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Clearing Up the Confusion E-Zine Vol 04 Issue 01
------- Clearing Up the Confusion E-Zine -------
Vol 4, Issue 1
It's funny how life can get so crowded sometimes that you don't
even notice the time passing by. In addition to some fun family
things (which included a vacation at Walt Disney World at the
beginning of December), Cyber Data Solutions has been keeping me
a bit tied up. I'm not complaining, though. I like having work,
even if it means the occasional long night.
I've also been devoting my writing time more and more to
developing a new project. I started a new blog called "The
Reluctant Networker" (http://thereluctantnetworker.blogspot.com/)
focusing on the networking tips, techniques and theory that I've
gleaned over the past ten to fifteen years of building my own
business. This may lead to more developments in the future, but
I will announce them as the time comes.
For those who will ask, Kaylie is still a wonder and a delight.
For her, the trip to Disney was a veritable parade of beloved
characters (whom she loved), stairs, ramps, and the hotel
swimming pool. What more could a two-year-old desire?
We did manage to get a lot of these events on camera and I will
be covering some of the tools I used over the next couple of
issues. In this issue, I'll be focusing on an old friend who has
come up with some new tricks. Read more about the developments
with Picasa below.
In the meantime, I hope you are all enjoying a happy and
prosperous new year.
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In This Issue...
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1. Article: What's New with Picasa?
2. Blog Posts
3. Shameless Self-Promotion
4. The Fine Print
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1. Article: What's New with Picasa?
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If you've got a digital camera (and who doesn't these days?), you
probably love the ability to take as many pictures as you want,
knowing that later you can delete the ones that didn't turn out.
Of course, no one actually does that and sooner or later you end
up with thousands of pictures of friends and family on your
computer with no real idea of who all is there. Now the most
recent version of Picasa, the free photo processing software from
Google, can help you out.
First just go to http://picasa.google.com and download and
install the package. When you fire it up it will go through a
process of scanning your computer for all of the pictures it can
find. Depending on how many images you have, this can take
several minutes. Next, click on the "People" button at the
bottom right side of the screen. This will cause Picasa to start
scanning all of your pictures for faces. It will also group
those faces which it thinks are the same.
Now comes the fun part. You go through the groups and give names
to each group. As you name more and more groups, the software
gets better and better at figuring out who each person is. The
system isn't perfect, but it does a pretty good job of getting a
majority of your pictures tagged with people's names. In a few
hours, you can get a large chunk of the faces each associated
with a particular person.
You can also tag photos with arbitrary words and phrases and
locations. For example, I've tagged all of my Leadership Ann
Arbor pictures with "LAA", the particular "day" it was, such as
"Education Day" and the class year "LAA 2009/2010". For the
house hunt that Lisa and I just started, I geotag all of the
photos for a given house so we can easily go back and look at the
details at a later date.
Of course, Picasa also offers a variety of photo processing tools
including red-eye repair, cropping, brightening, etc. It even
includes special effects tools to do cool things like make your
photos look like old-time sepia tone pictures. Really, unless
you are a professional photographer, you can do most of the photo
editing that you might want using the Picasa package -- so, no
need to shell out the big bucks for PhotoShop.
If you've got a ton of pictures sitting on your hard drive, now's
the time to get organized. Get Picasa and spend an hour or two
reliving the wonderful memories of your life.
Copyright 2010, Greg Peters
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2. Blog Posts
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Links to posts on the "The Reluctant Networker" Blog:
1/31/2010 -- Old Photographs
http://thereluctantnetworker.blogspot.com/2010/01/old-photographs.html
"I've been going through my collection of digital photos lately
(about 8 years worth or so). I've been running some facial
recognition software on them and taking time to look over the
results..."
1/30/2010 -- Schedule It!
http://thereluctantnetworker.blogspot.com/2010/01/schedule-it.html
"Let me know if this sounds at all familiar: You go to a
networking event. You have a great time. You meet a number of
interesting and potentially beneficial people. You promise to
call or email in order to set up a meeting with them..."
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3. Shameless Self-Promotion
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The "Clearing Up the Confusion" E-Zine is a production of Greg
Peters, owner, chief cook, and bottlewasher of Cyber Data
Solutions. CDS has been helping website designers develop better
web presence for their clients for more than a decade. Visit us
on the Web at www.cyberdatasolns.com to see how we can help your
webmaster.
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4. The Fine Print
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Clearing Up the Confusion E-zine, please email Greg Peters at:
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