jims musings

Update: Still work­ing on the sec­ond part of the pre­vi­ous entry, Philoso­phies. It’s coming.

I’ve just returned from a nice week­end at Bryce Canyon. A Win­ter Fes­ti­val is held just out­side the park every Feb­ru­ary, and this was my first. The entire fam­ily had a great time. With Archery, Kayak­ing (in the indoor pool, tem­per­a­tures out­side were well below freez­ing), Water col­or­ing, Snow­shoe­ing, Cross-Country Ski­ing and other things, there was plenty to do. A few of the activ­i­ties involved dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy, and I of course took some time for some snaps. Here are a few:

There was a pre­sen­ta­tion given by Scott Eldredge, the Dig­i­tal Ini­tia­tives Pro­gram Man­ager at the BYU Lee Library. His pre­sen­ta­tion, “What to do with all those Dig­i­tal Pho­tos” cov­ered stor­age and retrieval tech­niques. Hav­ing nearly 400 giga­bytes(!) of dig­i­tal pho­tos and doc­u­ments, I have a siz­able dilemma on my hands and was inter­ested in what the Big Boys are doing to han­dle the Dig­i­tal Prob­lem.
First, let’s review the problems:

1. Sheer size of data. Keep­ing all that infor­ma­tion safe and acces­si­ble is hard.
2. Archiv­ing. How do we make sure the data is still read­able 5, 10, 50 or a hun­dred years from now?
3. File for­mats. Related to Archiv­ing, file for­mats come and go. How do you keep your data from becom­ing unus­able because no cur­rent pro­gram can read it?
4. Search and index­ing. With thou­sands or mil­lions of files, how do you find what you want?

This is what I’ve come up with:

• Data stor­age: Hard disks, cur­rently, are prob­a­bly the best form of mass stor­age avail­able to reg­u­lar peo­ple. Go and buy an exter­nal hard drive and keep a copy of all your pic­tures and doc­u­ments on it. Win­dows has a built-in back-up pro­gram that you can con­fig­ure to do this auto­mat­i­cally. For those with a lit­tle more tech­ni­cal skill, a home server or NAS device can do the trick.
  Another com­po­nent of stor­age is folder nam­ing and hier­ar­chy. This is my basic format:

  [My Images]
     +-[Camera]
           +-[2009]
                 +-[2009 02 10 Pictures at park]
                 +-[2009 02 16 Bryce Canyon Winter Festival]

  This gives orga­ni­za­tion by date, pro­vides some over­all infor­ma­tion about a group of pic­tures, and pro­vides a sim­ple frame­work for photo retouch­ing and other work. Inci­den­tally, this struc­ture is sim­i­lar to what BYU uses to man­age its dig­i­tal collections.

• Archiv­ing: Unknown. I’ve been rolling for­ward to big­ger and big­ger hard disks. This may seem hard and expen­sive, but we all go through many cars and wrist­watches in our life­times. A hun­dred dol­lars or so every year or two isn’t a big expense.
  There was also some dis­cus­sion about the use of on-line stor­age ser­vices– there are many– and this may be use­ful in the short term, but what hap­pens if you wake up one morn­ing to find that your stor­age provider has gone out of busi­ness and sell­ing its servers on EBay? A per­sonal copy is always a Good Thing.
  For true long-term stor­age– some­thing your grand kids can use– there is no com­mer­cial solu­tion, yet. If you need it now, print it out on archival paper and store in a cool, dry place away from light. This should give you a hun­dred years or so.
• File for­mats. These are a prob­lem, because many cam­eras use a pro­pri­etary file for­mat which changes over time and is not well-supported in com­mod­ity appli­ca­tions. Stick with JPG, BMP or TIFF for­mats for images, RTF or TXT for doc­u­ments. Plain HTML should be usable for many years also.
  Another option is to use con­ver­sion util­i­ties as you move for­ward from one type to the next dur­ing the life­time of your data. This requires some work and tech­ni­cal skill.
• Search and index­ing. This is rapidly becom­ing my biggest prob­lem. Cur­rently, I use Picasa from Google to index my images. I am not aware of any anal­o­gous tools for doc­u­ments (this would include graph­ics pro­grams, like Corel­Draw). What I need, and what is needed, is a good tool for meta data tag­ging– GPS coor­di­nates, peo­ple, places, events, col­ors, scenes, etc. I’m still look­ing for this tool. Cur­rently, though, Picasa offers a basic set of tools for tagging.

To sum up, although I was pleased that Scott and I have inde­pen­dently arrived at almost the same solu­tion, I was dis­mayed to find that there is no good solu­tion for long-term stor­age of dig­i­tal media.

cross•road [kraws-rohd] –noun

1. a road that crosses another road, or one that runs trans­versely to main roads.
2. a by-road.
3. Often, cross­roads. (used with a sin­gu­lar or plural verb)
   a. the place where roads inter­sect.
   b. a point at which a vital deci­sion must be made.
   c. a main cen­ter of activity.

Our great nation is at the point where each cit­i­zen needs to be clearly con­fronted with this question:

Do you own your mind and effort? ¹

We are fac­ing that ques­tion now, but it has been dis­guised behind the mask of ‘for the good of soci­ety’. We con­tinue to pur­sue Social Secu­rity, Medicare, wel­fare pro­grams of amaz­ing vari­ety and stun­ning cost, national edu­ca­tion of stun­ning cost and mea­ger per­for­mance. There are many that now eagerly eye national health care. Each cit­i­zen, every voter, needs to ask, do I want to pay for these things? Does my labor and work and genius belong to soci­ety, or does it belong to me? If it does belong to soci­ety, am I get­ting a fair value for my effort?
Let’s look at progress so far.
Lyn­don John­son announced the Great Soci­ety over 40 years ago, with a par­tic­u­lar empha­sis on elim­i­nat­ing poverty and racial injustice.

The Great Soci­ety rests on abun­dance and lib­erty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injus­tice, to which we are totally com­mit­ted in our time.²

After decades of spend­ing and gov­ern­ment pro­grams, what do we have to show for it?
Cit­ing some recent research³, we are spend­ing upwards of a Tril­lion dol­lars each year on wel­fare. Now, after two gen­er­a­tions have paid taxes to sup­port this ambi­tious plan to elim­i­nate wel­fare, some sim­ple ques­tions to ask⁴ are:

• Is the low-income pop­u­la­tion more inde­pen­dent and self-supporting than before the War on Poverty?
• Has the trillion-dollar expen­di­ture elim­i­nated poverty in America?
• Reduced it dramatically?
• Has the trillion-dollar expen­di­ture reduced inequality?
• Are the egal­i­tar­i­ans grate­ful to the Amer­i­can peo­ple for their sac­ri­fices in this area, or are they con­tin­u­ally carp­ing about increas­ing inequality?
• Are more dis­ad­van­taged chil­dren being raised in sta­ble two-parent fam­i­lies today than before the War on Poverty?
• Are the chil­dren in low-income fam­i­lies get­ting good edu­ca­tions that pre­pare them for pro­duc­tive lives as adults?
• Have the racial gaps in edu­ca­tional achieve­ment been elim­i­nated or greatly narrowed?
• Has ille­git­i­macy been reduced in the low-income population?
• Is crime lower today than in the 1950s, before the War on Poverty?

It is obvi­ous, plainly and painfully, that the Great Soci­ety as imple­mented by gov­ern­ment is a total, abject and astro­nom­i­cally expen­sive fail­ure. Please note I am specif­i­cally avoid­ing fin­ger point­ing. I want solu­tions and I assume oth­ers do, too.
Return­ing to phi­los­o­phy and the ques­tion I posed, do you own your own mind and effort? If you do not, you will be made to pay for ever-increasing gov­ern­ment expen­di­tures in the name of help­ing oth­ers. You may want to take note that those who cham­pion these causes will them­selves pay lit­tle. At the risk of dis­tract­ing from my point, a quote from Theodore Roo­sevelt is germane:

Of one man in espe­cial, beyond any one else, the cit­i­zens of a repub­lic should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to sup­port him on the ground that he is hos­tile to other cit­i­zens of the repub­lic, that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or another, profit at the expense of other cit­i­zens of the repub­lic. It makes no dif­fer­ence whether he appeals to class hatred or class inter­est, to reli­gious or antire­li­gious prej­u­dice. The man who makes such an appeal should always be pre­sumed to make it for the sake of fur­ther­ing his own inter­est. The very last thing an intel­li­gent and self-respecting mem­ber of a demo­c­ra­tic com­mu­nity should do is to reward any pub­lic man because that pub­lic man says that he will get the pri­vate cit­i­zen some­thing to which this pri­vate cit­i­zen is not enti­tled, or will grat­ify some emo­tion or ani­mos­ity which this pri­vate cit­i­zen ought not to pos­sess.
-“The Man In The Arena”, Speech at the Sor­bonne, Paris, France, April 23, 1910

In other words, the politi­cian who wants to ‘help the peo­ple’ at the expense of the pub­lic (you), is a per­son to avoid at all costs.

Back to the topic.

On the other hand, if the results of your thoughts and efforts are yours, then nation­ally orches­trated wel­fare pro­grams– Social Secu­rity, Wel­fare, Health Care, et al, are to be avoided. Its not a mat­ter of not car­ing– its the prin­ci­ple that these pro­grams do not belong in Wash­ing­ton D.C. and they can­not be suc­cess­ful because those who admin­is­ter them can­not make them suc­ceed. In the long run, the cost and expense do more harm to the nation than doing noth­ing. Every gov­ern­ment in known his­tory has failed in these mat­ters; our found­ing fathers knew this and tried to design a gov­ern­ment that would be restricted to what it must do– and no more.

Next essay: A sen­si­ble way to undo the damage.

NOTES

1. Apolo­gies to Ayn Rand; she did get this ques­tion right.
2. Pres­i­dent Lyn­don B. Johnson’s Remarks at the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan May 22, 1964
3. Edgar Brown­ing of the Inde­pen­dent Insti­tute. If some­one has bet­ter or dif­fer­ent num­bers, please let me know.
4. Ibid.