the machine’s made it past the startupscreen this time. I’m still hearing massive disk thrash.
Crap, I picked up a Mac-centric disk-repair tool within the last couple years, um, DiskWarrior. Hope I don’t have to figure out where the discs are, given the move.
So, it seems as though my laptop’s OS upgrade may have hosed something, given that I have been awaiting a completed reboot for well over an hour.
If only I had two hours to rub together.
I’d love it if I could assemble a workflow for especially my Treo pix which would automatically pick up the pix from the folder they land in at sync, add them to iPhoto, and push them right on out to flickr in a new set with the day’s date as the set name.
It would be great to get that going for any arbitrary photo source, toom actually.
Since the Treo (and my other cameras) do not retain or offer rotation data, there’s a bit of a pitfall there. But not such a big one. I think setting my privacy defaults on Flickr is a bigger issue than that.
Last week the P-I ran a piece on a bunch of local salvage stores, which have become a primary materials resource for us in the remodel.
The REstore
1440 N.W. 52nd
Seattle 206-297-9119
M-S 9-6
Second Use Building Materials Inc.
7953 Second Ave. S.
Seattle 206-763-6929
Seattle Building Salvage Inc.
330 Westlake Ave. N.
Seattle 206-381-3453
www.seattlebuildingsalvage.com
2nd Floor Store
945 Elliott Ave. W
Seattle 206-933-3032
The NYT writes about Wal-Mart, among others, quaking in their boots at the specter of Google looming on the horizon. Annointed media priestess of the future Esther Dyson prophesies “a huge increase in efficiency” as a result of Google, and others’, far-reaching efforts to enable universal ease-of-access to arbitrary data. Efficiency! Ha!
The writer of the article either heard what they wanted to from Ms. Dyson or bought the nonsense whole, as a bit later on the article notes, breathlessly,
Among the many projects being developed and debated inside Google is a real estate service, according to a person who has attended meetings on the proposal. The concept, the person said, would be to improve the capabilities of its satellite imaging, maps and local search and combine them with property listings.The service, this person said, could make house hunting far more efficient, requiring potential buyers to visit fewer real estate agents and houses. If successful, it would be another magnet for the text ads that appear next to search results, the source of most of Google’s revenue.
This service is already available independently, albeit imperfectly, and was widely celebrated as an early and impressive Google Maps hack. The site is housingmaps.com. In addition, non-Google players have been rolling a fully–fledged version of this service out for the past year, as evidenced by our largely Redfin-powered house hunt. Redfin is Seattle-based, and I understand that also-regional real-estate programmers HouseValues just unveiled a similar tool, homepages.com.
I did appreciate the tools. I was, indeed, able to consider a seriously larger number of houses than I would have otherwise. But in the end, we invested an estimated twenty hours a week for about six months into the search. Without Redfin, I would have invested a probable five hours a week into the search. How long it would have gone on is unknown, but given the ten-percent-plus monthly cost increases in the market, my estimation is that we would have been flat priced out by February.
My real beef is with the idea that information transparency will bring greater efficiency. We looked at an estimated 120 houses and bid on five. Requiring potential buyers to visit fewer real estate agents and houses my sweet-smelling, taut, and perfectly round ass!
As person who has worked in the graphic arts for some time, this incredible, unproductive ballooning of the work needed to produce a given product, be it brochure or mortgage, is quite familiar. When the new tools make it easy to provide the client with a range of options, options increase to fill – and overfill – the time available, to no actual benefit or economic advantage.
Infinite choice is the end result of perfect information transparency. Infinity is the horizon of inflationary event spirals, while the numeral one is the horizon of efficient decision making.
As I stood in the sun on our shaggy lawn yesterday, I thought, ‘Perhaps I should mow it today instead of Sunday – after all, it is the rainy season.’
I dismissed this as an idle thought which was distracting me from other chores and decided to stick to my plan.
I awakened this morning to the soothing sound of steady winter rain.
It’s always halloween at my house!
Also, sometimes I try to post several thousand photos at a time to flickr, which makes me swear and cuss.
Also also, it seems that flickr and MT don’t always see eye to eye, imagine that.
Struck by a desire to avoid housework this morning, I hacked up a current-listings set of updating film showtimes for a selected set of Seattle-area theaters over on Siffblog. It’s drawn, circuitously, from the customizable movie times listings to be found via My Yahoo, which is why the film links point at Yahoo, and there’s no direct ticket-buying link. I may experiment with getting the data from the Google Movie Times page, but that does not yet allow one to exclude by theater.
You can see the list in Siffblog’s sidebar. Hopefully I can figure out how to do something like this for SIFF next year, too.
“A suspect who led police on a high-speed chase through several towns told investigators he was afraid to go back to jail and he had become convinced by his skill at video games that he could outrun the law, according to police.” [src: P-I’s Buzzworthy]
As I was seeing Viv off just now, a glint caught my eye within the sand and debris in the gutter.
It turned out to be the first of five unfired bullets, each stamped “Rem” on the butt.
