Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 145

2013 Expansion Plans

When Mister President passed away in December, it made for a very rough end to the year. But one thing that got me through it all was remembering how much I still have to be grateful for. For instance, Laura has been pregnant since late spring — with twins. Twins! Pure craziness.

For various reasons, I haven’t talked about it publicly yet, but the time to do so is now. With twins, doctors tend to want them to come out before they reach the full nine-month mark, so in just a little while we’re going into the hospital where her doctors will induce labor. If everything goes well, sometime in the next day or two we’ll add an ‘identical’ pair of baby boys to our family.

Here’s a picture of one of them — “Baby A” — from just a few days ago. “Baby B” was camera shy that day, and they couldn’t get a good shot of him — but they’re twins, so you can imagine what he looks like, right?

That’s all for now. Wish us luck.

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Corporations Are People Too

To those uninitiated in the vagaries of medical care for pets, suffice it to say that veterinarians’ bills can get pretty expensive pretty quickly. So for years I’ve paid for a pet medical insurance policy for my dog, Mister President. It sounds a little silly, I know, but it’s been worth the money.

After my dog, Mister President, passed away last month, and after I picked myself up off the floor, I somehow found the wherewithal to submit insurance claims for all of the bills we incurred in diagnosing and treating his cancer, and for the euthanasia and cremation processes too.

This week I got the benefits check back in the mail. On one of the schedules, there was a line item with a diagnosis code of 1090, described as “Miscellaneous: with deepest sympathy.” It also had a “Reason Code” of 173, and an explanation that reads:

“We’re very sorry for your loss. Everyone at — understands the special human-animal bond and knows how difficult it is to lose a cherished pet. Please accept our sympathy on your loss.”

Actually, I’m not even particularly offended by this nondescript handling of this emotionally delicate matter. (On the whole, I’ve been pretty pleased by the insurance carrier for this policy — I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them to other pet owners.) But I wonder why they even bothered? This seems about as unhelpful a condolence message as anyone could ever receive. Oh well, corporations will be corporations, I guess.

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Melbhattan

Happy new year everyone! Let’s start things out Down Under, where friend and illustrator Oslo Davis, one of my favorite artists, has put together “Melbhattan,” a wonderful, animated valentine to his native city of Melbourne. The artwork is distinctively his own, but the short film is “part homage, part pastiche of the opening sequence of Woody Allen’s seminal 1979 film ‘Manhattan,’” complete with a Gershwin-esque soundtrack. Here are a few select stills.

See the full short at Melbhattan.com. Also, if you’re interested, back in 2007 I wrote a few personal thoughts about Gordon Willis’ exquisite cinematography for “Manhattan”.

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Flickr for iPhone and the Long Road Back

When Flickr released a major update to its iPhone app last week, it seemed to jolt the long-neglected photo sharing network back to life. Suddenly, my activity stream was lighting up with scores of new contacts (I guess they got rid of the term “followers”?), a level of commotion that I hadn’t seen from Flickr in a long, long time.

But, over the past few days of using the app, I’ve noticed that this new activity is worryingly shallow. The vast majority of what I see is people adding me as a contact, but there seems to be little engagement beyond that. For example, Sunday night I posted this photo of my daughter at her ballet recital. As of this morning, it had received just a few dozens views, one favorite and no comments. For comparison, I posted the same image, with the requisite filtering and cropping, to Instagram this morning. Within a few hours, it already had twice as many favorites and several comments.

Step One

Comparing a single posting on these two services is not a perfect experiment, of course, if for no other reason than the social graphs I’ve built on each network are very different. Still, it’s close enough to an apples-to-apples comparison to suggest that Flickr has a significant amount of catch-up yet before it’s truly competitive with Instagram, the undisputed category leader.

While this latest update is a significant improvement, in truth it’s still fairly rough and will need continued refinement. For instance, its navigation seems strained, and I find that maintaining my sense of place within the app is difficult. And the fact that it relegates the favoriting action to an otherwise invisible double-tap gesture seems like a debilitating oversight (that decision is likely to be at the root of why I’m not seeing deeper engagement). Plus, there’s the challenge of convincing mobile users to modify their photo sharing habits — or develop entirely new ones — to accommodate what amounts to a new alternative. Flickr’s challenge is a long campaign, not a discrete battle.

The service still has considerable goodwill at its back though, and like many folks, I’m rooting for it to succeed. After using last week’s update for the first time, I felt a palpable sense of delight. Maybe it was nostalgia; I actually think the Internet was more fun, in some ways, back in the days when Flickr was at its peak.

Just as much though, I think that delight was the result of finally having a legitimate alternative to Instagram or Facebook for posting photos from my phone. I’m not alone in harboring tortured feelings about both of those services for a long time, even before the most recent furor over Instagram’s new terms of service. So seeing Flickr arise from the dead is like opening up a whole new vista on my phone. It’s not just an additional place to post photos, but a different kind of venue for different kinds of expressions and interactions. In fact, it’s a reminder that competition, when it is robust, directly translates into added functionality at the consumer’s disposal.

Renewal

It was just a few weeks ago when I renewed my Flickr Pro subscription. I remember thinking at the time that I was doing so largely out of habit or sentimentality, and also perhaps out of some faith that, eventually, the executives at Yahoo would finally see fit to invest the resources necessary to pull Flickr out of its years-long rut. I’m not quite ready to say that faith was well-founded yet, but I’m optimistic that when next it comes time to renew, it’ll be a much more rational decision, one way or the other.

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QuoteRobot Feed Sponsorship

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Noro Shop

Friends of mine run this business designing and producing beautiful glass objects for “the kitchen and table.” Their hand-blown decanters, cruets and carafes all feature an ingenious double-lip construction that recapture drips and run-off back into the main body of the bottle. Plus, they’re exquisitely crafted.

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A Grown Man, Crying

Just about anything that takes me back to Mister President has been bringing me to tears. This is true whether it’s something as pronounced as recounting for friends and family how he came to pass so quickly, or something as mundane as reaching for a scarf on the coatrack and, through muscle memory, picking up the old boy’s leash and collar by mistake. When I looked down and saw it in my hands, all my composure crumbled right off me, and the tears started pouring.

For men, crying is a complicated thing. I don’t claim to be John Wayne, but I do have a nontrivial amount of my identity invested in being emotionally anchored and resistant to dramatic mood shifts. I think of myself as “manly” or at least aspire to “manliness,” and gaps in that veneer are uncomfortable, something to be avoided, hidden, and left unspoken. The corollary to that is I also harbor a dread of weakness, or even the appearance of weakness; few things seem as unmanly or as weak as crying.

Nevertheless, I cannot deny that I have been crying. On the subway, at the grocery store, walking down the street, talking to strangers, on the phone, at dinner, and many more places besides. It’s awkward for me, and awkward for the people before whom I’ve been sobbing like a helpless child. No matter how enlightened most people claim to be, the reality of a grown man in tears ignites immediate discomfort.

The truth of it, though, is that I don’t really want to stop. The act of shedding tears, hyperventilating, losing my balance, letting the despair beat me down without a fight… it all brings a real and tangible relief. There’s comfort in it, a feeling as warm and intimate as a cherished blanket.

I’ve come to feel grateful for the crying, actually, and I even relish it. It lets me feel the loss fully in the moment, and allows me to hold the memory of my dear, lost companion very close to me, almost like an embrace. I’m clearly not yet ready to let him go, and for now the closest I can feel to him is when I drop all pretenses of strength and resolve, and just succumb to the pain.

A day after Mister President passed away, I cried so many times that by nightfall I felt spent, exhausted, almost numb, and I couldn’t utter a single additional whimper. I woke up that way the next morning too, and it scared the shit out of me. I tried to bring tears to my eyes, but I couldn’t. It felt like he was already slipping away from me, disappearing into the past.

Then, while washing my hands in the bathroom, I suddenly broke down. There was no specific reminder or provocation, just a sudden, involuntary flooding of grief that made me almost double over and fall to the floor. Laura came in and put her arms around me and just let me weep.

By the time the crying dissipated and my breathing returned to normal, I felt incrementally restored, like I had gained just a little bit of my strength back. I guess that’s how one grows to accept death: bit by bit, tear by tear.

When this all started I wondered whether I should really let myself cry in front of my family, especially my daughter Thuy, who is just three years old and has been bewildered but luckily not distressed by the sudden disappearance of the family dog. She is still too young to understand the reality of what happened, and regards his absence as just another event for which she needs no particular explanation.

And yet these kids miss nothing, and I’m sure she senses the anguish in the household. Even if I wanted to hide my crying from her, I don’t think I could have. I’ve just had so many feelings on my hands that I couldn’t possibly pretend they didn’t exist, or even stash them out of sight. I’ve wept in front of her, and I’ve wept with her in my arms.

A friend told me that when a father cries openly in front of his child, it is a kind of gift in and of itself. It’s a palpable example of being a complete person, a demonstration of how to be unguardedly and wholly present with your own emotions, no matter how overwhelming they might be. To paraphrase his wisdom: when you are emotionally real with yourself, you give your child the opportunity to grow up to be emotionally real with herself. I liked that, and I hope it’s true.

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Mister President, Rest in Peace

It was my birthday yesterday, and I had to lay down Mister President, my dog of ten years, to rest forever. All things considered, my family and I were fortunate in that we were able to say goodbye to him in the home we shared with him, where he could be comfortable and unafraid; his veterinarian came to us in the afternoon, counseled us, administered the sedative and then the euthanasia drug, consoled us, and took away his body to be cremated.

Afterwards I took a walk to Ft. Greene Park, about a mile away. Mister President and I used to walk there several mornings each week, during off-leash hours. I sat down near the trees where I used to chase him for fun; it was one of his favorite games. The weather was uncharacteristically mild for late autumn; clear and with bright golden hues from a warm, low-slung sun.

Still, I had already begun to feel a chill in his absence, like a draft coming in through an open window at the other end of a room. Beyond the window feels like emptiness, a void. I miss my dog.

Throughout Mister President’s shockingly fast decline, I’ve been struggling to express exactly why he meant so much to me, why I loved him so dearly. In some ways this is something that can go unsaid, because when you tell people you’re losing your dog, they instinctually seem to understand what’s at stake. Dogs are dogs, and they are designed to be loved.

But I think it’s important, at least for me, to articulate it more fully, and I’m only now starting to be able to do that.

This is what I’ve come up with: Mister President came to me at the height of my selfishness, during a time of my life when, fundamentally, I was interested only in myself, despite all the relationships I’d had up until that point. And when he came to me, he taught me how to care for someone else, to devote myself to someone else, to really love someone else — unreservedly and unconditionally .

When I look back, I had never learned to do that before, at least not as an adult. I have always loved my parents and my sister in that way, but I’d never been able to muster what it takes to truly love someone new — until I brought home that furry, awkward mutt.

In this way, he saved me. Without him, I don’t know if I would have been ready to fall in love with Laura when I met her, and more importantly, I don’t know if I would have known how to sustain that love. And without Mister President, I don’t know if I would have been equipped to care for and truly love our wonderful daughter.

In and of themselves, those are two enormous gifts that he gave me. This is what dogs do, I guess. You think you’re doing all the giving. But they give you more than you know in return.

I really loved that dog.

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