Daniel Greene

Tag: reviews

Products, services, consumer rights, customer experiences, gadgets, websites, movies, restaurants, reviews

  • Geotagging with my AMOD Photo Tracker AGL3080



    Los Olivos Finishing Tent
    Originally uploaded by Daniel Greene.

    This permanent tent has shade, a misting system, and blowers that they use to blow the water out of the crevices of your car so the water doesn’t come out of the crevices while you’re driving and leave water spots. Interestingly, you can see the tent in the satellite image of this geo-location if you click the map link. I’d say my GPS data logger captured my location almost perfectly for this photo.

    To explain my workflow on this public, geotagged photo:

    I bought a GPS data logger called the AMOD Photo Tracker AGL3080 for $69. All it does is record location from second to second. I synchronized the clock on my camera to the clock on my computer (which is automatically synchronized to an atomic clock). When I got ready to start shooting, I clipped my Photo Tracker on my belt with the carabiner that came with it, and turned it on. I took all the photos I wanted to take, and when I was finished, I turned off the Photo Tracker. When I got home, I hooked up the GPS unit to my computer via USB and dragged and dropped the log onto my desktop (the device shows up on my Mac as an external drive). Then I put my camera’s SD card into a card reader and connected it to my Mac via USB (it shows up on my Mac as an external drive as well). I dragged and dropped all my photos from the shoot into a folder on my desktop.

    Now that I had the photos and the tracklog in my computer, I launched a freeware app called GPS Babel+ and opened the NMEA log and converted it to a GPX XML file. Then I launched another freeware app called GPSPhotoLinker and I loaded the GPX file and the .CR2 (Canon Raw) photo into the app, and I had the app insert the geodata into the EXIF of all the RAW photos.

    I then imported the geotagged RAW photos into Aperture, where I added keywords, version names, and captions– which show up on Flickr as tags, titles, and descriptions respectively (GPSPhotoLinker automatically added the tags Phoenix, Arizona, and United States). I made whatever images adjustments I wanted to. Finally, I used the Aperture FlickrExport plug-in to upload this photo to Flickr and the photo automatically showed up on the map.

    I’ve been manually geotagging for months now by using the Flickr Organizr to drag my photos onto the map, and as complicated as the above process might sound to you, I assure you that this new process is much less time consuming and much more accurate.

  • Is This Extra Extra Lettuce?

    I’d like a vote: is this what you would call extra extra lettuce on a BLT (Bacon, Lettuce, Tomato) sandwich?

    I call it barely enough lettuce for a regular BLT. The first time I ordered one of these from the cafe in my office building, they served it with one thin piece of green leaf lettuce. So the second time I asked for “extra lettuce” and I got two thin leaves of green lettuce. The third time, I asked if they had any iceberg lettuce to make the sandwich wetter. They said no, so I asked for “extra extra” lettuce, and I got this: two or three leaves of thin green lettuce.

    And don’t give me any guff about being a Jew and eating bacon and kvetching about the lack of lettuce when I said I’d try to complain less. 😉 This isn’t complaining, it’s critiquing. I’m a food critic now; haven’t you heard? Of course I’m grateful to have food to eat (God knows we live in a world in which people starve to death), but I still have my wishes, and I wish for a moist BLT with lots of lettuce. Yeah! =)

  • Worth waiting for: Sandra Bernhard

    I’m not a big event-goer, and I don’t like sitting through a lot of awards and speeches, but someone with seats to spare invited me and Andy to the AHRF (now Equality Arizona) benefit dinner starring Sandra Bernhard. Well… there were awards and speeches (most of them brief, thank God!) and it was worth the wait for “La Bernhard” as she jokingly called herself.

    She may have shocked some of the people in the audience (by being a potty mouth and dissing Arizona where she’s from but is glad she left), but I’ve enjoyed her satirical sense of humor ever since I saw her in “Without You, I’m Nothing” in 1990, and nothing she said or did last night came as much of shocker to me. I just enjoyed her, and Andy did too.

  • Lo-Lo’s Chicken & Waffles



    Lo-Lo’s Chicken & Waffles
    Originally uploaded by danielgreene.

    Erneesha & Antwanelle flanking Trey (back to camera). And Antwanelle (frame right) knows some ASL!

    These girls were so sweet and so smart. Between them and the boys who came to wait on us, we couldn’t have possibly asked for better service (I say “girls” and “boys” because they were all so young– teenagers, even). They were totally hip to the Sidekick and Flickr; in fact, they both have Sidekicks (they said practically everyone in the restaurant had one) and one of them told me she was on PhotoBucket. Right after I took the picture, and they saw me thumbing away at the keyboard, they said, “So, you putting that on Flickr now?” At the end of the night, I said, “Miracle of modern technology; you’re already on Flickr,” and I brought Flickr up for them on the Sidekick’s Web browser. They said, “Yeah, we know! We’re college students.” It’s great to meet people who “get” the whole techie world I live in. Thanks, Erneesha, Trey, and Antwanelle for being such good sports and posing for this photo!

    In case you can’t read the back of Trey’s t-shirt, the restaurant’s address is 10 W Yuma St, Phoenix AZ 85003 (just west of Central Ave 2 blocks south of Buckeye) and their phone number is 602-340-1304. I’m not sure if their website is up and running, though.

    P.S. I found Lo-Lo’s Chicken & Waffles through a Google search for “soul food” in Phoenix.

  • Dennis Cokely "Culturally Rich Realities" Workshop



    Cokely Workshop 7 of 15
    Originally uploaded by danielgreene.

    This was the first time I had photographed a presenter giving a workshop in sign language. Those who know American Sign Language (ASL) can guess what Dr. Dennis Cokely was talking about. Those who don’t know ASL– well, they can have even more fun guessing. I don’t want to give away the content of his workshop to those who know ASL; rather, I encourage them to take his workshop themselves! As for those who don’t know ASL, there would be so much lost in translation if I simply said, “Dr. Cokely is signing X,” that I would be guilty of oversimplifying his message. And his workshop “Interpreting Culturally Rich Realities” is all about not oversimplifying any interpretation! I thank Dr. Cokely for his permission to photograph him as he worked.

    While I don’t want to give too much of his workshop away, I do want to use these photos to help myself and others who took his workshop recall some of this repeated points. One of the things Dr. Cokely repeatedly discussed was having multiple lexical items in one’s “mental files” to choose from when confronted with signs or words that represented “culturally rich realities,” or words that are not easily conveyed from one culture/language to another in a 1:1 ratio.

    As a photographer of a speaker presenting in ASL, I used the textual analysis and predictive skills I’ve developed as an interpreter to study Dr. Cokely’s rhetorical devices so that I would be prepared with my camera to capture him at the very moment when he would repeat one of his themes. As an instructor, he was very deft at using repetition to drive home a point.

    You may view my set of photos of Dennis Cokely on Flickr.