the island ride
the island ride, originally uploaded by Bryan Thatcher.
We scored an awesome ride for cruzin island style. It fit all five of us comfortably and it was good on the old fuel. I especially liked the creative paint, not quite a a flame job nor two tone, in fact I have not idea, let’s just call it old and crappy.
I have to say it treated us better than the food did….
3rd Grade Class Picture circa 1972
Click for a larger view
This was actually taken in 1971, I moved out of Brooklyn in December of 71
Happy Holidays
and may 2009 have upside for all
Only in Brooklyn
Bryan Thatcher
Fusebox
Empressr
- Posted using MobyPicture.com
More workflow thoughts
While I was putting together my post on how I manage my picture workflow and archiving, it got me thinking about an even larger problem, the archiving and workflow of the production server here at Empressr and Fusebox. This post I’m going to talk about archiving workflow.
At Fusebox we have a climate controlled server room with about 3 racks of assorted machines, these are all used for development and staging of applications and Web sites. We have a couple of co-lo racks in a hosting facility here in the greater NYC area and a redundant facility located in a top secret location somewhere in the middle of the US.
First the production environment, we do incremental backups from our rack to our office thru a VPN tunnel every evening, these backups go to a partition on our development server that has restricted access. This partition is synced to another partition on a different RAID and that is backed up to tape. Then, whatever service that falls into needing redundancy (or disaster recovery) is synced to the respected server at our top secret location, yes somewhere in the midwest.
So then on to our development environment, at a high level, we use a combination of Max OS X. Windows and flavors Unix in this environment, so back up gets tricky. All the front end graphics, images, video gets stored on a Mac Xserver that is hooked to a 16TB RAID 5 storage unit. That gets synced on a nightly basis to a Xserver with a 7 TB RAID. The Unix machines also back up to the 16TB RAID. Then this all gets written to tape as a nightly incremental backup, some of the windows machine get backed up directly, some thru a similar process as the Unix boxes.
I find this to be a tedious and expensive process and really want need to change the way we archive. Tape seems too archaic (and unreliable), backing up to the cloud is to expensive, my only thought right now is to have redundant RAIDs making backups of data.
Any thoughts are greatly appreciated, oh and another drawing, this one is a bit sketchy, as I only spent 5mins doing it,
My Picture Managment Workflow
A nightmarish problem that just keeps growing and growing is how to deal with all your personal data when it comes to pictures and video. I’ve been using this work-flow for some years now, I thought I should share it and get some feedback. I do plan on making a few changes to it in the near future.
I shoot mostly still images, in RAW format and then process them into JPGs or PSDs. So the first management issue is, once the images are processed, do I delete the originals, no, I keep it, the same way that you would save the old film negatives for later reproduction, same apply’s here, you may want to develop that RAW image in a different fashion at a later date. I save developed images in the same directory from that shoot. Speaking of file system, I have recently shifted to dumping the days shoot into a single folder with the date, I sometimes will add additional date to the folder as well.
I organize each daily folder into a monthly folder into a yearly folder. I use Expression Media as my cataloging tool and I catalog based on a years worth of images (I use to have one master of all years, until it corrupted one day and I lost all my meta data 
).
So the hardware flow is as the following, dump to my Pictures folder, (or lately I carry a portable Seagate 500gb drive that I have been using since I keep filling up my Laptop drive, to a 2TB LaCie RAID that I connect to my laptop one or twice a month (more often if I have some really nice shots that I don’t want to risk). I then sync the 2TB desktop RAID with my 2TB NAS RAID that is in a server rack in a climate controlled environment.
Somewhere along in this process I have processed and uploaded some images to flickr, or maybe facebook, or even here to share, I sometimes send full rez, occasionally If I really like the image I will only upload a medium rez and save the high one for just me, I know selfish…) Then every so often (I should do this more often) I will upload my favorite images RAW and JPG to smugmug for archiving. I currently do not allow browsing of this library, but plan on doing so in the future.
So that’s it, yes I know it sounds like a job, and sometimes it feels like it, but It’s heartbreaking to have a hard-drive failure and lose precious memories, especially since I can’t remember shit these days (gotta work on that next)
Oh and it was fun to actually draw a picture, yeah I have skilz
Hey Nominate Empressr for a Crunchie!
Hey please give us, Empressr, your vote for the best web application for 2008.
Thanks, stay tuned for some exciting new features being released before the end of the year.
Flip.com has flipped, stick a fork in its ass it’s done
Flip.com, the Conde Nast attempt at social networking thru the use of scrap books or flip books is shutting down. It’s really not so much of a surprise, they choose a very small niche market of a very fickle type that general run in cliques — teenage girls. That is a tough market to crack!
While I thought they did a decent job at creating an easy to use interface with hooks to facebook for grabbing images, I just didn’t see the business model.
Pownce enters the deadpool
When I first signed up for Pownce it was probably a few weeks after I had started to use Twitter. I sent my Twitter updates to Pownce, because I was too lazy to update in yet another place. I checked in every week or so and never generated any traction in my user base, so after a couple of months I just started ignoring it, other than the occasional email from Leah, with a link to some image of mp3.
To me it seems like Pownce died about 6 months ago, and has been limping along on life support, it’s the decent thing to do—pull the plug.
