Andy Gapin

Classified under cool things that can happen that I wasn’t expecting would be having Google send me a free laptop, but that’s what happened last week.

How I got it

As most have heard, Google has made their own operating system called Chrome OS and they put together a pilot program to get it into the hands of people while they continue the development. To get one, you can apply for the pilot program by filling out a form and hoping for the best. They are trying to get all kinds of people in the program, but I’m not sure of the specifics of how they’re choosing people. I filled out the form almost right after it went up and was hopeful, but I figured it was a long shot especially since when I answered the question asking why I’d be a unique user, I kind of gave an honest response and said that I wouldn’t be.

I expected that to be the end of it, I hadn’t heard anything so I figured I wasn’t chosen. This is where the surprise comes in, Friday night when my fiancée and I got home from our company’s holiday party, there was a box sitting on the front step. It was addressed to me which was confusing to both of us as I wasn’t waiting on anything, all the Christmas gifts that I had ordered had come already. The box was completely unmarked and the return address didn’t help–it certainly didn’t say Google on it. I was a little afraid, to be honest. I made my fiancée face the other way just in case it was something I ordered for her and had forgotten about. As I opened the box, I actually leaned back a bit, I had a slight fear that it was going to blow up in my face. I really had no idea what it was. Had I been completely sober at the time and not still a little buzzed from the party, I may have been even more careful.

When I got the box open, there was just another box inside. This box wasn’t labeled either. There was a nice graphic on one side that gave no real indication of what was inside and a lithium-ion battery warning sticker on the other side. No other markings. I was still a bit confused so I again opened the box in front of me with extreme caution and still expecting a face full of explosion. As I opened this box, the first thing that I saw was the battery and as I pulled that out, I saw a sheet of paper and the computer itself. At this point, I knew exactly what it was, but I was in utter shock. I couldn’t believe I had been selected for the pilot program. I also couldn’t believe that Google had sent me a free computer and didn’t even send me an email to let me know I had been selected–apparently, most people did get an email though.

Even though I was tired and a bit buzzed still, I immediately powered the machine on and started playing with it. How could I not? It was neat and my fiancée quickly grabbed it from me and logged in with her account too.

Awesome.

The review

How could I not review this thing, right? So where to start? Hmm…I’ll start with the outside. If you’ve read any reviews of this thing so far, you’ll know that the aesthetics are view simple. The computer is all matte black and entirely unbranded. It looks amazing, sort of reminiscent of the black MacBook. There are no fingerprints left as you handle it. It’s wonderful. Appearance-wise, computers don’t get much nicer than this. I truly love it. One thing that you would never even think about until you’re presented with an unbranded computer is that if you’re not paying attention, it’s easy to try to open it from the wrong side. When you pick it up, it’s not immediately apparent which side the hinge is on. I’ve made this mistake a few times.

It’s a bit bigger than my Asus Eee 1101HA which makes sense since it’s a 12″ screen, but it’s comparable in weight. The machine doesn’t feel featherlight, it’s got a small bit of heft to it, but it also feels quite solid. I don’t feel like I’m going to break it…very unlike my Eee. Very nice. When you open up the lid, everything still feels pretty solid. When you close it, the top snaps down with authority and stays closed. Again, very nice. While it’s open, you’re presented with a spacious, yet simplified chiclet-style keyboard. I like the keys and this thing is a pleasure to type on–I’m actually typing this review on it. The keys feel solid under your fingers and don’t have too much travel, but there is enough to keep you from guessing if you’ve actually pressed them or not. I like typing on this thing much more than my Eee.

The most interesting part of the keyboard is the layout of the keys. Obviously, a Windows key isn’t needed so that’s gone. This frees up some room so the Ctrl and Alt keys are a bit wider. Along the top, the function keys are history and that’s okay because they don’t really have a lot of use on this machine, but they are replaced with keys for refresh, screen brightness, volume, etc. You’re not losing anything here. The caps lock key has been replaced with a search key which doesn’t bother me in the least, despite some groaning from the internet about this. The last major change to what’d you’d expect is one that bothers me though, there are no end, home, or delete keys. On my MacBook Pro, I’m used to being able to do fn-Delete for a right delete, but there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent here that I’ve found yet. Home and end can be achieved by holding down Ctrl and Alt while pressing up or down. It gets the job done, but there’s still a bit of oddball functionality loss (like being able to go to the beginning or end of a page) and annoyance here for someone who uses home and end a lot. Your average user won’t miss it, but being a software developer, I’m very used to needing to move around text quickly without the mouse. It’s become part of my everyday computer-usage. The only other negative about the keyboard is the lack of backlit keys. Though, to be fair, this isn’t really something that would be expected for this level of hardware, but it goes a long way when it’s there.

(Update: I actually took a look at the help article for all the keyboard shortcuts and the situation is much better than I originally feared. I think I’m good here…mostly.)

The trackpad is somewhat of a mixed bag. I like the feel of it under my fingers, it’s large and responsive. Not only does it feel much better than my Eee’s trackpad, but the two-finger scrolling is quick and responds well. It’s smooth instead of jerky like on the Eee. My experience here seems to be very different from most other reviews. Maybe it’s just that my expectations were for a similar experience to my Eee and not to my MacBook Pro. Anyway, you get a couple other gestures like pinch to zoom and you can do a two finger tap to right click–this doesn’t work very consistently. Unfortunately, you don’t get any three finger swipes like I’m in love with on my Mac for moving back and forward in a browser. Also, the trackpad gets very finicky when trying to select text. The best method I’ve found is to click the pad down and drag your finger while still holding it down. It works, but my hands never want to do that, they try to instead use a method more similar to what MacBooks allow–you can get away with using two fingers.

The 12″ screen is the right size and gives more resolution than a standard netbook, much nicer than the smaller screens on my most netbooks. My Eee is an 11″ model, but the extra inch makes a big difference here. Definitely worth the larger physical footprint. Additionally, it’s got a matte finish and is plenty bright. Unfortunately, that’s all I can say on the positive side for the screen. The contrast on this thing is horrible and I can’t find any adjustments for it yet. Everything feels very washed out and the vertical viewing angles are crap. There’s a very small angle that looks acceptable. Horizontal angles are quite a bit better though.

There are just a handful of ports on this thing. For what you’re going to use a cloud-only OS for, one USB port will get you by and the SD slot is nice to have, but of limited use to me since I’ll won’t be able to do any photo editing on this. Most people will be able to pop in a memory card from their camera and immediately start dumping to Picasa, Facebook, and Flickr. The machine comes with a VGA port instead of an HDMI port which is slightly disappointing. Granted, the machine doesn’t have the power to really drive HD content, but an HDMI port is a bit more useful these days than a VGA one is.

I haven’t been able to fully test the battery life yet, but it seems pretty solid. I think getting close to eight hours of life out of this thing could be a reality. The power brick is nice and small like you’d expect for a netbook so that’s nice, but I haven’t really kept it plugged in while using yet. Now that I think about it, it hasn’t seen AC power in over 48 hours and I’ve probably put four or five hours of use in since that charge. I’ve got 31% left right now. That kind of life puts the Cr-48 in the very good category. It’s more than my year and a half old MacBook Pro gets, but less than my fiancée’s 2010 MacBook and my Eee. Of course, those aren’t all fair comparisons.

Update: I forgot to mention the speakers, they’re located on the sides of the machine and get decently loud. They acceptably clear, but as would be expected, lack any bass at all.

Alright, so let’s get to the actual using it part. The Google Cr-48 is unlike using any other computer. It’s the first machine built for Google Chrome OS which attempts to make a pretty big statement in favor of computing solely in the cloud. If you think about it, most of your computer use is probably in your browser anyway and what isn’t can be moved there pretty easily.

When you turn the computer on, a cold boot takes about 15 seconds. This is the kind of thing anyone can get used to. If this is your first time using the machine, you are presented with a screen to login with your Google account. Once you put in your email and password, the computer snaps your picture and you’re off to gallivant around the internet as you please. If you use Google Chrome as your browser already and have the sync turned on, everything pulls down for you. You get your extensions, bookmarks, etc. From here on out, everything you do on the machine is in the cloud. If you use someone else’s Chrome OS machine, you’ll pick up right where you left off when you log in. When you first experience this, it’s pretty remarkable. You’ll love it.

When you close the lid, the computer almost instantly goes to sleep and when you open it back up, it’s on by the time you have the screen in position for use. You’ll love this too.

After you’re logged in, you get a Google Chrome window. That’s it. All you get is a web browser. The idea is that webapps can do everything for you. For most people, Google’s assumption (prayer, really) isn’t completely unattainable. Since Chrome OS really just lets you use a web browser, let’s talk about that. If you’re a Google Chrome (the browser) user already, you’ll feel right at home.

The browsing experience on the Cr-48 is very good. It has to be, this is all it has. Just about everything about the browsing experience is a smoother than on my Eee, but significantly slower than on my MacBook Pro or my Windows 7 desktop. There are some caveats though, flash performance leaves a bit to be desired. An Intel Atom with integrated graphics just doesn’t cut it. Low resolution videos play fine, but even 480p videos start to get a little choppy. Something that I think is a little odd is that YouTube videos don’t give you the option of 720p or 1080p. The options just don’t show. In reality, this is probably a smart move on Google’s front because I don’t think this machine would handle it very well, but therein lies the problem. Google thinks and wants the future of computing to be entirely in the cloud and media is continuing to become a bigger and bigger part of the online experience. On top of that, HD is becoming more and more important…even for video on the web. How could Google ship a machine to show off their new OS that doesn’t play HD video from their own video site? Granted, this is not a production machine–you will never be able to buy it, it’s sort of like beta hardware–, the OS is still in beta and not at v1.0 yet, and the OS is built on Linux and Adobe’s Linux support for Flash is awful.  Still, to not even allow HD video is pretty crappy. This needs to get fixed before Chrome OS can be sold with production machines.

That’s all I’ve got for now, I’m still fiddling around with this thing and trying to find some hidden stuff. I haven’t tried developer mode yet, but I’ll get to that soon.

The verdict

Factoring in that this is not production hardware and this is a beta OS still, I like the Cr-48 a lot. There are some glaring flaws here, but the overall experience is very positive. I like what Google is doing here, but like many (even former Google employee and the creator of Google) have questioned, what is the long term plan for Google Chrome OS? How will it not get swallowed up by Android which offers more and could pull off what Chrome OS offers.

For a lot of people, I think this could be all they need, but it could never be a main computer for me. My music and video libraries are way too large to be moved into the cloud in the foreseeable future and without being able to play media over my network here without setting up my server to stream via the web, Chrome OS is leaving me high and dry. Additionally, I practically live and breathe Adobe Lightroom and without being able to run that, I need something else. No webapp anytime soon will be able to take over editing of RAW files. They’re just too big to to work with via the web right now. Javascript and the internet as a whole have come a long way, but not that far. Unfortunately, this not only prevents the Cr-48 from making it as my main computer, but also prevents the it from being able to replace my Eee.

For 95% of netbook users, this could do it for them, but I need my Lightroom. I’m not going to lie, Adobe Lightroom on a netbook isn’t the best experience, but it runs and with a little patience can get you by while you’re away from home. It’s nice to have a cheap computer that I don’t need to worry about yet can still run Lightroom while I’m on vacation. When I’m away, I can dump a days’ worth of photos on there and at least start tagging them and even get some of the basic editing done. If I could do that on here, my Eee would go up for sale.

The bottom line here is still a very big like. Even though I now have six computers to my name, this one will get a solid amount of use. My MacBook Pro won’t be replaced and my Eee will still come with me when I travel, but this will be nice for browsing on the couch or in bed.

A couple of months ago, I posted about trying to figure how to organize all my photos, roughly 30k, I think. Even though I just got my first DSLR six months ago and got seriously into photography, I’ve always been a bit of a picture taker. But I never go back and look at pictures and even though my old organization technique wasn’t awful—usually a folder with the event name and some sort of date—I always had trouble finding the right picture for something when I didn’t have a specific one in mind. So I decided that one of my summer projects would be to figure this about and go through all of my pictures and tag them.

I spent some time trying to figure out the best way to do this and now that I’m about 8,500 pictures in, I think I’ve got it down pretty solid. Or at least it works and it’s already been useful for finding stuff (like pictures for the wedding site my fiancée and I are working on).

If this is the kind of thing that bores you, you should probably quit reading, but if you’re interested in photography, organization, and workflow, read on! Oh, and I’ll note that I am strictly a hobbyist when it comes to photography, so all of my photos are personal photos, nothing is professional or anything like that.

Software
What makes everything below possible is a bit of software that I was already really in love with. I’ve been using Adobe Lightroom and it’s simply amazing. Even though it is just a single application, it provides both strong post-processing and strong library management features that are both good enough to almost entirely eliminate the need for a second piece of software.

For years, I was a big supporter of Google’s Picasa which is great for photo management, but the processing and editing side of things is practically useless. I also found that it was very slow and laggy on my Mac. The feature I liked the most was the face detection, but, as good as it is, I found that this left a lot to be desired. If someone in the photo wasn’t facing the camera, Picasa doesn’t pick it up as a person. So if you want to be able to tag everyone in every photo, you still end up going through every photo manually.

With Lightroom, I just tag everyone as keyword in each photo and it’s entirely manual since Lightroom doesn’t have face detection. This would probably be an annoyance, but since I am going through every single photo anyway and keywording other stuff, I’m already in there, I can do it myself.

Other than that, Lightroom does everything that Picasa does…better and snappier. I have plugins for Facebook and Picasaweb so those are covered and with more options.

Workflow
My workflow is simple in theory, but has a few steps. Whether photos are coming in fresh from my camera or I’m working on organizing older photos, every group of photos gets three passes. One for processing, one for keywording, and one for rating.

When I import the photos, I first import them to a local temporary folder in my Mac. Eventually, everything ends up on my file server, but I’ve found that when processing the RAWs things are much faster when they files are local rather than on a network drive. RAW files are converted to DNG during the import so this step can take a little while, but it’s easier to do it here than anywhere else. At this point, it seems that DNG has caught on enough that it’s a safe file format to use for archival and I really like the idea that all data is stored in a single file rather than needing to keep an XMP sidecar file with each photo. JPGs stay as JPGs which is fine because Lightroom can store all of its edits and info in the metadata in the file, making sure that the original photo data itself is untouched.

Each photo gets processed in my first pass through the bunch. Terrible shots that are either completely out of focus, so badly exposed that they can’t be saved, or pretty much useless for any other reason are marked as rejected in this step and I don’t bother doing any processing on them. Photos from my DSLR obviously take quite a bit longer to process, but even photos from my point and shoot and phone still get run through this step incase they need some tweaking.

Once the photos are processed and ready to go, I zip through them and keyword the hell out of them. I’m trying to be very thorough with this step and erring on the side of doing too much. I also make sure that all of the location fields are set for each photo and the timestamps are correct…or at least close.

The timestamps have been a little of a pain in the ass. I was surprised to find that only a handful of really old photos didn’t have timestamps that (I believe) are correct. I was afraid that that was going to be a problem. But there have been other problems. One issue is that some events, like my Disney trip this year, have photos from multiple cameras and the time isn’t exactly synced up on them. This leaves them sequenced oddly unless I fix them. That Disney trip has photos from my DSLR, point-and-shoot, my fiancée’s iPhone, and my iPhone. I had to adjust a lot of times.

The second issue is that my point-and-shoot was somehow off by 12 hours (am/pm wasn’t set correctly) for at least six months. I’m not sure how that happened or exactly when it started, but it’s something I’ve needed to keep an eye out for as I go back through my older photos and organize them. The third issue, and the one that seems to be the most annoying, is that a lot of times the timestamps from my iPhone photos don’t make it over to Lightroom properly. I’ve noticed this is especially so when I use third party camera apps. Lightroom imports them and names the files correctly, most of the time, but shows the wrong capture time. I’m not sure what causes this, but the capture time ends up getting set to the import time. It’s very annoying.

In the final pass, I assign each picture a rating of 0-5. Since I’ve already been through all the pictures at least twice at this point, I’ve got a general idea of how good each shot is in comparison to the rest of the group. A rating of 1 or higher means that it would at least be good enough to export and/or show other people. A 2 rating is generally a decent shot that would definitely make a slideshow or Facebook or whatever if it’s a larger group of photos where it wouldn’t make sense to show everything that’s a 1 or above. Rating a photo with a 3 means that it’s one of the best of the group. 4 and 5 are reserved only for my best shots that are really good in terms of content and quality. These are my favorites and if I pulled up all the pictures of a particular keyword, these would be the best.

Also during this step, I group shots if necessary. If I snap a bunch of the exact same thing from the same angle, I’ll usually group them together with the highest rated one on top.

After that, I make sure all the metadata is saved to the file and move the files over to my server for safe-keeping.

File organization
This was one of the toughest things to make a decision on. Like everything else, once you start down a path, you’re kind of stuck, but this would undoubtedly be the toughest to make changes to.

Each photo is named with the format of YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS_O. I’ve never read of anyone naming their files like this, but I like it because even if this is all I have to go on, I can figure out very closely where a file should go. It also automatically keeps the files sorted chronologically when viewing them outside of Lightroom. The ‘O’ at the end stands for original. That’s my indication that a file is the most original version of a photo that I have and I should never make any destructive changes to it. Any other version of the file will get an ‘E’ for export or some other distinction.

My folder structure is a bit more standard. There are top-level folders for year and then folders within that for month. Within each month, I have a folder for each “event” or group of shots. Events that span days are broken into a folder for each day and if different groups of photos are taken on the same day, I break them up into their own folders. Once you’re in Lightroom, the folders don’t really matter, but at least I’ll always know where to find a particular photo I’m looking for outside of Lightroom as well.

The one issue I found with this structure was that I have tons of photos of a specific subject that are thrown in a single folder. For example, I have hundreds of pictures of my cat that I’ve randomly taken over the last couple of years. They’re all just thrown into a single folder because they’re pretty random. At first, I had a “XXXX” top-level folder with some subjects in there, but I decided that was going to end up being a bad idea, so everything gets to fit into the above structure. This means that if I take just one photo of my fiancée while she’s sitting on the couch, it gets it’s own folder (ex. “Danielle hanging out 2010-07-09″). I’ve ended up with a bunch of folders with just one photo in them, but at least it keeps everything in the same file structure.

Each event folder has at least one folder inside of it. All of the most original versions of each photo are in a folder called “original” and, again, originals do not get any destructive changes made to them. However, these originals are where all the metadata and edits are stored–the edits are saved as metadata by Lightroom, the image data isn’t touched. Exported versions would go in “processed,” but I haven’t been exporting processed versions of everything so many folders don’t have this. There may also be a “video” folder if video was taken and a “PSD” folder if I’ve done some work in Photoshop…which is extremely rare.

So an example of all that would be something like “2010/06/Father’s Day 2010-06-20/original/20100620_143523_O.dng.” You’ll notice that the event folder has the name before the day. I kind of screwed up and was way too far in when I realized I didn’t like it so I’m kind of stuck with it at this point. My only reasoning for this was that in the left sidebar in Lightroom, you can only see about 12 characters of the folder name at that level without expanding the width and taking up more workspace. I thought it would be more useful to be able to see a few letters than always being stuck seeing pretty much just the year and month. It wasn’t until too late that it hit me that I could just hide that pane altogether when I’m not actively looking for a folder and keep it fully expanded when I am. Fail.

Keywords
I’m trying to be very thorough with my keywording. I’ve got tons of them organized hierarchically in Lightroom, but they could use a little more organization at this point as some groups of keywords expanded way past what I thought they would. I’ll take care of this soon.

Every photo is tagged with the full names of every person in the photo (that I know, of course) and various other content is tagged as well. Anything that I think I could ever want to use to pull up a photo is tagged. Places and locations beyond the simple location fields, landmarks, things that are being done, things people are wearing, references to anything, ingredients for food pictures, objects. You get the idea.

One of the more odd things that I tag is the name of the t-shirt I’m wearing in pictures that include me. It sounds weird, but I’ve got a TON of t-shirts and every once in a while, I actually find a reason to pull up pictures with a certain t-shirt or brand/site/store. For example, Threadless has done contests involving pictures of people wearing their shirts. I can very simply pull up these photos by the “threadless” keyword. If I want a specific shirt, the name of the shirt is a keyword under the “threadless” keyword.

That’s it!
That’s really about it. I’m working on going through my entire collection and I’m making progress, but it’s very time consuming. Getting all my old pictures organized was supposed to be one of my summer projects, but this will definitely extend a bit past that.

If you’re into photography and have a method to all the madness, I’d love to hear about it!

I thought that it’d be a good idea to wait a full week after I got this thing to write a review, but here’s how I feel about the iPhone 4.

Actually obtaining this thing was a little annoying, but my experience was a lot better than what most people had. I was able to reserve one using the Apple Store iPhone app so I had one waiting for me at the Apple Store. My first trip there was around noon during my lunch break and the line was still about 100 people long so I turned around and went right back to work knowing I’d never make it in time if I stayed. When I went back after work at 5:30, there were 3 people in line. Awesome. I was in and out in under 15 minutes with no activation issues. Unfortunately, for my friend, his experience was much worse. The line was hundreds deep when he went at 7am so he returned at 7:30pm to find 400-500 people still in line and saw a guy that was there 12 hours earlier just getting his phone. The Apple Store employees ended up cutting the line off at the 125th person because the mall was going to close before they could do the rest of the line. They told him he would have to go back the next morning to get his phone. He did, but still had to wait a bit.

Anyway, about the phone itself. It’s a phone, but it’s an incredible gadget. The design of this thing is beautiful. It looks futuristic, yet timeless, and feels great to hold. The phone feels much smaller and compact in your hand than previous generations and the flat back makes holding it more comfortable, especially while typing. Even though it’s only slightly heavier than the 3G and 3GS, it feels much heftier, but in a good way. The phone feels extremely solid, more so than any other gadget I’ve ever held, but because of the glass on both sides, I’ve been terrified that I’m going to drop it and break it. I need to get a case ASAP. The buttons feel great to use and the removal of plastic makes the phone look and feel much more elegant. One notable annoyance though is that it’s difficult to feel which way the phone is facing. You almost have to look. When it’s in your pocket, you have to feel for the buttons or the slit for the receiver.

Using the phone feels slightly faster and smoother than the 3GS running iOS 3.1.3. It’s noticeable, but doesn’t blow you away. However, when compared to my 3GS after I upgraded it to iOS 4.0, the difference is a lot bigger. Everything is smooth and snappy. Loading apps and using them feels snappier and more fluid.

There has been a lot said about the display on this phone and everything you’ve read is probably an understatement. I don’t know where Apple put them, but there are no more pixels. I can’t see them. I can’t focus my eyes at a close enough distance to be able to make them out. It’s glorious. Text is crisp and clear. Factor this in with the new snappiness and the device starts to disappear, if that makes sense. This screen is incredible.

The camera is something else that has gotten a lot of attention. This thing is really, really good. The pictures are detailed and clear and they snap very quickly. Low light performance is definitely improved to the point where you get usable shots in conditions that would have produced nothing but blackness on a 3GS. However, I don’t know how I feel about the flash. It’s great for use as a flashlight–even if it is a pain to get to. It’s plenty bright and supplies a lot of light, but the white balance seems to be a bit off, everything seems to have a greenish tint. Maybe it’s something I’m doing, but it’s annoying. Still, it’s nice to know it’s there. The 720p video is great. This is a nice feature to have and is more than good enough to cancel out that FlipHD purchase I was going to make. Tap to focus during video capture has been very useful for me so far. I’ve posted a few pictures from the camera here, but there’s another one to the right. Overall, the camera is good enough that I’ll be able to leave the point-and-shoot home more often than not.

The front camera is just fine. It’s just the front camera, what do you need? It would be sweet if Apple put the same camera on the front and the back, but is that really necessary? That might be helpful for self portraits, but one thing I’ve noticed is a bonus of having an all glass back is that if you use the back camera, you can use the entire back of the phone as a mirror to see what should be in frame for your shot. Works decently well.

Battery life is much improved overall. Light to moderate use seems to drain the battery much more slowly. Yesterday, I used 26% of my battery to get through 15 hours of the day using the phone lightly with push mail turned on. Under heavy use, the life is better than my 3GS and I feel like I can get through an entire day without too much worry. I like this.

Now, as for that “death grip,” that’s real. I can reproduce the bars disappearing relatively easily, but I’ll be honest about the fact that it hasn’t seemed to cause me much of a problem functionally…yet. However, this is definitely a design flaw on Apple’s part that they need to own up to. Simply saying that we should hold the phone differently is ridiculous. All phones may be affected by how you hold them, but none lose reception like this. The worst part is, the position that causes the problem is one that I use a lot when I’m reading things on my phone. Most of my web browsing is down holding the phone cupped in my left hand. Apple’s arrogance on this subject has been extremely annoying and it’s made me question them as a company. It’s been enough to make me consider returning the phone despite all of the other improvements. I almost want to switch to Android out of principle, but AT&T’s Android selection kind of sucks.

If you take away the death grip issues, upgrading for $200 to the iPhone 4 is a no-brainer for any current or wannabe iPhone owner. I like it a lot.

A short iOS 4 follow up…
After using iOS 4 a bit more, I’ve found that the fast app switching is definitely well done and my issues of ending up with a tray full of dozens of apps isn’t too big of a problem. The app I want is usually in the first 8. However, I would really like a quick way to clear everything out of there in one shot.

The saved-state is really nice for the apps that have included it so far, but I find that sometimes I prefer to start fresh. I wish there was a way to quit an app entirely right away. The default camera app is one of those situations, I’ve accidentally taken a few videos when I wanted to take stills because the camera was still in video mode from the last time I used it. Having Twitter and Facebook start where I left off is nice, but I miss the auto-updating on load, you end up doing it manually now. These are small problems though and will probably get worked out.

Like just about everyone else that has an iPhone, I upgraded to iOS 4.0 yesterday. If you’re gadget nerd, you’re either completely sick of hearing about the iPhone 4 and iOS 4.0 or you can’t get enough, so where you stand on that should probably dictate if you continue to read or not. However, for anyone that cares or wants to continue reading, I decided I would post my impressions.

Upgrade process
The upgrade process wasn’t bad for me at all. The software downloaded quickly, in just a few minutes, and the installation took less than ten minutes. It was quite impressive actually, especially compared to some of the experiences I’ve read about. My fiancée’s update wasn’t going as quickly though, the download for her was going to take 3-4 hours so we canceled it and just updated on my computer with the software I already had downloaded. The only hiccup either of us found was that most of our contacts didn’t make it across, but a re-sync fixed it for me and hers just came back on their own after a few hours. The only other problem that I’m still having is with my email (Gmail via GoogleSync), but that hadn’t been working lately anyway so it hardly seems like iOS4′s fault. I hear Google is having issues with it on their end. We’ll see.

What’s not to like
Feature-wise, I’m going to be honest, I’m a bit underwhelmed. Before I get into what was included, the fact that Apple doesn’t have a quick reply for SMS and better notification handling at this point is ridiculous. I was disappointed that these weren’t included in the preview a few months back, but was hopeful that ol’ Steve would surprise us with them at the last keynote. It also would have been nice to get some widgets or useful information on the lock screen. All of this stuff can be fixed via jailbreak, but since I’m not running a jailbreak right now, I’ll have to deal. More on that later.

I like the idea behind the multitasking implementation Apple developed. I think putting battery life and actual performance as the first priority was the right thing to do. I know there are many days where my battery struggles to keep up with me. I can think of very few situations in which I would ever need a full-blown app running in the background. Allowing just some necessary threads is great, but unfortunately, Apple decided against including a thread for apps to keep themselves updated with the freshest contect. It would be great if there was an option that could be toggled on a per-app basis that would allow the app to continue fetching updates. This would be great for Twitter and Facebook apps.

Having to wait for developers to integrate multitasking sucks, but it was to be expected and even though only a few apps have been updated so far, more should be on the way. My real issue though is the fast-app switching. It’s insanely convenient to be able to switch quickly between two or three apps without going back to the home screen, but the problem I’m finding is that the tray fills up with apps too quickly. I end up with a dozen or two app icons down there and it feels like the whole purpose is lost at that point. I never realized how many apps I go in and out of regularly, but it’s a lot.

So far, battery life has been much worse. To be fair, I’ve been using my phone pretty heavily today, but even just my normal morning web browsing in the car (while the fiancée was driving, of course) used up about 40% more battery life than usual. And to be even more fair, I didn’t do a clean restore when I updated as is regularly suggested when you’ve jailbroken–it’s a known issue that battery life can suffer horribly when you update/restore a jailbroken iPhone if you don’t start fresh. However, my fiancée is also seeing decreased battery life and she was previously not jailbroken.

On top of the battery life woes, I’m also noticing occasional sluggishness in apps and in system animations like sliding the app icons into the home screen.

What’s to like
The likes are mostly smaller things, but I do like the fast-app switching and multitasking for the most part, outside of the issues above, at least. Being able to quickly switch between apps without hitting the home screen is a really big improvement and speeds things up a ton. The overall implementation is really great…if only I didn’t end up with over 30 apps in the app switcher tray guy (what is this thing called?) so quickly.

Spellcheck, searching in the messages app, unified inbox, and message threading for email are all great and very welcome additions. So glad that this stuff finally made it.

The camera app is much, much quicker now. It feels ultra snappy and snapping and saving a shot seems to take less than half as long as it did previously. This didn’t seem to make it to third-party camera apps by default, but as far as the stock app goes, it’s much better now. Hopefully, devs will be able to speed up their apps like this as well. Being able to tap to focus for video recording is also pretty sweet and allows a bit of an artistic touch to video recording. I think this will yield even better results on the iPhone 4. And the 5x zoom is another nicety. I’m generally very anti digital zoom since you’re doing nothing more than cropping, but on a phone, it’s a nice feature when you just want to take a quick picture and send it along to someone. It cuts out the middle-app to crop it down.

I’m also really liking the audio control widget in the tray. This is really useful and the fact that it will control whichever app is being used to play audio is even better. I tried it out with Pandora (while it was backgrounded!) and it was fantastic. The rotation lock icon to the left of these controls is also a nice addition and removes one reason to jailbreak for me.

And folders are pretty sweet. The implementation is significantly better than Categories (jailbreak only). It’s smooth and consistent and adds a lot of organization to all your apps. I’m a fan and I don’t find it that annoying to be limited to 12 apps, though I have a couple games and utilities folders now.

Missing jailbreak though
I’m missing my jailbreak though. During the course of typing this, the Dev-Team released a jailbreak that is compatible with the early 3GSes of the world, but I’m not sure that I will be messing around with it. I’m planning on picking up an iPhone 4 on Thursday (I have a reservation) which I’m sure will not be jailbreakable for quite some time…if ever. So I might as well just get used to it now.

What I’m missing the most are SBSettings and BiteSMS. Both of these offer features that I can’t believe Apple hasn’t included yet, quick access to settings like WiFi and quick reply for SMS that works from anywhere in the system. I keep catching myself trying to fire up the BiteSMS quick compose.

I’m also missing GriP which is notification solution that I just recently started using. It’s similar to Growl on a Mac, if you’ve ever used that, or other solutions on Windows and Linux. It’s not perfect, but it gets the job done.

Other than that, I think I can easily live without anything else I’ve installed via jailbreak. I’ll miss having a flashlight app that’s actually useful, the app store versions don’t have access to make the screen as bright, but maybe the LED flash on the iPhone 4 will replace that need. I’ll also miss the status bar notification icons for email and SMS, but that’s not a big deal.

As for Backgrounder and ProSwitcher, I don’t think I’ll be missing those after a few weeks go by and most of the apps I use are updated.

Conclusion
There are definitely a lot of good things going on here, but there are some complaints too. Apple has come really far, but still has some major improvements to make in some relatively basic areas.

I made a reservation for an iPhone 4 at my local Apple store, but unfortunately, my line isn’t up for an upgrade so it’s going to cost $400 if I actually decide to show up and buy it. I was originally sold on the “retina display” and the front camera, but what I was most excited about was beefed up rear camera and extended battery life. I wasn’t sure if those would be worth it at $400, but it seems the reviews from the heavyweights are in and it supposedly, the iPhone 4 puts the iPhone back at the top of phones on the market right now. Engagdet did a very in-depth review and gives the camera and battery life high marks. For the amount of photos I take with my phone, I think that’s a pretty big selling point, especially the considering the low light improvements. If I can leave the point and shoot at home even more and forget about that FlipHD purchase I was planning on making, I’ll be happy.

Alright, that’s about it. Maybe I’ll post an iPhone 4 review…or anything else soon. Next week, I’ll have a review for Insubordination Fest this weekend.

I remember my first computer, it had 4MB of memory. At the time, that was half decent and that machine was bought for me by my dad who used to build computers and processors and only have a few kilobytes to work with. Since then, I’ve owned countless other computers, each with more memory than the last.

When I started college, I built a computer with 256MB of memory that ran Windows 2000 and Windows XP (I was always back and forth between the two). They both ran great with that kind of memory. By the end of college, I was running machines with a gig of memory and Windows XP. By that time, I couldn’t imagine using anything less, yet it was the same OS that ran just fine on a quarter of the amount of memory only a couple years earlier. By this time, somehow Windows XP seemed to need at least half a gig to run just some basic stuff. Crazy how things change. That gig got me by pretty fine though. I had some friends that were pushing a second gig, but it seemed like such overkill at the time, especially for non-gamers.

That was four to five years ago. Now, I’ve got my MacBook Pro with 4GB at home and a Windows XP machine with 4GB at work. 4GB just doesn’t seem to cut it on either machine these days and that’s kind of crazy. Even my two Windows 7 machines that I only use for light stuff demand 2GB.

At work, at any given time, I’m running SQL Server (limited to 512MB of memory) and SQL Server Management Studio, Eclipse, Firefox, IE, Outlook Express, Google Chrome, Excel, Twhirl (I like to keep Twitter open), Skype, EditPlus, and maybe a couple other things on occasion (Word, Photoshop, etc). Monday morning, things are fine, but once I’ve had Firefox going a while and have actually started getting into some coding, that memory usage climbs quickly. Before I know it, I’m getting close to using all four gigs. I try not to restart unless I have to during the week just because it takes so long to get back up and running with everything open, but by Wednesday, I’ve already had to restart Firefox, Chrome, and Eclipse just to free up some memory. My job demands a decent amount of multitasking on the machine, so on one hand it’s easy to see how the memory goes so fast. But at the same time, some of these applications take up hundreds of megs of memory each. THAT is what’s crazy and out of control.

At home, I’ve generally got Firefox, Adium, Lightroom, Mail, Twhirl, and a few Finder windows open. Sometimes I’ll have iTunes, Komodo, Sequel Pro, Transmission, Safari, iPhoto, and/or Handbrake open too, but I usually try to keep those closed when I don’t need them. Most of the time I’m fine, but when I decide I want to rip a movie and do some photo editing at the same time, things can get rough. The main issue, I think, is Adobe Lightroom. I’ll catch it using a gig and a half of memory sometimes. That’s pretty outrageous, but when you think about it, I am generally editing dozens, if not hundreds, of RAW files at 20MB each. My current catalog has 4,000 images in it and I’m currently in the middle of my massive photo organization Summer project (post coming shortly) so that number is climbing daily. Anyway, that’s a lot of demand even on a computer that still has a solid spec sheet.

Unfortunately, neither machine is getting upgraded anytime soon. The work computer is running Windows XP 32-bit so more memory would be useless and I can’t afford a few hundred dollars worth of memory to upgrade my MacBook Pro to 8GB.

But the point is just how ridiculous computing demands are sometimes. Even though I save a lot of memory by using web apps for a lot of stuff, it still goes quick. The biggest problem is really that developers have been given the ability to get lazy when it comes to efficiency. Computers are so powerful and have so much memory today that there aren’t really a lot of limits that developers HAVE to worry about so they just don’t worry at all–when it comes to desktop applications, at least. Part of it is that we’re running more and more applications at the same time, but the bigger thing is that they each use insanely more memory now. Four years ago, I was able to run just as many applications on my laptop with 1GB of memory. Now, many of those same applications use 4-5 times more memory.

It’s getting out of control.

I remember my first computer, it had 4MB of memory. At the time, that was half decent and that machine was bought for me by my dad who used to build computers and processors and only have a few kilobytes to work with. Since then, I’ve owned countless other computers, each with more memory than the last.

When I started college, I built a computer with 256MB of memory that ran Windows 2000 and Windows XP (I was always back and forth between the two). They both ran great with that kind of memory. By the end of college, I was running machines with a gig of memory and Windows XP. By that time, I couldn’t imagine using anything less, yet it was the same OS that ran just fine on a quarter of the amount of memory only a couple years earlier. By this time, somehow Windows XP seemed to need at least half a gig to run just some basic stuff. Crazy how things change. That gig got me by pretty fine though. I had some friends that were pushing a second gig, but it seemed like such overkill at the time, especially for non-gamers.

That was four to five years ago. Now, I’ve got my MacBook Pro with 4GB at home and a Windows XP machine with 4GB at work. 4GB just doesn’t seem to cut it on either machine these days and that’s kind of crazy. Even my two Windows 7 machines that I only use for light stuff demand 2GB.

At work, at any given time, I’m running SQL Server (limited to 512MB of memory) and SQL Server Management Studio, Eclipse, Firefox, IE, Outlook Express, Google Chrome, Excel, Twhirl (I like to keep Twitter open), Skype, EditPlus, and maybe a couple other things on occasion (Word, Photoshop, etc). Monday morning, things are fine, but once I’ve had Firefox going a while and have actually started getting into some coding, that memory usage climbs quickly. Before I know it, I’m getting close to using all four gigs. I try not to restart unless I have to during the week just because it takes so long to get back up and running with everything open, but by Wednesday, I’ve already had to restart Firefox, Chrome, and Eclipse just to free up some memory. My job demands a decent amount of multitasking on the machine, so on one hand it’s easy to see how the memory goes so fast. But at the same time, some of these applications take up hundreds of megs of memory each. THAT is what’s crazy and out of control.

At home, I’ve generally got Firefox, Adium, Lightroom, Mail, Twhirl, and a few Finder windows open. Sometimes I’ll have iTunes, Komodo, Sequel Pro, Transmission, Safari, iPhoto, and/or Handbrake open too, but I usually try to keep those closed when I don’t need them. Most of the time I’m fine, but when I decide I want to rip a movie and do some photo editing at the same time, things can get rough. The main issue, I think, is Adobe Lightroom. I’ll catch it using a gig and a half of memory sometimes. That’s pretty outrageous, but when you think about it, I am generally editing dozens, if not hundreds, of RAW files at 20MB each. My current catalog has 4,000 images in it and I’m currently in the middle of my massive photo organization Summer project (post coming shortly) so that number is climbing daily. Anyway, that’s a lot of demand even on a computer that still has a solid spec sheet.

Unfortunately, neither machine is getting upgraded anytime soon. The work computer is running Windows XP 32-bit so more memory would be useless and I can’t afford a few hundred dollars worth of memory to upgrade my MacBook Pro to 8GB.

But the point is just how ridiculous computing demands are sometimes. Even though I save a lot of memory by using web apps for a lot of stuff, it still goes quick. The biggest problem is really that developers have been given the ability to get lazy when it comes to efficiency. Computers are so powerful and have so much memory today that there aren’t really a lot of limits that developers HAVE to worry about so they just don’t worry at all–when it comes to desktop applications, at least. Part of it is that we’re running more and more applications at the same time, but the bigger thing is that they each use insanely more memory now. Four years ago, I was able to run just as many applications on my laptop with 1GB of memory. Now, many of those same applications use 4-5 times more memory.

It’s getting out of control.

Normally, I don’t do any Summer projects, but I think it’s time to change that. I always have a ton of things I want to get done, but the bigger ones never make it. Tasks that I can’t do in a couple of hours tend to just sit on my to-do list without ever being started. Half of it is because I just don’t have the time for most of these things, but the other half is laziness and lack of motivation for tackling these things. However, this Summer I want to do a few of the things on my list. Hopefully, it’s not too much, but I’ve got four projects that I want to do.

First, I want to get on the task of organizing all of my photos. I was thinking about this a lot last week and wrote an entire entry about it here, but I think this is a doable task. I’ve mostly worked out how I’m going to tackle the project and I’ve actually started already, which is good because this will probably be the project that takes the longest to complete. I’m just a hobbyist when it comes photography, but I’ve been getting into it a lot since getting my DSLR camera. Even before that though, I took tons and tons of pictures, I have tens of thousands of them on my computer. But for all of these pictures that I take, I rarely ever go back and look at them later on. Not only will this project allow me to get all of these photos better organized so that I can find anything I’m looking for later–I’ve got a pretty comprehensive keywording system that I’m planning on using and blogging about soon–but it will also be fun to actually go through and look at all of these pictures that I’ve taken over the years.

My next project is to actually clear my to-do list for the software I develop for the radio station. Okay, not the overall to-do list, but the one that’s been growing recently with about two dozen items on it. I started development on it again for the first time in a while this year and I have a pretty awesome new feature to push out, but there’s a lot more I want and need to do with the software. It’s hard to find the motivation to come home from developing all day at work only to do the same thing at home, but I think over the course of the summer, I can push out everything I want. My general process in the past was to do a ton of enhancements and then push them out in big groups. This was great at first, but it ended up causing some things to sit forever before going out. My new approach is going to be to push out each enhancement and bug fix as I finish it. This will get the new stuff to the users much quicker and also make it easier to check things off my list to make it feel like I’m actually getting things done.

I’ve got one more nerdy indoor project that I want to do, this one is not super important to me, but I think it would be a great learning experience. I want to develop an iPhone app. I downloaded the SDK a few weeks ago when I couldn’t sleep one night, but I haven’t had a chance to actually play around with it. I don’t know Objective-C yet, but I don’t expect it to be too hard to learn given the fact that I do software development for a living. I’m still trying to think of a good idea for an app though. It doesn’t to be the next big thing or even make me any money via the App Store, but I don’t want to make another to-do or fart app or anything else that will just get lost in a sea of similar apps.

And my last project is going to be to take enough pictures to be able to walk away with at least one “useable” picture everyday. I think this will be the most fun project out of the group. I know some people do photo 365 projects and make it a point to shoot everyday, but I’ve totally botched that idea for the year already, so I’m going to make it a Summer thing. I’m not going to try to limit myself to any particular theme or anything, but given that it will be Summer, I think I want to try some action photography. Maybe I’ll take some pictures of my soccer buddies one week or I’ll just go hang out at the park one day and take pictures of what’s going on. Who knows!

So that it. It’s a lot of nerdy stuff that will keep me indoors, but given that I’ll be playing soccer once a week, running a few times a week still, hopefully mountain biking here and there, and my fiancée and I finally got a table and chairs for the backyard so we can eat dinner out there, I’ll still be spending plenty of time outside. And besides, once the temperature starts to approach 80° I’m pretty miserable being outside anyway.

Recently, I added a to-do for myself to figure out a better way to organize my photos. It’s going to be a bitch of a task, I’ve got tens of thousands of them spanning over the last decade or so. For the most part, I’ve got everything grouped into folders by event or something else like person or subject for more open-ended collections of photos that don’t really belong to a specific event. So for at least 90% of my photo collection, I can work by folder and not individual files.

But this still presents a big problem for me, one that is probably somewhat unique because of the way I have my computers set up at home. I have a file server where I store everything, but I want to access the photos from at least three different computers (my MacBook Pro which is my main machine, my Linux/Windows dual-boot desktop, and my Windows 7 netbook). I also have photos that come in from my point-and-shoot, my iPhone, my fiancée’s iPhone, my fiancée’s point-and-shoot, and my dSLR (I save RAW files and JPEGs of the processed photos). That’s a lot of devices to deal with and since I’m just a hobbyist when it comes to photography, everything is personal, I don’t feel the need or want to separate anything. I want everything to fall under the same organization.

My current workflow has been to import photos from my dSLR using Lightroom (recently, I’ve been converting the RAWs straight to DNG and will eventually convert all my existing RAWs as well). These photos go in a sub-folder called “Raw” under a folder for the event or subject. Once I do all my processing, I export JPEGs into the event folder. Photos from our point-and-shoots and iPhones just get dumped straight to the event folder. From here, I tag faces and add captions to the JPEGs in Picasa and then post select photos to Facebook or a blog of some sort. I’ve found that Picasa’s face-tagging feature is pretty great. It does a great job of detecting faces and guessing which ones belong to the same person. The user interface for it is a little clunky, but it gets the job done. It’s incredibly convenient to be able to just select a person and pull up all the pictures with them in it…or even better, all the pictures with that person and myself.

That’s been kind of it, really. It’s not terrible, but it’s a pain and it kind of ties me to one machine. I end up having to do all my Picasa related stuff on my MacBook since the face tags aren’t stored in the files, they’re stored in a local Picasa database and a separate file in the folder containing the photos. At least with Lightroom, all my edits can be stored in the DNG (or XMP file for RAWs) so they can easily be accessed from any other machine or application that supports it.

This whole process is very clunky and relies a lot on data that is stored on only one machine and is proprietary to a certain piece of software (Picasa). I can’t do anything at all with the face tags in any other application and if I even want to be able to use them in Picasa on another computer, it’s a big pain in the ass. I honestly love the feature set of Picasa, but I’d really like to ditch it altogether. It’s very slow and laggy and has a lot of odd quirks that have gotten to be too annoying to put up with. It’s great for free software, but I’m ready to move on.

The other frustration is that none of this data is tied to the original files–there is no way that I will let Picasa touch my DNG/RAW files–so if I decide to export from the original again (either because I reprocessed it or want to export as a smaller file or different file type), the face data doesn’t make it over to the new file. Essentially, the issue is that for photos from my DSLR, Picasa only gets to touch the end result, not the source. Photos from anywhere else aren’t as much of a problem because the JPEGs are the only versions, but I would like to be able to store as much data with the most original version of the file as possible.

So back to the whole wanting to reorganize my photo collection thing, I really want to clean everything up and get a good system going, I just don’t know how to do it. This is something that I’d probably continue to put off if not for realizing last night that I made a couple horrible assumptions a few months ago that are going to cause me to have to reprocess almost every shot I’ve taken with my DSLR. I totally assumed that when I imported my RAWs into Lightroom, it would automatically set the white balance to whatever setting was on the camera when it applied the presets. I mean, it has this data and there’s no reason not to default it to that. At any rate, it didn’t do this and I didn’t notice at all that it wasn’t set. You might wonder why I didn’t notice this immediately by looking at the pictures. Well, I just assumed that I wasn’t taking good pictures or using the lighting very well since I’m a complete newbie. So since I didn’t know or think to look to see if my white balance was set correctly, I adjusted as much as I could with the other settings. After I realized this last night, I went through a handful of pictures and set the correct white balance and they immediately looked better, but I had to kind of revert back to the original and remove any other changes I made first and then go from there.

That’s entirely my fault for being a complete idiot and not noticing that as well has just assuming that I was sucking. Not all of my photos need to be reprocessed, it’s mostly just the indoor ones, I think. But it’s still a lot. I’d really like to take care of this soon though and re-export them so I can put the whole thing behind me and not have to worry about it later on when I want to grab one of these pictures. Since I figure there are about 4,500 photos that I’ll have to sort through during this process, I might as well just reorganize my whole collection at the same time and improve my workflow. I’ll have to re-export my JPEGs anyway. Luckily, I think that Picasa stores the face tags based on the file name so as long as I export with the same name, Picasa shouldn’t even know the difference. I guess this is one plus to the fact that Picasa doesn’t store this in the file. And since Picasa also writes these tags to a text file in the folder where the pictures are, I should be able to move the whole folder around and then have Picasa re-read the tags based on that file. I’ll probably have to rebuild its database entirely though. But after all of this, I’m still stuck with the face tags being tied to the JPEGs and Picasa.

I’m thinking that the best solution will be the say screw the face tags and screw Picasa. I’d do everything in Lightroom and just add names as keywords to the metadata on the original files, along with keywords for the event/location/subject/whatever. Then just preserve this when I export to JPEG. That should at least provide keywords that will be visible in any photo application and on any computer. I think. I won’t have face tags per se, but I really don’t care much if there are names attached to the specific faces in the photo as long as there are names attached to the photo itself. I know who the people in my pictures are, I just need to be able to search easily. And as far as exporting to Picasaweb or Facebook, I’ve seen plugins for Lightroom to handle this so I could pretty safely rely on that as well.

Since this method would be storing everything with the original file (stored on my server), it will also allow me to make changes and edits to any photo from my netbook, MacBook, or desktop without worry. If I’m away for a few days and dump my photos to my netbook and process them, I can just drop the folder onto my server when I get home and then add it to my Lightroom library on my MacBook. Nice and easy.

Though after that, I’m still left figuring out a folder hierarchy for where the photos are actually stored. What I have now isn’t terrible, but it’s not great either. There’s organization and I know where everything is, but it could be better. I know a lot of photographers store based mostly on date (e.g. /YYYY/MM/YYYYMMDD-filename), but since I also like to keep those open-ended collections based solely on a subject (like my cat) that don’t need to be stored by date, I have no idea what would be the best way to do this. I’d also like a clean way to deal with the fact that I’ll have multiple versions of the same photo (original, exported JPEG, differently processed versions, etc) that I would like to be tied to the same tags/keywords/etc. without looking like duplicates. I like to keep JPEGs of everything because it’s much more convenient for when I have to grab a quick photo for something. I guess I could just have a personal policy of only having the originals imported and visible to Lightroom, but then I’d probably want to dump all photos from all sources into the “raw” folder and then export everything, even photos that were originally JPEGS as well, into the main event folder when I’m done my post-processing. Maybe not a bad solution.

But anyway, I’m really curious as to whether or not other photo happy people have any of these same issues and what solutions they’ve come up with. Or even separate from these issues, how do other people effectively manage a huge collection of photos. If you’ve got anything, let me know!

A nerdy group of friends tries to break into the Skywalker Ranch in an attempt to see Star Wars: Episode 1 before its release date. Sound nerdy? Don’t worry, it is.

I liked this flick a lot. I thought the cast was pretty well picked and the cameos were fun. It’s a silly movie and if you aren’t a Star Wars fan, you probably won’t enjoy it that much, but if you’re a little bit nerdy this will definitely be worth your time. The story is very predictable and everything feels very familiar, like you’ve seen this movie before almost, but the laughs (more like chuckles, actually) are more than enough to make up for it.

Alright, that’s all I’ve got for this one.

Rating: B-

Such a great show last night. Musically, at least. I keep saying it, but there’s just a ton of great music out there right now. It finally got to the point where I impulse bought a new iPod last night. My 3.5 year old 60GB one just wasn’t cutting it anymore. It still works like brand new–I don’t know how, I don’t treat it very well–but I need more space!

For the past year or so, it’s been an hour long process every time I want to add music to it because I have to sit there and really think about what music I can take off and be okay not having on me at any given time. It’s really hard! And yeah, I know you’re thinking “who the hell needs that much music?” Well, I don’t know what I’m going to want to listen to later on! It could be anything! At any given time, I can really only have less than 25% of my music on me. And with all of the new stuff I’ve been trying to listen to lately,  it’s hard to find space to keep adding things while keeping all of the old stuff as well. Sure, there is plenty of music that I have that I’ll never want to listen to and can be fine without, but that only takes me down to maybe 160GB which is still more than the 120GB worth of space on the new iPod–seriously, Apple, why did you get rid of the 160GB model?

This has been helped a little lately by SimplifyMedia. It streams my entire music collection over the internet so I can access anything from my iPhone or from my computer at work. On a computer, it’s not too bad, but my collection is so big that my iPhone has a lot of trouble handling it to the point where the app is barely worth messing with at all. That part was a little disappointing.

Whatever, I like music and it’s only getting worse as I decided lately that I need to get more into jazz, classical, and hip hop. Three genres that I really enjoy, but have a very limited amount of. I’ve been trying to beef up in these areas, but that just makes finding the space for it even harder. And as for finding time to listen to everything, that’s just impossible!

My life is so hard.

But anyway, here’s what I played on the radio show last night. Like I said, great show.

Source: 90.3 The Core