unitasking is catching on?

photo from dumblittleman.com

It’s not new, but hopefully it’s starting to gather momentum: unitasking. I’ve never been a big fan of multitasking, but somehow I got through the last decade or so of its popularity, one task at a time (ok, mostly one at a time). The article’s title, The Death of Multitasking and Rebirth of Unitasking gives me a bit of hope that continuously interrupted attention will soon be regarded widely for what our brains have long known it to be: a waste of time.

Now off to finish cooking dinner…

Thanks to jclarey on twitter

how learners experience information dumps

This comic from The Usable Learning Blog provides the perfect, visual, I’d say even visceral, explanation of why information dumps do not work. You can really feel the learner’s reaction.

I especially love how the author/artist Julie Dirksen concludes (emphasis added by me):

You can make them sit through it, but you can’t make them pick it up and carry it around…

Thanks to a tweet from Kathy Sierra.

learning – and improving – by doing

Want to improve your photography? 

This looks like fun. Work, but fun work. The best kind of work: the kind that gets you motivated by your own progress.

Join Tasra Mar on this photography improvement challenge: each day, make a photo, read a page of the camera manual, and look at pro photos.

when does a snapshot become a photo?

Are you trying to move beyond taking “snapshots”  into making decent photos? How do you know when you’ve gone beyond taking snapshots? Don’t get me wrong, I love snapshots, all the gazillions of them stuffed in shoeboxes or hiding out on my hard disk.

Recently I’ve been learning a lot about photography through podcasts and experimenting with a used Canon 350D that I bought for the purpose. Nicole Young, a successfull  iStockPhoto contributor, was recently interviewed by Frederick Van Johnson of This Week in Photography fame. She mentioned how submitting photos to iStockPhoto is a learning experience. So of course I had to check it out…

And they have this cool article where you get to see the difference between  a snapshot and a photo that iStock would accept as sellable material: Are you taking snapshots? A *lot* of the difference, not surprisingly, is about composition, your photographic eye as it were. A great resource for anyone who’s got the bug to create nice pictures, with or without intentions to sell on iStockPhoto.

Here’s a sample, can you say what it is that make this a snapshot?

Check out the photog’s own explanation and sample changes.

Click! Click! Click!

wordle play

Here’s a wordle image of noahlittle.wordpress.com:

Looks like wordle is weighted toward newer topics, maybe it takes just the posts that appear when you land on the blog. Anyway, you can tell that I’m getting into photography lately.

Have some fun at http://www.wordle.net.

picasa wins out over iphoto

I’ve been using Picasa for mac for about a month now, more in the last few days. I really like it.Why? It’s simple, intuitive and pleasing to use. Here’s how I’ve been using it so far…

First, I download some photos to my computer. (Anywhere! It doesn’t matter!) Then I open up Picasa and use it to do a first quick slideshow of all the photos. That’s the “hey! look at this pic! It came out pretty good!” part. Then I go to library view and look a bit closer, zooming in and around to help decide which photos to trash. Looking through pics is simply a pleasure. Just today I discovered that you can click and hold on an image and it zooms it to 100%. Nice. I do that a lot, zooming in and out and moving the image around to look more closely at different parts.

For the photos that don’t make the cut, I simply click my keyboard’s delete button. Poof, gone. Don’t even need to right-click to then move to trash. And I know it’s just gone because Picasa lets me work with my own file system, and there’s only one image there. (iPhoto? Don’t get me started!)

I can crop, make light and color changes, even do little effect thingies, whatever editing I want – yet undoing them is no problem. Picasa doesn’t save copies of original photos when changes are made, it just keeps track of them and recreates them. And – get this – it recreates them even if you move the photos around after making the changes!

In addition to the editing possibilties (there are just enough for me, I’m no photoshopper) I’ve enjoyed the quick tagging feature. This will really help, for example, gather all the pics of our dog when she’s wet and is playing with a stick. (Yes, I will want to do that one day. Really.)

Overall, Picasa just feels right. I like knowing that I don’t need to peek inside a pkg file to find my images (hello?), they’re all right there in the folders I made for them, organized by me, in a way that I can understand (actually not much different than iPhoto’s year > roll  system).

Long story short: Picasa is a keeper! I’ve already stopped importing into iPhoto, and will continue to move my images out of the iPhoto system into the file system. Got 2009 done, that was easy.

I’ll probably keep iPhoto around as a kind of archive until I’m sure that all my pics are accounted for and viewable in Picasa. Eventually, though, it will become outdated, even more outdated than it already is (got iPhoto 6). That’s when it will have to go. No tears here.

woohoo! picasa for mac is out. but what about the latest iphoto?

Hmmm. Apple announced some interesting improvements to iPhoto just this week. And today I stumbled upon news about Google finally releasing picasa for mac! Decisions decisions…

iPhoto’s way of managing image files has always rubbed me the wrong way. I’d prefer to have a little more control, or at least more direct access to the image files. Maybe it’s because their default system just isn’t intuitive to me. Pictures > iPhoto Library > Data??  or is it > Originals? oh wait, what about > Import > Originals?  bleh.  And that system has changed over the years. Which brings me to the present problem: changing. Ouch.

After years of using iPhoto, with some rolls imported and named, some not, many photos in albums, many not (OK, I wasn’t the only one who was inconsistent) the task of completely transfering and reorganizing my photos is daunting.

So I’ll probably download and play with picasa for mac. But it may take a weekend with the doors locked and a raging  storm outside to get me to actually move to it. Wait and see what others do, find out if there are some nifty automagic moving tools, upgrade to iPhoto 09, what to do, what to do? Ditch it all and pay for Aperture?

learning through my ears

I learn, therefore I am.

That’s my motto (borrowed/shared with the brain friendly folks behind Head First books).  And lately I’ve been doing a lot of learning through my ears. Bliss…

My two recent favorite podcasts provide plenty of fascinating yet friendly and conversational brain food.

For lovers of the English language, or languages in general: A Way With Words, which is actually a radio show distributed as a podcast.

And for photophiles, beginner and advanced alike (yes, there is something for everyone): This Week in Photography.

Both are produced weekly and run about an hour, so they compete for valuable space on my ipod, and are worth every bit.  Check them out – you’ll wish you had an hour-long commute like I do.

all my internet friends

http://allmyinternetfriends.com/

Amanda French sings. Enjoy.

head conference experiment – first results as user

I signed up early for the <head> conference (previously known as singularity). The idea is appealing: a conference that is really affordable, promises great speakers, and doesn’t require any travel.

And has a cute little robot named Alvin.

Best talk so far: Your design sucks!  with Paul Boag. A recording of it is online here (thanks to an enthusiastic attendee):

http://phreadz.com/p/B191H2UV6OI0/

That’s pretty much the only one that I’ve truly enjoyed, others were kind of so-so, underwhelming, certainly not compelling enough to justify staying in with the – arrghhh – perfect weather outside. Paul’s talk came just in time to save the day. Maybe it’s just my mood.

This is an experiment, after all, and it’s been important to remember that. For the next run then, I’d have a little wish list:

• sound check, sound check, sound check. too loud! this is a persistent problem that improved only slightly through today, the last day of the conference). My system audio was at absolute minimum, but I had to wear my headphones on one ear only to reduce brain blast for practically all talks.
• post schedule earlier. worldwide means various time zones, and it’s nice to be able to plan ahead a little to catch the ones we can. and that brings me to the next point…
• provide recorded sessions immediately, at least during the event. given that we can’t attend all sessions (4 in parallel, time zone differences), the social side of the event would be enhanced if we could watch recordings while everyone is around still. I know that after an event my attention is taken up with other matters very quickly.
• reduce speaker lineup. less is more. this is a challenging setup for any presenter, so really only the best can pull it off well.

It’s a huge undertaking, and I’d say the experiment is a success, even if I’m not feeling all that excited by it right now.