Monday, December 31, 2007
Rediscovering my photos
WHAT’S a good way to manage your digital photos? I had been ducking this question for quite awhile, partly because I didn’t want to confront the years-long pile of digital photos that lurked in different directories of my hard disk. Also, the last time I looked, I was unable to find a satisfactory tool—one that would not completely take over my hard disk on one hand, and one that would not require too much intervention on my part on the other. I started the weekend, determined to find a good photo manager—one that was free, that would run on multiple platforms, and would finally put some order into the thousands of images scattered over two hard disks, one of them external.
IT’S an hour and 15 minutes by a 19-seat twin turboprop Dornier from the A. Soriano airfield in Pasay City to the El Nido airport in Palawan. From there, it’s another 45 minutes by a motorized outrigger to Miniloc Island, a gorgeous island resort. I was on a family vacation and on my own dime—and I was determined not to bring any work with me. So, even though there was free wireless Internet access at the clubhouse, this didn’t matter. I had deliberately left my notebook computer at home. This reminded me a bit of International Internet-Free Day, an annual event promoted by the Global Ideas Bank, a Web-based think tank, designed to get people to log off, get out and enjoy the real world.
RARELY watch TV, but this weekend I was a couch potato. Instead of sitting in front of the television set, however, I watched a bunch of shows on my notebook computer. No, I didn’t scour YouTube for the latest home videos. Instead, I watched full-length documentaries on nature, travel and food; ancient cartoons like Little Lulu and Betty Boop; news parodies from the Onion News Network; old black-and-white features like Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy and Tarzan; and 1960s TV shows such as Bonanza and the Monkees. My weekend entertainment was provided free courtesy of Joost, a program that distributes TV shows and other forms of video over the Internet using peer-to-peer TV technology created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, who developed the Internet telephony program Skype and the file-sharing application Kazaa.
