Was seeing the annular eclipse in person a profound emotional experience?  No, but it was pretty cool.

Annular eclipses don’t happen very often, and they are usually difficult to see without traveling great distances.  Thus, when we learned that an annular eclipse would be visible in the southwestern US, Tyler and I decided to go.

After nine hours of driving, an overnight stop in Rico, Colorado, and a touristy photo-op at Four Corners, we arrived in Kayenta, Arizona.  Why Kayenta?  First, the full annular eclipse would be visible there, and second, the landscape features amazing rock formations.  It was those rock formations that tipped the trip in favor of Kayenta as opposed to the much closer (to Denver) Albuquerque.

Checking the accuracy of the Four Corners marker.

With an hour remaining before the point of maximal eclipse, we started driving around unpaved roads in the Arizona desert.  We had to find a piece of landscape that was both interesting and in the right spot.  Several candidates were beautiful but far too close, and several others would have been great had they not been so far south.

Some of the rock formations near our shooting site

We drove and drove, bumping up and down the rough gravel roads, and then we found it: a rock outcropping with a great view of a tall rock monolith. We set up our cameras using the longest (if not the sharpest) glass we had available.

Shooting location

The shooting location from the other direction. For reference, that peak in the background has a prominence of about 1000 feet.

Slowly, the moon began transiting the sun.  We watched through the welders glass both directly and on our cameras’ screens.

Partial eclipse as seen on my DSLR's live view

The light got dimmer and dimmer.  Through the very dark filter, we could see the sun’s detail, but without the filters, it was still just a brilliant blob in the sky.

Finally, the moment came, and the sun became a ring around the moon.  We snapped photos, watched in awe, and snapped more photos.

I slid the 12-stop welders glass filter up the end of lens, turning it into a makeshift 12-stop grad-ND filter.  That let me shoot the sun and the silhouetted landscape in the same frame; no post-production sorcery required.

The full annular eclipse and landscape in a single exposure (click for details)

After less than five minutes, the moon had reached the other side of the sun, and we were again watching a partial eclipse.  The photos continued, but without the distinctive ring.

I enjoyed the eclipse immensely. As I mentioned above, I didn’t get emotional, but I did have a huge grin on my face. It was a new experience for me; I was exploring.  Given how rare annular eclipses are, I doubt I will ever witness one again.

In time, the sun set.  The eclipse was not done, so it appeared as an unusual triangle of light slipping below the horizon.

Setting triangular sun

The trip was a success.  The welders glass worked well as a filter once we learned to stop down as much as possible.  I wish I had shot the start of the eclipse at f/45, which is what I used for the end.  At f/8 or even f/16, the imperfections in the glass caused horrendous blurring and ghosting.

The sun partially eclipsed, shot through welders glass at f/45 and color-corrected. Note the sunspot in the lower right.

Next up: the total eclipse visible in the central US in 2017.

(Part of the One Month to the 1% series of posts)

It turns out that, Instagram aside, it’s really hard to rapidly build wealth.  Which is to say: I fell a bit short on my one-month-to-the-one-percent goal.  OK, a lot short.  Approximately $30k short.

Oh, you want actual revenue numbers?  Sure, I can do that.

• Amazon’s KDP: $0.70
• Avantlink: $1.70
• Total: $2.40

One way to look at that is total failure.  Another way to look at it is as a free coffee!

So what happened?  Although part of the problem was distraction from the YC Combinator interview, I think the bigger issue was the tremendous difficulty of developing and selling a significant product within a short time frame.  That wasn’t helped by my somewhat middling efforts in finding solutions to those product and sales problems.  There were many days with wasted hours.

Going forward, I plan to redouble my efforts.  The motivation is not only to save face. It is also an acknowledgement that my money tree has yielded nearly all its fruit. The need for a replacement becomes ever more pressing as time advances.

What will it be?  Will it be Snaposit? Will it be the revival of Blurity? Maybe something funny like this guy?

Not sure yet, but whatever I end up doing, you can be pretty certain that I’ll pimp it here.

About half a year ago, I started pondering a question: how were my Facebook friendships changing over time?  Or, to be specific: who was unfriending me?

I decided to start taking monthly snapshots of my Facebook friend list, a task made easy by Facebook’s data-export feature.  I imagine a full history could be obtained using the API, but I haven’t explored that.

Since the first snapshot in December, I’ve added 19 friends and lost 10, for a net gain of 9. Many of those I lost have been mundane: a guy I talked to once during my first year at Stanford, a girl who was trying to get me to be her roommate, and several people whose names I didn’t recognize (yikes).  There were a few surprises, but I won’t out them here.

Change in Facebook friends over time

Other than the jump from December to January, when I moved to Colorado, my total number of friends has been pretty stable.  I seem to lose about 0.6% of my friends per month, but I’ve been gaining new friends at about the same rate.

This brings to mind several questions:

• If I were to stop adding Facebook friends, what would my friend count eventually settle at?
• How has my true friend count (as opposed to my Facebook “friend” count) been changing over time?
• What distributions best model the addition and subtraction of Facebook friends?
• How many of my remaining Facebook friends would I care about unfriending?

To try and address that final point, I went through and classified all of my 346 Facebook friends into two groups: people who would hurt my feelings if they unfriended me, and people who would not hurt my feelings.  Turns out that 140 of them fall into the “oh well” category, which leaves about 200 people that I’d really care about losing.

Interestingly, that’s very similar to Dunbar’s number.  Perhaps that’s the natural lower bound on Facebook friend decay.

(Part of the One Month to the 1% series of posts)

You might be wondering what happened to my one-month-to-the-1% project that I first mentioned three weeks ago.  Been pretty quiet since then, right?

Well, the reason wasn’t that I had given up.  Rather, Tyler and I found out that we had been invited to interview with Y Combinator in Silicon Valley.  For those unfamiliar with YC, it’s basically the Harvard of the startup incubator world (even though it’s arguably not an incubator).  Companies like Reddit, Dropbox, and Airbnb have all come out of it.

Like Harvard, YC is highly selective.  Exact numbers are not published, but consensus seems to be that less than 3% of applicants are accepted.  For comparison, this year Harvard took 5.9% of its undergraduate applicants.

Thus, Tyler and I were thrilled to have our venture make the first cut: YC would fly us to California to interview, meaning we had beat out enough people to have about a 20% chance of making it in.

Frame grab from our YC application video

Everything else took a back seat to preparing for the interview.  I rationalized this because the expected value of getting funded was significantly higher than my goal.

Late last week, we had our interview in Mountain View, CA.  It was a good experience, but unfortunately, we did not get accepted.

Tyler and I remain convinced that we’ve identified a great market opportunity, and we have the technical skills to craft a product to address it, so we will be pushing forward anyway.

As for my other project?  Well, the month isn’t over yet: I turn 30 one week from today.

(Part of the One Month to the 1% series of posts)

I was both inspired and dismayed by today’s news that online photo-sharing/photo-filtering company Instagram had been acquired by Facebook for $1 billion.

I was inspired because it was evidence that times are good in the high-tech startup world.  Companies are being built, money is being made, stories are being formed.  A team of about a dozen people went from zero to $1 billion in just over 24 months.

I was dismayed because of the message it sends to young entrepreneurs: “Don’t focus on actual problems, and certainly don’t take big risks to make the world a better place.  You’ll be rewarded handsomely if you just make silly photo-sharing apps.”

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Project status: no progress today.