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Posts Tagged Doing Stuff On Things

In Search of: Network-shareable Photo Organization Solution

Jan 20

Posted by Aaron in Geekery | 4 Comments

Ok, so we have this problem at my job.

We have this fileserver for the marketing team. It’s got photos in it. Lots and lots of photos. It also has Photoshop files, Indesign files, Illustrator files, some videos, and other bits — but it’s mostly Photos. We have so many photos that our network admin had us move off of the main fileserver and onto our own special one that is not backed up with the nightly backups.

Having lots of photos presents its own problems, of course. One must organize large collections. We spend an inordinate amount of time searching for Photos — even those that are used relatively often. When we’re looking for photos that match a theme, it’s even worse because we have to iteratively look through each one.

Does anyone have any suggestions for software packages that would help with this?

Most of the ones I’ve seen that organize the photos (Picasa, Adobe Bridge, FSpot) do not share the tags / categories with others. It is not enough to simply organize them by date — we really need the ability to tag them based on who’s in them, what event they are from, the location, and any abstract descriptors we can think of.

We’ve considered using FlickR, but I’d prefer to keep these files off the cloud, mostly for maintenance reasons.

Basically, what we need is a Digital Asset Management solution that does the following things: Read the rest of this entry »

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“If you ever violate FERPA, I’ll kill you.”

Nov 7

Posted by Aaron in Personal | 1 Comment

We just had a meeting at work with the Registrar and our supervisor, concerning a project we’re working on. The project’s purpose is to track data about on-campus resources a student uses (Tutorial Services, Advising, etc.) in correlation with their grades. This is obviously an issue related to FERPA, the set of guidelines that oversees educational recordkeeping.

After the meeting, which took slightly over an hour, we were walking back towards our office alongside the Registrar and he was saying how he can’t wait to start deer-hunting. He then jokingly says “If you ever violate FERPA, I’ll kill you,” noting both of us.

He then informed me that he could probably gut me in about 3 minutes, and he would let Zak (my co-worker) watch so he could understand how to do it. This was probably the strangest conversation I think I’ve ever had. I didn’t REALLY feel threatened or anything, I knew he was joking in a macabre sort of way. What a day!

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What the hell is going on in America right now?

Oct 1

Posted by Aaron in Rants | No Comments

Ok.. first off – Check this out. It’s from CNN, “the Cafferty File”. Apparently there’s a bill in legislation right now (I HOPE it hasn’t passed yet) that has, buried deep in it, an exculpatory clause that pardons the current administration for ANY and all instances of liability concerning torture, detention, and atrocities committed since Sep 11 2001. GTMO, the Iraqi prison scandal, all of those. Wiped clean.

Pretty effed up! I really hope this doesn’t pass.. next thing you know, he’ll be trying to get immunity for breaking the law with his signing statements!

Next up on the chopping block: the MPA has shut down OLGA and other Guitar Tab online archives. This is ridiculous. The RIAA is the epitome of money-grubbing dogma, clinging to an antiquated business model, and throwing red herrings at the public news media about why their sales are slumping. I haven’t purchased a CD from an RIAA-affiliated company in over….3 years. (The last CD I bought was directly from a band, who is on an Indie label). I found a very informative and active coaltion called DownHill Battle, they are at the forefront of a movement to help breakup the monopoly of major labels. It’s worth checking out, they have a nice site. Rants aside, I really am sick of the RIAA and their bullshit. Ick.

*deep breath*

Ok. In *other* news, Melissa and I are doing well. The baby is slowly hardening into a fetus that you can feel from the outside. I was touching her stomach this morning and it was really amazing to think that the lump under her belly button is our baby. Really mind-blowing. Her next OB appt is next week. We’re having some difficulty with Medicaid right now, and are still kind of up in the air on the logistics of how to get the baby from the inside to the outside, but we’ll get it figured out.
The house has been kind of on hold right now — I want to finish painting the kitchen and hang some things up on the walls, perhaps we can do that tomorrow.

I just started my new job on Monday. I like it — I get a cubicle, I have a three-monitor display, my co-workers are all real nice, and the pay is great (twice my last salary!). My only complaint is that I have to deal with .NET. Granted, it IS C#, but even so, I have to program it in Visual Studio. Microsoft has this habit of wanting to do everything THEIR way — the idea of “compliance” is completely foreign to them. (case in point: Internet Explore v.7, which was JUST released, is only ~20% compliant with CSS 2.0… wtf?) My biggest complaint about VS.NET though is that it distances the developer greatly from the code itself. When I program in PHP, I manually type out every single line — I am aware of everything my code does; If it burps, it’s because I told it to, if it crashes, it’s because I made the typo or logic error. VS.Net is all about the point-click-drag model of development. You just drag widgets into the “designer screen” and then pseudo-HTML is rendered from that. (I say “pseudo” because .NET uses ASP objects, which then render HTML entities upon serving the page) I’m sure it has its place, and for people who were developers first and are now doing web development, it’s probably right at home for them — but it’s UGLY. It’s like using an F-14 Tomcat for Deer hunting.

I suppose a lot of my frustration is coming from the fact that learning new languages is difficult, and I’m merely transferring my frustration at myself onto the cause, but even so! I’ll learn it eventually, and I’ll probably be better for learning it, but I think I will ALWAYS prefer PHP to .NET for web development.

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Almost There!

Sep 12

Posted by Aaron in Home Ownership | No Comments

Apologies in advance to anyone who’s been trying to get a hold of me the past few days.

The kitchen is nearly done. Steve and Hank should be coming in today to install the countertops. With countertops done, they can put the sink, dishwasher, and stove back. We just got our flooring put in, so the Fridge can be moved into place now. Between today and tomorrow the kitchen should be completely done. What a relief that will be.

I have been so ridiculously exhausted lately. I feel the weight of various obligations slowly wearing me down. I wake up every morning still tired, I go to bed every night exhausted, if I lay down too long during the day my eyelids get heavy and occasionally close. On one hand, there’s the school obligation — reading In Cold Blood (by Truman Capote) by Wednesday (A really cool book, if you’ve never read it). I *should* have had more time to read this if my seller from Half.com had sent it on time like she was supposed to (I ordered it the first night of class, thinking I would have a week to read it). I found out on Thursday of last week that she had missed the email and had only just then sent it out. So Saturday I went to Waldenbooks and bought a store-copy. So I now own two copies of a book that I only need to read for the first 3 weeks of class, and I have roughly 3 days to read 377 pages.

Then there’s the house issues. It’s still a mess. There’s furniture, boxes, tools, and odds & ends EVERYWHERE. Appliances regularly decide to migrate, seemingly of their own volition, into the living room, dining room, and basement. I think they might be chasing Frank around. I leave for work in the morning and the Stove is under the hood-vent, and I come home for lunch and it’s in the living room! Maybe it wanted to watch The Food Network on television or something, I don’t know. Melissa has been getting upset lately because of the state of chaos the house is in right now, and while I understand why she’s upset, I feel like there isn’t a whole lot I can do.

And then work. This is probably the biggest headache. For those of you who don’t know yet, and I apologize for not having told you in person, I got the job at IU East. I start on the 25th. Full benefits, Full Time, double my current salary, and a better working environment (part of a TEAM). I put my notice in here at the city, and my last day is the 22nd. I have promised that I would have the overhaul of the city-website revisions complete. ORIGINALLY, I had planned on having this overhaul done by the end of the year, and now I’m trying to get all the work done in two weeks. They have offered to pay me extra to work a few hours here and there after the 22nd, just to get the website finished. I feel a lot of pressure about this, partly from my employer, but also from myself — I don’t want to leave this position without having this project completed, because it’s kind of a summation of everything I’ve learned in the past 2 years. (For nerds: It’s a CSS/DIV based layout, with a MySQL backend using PHP to dynamically render all of the pages. It’s going to be SWEET. I’m also writing a Content-management system so that city employees can add new content via the website itself)

All I want to do is take a nap. Or a shower (we only have a bathtub right now). Or a day off. Something. I feel like there are so many things that need to be done, I’m having a difficult time feeling like they are accomplishable at all! (It’s the circular logic: “I can do A and B but not C… but I need to do C! Ok, I can do B and C but not A, but I need to do A!” ad nauseum) I haven’t been eating very well lately, only sleeping 6 or 7 hours a night (instead of the 8 or 9 my body needs), and I really haven’t had any time to just let my brain recharge (although I *AM* going down to the gaming store at lunch today to play some games with Ryan). I feel like I have no impetus left to start anything.

I’ll get some pictures of everything up here really soon.

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Almost There!

Aug 17

Posted by Aaron in Home Ownership | No Comments

This has been a pretty good week so far. I just met with the mortgage loan officer today and provided him the source documents for some gifts and extra income I’ve had this month. All we’re waiting on at this point is the thumbs-up from the Appraiser and Inspector, and then it gets sent off to the underwriters for their stamp of approval.

And then we close!

We’re expecting to close on August 25th, but it could be even earlier. This whole month has been a constant feeling of “We’re moving, but not yet.” I’m just now starting to settle into that mentality. The big-day is rapidly approaching, and I feel like I haven’t reconciled with myself how ridiculously unprepared we are. We’ve got 10 or 15 boxes of stuff done, sure, but until we get to the point where the apartment looks like Franktown, we aren’t ready.

On an unrelated note — I finished the Knowledge-base project I made for work. I got a lot of really good practice working with CSS1 tags (and a little CSS2) as well as DIV-based layouts. I just resumed working on the City website redux, and it’s a lot easier. The main content, which is built via MySQL database queries, works correctly — as do the query-based links in the navigation panes. I’ve even figured out a way to get the hundreds of pages of Richmond City Code into database format so it will be SEARCHABLE!

I’m currently tenaciously waiting to hear about how soon I’ll be getting full-time employment here. Either my current position will go F/T, or I’ll be transferring down to the police department, doing IT there as a F/T employee. Either way, it’s happening soon, or I have to reluctantly bail to another job. If I make F/T, I’ll make nearly twice what I make now! It won’t make me filthy rich, but we should at least be comfortable. Oi!

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