Jed Pittman

A few weeks ago I was lucky and got a new digital camera for Christmas. As I wrote about a few weeks ago, I was able to actually start getting back into taking pictures because I knew that the camera was of higher quality. I was even lucky enough to take some pictures of some amazing Ice Sculptures from New Years’ Eve.

In order to understand the difference, I’ve learned that it is not enough to simply look at megapixel count. Much of this focus on number of megapixels is not necessary. However, my original camera was only about 2 megapixels and the Sony Cybershot is about 8.1 megapixels.

There is a difference when you make that much of a move. Now when organizing my pictures with Picasa, I’m able to easily get everything into a picture and not worry about zooming or cropping and ending up with an inferior picture.

One of the other things that I really enjoyed about this camera was how intuitive the controls and the features were. There was a simple lightning bolt symbol for the flash and a clock logo for the timer. And it has newer features that I haven’t seen before too. There was even a face-detection feature and real optical zoom, as opposed to the digital zoom on my prior camera. Sony Cyber Shot Camera

I’ve always been someone who was fascinated by the world of pictures. From back in the days when I took my semester abroad, I’ve always enjoyed taking large amounts of pictures. The downside of pictures with old-fashioned film is the fact that there are so many throwaways. I suppose that one way of thinking about it is that there is a certain skill to develop and a practice that brings you to actually enjoying the act of taking a picture.

For me, I think that there is something even more enjoyable about digital cameras though. I can take pictures by the hundred and then save only the ones I want, without having wasted lots of money on film for blurry or backlit photos. Furthermore, I can fix red eye and sharpen and so on.

All of this has been a great switch to digital pictures, but the real problem is that I couldn’t find a program that was simple enough so that I could encourage people to take pictures, even when they didn’t have lots of time to perfect taking pictures. Even now I still find it a struggle to get people to take pictures. Enter Picasa.

Recently, I’ve finally started to use Picasa, a program that Google has created for organizing digital photos (and videos). It is a great program and you have the ability to be able to get pictures organized and cleaned up and even add captions and tags to them. I think that this is one of the best things about Picasa and Google in general. They have not sat on their laurels since the program was developed.

Instead they use all of their money and resources and continually improve their projects. Furthermore, these are offered for free and then are able to be given to people for everyone’s use. This is another example of a great product from Google with tons of features.

The portability of Picasa is the best part of it. It is available on the web using a web-sync version so that the pictures are easy to share and are saved for the future. Furthermore, there is no worry that if you switch the brand of digital camera that you won’t be able to use the program for merging and organizing your picture library. Instead, Picasa is entirely independent of the platform where you take the pictures. This alone is a great selling point.

This weekend I found that I had some free time. In the near future, I will be able to take a week off from work and hang out around the house. One of those days, I have been hoping to play a round of golf. It has been years since I played so I decided I should try to find a driving range. However, I could not find a driving range within a reasonable distance from my house. Even a call to a local country club was no help because I ended up in voicemail hell and didn’t get to speak to a real person.

Thankfully, I didn’t need the internet to solve this problem. The solution was found by accident later on this weekend when I stumbled on to a golf course in my travels. Since it was open I decided to see if they had a range and once they did I found out it was open to the public. Of course, that feature is not advertised on the internet. This is something I plan to let them know about when I visit this weekend.

In the end, this speaks to not just the quality of search available. Because I feel like search engines are pretty good at this point and their algorithms are amazingly complex. But for the average person, the real issue is lack of good content. In this case, the golf course that I was interested in had a website, but it did not say that the driving range was open to the public, I found that out only by asking.

Keeping up with technology seems like an absolute must at this point. I have to admit, even though I am under thirty, I never even considered that this would be the case given that about 20 years ago, the Internet and computers were still so new.

For example, this week, Apple announced that it was going to be doing a lower price ipod. Of course, this was interesting because it generated several interesting stories as a result. The first story and issue was that Steve Jobs is basically carrying Apple. And the