Why you should read the small print

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Not satisfied in ressurecting my book database, inviting a massive updating job, I’ve decided to change my image cataloguing software, too, opening a whole other can of worms.

Once upon a time I tagged my photos in Adobe Photoshop Elements. At some point I started digital scrapbooking and for some reason (partly because of the way PE worked), I decided I didn’t want to tag my digital supplies there, so I purchased ACDSee to handle that job. Which it did beautifully, as long as I bothered to put in the effort of tagging.

Then PE crashed. That is, it refused to start in catalogue mode (this is not what the mode is called, but I can’t remember the proper name) and if I started it in editing mode and tried to change over to catalogue it crashed. I searched for solutions online, and found several, nonoe of which worked. I was faced with doing a reinstall and a rebuild, and figured it would only mean putting myself at risk of the same thing happening again. I therefore decided to change over to ACDSee for photos as well, since it seemed to be working so well for digital supplies.

This was, oh, 3 years ago or so.

The last couple of years I’ve been increasingly tempted by Lightroom – especially because I’d like to learn to handle RAW files. And in August Adobe ran a pretty good promotion, offering Lightroom 3 at half off. So I purchased a licence, and I’ve been meaning to delve into it ever since.

Now, if I’m going to be using Lightroom for editing, it makes sense to have the catalogue there as well, no? Well, I thought so. And so I started testing out importing images. And that’s when I discovered a hitch.

See, ACDSee has this nifty menu option: “Write database info to files”, which I’ve been using regularly. However, it turns out it doesn’t write any info to the files that Lightroom can find. It seems (and I’ve only spent a very little time investigating, so correct me if I’m wrong) it only writes information in its own proprietary format. So, yes, you could resurrect your ACDSee database based on it, but you can’t import it into another program.

Why?

I mean, I can see that it would make the threshold for changing to other software higher if you should find out about it while considering a change, but as I’d already made that decision, it only made me determined to change as soon as possible so as to not waste more effort. And had I known before I started using ACDSee, I would probably have searched for another solution entirely and NOT purchased the software. And I’m unlikely to recommend it to anyone else now – which I would have otherwise, it works well and has a gentler learning curve for amateurs than Lightroom. Oh, and it’s cheaper. 

Anyway. I just landed myself with three years’ worth of photos to tag. Sigh. However, I’d rather make the effort now. Portability is pretty important to me, and when the lass decides to unearth her mother’s photograph collection from that dusty old drive in the attic (or from the cloud or wherever we will be storing such things in the future), I want the image data to be readable to her, and the best way of ensuring that is to get it written to the standardised EXIF/XMP, not some proprietary format thingamabob.

Puter

Mirthful 1 Comment

Jeg sikler til stadighet (altså, ikke bokstavelig, da, det ville være uhygenisk) over putene til Putegeriljaen. Hva med deg? Enten du som meg har siklet lenge eller dette er første gang du ser putene har du nå TO sjanser til å vinne en pute. Eventuelt en sjanse til å vinne TO puter, dersom du har griseflaks.

Den første finner du hos Skjerstad 

IMG_4318

Den andre hos Gult hus i svingen

giveaway

Lykke til! Og gratulerer til begge bloggene med 1-årsdagen!

Linklove

Mirthful Leave a comment

An admirable practice and, well, I might not get around to doing it regularly, but I can try, right?

Books:

  • Bjørn Sotland has been awarded Aschehougprisen 2011. I need to read some more of his books, I absolutely ADORE Raudt, blått og litt gult and Forteljinga om jakta på forteljinga.
  • The Guardian Books Blog has a transcript of a webchat with the invariably interesting Jasper Fforde (also linked from the bookblog).

Politics:

The Interwebs

If you’re interested

Mirthful 2 Comments

I’ve blogged about our bookshelves on the bookblog. It sort of fits in with the series on “how the apartment is coming along”, but since it’s mostly book-related I put it over there.

I realise when looking at the pictures that even if we were able to live like minimalists in all other ways (not likely) our flat would never look minimalist with all those books. And there’s no way we’re covering them up. Or, even worse, making them look minimalist by turning them around. Yes, people actually do this (via). The mind boggles.

Words are just words

Mirthful 1 Comment

I spent yesterday evening obsessively reading my Twitter stream, checking facebook, nrk.no and aftenposten.no occasionally to see if I’d missed anything (I hadn’t. Twitter was by far the most up to date source of news yesterday). I passed a milestone by turning on the news despite the kid being awake, in the room and not too preoccupied to watch with me. Mercifully they’re too young to really get it, they were most interested in the ambulances, focused on how they were helping people, not registering the talk of those who were beyond help.

When I went to bed the casualty list was at 7 in Oslo, 9 or 10 at Utøya. I suspected the numbers for Utøya would rise, from what I’d read on Twitter the situation was bound to be chaotic, but I fervently hoped not, thinking “How many people can a lone gunman hit?”

I woke up to official numbers of “at least 80” killed at Utøya. The answer to my question, therefore, was obviously: “Way, way too many.”

As far as I know, I don’t know any of the victims (whether dead, injured or “just” traumatised) directly. But ours is such a small country, the degree of separation is bound to be tiny. I’ll know someone who knows someone. I’ll know someone who lost a child, a friend, a relative.

It’s a horrible, terrible, no-good day.

Still, I’m grateful.

First of all I’m grateful that my nearest and dearest are safe and sound, of course.

And I’m grateful that the Norwegian police seemed to handle everything pretty much perfectly. Their responses to the press have been exemplary (not so all the questions from said press). They obviously had plans to handle a much worse situation (I know it might be diffucult to imagine the situation being worse just now), getting people out of all suspected targets, telling people to remain calm, but to get out of the centre of Oslo and to avoid big gatherings. If there had been a series of bombs rather than just the one, their response would have been the only correct way of handling it. This is reassuring. We can’t avoid madmen completely, at least not without becoming the sort of society it wouldn’t be worth living in, but we can minimise their impact.

I’m also, though it might sound strange, grateful that the perpetrator seems to have been a right-wing fundamentalist rather than a muslim fundamentalist. It makes the horror that was yesterday no less terrifying, but it may make the reactions to come less horrible. Yesterday there were already plenty of reports of “muslim-looking” people in Oslo being hassled, or even physically attacked. It is to be hoped that that idiocy is curtailed now.

And I am profoundly grateful that the reaction from the Prime Minister, and from everyone else who really matters, has been – throughout, also when the perpetrator(s) were unknown – to keep calm, to stand together and most of all to not let fear rule our actions. Democracy – the principle that everyone is entitled to an opinion and is to be allowed to state that opinion – is one of the things that make our society great. Though, as it turns out, this is not “our 9/11”, it’s more like “our Oklahoma”, still the contrast in the reactions from our leaders expressed on Twitter and Facebook this morning is not without significance:

G.W. Bush, 9/11: “We’re gonna hunt you down.”
Stoltenberg, 22/7: “We will retaliate with more democracy”.

The AUF leader has already expressed the opinion that the camps at Utøya should continue every summer, in defiance of one maniac’s wish to stop them. I hope they do.

Links, quotes and other stuff I’d like to keep track of:

Syltegeek på Twitter:

Måtte han forstå hva han har gjort. #forbannelse

Utmerket leder i Aftenbladet.

Svelle på Twitter:

AUF bør fortsette med sommerleirene. Resten av året bør Utøya bli nasjonalt senter for de ideene gjerningsmannen hatet.

Finn en feil.

Historier fra folk som var på Utøya:

Jeanette_F på Twitter:

Kjære aviser. Denne mannen gjorde klar en pressepakke når han la ut portrettbilder på fb. Ikke bruk dem.

Anders Heger på Twitter:

Han skal ha en forsvarer, en lang og god rettssak, human straff, så takler vi dette som det vi er: Et sivilisert samfunn. Sånn vinner vi.

Sterkt blogginnlegg fra en mor (som har fått datteren sin hjem i god behold): Til deg som planla å drepe min datter (og jada, jeg griner).

Mariusgenser på Twitter:

Det jeg skjønner nå som jeg ikke skjønte i går er: Dette landet virker. Og jeg er uendelig takknemlig for det.

Kven er terroristen.

Jo Nesbø in English in the Guardian.

Uhm, what?

Mirthful 1 Comment

One of my favourite online tools is thesaurus.com, which I use if I can’t quite find the word I’m looking for. You know, when I’m writing something and want a word that means X, but all I can think of is this other word that almost, but not quite, means X. Or if I’ve already used X in the previous sentence and need another word that enchances the subject rather than just repeating what I’ve already said. Occasionally I use it to check the meaning of a word, to see, for example, if it has synonyms of both positive and negative connotations. This afternoon I had the occasion to look up the word “expletives”. As you do.

thesaurus

Notice the google ads? Why is google trying to sell me religion based on a search on “expletives”? Is the assumption that the only people who care about swear words are in search of religion or is it that my interest in the word indicates that I’m a filthy unbeliever who needs to be saved from eternal damnation?

Korrekturlesing?

Mirthful 2 Comments

Jeg skal fly til Oslo i morgen og sjekket inn på nett nå nylig. Jeg fikk en pop-up boks som lurte på om ikke jeg ville betale for mer bagasje. Øh, nei. Jeg skal på møter i tre dager, jeg tror neppe jeg trenger mer enn den ene forhåndsbetalte kofferten… Så valgte jeg sete og så fikk jeg en pop-up som lurte på om ikke jeg ville betale for mer bagasje. Og da ble jeg litt irritert, samt litt forvirret med hensyn til om jeg egentlig var blitt skikkelig sjekket inn eller ikke.

Og så gjorde jeg feilen å begynne å faktisk lese det som sto på siden:

sas

Jeg vet at SAS sliter litt med økonomien i perioder, men en korrekturleser kunne de vel spandere på seg likevel?