Saturday, November 04, 2006

error analysis: blogging

I think I did a fair job as a first time blogger capturing the events of the week, but I certainly could have done better. I didn't blog or even photograph a whole bunch of things that I could have:

  • chainsaw modifications
  • ice chime experiments
  • Sandra, Patty, and Annie's documentary production
  • competitors and their tools and techniques
  • fans who visited us repeatedly
  • the lathe in action
  • the gear tooth cutter in action
  • the sub-zero natural ice lubricant showdown
  • Wednesday night's pizza box design session at Belfair
  • observations on day one of the multi-block

My process for posting photographs was way too slow. I had to take the camera back to Belfair (we were only there for a short time each night), transfer the images to my laptop, select good ones, edit them with the GIMP, copy them to a flash drive, take the flash drive to Ice Park, and upload them to the blog at a convenient time at the warming hut. All of this activity created about an eighteen hour delay. I should have used ImageMagick or some such thing instead of the GIMP; since 90% of the image edits were just resizing and occasional rotation, batch processing from the command line would have saved time. The greatest benefit would have come from being able to upload photos directly from the camera to the blog on the warming hut computers, but my need to edit the images prevented me from doing so. (Also, I never tested connecting my camera to a warming hut PC; it might require special software or a separate CompactFlash interface.) I could probably download Windows binaries of ImageMagick or maybe even use a Linux LiveCD. Another option might be to use Flickr or a similar service.

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