OMG!! I have a clean office/library! It’s the first time in . . . well, forever.

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Every day I use Windows 7 is another day I’m happy I own a Mac.

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“Jeff, where are the pictures? We want to see what you saw. You’ve been back twelve days; how long can it take?”

Once upon a time — you might even remember when — going on vacation meant waiting . . . and waiting . . . for photographs to come back from the lab. I would put exposed rolls of 36-exposure slide film into mailers, write my name on the return label, affix postage, go to a mailbox, and hope nothing got lost or poorly processed. That wasn’t exactly fast; I didn’t even start to get nervous until two weeks after sending my film away. After getting the slides back, I would open them right away to find the very best ones. Was there anybody who could wait a long time to see their photographs?

Eventually, I would put as many slides as I could on my big lightbox and cull the overexposed, underexposed, out-of-focus, blurry, and plain-ole uninteresting ones. I suspect I kept a larger number of the “uninteresting” ones than I should. I have a big box in the closet of slides, just in case they might be more interesting to me after I’ve gotten over the initial disappointment of them not mirroring the memory I had in my mind of the scene. Of course, they’re in there with a whole bunch of slides that I haven’t properly sorted yet. The process of culling — when I did it right away — would take a while. Adding information to the slide about where the scene was and when I made the exposure, that made the process take even longer.

Back then a really, really big haul of photographs was fifteen rolls of film, or about 550 slides. Because I bracketed my exposures, about 1/2 of those could just be thrown out without looking too closely; they were obviously the wrong exposure, and film was unforgiving. A two-week photography vacation could be pared down to about 250 slides. The best of these (maybe 10-20%) found their way into clear, archival sleeves that still hang in my filing cabinet. Over the following weeks or months, I scanned the very, very best of these. It took a while because getting one slide ready for the web or print usually took me about 30 minutes to an hour. And if there was one that I really liked? I seem to remember working on one particular photograph from Ipswich for six hours spread over a few evenings.

But that was then. . . .

I no longer need to bracket my exposures with my dSLR. Instead, I have almost instant feedback, leading me to press the shutter another two or three times until what I see is what I want. Unless they’re patently bad, I don’t always delete the other photographs off my camera, preferring to see what they look like on a better display and wondering whether it’s possible to use the tools in the develop module in Lightroom to turn a middling photo into a better one. Furthermore, since Lisa and I go the same places together, we tend to come back with two slightly different interpretations of the same scenes. Plus, we had some amazing experiences and saw some beautiful scenery; we find each other very photogenic; and snapping away is just so mindlessly effortless.

Add it all up: We came back from Australia with 5,900 photographs from three cameras.

We’ve been sorting through these — picking, culling, cropping, adjusting RAW conversions, and adding metadata to help us with sorting. We don’t usually do this while we’re on our trips — though I know lots of people who do — for a couple of reasons. First off, our little 10″ netbook made a convenient place to store the photos, but it wasn’t powerful at all, and the monitor had a distinctly blue cast. But more to the point, we had a lot of other stuff to do on our vacation: reading, swimming, walking around, watching “Master Chef Australia,” spending lots of time at restaurants, etc. So while I did spend about eight hours of our trans-Pacific flight adding metadata and while we did look through the photos during the trip to help identify the 55 new-to-us bird species we saw, we didn’t really spend much more time than what it took to download the photographs and to pick one a day to post to Facebook.

Late yesterday evening, we finally finished the first pass through the 5,900 photos from the trip. We deleted about a thousand photographs and picked an equal number that we liked well enough to say that we liked them. Some of those are duplicates, and we need to make another pass through those 1,010 to whittle the collection down to a number that we would consider sharing. We’ve already decided that we need to present them in themed groups, since we don’t expect anyone — even the people who love us — wants to click through that many pictures; and no one would really get much out of such an enormous collection anyway. After that, we need to select a key set of photographs that we can share with people as totems of our trip.

So, have patience, little grasshoppers. We’ll post pictures very soon.

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I’m going to try something new, posting a small group of diverse links on a (more-or-less) weekly schedule. Hopefully this will help with my hoarding problem.

Living with Diabetes: Sarah has a really great piece on her site about growing up with the “bad kind” of diabetes. At least that’s how people differentiated type 1 and 2 while she was growing up. But really, all diabetes sucks, especially if you try to ignore it.

Software Development: Keith Swenson’s article 26 Hints for Successful Agile Development is full of good advice about how to do software development effectively — even if you’re not really doing Agile development. (via Infoq)

Functional Programming: Here’s a really l-o-n-g article about functional programming. It’s good, but . . . damn!

Risk and Oil Spills: You would think that a company like BP, whose contractors deal with potentially deadly situations on a daily basis, would have a better handle on risk. Even if BP engaged in neutral cost-benefit analysis, as this NY Times article suggests, it should have chosen the option that lowered its risk exposure. Remember: risk is cost of vulnerability times likelihood of vulnerability. In the case of deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, we’re seeing that the cost of an oil spill is astronomical. The probability of failure would have to be completely zero to make it worth choosing a less expensive option.

Time Machines: Stephen Hawking tells you how to build one using wormholes. He also advises against creating paradoxes where you kill yourself.

The Artificial Pancreas: So what’s this “artificial pancreas” that people with type 1 diabetes keep talking about? Let Wired magazine or Aaron Kowalski tell you. It’s not a cure, but (if done correctly) it will hopefully lower a lot of the variability that we see in our blood glucose levels. Basically, it’s an expert system built into a pump plus continuous glucose monitoring combo. It’s also a bundle of assumptions and heuristics. I find it somewhere between amazing and hella scary.

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Happy fifth birthday, Dispatches!

A lot has happened in my life in the five years since that first post just before our trip to India. I thought you were a goner during my last year of grad school, when I didn’t post anything for more than a month, but National Blog Post Month last November seems to have restarted a more regular rhythm.

I never really knew what you were going to be about. That’s fine with me. I’m a multifaceted individual, who is easily distracted. So, instead of mining the same vein of subjects to gather a steady stream of loyal readers, I’ve written about anything and not quite everything. For a little while I thought about getting you, my weblog, a little brother or sister, turning one of you into a single-subject weblog, and keeping the other one for random stuff. But I never did, because I know you like being an only child, and I don’t have enough time to devote to two.

As a result, you, my little weblog, are always meeting lots of new readers who are drawn in by the Google, stay but a brief while, and then move on. In fact, well over half of your visitors come from Google searches. You’re most popular when you’re unique and nerdy. Here are the top 10 most popular pages over the last five years:

1. The JPEG Family Circus (2008)
2. Fifteen is an Eternity in Photography Years (2007)
3. Ask Dr. Color’s Assistant: Tone-mapping in MATLAB (2007)
4. The Cognitive Style of Microsoft Project (2007)
5. Book Notes: The Looming Tower (2006)
6. Four Days in London (2007)
7. Deconstructing an Image (2007)
8. How a Digital Camera Works (2006)
9. Grandes Expectations, a.k.a. Four Days in Paris (2009)
10. Tractors (2008)

Okay, I don’t get that last one either. I guess there are a lot of people who, like me, enjoy 1/64-scale tractors. And almost 80% of the views of the JPEG article happened in the first week it was published, when Steve posted a link to it, which got a couple hundred views and was then Stumbled, garnering 30 times more readers. You, my little weblog, were almost famous.

But those things aren’t really what you’re about. Over the last five years, we’ve traveled a lot, started to talk a bit about diabetes, visited many cemeteries, thought about software engineering during and after grad school, played with a large format camera, worried about health care, learned many lessons, taken and posted tons of photographs, and tried to deconstruct the American experience. (Lisa, who is perpetually awesome, helped with some of the posts and many of the photos.)

So what next? What will happen in the next five years?

Given the randomness of posts over the last five years, it’s dangerous to guess, but I bet it looks like the last five years. Without a doubt there will be more travel: In two weeks we’re going a Australia for a month; next year, my mom and I plan to go cycling in Provence; and in 2012, we’re going to England and France with my in-laws. Unless amazing things happen, I’ll still have diabetes and will continue to write about that. No doubt, I’ll also visit some additional technical subjects, which will appeal mostly to the long tail.

You, my little weblog, were born near the beginning of an online historical moment when it seemed everyone was getting a “blog.”* A lot of people moved on — to MySpace and Facebook and Twitter — and let their online journaling end. Meanwhile the idea of the weblog became the basis for a lot of mainstream media and corporate sites. The weblog became the scaffolding for interactive, moderated, medium-to-long-form medium.

I’m excited to see the re-emergence of “microblogging” sites like Tumblr, where people post short things: videos, links to other pages, excerpts from articles with reactions, etc. It’s bringing the social back into “social media.” Now, instead of thinking about getting you a weblog sibling, I’m trying to figure out the right way to integrate shorter snippits with my regular fare.

Because what I really want is to have something like a magazine, with its mixture of time-relevant mini-articles and long-form features: something that combines what has traditionally appeared here with some of the stuff that I’ve offloaded to Delicious or Facebook or Twitter. But that’s all in the future.

Once again, happy fifth birthday, weblog!

p.s. — I haven’t gotten you a present yet, but I know you want a new theme so that you can look a little more hip. And I think I heard you say that you want better comment management, too. I’ll see what I can do.

* — Five years later, I still can’t stand that word “blog.” It’s just too ugly sounding. Like “atheist,” there’s just no happy-sounding, value-neutral way to say it. Of course, you who don’t have my hangups can call this site whatever you’d like. :^)

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In case you wondered what that post from earlier today was all about, perhaps a picture will help:

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This envelope came in the mail yesterday. I don’t know who put me onto this mailing list, but I’m pretty sure it’s related to the work I’ve done over the last few years supporting the NITF file format, whose users are an interesting lot. They don’t really like to talk about what they do or what they keep in their files: secret stuff mostly.

I’m not one to judge. I’ll just say that I’m very glad that I was also responsible for adding support for the DICOM medical imaging format to MATLAB.

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It’s time to share some of the French words that were new to me. If you speak or read French, maybe they’ll be useful to you, too. And if I have missed something subtle in their meaning, let me know.

• bagnole — voiture (a car)
• virée — petit rendre-visite (a small trip, a hike, etc.)
• revendiquer — to claim
• raté — failed, attempted, missed, abortive (adj./pp.) or failure, misfire, backfire (n.)
• portiques — gates, turnstiles
• rien que… — just…
• jeu de mot — pun
• étonnant — amazing, enormous
• touche — un clef sur le clavier de l’ordinateur (keybord key)

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It’s Earth Day, so it’s time for a public service announcement. This is no “holier than thou,” tree-hugger BS — just a little something you can do to reduce waste. In particular, those plastic bags that end up tangled in tree branches or filling cow’s stomachs or littering the side of the highway or floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. You can do whatever you want, of course, but it’s quite likely that more place are going to eventually adopt something like Washington DC’s tax on plastic shopping bags. Consider getting out ahead of the curve.

Sometime in February I decided to try using as few plastic bags as I could. I don’t know why I decided then, it just seemed like it was time. In my mind it sounded easy enough — after all, we’ve been using them for grocery shopping for more than a year. It wasn’t quite as effortless as I had imagined, but it wasn’t very difficult either. And it has worked, too. We only have a couple disposable bags left in the house for our recycling and cleaning up after the kitty.

So what have I learned?

• The flat bottom nylon fabric bags are where it’s at. They cost about $1. They’re really sturdy. You can put 20 pounds of whatnot in them, they won’t tip over in the trunk or on the counter, and you don’t have to worry about pulling off the handles. And I think they’re easier to fill than other kinds of reusable sacks.
• If the bags aren’t with you, they won’t do you any good. Keep at least one in each car. Getting them back into the car from the house. . . . oy!
• A family of two needs 3-4 bags to shop at the supermarket for 1-2 weeks.
• When you’re sending your groceries down the belt, try to group the things you want in the same bag. (For example, send all of the cold things together.)
• Cashiers/baggers are all pretty accustomed to reusable bags; but I find that you have to give the bags to them first thing, otherwise they default to plastic.
• If you’re going to multiple stores (other than the grocery store), you don’t need one bag for each store. I’ve found that I can usually get by with two or so: one for the store I’m visiting and one (or more) that I keep in the car and transfer the stuff I just bought into. This leaves me with an empty bag for the next store, and fewer half-empty bags when I get home.

Well, that’s probably enough more-or-less obvious ramblings about how to use a shopping bag. Now just go and do it.

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A while ago, I posted pictures of my diabetes kit. And by “kit” I mean a bunch of stuff thrown into a gallon-sized Ziplock bag. I need everything in it, but that gallon bag! I can’t tell you how much I’ve wanted something different, something that doesn’t need to have the air squeezed out of it before I put it in my bag, something a bit less hobo, a bit more chic.

Well, I can stop searching. Yesterday at REI, I found this: a medium-sized “Pack-It System” travel bag from Eagle Creek.

Click for larger…

It’s great! It packs flat without needing to have the air squeezed out of it. It comfortably holds 5-7 days of insulin pump supplies, a spare pump, glucagon, “just in case” syringes, prescriptions, etc. It looks nice. It fits well into my bag. And it seems pretty sturdy, so I shouldn’t have to replace it every few months like that Ziplock bag.

Oh, and that little blue thing in the upper left? That’s a pancreas pin from I Heart Guts. Lisa — who can be as geeky as I can — gave it to me as a Christmas gift. The T-shirt is pretty sweet, too.

Meanwhile, the weather has turned lovely here. Over the last few weeks, spring arrived all at once. Torrential rains, sunshine, a couple 85-90ºF days, and flowering trees and gardens. I’ve been out on the bike a lot, too. (Today I put in more than 65 hilly miles around Worcester and Middlesex counties.) Here are a few pictures from the flower bed.

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Elections are coming soon in the U.K. Here’s a little something for my British coworkers and readers:

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This is just a brief coda to the Congressional action on healthcare. There’s a little bit left for lawmakers to do, but I hope this is the last political post from me on the issue. I do plan to continue investigating and explaining the economics of health care and, of course, diabetes self-management.

But I have to mention the letter from Rep. Richard Neal (MA-2) that arrived in the mail today. About a month ago, Lisa — my lovely wife and the sobering yin to my raging yang — took my angry rant, gave it focus, and made it more moderate and constructive. We sent a copy to each member of our congressional delegation in the hopes that it would convey some public support for reform. This was the first time I’ve actually sent a letter to a representative or senator, though I have sent some e-mails and made a phone call.

I honestly didn’t expect to hear back from anyone, and we were both really excited to receive a letter that showed that Mr. Neal (or someone on his staff) actually read our letter and took the time to write a personalized, non-form letter back to us after the legislation passed.

Anyway, that’s enough self-indulgence — for now, at least.

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I would have to say that I have a generally cheery, optimistic, “can do” disposition that is somewhat tempered by my belief that we have to persevere through adversity brought on by those who subscribe to a variety of reactionary attitudes. (My endearing, sarcastic cynicism stems — most likely — from the recognition that I have these same, conflicting attitudes within myself.) For the most part I am stoically undeterred. I go about my day gathering information, using that to formulate solutions, and acting on them as much as I can.

In short, I’m an engineer.

But I have to say that the uncertain future of healthcare change — I’m hesitant to call it “reform” or “improvement” these days — is really dragging me down. It challenges my fundamental belief that we can come up with good, equitable solutions to social and governmental problems, that we can form a more perfect union. It’s getting harder for me to push down the unwelcome, paranoid, elitist, (probably) untrue feelings that the demagogues are tricking the hoopleheads into ruining my life for inscrutable (but certainly nefarious) reasons.*

But that’s not really helpful. So today I’m going to muddle through in the only possible way I can: by writing unit tests, going to meetings, and listening to Tracy Chapman. (Oddly Tracy’s music — I’ve seen her twice, so we must be on a first-name basis by now — usually cheers me up by reminding me that it could be worse, that it was worse in the late 80s and early 90s, that there’s pain and heartbreak, that we’ve got to keep going.) Because if I can’t make things better right now, at least I can calmly carry on get excited and make things. I can keep doing what I do well and wait to get back into the right frame of mind to think about healthcare again.

* — I do recognize that there are legitimate reasons for disliking the current proposals and/or the way that the legislation might be passed. I’m limiting my resentment to those who object with questions like “Why now? Why here? Why so far-reaching? Why should I give up anything I’ve got? Why should I pay anything to help someone else?” despite all of the evidence of the need for change in order to improve the health, economic security, competitiveness, and essential fairness of the nation.

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Dear readers, it’s time for a roundup of topics that just aren’t big enough for their own posts. I’m just going to jumble them all together. Enjoy!

It’s Olympics time. Woo! I don’t understand people who profess not to love the games. You may not like every event — bobsled, ice dancing, whatever — but how can anyone not love the whole Olympic ideal? Me, I particularly enjoy the nordic events, especially biathlon.

DiabetesMine interviewed skier Kris Freeman, the first type-1 Olympian in an endurance sport before the 30km cross-country race and afterward — I think he’s my new role model. They’re both great reads for any athlete with diabetes.

Freeman was “pissed” about going hypo during the 30km race, but he was “really, really pissed” about a bad ski choice during the 15km. I’m sure he will rock the 50km on Sunday!

Thinking of Canada, Lisa and I went to Montréal early in January. It was sooo cold (-14ºC for a high). How do people live that way? We went to see a J. W. Waterhouse exhibit at the Musée des Beaux Arts. While there, we ate some great food — check out Paris Crêpes on the corner of Ste. Catherine and Crescent — and I enjoyed the city’s polyglot lifestyle.

(And as for art: Last week the MFA installed its first painting in the new Americas wing. I can hardly wait!)

While we were in Montréal, I procured a bit of Francophone music. 90% of Canada’s population may live within 100 miles of the border that sees the most commerce between any two nations; but it’s almost as if there’s a Mounty-patrolled iron curtain separating the US from bootleggers French music. You can find a little bit on iTunes, but it’s hit or miss. Here are some names to look for: A.D.N., Amadou & Mariam, Marie-Luce Béland, Daniel Bélanger, Carla Bruni, Cali, Camille, Caracol, Les Charbonniers de l’Enfer, Cœur de Pirate, Les Cowboys Fringant, Étienne Drapeau, Dumas, Mylène Farmer, Grimskunk, Indochine, Kaïn, Karkwa, MC Solaar, Prototypes, Mara Tremblay, etc., etc., etc. The CBC nominated the top 50 Canadian francophone bands from this decade if you need more choices.

We also saw “Up in the Air” a month or two ago. Definitely recommended. It stars George Clooney, opens with a fabulous sequence of arial footage, uses a version of “This Land Was Made for You and Me” by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, and has a really strong story line. From time to time, I feel a bit like intern George’s character — at least I share his attitude toward flying, but certainly not his brand loyalty (though I do have my preferences). But I’m not very savvy when it comes to getting the most of my air travel dollar, which is why I’ve been reading the Cranky Flier’s web log.

Are you going on a trip anytime soon? Need reviews of places to eat, stay, visit? The Times gives a rundown of where to go online and in-print to figure where to go in real life. They mention TripAdvisor.com, IgoUgo.com, Oyster.com, and printed guidebooks. I’m starting to use TripAdvisor for hotel reviews, but books and magazines are still my destination for where to go and how to get there. Give me glossy pictures, a travelogue, and a map or two and I’ll be ready to pack my bags.

But my travel dance card is kinda full for a little while. I actually can’t believe how much I know about where I’m going in the coming years. Australia in just over three months. Bicycling in Provence, France sometime next year. England (and maybe Paris) in 2012. It’s not what I usually do . . . but I’ll take it.

More substance to come soon, I promise.

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If you don’t already subscribe to the New York Times‘ Idea of the Day weblog, you should.

(If I weren’t at work with a lot to do, I’d write about how it aggregates some of the best articles in print from the web concerning culture and the life of the mind. I’d say something about how it goes a little way toward fostering the kind of society-wide philosophical debates that are a common fixture in a certain Gallic country that I love. I’d delve deep into the contradictions between those last two sentences, digging into the inherent conflict between a time-shifted, remixed, excerpted, low-bandwidth form of communication (web sites) and the more active but ultimately futile discourse (about, say, the “hyperreal” in Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation) that tends to occur in the café or coffeehouse. But I am at work, and no one really wants to read about that anyway.)

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This evening I went to the MFA to see the current exhibits. I was delighted by all of the daily life figurines that were part of the Tomb 10A exhibit. The Harry Callahan exhibit was small but enjoyable, and it was my first time seeing Dürer’s Melencolia in real life. (See picture #13 here.)

But the unexpected treat of the evening was “Bharat Ratna,” a collection of 15 paintings (plus one fabulous sari) by contemporary Indian artists. You don’t see a lot of modern Indian art here in New England — except at the Peabody Essex Museum — and this exhibit goes a long way to making up for that paucity.

I go to the MFA several times a year. It’s a wonderful museum — a world-class museum, befitting the wealth acquired by yankee industrialists, bankers, sea-faring merchants, and scions of American society. And it’s still growing. The trustees finished a major capital campaign before the recession hit, and I’ve been watching the progression of the new wing every few months when I visit. All of the construction fencing is gone, though it won’t open until “late fall.”

Because of the expansion, the museum has been creative in placing items from the collection. It’s a bit like a jumble sale, actually; but it makes each trip a unique experience. I suspect I might be seeing things that I wouldn’t normally go out of my way to view.

Of course, I’ve been reading a lot about European painters recently — currently Peter Paul Rubens, which is kinda funny since I don’t usually get into Old Masters, but he looms large in the world of the Romantics that I felt I owed it to myself to get acquainted with his work. Usually I just walk straight through the cavernous hall full of Old Masters — you’d expect to see Beowulf or Grendel in there, it’s so moody — stopping only at Francesco del Cairo’s ecstatic Herodias with the Head of Saint John the Baptist. But today I took my time and — behold! — there were multiple works by Velásquez and El Greco and even (OMG!) Rubens, too. Not the Prado or the Louvre, but still worth the longer look.

What really surprised me were the 19th century French works. I’m not a big fan of Rococo or Baroque painting, whatever the nationality of the painter. It’s just soooo gaudy and overwrought and . . . and . . . mindlessly happy. In the past, this has led me to treat the pre-Impressionist French painting salons much like the Beowulf/Grendel salon. But today I slowed down and looked at the paintings: Gericault, Corot, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and (OMG!) Delacroix. Not the National Gallery or the Met, but so much more detailed than the pictures in the books I’ve been reading.

And I’m actually really surprised at how skewed the MFA collection (as it has appeared on recent visits) is toward Romantic painting versus Neoclassical. Were 19th century New England collectors just that prescient? More cost-conscious? Did the Hudson River School (the “American Romantics” that were so popular in the early decades of the 1800s in the US) inspire a kindred desire for European Romantics? Was Neoclassical painting too old-fashion for a fledgling nation that had just thrown off the weight of European history? Too associated with musty academism? Too close to scary Jacobin terror? I just don’t know. Isn’t cultural history fascinating?

What will I see next time?

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