Angela J. Hill

Last week, I gave a presentation on Improving Marketing ROI Through Web Analytics for the Silicon Valley chapter of the American Marketing Association. It was a great group of people and a lively discussion. My presentation centered mainly on building a story around web analytics, and specifically bringing the story of the customer lifecycle to life through the integration of analytics throughout the cycle.

One of the things I got to do, since this was more of a personal viewpoint presentation, was use this slide:

Tibetan has different symbols for numbers, which came as a surprise to me since every other language I’ve encountered uses the same number symbols, including Japanese and Mandarin. Perhaps they *have* their own, but on signs and in printed materials, I’ve seen the ones I’m used to. A few of the Tibetan symbols are similar to ours, but that can be misleading: the one that looks like a 4 is actually a 5, for example.

Anyway, somewhere along the line of presenting scorecards to clients, I realized that when we numbers people look at spreadsheets, we immediately see patterns, key changes, etc. jumping out at us–but it’s just not that way for most people. For the uninitiated, it looks like the above–a jumble of crap and some words that are easy to gloss over. Anyway, I used this slide to demonstrate that, then switched back to the usual numbers and text and went on to talk about monetization. I think it made the point, and got people to engage a bit more with the following slide (with legible data) than they might have otherwise.

Joseph Linaschke, my good friend and old neighbor, is a killer photographer. Ever since I’ve been remotely into photography, I’ve been dying to spend some time working with him, but he up and moved to LA. Last weekend I spent some time with him working in his home studio, which was a giant lesson in lighting. Once we got the seamless white backdrop lit, which took most of the afternoon (who knew that was so complicated?), we completely abandoned it and decided to have some fun with Joseph shooting me standing in front of a giant softbox. The pink hair really has a way of bringing out the extreme.

This was so much fun, I can hardly stand it. We did a ridiculous costume change too and I’ll probably post some of those at some point. In the meantime, Joseph’s submitted the batch of these to iStockphoto. Fingers crossed!

I’ve been dying to do some ridiculous shots with Gabe, because I know he can pull it off. Tonight he came by and after fixing my car and eating dinner, all we both wanted to do was sit. But we did a few shots anyway. The ridiculousness will happen this weekend.

I spent the weekend with my friend Joseph Linaschke, setting up his home studio in Pasadena. We spent all Saturday afternoon experimenting with ways to light a 9′ white seamless…and then all Saturday night doing a ridiculous shoot of me (photos forthcoming). After doing some holiday portraits of neighbors on Sunday, I finally got my camera out to experiment a little with Joseph as my subject. The moral of the story is: I’m ready to set up a mini version of this with the kit I have at home, so there will be more like this forthcoming.

xkcd is always hilarious.

This one is an Intel ad, but it’s still something that could actually happen when I get together with my brother Adam.

…so named because that’s what we used to make the (fake) grill. Vivi was AWESOME, and big thanks to Gabe and Kandra for driving. There are many more shots, but this is what’s ready now…

…I’ll be getting this incorporated into the site (and using it as a watermark) eventually, but I can’t wait for that. It’s too awesome! Such a great big thanks to Nidhi for this illustration of me!

In case you haven’t already seen this–it’s by far the best explanation of higher dimensions, and how to conceive of them, that I’ve ever seen. It blows my mind and is WELL WORTH the 11 minutes it takes to watch.

As a synesthete, anything about the ability of one sense to trigger another sense is immediately of interest to me. Gabe sent me this article from Wired, which also led me to this one from Discover. The point of both is that the parts of the brain we use to process input from each of our senses can be used to process information for other senses…basically just that the brain is extraordinarily plastic in ways that are almost impossible to conceive of because they challenge our fundamental perceptions.

(As a sidenote, we’re taught (in the US at least) that humans have five senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. But in reality, we all have many more.)

Thanks to Sam, I have a nice little kit of lights in my apartment at the moment! I’m improvising a backdrop with one of my dropcloths and I’ve been taking some portraits, experimenting with different setups. I’ve done a set of Katie and a set of Jackson and here are a couple of my favorites:

Let’s also add that I’m completely Photoshop-less right now, so these are pretty much entirely unedited–and the conversion to black & white was the heavy-handed Picasa way instead of the nuanced Adobe Camera RAW HSL way. I’m going to redo some of these when that gets resolved.

My friend Will Russ (we met over 10 years ago working at Opcode!) put on an OUTSTANDING concert at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz last weekend, and I shot it. He had a killer band and Tammi Brown joining him for a lot of the vocals. I was really, REALLY impressed and I can’t wait to see them again!

The fun continues. I’ve learned the alphabet, which is no small task, as it turns out. There are 30 consonants and 4 additional vowels, but although the written word is read left to right, it turns out that many of the letters can be stacked on top of each other to create new sounds. We’re on to basic grammar and vocabulary now, so I thought I’d sum up some of what I’ve learned about getting the hang of the alphabet (for English speakers).

1. The language is read left-to-right, and letters are aligned at the top (ours are aligned at the bottom).
2. The alphabet consists of 30 consonants; vowels are separate. English letters have names that are only sort of related to the sounds they make, but Tibetan letters (we’re talking consonants for now) are named with the letter’s sound combined with an “ahh” vowel. For example, the English alphabet includes “jay, kay, el, em, en…”. The Tibetan equivalent would be “ja, ka, la, ma, na…”. Much easier.
3. When you’re learning the consonants, you’re getting them with “ah” built in. This really is a lot easier and makes a lot more sense, when you think about it. There are four vowel marks that can be added above or below the consonant to change the “ah” to an “eh, ee, oh, ou”
4. In general, when consonants get stacked, you pronounce either the one on the bottom or a different sound altogether.
5. There are a lot of sounds in English that are almost identical, but we hear them completely differently. For example: “pa” and “ba”, “ka” and “ga”, “cha” and “ja”, and “ta” and “da”. Recognizing that has made it easier for me to wrap my mind around the Tibetan letters that seemed indistinguishable at first.
6. Learning a pitch-based language seemed impossible to me when I started. As a musician, I couldn’t completely get my head around it. Do you speak in a key? Does everyone speak in the same key? Can you change keys in the middle of a sentence? Turns out it’s a lot easier than all that. From what I can tell, it’s not exactly a different pitch, but more a different overtone series that creates a feeling of higher/lower. For example:
   • a pitch considered high sounds like a taut, well-tuned drum–basically it *has* a pitch
   • a pitch considered low sounds much breathier, airier, less tuned–there’s a lower pitch implied but it’s more of the absence of a higher pitch
   • there are also letters that imply a pitch change from low to high–which is actually pretty easy to handle as it just sounds (to English-speaking ears) like a question
7. There are names for stacked letters, and they’re kind of fun–the English equivalent would be “g with an r-head” or something like that.
8. There are a couple of different styles of written letters, sort of like our cursive and printing. The formal one you see on signs, and the one that’s most commonly taught, is Uchen (and that’s the one I’ve been learning). The less formal one is Ume and is characterized by a lot of vertical lines and sweeping curves above/below the main letters. There’s a third, Khug, but I don’t know much about that.

There’s a free Tibetan font that was programmed by a Sera monk. His website is in Tibetan, so here’s an English-language web page about him and the font: http://www.tibetangeeks.com/geeks/lobsang_monlam/

Another thing that’s been helpful for me is listening to, and looking at, Tibetan-language news broadcasts. There are a couple of good sources for those: Radio Free Asia and Phayul (which means “country” in Tibetan). I’ve been downloading broadcasts from RFA to my iPod and falling asleep listening to them. Since I spent some time in Tibet and heard plenty of Tibetan while I was there, maybe there’s something stored in my brain that I’m not fully aware of. If not, just hearing the sounds and beginning to recognize a word here and there certainly can’t hurt.

I’ve been on blog-hiatus for a couple of weeks, sort of recovering from a flurry of activity (most of it photo-related) that’s taken up most of the last few months. But I’m back!

One of the most fun outings was a roller derby bout featuring the Undead Bettys. This was my first roller derby and, not surprisingly, I loooooved it. And, it made me realize one of the things I love most about photography: it gives me license to get right up in the mix of whatever I can talk my way into. Improvisation really pays off!

I didn’t really know in advance what I’d be up against, so my gear imposed some major limitations. I’m still shooting with a Canon XTi, and I rented a zoom and a wide-angle lens both of which had a max 4.0 aperture. We were at a skating rink with florescent lights and a shiny white floor, so there was more light than I’d expected but still not really enough for really fast shutter speeds. The XTi is pretty crappy at high ISO speeds, but in the immortal words of some sports photographer I read about somewhere, a grainy sports photo is better than a blurry sports photo. Ok, fine, I shot at 1600 ISO most of the time–but even wide open at a 4.0 aperture, most of the time my shutter had to be slow enough that I couldn’t really get crisp action photos on the curves. So, anyway–I just went with it and used it as an opportunity to practice my panning skills.