Another one right in the middle of the patio. I have no idea how this was planted. I assume birds? Wind? Aliens? o

Caught this guy on our patio last night. Crazy. o

Taken on last night’s dog walk.

dooce® – The Armstrong Bathroom Makeover Catastrophe

Just read the comments. So awesome. o

Yesterday I wanted to give Heather the ultimate Mother’s Day: unlimited napping potential and uninterrupted solitude. This might seem a little strange, but given the state of things with the nesting and the impending baby as well as the fact that we spend our days working together, I can’t think of a better thing to give Heather. Except breakfast at her favorite diner. I hope that place never closes, because we survived on it in Leta’s early months and because it has three foods Leta will eat on the menu.

Leta and I spent the morning on computers. Leta is getting bored with the simpler Flash games and is requiring a narrative, a problem to solve and more hand-eye involvement. I found a couple of super girlie places online and Leta did well. While she was entrenched in her games, I started to fix metadata in old photos.

I started shooting RAW in the last part of 2006 using the Camera RAW plug-in and then moving to Lightroom. Both the Camera RAW plug-in for Photosohp and Lightroom will embed the tonal work, cropping, and other metadata that was added while working on the photo in its RAW state. The problem is that when I moved the files to the Drobo, we lost those changes. So I’ve been manually re-synchronizing the hundreds of folders of tens of thousands of images we’ve shot in RAW since 2006 and making sure that the collection has the correct metadata.

In doing so, I’ve been seeing a lot of really great memories and learning alot about how to manage a large library of photos. I have changed computers a couple of times since 2006 and that complicates things a bit. I also used to do a lot of my photo work on Heather’s desktop as well, further complicating the digital workflow. I thought I’d share a simple list that relates a little bit to this post where I talked about how to handle folders and files.

1. Store your central catalog(s) and images you’ll import into it on a super-reliable external storage unit that is automatically backed up every day. I’ve chosen Drobos for this task. Doing this insures that when I upgrade or move computers, teh library is always intact and does not require a certain computer to open files. If my computer dies, the library lives on. As a side note: store installer files of your apps on this drive as well for a quick and convenient way to be up and running should an emergency strike.
2. Since our library is so large (100,000 plus photos), I’ve split up the catalogs by year, importing each month/year folder with its corresponding folders of each shoot. Every year, I’ll start a new catalog that is stored on the exteral storage unit. Lightroom lets you do this fairly easily. The thinking here is that having the catalog spread out means faster navigating and preview rendering. As well as a concrete way to sort files and find files. Scenario: “I think I took that photo in February of 2007, but it might have been March. Or maybe late January?” With each month as a folder in the catalog, I can quickly select months and scan through thumbnails. There are ways in Lightroom to do this, but this method is quicker for me.
3. If you do external editing (Photoshop or other), save that image as a separate file in the same folder as the source, so that if you ever need to move a folder, any further edits you have made are not lost. As a result of not doing this, I’m having to spend a great deal of time across a number of catalogs to find images that I edited two and three years ago to make sure I have the source file. Note: this goes for any tweaking inside your RAW editor. Save/Export the XML sidecar files to the same directory as the source image. This will save you hours and hours of time in the future. I’ve had to find old catalogs, open them, re-render thumbnails (in order to see those images with obvious and not-so-obvious edits) and save out metadata in order to move the metadata files to the correct folder on the Drobo.
4. Back up everything every day. EVERY DAY. Use Apple’s Time Machine or SuperDuper! to clone your drive. I’m about to buy another Drobo for this purpose. I’ll automatically run that backup at 1 or 2 in the morning using SuperDuper!. I prefer it to Time Machine for these kinds of backups. Time Machine is great for a casual user, but I want bulletproof. I never ever ever want to lose a photo. Ever. Ever Ever Ever.
5. Use built-in rating/ranking and color coding to organize the definite keepers for quick sorting and searching. Develop a system and stick to it. I have a minimum of 3 stars assigned to a photo that I post and once I have posted it, I color label it green. I’ve been doing that since 2006. The problem is that I didn’t always save those edits out to a separate file (see 3, above). I’ll probably start rejecting files as well as a way to simplify the library.

I believe that this digital nesting instinct is my response to the final weeks of prep for the baby. I want to be able to add the tons of photos we will take of her without having to think about each and every set. Just shoot them and add them in. Once a system is in place, it makes working so much easier.

Heather’s system is simpler and likely better. She does a folder for each shoot and dates each folder. She just uses Camera Raw and Photoshop. Camera Raw on her machine is set to spit out a sidecar file (same name as the original file but with an .xml extension) that holds all of her changes to the RAW file. She does not save the layered work file (yet) in the same directory as the source, but I’m working with her about that. However, her discipline in working like this means that the only concern as a librarian I have is that I got all the photo folders and is the metadata current for all the images.

Lightroom has a quick way to look at a folder of images and grab the metadata from external files if there are any. It has become my best friend these past few days. Right click on a folder in Lightroom and choose “Synchronize Folder…”

Anybody have any other tips for dealing with large photo libraries? Please share! o

This cover of the Johnny Cash song was heavily inspired by the 80s version done by Wall of Voodoo. You can hear their version here. We did our version before Social Distortion did theirs. I like ours better. Social Distortion made more money from theirs.

Rod (singer) brought in the Wall of Voodoo tape and I came up with a keyboard sound that was close, but not too close. As with most of the keyboard sounds on these songs, mine were squashed pretty hard in recording and mixdown.

I recall pushing very hard for a click when we did these sessions and boy howdy did we fight it on this track. I think we eventually gave up, but not after some heated discussion. I should have let it go. One of the things I wanted from us was a tight sound that would help us sound somewhat professional. That was a loaded idea back then, as some in the band didn’t want us to sound too “commercial” or “pop”. I don’t think we had much to worry about.

This track got us some airplay on a locals only radio show and was a crowd favorite. We played a show at the Utah Valley State College (now Utah Valley University) and in the slow parts of the song had a 100 person mosh circle. It was crazy. We played a show at a club in Salt Lake called The Zephyr Club on a weeknight for money. We weren’t a very good bar band. We did better when we played a set at a show. So at the club, we had to play three sets about an hour each, with two breaks. Nobody was there. We repeated our first set and when we played “Ring of Fire”, the owner of the club got on the dance floor and poured a ring of Bacardi 151 on the floor. He took a large shot into his mouth, pulled out a lighter and sprayed fire onto the floor, dancing around the ring of fire. It may have been the coolest crowd response we got to this song, even though there were only about 7 people at the club.

Production Notes
Of all the tracks, this one proved the most difficult thus far to get a solid low end without sounding too ridiculous. I’m learning a few tricks, having never had much experience with an expander. The results aren’t too bad. I wish I had the source tracks. We shoulda bought the reels. Grrrr.

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Direct Download – Swim Herschel Swim – I Wish I Had a Raygun – Ring of Fire – Remastered, MP3, 320kbps constant

o

Sundays are for being calm.

The CIA’s $1,000 a Day Specialists on Waterboarding, Interrogations

ABC News on the psychologists involved in creating the CIA’s use of torture. Oh, GOP, aren’t you PROUD?

The new memos also show waterboarding was used “with far greater frequency than initially indicated” to even those in the CIA.

Abu Zubaydah was water boarded at least 83 times and Khalid Sheikh Mohamed at least 183 times.

If the Dems handle this correctly (and I doubt they will), their majority should be solid for a few more terms. This is definitely a Watergate-like era for the United States. o

Panel for the SubBass plug-in in Logic Express

Another in the reggae then ska then reggae then ska songs we wrote in the first months. There are two things about this song that I really love. The first is the lyrical content. It’s not entirely apparent, but I believe this song is about a woman in Provo with a decidedly Thomas Hardy bent to how she lived her life. Rumor was that she wanted kids and would lie about birth control to get pregnant, then try to manipulate the father into either marrying her or staying married to her. Victorian hypocrisy laid bare, right there. It’s hard to capture the notion that even in the late 1980s/early 1990s there could be a Mormon woman seducing men to give her children. It seems so 19th century. But so it was. Second, reggae always reminds me of driving in my dad’s 1980 VW Rabbit in the middle of a scorching summer, the AC broken, my shoes off and the windows down. This song always reminds me of summer. Summer is also when we added our sax guy, Sam, to the band.

We took the summer of 1990 off and when we all came back to Provo, we did some summer rehearsals and I’ll never forget the new sound of the sax with our songs; there was a kind of Paul Desmond (listen) vibe to Sam’s playing that reminded me of an innocent and hot summer. Sam looks like Paul Desmond. For some of those early Sam rehearsals, we played in Rich’s (drummer) apartment complex weight room. I believe those sessions were done partially semi-nude or topless. I also remember the feeling of playing with the band again after those few months and it’s hard to explain the exuberance, the feeling of finding something great with these lads that I wasn’t sure would come back after a break and wondering where it might take us.

1990 was a marrying year for the band. Three (four? five?) of us married during that year. The wives were super supportive and without their support, I doubt we could have continued as a band.

When we played our first big paying show the fall of 1990, we had enough money to pocket that would have gone a long way towards making the band a viable second income. However, immediately after that show in the parking lot behind the “Center Stage”, we had a Spinal Tap Moment™ or two discussing what we should do with the money. I think the door total was a couple of grand or so, and after paying the opening bands (at least I hope we paid the opening bands) and taking a few bucks for ourselves (I think $25 or $50 per member) we decided to pool our money and make I Wish I Had a Raygun.

Production Notes
I boosted the hell out of the bass and the subsonics. Logic Express has a sweet way to boost the lows without completely jacking the rest of the mix. Of all the tracks on I Wish I Had a Raygun, this was the one that had the most potential for the standard reggae bass treatment. In our modern age, where subwoofers are the norm, the bass fiends should find their fill here.

This may have been the third or fourth song we wrote. I’m still pleased with Rick’s dub guitar work and Jeff’s bass playing. Jeff was not a formally trained bassist, but this track features some of his better true-to-the-genre playing.

I love the organ sound. Love it. Super carnival fun house and extra cheesy. This was one of the first organ sounds I did on the Roland D-50/Cheesemaster 2000. It’s a pretty good Hammond B3 knockoff, if a little lacking in the analog department.

Fire up your subwoofer:

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Direct Download – Swim Herschel Swim – I Wish I Had a Raygun – Suzy Q – Remastered, MP3, 320kbps constant

o

I love the exuberant little stems in this shot. Love them to death.

Soundtrack to this image would be the Doves’ “Catch the Sun“. The chorus is brilliant. o