, Jason asked me to check to see if there were any errors showing up in my server logs when running the import.  Sure enough, here is what I found:

Reporting queued error: faulting application w3wp.exe, version 6.0.3790.3959, faulting module php_curl.dll, version 5.2.5.5, fault address 0x00018ed8.

Apparently the version of cURL I am running was the root of the issue.  Jason sent over a quick code fix which I have included below:

Try modifying disqus-comment-system/lib/url.
php around:

// Try curl, fsockopen, fopen + stream (PHP5 only), exec wget

if(function_exists(‘curl_init’)) {
if (!function_exists(‘curl_setopt_array’)) {
function curl_setopt_array(&$ch, $curl_options)

and change the second line (line 238 in the file) from:

if(function_exists('curl_init')) {

to:

if(function_exists('curl_init') && false) {

After making this simple change, I attempted to import my comments again and it worked.  Special thanks to Jason Yan and the DISQUS team for helping me out so quickly and efficiently!

But now, I need to turn to my readers and FriendFeed friends to make sure commenting and syncing is working as it should be.  I think you know what you need to do.

Till next time…

First off, in my professional life, last week I was given an extremely shocking and quick promotion to Technology Manager.  My new responsibilities were placed on me immediately and my work load has been a bit overwhelming due to all the changes.  My emotions are very mixed right now about the promotion, but I am trying to make the best of it and take the challenge head on.

Due to these changes, I’m sure my activity online will drop dramatically, at least for the next few weeks.  As a result, I will also have less time then I expected to focus on growing a photography business, but do plan on putting some time and effort into it.  I am hoping to keep up with extra curricular photography as well as posting to this blog as regularly as I was in 2008, but I can’t make any promises at this point.

On that note, I took the plunge this evening and upgraded to WordPress 2.7.  Everything seems to have gone as smoothly as possible (thanks to the awesome WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin).  At first glance, I really like the new layout of the administrative tools and just hope no gliches pop up randomly in the next few days.  If you notice anything not working properly, please take a second to contact me or let me know in the comments.

I appreciate your continued support!

Till next time…

It all started with a little curiosity.  I started a new job in August 2007 where one of my coworkers, Ross, was into photography as much as I was.  We started going on photowalks every Monday evenings in March 2008.  Ross easily convinced me to get a “PRO” account on Flickr.  We then began to look around for new places to photograph and I stumbled upon Thomas Hawk’s Top 10 Places for Photography in San Francisco. With that, I started reading Thomas Hawk’s blog regularly and when he mentioned that FriendFeed integrated Flickr favorites into their services, I was all over it.  I got involved and interacted with more and more people on FriendFeed.  My productivity in May sank dramatically.  In early July, a conversation on FriendFeed with Phil Glockner of [scribkin] pushed me to start a blog.  To be honest, I can’t thank him enough.

Since July, this blog has been through quite a bit…

Miraculously, after less then a month, Louis Gray picked me as one of his Five Cool Bloggers for the Month of August.  I certainly was not ready for this mention, but could not thank Louis enough for the exposure it provided.

In September, I Love Photoblogs wrote up a short feature on me and near the end of September, Robert Scoble and Michael Fruchter included me on their list of people to follow.

Finally, at the beginning of the month in December, Your Photo Tips listed this blog as one of the 100 +1 Best Photography Blogs of 2008.

I’m not 100% sure I caught everything, but I truly do appreciate those that have shown support of my blog and my photography.  I’m working hard at keeping Korn on the Blog an informative and inspirational place to visit and read and hope to continue to grow and spread the love into 2009.

Have a happy and safe New Year!

Till next time…