So I have been playing around with the idea of moving my blog from wordpress.com to my own hosted site. I started reading up on what needs to be done in order to move from my wordpress.com address to a different site and it turns out it is really hard with large sites. So I decided to take the step and move to http://www.scottwarren.info/ . I still have to set everything up but I thought that I should start letting people know because I’m planning on not updating this blog after today (assuming I get access to my webpage before tomorrow afternoon).

I had a lot of reasons for doing this. The first was Google Analytics. I really like Google Analytics because it gives you a much more detailed view of you site than the integrated wordpress stats plug in. By using my own site I can modify the template for this site so I can actually use that. I also want to have more control over the way things are added to my site. It’s really nice to be able to add a custom script or plug-in to perform actions that WordPress just doesn’t support. I also have had problems getting changes uploaded to a binary file without changing the files path everywhere on the site.

The only downside to moving is that I have to pay for everything now and I really hope I don’t go over on my bandwidth use age. I should have all the problems ironed out this weekend.

Next week I swear I will get these photos up quicker. I ran into a couple days this week where I took a picture but I don’t feel comfortable sharing them.

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2008-01-19

Just a quick update. Amanda and I had a 12+ hour day today so we are going to bed. I sat down to charge my iPod and the update that allows me to play rented movies showed up! I guess I can take back that ugly post I made about Apple not supporting the rented movies on all devices. I’m going to bed after I check to see if the AppleTV update is out. Tomorrow when I have time I’m going to post my pictures from the last week and start working on a couple longer posts. Now that my storage limit here has been upped I can really start working on the things I want without having to worry space. I have also put a lot of though into getting my Blog hosted on my own hosted server because I would really like to do more with it and I like the deals that GoDaddy.com has.

Recently, I have been looking for good photo organizing software. I know there are commercial options out their but as an amateur I have already spent over two thousand dollars on equipment (an amount that seems to increase every couple weeks ) so I don’t really want to spend more money. Because of this I have been looking at the various free photo organizing tools and I haven’t been able to find one that has all the features that I really want.

The features I want seem like they should be very basic. I want to have a program that allows me to import files based on a custom naming scheme that includes fields that are stored in the EXIF data. The software should be able to keep track of things that are useful for searching like events (if there is one), tags, and people in the picture. I want there to be several methods for sharing my photos online including posting to Flickr and a custom website. Finally, the software should run as a native desktop application and NOT as a web service. Photography really needs to be complied because speed DOES matter. It’s fine if you want to share the pictures but not if you need to do any management.

I just finished looking at the open source options and for the most part I haven’t been able to find one that works correctly after the install. Actually, I keep getting stuck at the photo import step because they don’t import the pictures they just look in specific folders. They have no support for uploading photos to Flickr. And they don’t store information for anything and really only show the EXIF which keeps the amount of information down but is completely unsearchable.

The closest I have gotten has been Picasa by Google. The only problems is that it is completely tied into Google services so my Flickr account is useless. The other issue I have is I can’t figure out how it stores it’s tag information so if I do move to another product how can I get my information out of Picasa and into it? Also, it doesn’t seem to support importing photos based on date but it could because I haven’t actually been able to get it to import from an SD card.

I guess my only solution is to look into writing my own software to do this. I would like to add additional features like being able to set up which pictures to have it upload and then upload later and having smart sets (like smart playlists in iTunes). What are the features you really need?

I have been spending a lot of time this weekend thinking about organizing digital documents.  I’m very anal retentive about keeping the bills that I receive but I have a couple filing boxes full of papers.  Only twice have I had to go back and look at the bills but I did need to get that information.  I have started scanning my bills and then shredding it so I have a way to refer to them but don’t have them sitting around.  The problem I have run into is that because I’m organizing the bills by month I can easily find a bill for a specific date but I have a hard time getting to bills from a specific company.  I could easily make a copy of the file in another folder but that would create redundant files and use up extra space.

What I need is a system that organizes files on disk based on the date they were created but also allows for tagging of the files.  That would allow me to quickly find the information  I need without using up to much extra hard drive space.  It would be nice if the program could store the tags inside the files whenever possible so they can easily be moved around.  I have found some software that is proprietary and I’m a little worried about getting my data stuck in a file.

I’m going to the Detroit Auto Show next weekend.  I’m trying to take as little as possible onto the show floor so I can practice carrying just a few things.   The first three are kind of self explanitory:

1. Camera
2. 18-200mm Lens – So I can get the nice close up pictures of the details of the car.
   
3. Fixed 50mm Lens – This lens is faster than my zoom lens so I should be able to get nicer shots with a small depth of field.
4. Monopod – Finally I get to use my monopod outside of my house!  This will be ideal because the lighting conditions on some of the cars are less than favorable but I can’t handle carrying around my tripod at the busy show.
5. Circular Polarizer for Both Lenses  – This will cut down on the glare from the shiny parts of the car but will unfortunately step the pictures down one step.
6. Lots of memory cards – Last year I only took 2 GB of pictures but was rushed out so hopefully I can take way more pictures this year. 

Let me know if there is something else I should bring.

Well this is repeat of yesterdays post but what do you do with old hard drives?  This seems like a recurring theme the last couple days because it seems stupid to put a 40 GB drive in my computer when I have two 120 GB drives.  I also don’t want to throw these out because I had personal data on them that I wouldn’t want other people finding.  My guess is that people will look at if they purchased it from my off eBay.  I guess I will have to start looking at ways to delete whole hard drives.

While I was cleaning today I ran across a 32 MB and 64 MB SD card. I not sure what I want to do with them because they are still usable but to what point? The 1 GB memory cards I have now hold fifteen to thirty times more information and having a 32 MB cards just take up space in my memory card holder that could be used for 1 GB cards instead. I don’t want to throw them out either because that would be wasteful. I guess I will just stick them into a junk drawer and hope I can come up with a use for them.

From http://www.penny-arcade.com/

So Wednesday I downloading Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End from the iTunes Store as my first digital rental.  It took a little less than four hours to download the movie (which was most likely my Internet connection) which isn’t bad because it is a three hour movie so it almost downloaded in real time.  I haven’t actually started watching it yet because I don’t have time to finish it within 24 hours so I have just been messing around with the file itself.

It shows up in it’s own category in the iTunes sidebar so you know exactly what is a rental and what you own.  Right now I can’t see the movie on my AppleTV but I’m guessing that the software update this month will fix this problem so I will hold off complaining about that until later.  However, the thing I can’t figure out is that I can’t sync the file to my iPod Nano.  WTF Apple!  I though that the file should be used anywhere on my set of Apple products.  I guess I’ll watch the movie when the AppleTV Take One(v1.0 or whatever we are going to call it) update occurs because I really don’t want to watch a three hour movie on my laptop.