Wellingtonians have ingenious ideas when it comes to coffee, serving it, and finding cool locations for a cafe. This coffee shop “Flight Coffee” in an old fire truck is the latest addition to the coffee shop scene in New Zealand’s capital.
Coffee from a fire truck
The New Zealand Open Source Awards Ceremony took place in Wellington on November 9, 2010. It was an evening celebrating open source and the people involved in the community or if you look at each project individually, communities.
The evening was filled with laughter for the introductions to the various awards were often witty, great conversation, food and drink. People who had not known each other before learned about each other’s involvement in open source and expanded their horizon about where open source can be seen in action and who is involved in it.
I particularly liked that the awards were not only about open source software, but also about the people involved in its development, promotion, and use. That shows that open source is more than the software, but that it needs the community involvement and enthusiastic users to bring it along further, to make others aware of it and to help it grow.
As one of the three photographers for the night, I took a whole bunch of photos – 763 to be exact of which I 222 survived as rated 2+. As we had not asked people’s permission to take their photo, I only published the close-ups of the people on stage online which is 50 photos.
If you want to watch the recorded introductions to the categories and the acceptance speeches, head over to YouTube or watch the playlist below.
Wow! Somebody must have started to look at every photo of mine. The stats have gone through the roof. Or is it a glitch in flickr? I hope not. Suddenly, I am over 50,000 views altogether. Hadn’t thought to reach that number so quickly.
My stats are through the roof 
Update: The final count of views on my photos and videos for October 15, 2010: 1,492 plus 16 views of the photostream comes to a grand total of 1,514 views.
Some weeks ago I decided to purchase Aperture 3 after a long time of non-decision due to bad reviews of Aperture crashing, eating photos and databases etc. Lucky for me, I had no problems importing my Aperture 2 database and photos and everything went smoothly.
I updated to Aperture 3 not necessarily to be up-to-date with the latest software, but to take advantage of some of its features. The ones very high on my list were:
Up until this update, I have hardly ever geotagged my photos as the process was a bit cumbersome with an external software. It did work well, but was just not easy for the workflow. Now with “Places”, a browser view in Aperture that shows where your photos are on a map, geotagging became easy as pie. Of course, having the GPS coordinates committed to the metadata immediately upon taking the photograph would be even better, but I do not have that luxury. Thus, I go for the second best option: tagging manually.
Places works very well and you can easily see which photos you have already geotagged as they have a little red pin in the Places view.
Aperture 3: Places mode
At first I thought I would be finished with tagging the faces in my pictures very quickly as I hardly ever take photos with people in them (how wrong could I be?). Once I fired up the Faces browser mode, Aperture told me that it found over 10,000 (!) faces in my photos. First, I thought: Yeah, right. But then, when I saw some of the faces, it dawned on me that I indeed had a lot of photos with people in them. I just did not upload them onto Flickr. As I tend to document events like special seminars or conferences that we had organized, by default, these pictures featured mostly people.
So it took me a long while to sift through all my faces and label those that I wanted to have in my Faces browser and reject all others. As I rejected the majority of faces, Aperture was not so good in “learning faces”, but that was fine by me.
Faces is actually nothing more than a special tag for a photo with the name of the person’s face. I could have achieved something similar by tagging the photo with the name in the keyword field. However, then the name would show up as regular tag everywhere. In photos with a number of people in them, I would still not know who was who. The Faces tagging resolves that problem. In addition, I can quickly see how many photos I have of a certain person, and I only see their face in a close-up and not the entire photo. This is especially great for photos of small children. You can see their development in seconds by flipping through these close-ups.
I had hoped that the Flickr uploader that was incorporated would be FlickrExport 3 for Aperture or something similar. However, I got disappointed. The Flickr uploader merely takes photos that you have selected and creates a new album on Flickr for them. That is nice for people who start out with Flickr after purchasing Aperture, but not for all others who already have Flickr albums. The Flickr option in Aperture does not allow you to view your already existing Flickr albums and add photos to them. I learned that the hard way as I tried to upload a photo to one of my albums and another one with the same name was created in Aperture AND Flickr. In the heat of the moment, I moved the image to the already existing album and deleted the newly created one on Flickr. But alas, the album still existed in Aperture. And I can’t delete the album there. That is the only time when Aperture actually freezes me out.
Aperture still needs to do quite a bit of work on this Flickr uploader. Meanwhile, I use FlickrExport which works like a charm and does not give me headaches.
I haven’t set foot on my blog for a long time, but enjoyed the summer on the Hawaiian island of Moloka’i. Although I have been back for three weeks already, the summer feeling is not entirely gone yet. It’s rather quiet on campus because many others are on vacation now, and Luxembourg in general is on congé collectif (annual holiday).
Soon (September 14, 2009), however, a new semester will start in which I will give 17 workshops on Mahara to our students and teachers until mid-October. Furthermore, on the ed tech front, EC&I 831 with Alec Couros and CCK09 with George Siemens and Stephen Downes will start on September 8, 2009, and September 14, 2009, respectively. I am looking forward to these two courses, the discussions, and especially the synchronous sessions though I won’t be able to participate in all of them. Better to gather all my energy for this hot fall. 
Until then I keep dreaming of paradise.
[flickr-gallery mode="photoset" photoset="72157621911616026"]