After acquiring a DSLR (this one) I decided to move from trusty old iPhoto to Aperture. I have about 6,000 photos in my library, many going way back. They’re all in Time Machine, so the move is less fraught with anxiety than it could be. But still, this sort of stuff is never painless. Also, I’m becoming less and less apt to tinker with software as I get older, so if something goes off the rails I’m more likely to call it off and retreat into the pocket of least resistance—or in this case, iPhoto and its overzealous virtual file system.

See, iPhoto stores separate copies of every action you perform on a photo. Rotate a shot? New version. Color correction? Ditto. What this means is that a drive will not only become littered with your original photos but their alternate versions as well. This would merely be a slight aggravation if it could be changed by ticking a check box somewhere. As you might have guessed, Apple chose not to provide such a preference. With that in mind, as well as the multitude of tools and options Aperture has over iPhoto, I made the jump this weekend. On the face of it, the process should have been easy; Aperture can natively import iPhoto libraries, after all. meaning there’s nothing too mysterious about getting the photos from one place to another. I was able to do that without any trouble. The snag came after the import, when I realized my new Aperture library was littered with all those alternate copies of many of my photos. Without a very good grasp on just what a “stack” is in Aperture, I was left without a way to quickly weed out the extra versions.

After a few hours of struggle, fiddling around with Smart Albums and importing and exporting things in various groups, I was rid of the duplicates. And the truth is I’m still not quite sure what I did. Whatever it was, between exporting a lot of junk and selectively re-importing it, I saved myself a gig or so of space. And I have to say Aperture is really nice. Somehow Aperture’s re-touchings seem more subtle than Photoshop’s; maybe it’s just the fact that I’ve been using Photoshop for so long that I can spot its use from a hundred yards away. I’m especially fond of Aperture’s gamma vignette tool, which is practically undetectable as a post processing trick.

All in all, I’d give my migration a 6 on the pain scale, with 1 being the Migration Assistant on recent Macs (yay!) and 10 being moving from XP to Vista (not yay!). Any Aperture tips or gripes out there?

The Borg-Yahoo merger won’t work. Here’s why. It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.

Here’s the weird thing: I first heard that line about the 100-yard dash from Ballmer himself, maybe a decade ago.

(Via)

So, super Tuesday is upon us. I can’t think of a better way to not only begin Black History Month but the next eight years of American democracy than for people in primary states to cast their votes for Barack Obama. The more I see from and about him, the more I’m convinced that his presidency would be a defining moment for the US and the world; not only that, but his hopeful message—one of the first of its kind in the darkness of the last 7 years—brings to mind the finest moments of figures who defined their generations: John and Robert Kennedy, Bill Clinton, even Paul Wellstone.

I urge you to visit his website to learn a bit more about why Obama is the only clear choice for us right now, and to watch Lawrence Lessig’s elucidating talk on why he’s choosing Obama over Hillary Clinton. Now, go vote!

On January 11th, Starbucks–the ubiquitous coffee giant–announced a restructuring plan. The initiative includes recalling former executive Harry Roberts back to the company as senior VP and replacing Chief Executive Jim Donald with Chairman Howard Schultz in an effort to save flagging sales. Starbucks will also close some of its 15,000 stores and slow further plans for expansion. The obvious question to the casual observer is ‘why?’ It seems as though Starbucks is everywhere: in movies, on TV and even in small town malls and grocery stores. How could a company this omnipresent be hurting for a foothold? The clearest reason is that it is everywhere, and that consumers are finally Starbucked out. There was a time when the chain had only a handful of stores compared to the staggering number it has now, and that glut has made the company’s offering of a fancy cup of coffee seem less like something special and more like ho hum.

Another reason for the downturn is the feeling among many consumers that four dollars spent on a latte may be better spent on a gallon of gas, or that enough of those lattes could add up to a chunk of a mortgage payment in these tough economic times. Still others say Starbucks has lost the “coffeehouse” charm it once had, and feels more like McDonalds (who, along with Dunkin Donuts has launched its own line of fancy coffee drinks). The simplest answer to Starbucks’ woes is that they have glutted the market: their product is no longer different and their ability to respond to customer needs has been compromised.

Apple, on the other hand, just posted its best quarter ever. Buried in the good news is the fact that Apple is showing just 5% growth in iPod sales year-over-year, despite a 17% revenue jump. In other words, lots of people are buying a second or third iPod, but not as many people are buying their first. The iPod Touch–while unique–is pricey, and hasn’t compelled many first time users to jump on board. The “gateway” iPods like the Shuffle are in need of a serious refresh in order to speed up sales.

But more than anything, Apple needs to find a way to avoid the glut that Starbucks is facing. If we use the growth of Starbucks as a yardstick, plotted on an eight year trend with 2007 being the final year, it would be fair to say that Apple is in the middle of a huge growth spurt. Part of what it needs to do now is find some sustainability for itself. The iPhone, MacBook and MacBook Pro are all excellent products whose lifecycles will see Apple well into the next decade; the iPod Touch and MacBook Air, however, are not the stuff that futures are built on. They are the “drinkable chocolate” and “blended creme frappé” in Apple’s lineup, the sorts of things meant to glow in the window and attract passersby who may never return, no matter how cool they are. Updates to the iPod line will help, including a revamping of the higher capacity iPod Classic. But prices of solid state drives may make them impractical for use in the product.

Over the last two years Apple has been essentially unchallenged in its (re)rise to prominence. A small slow down in one segment is not the end of the world, and it may just be the chance Apple needs to set the world on its ear again. Sales of iPhones and iMacs are brisk, and more and more people discover life on the Mac side every day. Whatever the second quarter may bring, everyone is excited to see what’s next from the house of Steve.

The truth is that I’d like to quit my job and start a rock band.

The truth is that I hate my commute, except for the part when I cross the bridge and the part when I pull into the drive way. The truth is that I stay pretty tired, but it’s okay cause our bed is pretty comfortable. The truth is that I desperately need to get into the gym, and write more posts, and take more photos with a real camera and fewer with a phone. The truth is that Juno was much better than National Treasure Part 2, or whatever is was officially called.

The truth is they might sell the company I work for, and I’m not having much luck caring or even understanding what that might mean—the truth must be that consolidation is Good™.

The truth is I bought a two pound bag of jerky, and have convinced even my wife that it’s awesome stuff. The truth is my XBox finally caught the red ring of death, and we might get a Wii assuming I can find one. The truth is it feels good to tell the truth, even a small one.

1.) When my dog amiably holds my gaze for just a second too long and I realize he is probably a reincarnated Buddhist monk, thanking me for the scrap of turkey I gave him under the table.

2.) When my wife calls me three times in a row in a twenty minute period to converse about essentially nothing, just so that she can say “I love you” at the end.

3.) When my in-laws give me a birthday card signed “may the force be with you” to accompany a Star Wars DVD boxed set.

4.) When people look at me–straight-faced–and call Internet Explorer version 6 a “web browser” in an non-ironic way when in fact IE6 is really just a trap, sent here by evil demons from another dimension; the same demons who want me to spend the rest of my life breaking perfectly good code instead of reveling in the first two things on this list.

I wonder if every line of work has an “IE6″? I’m sure it does. But this one, as they say in the marines, is mine. Yet again I’ve spent an evening wrestling my own hands to the desk where they can’t fly through my computer screen, thinking the same thoughts about just what would make a group of humans make a piece of technology–in general such a liberating and beautiful thing–so awful. It’s like being given an endless bankroll and a clock with no hands with which to make a piece of art and making You, Me and Dupree instead. I just don’t get it.

For now, though, I have the other two things. They’re enough. I didn’t code a single table today. Buddha and my wife are winning.

In the Fall we like to use as many fresh vegetables as possible. We do this in other seasons, too, but there’s just something about hearty fall veggies that my wife and I really love. So tonight, as I waited for Leopard to install, I used one such veggie–several fresh local sweet potatoes–to make a tasty soup.

Fall Veggie Soup

• 2 large sweet potatoes, cut into 1 inch cubes
• 1 large onion, rough cut into one inch pieces
• 3 cloves of garlic minced
• 32 ounces of chicken stock
• 3 par boiled chicken breasts (smallish ones)
• 1 tbsp butter
• 1 teaspoon canola oil
• A palmful of each of the following: cumin, paprika
• Sea salt and fresh ground pepper

Prep

Heat butter and canola oil in a dutch oven or deep stock pot. Add garlic and sauté for a minute or so. Add onion and sauté a little longer, until onion is mostly translucent. Add sweet potatoes to mixture, stirring often. Add cumin, paprika, salt, and pepper and continue to stir just until pan begins to dry out slightly. Add chicken stock and scrape pan bottom. Cover and simmer while shredding chicken, for about 20 minutes or until sweet potatoes are tender. Add chicken and cook an additional five minutes to give flavor to chicken. Serve in large bowls, optionally topping with any nutty cheese.The best part of this recipe is the broth, which has this complex flavor of onion and garlic with the sweetness from the paprika. Great stuff on a rainy fall night.

So, we close on the house tomorrow. Right now, I’m sitting in an almost bare house that’s almost packed and I’m almost asleep. I’m told that closings take a long time, and before I can attend ours I’ll be cleaning and watching the insulation guys do their thing.

This hasn’t been a bad apartment, aside from the heat that went on the fritz last winter and all the bats this summer. At least the neighbors were quiet, even the Ukrainian strippers.

Sometime tomorrow it will sink in that my wife and I are the proud owners of a pile of wood and brick and cement that we bought to put our stuff in. It’s a little absurd, really; I mean, who would have ever thought that I would buy a house, much less one that essentially is in the middle of nowhere. When I think of all the times that I sat in a restaurant here and mourned the death of our anonymity, longing for the days in DC when everyone didn’t know all of your shit, it seems even more odd.

But it’s perfect in a way, really. I’m not normal, so signing on to do a three hour commute for at least another three years kind of fits. Besides, who wants to pay DC rent? And anyone who’s seen my wife–or talked to her about her work, and heard just how brilliant she is–has even more evidence about why I might forgo a better job in a more stimulating town and sign on for a heaping helping of Beigeville. For this, I’ll take the constant waving at everyone we see; the inability to make it out of the coffee shop in under an hour. The trade off is that I have great friends in two cities, and a wealth of people to help us move all our stuff in that aforementioned pile of wood and brick and cement.

Owning a home is just another club to join, like the married club or the having kids club. After years of actively not wanting to be a member of any club that would have me, I think I’m weakening in my old age. As long as I can stay a member of the PBR and sheetcake club, this should be pretty easy.

Several things happened this week to draw my life into sharp perspective. First, I realized I’ve been making tiny changes to the same eight documents for the last eight months; granted these documents make up a larger project and encompass several programming languages. But the damage was done before I could really rationalize my way out of it. This then lead me to the realization that my life’s work as of this moment fits comfortably onto a two-hundred fifty-six megabyte flash drive, a three quarter by two inch piece of plastic attached to my keyring.

Right now, I’m not managing anyone or anything. I write isolated (for now) code that one other designer–despite a good nature and eagerness to learn–invariably ruins when trying to use it. I find myself in meeting after meeting being asked to pantomime some measure of authority or involvement, only to be shown time and again that my only real function is as a pair of hands and a walking CSS reference.

Sometimes this makes me want to start a tomato farm or a pizza parlor. Coupled with my commute it’s all I can do to drag my carcass to the car every morning. It certainly doesn’t imbue me with much enthusiasm about my work, except for being home with my wife cooking and playing XBox 360.

So today I made a mix for my wife. The best code I’ve written in months is part of the package. Here’s to the things that keep us going.

I remember when I was little my sister took me to see Amadeus, a film I was probably too young to see or appreciate at the time. The final scenes of Mozart’s death, with “Sequentia: Rex Tremendae” underneath them, are indelibly marked onto my brain even now. Though it should have been far over my head I remember watching the entire movie intently, long after the row behind us (and my sister) had fallen asleep.

I’ve been doing a lot of music shopping lately, buying up tons of records most nights and stuffing them onto my iPod for my morning drive. Every six months or so I remember that life is pretty worthless without music and I do this. I’ve managed to find some good and worthwhile things to listen to, but none so incredible as a recording of Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor. The provenance of the piece alone is amazing and eerie, but my favorite part is this from the Wikipedia entry:

The autograph of the Requiem was placed on display at the World’s Fair in 1958 in Brussels. At some point during the fair, someone was able to gain access to the manuscript, tearing off the bottom right-hand corner of the second to last page (folio 99r/45r), containing the words “Quam olim d: C:” (an instruction that the “Quam olim” fugue of the Domine Jesu was to be repeated “da capo”, at the end of the Hostias). To this day the perpetrator has not been identified and the fragment has not been recovered.

Ever since I read this passage I’ve been imaging a screenplay depicting the events leading up to the display of the score and the theft of the fragment of the page. Most fascinating of all may be the last part:

If the most common authorship theory is true, then “Quam olim d: C:” might very well be the last words Mozart wrote before he died. It is probable that whoever stole the fragment believed that to be the case.