Mormon "Swashbucklers" Spot Gets Award for Best PSA

This is fun.

One of the recent "Homefront" ads from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was recognized thusly,

Swashbucklers was recognized by community service directors for its relevance, high production quality, and exceptional combination of excitement, humor, and warmth. “The Swashbucklers PSA had a great message about parents spending
quality-family time with their children,” said Jana Gordon of WAVY-TV, Portsmith, VA’s NBC affiliate. “It was incredibly well-produced and the concept was so different than many of the other PSAs the station receives. I really enjoyed sharing that message with our viewers.”

Windows 7 Upgrade Report

This weekend I upgraded from Windows Vista to Windows 7. The process was very easy, smooth and devoid of hangups. But given all the preparation that's recommended (backing up your system, verifying compatibility, etc) the whole thing took more than three hours.

But it was worth it. The Windows 7 interface is quite cool, the performance is snappy and there's support for every single application I was already running. Looks like Microsoft got this one right.

Windows 7 Arrives

Well, my Windows 7 upgrade disc finally arrived today. I plan on installing it this weekend; I hope all goes smoothly. Better make a system backup disc first, just in case. I'll report how it goes.

For Fun...My Coworker

This dude sits one cube over from me.

Besides working with me, he designs and sells very cool t-shirts. Check them out!

Your Own Font - For Free

I remember sitting in a plane, leafing through an in-flight magazine maybe 10 years ago, and I came across an ad for creating your own custom font. Basically you wrote a bunch of characters in a series of squares, then mailed in the form along with around $200, and they mailed back to you a disk with your own font. I thought it was pretty groovy, but no way was I going to spend money on something I could reproduce by hand.

A decade later I find fontcapture.com, where you can do it all instantly, for free. Pretty cool--give it a try!

Public Opinion of Healthcare Plan: 41%

Take a clue, congress.

When 56% of your constituents oppose something, while only 41% support it, you'd better give that something the ax, or your jobs are toast. Just sayin'.

Picasa 3.5 - A Fantastic Photo Program Just Got Tons Better

I've long been an avid fan of Picasa, Google's free photo organizer and simple editor. No other application comes close to ease of tagging, simple editing and exporting of images. Now they've added two long-awaited and very desirable features: facial recognition and geotagging.

Picasa's online companion, picasaweb.com, has featured facial recognition for many months now. I find the service rather limiting, however, and it lacks much of the social aspect of my preferred online photo site, flickr.com. Now that Google has ported that technology into the Picasa desktop client, I can enjoy the feature with abandon. Because I have a lot of faces in my collection to be recognized. Nearly 20,000 photos worth.

The other new feature, geotagging, isn't really new with Picasa 3.5, but it is a vast improvement from previous versions. It offers a nice big Google Map right in the window upon which to drop whatever photo you please. Very slick.

What makes everything nearly perfect is the Picasa2Flickr add-on that I use. By simply selecting the photos I wish to move online, then clicking the Send to Flickr button, the photos are automatically placed in the separate Flickr Uploadr application, ready for upload.

The nice thing about the Flickr/Google combination is that they share the basic tagging/geotagging functions. So whatever data I give a picture offline in Picasa is automatically recognized by Flickr. The one drawback is that Flickr doesn't recognize the facial data tags it gives when recognizing faces.

In short, thank you Google for finally adding these features to Picasa. You definitely beat Flickr to the punch on this one--and you have retained at least one solid fan.