Horchata & Neon

'Member that I was just complaining about the severe keyword restriction on Blogspot the other day? Well, I just basically use keywording on this blog as an extension of the post, just to add a couple relevant or contrasting words to hopefully make the experience better for all my readers.

Haha, you almost bought that, didn't you? Replace the last half of that last sentence with "just to try to be clever and Epic Fail at it most of the time".

Keywords hanging off your posts allow you to find individual posts amongst the mountains of them you may accumulate over time. On a blog though, you can search the entire thing for any text string you want so it's really not that important to go around sprinkling keywords on everything like you were throwing candy to the crowds at a parade. But while I am pretty loosey-goosey on keywording in my blog, I am dead serious about it on my photographs.

Keywords are a type of metadata, which just means "data about data". They are stored in the picture file itself* and I consider keywording to be vital and mandatory. BTW, some consumer-oriented programs call keywords "tags".

I need to be able to find specific shots in my library quickly, and that library has now grown to more than 100,000 photographs. I have recently been restructuring my Lightroom keyword hierarchy to make it more efficient and easier to apply to incoming photos. It can be a royal pain in the keister, but modern software like Lightroom really makes it tolerable.

Although I am disciplined about keywording, I really don't go overboard with it. Some photographers apply 50 or 100 keywords to every image they take, minimum, and to me that seems like overkill. I just want the basics. Here's an example:


This picture is tagged with the following keywords in my Lightroom Library:

USA, Michigan, Detroit, Mexicantown
Places, Restaurants, Mexican Restaurants, Lupita's Taquiera

Eight keywords, not too crazy. And since the keywords are hierarchical, all I need to apply to the image are "Mexican Town", and "Lupita's Taquiera", and all the other words are automatically added because they are parents.

But there are photogs out there who say that's not enough description, especially if you want to sell stock photographs online where customers know exactly what they want and do very specific searches. So one of these guys might tag this same picture with:

USA, Michigan, Detroit, Southwest Detroit, Mexicantown
Places, Restaurants, Mexican Restaurants, Lupita's Taquiera
Colors, Warm, Orange
Signs, Neon
Glass
Gasses
Wiring
Reflections
Electrical Appliances
Angled Shots
Isometric Shots
Outdoors
Sidewalks
Christmas Trees
Christmas Ornaments
Christmas Lights

And then, go into a thesaurus and look up the synonyms for every single word in that list and add them too. And then you might as well type in the entire menu of that restaurant, in case anyone who is out looking for an image of a frothy Horchata might like this even better. These photogs often have 15,000 or more keywords in their libraries! For them, "clouds" is not enough. They have to go to the next level. Check this out:

Clouds, Altocumulus
Clouds, Altostratus
Clouds, Cirrocumulus
Clouds, Cirrostratus
Clouds, Cirrus
Clouds, Contrail
Clouds, Cumulonimbus
Clouds, Cumulus
Clouds, Nacreous
Clouds, Nimbostratus
Clouds, Noctilucent
Clouds, Stratocumulus
Clouds, Stratus

That's an actual section of a stock photographer's keyword list. So now you need to be a climatologist in addition to a photographer, just to tag a freaking sky picture. Does this guy really know the difference between Nimbostratus and Cirrostratus clouds? God I hope not.

I imagine keyword frenzy like that may be cool to do if you happen not to have any friends or family, but for the social photographer, it's just way, way too harsh.

So I keyword responsibly, not too much, not too crazy, just right, like Goldilocks.

Which is not one of my keywords.


* Your camera automatically packs your picture files full of useful metadata like the time and date the picture was taken, the camera model and serial number, lens information, exposure information, flash firing state, and lots of other goodies. So it's not necessary to keyword things like that - they're already in there.

Maddie247

I used to be carefree and footloose with my passwords. I used the same password for almost everything. It was pretty easy to guess, and if you did, you had access to just about my entire online life.

Then one day my Twitter account got phished, and, while that in itself is not very dangerous, I started thinking about all my other accounts with that password and decided it was time to get serious.

There are password guessing programs out there that mash through thousands upon millions of guesses so efficiently and powerfully, even passwords like My_checking-account247 fall easily to it. It knows all the tricks, the strung together words, the hyphens, the 365 and 247 add-ons, everything.

And failing that, passwords can often be gleaned from the data left behind by your computer, via software cracking algorithms. These programs check data in RAM and on disks to tease out cached copies of remembered passwords.

Password stealing is big, big business. Just think about what someone could do with access to your bank accounts, credit card numbers (with expiration date and that silly code on the back too), 401k account, email, Facebook, and everything else you do online. It makes me shiver.

So what to do? Well, if you know me, you know that when confronted with a problem I often go to extreme measures to solve it. I pulled out the big guns this time. I got something called 1Password that is designed to generate, hide, and maintain incredibly complex, essentially unguessable and uncrackable passwords. They are stored in a highly encrypted vault that is like a Fort Knox of logins. It's also got built-in anti-phishing and anti-keylogging protection. My passwords are now about as safe as they can be. A typical password of mine now looks something like this:

k5!#ON<3rbslGi:6C!MTS5pXn25VBqibzoA[u#3T?L.hOV

Go ahead and try to guess one like that. No pet names or anniversary dates in these bad boys! Even a CIA supercomputer would choke on this evil thing.

This software doesn't cache passwords anywhere. They are inserted at login on your command and then they vanish like dust in the wind. You can tell your browser and all sites to "not remember you", giving you another big security boost.

1Password generates such powerful passwords that I have run into several sites than can't even handle them. One site couldn't do special characters and many limit password length. Fortunately you can tone your passwords down in cases like that.

If you are like I was, please get some kind of plan for increasing the security of your passwords. Until we have optical retina ID scanners in use everywhere, this is your best bet.

Words

Mere words fail to describe the extreme heinousness and unbelievability of the Japanese Pizza Hut Double Roll.

So I will not try.

Cathedrals And Radios

I have been reading much more lately, owing to the fact that reading is much easier on the iPhone than it is with a regular book: I can take it anywhere and read a few lines at every stoplight if I want, and it holds hundreds if not thousands of books. Oddly, I also read about twice as fast on the iPhone as I do with pulp and glue.

My current book is a 1,000 page middle-ages period yarn about a mason who wants to build a cathedral, called "Pillars Of The Earth" by Ken Follett. It's really good so far, despite the fact that Oprah liked it (that's usually bad news for my prospects with a book).

Next I've got Revolutionary Road lined up, the well-regarded 1961 book about the death of the American Dream in the 50's. And after that Darwin's Radio, a thriller about a dormant and deadly retrovirus coming alive inside us.

After those I'll probably be in need of an "outdoorsy" book (something akin to "A Walk In The Woods"), and then some hard science space fiction (ala Ringworld), but we'll see.