Shaine Mata Blog

I accompanied my children to the park so they could ride their bikes while their mother and sister were in a bible study class. 

When your child, especially a young one, becomes sick to the point where they have to be admitted to a hospital, it is a very personal experience. I do not mean it is personal in that it is a private matter to be kept among your closest circle. By personal, I mean that it is a deep and personally moving experience. The first thing that hits you is worry and a lingering fear. As a parent in general, you worry about a sick child. No parent want their child to go through illness. But, that gets multiplied when a hospital stay is involved. Something so serious surely means that there is a chance things could get worse. And, it's that remote chance of things getting worse that causes fear. If you have any understanding of health care sciences, you know that certain things are routine and can easily be treated successfully. You also know that there is always the remote possibility that the same symptoms are of something worse. You start to imagine things such as multiple drug resi

This month, I wanted to spend a little bit of time in the monochrome space. I'm not comfortable using other monochrome colors than black, yet. I started the month OK; but, after photographing an event, which came out great, I burned out a little. It's been a few days. Today, I visited with my in-laws and took a few photos around the house.  Clothespin The clothespin is nothing new. I've done clothespins before. There is a lot of play when it comes to depth of field and bokeh with clothespins. In this case, I wanted those elements; but, I also wanted to try a clothespin with backlight. The light in this photo is reflected from a tree trunk. The clothespin is in the shade of a car port. In this case, I over exposed. The camera naturally wants to balance out the light; but, then that leaves the details from the clothespin too dark. Nothing too special about this light bulb. I just thought the fixture and surroundings would look nice in black and white.

One of the most used phrases used in business is "at the end of the day"; which is usually invoked when referring to something that has results in some significant consequence or meaning. So I am sitting at my kitchen table at the end of today pondering what the end of the day entails for me. Is it really the culmination of a day? In my experience, the end of the day usually means a break from work. Rather than being the end of my work, the end of the day is a chance to regroup and prepare for the next day. Even when it comes to major decisions, one normally "sleeps on" a decision, making the choice by the next morning. So while the end of the day is the finalization of a calendar day, it is mentally the start of the next, a chance to pull back and see the big picture.

Google announced, today, that they linked comments between Blogger blogs and Google+ accounts . This is a good thing. In recent years, I've had way fewer comments on the blog and more comments on G+ and Facebook. The audience is there, it's just shifted away from the blog. Having blog comments also appear on G+ makes the blog less ghost town and more hub. I can tell from the stats that people read my posts and even share them. But, there is little evidence to the outside world that this is the case. I didn't see this feature coming. I'm glad it's here. I like it.

Today I discovered Friends+Me , a service that grabs your Public posts on Google+ and then reposts them to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. The service is currently in beta; but, it will soon have different plans, starting from Free, to an Unlimited version. In the past, I have used similar services, except they attempt to create an RSS feed from your Google+ feed.  Unfortunately, RSS doesn't map well and consistently across services. The result tends to be messy. Friends+Me seems to have worked out how to get around the formatting problems that other services have had. The result is a neat and very useful way to share your Google+ posts. Google has chosen to leave Google+ off limits to incoming feeds for auto posting. This is probably for the best. Having automatic incoming links would mess up search results, which often feature Google+ posts from yourself or people you know. Search results could quickly get spammy. Outgoing posts are the only other option for automatin