In my personal life I keep a blog about my daughters. My wife, due to divorce and hard times, never got a baby book and we wanted to do something better for our daughters. We share picture and video-taking duties, and I write most of the stories. On that blog I have 550 posts over 6+ years, averaging out to about 6-8 posts per month.

The problem, though, is that I am writing this blog to last longer than one lifetime and there is little guarantee of the technology being around that long. I can’t even keep the technology around for 5 years!

I started the blog on Google’s Blogger platform. What a mistake! The environment was exceptional at the time but like so many things Google, Blogger had fallen into disrepair. Uploading media through Blogger meant videos went to Google Video and pictures to Picassa. The first problem I ran into was that the iPad and iPhone came out and the only videos I could embed were Flash-based. So I decided to move them.

It was at this time that I realized that Google would let you put your videos into Google Video but not get them out. This pissed me off so I switched to using WordPress instead with YouTube for new videos. Since I was hosting my site at WordPress.com and didn’t want to pay them for more space for my photos, I started uploading the photos to MobileMe, which I was paying for, and linking them into the blog. I’m paying! The service won’t go away!

Oops! Apple cancelled MobileMe and gave me a year to move them.

This started an avalanche of concern for me. Given the amount of time and energy we had put into creating this blog we wanted to make sure it was around for a long time. I needed services that were more stable. So we licensed our own shared server, bought our own domain and moved our WordPress installation to it, thinking we’d be safer.

But now we have photos and videos at multiple locations. Some photos are at Picassa and some are uploaded to our server through WordPress (including a painstaking process of re-importing all of the images that used to be at MobileMe). Some videos were at Google Video (which I couldn’t get out) and some at YouTube. Then Google announced Google Video would be shut down in 45 days so I scrambled to find all the videos in our primary collection and upload them to somewhere and re-link them into the blog posts. Videos, in particular, are a problem because I need someone to serve them and make them playable on the web. I tried uploading them to an Amazon S3 installation and then linking to them in the blog but all I get is a link, not a player. So I bit the bullet and uploaded them to YouTube, which seems to be the best solution for now. I still need to consolidate the photos.

Now… I’m not happy with any of this. It just doesn’t feel stable and secure, like I have control over this. I don’t like pictures being in the WordPress repository, uploading is arduous and WordPress seems to make multiple copies, fattening the hard drive. Videos are often too big to upload to my server so have to go somewhere else. And the big thing I have received from this is a deep mistrust for Google. I don’t believe any of their services will be around in 10 years, let alone when my girls are 75 and want to show their grandkids.

My wife can trace her family back to England and France, on the Mayflower and across the pond. They have a rich history, including one of the early California pioneers. There are pictures and letters passed down from generation to generation of just the immediate family. But now that we are so technologically focused, it seems less and less likely that the files and formats we rely on today will even be around for the next generation to see.

All of this work could be for naught.

I started programming in 1986 at age 13. I got an Apple IIc for my bar mitvah and it turned into a (mostly) life long passion.

I learned to program in BASIC, which served me well for quite a few years. I self-taught for a couple of years until it was the first language in the first computer science class I had in tenth grade at age 15. I used it off and on for years as the scripting language for Excel as well.

After BASIC I learned Pascal. I used that language in 11th and 12th grade. I didn’t program my first couple of years of college but then took a Pascal then C class in my third year of college. (I went five thanks to transferring from a quarter school to a semester one.) I became proficient in ANSII C, writing various apps on Unix, Mac and Windows, but ANSII C isn’t event-driven programming. Visual C was, though, and I took a semester of it plus a semester of Assembly my fifth, senior year of college. I wouldn’t say I really understood it but I learned enough to get an A in the class and complete my senior project.

That was also the year I started Infinity Softworks, developing our first apps for PalmPilot. That was the year event-driven programming kicked my rear end. The PalmPilot was so crude in those days as a development environment. I also went to graduate school and took a programming class that did a whole bunch of languages in one semester, including Java. That was 1998.

By 2001, though, Infinity Softworks was growing and I needed to focus on the business. I wrote a little bit of Palm code after that, did quite a bit of HTML and CSS (not a programming language — don’t let anyone convince you otherwise) but didn’t write any commercial code again until 2007 when we had shrunk back to two and we had an opportunity to work on BlackBerry (Java language) and Ruby on Rails, the former of which is dead to me and the latter has served me well for the past five years.

In 2008 we started working on iPhone and later iPad, or rather iOS code using the Objective-C language. Since then it has been all Objective-C for iOS, Ruby on Rails, and a little design work with HTML and CSS.

Notice I referred to it as Objective-C for iOS. The problem with developing for a new platform isn’t the language, per say. It is actually the programming calls (APIs or Application Programming Interfaces) into the operating system that are difficult. APIs are usually complex and involved and learning what is provided for you and what isn’t is so crucial to programming on a new operating system.

Well, this week I started learning Objective-C for Mac OS X. And I can tell you I have never had so much fun learning a “new” language. I say “new” because, yes, it is the same Objective-C language but the hard part, all the user interface APIs, are completely different.

I generally find this part of the routine a struggle. But not this time. I am really enjoying learning the OS X way!

Two nights ago at the Mobile Portland event I was asked who I read and influences me. I thought I would share some of my favorite blogs here (no particular order):

• Asymco (great podcast, too!)
• Michael Mace
• Fred Wilson
• Bryce Roberts
• Seth Godin
• Bijan Sabet
• Chris Dixon
• Albert Wenger
• Brad Feld
• Jean-Louis Gasee
• Paul Graham
• Jason Cohen
• Marco Arment (great podcast, too!)
• Watts Martin
• John Gruber (great podcast, too!)

I’d love to find some great bloggers on Google/Android and Microsoft, too, but I haven’t found any yet. And, of course, don’t forget me right here at eliainsider.com! 🙂

This is one of the cooler things I have seen in a while. The first minute or two is amazing, and who would have guessed at the physics behind levitating slinkies.

(via Daring Fireball/Kotke.org)

I was going to post on my impressions coming out of WWDC last week but I saw something last week that only 550,000 people have ever seen, and frankly, as a baseball fan, it doesn’t get much more awesome than this.

Last Wednesday night we thought we’d have a night out and go to a Giants game. They were playing the Astros, who haven’t been all that good of late but I expected at least a decent game. By the end of the second inning, though, it was clear the game was over. It was 5-0 and the Giants would go on to score at least one run in each of the first five innings.

But there was something else to celebrate this night. I started messaging with my wife back home after the second. Matt Cain, the Giants pitcher, wasn’t giving up any hits. 6 up, 6 down. 9 up, 9 down. 12 up, 12 down. By the ninth inning, with no Astro reaching base, the crowd of 42,000 was on the verge of seeing a perfect game.

For those that aren’t baseball fans, a perfect game is when 27 batters come to the plate and 27 batters are retired. No walks, no hits, no runners reach base at all. In the history of baseball there have only been 21 of them before last Wednesday night.

About 3 billion people have seen major league baseball games in person over the last hundred years plus. I have seen between 50 and 100 games myself in my lifetime. I’ve seen some great games over the years, even got to go to the 1995 World Series to see my favorite team play in it for the first time since 1954. But seeing a perfect game will be hard to top.