Yay Me

As a coda to the Photography Contest, the results are in and I did rather well.

I won the Sports & Activities category with my image of the rowers and all three of my images garnered more votes for me than any of the other finalists. That means that I also won the grand prize. As is turns out, I technically won the Abstract category with the spiderweb image, but the rules state that entrants can win only one category, so I was awarded the category that gave me the most votes. I was also awarded a rather sizable check, which will help me price my art, should I ever want to ruin this perfectly serviceable hobby by mixing it with money.

That said, soon, if you apply for a credit card offered by my company, you'll be able to select at least one of my images to decorate it.

And, our internal communications department wants to do a profile on me.

I'm so cool.

September 26, 2008 by Brent Schneeman

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Photo Contest

A rather large financial business employs me. I'm not sure why, but it does.

The company is about to release a new batch of branded credit cards and started a contest for employees to get photographs taken by employees printed on the cards. When a customer requests a card, the customer has the option to upload their own image, select one of the employee images or select no image for background printing on the card. The call-for-images went out in mid August, right before I went on vacation. I hastily selected five images good images that I thought would make decent credit card backgrounds. It turns out I forgot to select a really good one, but I was busy. The images needed to fit into eight different categories. I submitted five (total) images into at least two categories. A total of over 6000 images were submitted. 6000! That seems like a lot to me. From the submissions, six images for each category were selected by some committee and released for voting. The winner from each category will be made available for selection by customers for the credit cards.

Of my five entries, I have three selected, two in the 'Abstract' category and one in the 'Sports' category. The ballots look like this:

And

Can you guess which ones are mine?

 

 

I have A and D in Abstract and E in Sports. I'm pretty happy.

As it turns out, the voting is run by a third-party provider, and the vote URL:

[redacted]

is open to the public. Anyone can apparently vote. Anyone. Strange. Also, the rules state that you have to vote for each category, but you can only submit one ballot. That one-ballot restriction seems to be protected by a couple of Cookies, which are presumably checked if someone tries submit twice. I'm pretty sure that the Cookies are randomly generated, meaning if someone deletes them and tries to re-vote, the system will allow it. Seems like a security flaw, but the third-party is presumably smarter than me.

September 09, 2008 by Brent Schneeman

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Jelly in Austin

I got tired of my 18 mile commute FROM work. TO work isn't too bad, but coming home is always a pain in the patootie - moving south on MOPAC during rush hour abuses both "moving" and "rush". I takes me 40 minutes and I know all the tricks. So, I decided to do something else.

With three children, difficulties exist working from home - they are always underneath and it is generally not super conducive to effective work. It can be done, but takes supreme effort. I read an article in our local newspaper a few months ago about casual co-working at various venues throughout the country. An organization of sorts manages these venues - Jelly - and they have a Jelly in Austin. On Fridays, Jelly takes over Cafe Caffeine, which is conveniently located less than two miles from me, and is on an official bike route (which goes almost from my house to the Cafe).

I've only been here twice. 1st time, it was pretty uninteresting - just a bunch of people with laptops hanging out. This time, someone from Sun And Ski is filming some promotional video, trying to convince people to follow SunAndSki on Twitter. Should be available on YouTube shortly.

Distracting? Yep. More so than working in the office on a typical Friday? Nope. Net gain for me.

August 30, 2008 by Brent Schneeman

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