In learning new things there are always mistakes. I have become so used to taking a certain kind of picture with my other cameras that I had forgotten how much fun making common mistakes can be. Not that I am even approaching proficiency with them, still very far from it. But I have learned how to adjust more quickly. Yesterday, I ended up taking pictures that resembled the images I made when I first got my point-and-shoot: overexposed, blurry, out of focus, and plenty to choose from.
I wish I had been more careful when building my photo libraries. The command to send a picture to the trash in iPhoto is Command-Delete. That is the same key command that is used to return them to the library from the trash, without any warning that you're doing so. Go Apple!
So, only after amassing one 200GB photo library did I realize that I had been going though my photos and deleting them only to be putting them right back where they came from; more lost hours of life. I have had moderately increased success with my secondary library but there are still hundreds and hundreds of useless pictures, mostly large, fine-quality jpegs.
I suppose the thing to do would be to export them as lower quality images, keeping only the better ones in their current state. It's not as if I spend any time printing any of them out. It is nice to double click on them and see them fill the computer screen without loss of quality. There's that, I suppose.
We were once told that hard drive size would just increase and increase. Now, everybody wants to store your data for you somewhere in a dream. If they can just convince everybody to pay for "cloud" storage for the rest of their lives then all will be settled. It's better than tobacco, they say. The people who have amassed enormous libraries of music, films and still images will end up paying far more than they would have for local storage and everybody else will pay a monthly fee to access what they already own. The world is such a perpetual rip-off at times that I question how anybody keeps their sanity. Most of them actually seem quite pleased with the way things are going. They always cite "convenience"...
How convenient it will be to one day pay others to keep your wealth for you.
Well, I suppose hard drives cost money too, and they're not made very well, many of them. Right now I need about a 20TB RAID system, set up in type I duplexed redundancy with independent disc controllers.
Oh no, I promised myself I would never do that here.
A regular reader was telling me what an API is the other day. It was cute. I had told her that I didn't want to bore her with the details of my job and she questioned me further on the specifics. After listing a variety of things that I deal with on fairly a regular basis she came back to me a little later and announced that she knows what an Application Programming Interface is. Adorable. We once worked on a college degree together. I think we got our bachelor's in lit. at NYU, if memory serves.
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