The Big Switch

I’ve been away for two days working on technical issues instead of photography. The big one is that I’ve changed from richardxthripp.com to Thripp.com for myself and my users. A lot of work, but worth it because it’s so short. Read more about it here. I’d been posting to Twitter about it, right after I discovered that Thripp.com had become available, yesterday.

Expect some more photography tomorrow. The new address is richardxthripp.thripp.com, but richardxthripp.com/richardxthripp, richardxthripp.richardxthripp.com, and rxthripp.com, and subdirectories of them will continue to work forever. My email is now richardxthripp@thripp.com, but richardxthripp@gmail.com and richardxthripp@richardxthripp.com will also continue forwarding. Since the RSS feed address changed, Feedburner sent old posts to all my email subscribers. Sorry about that! It only happens once.

I updated the banner at the top so it says Thripp.com now. I’m here to stay! :cool:

I am no longer an employee

I was fired an hour ago. It took me this long to write this (I’m slow, you know).

If you’ve read my first post about this, you’ll know that I was in trouble for telling my boss she’s in the wrong career. And possibly for teasing her for five months, but she started that and it didn’t become a problem until after my nerve-striking statement, after which she was searching for problems to catch me on. That meets the definition of a red herring.

Bascially, I was fired for being honest rather than fake, by my boss’ supervisor over the phone. When you have a boss (even yourself) who wants attractive but evil fakeness rather than honesty, then that is the only thing that can happen if you refuse to compromise. The only thing.

Perhaps if I would’ve groveled a bit more at several key points along the way, or put up a wall of fake professionalism through the past three months of my job (i.e. not talking about anything deeper than the state of the morning coffee), then I could’ve clung on a lot longer. I also could’ve sucked it up and not asked to be transferred to the Ormond branch, and acted as if I wasn’t being held back.

Or maybe it was sharing Fear is Evil with my supervisor and old friends at Ormond. It was probably too jaded, yet truthful for them. Truth is a scary thing, for people who have sheltered themselves from it. There isn’t one truth, but many, and mine is one of them. I learned this from my year in QUANTA. Mine is a particularly frightening one to someone in the system.

Sharing that article was not a “smart” thing to do, from the standpoint of a normal person. What would the normal behavior be?

• 1. Offend your boss, not by something inherently offensive, but because there’s a shred of truth in it and she is scared.
• 2. Apologize profusely.
• 3. Promise it will never happen again.
• 4. Say it wasn’t true, you were just joking.
• 5. Say it wasn’t true, you were just angry.
• 6. Beg forgiveness.
• 7. Work extra hard and donate money to the library (or the equivalent for another workplace), to prove what a wonderful servant you are.
• 8. Not try to get transferred, because that’s asking too much.
• 9. Go up the chain of command and tell them how sorry you are too, because that’s what it’s going to take.
• 10. Be so wonderfully nice to everyone, you’re bound to be loved. But to everyone else, it’s obviously fake.

… and the list goes on. Do any of these sound like the behavior of a smart, passionate person? If this is the list you’d follow, it’s time to wake up.

In my younger days (12-15), I would’ve been more apt to handle this differently. I’d respond with a month of hatred toward my boss, plus three months of hatred toward the system, and then, because I was never weak enough to seek revenge, six months of apathy. Then I’d just try to forget all about it. But when we forget, it’s just avoidance. Fear. I’m sixteen now, and I hope I’m passed that. You have to face your fears if you’re ever going to grow anywhere. Being an employee isn’t so great after all. This is a blessing in disguise for me.

I’m not angry, I’ve moved above anger. Which is great, because anger drags you down. It’s a weight on your soul which pulls you down to the level of an animal. All I can feel is compassion, which is great because it means I’m moving forward and I’m not permitting negativity in my life.

The big problem, even bigger than being pushed to act fakely, is that since my new boss started (Jan. ’08), she took away everything I used to do. I was relegated to shelving and organizing the shelves (shelf reading), and not helping patrons check out items, or find stuff, or on the computer (unless it was something she couldn’t do), or issuing library cards to new faces in the library, or photographing story-time and other children’s events. In fact, she was bent on a strict code of professionalism in the workplace (no humanity). I used to give out print copies of my photos or articles to patrons and staff often, but she prohibited it, saying it was not my “job.” Funny thing is, it’s exactly my job, because all of our jobs in life involve each other. Not a grandiose title, or a book full of policies and rules. Normal people don’t need a man-made book of policies and rules.

So, where my goal in library services is service to others, I became unable to fulfill the mission by these new restrictions. And if I can’t do the mission, than each day is drudgery. I was dreading going to work today, before the news, because I didn’t want to go through another (half) day where my path was blocked. I’ve seen it in the library, because we get half the patrons than when Lisa was there (the upbeat librarian who was transferred out at the start of the year). The shelves and books are in beautiful shape, evenly spaced (one of my projects was to make their heights equal), and in perfect order. And it means nothing.

Either way, I made 59 cents on my website yesterday, far less than my $8/hour job. But at least this path has a heart.

So what am I going to do now? Besides my precalculus algebra class that I have eight days and two tests left in, I’m going to dedicate myself here. To my photography, and sharing it with the world, and building profits off of contextual advertising. The Volusia County Public Library system is no worse than any other, but that doesn’t mean it’s better either.

There’s a really funny thing here. When I spend twelve hours on the computer on days where I released my entire portfolio as stock imagery, or made dozens of comments on other blogs, it’s a smart and logical thing to do if I make it big (i.e. make money). If I fail miserably and make nothing, than no matter how driven and positive I am, I’m nuts. A megalomaniac, and quite a monomaniacal one. Perhaps I’m even delusional, for maintaining positivity where others would give up in despair. I might even have Attention Deficit Disorder. Whatever it is, there’s something horribly wrong with me, because I refuse to be “normal.”

It’s the same thing for gambling. If you play black-jack at Vegas for twelve hours a day, you only have a gambling “problem” if you’re losing money. If you’re the most brilliant card counter ever and are making money hand over fist, there is no gambling problem. The “problem” status is not dependent on the righteousness of the behavior, but its end results. A curious quirk. There must be a name for this concept. If not, I’ll make one up. But I’ve reached the end of my thoughts for now.

An ode to courage, and to living with it even when everyone else forsakes it. I know I try to.

Doing the Unthinkable

I was looking around today, thinking “What one thing can I do on my website to make it a highly useful photography resource.” It didn’t take long. I decided and set out on releasing my entire portfolio as royalty-free stock images in their high-resolution glory, all free under the least restrictive Creative Commons license. If you’re any sort of digital artist, this is some awesome news, because I’ve literally put years into this stuff. You can do anything with them; even commercial stuff. All you have to do is credit me as Richard X. Thripp, and link back here at http://richardxthripp.thripp.com. Click here to see the complete gallery, or choose from some of the quick picks below:

Thanks, and enjoy. Click “ShareThis” below and get the word out to your friends.

Everything Old is New Again

I’ve been working on the Thripp.com network non-stop over the past ten days. It’s looking great; I learned a lot and made a lot of progress with features. The next step is to move my blog, Brilliant Photography by Richard X. Thripp, over to it. I’ve done it and you’re reading it now.

The reasons are so I won’t have to maintain two separate WordPress installs, so I’ll have nice threaded comments as on Thripp.com (see comments here for an example), so people can comment while logged in at Thripp.com, so I’ll appear in lists around the site, so I’ll have the nice statistics I’ve set up, so I’m supporting my own product, etc. The challenges are implementing my WordPress install’s features in WordPress MU, while restricting many of those plugins to me, and the new URIs. The compromises are giving up caching, selling prints, Xanga mirroring, and Twitter. It’s all worth it because I’m fighting this battle to the death and I can’t be diving my efforts. I’m sabotaging myself if I don’t move here.

I couldn’t get yak to work on WordPress MU, which I used to sell my prints. It would try directing to the main site, and when I changed that in the code, there were more errors. So I’ve removed it and won’t sell my prints anymore. I only sold two in five months anyway, and this will free me up to not have to enter each product into the produce table, so it’s not all bad.

I couldn’t get WP-Cache or WP Super Cache to work for this blog, though I could’ve tried harder I suppose. So for now, there’s no caching (except the WordPress object cache). The site actually loads faster than the old one, though; I’m getting query times of two seconds instead of the usual five.

I tried mirroring to Xanga and it didn’t work, so my Xanga blog won’t be updated anymore. The Twitter display won’t work either, so it’s outta here.

2008-09-21 Update: Next paragraph is old info; I’ve fixed this since and my URL is richardxthripp.thripp.com. When I switched from richardxthripp.com to thripp.com in 2008 July, I replaced every instance of richardxthripp.com with thripp.com in every post, rewriting history.

I had to switch URI structures, from richardxthripp.richardxthripp.com to richardxthripp.com/richardxthripp, because Thripp.com requires it. I started out doing this because I can’t use vhosts on Thripp.com with my shared hosts, and I might stick with it forever. It’ll be hard to change later, and it does seem more of a community than mini-sites like on deviantART. I set up a rewrite rule with mod_rewrite in the .htaccess file for richardxthripp.thripp.com, so all the old URIs―even ones below the root―redirect here, transparently. So there’s no penalty from Google or for old links. I’ve made the decision; I’ll switch to richardxthripp.thripp.com everywhere but in the backprinting for my printed photos (which have always been with the subdomain) and the watermarks on my images here. It’ll just become traditional for the subdomain to be used there, and it won’t matter because it will always redirect to the right place. :grin:

Nothing can stand in my way―these were all small obstacles. I set up my theme to be custom and different from the main site, like my old site, but with the community modules of Thripp.com (links to recent blog entries, statistics for this blog, which I imported from StatCounter, a link to the community forum, and anything upcoming). Amazingly, almost everything from WordPress transferred to WordPress MU; the posts and comments, post IDs, times, custom fields, tags, categories, pages, comment threading order, etc. I exported the database tables from my old database, renamed them to the WordPress MU format (added my user ID), changed all instances of http://richardxthripp.thripp.com to http://richardxthripp.thripp.com, and imported them here, after getting all my plugins up. WP-Print, PostThumb, Highslide, related posts, category exclusion, Exec-PHP, the contact form, galleries, text control Facebook integration, Wordtube, customized HTML titles, top-level categories, unfiltered HTML… all these transferred without a hitch. Google Search is down till I update my AdSense account, but it’ll be back soon. I have more ads here than on other Thripp.com blogs, but they’re discreetly placed (link and skyscraper in sidebar, banner in footer).

The switch is a success, and I’m back at it. If you’re logged in on Thripp.com, you’re logged in here, and if you post a comment, you’ll automatically be emailed if anyone replies, but only to your comment, by clicking “REPLY TO THIS”. This is good, because when a post gets popular you won’t get irrelevant comments. And all the great stuff I add to Thripp.com will be here too.

It’s a milestone, I say! I have a simple, redesigned header image that says “Brilliant Photography by Richard X. Thripp on Thripp.com” (finally!). I’m reaching for my dreams.