I flew out from San Francisco to Munich on Friday night. Arrived well after a great Lufthansa flight. It was nice to bump into friends and acquaintances on the flight (Barney Pell from Powerset [now part of Microsoft], Chris Shipley from the Guidewire Group, Gary Bolles from Xigi, Robert Goldberg from Crossroads Ventures and Don Levy from Sony Pictures Digital production.

We had mostly all slept on the flight and it was 6pm when we landed so there was only one option – drink and eat until tired :-) . The Augustiner Beer Hall served the purpose well.

The first day of DLD has just finished. Some very good panels. The highlight was Esther Dyson accepting an award from Hubert Burda for her contribution to the industry over many years. Esther flew in from her cosmonaut training in Star City, Russia to receive the award.

Great fun. Here is the fotonauts album of DLD. Feel free to add to it.

It seems that Facebook has taken issue with pictures of women breast feeding their children. As a dad of 3 young boys and a photographer I know first hand that the breast-feeding picture is one of the first a new parent takes. Either somebody at Facebook has made a silly error of judgment, or the place is run by pre-parents who find breasts to be only sexual objects. (OK I’m joking about the latter, but still, this is ridiculous).

As a contribution to the protest that has broken out I have created an album on fotonuats that is entirely open to others to add pictures to. Below is a widget showing the current pictures. You can get a copy of it here – http://www.fotonauts.com/albums/00636fa0-9cdf-4990-ba19-05d0ca7d0728 – just pull down the actions drop-down and make your own widget.

Please do so and put it on your own web site.

If you want to add images to the album get accepted to the fotonauts beta process here – http://www.fotonauts.com/about/invite, download the application and drag your own images into the album.

Here is the discussion from the web:

http://www.techmeme.com/081230/p10#a081230p10
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10129731-71.html
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2008/12/29/are-breastfeeding-pictures-pornographic-facebook-thinks-so/
http://www.techmeme.com/081229/p63#a081229p63
http://venturebeat.com/2008/12/29/facebook-vs-breastfeeding-moms-fight/
http://www.hothardware.com/News/Protest-Over-Facebook-Yanking-Breastfeeding-Pix

fotonauts released a new build of the Mac beta today and it got me to playing with it again. It can now access Facebook files and also file system based images. It already had iPhoto, Aperture, Picasa and Flickr.

So, here is a memory jogger. this is an album of RealNames related people and events between 1998 and 2002.

Wow! Mike looks young. And so does Jean-Marie. As for me. I look pretty much the same :-( . But what great memories. And now shared… :-)

Notable faces:

Gené McPherson, Jim Strawbridge, Rob Reid, Griffin Golamco, Barbara Gore, Nicolas Popp, Bruce Ong, Ted West, Amy Katch, Jeff Stephenson, Rob Bowman, Rusty Baker, The DARNAPSNPS Whieboard (our business plan), Mary Burnside, Terri Holbrooke, Alan Marcum, John Dowd, Greg Ott, Yves Arrouye, and many others….

Leave a comment if I missed you out.

I just took delivery of a new Canon 5D Mark II. Its a 21 megapixel hottie with full 1080p video. Here’s an example video of my 2 year old - http://gallery.me.com/kteare#100150.

Then, Nikon announced a 24.5 Megapixel D3X for $8000 (the Canon is $2699.00). It doesn’t do video! And by many measures it is a worse camera.

Here’s what Hitler thinks – warning, it is VERY funny.

The news of Barak Obama’s election victory, inevitable as it has seemed for weeks, if not for months, has barely sunk in. Commentators as diverse as George Bush and The Reverend Jessie Jackson are agreed about one thing – Americans (and I am now one) should be proud of themselves for electing an African-American as leader of the USA. It is historical. It is a proud moment for the people of the USA and shows they are looking to the future with optimism, not the past with cynicism.

But the significance of Obama’s victory goes far beyond what it means for the position of African-Americans in society, or for what it means for the rest of American society, significant as those things are. His victory brings to an end an era that began with Ronald Reagan, remained largely unchanged during the Bush senior and Clinton years, and has been relied on entirely under George W Bush. That is an era in which fear of internal and external enemies, or of cultural difference dominated the political discourse and atomized and paralyzed the American electorate. These were the years in which there was thought to be a Conservative majority, albeit a silent one. An era in which big bold optimistic ideas were frowned upon. An era in which the population as a whole was given the role of passive agent, living our lives, safe in the knowledge that we were protected by an all-powerful government.

America has been re-booted, with a new operating system. The past was a PC, Obama is a Mac. He is clever, attractive, well put together, desirable, optimistic, and many other good things. Above all else he is wanted – by Americans, by foreigners, by the world as a whole it seems. And he has unleashed and become a focus for the power of the people. Americans now officially care and are prepared to put their money where their mouth is. Optimism is Wired – Fear is Tired.

Obama’s movement has unleashed a bottoms up openness. The People can no longer be seen as a passive, fear-focused, manageable mob whose only job is to show up to vote every 4 years for the fear-monger in chief. The future will not look like the past. It will be better. There will be more thinking, more doing, more optimism and more real politics.

So… before I get too carried away I will end this piece by saying – YES! What a great feeling this is! At last we have an operating system that won’t keep crashing. It looks good. It feels good. I want it. And better still, it is crowd sourced!

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