May 2007 Archives
Congratulations to Facebook for realizing that, contrary to popular opinion, it’s all about the platform.
Let the developers in and you win.
Since somebody asked…
- Copy photos from camera to a temporary folder on my MacBook Pro.
- Import photos from the tmp folder into organized directory structure in Adobe Lightroom, e.g.
/photos/2007/2007-05/2007-05-25-Zoo/RAW- renaming the files in the process as2007-05-25-Zoo-001.jpg, etc… - Cull and process photos in Lightroom.
- Export the surviving photos as full resolution sRGB to, for example,
/photos/2007/2007-05/2007-05-25-Zoo/Processed. - Upload the processed photographs to Flickr - tag, title, permissions and licenses as appropriate.
- Copy the whole
/photos/2007/2007-05/2007-05-25-Zoodirectory to my NAS. - Resync the NAS to an offsite server as a final backup.
- Finally delete the photos from my camera once everything is backed up multiple ways.
Simple really :-)
Apparently Kirkland is about to annex a whole chunk of unincorporated King County, which would almost double the population of Kirkland.
The insane thing is that the citizens of Kirkland, whose resources will get spread thin, don’t get to vote on the issue - only the citizens in the area targeted for annexation!
Oh, and being a ten year (high) tax paying non-US citizen, I don’t get to vote anyway…
No taxation without… Oh. Whatever.
I have a theory that Open Source software is so good and stable compared to Windows software because Open Source debuggers suck.
This means that Open Source developers have to program defensively whereas Windows developers will rely on catching and easily debugging the bugs in the debugger.
Thoughts?
Hey, so it’s a different day in the US than the UK, but anyhow, Happy Mother’s Day Mum!
Also interesting as far as coincidences go is that today is my Mum’s birthday as well as being Mother’s Day in the US.
Randomly interesting is that I was actually born on Mother’s Day… Of course that means that I’m my own best present to my Mum. Heh :-)
I just recently reconnected with a friend, Brian Jolley, from the halcyon days of school back in England. Anyhow, he just sent me a picture of us from around 1974…
See if you can spot me…
One of Julian’s school friends had a birthday party today - and not at the usual sort of places either!
The party was at the Woodinville Fire Station - what an incredibly brilliant idea!
The day started out in the fire station’s classroom when Lieutenant Davis showed a kid friendly instructional video and then one of the Fire Fighters donned all of his gear, including the breathing apparatus. To be quite honest, this was the first time I had seen a Fire Fighter fully kitted up, so I asked how much it all weighed. About one hundred pounds apparently, but much heavier when it all gets wet…
However, Lieutenant Davis had an alteria motive for doing this. Apparently a big problem with rescuing kids from a burning building is that a Fire Fighter can appear quite scary with all their gear and their voices sounding Darth Vader’s, plus the fact that the kids are already freaked out by the fire. Sometimes they run and hide from the very Fire Fighter that is attempting to rescue them…
So he got on hands and knees and crawled around in front of the kids, letting them hear his weird voice and having them touch his hand.
That one thing was probably the most valuable part of the day.
Anyhow, after that everyone got to go outside, play with fire hoses and sit in fire trucks. We also got a great tour around the station, including the dorm rooms and gym (which included a large plasma and an Xbox 360).
A great day, topped off with them extending the ladder truck’s one hundred foot ladder whereupon one of the Fire Fighters climbed all the way to the top!
Superb!
My most popular photo doesn’t live on flickr. It also doesn’t happen to be a particularly good picture. It wasn’t taken with a decent camera.
It’s one of the pictures of my car that I took the day after it was delivered to share with some other BMW enthusiasts at Microsoft.
It’s had over 55,000 views. The stats on the other pictures are pretty good too.
I guess my point is that a random hidden gallery of photos on the web can be discovered and become as popular as any high profile photo site on the net. It’s all about the extremely cool content :-)
Anyhow, here is the 2008 M3. It’s got a V8. It’s sexy. I want one.
How can I not resist? :-)
Note to wife: I’m just joking about the “not resist” thing. Kinda.
I’ve talked before about how much I love the Infrant ReadyNAS product. Well, it appears that NETGEAR loves them also.
I wanted to inform you that today is the most exciting day in the history of Infrant Technologies as we have agreed to merge our company with NETGEAR. We believe that our ReadyNAStm line of Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances fit in perfectly with NETGEAR’s established brand and will continue to evolve positively under their banner (www.netgear.com)
The vision we had when Infrant was formed is driving the revolution we see today. With ReadyNAStm, anyone can have terabytes of storage at home or in the office with the same features and performance that not too long ago was only available to the enterprise. Infrant set the standard of adopting SATA and Gigabit Ethernet when others were still using the 40-pin IDE cable and 10/100 connections. We pioneered the use of the diskless model to lower the acquisition cost of a high-capacity NAS. We provided a software feature set that was so complete, people felt compelled to use our ReadyNAStm not just in the home but purchasing a second unit for use in their office. And X-RAIDtm is still the only RAID that lets users add capacity as easily as putting in four little screws on a disk tray.
Congratulations to Infrant! A great company with a great product seals the deal.
And thanks to Steve Kennedy, who pointed me at them in the first place when I was in the market for a NAS solution.
Man, this just sucks.
She had raised her daughter for six years following the divorce, shuttling to soccer practice and cheerleading, making sure schoolwork was done. Then Lt. Eva Crouch was mobilized with the Kentucky National Guard, and Sara went to stay with Dad.
A year and a half later, her assignment up, Crouch pulled into her driveway with one thing in mind - bringing home the little girl who shared her smile and blue eyes. She dialed her ex and said she’d be there the next day to pick Sara up, but his response sent her reeling.
“Not without a court order you won’t.”
Within a month, a judge would decide that Sara should stay with her dad. It was, he said, in “the best interests of the child.”
After almost 2000 comments getting through the junk filters (what’s up with Askimet?) over the past 24 hours and almost two a minute coming in, comments are now completely moderated…
Sigh.
Everyone says that moving house is probably one of the most stressful things you can do, especially when you’re trying to sell your existing house in the process. Our plan is to move into our new home, get our current home ready to sell and then sell it.
I indeed tend to agree, but I’ve been saying to myself “I refuse to be stressed about this”, so to this end I’ve been trying to put as much of the process in online and do the “GTD” thing of getting as much of it out of my head and written down as possible.
As Nabila and I are sharing the workload, putting everything online helps immensely with the “who’s doing what?” and “Steve, that slacker, I bet he hasn’t called the contractor yet!” questions…
So, we’re tracking all our moving expenses and various documents in Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets, and all the work items, todo lists and milestones in 37signals’ Basecamp.
This all appears to be working a treat so far!
There are milestones for “House is ready to sell”, “New House Closes”, etc… and todo lists associated with each.
Notes for each contractor we’re getting quotes from are being tracked as are dates and dependencies, etc…
As an aside, having a really good real estate agent is another piece of the puzzle that keeps you from going insane and we’ve found a really good one in Kathy Magner. From being told what we need to do when to helping us get our current house ready for sale and generally making our lives easier, she’s a bit of a star…
