How did I miss it?

While I was making dinner tonight there was a small earthquake. I didn’t notice anything, maybe it happened while I was running the disposal? My room mate came downstairs to ask if I noticed the earthquake. I had no idea…

http://news.mongabay.com/2007/1030-quake.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN30435739
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsus/Maps/US2/36.38.-123.-121.php

Geotagging Workflow

I started this as an email but thought I’d share how I organize and geotag photos.

In Expression, you can view the lat and/or lon as a view option. I made a thumbnail preset to show all of the tagging information that I use namely, File name, City, State, Keywords, People, Lat. This takes up a lot of space, so I made another preset to only show the image and the rating info (for sorting). That way when I’m in tagging mode, I look at lots of data, and when I’m in sorting mode I only see images.

When you’re ready to add lat/lon info, the easiest way I’ve found is to add Geotagger as a helper application. Geotagger sets a photo’s lat/lon EXIF using Google Earth’s center. When you want to geotag a photo, right-click it and select “Open with > Geotagger”. It took me a while to figure out how to get Expression to show the geotag. You have to “Rebuild Item” [Apple+B] after Geotagger has finished. For some reason, resyncing the metadata [Apple+Option+B] doesn’t update the lat/lon. The nice thing about this method is that it runs in the background and doesn’t require loading/learning a new program, plus you can batch process many images from the same location.

I’ve found it really helpful to make a .kml with the places I tag a lot. You can save a subset of your “My Places” in Google Earth by right-clicking and selecting “Save As.”

I also use “Map the Photo” to verify tagged photos. It opens a Google Map in your browser with the location from the photo.

If you have .gpx data from a GPS you can use GPS Photolinker to sync the tracks with your images very quickly.

Helpful Links
Geotagger
GPS Photolinker
Map the Photo
GPSVisualizer

Morning Rides

I’m really excited that I made all three 7am bicycle rides this week. Even though I didn’t want to wake up most of the mornings, somehow I managed to get it together (enough). Since last Saturday, I rode 96 miles, the most in any week ever for me.

The image here shows the routes from my trusty bike GPS. Once I get a little better with MotionBased.com, I’ll post a link so you can see neat graphs like elevation or heart rate vs time. For a sense of scale, Stanford, where the red tracks start, is about 35 miles from San Francisco, the peninsula on the left.

Poached Pears

For dessert tonight I poached a couple of pears in my favorite grocery store wine, Beringer’s Pinot Noir, with a little sugar and vanilla. They were really tasty served warm with a dollop of ice cream.

Facebook Friends Collage

I found out about a neat Facebook feature on Lifehacker that let’s you see the profile picture of all of your friends. Here’s my collage.

Coachella camping

Here’s a panoramic shot of the camping area from the Coachella Valley Music Festival. I heard that there were 16,000 people camping, and I believed it.

State signs now geotagged

After taking forever to geotag my photos, I’m ready to upload them. You can see on the map above the state signs I passed. The photo is a link to the Yahoo! map where you can click on the pink dots to see the image that was taken there.

After you look at the state signs, be sure to check out the set Westward Ho! which has images from my drive across the bottom of the US. The California set shows my pictures from guess where.

I’ll add links below once I get the rest of my photos uploaded.

Photo Maps:
Westward Ho!
California
Northward

Museums, et cetera

My sister, Lindsay, came to visit this weekend. I was really impressed that she decided to leave her cell phone at home so we could have quality time together. We took a quick trip to San Francisco to check out the de Young and SF MoMA museums.

At the de Young, designed by Herzog and de Meuron (two of my favorite architects), we spent a while in the sun at the outdoor cafe under a beautiful clear cool sky. There were no empty tables when we got outside, so I asked if we could share with this girl who was sitting by herself looking at a San Francisco guide. It turned out she was from Paris and in SF on vacation as part of a work trip to Seattle. We ended up chatting in French for about half an hour, which was good practice for my quickly rusting French.

When I realized that SF MoMA closing was rapidly approaching, we jumped in the car and headed across town to take a quick peek at the Olafur Eliasson. This exhibit will be here in SF for a while and is touring afterwards, if you get a chance to catch it it’s totally worth it. Imagine a science museum for adults. This exhibit asks you to re-experience a number of novel and everyday experiences. Getting off the elevator into the mono-frequency light filled room immediately warns you that you’re about to experience something strange. The single frequency of light creates essentially a tonal black and white world. I don’t ever remember seeing a live black and white well light image. The image with this post is taken from the ground level looking up at the 5th floor walkway which Elaisson covered with small triangles of chromatic glass. Walking through it was another great part of the whole experience. I was also really struck by the arrays of images from Iceland, highlighting different features like waterfalls, rocks, and glaciers.

Great Talks

This week has had its share of excellent talks. After 2 nights with Philip Glass (one “conversation”, one performance) I went to see three other eminent speakers.

The first was Martin Eberhard of Tesla Motors who make the Tesla Roadster, the world’s first electric sports car (it’s lighter than a 911 and does 0-60 in less than 4 seconds). He gave a great talk on how to start and run a successful start-up business as a part of the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar Series. You can listen to his talk here. If you want to hear more just about every week, you can subscribe to the podcast (part of the reason I wanted to come to Stanford).

After that, I went to a full house lecture at the Law school given by Jimmy Wales, the guy who started Wikipedia. If you haven’t heard of or played with Wikipedia, it’s worth checking out. There’s a ton of information on just about every subject you can image, and if you disagree, you can always change it. That’s the beauty of the Wikipedia model. All of the content is created and edited by the users.

The third in an amazing series of talks was Jeffrey Katzenberg. A big time Hollywood guy who’s most recently been running Dreamworks animation, the makers of Shrek.

[Note: for the Internet neophytes the words that are a different color are links, clicking them will take you away from my site and give you more information from someone else. Many of the ones here link to Wikipedia, so seeing the founder talk was pretty cool.]

Skeletor

Skeletor
Originally uploaded by Straight Chirp’n

Here’s a picture from a drive down CA84 over the weekend.