iPhoto to Aperture migration?

May 11, 2007

There have been a crop of resources about migrating from iPhoto to Aperture or using the two applications together lately. I'll be taking a look as I've been using iPhoto of late to manage the photo libraries and would be interested in using Aperture some more. Today's link is to an Apple webinar on the topic. The June 2007 Macworld also has an article but the magazine is not posted on the company's site yet. Sometime soon I hope to settle on one of these tools or iView Media Pro as a means for organizing our large photo collection. As conceptualized at this point I see putting the media on a shared drive attached to an Airport Extreme base station as a shared disk.

The other shared disk will be devoted to getting rid of paper and scanning it all into a central storage location.

Mob turns on Google

May 10, 2007

It seems the lynch mob after Google this morning over this result. It seems that if you search for "She Invented" in Google it returns "Did you mean He Invented?" at the top of the results. Of course with little research many are running off suggesting this is some kind of evil, anti-feminine plot. In reality it has far more to do with how Google spell check works. As that page points out when you search for "United Stats" it asks if you meant "United States". It isn't that "United Stats" has a mis-spelled word but rather that most people who search for "United Stats" modify their search to "United States". This brings up the question of how many searches one would have to do to game the system. Imagine what could be done with searches for "bad companies" and having "Did you mean our main competitor" pop up. Maybe that's the next step in search engine optimization/marketing -- blackhat version.

America's secret

May 8, 2007

Marketplace had a great commentary yesterday about American's unwillingness to talk about money problems. It seems more people file bankruptcy than divorce yet we're far more secretive about the challenges we have with finances than when something goes terribly wrong in the family.

Groups of groups

May 7, 2007

My latest wishlist for a module for Drupal is for an easy way to have users choose, or be assigned, membership in one of a group of groups that would exclude being a member of another group in the same category.

One way to think of this is I'd like to have a set of groups for political party and a set of groups for state. Democrats in Nevada can join the group Democrats and Nevada but can't be in the Republicans group. Ideally a user could change their membership and in so doing would relinquish their membership in the the other group in the same category.

Living in a small town

May 4, 2007

Yesterday the phone rang and the caller reminded me just what a special place living in a rural area is. "Is that your Honda parked at the corner?" a neighbor asked. I thought for a moment and answered that it likely was. Sarah was heading over the hill with a colleague and likely parked near the intersection to save some mileage and pick up the car on the way home. "Do you need help getting it home? Is everything OK?" were the next words from my neighbor.

This is what living in the Rural West is all about. With the engine still warm a neighbor had seen the car and called to see if they could help. In helping out a neighbor recently after their shop was broken into Sarah said "We take care of our own". In rural towns that is absolutely true. It is good to be home.

Something is rotten....

May 3, 2007

The UNLV newspaper "The Rebel Yell" has a brief note today that UNLV's dean of liberal arts, Ed Shoben, was forced out of his position today. I haven't had the opportunity to work directly with Dean Shoben but I have worked with his wife Professor Shoben who is an outstanding educator and just plain brilliant. From what little I know of Dean Shoben it is hard to imagine what could possibly have caused this situation. I hope it can be worked out shortly as I'm quite certain UNLV will be stronger if we keep a good dean.

May 2007