Searchable thoughts?

Photo star power

2010-11-21T17:15:00.000-05:00

I've been marking photos with stars for a while now but don't really have a system. I feel like my ratings drift over time but worse I sometimes don't put ratings on photos because I don't remember how I use the stars. This, of course, means that I am building a backlog of photos that are unrated. This wouldn't be a big deal except I am thinking of making a photo book for Grandma and Grandpa at the end of the year and I don't want to wade through a year's photos to choose the ones that should go in the book. So here's a scheme:
5 stars - outstanding photo
4 stars - photo that I like a lot but something is less than perfect
3 stars - photo that is a worth looking at again (best in a series where none were great)
2 stars - photo was a nice idea but didn't turn out well
1 stars - bad photo but one that I can't bring myself to delete

After asking Google it turns out others have thoughts too:
deeje cooley on rating systems in general
austinpreneur explains his workflow including ratings (very good write up)

I guess I'll try my system for a while and see how it goes but austinpreneur's might be better.

Photo management software for Macs

2010-11-21T16:26:00.002-05:00

So I use a Mac... and I went out and got iLife '09 when it came out because I wanted Places and Faces. Both turn out to be pretty cool. But the face recognition isn't that impressive. It misses a bunch of faces and even with hints it seems to make obvious mistakes. For example, I import an album of 20 picutres all of which are the same 3 people. I'd think that after I confirm/add faces to the first few pictures it could do a much better job guessing that the same people appear in the remaining photos. But nope--it will still suggest a name that appears in only 2 other photos from 4 years ago. And I haven't been able to find a workflow that I like for tagging faces. The best I've found involves lots of switching back and forth between keyboard and mouse.

But what I really meant to post about is the decision between iPhoto and Picasa for Mac. Here's the deal. Almost everyone in my family has a Google account. So Picasa web albums is a convenient way to share photos. And perhaps most importantly it is what my Mom has learned how to use. (I am sure she would learn a new website or two (or 50) if that's what it took to see pictures of her grandson but none the less our history is with Picasa.) Likewise my in-laws are used to Picasa web albums and so there is a large incentive to stick with it.

Given that I am going to use Picasa on the web it would make sense to use it on my Mac too. It seems to be a fine program.

Things I like about it (Picasa's Advantages):

Good facial recognition.
The "People" view showing only suspected matches to let you confirm quickly.
The ability to rotate videos that were taken in portrait aspect ratio
Integration with Picasa Web Albums
The ability to load videos to Picasa Web Albums
The print layouts are easier to understand (e.g., you can print 4 3x5s on an 8.5x11 sheet of photo paper)
My wife uses it on her PC

iPhoto's Advantages:

Integrated with the Media Browser on the Mac (file open dialogs, other iLife programs, etc)
Tools for creating photo books are way better than anything I've tried on the web (Picasa has no built in tools--it just helps you get to web-based tools)
All my tags, ratings, and Faces are up to date in iPhoto
It has a 5 star rating system.
Full screen editing mode
Compare feature lets you view pictures side-by-side

Ideas for workarounds:

You can create a 5-Star rating system in Picasa using tags
You can buy an iPhoto plugin that says it will let you upload videos to Picasa Web Albums
You can export photos from Picasa to iPhoto to make a book
Write an Applescript/Automator routine to use iMovie to rotate videos

Sometime I'll make a decision. Right now I am squarely on the fence and using some of each.

(Updated: 1/2/11 to add the full screen and compare advantages to iPhoto)

avoid Born shoes, HHBrown, and shoebuy.com

2010-03-07T16:27:00.000-05:00

at the risk of becoming just a consumer experience blog i have a rant....

I'm quite frustrated with Born Shoes and their parent company HHBrown. I had a pair of Borns that I loved. They lasted about 6 years--looked good, very comfortable. So when they fell apart I ordered another pair of the same model and size. When they arrived they didn't fit. After exchanging them they sort of fit but not well. And the new pair were of much lower quality--the seams were not well finished from the start and the stitching started pulling out after about 5 wearings. The place I purchased them (shoebuy.com) did not allow me to return them because they had been worn. I started a correspondance with HHBrown who indicated that they would replace the shoes. After a few weeks trading emails with their customer service rep they stopped replying to me. I started back with their customer service website and NO RESPONSE at all. Needless to say I am not pleased at having paid a premium for these shoes when the company fails to stand behind them. I intend to avoid Born shoes, HBrown, and shoebuy.com in the future and recommend you do the same.

<\rant>

A positive Verizon experience

2010-02-15T22:40:00.000-05:00

So we traded down from a DVR to a converter box that lets us use FIOS to watch our standard definition TV. Deciding to trade down wasn't too hard--the DVR came as a freebie when we signed up. Once we had to pay for it we quickly realized that watching 3 or 4 TV shows a month was not worth the $30 we were paying. Deciding what to trade down too was more of a challenge. I am sure Verizon is just trying to compete and thankfully the market drives them to give me my choice of cable boxes (5 models to choose from) and channel packages (?? how many to choose from). After a few visits to the website and a phone call (not too long a wait) I decided to trade down to a basic converter box.

This is where it actually got good. I was waiting for the customer service rep to offer me my choice of weekdays where I could skip work to let them in to the house so they could swap boxes. Instead she said, "Your new box will arrive in 5 to 7 business days. You'll then have 30 days to take your DVR to the UPS store."

But it got even more pleasant. I made the mistake of packaging the DVR and taking it to the UPS store. (I did walk all around the block in the snow carrying the DVR but I can't blame Verizon for me forgetting directions to the store now can I?). When I got there the woman behind the counter said, "Oh your a Verizon customer--just leave it with us. You can take the box if you want. We'll re-package it." I was dumb-struck. I didn't have to pay. I didn't have to package. I didn't have to do anything. (Well I should have asked for a receipt--I didn't think of that until I was half a block away so I had to go back for it but again that is hardly Verizon's fault.)

All-in-all I was quite pleased. If you're a Verizon TV customer and find yourself needing to change equipment ask if they have the self-install option.

Choosing Hospitals

2009-11-08T08:40:00.000-05:00

Choosing hospitals, like choosing insurance, seems like a super daunting task. Sure you can look at the newsmagazine "Best of..." lists but they are at best quasi-scientific and probably have little to do with the experience that one individual will actually have. You can also visit the Medicare Hospital Compare website but again it is a bunch of statistics that may or may not be relevant. A couple questions come to mind as I look at the stats on their site:
- Since these stats/surveys are about/from Medicare patients, who are generally older, sicker, and less well educated than I am how do I translate them for my own use?
- When I am wading through the stats how do I know what is a significant difference. Look at this graph about how well nurses communicated with patients. Does a 5% difference really mean that one is better than another? I assume that the sample size is large enough that these numbers are meaningful but they could be skewed by the department that most of the patients were in.

Ok so I haven't solved anything but at least I made a note that there is a place where you can get survey results that provide statistics about hospitals and that you can use these in an attempt to compare one hospital to another.

Legislative language

2009-05-23T20:46:00.004-04:00

In musing about how Congress should stay on topic I found govtrack.us (which seems to be a very useful site). (No comments on how my first sentence is not related to the rest of my post).

As a result of finding govtrack and the full text of the bill I skimmed through the Credit CARD Act of 2009 and read the section allowing guns in National Parks and National Wildlife Refuges. The thing that struck me was the language used. I did student congress in high school and I know that the law has its own language. But some parts of this section read more like PowerPoint slides than legal language. The sentence that really got me:

Congress needs to weigh in on the new regulations to ensure that unelected bureaucrats and judges cannot again override the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens on 83,600,000 acres of National Park System land and 90,790,000 acres of land under the jurisdiction of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.

Weigh in? Next thing you know Congress is going to leverage the synergy of the new process to produce outstanding results in all that they do.

Why doesn't congress stay on topic?

2009-05-23T20:37:00.002-04:00

I've been thinking about this for a long time but the recent passage of the Credit CARD Act of 2009 prompted me to write it down. Would our government be better or worse if members of Congress were compelled to deal with issues one at a time? Or maybe not even that--members of Congress do need to multi-task and deal with many issues in a day. Would public policy/legislation be better if it were always limited to a single topic? We would end up with more bills certainly but would they be better?

Regardless of how one feels about credit card regulation or carrying guns in National Parks these topics are not in any way related. I know that there is a good deal of horse trading that goes on to get legislation passed. And I have heard the old saw about laws being like sausage. But even if the deal making includes unrelated topics it seems like the legislation itself should be on a single or closely related set of topics. Maybe there are big advantages to doing it this way that I just don't see but it seems ludicrous that such muddled thinking and writing are the norm and that everyone accepts it.

HealthCare could be better...

2009-05-16T13:35:00.003-04:00

As a Kaiser patient ordering from their mail order pharmacy involved logging in to the website and entering some information about the prescription I wanted filled and my credit card number. Since their docs enter the prescriptions in their system the pharmacy fills it and sends it to me.

Now that I have Aetna I have to go to my doctor, give them a form, which they fax to Aetna, and then I send Aetna a payment, and then Aetna sends me the medicine. The Chipotle add that says "1984 called and they want their fax machine back" comes to mind.

Thankfully our health care system gives me "choices" and since my employer dropped Kaiser I got to choose Aetna. I think Aetna is typical and Kaiser is the exception with regards to computerized records and I find this amazing (in a bad way).

audi a4 dome light rattle

2009-03-29T17:55:00.003-04:00

As it turns out it isn't the dome light that rattles so bad--it is the piece of plastic right behind it that covers the built in microphones (for the bluetooth that I don't have).
It's not actually that hard to take the whole thing apart but the steps at audiworld helped. I took the whole assembly apart which made it easy to snap the rattling mic cover off. I then stuck some double-sided tape (the puffy stuff for mounting pictures to frames) on the inside and re-assembled. Hopefully this fix will last longer than the dealer's did.

competition for government contracts

2009-03-09T20:35:00.003-04:00

Competition for services is different that competition for goods
After hearing about that no government contract should be awarded sole source and that no contract should be cost-plus I have been thinking about what that might look like. The problem is competition for government contracts is not like competition in a normal marketplace. Most contracts aren't for widgets that are being built and the government is trying to buy a few--it is for a service. So it should be thought of more like hiring a home contractor or a doctor. Have you ever tried to get a fixed price contract with your doctor? Do you shop for a different doctor every time you feel sick?

I am not saying that all contracts should be sole source or that fixed price contracts are bad. I do find the lack of depth in the public conversation to be frustrating.

My wife is way smart (programmable thermostats)

2009-03-07T11:30:00.003-05:00

A while back my wife and I were discussing how a programmable thermostat can save energy (money). I fell into the trap of thinking that it took just as much energy to heat back up as was saved while the house was cooling. She pointed out that savings is not while cooling down or heating up but while the house is sitting at the cooler temperature. In almost exactly the same words the Department of Energy says the same thing. She claims she's not a physicist--just that she studied physics--but I don't think I believe her, she thinks like a scientist, a super smart one.

I love you T.

Times Reader

2009-01-24T13:07:00.006-05:00

I downloaded the Times Reader (Beta) for Mac a few months ago, when it was first announced. I played with it a few days and then deleted it finding that I preferred reading the email headlines and then surfing around NYTimes.com. But after a recent plane flight when I couldn't get to the website I decided to give Times Reader another look. Here are my thoughts:
- I wish that it scaled better. At the middle-sized font (they let you choose from 3) most articles are divided across 2 pages. But the Reader window is limited to a small portion of my screen. I am sure this is for some reasonable technical reason but it feels clunky almost to the point of annoying.
- Partly because articles are divided a lot of navigation is required -- the keyboard shortcuts help out a lot.
- It doesn't keep track of what has been read and they don't keep stories to a certain date. So I skimmed through the whole paper yesterday and today it is showing me a bunch of the same stories. Maybe I don't really understand how it works. On the 28th I went back to the 26th and found an article whose byline was the 27th??? Anyhow it doesn't give me a feeling that I am in control of my reading experience and that was one of the things that I really hoped to get from this application that NYTimes.com doesn't offer.
- The Most Emailed section is way better than the NYTimes.com version. It includes pictures and short summaries of the article whereas NYTimes.com just shows the headline.
- I don't know if it is Times Reader itself or Silverlight but the application seems to spend a bunch of time with the spinning beach ball. (I guess this might be a function of the app being in beta...)

I'll keep playing with it but as of now I am not sold

Money Management Software

2009-01-11T22:20:00.003-05:00

It turns out that I am pretty tired of Quicken. It seems to be a bit buggy and the amount of advertising in it is really annoying. Plus I have been using the Windows version and hear that the Mac version stinks. Even if I wanted to switch there is no good way to convert from Windows to Mac (Intuit provides a tool but basically says "Use at your own risk -- we didn't design these to convert back and forth."). So I am stuck with Quicken for Windows in a Parallels session (which is nice and all but it's slow and clunky).

As a result every few months I think I'll try Wesabe, or Mint, or Yodlee, or Morningstar. But I always back down and then forget most of what I have learned in doing the research. Keep in mind I haven't used any of these sites--this isn't a review--just some notes to myself about what I have learned about each site. So here goes:

Wesabe:

Tim O'Reilly is an investor and backer which makes me like it from the get go. They are crazy about security and data rights -- their philosophy is that you own your own data. They don't take account numbers or user names or anything. Instead of automatic updates of account information it is semi-automatic. They provide uploader tools so that you can download info from your bank to your own computer and then upload it to Wesabe. This means that all they have is a pile of data -- no way to access your accounts.

The focus of the site seems to be on managing spending and saving -- tracking cash flow. They claim to have nifty reports and so forth and let you compare your habits to other people. They can help you by providing a community to work on spending goals (or savings goals).

The big downside is they do nothing to track investments, zip, zilch, nada so they don't really meet my needs.

Mint:

They claim to do both cash flow and investment analysis. You provide account login information when you sign up and then they automatically retrieve transactions from your financial insitutions. The rub here is that they claim they don't store any of this stuff (username, passwords, etc). Which, I guess, is, technically speaking, true because they use yodlee for this (see entry below). But it means that all of your passwords and login info is stored in a single place on the web. They also claim that Mint is "read-only" so nobody could mess with your accounts even if they broke into your mint account. I guess this is also true. But the credintials that are stored by yodlee are the same ones that you use to log in to the banks' websites so again all of your info is out there in one place as best I can figure.

Seems like it might be worth trying if I wasn't paranoid about having all of my username/passwords in the hands of a single website.

Yodlee:
Based on the look of their website they got their start as a financial aggregator not a consumer website. They offer a personal money management page but it does not appear to be their primary business.

You provide yodlee with all of your usernames and passwords and they periodically log in to your financial institutions and get updated account information. They also make some mention of managing money all in one spot so it may be that they can initiate transactions from their website.

Like Mint they claim to show you investment accounts too.

Morningstar:
Focused entirely on investments. They provide no cash flow or budgeting tools. They also provide no tools for automatically updating accounts -- you have to enter all transactions by hand and there doesn't seem to be an uploader. Finally there is a monthly cost to use the service. On the other hand they are the industry leader in providing investment information and the tools do seem to be pretty useful (I signed up for one of their free 14 day trials and put in some fake data to try things out.)

That's all I can think of for the moment. See you in a month when you get sick of Quicken (again).

White House Communications Feedback

2008-12-21T15:36:00.003-05:00

Mark Leibovich writes in the New York Times Magazine, 'The podium job [of White House Press Secretary] is all-consuming, especially in an age when daily briefings are televised. As Axelrod says, “You can send markets crashing and troops in motion by one slip of the tongue.”'

Isn't this a sign that we have our feedback loop out of whack? If we engineered a car such that operating the turn signal incorrectly caused the freeway to back up wouldn't that be a problem?

focus follows mouse

2008-12-04T21:17:00.005-05:00

Steve Yegge gives this a much more thorough treatment on his blog. But if you want to fix Terminal.app so that focus follows the mouse between Terminal windows then this
defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES
does the trick.

link to Put Change.gov under Revision Control

2008-12-01T08:46:00.004-05:00

A concrete suggestion from Tim O'Reilly for improving transparency in government.

Campaign Analytics

2008-11-20T22:15:00.002-05:00

I am really interested in how much money Obama raised from small donors vs large donors. Does the argument "even if he has some 'large' donors it doesn't matter because even if he looses them they are a very small percent of the total" make sense?

This story has a bit of info on the topic.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/11/20/obama_raised_half_a_billion_on.html

Firefox vs Safari

2008-11-08T18:03:00.009-05:00

I am not looking to write the definitive guide. I don't even consider myself a browser afficianado. But I do dabble and now I am finding that I forget why I choose one over the other.

I use Firefox as my day to day browser for a few reasons:

phishing filter (no longer after Safari 3.2)
adblock plus
renders more sites correctly than safari
force windows to open in tabs
all my stuff (history, bookmarks, etc) are already there
center click in safari doesn't open a background tab
clicking on an RSS feed adds it to google reader (could I get Safari to behave this way?)
when you cut and paste something into blogger it works on Firefox but not for Safari

Of course Safari has some things going for it too:

respects the home/end key fix to make home go to beginning of line and end go to the end of the line

asset allocation vs asset diversification

2008-05-04T17:44:00.002-04:00

Work just changed our 401k options and has made lifecycle funds the default contribution. They also took away Asset Allocation funds (Conservative, Moderate, Aggressive) and replaced them with Lifecycle funds. So I am thinking about what the right strategy is and how to do the transition. There doesn't seem to be much information on how to handle single events. Everyone says that allocation is important and that you should re-allocate periodically but doesn't give any advice on the nuts and bolts of doing so. There isn't anything that says "I have decided to change my strategy here's some things to consider". I get that I can't know for sure what will happen over the next few months but all of the sources that I have found don't seem to say anything about what do differently if you assume that the market (and the US economy as a whole) is generally doing well or generally doing poorly. I realize that the whole point of long term investing is that you need to find a strategy and stick to it but given that I have a whole bunch more information about what is going on this month and this year should I make different tactical decisions about how to implement the strategy?

Anyhow that lead me to flip through Living and Learning by Robert Keebler and Daniel Pinkerton and something struck me which I hadn't grasped before. They make a distinction between asset allocation and asset diversification. They define asset allocation as the choice of which asset classes to own and define 4 asset classes: cash equivalents, fixed-income investments, equity investments (including real estate), and tangibles (precious metals, commodities, collectibles). They define asset diversification as the selection of investments within those asset classes. This is a slightly different way to slice things than what Quicken presents. Quicken gives 7 asset classes (8 if you count no class) that divide Keebler and Pinkerton's classes further by separating equities into US Large Cap, US Small Cap, and International Stocks and fixed income into US and Global Bonds. It gets to the same point I suppose but the way Living and Learning presented made it simpler to me.

Wedding Planning Tips

2008-01-13T21:40:00.003-05:00

Use a google spreadsheet or zoho sheet (or equivalent) to store your guest list. this means everyone (bride, groom, parents of each) can view it no matter where they are and updates can be made without confusing which draft just ended up in your inbox
We wanted to try out both weddingchannel and theknot but found that it was confusing to have 2 homes on the web. It might be worth setting up a fake wedding (don't use your real name or email address) on each and see which you like better (after a couple days you'll probably know). The advantage of using a fake name is that when your friends go searching for you they won't find the wrong info. We ended up going with the theknot because the free wedding web page seemed better but the checklist from weddingchannel was way better.
If you need to post more text than will fit in the dialog box on theknot use the spammers trick of linking to a jpg of the text (we were able to get theknot to accept some basic html)
If you're psyched about the music at your ceremony (friends performing or whatever) look into recording the audio from the church's sound board -- I wish I had an audio recording to go with slide shows and so forth. (Not to mention I think the priest's sermon was pretty good but I can't remember any of the details...)
Buy thank you cards at the same time as invites -- you can get 'em cheaper and it's one less thing to worry about later. (Unless you are using post cards of wedding photos as thank-you cards - I've seen that work pretty well for some of my friends)

Welcome aboard

2008-01-13T21:22:00.001-05:00

Apparently my years at sea have had more influence on me than I would have guessed -- who knew that the first thing that popped into my head for the title of the first post would have a nautical ring to it.

And I guess the nom de blog is nautical too. Though it has more to do with the fact that Moby-Dick is the most visibly prominent title on the bookshelf across the way. If a computer asked, "What should I call you?" with a copy of Moby-Dick staring you in the face what would you answer?

Call me