Mad Times

There was a surge of publicity a while back about the concept of Peak Oil (the point at which production begins declining as supply dries up).

Could it be that we’re coming to the point where people are going to start to realize that we’re heading for a similar precipice in the life of the individual automobile. These energy and resource intensive conveyances are just too inefficient for them to survive as our primary method of transportation for much longer. And making them electric doesn’t help that much. You still need roads and parking lots and garages and factories and repair shops for individual cars regardless of your fuel source.

What makes me wonder this now is that Orson Scott Card, who’s usually a bit of a wingnut has posted a piece called Life Without Cars (via).

I had one of those heart-stopping “oh !@#$” moments this morning. I’ve been using Adobe LightRoom since about February as my primary photo management and manipulation tool. Over the weekend I’d been exporting all the lost gloves from iPhoto on the mac and last night tried importing them into LightRoom. I had some problems so I deleted all the imported stuff, emptied the trash, and tried reimporting a subset. The problems persisted so I called it a night.

This morning while waiting for folks at work to make up their mind what they wanted me to work on, I fired up LightRoom again and was horrified to see that when I thought I’d been deleting the stuff I’d just imported, what I’d actually done was delete everything I’d ever imported. This revelation was followed by much cursing and head bashing and gnashing of teeth. All the photos Becky and I had taken since February gone. Poof!

Once I’d gotten done pounding on things I went googling for file recovery tools. I’m happy to report that I found a couple of free tools that allowed me to get back a large portion of the lost pictures. Neither tool is perfect, but they’re imperfect in mostly complementary ways.

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Got an email a couple days ago from a woman from Dortmund who spent 3-1/2 months in Denmark and took 150 lost glove pictures while she was there! Amazing variety both in setting and style of glove. Thanks, Anita!

I couldn’t decide which picture to post so I’m posting three. Complain in the comments ;-)

Alice is back to all her old tricks. It’s making us realize that she’d been feeling under the weather for a long time. It was a gradual series of subtle changes so we assumed she was just getting older. That wasn’t it. It’s so good to have her back!

Great piece over on Joel On Software about how depreciation deduction rules make office cubicles effectively cheaper than offices with real walls.

Rachel made this amazing lost glove cake for my birthday. Not only is it terribly amusing, it’s also quite delicious. Click the picture to go to flickr where I’ve added notes to draw attention to the various features of the cake.

Hard to believe someone this cute can be so infuriating. Theo’s not coping well with the return of his sister from her illness and some recent rearrangements in the house. He’s expressing his displeasure by depositing urine in locations other than his litter box. We probably just strayed into Too Much Information land, so I’ll just leave it at that.