PureGin.org

I bumped into Alex Waterhouse-Hayward at one of my favorite coffee shops a few days ago. Alex is a terrifically lively, interesting creative spirit - a working photographer and an artist, a writer, a gardener, an afficionado of music, a collector of t-shirts... I give up, it's impossible to put him in a box. Suffice it to say that it's always interesting to talk with him. Some of his photographs make the hair on my arms stand straight up.

Alex is a guy who embraces and invents technology - when it saves him time/effort, or furthers his expression or creative vision. Our conversation started with his asking me 'what is XML?'. When I attempted to explain, he got it right away. Turns out that he had an assignment to photograph Tim Bray, the inventor of XML, for the Globe and Mail newspaper, for a technology leaders in Canada series. This was eight years ago, when the collection people who had even heard of XML was a pretty small crowd.

When I explained that XML is the representation standard underlying RSS and ATOM, web-based content syndication formats which constitute part of the technology that makes blogging interesting, Alex was all over this stuff. "I feel sorry for some of the kids I teach," he told me. They're half his age and so afraid of the technological side of photography that they are in denial.