Friends, Cardinals… how we think the internet
so last night I went over to visit my friends Josh and Ashley at Ashley’s house on Carlsbad off South Gravois. we sat on their
upper porch for a few hours talking about crime in St. Louis, our run-ins with petty criminals, and attempted to call just about everyone in our mobile phones to offer an extra ticket to the Cardinals vs. Marlins game last night at Busch Stadium. There weren’t any takers.
They don’t know what they missed, because it was one of the best baseball games I have seen, ever.
Chris Duncan hit a first-pitch pinch-hit home run in the bottom of the eighth to tie the game 2-2 and began a four-run rally to put the Cardinals up 5-2! All four runs that inning were spectacularly played! And Duncan’s home run was a firecracker. The instant you heard the crack of the bat you knew it was out of the park!
But all the while, what was going through my head was how to organize my digital photos. Earlier in the day I was searching through google links for the means to better organize and tag photos. I use and am a very strong proponent of Picasa, a Google technology. But even Picasa has limitations. Such as the photos above-linked: do I put them in a ‘Friends’ folder for Josh and Ash; in a ‘Cardinals’ folder for the baseball game; or under the rubric ‘St. Louis Trip 2006′ for everything from this trip, and have to visually search for photos therein when I need to? Perhaps the latter makes the most sense now, but I’m not so sure of that even, especially if I wind up taking over 600 photos on this trip, which is looking very likely — how do I find that one photo of Ashley in the crowd of the baseball game?
So one of the first links I stumbled upon in my searches was this post over at the official Google Blog where they mention recently acquiring Neven Vision and their technology which is potentially capable of scanning images and extracting information for you, to heighten search functionality.
I thought, “That’s great” and found it ironic that Google was already pre-eminating this psychological concern among digital photo enthusiasts. But of course they were!! They’re Google!
But then I got wondering about Neven Vision, and who they actually are. My searches were quick and futile, and it shows how when Google acquires technology they really move fast:
[...] Tomorrow my friends Ashley and Josh will be driving in from St. Louis. Actually they’ll be driving in from eastern Pennsylvania, where Amelie, Ashley’s sister lives and works as a preacher! She’ll be driving in with them, but she’ll only be sticking around for a day or two. Josh and Ashley will be staying for around a week, including a visit us three will be taking next Monday to Shea Stadium to see the Mets crush the Washington Nationals (not that they need to, since they’ve already clinched the NL East division!). They’re timing their trip to coincide with the opening of ‘Down the Street and Around the Corner‘, the next exhibition at Flux Factory, which I’ll have some work in, in some form or another. Ashley Sell baseball friends Josh Picker Mets [...]
[...] But also, crazy, “just like me“! Like other fans, I grew out my playoff beard, or stubble in my case; I wore a St. Louis t-shirt underneath all my October layers that I didn’t take off or wash in nearly three weeks (I STANK!); and for every World Series game I wore – and never took off – a Cardinals hat that my friend Ashley Sell gave me a couple of months back when I visited my hometown and saw a couple of Cardinals games at the new Busch Stadium (did I mention they won the Championship in the first year of their new stadium? Cmon, that’s pretty fucking magical!!). [...]