A journal.

I just switched to a MacBook Pro (finally), so I’ve been spending some time porting my usual apps and whatnot over to the new machine. Probably the one immediate disappointment I’ve encountered is that the Mac version of Chrome can’t (yet) create application shortcuts, which is a convenience I’ve grown to depend on. It’s really quite a clever convenience — Chrome will take any website and create a desktop-like app out of it, all self-contained in its own tidy little window. It makes checking my mail and calendar a lot faster and more convenient, and the way I use them, my desktop clutter is cut way down.

So I’ve had to find an alternative, and the #1 recommendation is an app called Fluid. It’s essentially a single-minded utility dedicated to creating these self-contained web apps, and it’s not bad.

Unfortunately, I encountered some problems after creating the app for my Google Apps mail account. When I launched the new app, three new browser windows would open in addition to the main app window. Not desirable, and I had no desire to go on a deep troubleshooting expedition.

I figured that Fluid was somehow misinterpreting something in the Google Apps startup code, leading it to think that it needed to open up several new windows. The big clue was that all of the windows were pointed to some version of mail.google.com — not my domain. Apparently, when Fluid parses URLs from a different domain, its default behavior is to spawn new browser windows. Obviously, the discrepancy between my mail domain and gmail was causing the problem. After spending a couple of minutes looking through the settings, I discovered a helpful workaround that stops this behavior.

Within the app for your Google Apps mail account, go to Preferences > Advanced. Then under “Allow browsing to URLs matching these patterns”, add “*mail.google.com*” to the list. This tells Fluid that mail.google.com should be considered part of the app — and that it shouldn’t open new browser windows when it loads URLs from those addresses. Now it works fine.

The ultimate result of shielding man from the effects of folly is to people the world with fools.

– Herbert Spencer

These ever-expanding enforcement powers miss the point: The threat posed by drunk driving comes not from drinking per se but from the impairment drinking can cause. [...]

If our ultimate goals are to reduce driver impairment and maximize highway safety, we should be punishing reckless driving. It shouldn’t matter if it’s caused by alcohol, sleep deprivation, prescription medication, text messaging, or road rage.

– Radley Balko

It is the working man who is the happy man. Man was made to be active, and he is never so happy as when he is so. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.

– David Alfred Doudney, Old Jonathan, or the Parish Helper (though often misattributed to Benjamin Franklin)

A: One bite at a time.

Changing the status quo.

If I am unwilling to take responsibility for the attainment of my desires, they are not really desires — they are merely daydreams. For any professed desire to be taken seriously, I must be prepared to answer, in realistic terms: What am I willing to do to get what I want?

— Nathaniel Branden

Ben Franklin

Thomas Jefferson

a furlong is 660 feet.  there are 8 furlongs in a mile.

there was one furlong in American History X.

if that same furlong had been cast in 8 Mile,  there would have been 1 furlong in 8 Mile, not 8 furlongs in a mile.

so i’m pretty sure that’s why he didn’t get the part.

For about the last 10 years, I’ve been carrying around an overstuffed shoebox filled mostly with my old-school point-and-shoot photos from the 90s.  Like my CDs and DVDs, I’ve had a longstanding ambition to digitize them once and for all.

There are some good pictures in this bunch.  Not really for their photographic quality, but I’ve got about 6-7 rolls of film representing my trip to China in ’92, and another 3-4 rolls from a trip to Italy in ’93.  There are a good 100 or so photos of my road trip with Steve out to the Grand Canyon in ’98, and there are a ton of single photos people have given me from plays and other various events I’ve been a part of.  (There’s even a handful of slides some photographer gave me from the infamous Summer of ’97 at Camp Longhorn.)  I was never really a take-pictures kind of guy, but the photos I do have, I want to save.  Obviously.

I took my first step towards doing this about 3 years ago, when I bought a semi-fancy flatbed scanner that had excellent resolution and attachments to scan my negatives slides.

Since there are a ton of landscapes and travel-type photos in the lot, I wanted to make sure I could preserve as much of the original frames as possible.  I had no idea how much would be possible to keep, but I wanted the max.  I also wanted to do whatever I could to color-correct and remove dust and scratches.  Essentially it boiled down to a simple goal: digitize to the best quality possible, and restore what’s there.

This is totally more easily said than actually done.  I took a few sample prints and scanned them in.  I tried a ton of settings, using the automatic features like dust & scratch removal and color-correction.  Cropping was supposed to happen automatically.  None of it really worked all that great.  I tried using Ross’s photo scanner from a different manufacturer.  It was better, but it wasn’t really satisfying my perfectionist ambitions.

After screwing around with the store-bought scanners for a while, I came to the conclusion that this wasn’t going to work the way I wanted it.

Even if I could find a formula for getting great results out of my dusty and fading old prints and negatives, I still would have to spend a good while on each picture in Photoshop, removing scratches and dust and probably hairs and fingerprints and whatever else most of these photos needed.  But after a couple of hours of fooling around with a couple of sample photos, I realized that even a week’s worth of experience was not going to leave me confident that I’d done a good-enough job at this.

And the way I figure it, I want to do this once, and exactly once.  At the end, I need to be satisfied, or it’s a completely wasted effort.

I realized I wasn’t going to be happy scanning them myself.  So I sought out professional help.  I did a little research at first, googling up some results for “photo scanning service” and “professional scan photos” and the like.

After several hours of poring through user reviews and articles, I’ve decided to take a chance on a company called ScanCafe.  There are a good 4-5 companies that offer services like ScanCafe’s, but they set themselves apart by promising much better quality than their competitors, for about the same price.  They use many of the same professional scanners and software that the other major players use, but they have a single technician handle your entire order, personally reviewing the quality of the scans, and correcting for dust and scratches and color, basically giving a huge leg up on quality that you can’t get from an automated process.  Which they’re able to do, of course, by outsourcing the human labor element of their work to Bangalore.

I kind of recoiled a bit when coming across that fact.  But that’s just my natural concern at the distance involved; I’ve personally worked on projects with people from Bangalore, so I know that there are a ton of technically skilled and competent people in the city who’d be capable of doing the work.  And from the reviews and articles I read, it seems like the great majority of people are really happy with the results they’re getting back.

So I’m taking a little bit of a chance by having my memories shipped off to the other side of the globe.  But what I’m going to get back ought to make the risk worth it.

Several things I like about ScanCafe, so far: 1) Their website is very clear and easy to use. 2) Their ordering process and general business model make it easy to just throw my photos into a box and send it without having to worry too much about the details.

This is really important.  I have a ton of negatives and prints, and I’m not sure which are going to end up scanned better in the end.  But fortunately, I can just throw them all in a box, and then later, I can review the results, keeping only the scans I want.  (Subject to a 50% minimum, of course, but that’s totally reasonable.)  Part of me feels a little guilty for sending them an order that I know is going to be a little on the heavy side, but they really encourage you to just throw your stuff in a box and send it on, so that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

But in the end, I expect to spend only about $200 on the whole process — something that would have taken me a week or more to do myself.  I’m thrilled that this kind of thing is possible, and I’m excited to find out how it actually works out for my stuff.

I’m sending the box out tomorrow morning.  I’ll be following up with updates as they come in.