{bp} formerly known as WebBP :: Blog

Inspiring.

At Mount Baker, Washington. By Michael Kittell. Reprinted without permission.

Every so often I come across a picture that is so striking I just keep staring at it. This picture, the second place pacific northwest image in The Oregonian's 2008 travel photo contest, is one such image. I want to be there!

After reading the little blurb about the image in the paper, I went to the paper's web presence, OregonLive.com, where I was amazed to discover there is no permalink for the image. It only seems to exist in a pop-up window. Wanting to be able to share this image, I searched the web to see if Michael Kittell had it published on Flickr or another site.

While I was not able to find the image hosted anywhere, I did stumble upon a feature article (55 Peaks) in the Pomona alumni magazine and an interview with the Fresno Bee, both of which chronicle how the boyfriend-girlfriend pair of Michael Kittell and Taylor Smith decided to climb all 55 peaks over 14,000 feet in Colorado in 55 days in the summer between graduating from college and starting law school. That sounds like such a great adventure (and an inspiration to us all)!

Is it spring yet?

This has been a crazy spring. Last Friday, it was 80 degrees and I was playing Frisbee in the sun. Today it's snowing outside (I'm not kidding!).

Happy Holidays!

May your holiday season be filled with simple joys and special times spent with friends and family. I will be offline until January. Best wishes and see you in 2008!

Project 365: Capturing today everyday

Sometime in the past year I stumbled upon a Lifehacker post about Project 365. The idea is to document your life by taking a photo every day for a year. The author gives a few reason why you might want to do this. For me, it's a simple and fun way to ensure that I get to be creative for at least a few minutes every day. As life has gotten busier, being creative is something that increasingly seems to get pushed to the side and I desperately want to bring it back.

So I am. One photo at a time. Every day. I started on my birthday and intend to keep it up through the coming year.

I may need your help until it becomes second nature so I encourage you to follow along. I'm not making any promises -- to myself or anyone else -- about the quality of these pictures. Some will undoubtably be more inspired than others. That's okay. For me, this isn't about perfection nearly as much as it is about the creative challenge of coming up with something new every day for a year. And to simply delight in the little things that give every day so much texture and richness. I can't wait to look back at the year ahead this time next year. Won't you join me?

Congratulations to OSU Beavers -- National Champions!

Two weeks ago, the OSU Beavers baseball team beat Stanford 15-0 in a decisive NCAA Super Regional 15-0 victory at home and earned its second trip to Omaha in as many years. The Beavers lost their first game in Omaha and -- given the College World Series' double-elimination format -- another loss would send them packing. Many in the national media expected them to lose early.

Instead, the team went on to win six elimination games in the College Word Series and tonight they made history. It's been an exciting road to watch. Congratulations!

More coverage after the jump.

Hello, world

That was the output of my first computer program when I (and millions others) was a kid and seems a fitting title to this post. Why? Let me explain.

I started writing for the web in February 1995, having self-taught myself HTML and working in Notepad. As my familiarity with the medium grew, so did the content I contributed. I launched my college's student newspaper online in March 1996 and was hired to begin developing a web presence for the university's athletic programs (which was later outsourced). Studying abroad in the UK, I created a site covering the euro common currency, which featured dynamic headlines provided by Moreover and grew to become a leading resource in the year leading up to the currency's launch. When I went to graduate school, my focus shifted to architecting an alumni networking service and I started dabbling with blogs. That was fall 2000. By 2001, I was posting several times a day and falling in love with blogging. That summer, I authored some of my best travel writing online as I toured Europe. Two years ago, I switched from Manila to Typepad and started a new chapter. Unfortunately, the combination of privacy concerns, an increase in the number of employers who have fired bloggers, and an incresaingly lack of time to spend either writing or reading on the web have conspired to make this blog far less than it once was, in my opinion. The most obvious result of this has been the near-complete lack of fresh content of late. For that I apologize.

The simple truth, however, is that I would still like to blog again. And so I am. These first steps will be baby steps and there may be a step back for every two steps forward, but as I've said privately from time to time, "Bryce is Back."

Renewal...

I am going to do something new today: post.

Why? Because I can. Because I want to. Because I need to. Because I believe in the power of the written word.

I haven't posted with any regularity (or for that matter, much frequency) in quite a while. Every so often I feel badly about this, and then I remind myself why I started blogging in the first place: to share ideas, to converse and to learn. Not to work under the pressure of deadlines. I have enough of those in the rest of my life. Truthfully, I've just been really busy with moving, remodeling, work, you know, that thing called "life".

So what's changed? Perspective.

I learned this weekend that someone very dear to me has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Suddenly, my world changed.

Beginning today, I am going to post things I am thankful for. At this very moment, I am thankful for Ali Edward's post today which was strangely inspiring and empowering and her post yesterday which was somehow calming and motivating. More on that tomorrow.

Life (and death) after Katrina

By all accounts, the situation in New Orleans continues to deterioriate. As I've watched the media coverage unfold day by day, I think the enormity of the situation is starting to sink in. Every media outlet has its own perspective on the story, but the emerging thread is one of a humanitarian disaster. Here is a link to a weblog where people are posting cries for help. Reading through these makes this disaster real. Very real. I hope the authorities know about this blog.

Donate or volunteer at the RedCross. Or visit the official government Hurricane Katrina site.

Photo Credit: Richard Alan Hannon (AP) View more images from New Orleans or visit Wikipedia's coverage.

Finding myself (after all these years)

When I was a kid, every time I found myself in one of those stores that sell tacky tourst stuff, I would look for something with my name on it. You know the sort of stuff I'm talking about: keychains, mugs, license plate holders, silly looking figurines with "Samuel" or "Alice" plastered across their bellies. It's not so much that I ever really wanted any of that stuff. Rather, it was that they never included my name in their inventory. As a little kid, it didn't seem fair. Why if they had "Bryan" and "Bruce" did they not have "Bryce"?

As I got older, I grew to like the fact that my name was both common-enough-sounding and yet relatively-rare. It suited me perfectly.

I was in college before I knew another "Bryce". But soon there will be many more "Bryces" out there. If you look at this this site which charts the popularity of names over time, the exploding popularity of my name among the younger generation closely resembles those hockey-stick growth charts that Gartner always put out during the tech boom.

So I guess it isn't too surprising to discover that I am now a "collection" at none other than that shrine to faux urban surburban shabby chic itself, Pottery Barn. I am a table, a cart, and a stool. Read about the Bryce project table:

With its sturdy wood construction and multifunctional design, this project table provides a comfortable venue for everything from sorting photos and reading mail to framing artwork. Its counter-height top provides a spacious work surface, while two dovetailed drawers and an open shelf below keep supplies in easy reach. Its roomy drawers are fitted with two oversized pulls. Use the wide open shelf to display larger items, or fill our Rustic Baskets (sold separately) with supplies and slide them into place. The table is built from pine and finished on all sides with a wheat stain that brings out the wood’s rich grain and pleasing knots. Antique-bronze-finished hardware.

"Multifunctional design", "wood construction", "sorting photos", "a comfortable venue", "artwork", "rich grain" ... it's as if someone knew the essence of "Bryce".

I always told myself as a kid that I would buy the first thing that I found with my name on it. Given all the tourist trinkets I've seen over the years, it could be a lot worse.

On using craigslist

I still remember the first time I used craigslist.org: I was looking for a place to live in San Francisco. It was the end of 2001 and a friend who used to live in SF had recommended that I check it out. Craigslist helped me find a wonderful roommate (I miss you, Anne Marie!) and a great place to live. From then on, I was hooked. I've used it dozens of times since then, sometimes posting, sometimes responding, and always amazed at how useful craigslist is.

Have something you no longer need? Take a moment, make a post and you'll undoubtedly receive several emails within hours from people who have been searching for precisely what you no longer need. Looking for a tennis partner, a temp job, a toaster oven or transsexual erotic services? You'll surely find it on craigslist.