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Sunday, May 30, 2004 |
In my whole career of exercising regularly, 3-4 times per week, for the past 15 years, never once, after having completed my workout, have I though "I really wished I had skipped exercising today".
11:50:04 PM 
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After much searching, I finally found software that gives me tiled, full-resolution (not thumbnail) views of my photos, to rapidly select the keeper from a burst series. I spent several hours downloading and trying various items of freeware or shareware, with no luck whatsoever. I also ran my idea by various friends, mostly receiving blank stares, but one of my friends came through.
The irony is that Adobe Photoshop has the feature. I had looked at the eval version of PhotoShop--supposed to be a full working version, except it drastically limits the number of photos you can import--and didn't find it. Turns out that was a feature removed from the eval version! Doh!, Adobe. How can I evaluate what I can't see?! (Note: this is only in the 2.0 version of PSA.)
Anyway, it works pretty well, well enough that I paid good money ($35, after rebate) for Photoshop Album. I still like iMatch better (having already traversed the iMatch learning curve), so I use PSA just for that feature. Oh, I haven't used it yet, but it's printing is very nice--given a selected set of photos (cropped to arbitrary sizes), and paper size (e.g., 8.5 x 11), it will optimize the number of photos per page. Very convenience.
11:48:33 PM
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Unbeliveable, I am caught up on digital photo processing. Or maybe I should say "current"...because "caught up" might seem to imply that I had worked off the backlog that existed before I adopted current tools and workflow. Those will take a while--and that's just 10 months of digital, let's not even talk about all the traditionall-developed photos that need to be scanned.
10:57:15 PM
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I was pretty much born a "PC bigot". I used the TRS-80, and Apple IIe. They were fun. Then I got to RPI, a top-tier undergraduate engineering college, and it was stricly mainframesville. I hated it. No fun at all. I avoided computing. (RPI was behind the times then, the Computer Science department was still part of the Math department).
I entered the workforce just as it was becoming evident that PCs were on their way to displacing mainframes. (In fact, this was the time the term "PC bigot" was coming to the fore.) I still didn't like mainframes. I had never actually learned Cobol, but I was definitely in the group that thought mainframe Cobol programming was b-o-r-i-n-g.
Now, with 15 years' hindsight, I can see how, in at least certain ways, maybe Cobol programming on the mainframe might not have been so bad. The way systems are developed now, the pile of abstractions is so high, and there are SO many existing systems to interface with, plus all the GUI concerns, that it is impossible to do any meaningful amount of work on your own. Almost every step of the way, you have to coordinate with lots of other people. Hard to get into "the zone", because just as you are getting there, you have to wait on someone else. It was different back in the batch, mainframe, Cobol days.
10:13:30 PM
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I still have a question about shutter lag on digicams. If auto-focus is the main culprit, why is it worse with digital than the comparable film cameras? In either case, the camera has the overhead of auto-focusing. If anything, I would have though that Moore's law would have made the auto-focus on today's $250 digital camera better than the equivalent-priced auto-focus of 10 years ago.
The only thing I can think of is that film cameras used infrared to auto-focus, while digicams use the the CCE (I read something about this somewhere, but am too tired and lazy at the moment to track it down.) I think the CCD has a few advantages (one of them being that it is already a sunk cost, versus the added cost, however small, of an infrared AF system) versus infrared, so maybe that is it.
12:19:12 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Erik Neu.
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