Category: Random

Because I don’t think I could afford to buy more than one or two of these.

Seriously, what sort of crazy screw-up or bug had this posted at $263?

I find it interesting the different units used in different industries and for different products. For example, I learned today that dehumidifiers are rated in pints of capacity. Not quarts, or gallons, or liters, but pints.

We ran into something similar when we were in France because wine and beer was sold by the centiliter, rather than the milliliter or fluid oz.

As Americans are used to ounces and milliliters, the first time it took a second for me to do the conversion in my head from fluid ounces to milliliters ((Especially because my conversion train went like this: “Ok, it’s “A pint a pound, the world around” and a pound is 16 oz and divide that by 2.2 to get kilograms which is is a thousand milliliters and a beer is only 12 oz so I need to multiply by 2/3 and carry the one and&ellip;”)) and then drop the decimal to get centiliters.

Wandering around my house in my mind, I have paint in both gallons and fluid ounces, milk in gallons and a liter of vodka. There are dry goods in ounces and grams and pounds, and at least one toxic chemical that is sold by volume (cubic centimeters) rather than weight. My house is an argument for basic math skills all by itself!

But dehumidifiers are measured in pints.

My purpose for the craft weekend that we had a few weeks ago is now done.

As I’ve yet to figure out a way to make theme changes to my blog in invisible ways to you, I’ll warn you that there may be some odd seeming stuff appearing here in the next few days. I apologize for any breakedness that occurs.

And yes, I’m too lazy to install a webserver on my own computer to do these things locally before uploading them.

Last night’s State of the Union address was standard and predictable: high-minded appeals to a better future and how we’re going to get there, with few specifics. States of the Union are never very specific, however and the Republican responses to it were also predictable and standard. Honestly, yesterday was a pretty boring day for politics, nationally, and the theme of the day was “reduce spending”.

Georgia, however, has an interesting stake in this reduce-spending game. You may not be aware, but the Port of Savannah is one of the busiest container ports in the United States, generating a lot of jobs for Georgia. You may also not be aware that we are three years away from the completion of the Panama Canal Expansion project, which will allow supersized container vessels to more easily traverse the oceans. Georgia has an interest in attracting these enormous ships to our ports, but in order to do so, the Savannah River has to be dredged. The current depth of the river is 42 feet, but there needs to be 48 feet in order to pass the new ships.

This is an expensive proposition. Cost estimates I’ve seen range from $500 million to $800 million (here’s one). Georgia wants the federal government to kick in a good portion of that.

This has run our home-grown congressional legislation, who are mostly Republican, squarely into a philosophical quandry: How to get the money while still appearing to reduce spending?

On the face of it, individually I don’t see that Georgia Congresscritters will have any real problem at home if they push for both. Their direct constituents (i.e., the ones who will vote for them in two years) will be happy if a huge glut of federal spending comes their way. However, this will present itself with more difficulty in a national election. The concept of the Albatross comes to mind.

My personal Congressman, Tom Graves, who is now on the appropriations committee has stated that he will not support an earmark for the port. This differs from both my Senators, who will. You may recall back in November there was a symbolic pledge by both the House and Senate Republicans to swear off earmarks for two years. However, one of those little things that make such a difference is that there was nothing in that pledge that said they had to vote against bills that do contain earmarks. If somehow those earmarks ended up in there, they could just whistle a happy tune and claim they had nothing to do with it.

How will this all fall out? Who knows? Politics is a slippery game. We’ll just have to wait and see.

I get some good sunrises at work.

30 Aug 2013 update: Note that this discussion has been deprecated by Photo Supreme supplanting Idimager. The following discussion isn’t relevant anymore.

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The Situation

Last week I ranted about Idimager. Since then, it has actually come around a bit. Two things occurred to enable this transition:

1. We had snowpocalypse, which meant I spent a lot of time indoors
2. I broke myself, which meant I spent a lot of time indoors

I used that time to mess around with Lightroom and Idimager and my image databases. I learned a few things that seem to make using Lightroom less attractive, and using Idimager + Lightroom also less attractive.

Lightroom is awesome

I’ll start by saying that Lightroom worked smoothly, quickly, and reasonably intuitively “out of the box”. If I were not currently invested in Idimager both in money and time, we’d not be having this conversation; I’d be using Lightroom without any qualms.

Things that make Lightroom Awesome:

• The button placements make sense. That doesn’t surprise me as this is a flagship product of Adobe, complimentary to Photoshop; I’m sure they’ve spent money on usability testing
• If you have any familiarity with Photoshop, you already know the terminology of Lightroom
• It works, smoothly, and doesn’t have conniptions sometimes when it decides something is resource intensive

Things that make Lightroom less Awesome:

• Cost: It’s $300
• In my case, 2 gB worth of additional data that is just the catalog of the images I’ve uploaded. Note that I haven’t uploaded my entire catalog; I’ve done maybe half. Also, again probably only relevant in my particular case, but that 2 gB worth of catalog comprises a gazillion different folders and files, which makes…my…backup…run…sloooowwwwwww…

Still Haven’t Purchased Lightroom

You might surmise that, given my previous post, I was done done done with Idimager. I imagine that there was a bit of frustration evident in the writing. That was intentional. At the time I wrote that posting, I fully intended to get things to a stage where I knew my Idimager catalog database was good, then port everything to Lightroom and be done with it. However, things interfered. Things, such as:

• I had to figure out how to be sure that all my tags (keywords) in Idimager were placed correctly in the image XMP/IPTC files so that Lightroom would have the keywords I’d spent the last year and a half producing
• I had to figure out if there was a way I could still use Idimager as a tagging application (see below) while using Lightroom for everything else
• I had to figure out how to do a few things to a couple of cool pictures before uploading them to Flickr, and ended up figuring out how to do them in both Lightroom and in Idimager

I’ll come back to these things in a moment. First, let me list why Idimager is Awesome.

Idimager Has Excellent Points, Too

Things that make Idimager Awesome:

• Tagging methods: Simply stated, the way that Idimager goes about tagging and categorizing your images is slap-bang, hands-down awesome. This one feature is the reason why I purchased the software in the first place.
• Highly malleable: You have control over Idimager that you won’t get from Adobe. Also, the developers are responsive to features requests. Again, something you won’t get from Adobe.
• Not expensive: I think the basic version is $40 and the professional is $140. I have the professional version (v5.0 as of this writing)

Things that make Idimager less Awesome:
See my previous post, but to summarize

• Unexpected errors that don’t have good documentation
• Slow and laggy at times, especially when doing large database operations
• Not at all intuitive and you have to learn by screwing up
• Too many damn features that are overwhelming
• Difficulty finding that one thing you want; the help files don’t tell you where the buttons are
• What all of the above boils down to is: Phenomenally Steep Learning Curve

What I should have mentioned in the previous posting is my other top requirement in a piece of photo-database software: Ease of Use. I don’t (didn’t!) want to spend a lot of time going through the torturous process of making dozens of mistakes to learn how the thing works. I’ve been a PC user since MS DOS and I know from personal experience just how painful it can be to learn new software, especially one with so many features. I wanted a database that was intuitive and easy to use so I could get on with creating. I don’t like being an IT monkey.

Sticking with Idimager (for now)

However, once you have taken the time (which wasn’t desired) or been forced to take the time (which is equally undesired) to learn a software package through the expedient of breaking things, fixing things, swearing, cursing, howling, and breast-beating, you’re most of the way past the majority of “why Idimager isn’t awesome” items. Through the process of trying to figure out how to get my database working for portation to Lightroom, I’ve come back around and decided to stick with Idimager.

Idimager and Lightroom Together?

One of the reasons—actually a main reason—for this turnaround is because of the fundamental awesomeness of Idimager’s tagging and cataloging function. It’s great and I’m loathe to give it up, especially because I’ve already paid for it. So, I thought, “Maybe I can keep using Idimager for downloading and for tagging, but use Lightroom for everything else.” Alas, no.

Well, I suppose I could, but it would invalidate the reason I want to use the two programs together. In my personal workflow scenario, I’d use Idimager to download images from my camera(s) and tag the individual images. These tags would get synced to the various image’s XMP/IPTC metadata files, at which point I would import the lot into Lightroom and off I would go on actual image modification, if necessary.

Here’s where that scenario breaks down: When you modify an image by (say) altering the whitebalance, Lightroom saves that to its own catalog entry for that image. It does not alter the image itself, it merely makes a dabase entry which says “when showing this image, change the color temperature to 2400 K”. This is non-destructive and allows you to come back later and recover the original image, doing other (different) things to it. Which is fine. However let’s take a wild stab in the dark that (say) yours truly was in a rush and didn’t tag all the images he needed to before doing some quick modifications in Lightroom. So, he goes back to Idimager, pulls up the images in question and slaps some new tags on them. That should work fine, right?

Right! Except that when you sync the tags back into the Lightroom catalog (which is easy) it will overwrite the image modifications you did previously, leaving you with an unaltered image—with new tags! All of the creative mods you did in a rush are now gone and you’ll have to redo them. This is not a good thing. In fact, it’s one of those “fatal flaws” that creep up in workflow. The only way this could work in the real world is if I were perfect in my tagging during download and prior to importation into Lightroom.

Yeah. Right.

So, at this moment in time, I expect that I will not be finalizing my purchase of Lightroom. I still have 23 days left on the trial, though, so expect to hear a bit more about it.

I’m GLaD that today (at least) the cake was not a lie.

In case you weren’t aware, we had a bit of snow and ice last week. I know our mail delivery person did not come to our mailbox on last Wednesday. Curious that a notice was left, according to the tracking information. Very curious.