The Hellmouth

From pacocalderon.net

As you may have noticed, I had a little problem with my pictures. Nothing big, really, except I expected something to work easily: arranging pictures taken by two separate cameras by date and time taken. It turns out Adobe Camera Raw and it's DNG converter in their version 4.4 had a little problem messing up with the EXIF data in an image. Have I lost you yet? Ok, every time you take a picture with a digital camera, the image itself contains tons of information, the most basic (and sacrosanct) is the date and time. If you shoot with a pro or semi-pro camera or if you shoot in RAW mode you get even more information like which aperture, shutter speed, gps, etc. In a RAW file (which is proprietary to each camera maker) all this info gets put into a neat little "sidecar" file. You have your image in its purest form (ones and zeroes, basically) and the "sidecar" tells your computer how to view it: color balance, sharpness, contrast, etc. You can tweak this sidecar file without compromising the quality of the image itself. With me? Ok. I managed to download a version that turned out to be buggy and it messed up the date and time taken of my pictures. So, if I wanted to sort my pictures along with Chris' for the last wedding we shot so that they flowed from beginning to end, I would have to do so manually. One by one. Have I mentioned is close to 400 pictures? There are ways to edit this Exif data (metadata) but most require knowing some code and even though I was willing to learn, I could not find anything that could help me do it in one night. I had almost resigned myself to spending hours doing it by hand when I realized that if you have an image with the correct information and you copy and paste another image on top of it, only what the file looks like changes, not the file itself. In other words, I can open a picture of myself taken two days ago, gather ten pictures from other people and put them all on my picture to make a collage and once I save it, that collage will retain the information of the original picture (yes, I know it will have a new "modified date" but that's not what matters here). So, I downloaded the most up-to-date version of the plugin, fixed the original files and then, lo and behold, I opened the finished jpeg (with the wrong info) and pasted it on top of the corrected file. It friggin worked! All the pics taken have now been corrected. I am uploading to my site now. So, before (look at the second line): and after:

I'm trying to use the Terminal and Exiftool to copy the metadata on my RAW files onto jpegs so that I can sort photos correctly. Photoshop f*cked up the "time taken" tag in my photos, so now when I try to sort them along with Chris' they're all out of order because mine show the time as "00:00:00". There is a way to do this through Exiftool and Terminal in the Mac (and Windoze too, but I don't use windoze, ew). Here is my question: the command is "exiftool -TagsFromFile src.crw dst.jpg" which is supposed to Copy the values of all writable tags from src.crw to dst.jpg, writing the information to the preferred groups. The thing is, I don't know how to do that! Am I supposed to substitute "src" with a file name? a path? how will it know which is the "dst" (destination folder . .. .btw, is it a folder, file or path?). I've been able to change files in one folder (changing the date of one file with another, manually entered date) using this: exiftool -overwrite_original -DateTimeOriginal="2004:05:25 00:00:00" desktop/sap1/*.jpg. Where "desktop/sap1" is the name of my directory ("DIR"). I can batch that. What I want is to copy the info on one file (my new brand-spanking-corrected digital negatives (DNGs)) onto the final JPGs Anyone know Terminal? Perl? Here's the link to exiftool, it's pretty straightforward if you know a bit about programming, but I have no idea! http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/exiftool_pod.html#item__2dtagsfromfile_srcfile_or_fmt If you help me figure it out, I will send you a big print of one of my pictures, your choice. I'd rather figure out how to do this than manually have to sort 389 pictures. Thanks!

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/03/rnc.day/index.html?iref=mpstoryview this is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting and never use the word 'victory' except when he's talking about his own campaign Well, uh, yeah. Last time someone said something similar was May 1, 2003 aboard the USS Lincoln.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10030344-37.html?tag=mncol;txt Since AT&T wanted to charge me a $500 deposit for simply joining their network, I've put my iPhone aspirations on hold. For now. Today I learned, however that if I wanted to upgrade to a Blackberry Perl on T-Mobile I would have to make a lot of changes . .. and renew both of my lines for two years. WTF! I wanted to drop one, but since the one I don't use doesn't expire until December, I can't drop it and any changes I make will renew both lines. A ray of hope, nevertheless, as Apple prepares for another Special Event next Tuesday. Rumored in it are new Nanos and perhaps a drop in the price of iPod Touch. That might be my fall back. As for a new phone, the call I made to T-mobile kept getting dropped (ironic, innit?) so I didn't do anything to my account.

I'll fetch the chainmail and swords

From Sinfest.

I can spell contre-jour but not "sillohuette". Go figure.

From pacocalderon.net (w/o permission)

David Duchovny in rehab for sex addiction Can you blame him?