Some of you may know that I use an Apple Macintosh computer system at home. Like most computer nerds I went through a fairly geeky phase when I would get into fanatical Mac vs PC arguments. (Actually in the early years I was a PC fan and hated Macs with a vengence for being wussy computers.)
I’ve since come to realise that life’s too short to worry about petty things. I use a Mac because, much of the time, it just makes my life easier. Amateur photography is one of those areas where the Mac particularly excels.
I’m currently still using a film camera (mainly). However, I now get all my photos processed on to PhotoCD and am progressively scanning old albums. Managing JPEG files on a computer hard disk using a file manager is do-able but has its limitations. You want to be able to browse a collection, quickly, and break it down by any number of factors (film roll, event, time, etc.). By far the best program I have come across is Apple’s iPhoto software. It used to be free by they now charge for it – and it is well worth the investment.
iPhoto works well in managing your photo collections and turning them into screensavers and wallpaper. One of its best features is being able to link in with .Mac to automatically publish photo albums on your web page. As an integrated package for a novice computer user it’s hard to beat.
I am not a novice computer user. I actually have a degree in the discipline and I want to host my own web pages. What’s more, .Mac hosting can become quite expensive when you want to host your entire photo collection (the per MB charges are relatively high compared to hosting your own server on a high speed internet connection). So what I ended up doing was exporting albums out of iPhoto and then using Adobe Photoshop to generate basic HTML pages with thumbnails. This would work but was not particularly elegant. I would have to manually hack each HTML file to include a custom header/footer – which I was not enthralled by (so eventually wrote a script to do it) and I lost all the rich information about each picture held in iPhoto.
Then I stumbled across Zachary Wily’s excellent iPhotoToGallery software. Honestly, this software is a God-send! It’s a simple plug in to iPhoto that let’s you export directly to web sites using the open source Gallery image library software. I can now export any of photo albums from iPhoto to my online photo gallery with just a couple of clicks. Fantastic! It’ll take me some time but sooner or later I’ll have loaded all my Photo CDs and scanned quite a few recent albums and have them all online. Woohoo!
Thanks Zack!
Research is important. Scientific research that is. And in order to get it right, that’s why we are supposed to be concentrating it at elite institutions (i.e. Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College and University College, London). Unfortunately that still doesn’t leave enough money to fund all “the big science” research we are supposed to be doing.
Sometimes, however, I wonder whether the problem isn’t so much a lack of funds as just money being wasted on stupid science.
This evening I was resuming one of my, now lapsed, habits of perusing through the foriegn media. As I worked my way through my News bookmarks I came to Pravda, former bastion of the Soviet politburo. They usually have an interesting ‘take’ on world affairs and gave a very different perspective of things like the Iraq war last year. What I was least expecting to see, however, was an article about the medicinal benefits of passionate kissing.
Bemused I sent the link to a friend who I was chatting with on MSN. They sent me back a link to a BBC article on how masturbation prevents cancer (basically because it flushes out your plumbing…). Now, of course, this is silly. Whilst it might increase your life expectancy, I wouldn’t want to be blind in old age…
But the point is this: is this really research? Is this worth the funding it gets from the taxpayer? Are these pointless studies an indirect cause of top-up fees?
Or have I just temporarily lost my sense of humour?
Published on
11 April 2004 in
Society.
mochachocolatté is using MSN Messenger to advertise The Refinery. Apparently it’s some cross between a health spa and a gentlemen’s club and is recommended by FHM. mochachocolatté says I should pay a visit because “it’s very good and relaxing”.
I’m not convinced. I’m not a fan of people being untidy but I think there are limits to the amount of grooming men can undertake without becoming just a little bit wussy.
Published on
11 April 2004 in
Journal.
OK, it’s Easter. And as with most holidays, I’m bored. So what do I do?
Well, the “day job” has distracted me from many things, amongst them my core geek-y habits. So, with spare time on my hands what else to do then catch up on pointless computer activity?
Well, when I was left stranded in Glasgow after the Northern Services General Meeting, Mike got out his shiny P800 and used it to blog about our situation. I was extremely peeved that I wasn’t, at that time, set up to do it.
I went to my web site and found that it was completely out of date. The bottom of the page was asking people to vote for me in the Feb 2003 ICU Sabbatical Elections. The start claimed I was still a third year (back in 2002). So, it had to go.
Here, in it’s place is a shiny new web site. It still needs some work doing. As is necessary these days it includes a blog so hopefully it’ll stay more fresh (especially as I can blog from my shiny P800 too!).
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