Things continue to settle at the house. Lewis is now comfortable laying down in the same room as RM. And, in a major breakthrough, Lilah actually walked within 5 feet of Rita Mae. She still won’t set down anywhere near her, but we’re hoping in time for a cool detente between the two

So admittedly, we’re being those new pooch parents and taking lots of pictures. You can see the growing amount at my flickr account. What’s great for me is that this has been giving me an excuse to start really exploring some new technologies for capturing, managing, and storing pictures. Here are a couple “must haves”:

• Shozu
  It’s a mobile phone application that allows easy upload of pictures and video to social media sites like Flickr. What’s really cool about it is how it handles meta data. Not only can you add titles, tags, and captions on the phone, but if you have GPS enabled (like on my phone) it will grab the geo-coordinates and wrap them into the metadata as well. Which means that Flickr (and other services) can immediately place them on a map. That’s particularly useful for later encoding geo-coordinates onto other picture take in the same location using cameras without a GPS feature.
• Adobe Lightroom
  Where have you been all my life? This is hands down the best Photo Management Software out there. Between its organization capacities, the non destructive retouching, and the metadata coolness, I can do about 90% of what I normally need to do with Photoshop in Lightroom. And its faster and more organized. It also has, thanks to web folks out there, solid Flickr integration. Unfortunately, I had to loose a lot of pictures to Apple Platform quirks before I learned my lesson and made the switch.

That’s about it for now. I need to get outside and start a little gardening and then work on the HP grant for the OPL.