2007
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Consistency is important. You want to make sure that regardless of camera, subject or any other variable there is a consistent way to find a photo.
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Uniqueness of photo name is important. Even though the directory structure would allow for multiple files with the same name, you should guarantee that every file is unique and “fully qualified” for each individual photo.
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Backup management is handled most simply through your file structure. I don’t like to rely on fancy backup programs to know what has been backed up or not, I like to be able to achieve this through chronology.
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Your photos live in a root directory. This could be anywhere and just identifies the home of all photos.
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Start your directory structure with the year. There should be a year for every year you have photos. This cascades into months and finally days.
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The “day directory” itself is typically auto-created by your importing software but it likely won’t have the a title for it (e.g. “Around House”). I add this myself, and I have an additional trick in that I don’t add that text until I’m done doing post-processing on those photos (purging, keywords, metadata, etc). The other reason to add a title is to give you some visibility on what you are looking at when you are just looking at your directory structure.
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The filename itself is really simple. I always use YYYYMMDD (year, month, day), dash, HHMMSS (hour, minute, second), dash, and lastly the serial number of the photo from the camera. The serial number is important since you may take photos in burst mode and have more than one in a second. Or, if you are shooting with multiple people and multiple cameras, and happen to take a photo in the same second, you are still unique. I could put more here (camera serial number, ISO, etc. but I’ve never found it necessary). The completeness of the timestamp inside the filename is great. I can always figure out the full path to any file just using it’s filename.
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The last “Other” is a catch all. Sometimes I get copies of photos that other people take. I don’t typically interleave these with my photos, and instead just drop them in the Other directory. This is a catch-all for such photos, sometimes even having directories inside other like “Bob’s Trip to Alaska”, that is all grouped together. The other directory is last which is helpful for backup.
At Oceans 13
Tammy declares that I cannot wear my new fishing shirt to work, citing that “there has to be a line somewhere”.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Watching AllThingsD Gates/Jobs interview. Transcript.
Getting even happier with my iTunes-centric music world. I should have caved years ago. 🙂
Mazie's First Baseball Game
Grandpa Bruce came into town for the Memorial Day weekend. It was a nice time, and the most time that Mazie has gotten to spend with Grandpa Bruce since he lives so far away. I think the highlight of the weekend was the Twins game. Mazie’s very first baseball game and the Twins put a “W” on the board for her.
Alona, Bruce and I went to the game and Tammy hung out with Mazie while she finished her nap. Mazie and Tammy joined at the top of the 7th inning which was perfect timing for her. There is just no way she could have sat through an entire baseball game. I got to have some great Dad time with Mazie on my lap. I explained that our guy throws the ball to this other guy and that one of their guys stood in the middle and tried to hit it with the bat. If he did hit it, our other guys out there would try to catch it. Baseball redux for a 2 year old. I brought my crazy camera lens and got some great photos.
Shortly after she arrived the Twins had a big play and drove 2 runs in. The crowd roared with enthusiasm and Mazie was a little freaked out but held it together with a lot of thumb sucking and me holding her. I think she actually had a pretty good time, particularly when we got some ice cream. 🙂
Cold Press Coffee
I had a great coffee moment today that I just have to share. It’s worthy of sharing because there is information here that is new to me, and it highlights why small, local coffee shops are great.
I have two “coffee moments” each day. The first one is at home with my DeLonghi Espresso machine that I’m still loving. Two shots easily obtained with the press of a button. Just great. The second one is in the afternoon with a quick walk to One on One and get some afternoon espresso.
It’s summer now, or at least summer enough, and I’ve now switched to iced drinks in the afternoon. My typical drink is iced espresso. It used to be a triple shot over ice, but I’ve brought it down to a double shot over ice to reduce the shakes later in the evening (too much caffeine!).
I like my iced espresso, but it’s not very much liquid and just disappears too fast for me. So, I presented my problem to our favorite barista.
me: So, I want an iced drink – but there just isn’t much liquid in iced espresso. What do I do?
barista: Well, you could add water to the espresso.
me: That sounds horrible.
barista: Or how about iced coffee?
me: Brew sucks.
barista: Hmm… how about a cold press?
me: Huh? What in the world is a cold press?
barista: It’s great. We take a pound of beans and cold brew it with 80 ounces of water for 12 hours…
The conversation about cold press continued for quite a while. I got one, and it was perfect! The cold press is never heated, and slow brewed for 12 hours and then pressed through a cloth filter. It’s incredibly smooth and wonderful. I’ve got a new favorite drink!
Your not going to find something like this at most coffee shops. And your also not going to find such a helpful person with their headset on punching your order through their assembly line. What a great discovery. Try a cold press the next time you can. If you like serious coffee on the colder side, you’ll love it.
Canadian Fishing Trip Intro
I will soon be departing on a Canadian Fishing Adventure. T-minus nine days before I head out with my father-in-law and all my brother-in-laws to Canada for a week of fishing giant fish. Really giant fish. Fish that, if you are not careful, can severely injure you. I’m not an expert fisherman. I’m not even a basic fisherman. I haven’t fished for a decade, and this trip will double the amount of time I’ve fished in probably my entire life. This fills me with some trepidation.
However, I’m also really excited. This isn’t the type of trip I would typically go on so it’s fun to try something completely outside of your typical zone. Plus, fishing is loaded with gear and I’m a gear addict so that is fun. We’ll be departing for our trip and heading into the great unknown with a sun that never sets and more water than land, GPS in hand of course.
We’ll be eating a lot of fish. I’m going to pack some extra stuff just in case. I’ve ordered some wacky natural bars to take along called Figamajigs. They are supposedly pretty good, and should be a nice break if desired.
We are going to be totally off the grid. Forget the Internet. Forget phone lines. Forget cellular. There is a little bit of power via a solar panel and a generator that can be started from time to time. Digital cameras and such can be charged, but that’s about it. This will be the longest that I’ll have gone offline for quiet some time. The urge to pick up a satellite phone is strong, but the price point is enough to push that urge aside. Plus I’d probably be stoned if I showed up with some crazy phone.
I’ve got a little bit of additional gear to get or arrive via UPS. We are limited to 80 pounds of gear and I’m probably going to be right up against that with fishing stuff, photography stuff and clothes. I’m going to journal while I’m there and post when I return. I’m looking forward to the northern waters, really huge fish, time with the guys and giant fish stories to lie about when I return.
2007 Olson Family Weekend
This year was the 4th annual Olson Family Weekend! This year was Angie’s turn to plan and there is only one more year before we loop back around for the next round of trips. It was a great weekend and Angie did a great job putting it all together.
We had a great weekend up at the Lundeen’s cabin (huge thanks to Lundeen Sr. for allowing us to overtake their cabin!). The cabin was cramped with 11 people and 3 dogs, but it added to the fun actually. The weather was sketchy but that didn’t slow anyone down either.
Rather than reading, go take a look at the pictures from the
weekend, or
watch a couple of videos of Mazie from the weekend (thanks for the
videos Angie!) [I removed the videos from YouTube].
Serious Development in JavaScript
JavaScript is a really powerful development environment. Really.
Many developers don’t agree with that statement. I think there are a couple of reasons for that. First, the word “script” appears in the name of the language and developers are often pejorative of anything with the script word in it. The logic goes something like scripting may be fine for hacking out little things, but cannot be used to build real applications.
I think the other black eye for JavaScript was that the first uses of the language were purely trivial. Remember the first time you had snowflakes falling on a web page? Or how about going beyond blinking text to text just jumping all over the place. True, the first implementations using the language were primitive.
There are other issues that you could highlight. There are no threads. It’s not compiled. Namespace is very loose. But this all misses the point that some of the most sophisticated and sexiest web applications out there are largely built in JavaScript. I personally spend a lot of time everyday now in JavaScript applications thanks to Google. Developers need to focus more on this language as a serious development environment, and the tools for it need to catch up. Venkman is nice for debugging, but more is needed. Further tools like Google Gears will extend JavaScript even further including off-line.
The May 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine featured a cover article called Create Advanced Web Applications With Object-Oriented Techniques (whew, mouthful) that touched on building JavaScript in a more sophisticated way. It’s a good read, and will start your thinking down the path of using JavaScript for more than snowflakes falling off your mouse pointer.
Congrats to my sister Alona for passing her social work exam!
Going Offline with Google Gears
I just spent a little while getting caught up on a variety of sites with Google Reader. Reader is my RSS tool of choice. This isn’t all that special, except that I did it while sitting on an airplane.
Last night Google released the first “developer release” (alpha?) of Google Gears, and along with it Google Reader got a revision to allow you to go offline using Gears. The experience was pretty amazing. Reader works just as you would expect it to. You launch your web browser, go to the Reader URL and instead of the expected error since your not online, you actually get the site but in offline mode.
This is a first release for Reader using the offline capability so it’s a little overly modal (either offline or not) and some features are frustratingly unavailable, particularly marking all items read. To my surprise sharing items is available.
Google Gears, the technology that makes this all possible, provides a nice suite of features to make this all work. I’m assuming that the Googleplex is hard at work on making an offline version of GMail, it’s the most obvious next candidate. I did a little poking around the developer documentation for Gears and I was really excited to see that all the hooks are there for ‘sometimes offline’ applications. With a little bit of ingenuity we should see web applications that seamlessly go online and offline as needed. I’d love to see this in a number of tools – all the 37 Signals applications, Wordpress, Google Calendar.
I think this is a big moment. The Internet is nearly pervasive, but there are times when it may be unavailable. The biggest net benefit of technology like Gears may be in making applications much more resilient to transient network failures – in addition to the offline experience.
It will be worthwhile to keep a close eye on this space.
Update
I used this on the flight back with a lot more unread items and it again worked great. Going offline took more time since there was more data. The lack of a mark all as read feature in offline Reader is a real pain though.
Update 2
I tried getting this going in Firefox on Vista and the installer fails. The Mac OS X Firefox install is a breeze and is just a browser plugin. The Windows install is a separate installer. YMMV.
Used the BlackBerry 8800 + GPS + Google Local to get coffee in completely random locale. Now watching myself walk on the map on the BlackBerry. Geek++
Car service is a fully decked black suburban! I feel like I’m in the secret service. Where is POTUS?
iTunes 7.2 just showed up in Soaftware Update with DRM-free downloads. Guessing I know what Jobs said at AllThingsD.
Dissapointed that it seems very hard, to impossible, to get a plug-in converted Toyota Prius.
My Robot and Steven Wright
A friend of mine forwarded this screen capture from a friend of his who grabbed this great Twitter moment. It seems my robot and Steven Wright (also on Twitter) are on similar wavelengths.
Drive to Work Take 2
Time for “Take 2” of my drive to work time elapased video!
I really liked the first take at this, but the camera was mounted very poorly. Think tape combined with a rear-view mirror and you get the idea. It was swinging around and shaking with abandon, which caused a ridiculous video. I was looking at getting a Gorillapod for my trip to Canada in a couple of weeks and it was also the perfect tripod to mount a camera on my dash. This, combined with an overcast day that gave more even light and a closer position to the windshield to eliminate a lot of the grime on the glass made for a significantly better video.
For comparison, here is the first one as well. Try hitting play on both of these at the same time to see the differences.
Directory Structure for Digital Photos
It seems that a lot of people have a hard time settling on a file structure to use for their digital photos. There are a number of different approaches, and the tools that you use will heavily influence this but I think it’s important to settle on something independent of your tools since those will change over time.
There are a couple of things you want to make sure to accomplish with the directory structure that you use for your photos.
I’ve been using the following structure for over 5 years and I’ve found it to work very well. I’ve used it with a number of different photo management programs, including my current favorite, Adobe Lightroom. It is inherently driven off of the timestamp of the photos.
Let me highlight the five critical sections of this (cross-reference to numbers above, sorry Tufte).
The backup strategy for this structure is a simple top-down flow. I never backup a month until it’s completed. The great thing here is that once the time has passed, the directory and files in those directories are not changed so you don’t have to worry about going backwards in time. (Note, I also mirror files every night, and this is automated to other discs.)
Just bought greenrequest.com.
Got home after running (and walking) my first 5k in forever.