I've been organizing my digital photos for almost 10 years now and have used a few different approaches. My primary computer is a laptop, which is no match for the hundreds of gigs worth of photos that I've taken over the years. I pretty much only have room on my laptop for photos from the past 1-2 years. I also have a home PC which has a 1 TB internal drive (which I added for less than $100). That PC is hooked up to my home network and has all my photos from 2001 onward. I usually take photos when I'm on the road, which is also when I have my laptop, so they always go there first. Here's my approach:
* Occasionally dump photos from camera to laptop when my memory card fills up * Keep everything from the past year or so organized on my laptop * When I'm home and connected to my network I use a free program called SyncBack (http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html) to synchronize what's on my laptop to the PC. SyncBack is great and is pretty powerful for a free program. * Every so often I back up the photos on the home PC to a DVD
So basically, memory card overflows to laptop, laptop to home PC, and then that to DVD for archiving. Although I'm not sure I trust the DVDs for real long term storage, so I may make new ones some day.
For online storage & sharing albums with friends I use Phanfare (http://www.phanfare.com). I upgraded their unlimited storage which I think is maybe $80 or $90 a year. Their slide shows are great, because you can upload songs/mp3s directly from your home PC / iTunes to the slideshows.
I can only hope that the right people in government see this and continue to help improve transparency in as many areas of government as possible. Added government transparency can only bring improvement.
On the other hand I don't advocate 100% transparency. To me it's the same reason why women don't reveal to everyone they're pregnant the instant they find out. Instead, once they decide they're going to have the baby and they have a good idea it's going to work out, then they let others know. I feel like government should have the same levels of privacy, but not much beyond that.
The worst are people that cram around the boarding area and / or try to board when it's not their turn. Sometimes these people get waved through, but sometimes not. And if they don't get turned around to wait for their turn they end up blocking the people that could be getting seated in the back of the plane.
I always thought it would be great to have sort of a "bad boarder" or detention area to corral people off to the side of the gate that tried boarding at the wrong time. Just a nice little waiting area that they direct you to stand in and wait. And then once the entire plane has boarded you and all your non-boarding in time friends can join. And then everyone could give them a nice Nelson-style "Hah hah" laugh as they walked bye.
I disagree. I don't think Radiohead care about the money anymore. They could (although doubtful) make millions more off the downloads, but would that really matter? It's their message that they care about most. The press. The fact that people are talking about it. It's putting your foot down to take a stand. It's the amount of downloads and influence it has on other bands and the public that will decide if it was worth it.
As big a Radiohead fan as I am, I impatiently downloaded the torrent about a week ago. The album is great, so I went to the site to plunk down my 5 quid. I'm not sure removing the torrent download with the one from radiohead.com does anything for me, but it feels a lot better in principle.
Google has some great examples on their API website, but it takes some searching around to find more complex code depending on what you want to do. For my own personal art website, I was able to create a separate XML file of all the photos (http://gregsdigital.com/markers.xml), their coordinates, and other random data for generating a pop-up window when you click on the image. Feel free to steal all the code you want:
I was fortunate enough to remember exactly where I was when I took each photo, and it's nice being able to view the satellite shot of where the photo was actually taken.
...had a great article on this back in September of 2003, interviewing people from all over the globe who were getting benefits out of MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative:
Exactly - the same way if drinking makes you more angry and upset, you could show how drinking shortens life span. It's really on an individual basis, but I think it's safe to say that having a few drinks every day will cheer most people up, which probably has a much greater affect of increasing longevity than the alcohol itself.
Check out the worldwide recommendations for drinking. Currenty (as far as this chart is concerned), the # of drinks men should consume is "no more than two drinks per day", and "no more than one drink per day" for women.
It would be interesting to find out what types of drinks this included, and / or what types yielded different results. For some reason I'm sure consuming the same amount of alcohol found in Absinthe is a lot more different than the same amount in wine or beer.
I hope some day we find the ability to broadcast high-strength connections to countries where the Internet is filtered. If only we could make it as easy as getting a wireless card you could connect anywhere in the world unfiltered, then all information would truly be free.
...that IT should own deployments. That being said, this assumes that DEV has made strict guidelines clear instructions, and foolproofed their release. There also needs to be a fully tested system in place for rolling out changes and rolling them back.
I work for a small software company that provides software for doing exactly this, and run into these questions and scenarios at every client I go to. Even when the instructions for deploying a release are 20 pages long and extremely complicated and labor intensive, you still don't see development applying it. My job is to make it a simple hand off process where DEV packages the release (in our software) and hands it off to the deployment team, who in turn executes the job against the production environment. If there are problems deployment can roll the changes back and let DEV debug any issues.
I am always amused at how overdone "*insert company name here* to try an *insert market dominating / news headline catching product here* killer" headlines (and similar) are. Especially when it comes to things like Google, MySpace, or iTunes. First of all, how can one new produt or website possibly come out to actually "kill" one of these brands? Don't sell by the headline, sell by the content. The real killers are lawsuits.
I hate it when another company, or entity for that matter, resorts to attacking hte other. Whether it be in business, politics, or even daily life, it's just ugly, unprofessional, and lowers both parties involved.
Aspirin doesn't seem to have the same effect on people in England. If you haven't read Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot, I highly suggest you do. It talks about how strong the mind is in regards to personal health and getting sick. From the book:
"The placebo effect may also be affecting is in far vaster ways then we realize, as is evidenced by a recent and extremely puzzling medical mystery. If you have watched any television at all in the last year or so, you have no doubt seen a blitzkreig of commercials promoting aspirin's ability to decrease the risk of heart attack. There is a good deal of convincing evidence to back this up, otherwise television censors, who are real sticklers for accuracy when it comes to medical claims in commercials, wouldn't allow such copy on the air. This is all well and good. The only problem is that aspirin doesn't seem to have the same affect on people in England. A six-year study of 5,139 British doctors revealed no evidence that aspirin reduces the risk of heart attack... Whatever the case, don't stop believing in the prophylactic benefits of aspirin. It still may save your life."
I'm not sure what this says directly about Americans, but using this data it seems very apparent to me how powerful beliefs can be when it comes to affecting personal health. Whether it be commericals showing us people sneezing and coughing because of allergy season, or someone not getting enough sleep, the mind can be very powerful in convincing the body it needs these medicines in order to get better.
I highly suggest anyone read more about the powerful effects of placebos. That will change your ideas about getting sick.
I heard a rumour the other day, and I have to say I was delighted when I heard it. My friend told me that Marriott is taking customers into the 21st century by spiking nanobots into their shampoos so that guests can be tracked throughout the hotel and provided services without even presenting a room key. For example, I noticed it right away at my current stay when I approached the concierge lounge and the doors were open. I was greeted by the attendant, and offered food, drinks, snacks, and all the television I could watch. I saw several episodes of Jeopardy and America's Funniest Videos. The video that won on Tuesday night was this lady jumping around doing half-cartwheels and doing a face plant after receiving a diamond ring. What a good laugh that was.
My point is that I was greeted without showing any identification, room key, or stating my name or room number. How else would the concierge have known? I figured my friend was right - nanobots. I think putting nanobots in the shampoo is ingenious, since not only is the process seamlessly integrated into a normal routine of all guests, but they are undetected by the human eye and harmless to the scalpal regions. Imagine all the possibilities - no more room keys, knowing when young children venture into the pool area without supervision, and express checkout - all because of sensors interacting with the nanobots from the shampoo.
I'm sure that there are all sorts of exciting surprises to come. If you want to send me some of them, that would be fantastic. I can say that I hope you at least never replace your real staff with robot staff, because I find they're all super friendly and a pleasure to talk to. I think we're at least a few years off from having robots like that!
whatisslashdotting.com was slashdotted today when Google displayed a whatisslashdotting link on their homepage. The server was fixed, but then was slashdotted again when news.com reported on the slashdotting. After traffic slowed down and the site was restored, Slashdot reported on the news story and the site was slashdotted. Amused with these occurences, Wired reported on the future of web traffic and linking, referring to the site and causing another slashdotting. Slashdot, who then posted the Wired article about itself, took the site down again for the final time.
It's too bad the creator of the image didn't show what sort of resolution you could get using normal film. Even with the progress of digital cameras, I think we're still far from that sort of quality.
I agree. When I first started reading The Elegant Universe (http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall98/universe.h tm), I'd go to bed and couldn't sleep because my brain was going a million miles an hour thinking about everything I'd just read. The first third of the book introduces you to some amazing stuff, such as some of Einstein's ideas about time travel, numerous dimensions, and basic physics.
The second two thirds are a bit more complex and I began to lose interest. It spent a lot of time talking about the Theory of Everything and how that seems to be the Holy Grail of physics these days. It also got into some extra-dimension stuff which was cool.
Overall it's definitely worth reading. Like I said, the first third is mind blowing, and the rest is interesting enough to keep reading.
Has anyone seen this forward? I thought of it after reading this post:
"Why didn't I think of this?
When you get ads in your phone or utility bill, include them with the payment. Let them throw it away.
When you get those pre approved letters in the mail for everything from credit cards to 2nd mortgages and junk like that, most of them come with postage paid return envelopes, right?
Well, why not get rid of some of your other junk mail and put it in these cool little envelopes!
Send an ad for your local dry cleaner to American Express.
Or a pizza coupon to Citibank. (I especially liked this!)
If you didn't get anything else that day, then just send them their application back!
If you want to remain anonymous, just make sure your name isn't on anything you send them.
You can Send it back empty if you want to just to keep them guessing!
Eventually, the banks and credit card companies will begin getting all their junk back in the mail.
Let's let them know what it's like to get junk mail, and best of all THEY'RE paying for it! Twice!
Let's help keep our postal service busy since they say e-mail is cutting into their business, and that's why they need to increase postage again!
Send this to a friend or two or three...or fifty..."
Shortly after I started doing this I began noticing a "customer location code" printed on the back of some of the envelopes, with a message about tampering with the contents of the envelope. I also noticed that they got creative and started printing your address on the opposite side of what needed to be shown through the hole in the envelope when you send it back to them. I got around this though, and still send dirty tissues, shoelaces, etc..., along with some of the ideas mentioned above...
Slashdot Mirror
I think SNL's Nick Burns series characterized people's typical views of Nerds pretty well: http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/nick-burns/2786.
I've been organizing my digital photos for almost 10 years now and have used a few different approaches. My primary computer is a laptop, which is no match for the hundreds of gigs worth of photos that I've taken over the years. I pretty much only have room on my laptop for photos from the past 1-2 years. I also have a home PC which has a 1 TB internal drive (which I added for less than $100). That PC is hooked up to my home network and has all my photos from 2001 onward. I usually take photos when I'm on the road, which is also when I have my laptop, so they always go there first. Here's my approach:
* Occasionally dump photos from camera to laptop when my memory card fills up
* Keep everything from the past year or so organized on my laptop
* When I'm home and connected to my network I use a free program called SyncBack (http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html) to synchronize what's on my laptop to the PC. SyncBack is great and is pretty powerful for a free program.
* Every so often I back up the photos on the home PC to a DVD
So basically, memory card overflows to laptop, laptop to home PC, and then that to DVD for archiving. Although I'm not sure I trust the DVDs for real long term storage, so I may make new ones some day.
For online storage & sharing albums with friends I use Phanfare (http://www.phanfare.com). I upgraded their unlimited storage which I think is maybe $80 or $90 a year. Their slide shows are great, because you can upload songs/mp3s directly from your home PC / iTunes to the slideshows.
It all works pretty well for me.
I can only hope that the right people in government see this and continue to help improve transparency in as many areas of government as possible. Added government transparency can only bring improvement.
On the other hand I don't advocate 100% transparency. To me it's the same reason why women don't reveal to everyone they're pregnant the instant they find out. Instead, once they decide they're going to have the baby and they have a good idea it's going to work out, then they let others know. I feel like government should have the same levels of privacy, but not much beyond that.
If we eliminated time zones and the globe were all on the same time.
The worst are people that cram around the boarding area and / or try to board when it's not their turn. Sometimes these people get waved through, but sometimes not. And if they don't get turned around to wait for their turn they end up blocking the people that could be getting seated in the back of the plane.
I always thought it would be great to have sort of a "bad boarder" or detention area to corral people off to the side of the gate that tried boarding at the wrong time. Just a nice little waiting area that they direct you to stand in and wait. And then once the entire plane has boarded you and all your non-boarding in time friends can join. And then everyone could give them a nice Nelson-style "Hah hah" laugh as they walked bye.
Death once had a near-Game-Boy experience.
I disagree. I don't think Radiohead care about the money anymore. They could (although doubtful) make millions more off the downloads, but would that really matter? It's their message that they care about most. The press. The fact that people are talking about it. It's putting your foot down to take a stand. It's the amount of downloads and influence it has on other bands and the public that will decide if it was worth it.
As big a Radiohead fan as I am, I impatiently downloaded the torrent about a week ago. The album is great, so I went to the site to plunk down my 5 quid. I'm not sure removing the torrent download with the one from radiohead.com does anything for me, but it feels a lot better in principle.
Google has some great examples on their API website, but it takes some searching around to find more complex code depending on what you want to do. For my own personal art website, I was able to create a separate XML file of all the photos (http://gregsdigital.com/markers.xml), their coordinates, and other random data for generating a pop-up window when you click on the image. Feel free to steal all the code you want:
http://gregsdigital.com/gallery2.html
I was fortunate enough to remember exactly where I was when I took each photo, and it's nice being able to view the satellite shot of where the photo was actually taken.
...had a great article on this back in September of 2003, interviewing people from all over the globe who were getting benefits out of MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative:
? pg=1&topic=&topic_set=
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/mit.html
A nice read.
Exactly - the same way if drinking makes you more angry and upset, you could show how drinking shortens life span. It's really on an individual basis, but I think it's safe to say that having a few drinks every day will cheer most people up, which probably has a much greater affect of increasing longevity than the alcohol itself.
Check out the worldwide recommendations for drinking. Currenty (as far as this chart is concerned), the # of drinks men should consume is "no more than two drinks per day", and "no more than one drink per day" for women.
http://www.drinkingandyou.com/site/uk/biggy.htm
It would be interesting to find out what types of drinks this included, and / or what types yielded different results. For some reason I'm sure consuming the same amount of alcohol found in Absinthe is a lot more different than the same amount in wine or beer.
I hope some day we find the ability to broadcast high-strength connections to countries where the Internet is filtered. If only we could make it as easy as getting a wireless card you could connect anywhere in the world unfiltered, then all information would truly be free.
...that IT should own deployments. That being said, this assumes that DEV has made strict guidelines clear instructions, and foolproofed their release. There also needs to be a fully tested system in place for rolling out changes and rolling them back.
I work for a small software company that provides software for doing exactly this, and run into these questions and scenarios at every client I go to. Even when the instructions for deploying a release are 20 pages long and extremely complicated and labor intensive, you still don't see development applying it. My job is to make it a simple hand off process where DEV packages the release (in our software) and hands it off to the deployment team, who in turn executes the job against the production environment. If there are problems deployment can roll the changes back and let DEV debug any issues.
I am always amused at how overdone "*insert company name here* to try an *insert market dominating / news headline catching product here* killer" headlines (and similar) are. Especially when it comes to things like Google, MySpace, or iTunes. First of all, how can one new produt or website possibly come out to actually "kill" one of these brands? Don't sell by the headline, sell by the content. The real killers are lawsuits.
All attacks are a cry for help.
I hate it when another company, or entity for that matter, resorts to attacking hte other. Whether it be in business, politics, or even daily life, it's just ugly, unprofessional, and lowers both parties involved.
Aspirin doesn't seem to have the same effect on people in England. If you haven't read Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot, I highly suggest you do. It talks about how strong the mind is in regards to personal health and getting sick. From the book:
"The placebo effect may also be affecting is in far vaster ways then we realize, as is evidenced by a recent and extremely puzzling medical mystery. If you have watched any television at all in the last year or so, you have no doubt seen a blitzkreig of commercials promoting aspirin's ability to decrease the risk of heart attack. There is a good deal of convincing evidence to back this up, otherwise television censors, who are real sticklers for accuracy when it comes to medical claims in commercials, wouldn't allow such copy on the air. This is all well and good. The only problem is that aspirin doesn't seem to have the same affect on people in England. A six-year study of 5,139 British doctors revealed no evidence that aspirin reduces the risk of heart attack... Whatever the case, don't stop believing in the prophylactic benefits of aspirin. It still may save your life."
I'm not sure what this says directly about Americans, but using this data it seems very apparent to me how powerful beliefs can be when it comes to affecting personal health. Whether it be commericals showing us people sneezing and coughing because of allergy season, or someone not getting enough sleep, the mind can be very powerful in convincing the body it needs these medicines in order to get better.
I highly suggest anyone read more about the powerful effects of placebos. That will change your ideas about getting sick.
... or as Bush calls it: "Innernets"
...And if they didn't have to pay taxes, it would have been almost double. That is some serious cash for the government.
I heard a rumour the other day, and I have to say I was delighted when I heard it. My friend told me that Marriott is taking customers into the 21st century by spiking nanobots into their shampoos so that guests can be tracked throughout the hotel and provided services without even presenting a room key. For example, I noticed it right away at my current stay when I approached the concierge lounge and the doors were open. I was greeted by the attendant, and offered food, drinks, snacks, and all the television I could watch. I saw several episodes of Jeopardy and America's Funniest Videos. The video that won on Tuesday night was this lady jumping around doing half-cartwheels and doing a face plant after receiving a diamond ring. What a good laugh that was.
My point is that I was greeted without showing any identification, room key, or stating my name or room number. How else would the concierge have known? I figured my friend was right - nanobots. I think putting nanobots in the shampoo is ingenious, since not only is the process seamlessly integrated into a normal routine of all guests, but they are undetected by the human eye and harmless to the scalpal regions. Imagine all the possibilities - no more room keys, knowing when young children venture into the pool area without supervision, and express checkout - all because of sensors interacting with the nanobots from the shampoo.
I'm sure that there are all sorts of exciting surprises to come. If you want to send me some of them, that would be fantastic. I can say that I hope you at least never replace your real staff with robot staff, because I find they're all super friendly and a pleasure to talk to. I think we're at least a few years off from having robots like that!
Thanks,
Greg
whatisslashdotting.com was slashdotted today when Google displayed a whatisslashdotting link on their homepage. The server was fixed, but then was slashdotted again when news.com reported on the slashdotting. After traffic slowed down and the site was restored, Slashdot reported on the news story and the site was slashdotted. Amused with these occurences, Wired reported on the future of web traffic and linking, referring to the site and causing another slashdotting. Slashdot, who then posted the Wired article about itself, took the site down again for the final time.
It's too bad the creator of the image didn't show what sort of resolution you could get using normal film. Even with the progress of digital cameras, I think we're still far from that sort of quality.
I agree. When I first started reading The Elegant Universe (http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall98/universe.h tm), I'd go to bed and couldn't sleep because my brain was going a million miles an hour thinking about everything I'd just read. The first third of the book introduces you to some amazing stuff, such as some of Einstein's ideas about time travel, numerous dimensions, and basic physics.
The second two thirds are a bit more complex and I began to lose interest. It spent a lot of time talking about the Theory of Everything and how that seems to be the Holy Grail of physics these days. It also got into some extra-dimension stuff which was cool.
Overall it's definitely worth reading. Like I said, the first third is mind blowing, and the rest is interesting enough to keep reading.
Has anyone seen this forward? I thought of it after reading this post:
"Why didn't I think of this?
When you get ads in your phone or utility bill, include them with the payment. Let them throw it
away.
When you get those pre approved letters in the
mail for everything from credit cards to 2nd mortgages and junk like that, most of them come with postage paid return envelopes, right?
Well, why not get rid of some of your other junk
mail and put it in these cool little envelopes!
Send an ad for your local dry cleaner to American
Express.
Or a pizza coupon to Citibank. (I especially liked
this!)
If you didn't get anything else that day, then
just send them their application back!
If you want to remain anonymous, just make sure
your name isn't on anything you send them.
You can Send it back empty if you want to just to
keep them guessing!
Eventually, the banks and credit card companies
will begin getting all their junk back in the mail.
Let's let them know what it's like to get junk
mail, and best of all THEY'RE paying for it! Twice!
Let's help keep our postal service busy since they
say e-mail is cutting into their business, and that's why they need to increase postage again!
Send this to a friend or two or three...or fifty..."
Shortly after I started doing this I began noticing a "customer location code" printed on the back of some of the envelopes, with a message about tampering with the contents of the envelope. I also noticed that they got creative and started printing your address on the opposite side of what needed to be shown through the hole in the envelope when you send it back to them. I got around this though, and still send dirty tissues, shoelaces, etc..., along with some of the ideas mentioned above...