Just pulled into Cornell. Now it’s off to registration in Bartlet hall!
research and writings at the crossroads of journalism, cultural anthropology, technology, and reading.
Today’s beings with a quick post. I’m leaving for Cornell within the hour to start my PhD. I’ll be posting and tweeting on it all day. I’m excited and more than a bit nervious about what the future holds.
Things continue to go well with Rita Mae’s adjustment to her “forever home” (as they like to call in in pet rescue circles). In fact, the only member of the household that RM seems to have an issue with is the vacuum. I’ll let the footage do the talking on this one:
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.
It’s been a busy 24 hours or so. Yesterday, Dre and I traveled to Ithaca to bring Rita Mae home. As I type this she’s laying quietly next to Dre.
Everyone is adjusting well. Or perhaps I should say as well as we could hope. The cats, when we see them, still are not sure what to make of RM. Lewis is intrigued, but keeping a cautious distance. Lilah had decided the safest place to be is on the opposite extreme of the house, under the largest piece of furniture she can find. On the plus side, this used to be her reaction to human visitors – so we’re pretty sure she might one day be ok with being on the same floor (if not the same room) with RM. RM’s fine with the cats. Her tail starts to wag everytime she spots one and she hasn’t shown the least bit of interest in chasing them.
She loves car rides and was as good as gold on the trip back to Rochester. This morning she went with us to buy a couple extra toddler gates — we’re sectioning of her free roam of the house in hopes of helping the cats adjust. She also helped us choose new plants for our gardens at Country Way Garden Center.
We’re all getting used to this new dynamic and we’re all pleased (we’ll at least us humans) with the new addition to the house. Here’s a Flickr Slide show of pictures taken from yesterday (the trip into Ithaca, picking Rita Mae up, and bringing her home).