What's Wrong with What We Eat

New York Times food critic Mark Bittman, a self-proclaimed omnivore who will probably never stop eating animals, lays it on the line: over-production and over-consumption of meat and junk food must stop. This "odd form of malnutrition", is killing individuals (via "lifestyle diseases" such as diabetes, heart disease, stroke and some cancers) as well as the planet (via industrialized food production). It's 20 minutes and it's brilliant.

my nephews are awesome

Oh, to be a kid!!

overheard

I overheard a conversation at the train station this morning in which a fella confided in a complete stranger that he just got engaged to a gal who is 12 years older than he is and whom he's been dating for only 6 weeks. He's worried his parents will freak at the news, not because of her age, but because of the duration of their courtship. But, it's not like they've known each other for only 6 weeks; apparently, he lost his virginity to her 9 years ago at a friend's wedding. Also, he doesn't feel like his parents have any room to criticize because they knew each other for only 4.5 months before they got married...his best friend, though (who apparently knocked up the last gal he dated and asked to marry), holds the record: marriage after only 2 months of acquaintance. Very, very brief critique of serial monogamists followed. Well, that was interesting.

all spleen

Top two things on my current "can't stand" list: people who lack integrity and ass-kissers who bad mouth those whose asses they kiss. Sadly, these are not mutually exclusive character traits and, even worst, those possessing both often rise to the top of the ranks in our society. Are we twisted or what? End of rant.

dog chow

Why don't I eat my own dog food?

I was recently struck by this question when our team was asked to brainstorm some new UI features we could implement to impress the big cheesies at work. I looked at our site and thought and thought (this was, after all, round Two and we'd already hammered out a few demo hacks)...and thought. And then when all thought had evaporated, I pondered what would get me to use our site when I could send my cameraphone pictures straight to other users (phone or email) AND I can upload them easily to flickr, facebook, myspace, youtube or any other number of third party sites?

Was there really anything we could add to this site to make it more appealing to use??? Could there be anything that would persuade me to use our app versus one I was already using?

The sad thing is, the more I thought about it, the more I realized I would never really switch and, moreover, the only features which might make the app more appealing would actually whittle it down to a smaller and smaller size. What do people want to do with their pictures, after all? They want to view and organize them surely, and they probably want to share at least some of them.

In the Web 2.0 world of rapidly multiplying virtual networks and the increasing popularity of life-caching, the ability to aggregate your various data and display it in one central location (at one central URL) for all to see has become more and more desirable. So, all I could really thing of (beyond full-screen slideshows, more more more drag and drop functionality ('cuz that seems to be the AJAX flavor of the day) and flashier UI components), were things like widgets for displaying cameraphone photostreams elsewhere, and RSS feeds neither of which keeps the user in the app and both of which exist in just about all of the other popular social networking sites already.

To return to my original question: why don't I eat my own dog food? Well, gosh, it's not original and it's been done better elsewhere.

ACDSee Photo Manager

One of the features I like most about ACDSee is the ability to upload to Flickr AND use the ACDSee caption as the title and my ACDSee-assigned tags as flickr tags. You can also type in more tags for a photo once the Flickr uploader panel is open (I usually add the current year as an additional tag); and, you can set max upload sizes, and add images to a set (or create a new one).

Yes, performance is slower than Flickr's own Uploader, but I don't mind. At least the captions and tags in my catalog of images is in sync with what's uploaded to the web.

More advanced photo hobbyists complain that ACDSee's image editing capabilities are limited as compared to Photoshop. But the biggies are present: levels, curves, some noise reduction, shadow/highlight correction, sharpness, and color/saturation/hue (EXIF data is also available) and the interface and controls are not nearly as complicated as Photoshop's.

I'm just now beginning to get into editing RAW format (the unadulterated data captured by a digital camera's sensor) and I find that ACDSee coupled with the more extensive RAW (NEF) editing capabilities of Nikon's Capture NX software is all I really need.

All software can be improved, though, right? So, my wishlist for the next version of ACDSee is currently as follows:

• right-click menu option allowing one to edit file in an external editor (for me, this external editor would be Capture NX)
• improved uploader performance/speed
• better "Email Images" integration. It would be nice if it didn't spawn an external email program and just emailed photos natively (Photoshop Elements has ACDSee beat on this feature).

Anyway, that's my two cents.

"and baby makes 11"

Cute shirt, huh? It's called "Binary KID" (yep, that's right! It says "KID" on it). Available at ThinkGeek.

I'll tumbl for ya

It's the beginning of a new month, a good time to start experimenting with the utility of a tumblog, yeah?

Tumblr provides a dashboard to make it super simple to post text, links, photos, videos, audio, chat transcripts, and quotes -- just click the appropriate button and fill in the blanks. Titles and commentary/description are optional....So far, I see it as a more visual form of del.icio.us -- bookmarks from around the web (with the added ability to add from one's PC), saved and shared, with little or no commentary. I have yet to see if such a thing is useful....