Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

  • piano nostalgia

    I recently reached the five-year mark at my day job, which is another topic entirely. But as a result of this, I was given an opportunity to order a bonus gift from a loyalty-type catalog online. These are usually a mixed bag, in my previous experience, SkyMall-style gadgets I don’t need like wine fridges and socket sets.

    At Samsung, they did this at the end of every year, but the gifts were maybe four or five Samsung items that had dropped off the market, like the remaining stock of last year’s hot tablet. One year, I got a netbook that was sort of cute and decent for travel, but painfully slow and cheap. I took it apart to upgrade something, and ended up breaking it. The next year, I got a 40-inch TV, probably the last generation without the “smart” features, which is fine by me. They also had smaller gift things, like for merit-based recognition, and the gifts were much worse. I think once I got a fanny pack, and another time, I got some no-name bluetooth headphones that worked once.

    Anyway, the work gifts were slightly better than that, but there wasn’t much I really needed or wanted. I didn’t really need another low-end point-shoot camera or a charcoal grill. I ended up ordering a Yamaha electric piano keyboard, and then sort of forgetting about it. It showed up yesterday, and I unboxed it and got into a strange nostalgia mode about the idea of piano.

    When I was in high school and worked as a stagehand at the Performing Arts Center, I was around pianos constantly. I think we had like a dozen of them; there was a flawless Steinway concert grand, and a really nice Yamaha upright. But there were also other uprights of various manufacture in pretty much every practice room in the music department, along with other floaters that moved around everywhere. Some of these were decent. Some had survived elementary schools and were latex painted bright orange and barely stayed in tune. I never played piano, but I moved a lot of them, cleaned them, and spent a lot of time polishing the Steinway, like it was a sports car. The idea of piano intrigued me, especially after being around so many people who could play.

    In my senior year, they started teaching a piano for non-music-majors class, and got a lab full of really nice Yamaha digital pianos. I took the class in my final semester, and about eight of us sat in the little room, plinking away and learning basic chords and how to use both of our hands at the same time. It was neat to me, because this was in 1989, the height of MIDI and pop music using Korg M1s and Yamaha DX7s in everything. The keyboards we used had very convincing sampled sound, maybe a dozen instruments, like a pipe organ and marimba, along with concert grand and electric pianos. They had weighted keys and felt very nice, at least to a person like me with no experience whatsoever.

    They were also wired together in a network. We each had our own headphones to hear ourselves, but the teacher could share his audio to all of us, to play examples. He could also snoop on each of us during our free practice time. We had a similar setup in the new Apple II lab that I practically lived in. This was the very start of a networked world, which has now become unimaginably huge. Teachers can share and network and spy and monitor more than I could have ever dreamed in 1989. I’m not harping on the spying stuff; I just find it interesting that I lived most of high school in an era when there was no technology beyond overhead projectors with transparencies and ditto machines, and saw the very first edge of interconnected machines used in learning. I even helped perpetuate this – my first programming job ever was writing a schedule-maker program for sports teams, so a coach could enter all the home and away games and practices on a calendar, then save it to disk for later and print a handout for all the players’ families.

    The piano class was fun. I mean, I took it because I’d finished all but one class before my last semester, and took all fuck-off classes for the most part: two study halls (one to work in the theater), a drafting class where I worked on whatever I wanted, a computer class where I did all the assignments in the first week and spent the rest of the year working on that schedule program or playing chess. I’d never played a musical instrument, and just getting to the point where I could play a chord and a melody in straight time and almost read music was an enjoyable challenge that made me use a different part of my brain. I also ended up meeting someone I briefly dated and went to prom with, so that’s another memory that came out of it.

    I did buy a cheap Casio keyboard at the time, one with mid-sized plastic keys and a bunch of cheap sounds, but I never religiously practiced outside of school. There was some invisible wall for me, aside from my own brain issues. I’m not really that musically inclined, but also piano was never seriously “cool” to me. There are occasional bits and bobs of interesting keyboard music, like I remember buying a Journey songbook and trying to plink out the song “Faithfully,” but that was already five or six years behind the curve. I ended up starting bass guitar shortly after that, and then drifting away from that as college got underway.

    At IU though, it seemed like everyone I knew had some degree of literacy with piano. I mean, it’s the biggest and best music school in the world, and you have to take keyboard proficiency as an undergrad. There were also pianos everywhere; I worked in the Musical Arts Center and was constantly moving pianos, plus every practice room had one; every dorm lounge had one or two; the basement of my dorm had its own practice rooms, too. It always amazed me when someone who wasn’t a music major, like some economics major friend, was suddenly presented with a piano, and would do the “oh, I had to take it as a kid” and then could belt out “The Entertainer” or some random Billy Joel riff ten times better than I ever could.

    I would sometimes sneak into a practice room and mess around. This was fairly easy the year I was at IUSB, because I worked late and had keys and 24-hour access. It was both cathartic and frustrating, because I’d quickly run through the four or five stupid tunes I knew, Christmas songs and “Camptown Races” and whatever else, then drift into stupid experimental free-form garbage, just banging on keys until something sounded right for a second, and wishing I had the ability to do more.

    So now I have this new keyboard in front of me. It’s got 41 full-sized keys, but they’re cheap plastic and not weighted, and not touch sensitive. It also has no MIDI or USB out, just a headphone jack, so no way to use it as a synth with my computer. It has the usual 300-some styles, some cheesy and some decent, and some built-in demo songs and drum patterns and other junk I’ll never use. It could be a fun toy to plink around with. But, I’ve got other musical instruments here I’m not learning well, and too many other things taking up my time. And I’ve got so much junk in the house lately. Maybe I will buy a dummies book and give it a month, see what I can learn. Maybe it will go to a more worthy home. We’ll see.

  • Yes, I have a new book out now

    Yes, I have a new book out!

    No, it’s not like the last one!

    No, I don’t have a snazzy elevator pitch to describe it in a sentence by saying it’s like this movie meets that movie! I don’t write those kind of books. Actually, I did write one of those books, my last one, and it was sort of silly. So let me assure you that this book isn’t like that.

    This book is titled He. It consists of a hundred short microfiction pieces. Each piece begins with the word “He.” Like my book Atmospheres, the pieces are related, but if you flipped the book open to any random piece, you could read just that and read it and then LOL and put the book back next to the toilet and finish your business.

    (For some reason, a lot of people read my book on the toilet. Maybe the toilet is sort of like my Hot Pockets or Pringles can/tennis ball factory. I don’t know. I’m just glad you read the books.)

    The book is funny and dark and offensive to everyone, including you. I’d say sorry, but I’m not.

    I realize this is a bad description, and I should have thought of a better title instead of He, and books with more color on the cover sell more, blah blah blah.  I don’t give a shit.  I write what I write.

    I took the cover photo on the way to Area 51 this year at KonCon 2015. Just think, if you would have went, you could have your picture on a book. Also, I hope you like my new author photo. I’ll leave it as a surprise.

    The links:

    The book is on Kindle Unlimited, so if you have that, you can read it for free. It is also on Kindle Match, so if you buy the paperback from Amazon, you can download the book on Kindle for free.

    No plans for an audio book. (You probably should check out the Atmospheres audio book, though. It’s pretty awesome.) No plans for a not-Kindle ebook.

    Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to for the last year. Please, please, please, share the shit out of this on your face places or whatever. If you review books, get in touch. If you know anybody at Kraft Foods who works on Lunchables who can get me an endorsement deal, get in touch. Thank you.

  • Various Vegas thoughts

    I planned on blogging more from KonCon in Las Vegas last week, but I didn’t, because I am lazy. I probably should write a synopsis of the trip, but the TL;DR is that it was way too fucking hot – usually at or above 110 each day, and even hours after the sun set, it was still above 100. So that’s why it’s so cheap to go in July.

    Someone asked me for some advice on Vegas while I was gone. I have not spent much time there in years, and everything I mentioned in my book about Vegas is largely gone. But my response to this question in an email is an interesting companion to the trip itself and my thoughts during it, so I’ll just leave this here for your amusement.

    • I waste a lot of time on this site when I am planning: http://www.lvrevealed.com/deathwatch/ – their casino reviews are decent, but I am sort of obsessed with who is rumored to get imploded in the near future.
    • If you look at a map of the strip, most of the mid-strip properties are what I’d consider first tier (Bellagio, Paris, Harrah’s, Caesars, etc), and the Wynn is north strip, but I’d group it in with those mid-strip properties. Same with Aria/City Center, which is technically south strip. It’s the newest; I’ve never stayed there, but from eating/shopping there, it’s pretty high end.
    • The south strip was the big deal maybe 10-15 years ago, and that stuff is now dated, but can be tolerable to stay there. It can be cheap, and the location is decent. So Mandalay Bay, MGM, NYNY, Luxor, Excalibur in that order. (Most of those are owned/run by the same monopoly, so they’re similar.) Tropicana got bought by Hilton and redone, so the rooms are nice, but there’s not a lot in there.An example: the Luxor is not that trendy of a property – I think it was so-so when I stayed there in like 99, and now it’s really lost its focus. It used to be Egyptian-themed, and they decided that maybe flyover rednecks aren’t into that, so they started de-theming it and ripping out the king tut stuff, but it’s still got these random stone pyramid walls in places.  But, the rooms are now ridiculously cheap, and it’s a really good location, and connected to the big mall by Mandalay Bay. So if you don’t plan on spending a lot of time in your room, it could be an option.
    • Everything north strip is shit. Everything downtown is total shit. Everything that’s not on the strip is mostly shit, unless you stumble on some deal to stay in a timeshare at Trump or something weird like that.
    • Absolutely do not stay at Hooters like I did.  I won’t go into the horror stories, but I’ve stayed at hotels in rural Mexico that were much nicer.
    • I used to never rent a car and cab it from the airport and around town. But the last few times, I’ve found an okay deal on a rental car bundled with the hotel (I think I used Expedia this time) and if you drive at least once a day, it’s usually a better deal. You can generally park at any hotel for free, or valet for almost nothing.
    • If you are driving, don’t actually drive on the strip to get north/south. Either go west to I-15, or go east to Paradise, Maryland, or Eastern.
    • Think of whatever amount of water a person would drink in a day that would be entirely excessive, and double that.
    • You can drive off the strip and buy a case of water for four bucks or whatever, or you can buy two bottles of water at a hotel for seven bucks. The problem is almost none of the hotels have a fridge. You can buy a crappy foam cooler at the grocery store and then commit to filling it with ice every other hour, but that’s a huge pain in the ass.
    • Opentable is a good way to get reservations for dinner.  There’s a surprisingly large number of high-end restaurants with decent food.
    • Every buffet is a ripoff. Wynn is almost tolerable, if you pace yourself and don’t eat all day and go in with the plan of fucking them by eating five pounds of lobster. But I made the mistake of going to the MGM buffet, and paid $35 for about $10 of Sizzler-grade food.
    • If you’re into steak, Tom Colicchio’s Craftsteak at the MGM has a fairly insane three-course beef selection that is not cheap but is awesome. Or in the opposite direction, there’s the Golden Steer, which looks a little dodgy because it’s ancient and has never been remodeled, but it’s cool because it’s ancient and has never been remodeled – it’s one of those old-school places where the brat pack used to hang out.
    • Everyone associates the Grand Canyon with Vegas, but really it’s like a 4-5 hour drive each way, and easy to kill an entire day to spend a few minutes there.
    • If you are actually interested in going to Area 51/Rachel I could fill up another post with details on that.
    • If you are there and hit the wall and need to bug out and go somewhere quiet to get work done or whatever, go to UNLV. You can hide in their library and use wifi without any hassle.
    • There’s a huge Fry’s Electronics south of the strip, at a big outdoor mall right before 215. There’s a Target at Flamingo and Maryland. There’s a few Vons grocery stores (Safeway-owned, I think) on Tropicana and Flamingo.
    • Pinball Hall of Fame on Tropicana is worth checking out. The atomic testing museum on Flamingo is neat, but their Area 51 exhibit is pretty cheesy.
    • If you want to tour the neon graveyard, book it early.  They have limited tours and they always fill up.
    • Don’t stay at Hooters.

    Thoughts?  Leave ’em in the comments.

  • Flickr Magic View

    The other day when I posted about Google Photos, I mentioned how I hoped some of its features for image discovery and auto-categorization would come to other tools like Flickr. Well, I should probably log onto my Flickr account more often, because it looks like they did.

    Flickr now has a feature called Magic View. If you go to your Camera Roll view, there is a slider at the top that defaults to Date Taken, but you can toggle it to Magic View mode, which groups together photos into various object categories.

    My Google Photos uploader worked away all weekend, eventually transferring about 27,000 unedited photos to their cloud. The Assistant wizard is still churning away, sending me various alerts as it groups together things into animations or “stories.” I only have about 10,000 photos on Flickr, because I use it as a repository of public albums of sorted and edited photos, and not a complete bucket of everything I take. But there’s enough there to compare the two.

    In general, Flickr is way better at auto-categorizing things. For example, I take a lot of pictures of my cats. If they are at all blurry, or the cats are wearing a costume (don’t judge), they are categorized by Google as dogs. My long-haired cat got identified as a raccoon a bunch of times. I have a category called “Race Tracks” on Google, which consists of pictures of stalled traffic on the Bay Bridge, and baseball diamonds. I also have a category named “Football” that is pictures of swimming pools and people in the desert. Flickr isn’t perfect; it thinks snowmobiles are bikes, and thinks a lot of old Las Vegas is an amusement park.  (Maybe it is, from a metaphorical standpoint.) But Flickr seems to be a bit better for me.

    Flickr has some interesting categorizations. One I like is a “style” category, that identifies things like pictures with strong depth-of-field or abstract composition. Google has some other interesting concrete categorizations, like taking a stab at identifying when something is a wedding, art museum, or concert.  (Although for me it also grouped proms, hotel lobbies, and night portraits in those respective buckets.)

    Google does group by people, place, and thing, and the first two of those are mostly absent from Flickr. Flickr does no facial recognition, but the Photos software by Google only groups your like-faced photos with no identifying tags, just within your photos, so it’s not as accurate, and gives you no way to label a collection as being a person, like you could in iPhoto, Picasa/G+, or Facebook.  Flickr can store geo data and group your photos on a map, but that’s a different interface, and it’s slightly clunky. It would be nice to see a list of cities/countries with all of my photos in that location. I guess it’s possible to write an app to do that, or maybe somebody has.

    Flickr also doesn’t do any of the Assistant things that Google does, like auto-stitching photos into panoramas, or making “Stories,” which are slideshows from auto-curated chunks of photos spanning multiple albums.  These can be pretty goofy, though, especially because there’s no metadata or context to things you’ve mass-dumped into Google Photos. Like I have these stories titled “Ten Days in Oakland” that are assembled-together slideshows of crap I saw at the grocery store.

    This further brings up the issue of using a cloud service like this as a private cache of everything I’ve taken, versus a public set of edited photos. I use my phone as an extension of my memory, and I’m always snapping pictures of notes or grocery lists or things I need to remember. I also try to document things only I’m interested in, because I know that now I wish I would have taken more photos of things in the past so I could go through them now when writing or sinking into a pit of nostalgia. I don’t want those to be public, but it might sometimes be interesting to have them grouped. I might continue mirroring photos on Google, but keeping everything public on Flickr.

    Oh, in case you’re curious, I’m on flickr at https://www.flickr.com/people/jkonrath/

    [2020 update: of course they removed this feature a year or two ago.]

  • Yes, I can legally perform your satanic gay wedding

    In addition to being a world-famous fiction writer, cough syrup enthusiast, and inventor of the zero-g bong, did you know I, Jon Konrath, am an ordained minister?

    Seriously – I am legally ordained. I can perform marriages. I’m available for your wedding. Schedule permitting (I don’t like to leave the house), buy me a plane ticket and put me up somewhere that has free wifi, and I’ll marry you and your sweetheart for a very nominal fee.  (Depending on your state, I might need to get some additional paperwork first, which takes time and money.)

    I can also perform funerals, although note that if you ask me to do the eulogy, there’s a strong possibility I will talk about RoboCop for an hour.

  • Google Photos

    Anyone else here trying out Google’s new Photos thing?

    They announced this new service the other day, a “gmail for photos.” Traditionally, Picasa had a quota, like any other cloud photo storage service, and then you paid for more space. Now, they offer an unlimited amount of storage for free. Also, unlike G+, this isn’t a place for you to simply share photos and make them public; by default, photos (and videos) are made private, and then you choose to share them if you want.

    This also isn’t a “social” play like G+, or sharing on Facebook or elsewhere. You can share photos from there, but it’s more like a storage bucket where you put things, and then optionally share them if you want.

    The interesting part to me is that Google is adding various features to automatically categorize or clump together photos. The obvious one is that it will create virtual collections of places, like when you dump all of your geo-tagged photos into one clump. But the other neat thing is that it guesses at other categorization. For example, I had categories magically show up for food, cats, baseball, stadiums, and sky. Your photos are still maintained in a chronological order, just a “firehose” dumping ground, like throwing everything into a folder, but it does this smart collection thing on its own. You can also sort and create collections, and share those, but I’m mostly interested in what it can do without my interaction.

    It’s not entirely clear if the original resolution photo is being kept, or if it is hosted. There’s some vague language saying that under 16MP files are kept in the original form. I think it’s serving up compressed versions of them, but you can get at the original (under-16MP) ones if you need them.

    I haven’t thought out fully how this would land within my workflow. I keep everything on my computer in Lightroom, which is backed up wholesale to CrashPlan and locally, and then sort through and make collections that are then shared to Flickr. In my head, here are some brief comparisons I could think of:

    • Vs. iCloud: I am not paying Apple to store a copy of my photo library and then killing my battery to constantly sync with it, sorry. It’s why I ditched Aperture.
    • Vs. Dropbox: Dropbox has a quota, and its sharing stuff is a bit clunky.
    • Vs. Amazon Prime photos: Amazon has an unlimited quota, and keeps originals, but their sorting/sharing/organizing is barely there.
    • Vs. Flickr: I don’t like to dump everything to Flickr, because I use it as a destination for albums of sorted, edited, and cropped photos, not everything I take. Plus it’s my “public” destination, so I’m not sending private photos there.
    • Vs. Instagram: I only see that as a one-shot thing for sharing a single, square-cropped photo, not entire albums.
    • Vs. hosting it myself on this site: ugh.

    I haven’t messed with the mobile app yet, but this seems like it could be a good solution for the person who only takes pictures on their phone or tablet, and don’t want to sync with a PC at all.  They have a Mac (and I assume Windows) uploader program that you can set loose on one or more directories, an iPhoto library, or any inserted cards/phones to upload the images.

    My current game plan is to keep my workflow as before: import my cards/cameras to a Lightroom master catalog, and import from my iPhone and iPad when physically plugged in. Then I’ll create collections, edit, and share to Flickr. But I’ll also upload to Google Photos in the background from my laptop, mirroring my LightRoom masters directory. When I need to one-off mail a picture, I can do that. I also mostly want a way to look at my entire collection when I’m not at my computer, without keeping 30,000 photos on my phone.

    One thing suspiciously missing (and this may be on purpose) is that there’s no way to embed a photo from Google Photos into a page here or elsewhere. That would be awesome, to drop a google link in an image tag on this blog, and have Google host it up instead of me. But I could see why they would leave that out on purpose.

    Anyway, photos.google.com. Try it out, let me know if it works for you.

  • Padres @ Giants, 5/5/15

    IMG_0560.jpgI got tickets to see San Diego play San Francisco last week, via my wife’s work. It was a last-second, unplanned thing, but my first game of the year, so I went to eat, take a few pictures, and eat.

    Here’s a quick bulleted list update of the game:

    • I took BART from West Oakland to SF, which itself was pretty fast, but I always underestimate the walk from the subway to the stadium, which took about 30 minutes.
    • I brought my full-sized DSLR, with the usual kit lens and zoom, plus a new 10-18mm wide. I also brought my EOS-M mirrorless with a 50mm prime.
    • I shot a touch of video with the EOS-M. The wide-angle lens didn’t work out. I feel like I keep taking the same pictures of AT&T park over and over again with the zoom. The 50mm and the mirrorless was great.
    • We had a box suite, but went downstairs to the club level to eat. I ended up getting a trio of sliders that were corned beef and briscuit, and a bratwurst. The corned beef was exceptionally good. The bratwurst was a bratwurst.
    • I’m still (allegedly) a Rockies fan, so I don’t like the Giants or the Padres. I won’t say anything bad, except that I think it’s chickenshit when a World Series champion’s fans boo every player’s at-bat, especially when you’re outspending all but three teams in the game.
    • I actually like the Padres’ dark uniforms. I think they remind me of the Brewers’ uniforms, minus the cool caps.
    • The game itself was eh. The Giants jumped ahead fast, and the Padres never scored.
    • It was Cinco De Mayo, and some dude proposed on the kiss-cam.
    • I saw a huge dude with a giant Bud Lite logo tattooed on his hand.
    • The Rockies game that I was going to passively follow was rained out.
    • We left after the 7th inning.

    A bit boring, but I do like going to AT&T for the food.

    Pictures are up on flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jkonrath/sets/72157652540439541

  • Latest Obsession: Guitar

    So a week ago, I decided to make a change, hobby-wise, and do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: learn to play guitar.

    I’ve been playing bass for about two and a half years now, after a recess of a few decades. And bass has been fun, but I’d hit a plateau, and thought I’d try something new. I’ve never really played guitar, although my stepdad had an ancient acoustic when I was a kid, and I learned like maybe two riffs, and used to mess with it a little. And I’d tried to resuscitate a few unplayable garage sale guitars when I was a teen, with no real success. (I remember getting a department store Les Paul clone with a snapped neck and trying to fashion a makeshift one from a piece of dimensional lumber, which didn’t work at all.)

    So, I ordered a cheap guitar from Amazon. I got the lowest-end Squier Affinity Stratocaster, in the “beginner” pack, which included a tiny shoebox-sized amp I’ll never use, plus other paraphernalia like a bag, a tuner, some picks, and a strap. I also started scouring the web for any lessons or videos that would be helpful. I also have a copy of Rocksmith, which I used for bass, but which works for guitar, too.

    The guitar: well, it was DOA out of the box. The jack screws were loose, hand-tight.  I took it apart, futzed with it, and it’s fine now. It looks very nice: a transparent blue, with a white pick guard. It’s a Strat, same size and design, with the three single-coil pickups, and same curves and lines as the more expensive cousin. The neck isn’t too bad, with a couple of sharp frets, but it was playable out of the box with no adjustment. It’s amazing to me that in the day of CNC machines and overseas factories, a hundred-dollar guitar is much more playable than what I’d find in a pawn shop for $100 back in high school or college.

    Physically, it’s taking some time to get used to it. It’s much lighter and shorter than a bass, which is nice. The strings are much thinner, and closer together, which makes it feel much different to me. And playing chords is an alien process, as is using a pick. After a week, I am starting to be able to play some chords without my fat fingers dragging across other strings, but it’s going to take much more practice to move around and get used to it.

    I’m having a lot of fun with it, though. There’s a complete different psychology to guitar, and it’s the reason I wanted to try it. I like and appreciate the bass, but it’s a different mindset, and I wanted to shift gears. I am not at the point where I can sit down and play complicated things yet, but it’s easy to turn on the distortion and Iommi away on some power chords.

    Anyway, here’s the short list of what I’ve found useful for learning guitar:

    • http://www.justinguitar.com – a great source of free lessons for beginners.
    • http://get.yousician.com – a fun game with a guided learning path and lessons. I’m just trying the free option, which is time-limited per day.
    • I got the Dummies book, but I’d only say it is half-useful. I don’t like the dead humor tone in it, and I think they burn a hundred pages on useless stuff before they really get going. Plus I don’t want to learn to play “On Top of Old Smokey” – I’m not seven.
    • This book is only four bucks in paperback, and is short (50 pages) but has good info. For that price, the back cover’s chord chart is worth it.
  • The Death of Aperture

    So Apple has killed off Aperture, the photo program I’ve been using for the last few years to slog around the 30,000-some pictures I’ve taken. iPhoto is going to die soon, too. They’re replacing both with Photos, a dumbed-down port of the featureless picture program that’s on the iPhone. Oh, but that has The Cloud, so I’ll be able to dump 100 gigs of photos, pay $4 a month rent on them, and then live in fear that I’ll accidentally have some switch flipped in a system update and burn through my monthly data cap when it tries to sync all of that stuff to my phone seven times every time I leave the house.

    I know, “why don’t you just put all of your pictures in a big hierarchy of folders on a hard drive and not keep them in a database?”  Because I actually need to find shit, and it’s not 1997 anymore.

    I moved everything from Aperture to Lightroom yesterday. There’s a plugin for Lightroom that does most of the deal for you. I bitched about this endlessly, and it ate up a few days of my time, but I guess it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Here’s the various observations and gotchas:

    • It helps if you clean up your Aperture library first. I found I had an insane number of scans that were impossibly huge and didn’t need to be, and a lot of RAW files of dumb stuff that I didn’t need. I like to keep RAW files of Hawaii sunsets, but if it’s a picture of a dumb sign or a Taco Bell, I can smash it into a JPG and still sleep at night. My library was about 140 GB, and I got it down to about 85 GB before import.
    • You basically need your library size in free space on a drive to do the conversion, so good luck with that. I chose to convert in-place, so I freed up about 100 GB, put the new Lightroom in ~/Pictures/Lightroom* and then moved my old library off of my machine to a backup when I was done.
    • Back up your shit before you start. Back up your machine in general. Clone your entire drive regularly, not just your documents.
    • Lightroom puts all of your master photos in a hierarchical tree, just like I made fun of, and then keeps a separate database of metadata and non-destructive edits. The database itself isn’t that big. It keeps a previews database, too, and that can get big, depending on how big you make your previews.
    • Lightroom Folders = the hierarchy where stuff is stored in the above. I used Aperture folders projects as the “hard” dividers of what photos were captured in my library, although those are just virtual and you can move them around.
    • All of my photos ended up in a folder tree like this: LightroomMasters/YYYY/MM/YYYY-MM-DD/files* I don’t know how it decided on that hierarchy. I think it’s based on actual imports into my Aperture library, and not capture time or EXIF data or projects. I guess that format works for me.
    • Your tree in the left panel thing for Folders won’t look right. Right-click on the folders and do “Show parent” endlessly until it looks right.  (I.e. show the parent of the three levels of the hierarchy. Is there a faster way? I can’t find one. You only have to do this once, though, I hope.)
    • An Aperture Library = a Lightroom Catalog. I only had one Aperture Library. If you keep multiple Libraries, I don’t know what to tell you.
    • Aperture albums and projects are converted into Lightroom Collections. I.e. a Collection is a “virtual” collection of photos from your folders, and if you add or remove things to a Collection, you aren’t touching your stuff in folders.
    • If you edit the Collections made from your Aperture projects, you aren’t actually moving your masters in your folders. That’s a huge pain in the ass for me. Like I found a bunch of scans I took in 2006 that were pictures from, like, 1979. They should be in the folder for 1979, and they aren’t, so I had to find the pictures, then move them into the right folders.
    • All of your Aperture Smart Albums are broken. You can possibly use Smart Collections to replicate that, but you need to do it over.
    • All of your Aperture edits are gone. If you did edits, static preview images of the edits were imported, but you need to start over using Lightroom’s tools to do them again.
    • Any of those edited images will not have a Capture Time in them. The default grid view in Lightroom is sorted by Capture Time. So you’ll have a big mess there, and have to spend some time with the Metadata > Edit Capture Time settings.
    • I don’t even know what happened to shared albums. I don’t even care. I’ll start over. Nobody looks at my Flickr page anyway.
    • You end up with a huge shitstorm of dummy Collections with nothing in them. This is probably my fault, but I had to do a bunch of cleaning there.
    • At this point, this bulleted list is longer than I wanted and nobody’s reading, so figure the rest out. It will 90% work, but you’ll probably spend a weekend futzing with it after import.
    • Back all of your shit up again after you do all of this, and not on top of the old backup.
    • Do all of your imports in Lightroom. Don’t just dump images into your Masters directory or Lightroom won’t know they are there. If you want to dump them to a folder because you have a piece of shit phone without a modern sync, you can make Lightroom watch a folder and auto-import it. You can also do various schemes like watch a Dropbox folder and dump pictures there, like screenshots or your security cameras or whatever.

    Here’s the main problem with Lightroom: there is no good way to sync with an iPhone (or iPad.)  You can set it up so when you plug in your phone and Lightroom will start and go directly to the Import screen and then import your photos, which is mostly how Aperture worked. (You could also just mount your phone and drag the files to your ~/Pictures directory if you are an idiot and want to lose all of your metadata and spend hours dealing with duplicates and creating new subdirectories and moving files around and whatever else.) So import is fine.

    But there’s no real way to export and sync files to your phone. There are half-assed ways, but you can’t use iTunes to do it automatically anymore. It used to be in iTunes, I could say this:

    • Go to my iPhoto/Aperture library
    • Get my last X months of pictures, plus these other Albums I’ve selected
    • Sync those to the phone, and also clean up the ones that aren’t in the above, so my phone doesn’t slowly fill up and I end up trying to sync and I have 62GB of pictures on my 64GB phone and I have to spend a weekend deciding what to kill, and then the fucking thing will try to resync the 62GB anyway.
    • Do all of the above without me thinking at all, with no interaction, without opening iPhoto or Aperture, because life is too short.

    There’s no way to do any of this in Lightroom. The closest I can think of is this:

    • Tell iTunes to sync from a folder.
    • In Lightroom, create a Publish Service that dumps a Smart Collection to a directory.
    • Remember to open Lightroom and click Publish before every time you sync your phone.
    • I don’t know how this handles duplicates or if it deletes old images. I haven’t tried it.
    • This is horrible.

    There are some various plusses to Lightroom, I guess:

    • My library size dramatically dropped. I went from about 85 GB to about 70 GB. It’s possible that I just haven’t generated previews for everything and that will slowly climb.
    • Lightroom processing tools are supposed to be better. I haven’t gotten into that yet, but I spent a few minutes futzing with some RAW images, and it’s not bad.

    So there’s what I did for the last few days instead of writing.

  • Mexican hookworms and shipping companies run as a hobby

    I’m not sure which is more depressing: a long-running blog with no entries for months, or the blog post that has a giant preamble talking about how sorry the author is they haven’t posted, the promise to post more, and the likelihood that this post will be an island in the middle of a long body of nothingness. I guess both are better than then site vanishing and redirecting to a Chinese boner pill site, or the long “farewell” post announcing its closure.

    I’m still semi-obsessed with hookworms. My allergies go in cycles — not seasonal, but they wax and wane, according to some unmeasurable cycle. And when they get bad, and it knocks 40% of my efficiency away so my body can run my immune system overtime, I start googling dumb cures, which is always a bad thing to do.

    The other night, I ended up on some crazy helicopter parent autism site about antihistamines and diet. I’m not saying autism is crazy; just the ideas about crystals or chanting or gluten or whatever else that seem to cross-pollinate (no pun intended) into every other autoimmune disorder’s narrative. Anyway, there’s a low-histamine diet, I think it’s called, and I read enough to start thinking it almost made sense, until the person started talking about the evils of microwave ovens. Then I tuned out.

    I already wrote about hookworms a few months ago, which is the danger of this blog. I have a dozen and a half years of various memories here, so when I am suddenly inspired to write about that Christmas in 1992, it turns out I already did. Anyway, I was thinking of the hookworms and that made me think of going to Mexico in 2009, and caught food poisoning. We took this tour of a coconut plantation, which was interesting, but then they had a huge lunch, and brought out a salad, and I think every person at the table stared at the washed greens, and thought “I’m going to get dysentery and die if I eat that” and the guy said “don’t worry, is filtered water!” and so everyone reluctantly took two bites to be polite, and everybody got sick.

    I didn’t get as sick because I’d been taking probiotics prior to the trip, but to me, probiotics are the same logic the flu shot: you’re trading a low-level misery for a long time to avoid a brief burst of heavy misery. Some people love probiotics and think they cure everything from allergies to paralysis. Every time I suddenly decide “I’ll start taking probiotics” I get whatever supplement or drink, and it gives me a horrible taste in my mouth 24/7 and I think “this is the rest of my fucking life” and then stop.

    And to some people, the simple act of me saying “no, I don’t think I’ll have crippling abdominal cramps and the taste of garbage in my mouth forever” is like taking a dump in the holy water at the Vatican. I get the endless “maybe you aren’t buying the right stuff,” which is basically like “maybe you’re not stabbing yourself in the eye with an expensive enough pencil.” So there’s that.

    A lot has been going on, and writing’s been uneven. It’s been long enough since the last book, and I didn’t like the last book, that I feel an overwhelming need to put out another book, because the other ones are slowly rotting on the vine. But I have two projects, and one has no structure or purpose, and the other looks like it could take years to finish. So there’s that. I have a couple of stories out and accepted, and they’ll show up at some point.

    I’ve fallen down a horrible music gear k-hole, and have bought three basses in 2015. For the record:

    • Ibanez BTB-686SC Terra Firma – very beautiful and great-sounding. But 35″ 6-string, which has me lost.
    • Squier Jaguar short scale – Great $170 bass, but incredibly neck-divey. I replaced the tuners with lightweights and the bridge with a heavyweight, but I still can’t get into the ergonomics.
    • Lakland 44-01 – love this bass. Lowest action ever, and very great sound. It has a really bright “modern” sound to it, which is the opposite of my Jazz.

    I’ve also fallen into a Don Delillo thing. White Noise was exactly the book I needed right now, and is an absolutely incredible piece of absurdism. Libra was a great historical piece, about Oswald and JFK, but had me on the edge of an all-out Nov 22 Book Depository k-hole that’s endlessly deep with far too much online reading to do. I’m mostly through Falling Man right now, and it’s decent, although I typically can’t deal with 9/11 stuff. Ratner’s Star is in the mail right now.

    Also, is it just me, or has Amazon’s service gotten much worse since they raised the price of Prime? I swear, before the increase, two day Prime meant two days. Now it’s “well, let’s take a day or two to get our shit together and ship, and then it’s two days from there. Unless it’s a weekend. Or you know, any of those 4 or 5 days take place on a weekend. Also, Mondays and Fridays are sort of part of the weekend.” It doesn’t help that our UPS service routinely takes multiple days after something goes on the truck, because we live in the ghetto, and when the sun sets, if the driver’s not done with his route, fuck it.

    OK, need to figure out what I’m writing.