Tech

I started using Google’s Picasa 2 software because 1) I was looking for a way to do easy batch-viewing and -editing of photo image files, 2) it was recommended and 3) it’s free.

Results are mixed, though on balance I find Picasa useful as a supplement to Photoshop Elements 2 (which has limited batch-viewing and no batch-editing capabilities). Picasa makes it easy to select a group of images and apply simple corrections en masse, e.g., to create a virtual contact-sheet for film scans — very helpful. Picasa also makes it simple to categorize and search images, and to export or email them (resized appropriately, and automatically, according to easy-to-set user preferences). Its image-adjustment controls are rudimentary but well designed and effective. There is no way to remove dust spots, but Picasa is clearly intended for the casual digital photographer rather than the hobbyist film aficionado (who can always use Photoshop for specialized editing).

Picasa’s big flaw is that it has no provision for displaying the directory hierarchies on the user’s hard drive. Picasa’s file-library window shows only directories that contain images. The apparent idea is that the user will search for images by date, tag or label, so who needs hierarchy. Or maybe Google expects everyone to keep his images in the Windows-default “My Photos” or “My Pictures” directory. Or perhaps it’s a carryover from some Mac-centric view of things that has contempt for Windows-style directories (Picasa seems designed to compete with Apple’s iPhoto).

The problem is that I already have my own date-based categorization system, in which the images from each roll of film or digital photo session are stored in subdirectories under a higher-level directory that’s named according to the date the photos were made. For example, photos made April 12 are stored in subdirectories named “hi-res scans” and “edited versions”, in the directory “20050412”, which is itself located in the higher-level directory “2005”. I think my categorization system makes a lot of sense, since it’s much easier to manage than if I had to label every photo (there are thousands) or manually import it into an album (as in iPhoto). Dates correspond to events in my life and are usually the easiest points of reference when it comes to finding a particular image. Labeling is a nuisance, and would force me not only to create numerous categories but also to go back and add category labels to older photos every time I added a new category. Too much trouble. Only the lowest common denominator of labeling is going to work for me, and that means dates. But Picasa recognizes only the lowest-level directories in my hierarchy, so instead of displaying a simple hierarchy of directories in the form “\YYYY\YYYYMMDD-X”, which I can very quickly navigate and drill down into, I see a jumble of the identically named low-level subdirectories (“hi-res scans” and “edited versions”) that contain the actual image files. This is silly. There ought to be an option to view image files in conventional, Windows-style directory hierarchies. It’s an easy fix if Google decides to do it, and I hope that they will.

Other than these quibbles, Picasa is really quite good, and that’s partly due to its stickiness. What makes it sticky is its seamless integration with email, particularly Google’s Gmail service, and here Google was extremely clever. It understood how much utility could be gained by making it easier to email photos. Before Picasa, when I wanted to send a photo, I had to first open the photo in Photoshop, then edit it to reduce its size, then I had to save the edited file and remember where on my HD I saved it, then I had to create, address and title a new message using my email program, then I had to find the photo file on my HD and attach it to my email message before I could send it. With Picasa, I select a photo, click “Email”, click “Sign in” (for the first photo sent), specify an address and click “Send” — that’s it. This process works particularly well with Gmail because Gmail gives you a lot of storage space; you don’t have to worry about your email server filling up with bulky jpegs. My threshold for emailing photos is now much lower than it was previously.

When I started using Picasa it seemed like OK software, but then Incognito sent me a Gmail invite. Soon we were exchanging photos (and sending Gmail invitations to third parties), and I was using both Picasa and Gmail a lot more than I had initially intended. This is a winning system. Google stands to make a lot of money from it because of the context-sensitive ads it embeds in the emails, so I suspect they will continue to improve it.

Oh, wow…I’ve got the keys to ChicagoBoyz. Can I get it started…ran rough for a minute, but now it seems to be turning over nicely. What to write about…perhaps a rant in the classic style.

DEAR CELL PHONE FANATICS

What exactly is it that you’re talking about that is so overwhelmingly important? It must be very important indeed..

*More important than the lane change you’re doing at 70 mph
*More important than the attractive person sitting across from you at the restaurant
*More important than showing common courtesy to the clerk in the checkout line

The thing is…you talk so loud, it’s hard to avoid overhearing your conversations..and they usually don’t sound all that important. It’s not usually about getting that corporate acquisition done, or even about picking up little Jimmy at school to take him to the dentist. An awful lot of it seems to be …talking for the sake of talking.

When the telegraph was first introduced, a journalist remarked:

“This extraordinary discovery leaves…no elsewhere…it is all here.”

If wired communications reduced the sense of elsewhere, does the abuse of wireless communications reduce the sense of the here and now?

A lot of people seem to think so. A good part of this perception, as far as I can tell, comes from a misunderstanding of the way society would look after the skycar came into general use.

When people recoil in horror at the thought of cheap flying cars, they seem to envision a city much like the ones we live in with those idiots they share the road with trying to navigate our accustomed traffic density in three dimensions. They imagine millions of the things flying over a few dozen square miles of city, with cars falling out of the sky through accident or mechanical failure and inevitably crashing into a building or residence far too often for anyone’s comfort.

All of which fails to address one fundamental question: why do cities exist in the first place?

They exist because they drastically lower the cost, in time and money, for people to trade and socialize, and thereby drastically increase the number of people they can feasibly choose from to trade and socialize with. This leads to more competition as well as larger markets for enterprises of every kind; the latter allows products, services, jobs, and enterprises to exist that couldn’t show a profit if they were limited to serving smaller markets.

For all of these purposes, the flying car serves not as a means of traveling within a city, but as a substitute for the city itself! Instead of shortening the distance between people and enterprises by crowding them into a city, the skycar shortens the travel time while allowing the people themselves to live hundreds of miles away from their jobs, their friends, and their favorite shops. A few dozen houses may be clumped together in a single clearing, or a single house may stand on its own, but in either case small neighborhoods and single office buildings/strip malls/large stores will be surrounded by miles of wilderness, and people will spend most of their time endangering nothing but trees or grass if they happen to suffer mechanical failure, and enjoying plenty of space between themselves and the nearest fellow traveler.

How do we get there from here? Simple – allow ordinary people to operate skycars/aircraft/etc. anywhere except over cities. Even better, let anyone operate an aircraft anywhere if they get sufficient liability insurance – and the insurance companies will profit by setting appropriate rates and conditions. Either way, people flying their own vehicles will tend to avoid population centers, enterprises wishing to sell to or employ such people will start locating away from population centers, and as sales volume and penetration increases and prices go down, the countryside will become more desirable and large population centers less desirable as places to live, work, or operate a business.

And the end result will be better and safer than what we have now. Against a dispersed population, most terrorist attacks, even with nuclear weapons, would yield disappointing results (a notable exception being contagious diseases). While natural disasters are not as much of a threat for us as they once were, there are potential disasters that could still exact large loss of life in today’s concentrated population centers – a direct hit on New Orleans by a hurricane being one example – that would be drastically mitigated by lower population concentrations and faster evacuation capability. Profit opportunities will open up in the development of vehicles that are easy to control safely, opportunities that don’t exist today because no one who isn’t trained to use today’s not-so-user-friendly controls is permitted to fly a craft with any controls.

And when you get right down to it, it’s a travesty that, more than a hundred years after the Wright Brothers’ pioneering flight, practically all of us are still driving glorified Model T’s and seem to accept without a second thought that our children and even our grandchildren will do so as well. What happened to us?

A WSJ (subscription only) column explains the issue WRT to telephones, but the point applies to all media that transmit information at the pace of speech:

. . . Given a choice, who uses the phone anymore? Talking — whether on a cellphone, a landline, or some VOIP-y instant-messenger doodad — can be time-consuming and ponderous, and costs money. E-mail is a cold and barren medium, but it’s efficient, and we don’t have to wait for the bozo on the other end to hang up — we just hit escape. Anyway, we can read much faster than we can listen — all that spam in your inbox is annoying, but just imagine if it were voicemail.

Not only can we read much faster than we can listen, but with text we can easily read ahead or reread what we’ve already read. Simple and efficient.

Text is for communication, speech is social. While speech is useful for communication, text tends to displace it in uses where efficient communication is more important than sociability. For example, text messaging and text email access are popular cellphone features but email-to-voice translation never took off.

The use of text to transmit information will continue to increase as productivity increases continue to make everyone’s time worth more. The model for the future is not video blogging or video phones but specialist blogs and RSS feeds, and other text-based information filters on the margins of the network. Voice and video will remain the province of calls to your mom, business meetings, some news reports and a narrow range of other applications, where the social information conveyed by speech or the visual information conveyed by video is valuable enough to outweigh the speed advantage of pure text.