Cleaning the Lab

I've been working Meaghan's overnight shift, and somehow randomly decided it would be cool to finally go ahead and clean up the lab desk area. I'm not going to lie, I enjoyed it. Probably a little bit too much, but it's something I have wanted to do all semester, and having done so gives me this weird feeling of accomplishment.

The main inspiration to clean the lab desk was the note put up by the South Lab director, saying that the Overnight people are to clean the lab station. My big problem with this is that there seems to have been no actual communication between Labs staff and Academic Computing Help Desk staff in this decision.

After having gotten it done and having gotten everything put back into place, I feel like I should have done this a very long time ago. The whole area was very grungy, and extraordinarily dusty. Being a bit of a clean freak myself, I'm not entirely sure how they were able to stand it day in and day out, the main thing is that there were massive amounts of used staples and huge piles of old dust. Not just dust, I think much of it was old dust.

They didn't just have dust. It was very, very old dust. Old dust that was probably last addressed in 2005 or so when the OptiPlex GX270 machines SCLLAB1 and SCLLAB2 were brand new. The cables were disorganized and a mess, and the workspace suffered from pretty terrible choices in the exact placement of the machines.

I even re-did some of the wiring on the left computer, whose wires were very badly messed up. A nifty little advantage of the re-wiring is that the overnight staff can pull the phone out a bit more to get easier access to it while on a call and printing at the same time. It may be fine for the daytime lab staff that shouldn't be on the phone.

Over the summer I'm kind of going to miss this desk, especially now that I've put so much effort into de-grunging it. Ah well, at least I won't have to suffer the moral question of whether or not to let a student sans-ID into the lab before 8 a.m.

Switching to Bridge

This is "Part three of an unknown number of parts" in a series I'm calling "Cory talks about how he manages his images." In Part One, I described the history of the schemes I used to manage my photos, including some of the rationale behind each of my switches to a new management system. In Part Two, I ponder the affects of various systems which I could use for photo management. It's also worth noting that I sat on this draft for a very long time, so some of the time is messed up.

This is no giant shock, because it happened several months ago, but I've recently switched to a workflow featuring Adobe Bridge for organizing photos. One of the main features of this system is a heirarchy of folders and Adobe DNG files that consist of my master images, Photoshop PSD files that have files that have been changed at all, and images I've already prepared for output.

Adobe Bridge is what we'd like to call image browsing software. It's capable of interpreting Camera RAW data, building little previews of almost all types of files in any given folder, and things like assigning keywords, ratings and other metadata properties to files. It's somewhat less efficient in some of these processes (particularly rating and keywording) than a few other options available for the Mac, but on the PC, it works great. (More on that later, I'm sure.)

One great side-effect of this system is that I can actually access my files from any computer that doesn't have Bridge or Photoshop installed. Another cool aspect of Bridge is that it doesn't even require I be using a specific type of computer, or accessing my files in a particular way. Because there's less overhead involved in using the files, I can feel confident hooking them up to a network server, or leaving them on a FAT32 formatted drive and using them with my mobile Windows PC as well as my Macintosh at home.

After using the iMac to convert just over thirteen thousand images to DNG format, then split the files into the four gig buckets specified by my workflow, I started using it to give keywords to the images in the first bucket of images, from when I got my first digital camera several years ago.

One thing I noticed at this point was that while Bridge "worked" it definitely wasn't the smoothest possible solution on the Mac. it lagged when loading any significant number of images, and during the process of keywording, something that's specific to the Mac version prevented it from being able to actually add a keyword to an image unless you follow a strange set of keystrokes for each image.

But alas... as a result of PHO382, I was switched to Bridge permanently.

Well that's enough of Bridge for now, but stay tuned for the next article in this series about digital workflow management, or whatever it is I'm calling it as you read this.

Publishing Schedules

One of the things I've noticed about some of my favorite web logs, even personal ones, is that they come out on a fairly regular basis. One of my intents for Strapped to a Desk has been to publish it on a fairly regular basis, my original plan for that was just to always be writing, and then I'd always have something to post to the blog. What ended up happening was a bit different. I kept writing, into a document called NaNoNovel 2007, and so I didn't have anything to publish during November. Between that, and not really having a dedicated blog-writing time, not only has my publishing schedule been sporadic at best, I've somewhat slowed down in my writing.

So one of my goals for 2008 is to start publishing my blog more often. I'm going to achieve this by just writing more, plus I intend to use a calendar, which will help me keep track of when I've started to write things, and when I intend to finish them. I've already started the calendar, I'm using Windows Calendar on my ThinkPad R61i to keep track of when I start writing things, and when I intend to publish them. My intent is to have something fairly major ready for publishing every Monday, and I've already started filling in Mondays in 2008.

One thing I've definitely noticed is that I think to my blog a lot, or at the very least, I think in things I write that could potentially end up on my blog. Another thing I suppose I would like to do is write some more things that don't get published to the public weblog, but that do get written, primarily as a personal record. It's a need I have because there are a lot of things I see and hear and experience that most people don't need to know about, but that I'd like to have in the future. I may just start writing Word documents into a separate folder for that.