13 June 2002

I went over to K.T. and Kevin's last night. While K.T. was making dinner, I decided to stretch out on the couch. My intention was just to rest little - maybe doze. But the next thing I knew, Kevin was saying, "Wake up, Liz. Dinner time. Liz? Time to wake up..." and I'd been sound asleep for half an hour.

An amusing anecdote from dinner: K.T. and Kevin were trying a new wine that they both quite liked, at first. But its flavor conflicted badly with the garlic (or something) in the food. Shortly into the meal, K.T. took a sip of wine and made a disgusted face. Kevin asked if she'd decided she didn't like the wine, and she explained about the conflict. Naturally, Kevin then took a sip. He made the exact same face. It was a face that said, "Hey! This tasted good, just a minute ago!"

After dinner, we settled in for a game of Monopoly. (Star Wars edition. I wound up with Mos Eisley, and had to make a "wretched hive of scum and villany" comment every time anyone else landed on it.)

It was actually quite a fun game - each of us, at least once, teetered on the brink of disaster before making a miraculous recovery. But in the end, it became obvious that Kevin was going to win, and K.T. and I conceded rather than play it out to the bitter end. Especially since I needed to go home and get some sleep.

Okay, iPhoto I'm not too thrilled with.

The viewing options are pretty limited - by "film roll" (which is done according to how they were imported to iPhoto - I have one "roll" with almost 500 pictures in it, because I dragged a bunch in all at once, and another "roll" with only twenty - and you can't change it short of deleting them from the album and re-adding them); by date (is that creation date? Modify date? At least the upgrade I downloaded last night lets you change the date, which is useful for scanned pictures); or you can manually arrange them.

What about arranging them by filename? Or by title? Or different options for the date arrangement? For that matter, what about a view in which I only see the filenames, instead of the thumbnails?

I have nearly 1500 pictures in the library (and I haven't even thought about adding non-photo pictures yet) and switching between albums or scrolling down through the library is almost unbearably slow.

It lets you assign "keywords" to photos - but the entire database is restricted to exactly six keywords. If you change one of the six, it changes for all the pictures, not just one.

That's not even mentioning the hallucinatory option screen. (I found an options screen yesterday and have no idea how to get back to it. None. I've tried every key combination and mouse-click combination I can think of. For my own peace of mind, I've decided that it was just because I wanted those options so badly that I hallucinating having found them.)

If I had a digital camera like Matt's, that required some software to download the pictures, I'd learn to live with it, I guess. But I think I'll stick with iView MediaPro, which I already registered a few months ago, and which has far superior options.

(Okay, to be fair, iPhoto is free, while MediaPro is a $65 bit of software, so it's reasonable that MediaPro has more and better options. But I actually registered a now-defunct iView product - a non-"pro" version of the same thing - which was only $30, and when they discontinued it, they allowed me a one-time free upgrade. And since I do have a better product, why use the inferior one?)

Have I bored you utterly, yet? Here, go look at some more of Jeremy and Elizabeth's plants. They have gorgeous flowers.

--Liz