Wickersham's Conscience

If you shoot in RAW and manage large numbers of photos, you need to give very serious consideration to Aperture 2. The program provides truly outstanding RAW conversion tools – greatly superior to Adobe’s free Digital Negative Converter. It provides very flexible, easy-to-use tools to compare and rate photos, including stacks, ratings and comparison tools. The library management tools are truly outstanding, giving you multiple levels of keywords, a variety of tools for organizing your shots, and a hierarchical system for organization. And it links tightly to the photo editing application(s) of your choice.

Batch processing is well-supported, both on import and on photo selections. Essentially all data associated with the photos – both image details and EXIF – can be handled individually or at a batch level.

Famously, Aperture makes its edits to photos by linked mathematical formulas; the RAW photo itself is not touched. So manipulations can always be reversed. This also keeps the photo database from growing through duplicate files; there’s just one file, and a series of small files representing the edits.

Aperture isn’t perfect. While it is adequate for simple edits to photos, you’ll still need a tool like Photoshop or Elements to perform serious adjustments to your photos. Aperture does a fine job of working with those photo editors. And Apple can be slow – sometimes, seriously slow – supporting the RAW formats of newly released cameras. In the case of the Olympus E-3, the camera was released for five months before Aperture could import its RAW format. There are always workarounds – Adobe DNG if nothing else – and in fairness to Apple, its Aperture RAW converters are outstanding, but be prepared for a wait if you have new model camera. And Aperture demands significant resources: at least G5 (an Intel chip is better), at least 2 GB RAM (4GB much better), an approved video card, hard drive space adequate to your projected library and a backup or removable drive to hold a backup (a “vault”).

Perhaps best of all, Aperture lets you define your own workflow. Adobe Lightroom, by contrast, pretty much imposes its workflow structure on you. You can do things in the order you want, not the order some programmer wants.

If you are new to Aperture, I recommend the Classroom in a Book tutorial, Apple Pro Training Series: Aperture 2 (Apple Pro Training Series).

I could not be happier with this program. I have some 35,000 shots, and add 1,000-2,000 per month. It has been flawless. And I’ve never lost a photo.

My highest recommendation.

UPDATE: See WC’s review of Aperture 3.0.

Book Review: Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett

No one agrees on which is the best Terry Pratchett novel, but a lot of his fans, myself included, would name this as a candidate. In this novel, he takes his manic punning, wordplay and double- and triple-entendre to the highest level.

Soul Music has three narrative threads: Death takes a holiday (which Pratchett fans will remember from Mort), Mort’s orphan granddaughter, Susan Sto Helit, and her attempts to cope with the family legacy, and the invasion of rock and roll on the Discworld. The three stories intertwine and the result, for me, ranged from snickers to guffaws.

The big news is that rock and roll comes to the Disk, through the agency of a pawnshop guitar and a skilled harpist, whose name translates as “Bud of Holly” and who looks kind of Elvis[h]. With a dwarvish horn player named Glod and a trollish drummer named Cliff, the band Music with Rocks In takes the Discworld by storm. The Librarian, the monk… orangutan who runs the Wizard’s library, sits in on keyboards, and exceeds even the excesses of Jerry Lee Lewis. You cannot imagine a rock music issue that Pterry doesn’t reach. Women fans pitch articles of clothing; espresso shops appear; rock promoters – C.M.O.T. Dibbler, of course – arrive; even the sedate wizards wear leather, do their best James Dean and show they, too, are “Born to Rune.”

Parts of the book are a pastiche of “Blues Brothers” (“We’re on a mission from Glod”), “Spinal Tap,” and “Woodstock.” Other parts are simply Pratchett’s own mad invention. And this book also features Pterry’s best pun – “some felonious monk;” possibly the best pun in fantasy literature since Niven’s and Gerrold’s The Flying Sorcerors. You can spend a lot of time just working out the puns. And let me note that Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” gets the treatment it righteously deserves.

But while Buddy and his band tour with their roadie Asphalt and inescapably head towards Dead Man’s Curve; while Death does his best to learn how to forget with the help of the Klatchian Foreign Legion and alcohol; Susan is left to make increasingly frantic efforts to keep what passes for reality on the Discworld from coming completely unstuck. With the help of the Death of Rats, Albert and other favorites, the Disc is saved, but not without some uncommon poignancy.

There are scholarly articles on whether Pratchett writes parody or satire. However labelled, this was the high water mark for his experiments with the pure form. Anglo-American literature has never had as brilliant a satirist/parodist as Terry Pratchett. He may have written better Discworld books, but I’m not sure he has written a funnier book. Especially if you know and like rock music.

“Bee There Orr Bee A Rectangular Thyng”

As all but the youngest birders must know, the Long-tailed Duck was formerly known as Oldsquaw (reportedly named after the inane chatter they do among themselves in winter flocks).

But Oldsquaw is offensive to some folks, so like the Siberian Tit (now the Gray-headed Chickadee) it was re-named. But it’s hard to see where it will all stop. American Coots might be offensive to elderly men.

And Wandering Tattler might be offensive to jailhouse snitches and informants.

Where do you draw the line?

If you are of a certain age, you remember the rock concert movie The Last Waltz and Ronnie Hawkins’ performance of Who Do You Love? early in the show. Tell me, Sarah Palin, who do you love?

On June 3, 2009, introducing Michael Reagan to a crowd in Anchorage, you launched into a long, embarrassing tirade. Among other things, you claimed that the government is planning to “bail out debt ridden states” so it can “get in there and control the people.” You somehow extrapolated this from the federal government’s efforts to save the American automobile manufacturing sector. And you claimed this “violated Economics 101.”

Wow, is my face red. I took economics in college, too. Somewhat beyond Econ 101. All these months I thought it was the past, Republican administration that decided to inject billions into Chrysler and GM. And I thought it was something about a couple of hundred thousand jobs being saved to avoid making a Republican-created recession far worse. I sure don’t remember that being covered in Econ 101. Of course, I didn’t attend any of the five different undergraduate colleges you did, so I can hardly be sure. But what former President Bush did and President Obama is doing is classic Keynsian economics.

And as for the leap from saving an auto industry to “bailing out a state,” I don’t see how you connected those particular dots. But let’s assume the federal government does bail out California or Michigan. Do you seriously believe the feds are motivated by some overarching, conspiratorial drive to “get in there and control the people”? As opposed to keeping unfettered greed and capitalism from collapsing our economy around our ears?

Are there medications you are supposed to be taking? That chain of argument is seriously irrational.

I think the only thing the United States has to fear is fear-mongering politicians who will say anything to stir up a crowd, even if it is patently absurd and founded on appalling ignorance. I’m sure there are conservatives who chow down on the raw hamburger you are feeding them, but that’s not enough to win a national election. It’s divisive, and transforms you into a divisive figure on the national stage. And we know how divisive figures do on the national stage. You’re not helping your country, Sarah. And Lord knows you aren’t governing your state.

Maybe all this is really just about you Sarah. You love the national stage. You love feeding that raw hamburger. New, constructive ideas? No so much. You told that crowd you couldn’t sit down and shut up. You said, “I just can’t, because I love my state. I love my country.” Not on the evidence. The evidence suggests it’s all about you.

Tell me, who do you love?

My buddy Ted points out not all Lutherans took biology.