Images in the Sky

When you look up at the clouds what do you see? I see Marin, Angela, myself, friends and family, and several vacations! Before you ask...there is just Diet Dr. Pepper in this cup! I have slowly been sorting through a bunch of photos that I have stored on my computer. I have a little over 5,500 pictures and a few video clips from the digital camera that add up to about 12 gigabytes of data. I have gone through and got rid of most of the duplicates and started organizing them into relevant folders. I have been using the new Picasa 3 for managing the photos. The newest version includes face recognition abilities.
Once you name a few, it will try to find others based on the facial features.  I have noticed that it sometimes suggests the wrong person when it comes to children because their face changes so much, but it does well on adults.

As everyone, I always try to keep backups of files that are of importance.  This use to be in the form of burning files to multiple CD/DVD's every so often.  Of course you have to remember to do it.  Another problem is that burned CD/DVDs do not last forever.  I have had several issues trying to read back burned discs that were only several months old!  Sometimes I could only end up reading the disc by placing in the original burner that I had used...weird!?

Over the summer I implemented a RAID 1 configuration for storing my videos, pictures, and documents.  This works great to protect against a failed drive, but they will tell you to always keep a copy elsewhere in case the worst happens.  There are plenty of online backup companies out there, but I'm not talking about them today.

Google Picasa 3 will let you sync your web albums!  I have uploaded images to Picasa in the past, but typically reduced the quality to keep the file sizes low due to the 1 GB limit.  You can now purchase additional storage at a dirt cheap price in my book.  I just added 20 GB to my Picasa account for $5 per year!  I dare you to find an online backup company that is cheaper and as trustworthy.  So I now have 21 GB's of available storage to store my 11 or so gigs of photos (taking away about 1.5 GB of short video clips that will go to Google Video or YouTube).  Luckily I have a decent ISP that will allows me 5 MB upload speeds.  So it will only take about 6 hours to upload all of my photos.

Don't get me wrong...I'll still keep the RAID of course.  In fact, I added another RAID 1 of 2 750 GB hard drives for Marin's movies and shows!