Be Good or Be Gone

Thursday, September 28th, 2006

Last night after work I went drinking with my friend Ashley at McSorley’s near Cooper Union. what a great place. I didn’t give Ashley the option, I just ordered round after round of the dark, though I reckon Ashley would have liked the light. Either way it was delicious. Josh Picker met up with us near our last round and afterwards we headed over to Pommes Frites for chips, a real New York outing.

st. louisans et al

Saturday, September 23rd, 2006

my friends Ashley, Josh, Amelie and Amelie’s husband and fellow St. Louisan Mike arrived into town yesterday evening. A bit of a hassle with the arrivals because Mike arrived on a different bus, that was stuck in traffic, but the others had already abandoned their luggage with me at work. Ashley met back up with me and we shuttled it all home in a cab, which I needed anyways to cart home a Mitsubishi DiamondPro CRT monitor that I found on the streets of SoHo last night (works flawlessly!). The cab ride was much talked about, as the cabbie was attempting – and succeeding with – maneuvers that nearly gave Ashley and myself heart attacks. It was great! It was Ashley’s first ride in NYC and it definitely met all expectations!

Ashley helped me lay some ethernet cable before we spent the wee hours of the morning playing Resident Evil 4 on the PS2. woke up this morning to a communal breakfast, around 12 of us at the kitchen table, then we departed for the city. We all arrived at Location One where I’m invigilating the gallery today; they’ll parade around town before we (minus Amelie whose heading back to PA this evening) head back out to Flux Factory for the opening tonight. Tomorrow morning we plan on going to Martina Mrongovius‘ show at the Holocenter and then to Coney Island for the afternoon.

Friends, Cardinals… how we think the internet

Friday, September 1st, 2006

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: