Tag: news

Tech Trends in the News: Vehicle Technology & Augmented Reality

On Episode 101 of The Edge of Innovation, Paul Parisi & Dan Buckley are talking about the latest tech trends in the news today! They’re discussing vehicle technology & augmented reality!

Sections

Apps & Augmented Reality To Complement Our Driving Experience
Reward-Based Driving & Alexa Car
The Freedom of Having a Car
What Technology Should Car Manufacturers Invest In?
The Hybrid Era: Electric Cars
Companies Sharing Technology
Tesla and Secret Technology
More Episodes
Show Notes

Tech Trends in the News: Vehicle Technology & Augmented Reality

Apps & Augmented Reality To Complement Our Driving Experience

Dan: Hello! Welcome to the Edge of Innovation. My name is Dan Buckley and I’m here with Paul Parisi, and we’re going to discuss some tech trends in the news together today.
So welcome, Paul.

Paul: Thanks, Dan

Dan: Great to have you, as always.

I was looking at a curve or a graph of deaths per – I think it was a hundred million miles driving – and it seems to have gone down, which actually, to have steadily gone down over the past few decades, in some ways surprises me, with phones and people texting on roads and so forth.

Paul: That’s true. Good point.

Dan: And that’s interesting. The interaction of phones also, other sorts of apps, even augmented reality in the way in which that’s going to interact with driving. I think people think of it now they tend to think negatively that you’re distracted, you’re texting. However, you could also be using Waze. You could be finding smarter ways of beating traffic or to help you with your commute. So, I wonder what that might look like in the future as we go forward, what o sorts of apps or what sorts of even augmented reality we’re going to see kind of, complemented our driving experience.

Paul: Well, about fifteen years ago Cadillac introduced heads-up displays – might be twenty years now – but basically, they had a display mounted on your dashboard that reflected onto the window in front of you. I think they even had rare in it so that they could tell that there was something beyond your visual, so at night you’d be able to see beyond and it would alert you. I think it was well ahead of its time but I think those kinds of things are going to be really really cool and really beneficial.

The question is, does that heads-up display also give you, “Hey, you just got a text from your brother and do you want to read it now or it to be read to you?” And that’s going to be an interesting question. Do we allow that? Do the laws allow that? That’s going to be an interesting question. So, you know, there’s an accident coming up ahead, remain to the mission that you’re on of driving, but is the fact that you’ve just passed a McDonalds and it’s dinner time and you can stop there and get something. Or Dunkin Donuts is nearby.

Now, if you watch Waze, they do that when you’re stopped. Once you stop at a light they can say, “Hey, there’s a Dunkin Donuts down the street.” And so, they’re dealing through those issues. But I do think the integration of these things into heads-up displays would be a lot better than putting it to the right or to the left of the driver and then they have to look at it. And that’s why these voices in our face, you don’t need to look at a voice talking to you.

Reward-Based Driving & Alexa Car

Dan: That’s true. Yeah. I wonder about advertisers. They are already using Waze. I wonder if, when we have heads-up displays, sort of augmented reality, or augmented windshields, if you will. If advertisers would leverage that? Or to what extent they’ll be allowed to do that? Advertisers, as well as perhaps, services like Uber to be able to gamify driving or to be able to let people know to go in a certain direction.

Paul: Sure.

Dan: Or things that might be out there.

Paul: Yeah, rerouting and things like that. That’ll be interesting. I think one of the things that is fascinating that I’ve noticed is the –

Dan: The rewards-based systems?

Paul: Well, we need to be really careful with that. So, you know, Amazon has just come out with Alexa Car.

Dan: Oh, wow!

Paul: And so, now you can converse with your car. I was on the invite list and I forgot to do it so I lost it, so I’m waiting for the invite to see but that’s an interesting idea to be able to interface with a voice to do something. I don’t know what it’s going to do for me. I would hope it would be able to say, you know, play the radio show I want to play or play the music I want to play. That’s sort of a limited, minimum thing. I think you’re going to see as you see with Android Auto.

Dan: Watch a movie.

Paul: Yeah, watch a movie, exactly. Fast forward, rewind, or watch two movies. One for each eye.

Dan: Multitasking.

Paul: That’s right. But the thing is – we have Android Auto. We have, I don’t know what it’s called, iOS Auto, basically an iPhone for the car – Is they haven’t really integrated in, they have a touch panel, but they don’t have a heads-up display. So, I don’t know why that hasn’t happened yet.

Dan: Interesting. Yeah, the other idea I was thinking of is maybe – you have Uber already. Perhaps there could be other award-based or maybe something that that sensitizes you to move something from one place to another – or people – that says, “Oh, there are people over here. Or if you go that way you can give them a ride and maybe make some money. Yeah, I guess a rewards-based system. And in line with rewards, maybe also just rewards for good driving. I imagine, sometimes I see in Waze, it says, “Oh, there’s a policeman ahead.” I imagine that must not be popular among police forces necessarily, who are recording that.

Paul: It’s part of the game.

Dan: Yeah. It also lets you know, don’t use your phone while you’re driving and also, you’re going over the speed limit, excreta.

Paul: But it doesn’t tell you that. It just turns red to say that you’re going over the speed limit. It doesn’t say you should slow down, because I think people would say, “Who are you to tell me to slow down?”

Dan: To some people red, maybe that’s a positive combination.

Paul: There you go. Exactly.

Dan: They think they’re doing well.

Paul: They have a different and alternate view of reality.

The Freedom of Having a Car

Paul: One of the things I thought was interesting in Waze is that they have a carpool interface now where, basically, you can expose the fact that I’m a driver and I’m driving this way and then it can start to bring together the people that are traveling those similar routes because it knows all that stuff about you. So, that will be interesting to see what that works out to be.

Dan: It seems like there are more and more cars on the road, but there are also a lot of empty seats on the road with people that go the same ways. I tend to notice similar people on my commute and maybe they notice me. But yeah, it’s fascinating to think of that in terms of why does every individual person need his own giant chunk of metal with all these extra seats, all the time.

Paul: Well, that freedom seems to be germane to America. I mean, even before cars, you know, people had the freedom to take a horse and ride it out into the wilderness, out into the West, and homestead. That’s really hard to take out of the people. I think you almost need to break people to not want to do that. People enjoy their vehicles. They enjoy the freedom that comes with a vehicle. We have a big country and there’s lots of space between things and so a vehicle is very convenient for doing that.

Dan: Yeah.

What Technology Should Car Manufacturers Invest In?

Dan: So, in terms of other changes in transportation, if I’m a car company like Toyota or Suzuki or any other company, I’m thinking to myself, “What do I invest in?” Because there’s the autonomous stuff, there’s electrical, there’s a number of different options out there. I don’t know which direction to go in or which ones are actually happening, like there might be a lot of hearsay per say. And we see that happening to some extent, but what are the big players? What would you recommend the direction they could go in? Or how to tie these things together?

Paul: Well, I think that one of the things that was a bit of a surprise to me as I started to research this over the past couple of years, is that the efficiency of a gallon of gas is actually quite low. There’s a lot of power in a gallon of gasoline. But we don’t use it nearly as efficiently as we could. And so, the idea is that if we have electric vehicles, that we can produce electricity more efficiently that we can utilize the gasoline to produce horsepower. And there’s reasonable thought to say that, okay, we put together a generation system, an electrical generation system, whatever it might be, hydropower, whatever it might be. We’re going to be able to control that and generate electricity more efficiently than we can generate horsepower out of gasoline.

And also, all of the costs that go into gasoline and all the negative impacts of burning gasoline, and so those are generally real. I mean, I don’t like being an exhaust of anything. So, those aren’t the best things for us, but we’ve greatly improved it since the car was first invented. Most exhaust out of most cars is extremely clean so it’s not just that, but it’s the limited resources and how can we most efficiently generate that.

The Hybrid Era: Electric Cars

Paul: So, I think electric, you’ll see that more and more. We’re in a hybrid era right now. You have Tesla trying to be 100 percent electric and its very expensive so only early adopters can get it and it has that limit of limitation to your freedom. You can only drive four hundred miles or whatever the mileage is. So, those issues have to be dealt with and the efficiencies will be found and the ability to charge more quickly and things like that. But I think that, as we start to look at that, lighter materials means less power, all that kind of stuff, is going to add up, smaller vehicles.

And then also, in the big vehicles, a lot of our fuel is used by truckers and trucks are integral to everything that we consume. In order to have those efficiently getting us from point A to point B is critical, so I think you’re going to start to see partnerships with all of these companies that will be partnerships of ten or fifteen years and then they will sort themselves out and they will go off and produce them in the long run. If you look at the way Japan has worked through the 70s, 80s, and 90s, is you would find different companies partnering together to develop calculators for example. Casio and Sharp collaborated a lot on that and they actually seeded different parts of the market to each other. Those aren’t necessarily American ways of doing things.

Dan: Yeah, how do we stand up to that!

Companies Sharing Technology

Paul: Yeah, but I think you’re going to see some of that. And it’ll be interesting because as Tesla invents a lot of the future, are they going to license some of this stuff and make money that way – nobody’s saying they can’t make money – or are they going to keep it themselves? Everything that Tesla does is secret. There are no manuals for it. You can’t repair it yourself. All this kind of stuff, so it’s a very interesting way of doing things.

And there are other companies – and Apple’s the same way – But there are other companies that say, “Hey, we just invented a better way of doing this, let’s sell it to everybody. We’ll sell it to Apple. We’ll sell it to IBM. We’ll sell it to Lenova.” Whoever it is that wants to, they can pay a license fee and that’s how we make our money. And that hasn’t been the case over the past ten years. There has been patent infringements that force settlements between companies but most patents should result in a licensing agreement, not a “you cant make what you’re making.”

Dan: Yeah, it seems to me with innovations like this, if we’re going in the direction where it’s electrical or non-gasoline vehicles, it is going to take more than one company. It’s an infrastructural change to some extent. Because if I use my gas-based vehicle, it’s kind of easy for me. I know those people who are trained to work on my Honda vehicle. They know the parts. I go to a gas station – gas stations are everywhere. There’s a whole market for that skill set and so I wonder how long might take for people to become Tesla mechanics, to have the Tesla parts readily available or even to have other companies besides Tesla that will be part of that market and compete with Tesla even, based on having the license and being able to do similar sorts of things.

Tesla and Secret Technology

Paul: Well, as you said that, it became clear to me. It’s like that’s really interesting that Tesla would choose the closed route, as opposed to saying to all the car maintenance people out there – all the mechanics – learn how to service Tesla. Now they might be saying, “That’s crazy! We’ll get electrocuted!” But still, you’ve got to get them to that point and if you need to get your Tesla fixed, it almost needs to go back to the factory.

So that’s an interesting thing. Now, Apple just recently announced their service provider program, an authorized repair center program. They’ve been at odds with this at making all sorts of extreme statements like, “Oh, we don’t want a bad repair to endanger someone’s life on an iPhone,” and all this different stuff. And what they did was they forced all of the independent repair people out there to find alternate sourced parts. So, they would be getting a battery for your iPhone that was from “Joe’s Batteries” as opposed to from an Apple certified battery and so they’d put it in there and that would swell and break your iPhone and so Apple was saying, “See!” and the repair guys were saying, “Wait a minute! If you just let us buy Apple parts we could do that!” And Apple said, “Well, you’re not – they didn’t say this but I think what they meant here was you’re not smart enough to do that.” And it’s just not true.

Just recently they announced a new program which is going to allow independent repair people to get real parts, real schematics and all these different things. It took Apple ten, eleven years to figure that out with the iPhone and even the Mac and all the different products. Why is Tesla making the same mistake? Why wouldn’t they say, “Here’s how you fix it.” I just don’t understand that. That’s an interesting problem to say, “Oh, not only can you buy it from us but you have to have us fix it.” That’s not the business model they should be in.

Dan: Yeah.

Paul: They should be in the business of inventing really good cars and selling them and helping anybody who has one, make it work.

Dan: Yeah. Wow.

Well, this has been a fascinating conversation, Paul, and I appreciate it. We’ll have more information in our shownotes as well, with links to the articles we discussed.

Thank you for joining us, Paul.

Paul: Alright, thank you!

More Episodes:

This is Part 2 of 2 our Tech Trends Talk about autonomous vehicles. If you missed Part 1, you can listen to it here!

Show Notes:

Freelance Photography & Entrepreneurship with Al Pereira

On episode 68 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with freelance photographer Al Pereira, about being an entrepreneur and running Advanced Photo, a photography store in North Reading, Massachusetts.

Show Notes

Advanced Photo’s Website
Contact Al Pereira
Find Al Pereira on Facebook
Find Al Pereira on LinkedIn
Gear Review: Yashica FX-3 35mm Film SLR
UPI – United Press International
The Eagle Tribune
Link to SaviorLabs Assessment

Sections

Picking Up A Camera – The Start of a Career
Working as a Freelance Photographer
A Hands On Experience – Working for United Press International
Darkrooms Before Computers
When Color Printing Became Popular
Camera Equipment Back In The Day
Al’s Photography Work
A Freelance Photographer is an Entrepreneur
The Danger of Being a News Photographer
Starting a Photography Business

Freelance Photography and Entrepreneurship with Al Pereira

Paul: Welcome to the Edge of Innovation. I’m here with Al Pereira, president, founder, chief photographer of Advanced Photo in North Reading, Massachusetts.

Al: Thank you very much for having me, Paul.

Paul: So, Al, we’ve known each other for a long time, and I’ve been following your career as a photographer and I thought it’d be interesting for our listeners to talk with somebody that is really good behind the camera.

Al: Ah, thanks for the compliment.

Paul: Well, we’ll see if we can find somebody after this. Right?

Al: There you go.

Picking Up A Camera – The Start of a Career

Paul: So, what, what made you pick up a camera?

Al: Well, it’s kind of a funny story. I was kind of laid up from work for a while due to an injury. And, I got bored, and I bought a camera. Not even a week later, I was driving down the street, and there was a fire. It happened to be in Malden, and I took pictures, and I actually had a black and white darkroom that I had started in my basement a couple of days after I bought it. So it was actually about a week after I bought the camera, I had a black and white darkroom, had somebody show me how to process the film. Anyway, I processed the film, and I printed a couple of pictures, showed them to a couple of friends. They said, “You should have taken that to the paper.”

And I said, “Okay. Maybe next time.” And then low and behold, something else happens, I get it, and I sold it to the paper, and here I am 35 years later.

Paul: Wow. So what is it? It’s 2017. So that would be…’83? Yeah. About ’83.

Al: Yeah. A little before ’83. Yeah.

Paul: So, alright. What in the world made you think, “Okay. I’m going to get a camera”?

Al: I’ve always been the photographer in the house, and the Polaroid Instant Cameras that we had and the little point-and-shoots. So everybody else would always cut everybody’s head off, and I always seemed to do it the right way. And I’ve always kind of been interested in cameras and taking pictures. So I’ve always been one for capturing that moment because it’s all about family and back then, it was about family. It should be all today too.

Paul: Okay, so it’s 1982, ’83, and you’re going to go out and buy a camera. What did you buy?

Al: A Yashica FX3.

Paul: Wow. See, now whenever you talk to photographers — just so you know. So if you’re out there listening, and you talk to a photographer, they know their equipment. They’ll always remember your first camera and so it was Yashica.

Al: FX3.

Paul: FX3. Did you buy a lot of lenses or just the one that came with it?

Al: I bought two lenses, a zoom, and a regular 50 millimeter.

Paul: So you were in… You were like, “Alright, I’m going to go and become a photographer.” At least a hobby. Right?

Al: Well, I intended it to be a hobby, but then after that first print got published, I had the bug, Basically, what I ended up doing was getting a scanner and putting it in my car. I had a portable scanner.

Paul: Oh, a police scanner.

Al: Police scanner.

Paul: Not a, not a photo scanner.

Al: Right, no. Well, we didn’t have them back then.

Paul: No, I know. I was just like, wow. That was early for a scanner. Okay. Go ahead.

Al: And, I’d go to sleep with it on. Something would happen, and I’d get up at 3:00 in the morning, 4:00 in the morning, and I’d get there, a bad accident or a fire or something. And the next day, I’d have the film processed and prints, and I’d take it down to the local paper.

Paul: Wow. So you were…I think the technical term was a stringer.

Working as a Freelance Photographer

Al: Well, I was a freelance photographer.

Paul: Freelance. Okay.

Al: Stringer came later on when I actually got picked up by United Press International.

Paul: Okay. So now you’re doing this. How many years were you doing it before you started…? You know, so you were freelance. Then you got picked up by UPI, and was there something between those?

Al: I was freelancing for a bunch of local papers. I actually expanded. I did the Summerville Journal, Medford This Week, Medford…what else? Cambridge Paper. And at times, depending on what I covered, The Globe and The Herald would buy my stuff. UPI picked me up after an incident in Melrose where there was a drowning of a young child, and he fell through the ice. And I happened to get there as they were bringing out two of the four and then they went looking for another one that actually ran home. And they didn’t know there was someone else in there. And then they basically said, “Let’s put the boat in,” and they found him, like about two minutes later. And I captured everything from them putting the boat in to finding him, putting him in the boat, and doing the CPR. The whole bit. And I happened to just take my film. I didn’t even process it. I took it down to The Herald, and then I believe, if I remember correctly, The Globe. And I went home.

And all of a sudden, I got a call from this guy from UPI saying, “We understand you have some photos of an incident.”

And I said, “Yeah.”

“Well, can you come in?”

And I did. And I started stringing for them ever since.

Paul: Oh, wow.

A Hands On Experience – Working for United Press International

Al: Yeah, and it was interesting because I felt like I was going to college but not going to college. I was getting the hands-on experience. I mean, I covered presidential races, the Jackson-Mondale races for president. I covered movie stars going to the Hasty Pudding, Sean Connery, Joan Rivers. I had spectacular photos of that. I covered the Celtics, the Bruins, the Red Sox, the Patriots. Every sporting event in Boston I did. You know, it was a lot of fun.

Paul: So now you did that for how long? I mean, you probably still do it occasionally, but when that was the main bread and butter of your business.

Al: Right. I mean, I was actually working a lot of hours for UPI, which I didn’t mind because I was learning the trade, and, like I said, it was like going to college, but I was actually doing the actual work without the books. I did it till ’86 when I got picked up by The Eagle Tribune. That happened was I put in an application, and they called me in for an interview. And I was still stringing, of course, for UPI. And, if you remember correctly, the riots in Lawrence was happening at the time. And the day before my interview I went and covered the riots up in Lawrence. And I took some great photos of an arrest and so forth, went back to UPI, and I reprinted them, and we put them on the wire.

But The Eagle Tribune was not a customer of UPI, but I had inserted a bunch of those photos that we used, took it with me to the interview along with my other pictures in my portfolio. The gentleman that interviewed me noticed the photos. He didn’t recognize where they were, and he said, “Do you mind if we use them?”

I said, “Absolutely not.” And the next day, I was hired.

Paul: Wow.

Al: Yeah. It was a surprise.

Darkrooms Before Computers

Paul: Okay. So you went from being injured, thinking about photography, buying a camera, starting to set up a darkroom. I mean, this is just such a different world, because now everybody’s got a darkroom in their computer.

Al: Right. And that is today’s darkroom. It’s harder now, to be honest with you.

Paul: Oh, definitely. But I’m just saying that you had to go out and buy chemicals. You had to buy enough enlarger. You had to buy the trays. You had to learn all about it. You had to get a darkroom. You know, so you were really committed to it. And, so it’s sort of, I mean… You know, back in those days, it was a commitment. You really became a photographer, and you sort of learned all these different things.

Al: It was actually easier to learn to be a photographer, back then than it is now.

Paul: Yeah, that’s probably true.

Al: You can actually set your mind to do it even today, but, you know, like for example, mixing chemicals. It was easy because your heart was in it. But you could pick it up a lot faster than you can do like, for example, Photoshop, unless you have a really big brain, and you’re really smart. You know, you can pick it up faster. But I find that Photoshop, at the beginning, was very difficult to maneuver and so forth. Even today, there is so much to it that, where do you start?

Printing, for example, locations in the photograph and the dodging and the burning, that was art because you could put your hands together, and you’d have a little hole that the light would go through, and you make it wider or lighter. The smell of the chemicals when you mixed it. It was just amazing.

Paul: Yeah.

Al: It was a different world.

Paul: It was. It was.

Al: Simpler.

Paul: Well, it was very simple. It was simple. There was a lot of depth to it, though. You could get very complicated. And I think a lot of that is lost in the new digital photography because you don’t appreciate what’s really going on. You don’t learn the actual, don’t want to say the physics of the situation. But, when you see that paper develop in the pool of developer, you know, in the tray…

Al: The image coming before your eyes.

Paul: The image coming up, you’re sort of like, “Oh, okay.” And then the dodging and burning. And it sort of teaches itself to you. Whereas with Photoshop, you just open it, and there’s a picture on the screen. Oh, is that good, or is that bad? And you don’t really get sucked in as much.

Al: Right. And what’s interesting is, though, that if you go from one screen to another, you’re going to get a different color, a different tone. Actually, it could be lighter or darker, and that confuses a lot of people. Where, when you see that photo come up, it’s either you did it the right way or you didn’t. And there’s no in between.

Paul: And we’re talking about black and white.

When Color Printing Became Popular

Paul: Did you ever do developing color printing?

Al: No because—

Paul: Without a machine?

Al: No. It was actually… And I don’t know if it was even possible to do it in the trays because—

Paul: No, you had to do it in a drum. Remember? I mean, Cibachrome? I don’t know if you remember that, but that the “easiest,” but it was just so… I remember, being a black-and-white photographer in the darkroom and you being so involved in the process. Color, you couldn’t see what was happening. And that really disappointed me. And then you’d sort of put it in this jar, you know, this big tube with the cover on it. You’d rock it back and forth. You’d dump that out, put the other stuff in, rock it back and… Well, it was like developing film.

And then you pull it out, and it looks terrible. It was like…huh. I remembered many times where I’d shoot something on the enlarger, expose it, and then develop it, and then pull it out and stop it.

Al: I remember when I was stringing for UPI. We were strictly a black and white printing in black and white. And the color was starting to get popular. And the AP was doing it.

Paul: Right USA Today came out, and it was starting to print in color.

Al: And of remember we were trying to get a really good color print. And at the beginning, it was very, very difficult that we almost gave up, but we couldn’t because our competition was doing it. Eventually, we mastered it and so forth, but it was a whole different world.

Camera Equipment Back In The Day

Al: Let’s go back to, for example, the equipment that we used. It was a manual focuses lenses. There were not auto-focus lenses. I had a very hard time giving up my manual focus. It took me a while.

Paul: Have you? Have you given it up?

Al: Yeah. I had no choice. Yeah.

Paul: Well, you know, I mean, it does work really well.

Al: It does. But it takes a little longer to focus where you go to a wedding now, you tend to want to do the job quickly. And today’s equipment is fantastic.

Al’s Photography Work

Paul: Right. So you’re United Press International. You go to the Lawrence Eagle Tribune. And then what? What was the next step in your career?

Al: Well, while I was stringing at UPI, I was also doing what ends I actually hooked up with a photographer out of Medford College. And he and I ran into each other when I was on assignment for a local newspaper. And he said, “You know, I need help, so could you come over?”

So I did. He interviewed me, and he sort of basically hired me on a freelance basis, but he was willing to train me as a wedding photographer, a studio photographer. And that’s where I learned how to be a really good wedding photographer and portrait photographer. I also ended up doing all his black and white printing. Back then, it was all black and white, and head-and-shoulder shots for banks or any companies his would do.

I remember one time he got a job for a company called You First. And it was a uniform company. They would pick up your uniforms, and they would clean them and take them back. So they hired him to do a photo of someone wearing a uniform. Half of it was really spotless, really clean. The other half was torn, greasy, and so forth. And I got to end up being the model.

Paul: Oh, really. Oh, wow.

Al: And they used it for many years. And what’s funny is that that company now is one of my customers at Advanced Photo. And they actually remember that photo.

Paul: Interesting.

Al: Yeah, so I was always, when I was freelancing for UPI as, as a stringer, I always kind of had my own little business on the side, doing photos for banks doing photos for doctors, the weddings, portraits, the sports photography. Also, I would, on my spare time, which was very little, would still do work for the local weekly newspapers.

A Freelance Photographer is an Entrepreneur

Paul: So now would you characterize yourself as an entrepreneur?

Al: I would think so.

Paul: I would think so. I mean, from what I know of you and knowing you always have that entrepreneurial edge, always thinking, “Hey, what about this?” Or, “What about this?”

Al: I’m always thinking.

Paul: Right. So now you’ve expanded. You’re working for Lawrence Eagle. You’re doing wedding pictures. You’re doing freelancing, and then what happened?

The Danger of Being a News Photographer

Al: While I was on assignment for the Eagle Tribune, I was covering this spot news and long story short, it turned out to be somebody, took their own life. And if I had known that, we wouldn’t have been there. But because of the secrecy that the cops ended up having, and the way they talk on the radio made you think that it was something serious.

So I took a reporter with me, and we went to the location. And, I get there, and I’m doing a few shots of the area, and we’re just waiting for the cops to come out so we could find out what was going on. But right next door, a family, these people, came out of the house, and apparently, there were family members of this person. And they didn’t like us being there. And all of a sudden, they just beat the you know what out of me. They really did a number on me, and the reporter was trying to get them away. And she actually got pushed around also. By the time the police came over, I was really bleeding and my back was really sore. And I ended up going to the hospital. And I was actually out of work for a long time. And I ended up getting a back operation because of it.

And with that free time, I decided, “You know what? I’ve always wanted to start a business,” so I decided to start a business.

Paul: Okay. Well not the recommended path to it necessarily. But, so what was that business?

Starting a Photography Business

Al: You know, a friend of mine owned a photo store in Methuen called Advance Photo, and I liked what he did. I liked the way he printed the photos. He had a one-hour photo, so he printed photos for people. He really loved it. People really liked the results, and I was thinking, “You know what? This could be me, but I want to do a little bit more.”

So before I opened up, I actually had a little portrait studio in his place. I learned how to use the machines, and about a year later, I opened up Advanced Photo in North Reading.

Al: When was that?

Al: 1992. March 4th.

Paul: Wow!

More Episodes:

You’ve been listening to part 1 of our interview with Al Pereira! Be sure to listen to Part 2 here!


Also published on Medium.

Is Your News Site Too Slow? Probably, Though, The Guardian’s Trying To Speed Theirs Up

Web publishers face a quandary in 2014: User expectations for how quickly a website will load are getting faster and faster. But web pages keep getting fatter and fatter, adding custom fonts, bigger art, more video, and more complex JavaScript into the mix. Our 3G reality often falls short of our broadband dreams. Patrick Hamman at The Guardian gave an interesting talk last week at the FrontTrends conference in Warsaw about how they’re trying to make theguardian.com load a lot faster in its new, responsive design, and there are a lot of ideas in here ready to be stolen by other news site developers. One remarkable fact: A Guardian audience survey found that, of 17 key product drivers, the speed of the site ranked No. 2, behind only …

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Is your news site too slow? Probably, though The Guardian’s trying to speed theirs up

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