All across Europe there is beautiful street art to be seen. It’s not graffiti (or at least not just graffiti) and my wife is fairly obsessed with it as an art form. Everywhere we go, she is always on the lookout for more, and when she finds some, she has me photograph it. This is my favourite from the recent batches.
I should really put together a collection of all of it one of these days!
I resisted as long as I could.
In the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur in Paris, you are asked not to take any photos. And I didn’t. Mostly. Almost entirely, really. But when I saw this statue, I just couldn’t resist. It was too beautiful.
Can you blame me?
It’s that time again. The Automattic Grand Meetup! And a few of us Automattician photographers have been going crazy this time around. There have been several photography-themed activities, including a night photo excursion tonight.
I don’t know how many shots I’ll be posting, but I really liked this one!
I’ve only seen Mt. Ranier once before, on one of those virtually mythical completely clear days in Seattle. But yesterday when flying in to Sea-Tac airport we flew very close and I got a ton of photos. Sadly my nice camera was in the overhead bin, but my iPhone 6 took some decent snaps, and this is my favourite I think.
Another photo from the Renaissance Festival. This guy looked like an absolute warrior and I had to grab a photo of him with a sword fitting for his stature.
I would not want to go in to battle against this guy.
For the first time in 20 years, I am not either working at a Renaissance Festival or getting a degree in Renaissance History (I took a couple of years off to get my MA). It’s not stopped me from visiting a couple of times though.
These two guys were having a great time goofing around and I got a ton of photos of them and their shenanigans. I even got one of the guy on the right trying on what was basically a medieval gimp mask and making kissy faces. It was . . . it was creepy.
I don’t usually shoot weddings, but a dear friend of my family’s asked me to shoot their vow renewal on the occasion of their 10 year anniversary. Of course I said yes. The “bride” was beautiful the “groom” was . . . a groom. It was a lovely day!
In January, my team had a meetup in NOLA. It was my first time visiting and I had a blast (despite being sick the entire time). The city (unsurprisingly) felt very European, and I can’t wait to come back and visit again with my wife (who was very cross that she didn’t get to come along)!
As you (probably) know, I am an Automattician . . . I’m a Happiness Engineer for Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, VaultPress, Akismet, Cloudup, and a whole host of other amazing products.
Over the coming weeks you are probably going to see a bunch of other employees posting a blow-by-blow of what we do throughout our day. We have a really unique setup; we are completely distributed as a company meaning we all work from home for most of the year (at least one week we all get together for a Grand Meetup, and we also travel to conferences, which you’ll see pictures of throughout this blog).
A couple of notes:
Thus begins the day of Sunday, 5 October 2014:
6:20am
My son, Malcolm, wakes up and starts screaming his fool head off. My brother-in-law’s band had a concert last night so my wife, Kendra, and I didn’t get to bed until pretty late. Though I usually get up with him on days that I work, she was sweet enough to get up with him today. Faith in the institution of marriage: restored.
6:55am
Alarm goes off and it’s time to get up for work. I brush my teeth and grab my laptop. Work emails are loading by 7:04.
7:10am
New emails have been read (there aren’t many since I stayed on top of things for once this weekend) and I start going through the older emails/P2s which I flagged from earlier in my weekend for follow up. This takes a bit longer since we’ve got quite a few things going on these days.
7:45am
Start catching up on Slack backscroll. This also takes a LONG. WHILE.
8:25am
Finally able to start in on FRs (Feedback Received, any replies to tickets which we’ve already done). I don’t have any tickets in our older legacy system, Kayako, but I have about a dozen tickets in our newer ticket review program, TQR. We always tackle responses as quickly as possible so that even if our users had to wait a little while to get their first response, they won’t have to wait any longer than necessary to get things fully managed.
8:45am
Malcolm goes down for his nap. Yay!
9:20am
Wrote out an entire HG Ticket and write as I was about to submit it, I went to get a final piece of information buried in the user Report Card and answered my own question. Was incredibly relieved that I didn’t waste anyone’s time but my own!
9:30am
Starting in on new tickets. Modlook and Staff Answers are in the 130s and 90s respectively. Even if the queue wasn’t higher, I’d be doing Modlook as the tickets are frequently older (a user will post a question in the forum and we don’t necessarily find it immediately. Plus tickets continue to get modlooked over the weekend, even on Sundays). Oldest tickets today were originally created well over 2 weeks ago, as an example.
10:07am
My family has a family-wide breakfast every two weeks on a weekend day. No matter what my wife says, these breakfasts were MY IDEA! 😉 We weren’t able to do it yesterday, and so it’s being held today. Breakfast is ready and I now have 3 toddlers trying to press keys on my laptop. Time for a break for some family time and some delicious brunch! 🙂
10:35am
Foooood commmaaaa. Back to tickets, energy drink in hand. Please see this recipe for super-amazing biscuits n’ gravy casserole which currently has the other half of my BFF necklace.
11:30am
Restarting 1/2 of the current soundtrack of my life: Tangled. Can’t handle Cars today.
1:15pm
Tangled is over. Kendra is up from her nap (she hasn’t been feeling well), and they are playing games which supposedly do not distract me. The fact that I’m recording this fact here shows how successful they are. Goal of said game seems to involve a competition to see who can be more OCD in the arrangement of toys according to colour, size, and shape. I don’t know which of the two I should be more worried about.
1:38pm
Modlook is down to 100 and 5 days.
2:50pm
SHIT. I apparently took down the entirety of WordPress.com by setting it to Private when I was trying to set one of my test blogs to private. It was private for 48 minutes. Doing my best not to hyperventalate. .com is already back up and the way this occurred has apparently happened to several others, but it was really nice not being one of them.
2:57pm
Posted to WHTA to let everyone know what happened about setting .com to private, just in case there is any fallout. Thus far there doesn’t seem to be any.
3:30pm
Back to work! Needed a break after . . . all of that . . . Tons of support from everyone, and I feel much less like a great big idiot. 🙂
5:47pm
An early finish today. Mostly because a toddler is currently insisting that it is HIS turn to play with the keyboard instead of me.
So there you have it! A day in the life. And because this is a photography blog first and foremost and always, here is a photo of Automatticians not working TOO hard at our most recent Grand Meetup!
Every year the employees of Automattic, the folks behind WordPress.com, VaultPress, Akismet, Jetpack, and a host of other amazing products gets together for a week to socialize, build more stuff, and generally have a great time. This year we are doing so in Park City, Utah and the photographers amongst our numbers got together one morning for a photowalk down the main street. Here are my photos!
Mighty Pretty Photos! 