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I started wearing a tie to work in late February of 2013 and people are commenting, but not asking. So far only one person has asked me why I was wearing the tie. What is interesting is who asked me. The General Manager of my business unit, in other terms basically the brand president. Given how often he and I are in the office at the same time, he at first thought it was just that I had a client meeting.

I had just changed roles in the company, but he knew that wasn’t a reason for the change as the division has the same basic dress code. So the question was “Dude, why are you wearing a tie?”

The answer can be fairly simple of “Dress for the job you want.” I thought showing up as The Dark Knight Batman could be a little awkward. The better answer is multifaceted and has personal and professional overtones but figure you as my loyal reader would want to know the story.

Over the past year I have put on weight as my exercise fell in to oblivion. I got squishy and my clothes became unflattering. That kind of becomes a circle of feed back. So I finally decided to stop the loop and purchased more flattering clothes. I liked the idea of a tie to allow some expression and style.

I had a day at the office that I knew was going to require heightened focus, so I figured follow the cliche of dress for success. It worked better than I thought. I was pleasantly surprised when I found I had time for my usual Starbucks break midday and still left on time. I tried it a few more times and it worked very well.

So my answer to the GM, “it helps me get more done and people treat me more seriously. I also want to continue growing.” He was supportive and chuckled about the Batman comment.

A friend of mine has an aphorism of “Assume the virtue”. I think that sums it up. I assume the virtue of valuable employee by putting on the work costume, the more formal clothes. It allows me to both focus on work and also allow me to leave work more easily. Not just physically, but mentally as well. When I loosen the tie, I loosen up as well and work is done.

I did not realize how much the change had happened until about a week ago. I had to do remote support for an audio installation on the weekend. I could have done it at home, but I decided to go into the office. I still dressed for work, not the full work costume but still casual Friday level. After the session I was able to go home and change clothes and leave work behind for the short weekend.

Assume the virtue my friends. Give it a try, I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

My faithful reader might remember that in August of 2009 I posted my Three Rules. These rules apply all the time, of course tempered by common sense. At the time I alluded to there being a fourth rule being considered. I am pleased to announce that after much testing and verifying that there is now a fourth rule.

The Four Rules are:

  1. I am not prejudiced, I hate everyone equally.
  2. Do not ask anyone to do something you wouldn’t do.
  3. If you are not sleeping with me, I don’t care who you are sleeping with.
  4. Don’t see anyone you work with, without their pants on.

Many people think I am being flippant with these Four Rules, but I can say that they have gotten me through life this far. I wish I could say I have followed these rules my whole life, but I did not crystallize them until I was in my 30’s. Now in my continuing effort to leave things (the World) better than I found it I am sharing my rules with you.

It seems like these don’t really make sense until you start thinking about them as they actually apply in daily life. Let’s take a look at each rule.

I am not prejudiced, I hate everyone equally.

This is my flippant or sarcastic approach to equality. I believe in treating people equally however as I have found from traveling, I dislike People. People are different than a Person. It does not matter their background, race, religion, creed, or gender they all annoy me. I see the Person for their behaviors and actions; that is what one should be judged on. People are all the same in my eyes, a Person might be different.

Do not ask anyone to do something you wouldn’t do.

This one applies in many situations and is very closely related to the “Golden Rule” of treating people like you would like to be treated. An easy example is the borrowing of money, do not ask someone to lend you an amount of money you would not be comfortable lending out. It can also apply to the work place, such as asking someone to work extra hours, if you wouldn’t do it why would you expect someone else to?

If you are not sleeping with me, I don’t care who you are sleeping with.

This one is not as straight forward as some of the other rules. However it still applies. It started with people gossiping about who was going out with whom. Relationships are hard enough why make it harder by gossiping about it. The additional application of this rule is toward LGBT couples. As long as things are between two consenting adults, why should it bother me. It is just the same to me as whether someone likes chocolate or vanilla ice cream. It is personnel preference and as long as you are not pushing your opinion on anyone why should I care?

 Don’t see anyone you work with, without their pants on

This rule also requires a lot of common sense. I think everyone understands this one, don’t bring personal relationships into the office. It makes things harder, there are always calls of nepotism as well. Also I use this rule to explain to people why I won’t share hotel rooms. In my opinion when traveling everyone needs a little privacy and sharing hotel rooms can prevent that from happening. If you and your partner are starting a business together, that would be excluded. It is key to remember that the word with is in there, couples can work for the same company just I would avoid being in the same project.

It is important for each person to find their own code and rules to live by. These Four Rules are my guideposts. They have gotten me this far, however remember to temper all things with thought.

I was watching the Mars Science Laboratory Lander (@MarsCuriosity) land and I thought about some of the discussions that had occurred during the NASA Social meeting to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Cape Canaveral. We had people from the launch teams join us for some discussions. One of the comments that @NASA_Caley made resonated with me, “There are 7 minutes of terror for landing. For launch, we had 44 minutes of terror.” She then went on to explain all the things that were thought of in the process of planning the route for Curiosity.

I am sure that my post will gloss over some things, but I am still reeling at how many things had to be accounted for.

Let’s say you want to send a projectile (Curiosity) from a source object (Earth) to a destination object (Mars), what do you need to consider. Well first you need to think about the location of the objects relative to each other so that you can point the projectile in the proper direction. But what is the right direction?

If the two objects are stationary it is pretty easy, just aim from one toward the other. If the objects are rotating at different speeds, it gets more challenging. The Earth revolves around the Sun in basically 365.25 days, Mars since it is farther away makes the same revolution in approximately 688 days. As a result the relative position of the two objects changes constantly. The knee-jerk reaction is to say to send the projectile when the two objects are closest to each other. So let’s declare two basic variables, location of source, location of destination.

Oh wait, that is really a more complex variable than those simple statements of source location and destination location would indicate. These objects are not just spinning around the star at the center of our solar system, they are also spinning around their own axis. Their axis and orbital paths are also not perpendicular or parallel to each other. So these locations are not in one plane with just X & Y coordinates but actually in three axises.

Seems to make sense, the locations relative to each other will be the shortest distance and the shortest travel time. Yes, travel time, a new variable. The travel time has to be accounted for as the objects will move relative to each other as the projectile travels from the source to the destination. The easiest way to think about it, is leading a target, many of us do it while playing video games, or shooting rubber bands at people. So you have to account for the amount of time to get from Point A to Point B while both points are moving. You definitely need to know the speed of the projectile to know the travel time.

The speed of the projectile is not a simple value, it is also another variable of the equation that needs to be considered. The obvious answer is to make things travel as fast as possible. However there is always a trade off. To make things move quickly requires lots of thrust. So you need to have more fuel to allow for more thrust. Fuel has mass which means that you need more fuel to get that mass in motion. The designers need to determine the proper balance between speed, launch weight, and time to travel to destination. Don’t forget to include the mass of the projectile in there. Hopefully the mass has been determined but it might still be in flux. Is that one variable or four variables? I would say it is three interrelated variables, as the designers will work within a mass budget. What about the time it takes to get up to speed? I guess we can just use average speed… that 44 minutes of launch is not that significant compared to the approximately 253 days and 14 hours of cruise. It is just 0.012002182215% of the total time. That is tongue in check.

While leaving Earth there are some other things to consider. Such as not hitting the International Space Station or other satellites. Plus one also has to consider the biggest satellite out there along the way, the Moon. We have to steer clear of that, and its gradational pull. Wait we can use its gravitational pull to speed us up some more or to adjust the course.

So as you can see just a little math.

This math was done and allowed for landing within 1.5 miles of the desired landing site after a journey of approximately 350,000,000 miles. Yes, they can do some adjustments in flight, but those have to be calculated as well. To put this in perspective  to get the same resolution you would need to land on a single human hair (0.04mm) from 14km (8.7 miles) and not hit anything, seen or unseen, during the flight.

Did you remember to compensate for the satellites going around Mars?

Pretty impressive. It isn’t rocket science, it is math and physics.

Faithful followers may have noticed that recently there has been a large amount of NASA and space related content from me. Some people think that this is new, in reality it has been an interest of mine for most of my life. One of the earliest experiences I can recall is watching the launch of the American half of Apollo-Soyuz in July of 1975. It is so clear to me, I even remember the room I was in at home down to the orange carpet.

My grandfather worked as a civilian  at Fort Monmouth as part of the U.S. Army Electronics Command (CECOM), my understanding was in the Electronics Technology Laboratory. I remember us building models of TIROS satellites and talking about how relay communication worked when I was younger. He would share all sorts of stories and technology with me. I even had a jumpsuit like an astronaut that either my mother of grandmother made me. I even remember taking my first plane trip when I was six years old to visit my aunt, uncle, and cousin in the Washington DC area to go to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. From that same summer I remember the MacNeil/Lehrer Report about the Viking landings in 1976. One of the few toys/game I miss from my youth was a puzzle I got at the Smithsonian Air and Space that showed all sorts of facts about flight and space. I used to put that puzzle together all the time. It was not just to put the puzzle together and see the pictures, it had text on it so I could read about the X-15, the Wright brothers, and things in between.

In the early 1980’s I was fanatically following the Space Shuttle Project. I clipped articles and read magazines and covered my walls in articles and pictures. One of the cool things was I once again went and visited my family in the Washington DC area. My aunt worked in the Department of Education and luckily for me happened to be in a shared building with NASA. So that day not only did I get to go to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum again, I also literally got to walk the halls of NASA. How cool was that. I remember looking at the pictures on the wall and being awe struck. The coolest thing was that my aunt found some posters for me of the Space Shuttle. I mean original when the external tank was white. I also did all the typical space fan things such as building model rockets purchasing telescopes and sky gazing. My grandfather coached me through some math puzzlement so I could learn more.

Then came high school, I can remember sitting in biology class when the Challenger explosion occurred. Literally down to which seat. It was a sad day.

Once NASA got flying again, college and girls started to fill my attention. I was still interested in technology I just did not have as much time. Unfortunately at that point space flight got to be “common place” and I was not following it as much day to day or project to project. Through my job as an audio integrator I got to work on projects at the KSC Visitor’s Center, including the Saturn V Experience. Since I was living in Florida I went to a few launches.

I still watched and read quite a bit about space and space flight, but more of history than current. I read and watched The Right Stuff, From the Earth to the Moon, Lost Moon … etc. So I never lost the interest, I just was not as actively studying it and following. Then a friend of mine got selected to take part in a NASA Tweetup Event for a launch. I started following space more and more. I subscribed to the NASA twitter streams. I started getting the daily news letter. I would stream NASA TV when hockey wasn’t on. It started creeping back in. Heck the last three books I have read are about space.

I kept entering for chances to take part in NASA Socials (the new name for tweetups as it is not just twitter). I kept on not getting selected, however I kept entering as hope spring eternal. Then came the one that I finally got picked for,”Celebrate Kennedy Space Center’s 50 Years of Human Spaceflight“. I would get to see the cool stuff you don’t get to see during the normal tours. I would get to go to the place where the program got off the ground. There was not a moment of hesitation I would be going, the hesitation was how would I pull it off.

The Lovely and Talented Wife (a.k.a. @GentlyMad) said she would help with the driving. Flying was cost prohibitive and driving approximately 20 hours each way on my own did not seem like a good idea.  But it was on, I told the boss I was taking three days off and off we went.

Now comes the back half, digging out from the 1,000+ pictures I took and trying to capture as much of the experience as I can in words. So in the new few days and weeks expect to see heavy amount of space content coming. I expect the trend to continue for a while. Actually to quote the L&T Wife, “I hope the space bug continues”. So if you will excuse me, I have to go pack for another business trip, upload some photos, review some photos, and watch Mars Curiosity landing coverage.

Originally posted: August 5, 2012

I recently was asked by one of my Twitter followers why I tweet once a day the date and to be nice to one another and to be polite. There are three reasons that I will share and the rest are conversations for later.

The first reason started during the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 events. I remembered how the world changed that day, but not just in the innocence and lives lost but for a brief period of time when everyone was nice to each other. I was not just the local community, it was wide spread to the country, and most of the world. I experienced it myself at Los Angeles Airport, LAX, the morning of Sept 14. I was on one of the first flights out of LAX. I arrived at the airport four hours before my flight. The place was packed. Security was tight, there were lines everywhere. However everyone was polite and nice. People in the line were sharing their food with strangers. There was no pushing and shoving or frustration at the security check point. Other than the huge time amount and long lines it was actually pleasant. People were nice to each other and for a few days, weeks, or months, the world was a better place in my not so humble opinion.

The second reason is that the Interwebs can easily become a repository of just negative things. I am guilty of it as well. Often people broadcast when bad things are happening and their dislike of a situation, person, or company. I am guilty of it with my rants about the NHL. However I tried to be polite about and nice to the person who was helping me, when I got help which was only once. See, I did it again. I try to be aware of it, it is part of the reason when I encounter problems I try to communicate directly with the parties involved. It is too easy for the dogpile effect to happen online, one person says something bad and then lots of other people chime in. It is nicer to allow the people a chance to fix the problem before broadcasting the issue. At times broadcasting the issue is a tool to try to get the issue fixed, but one should still be polite.

The third reason is that with how much I travel I see people behaving badly quite often. As an example I will use my most recent case of delayed baggage. When I arrived at my home airport, my luggage did not. This situation also happened to other people. What was interesting was watching a passenger yell at the gate agent about their luggage being delayed. The gate agent had nothing to do with the luggage being delayed. The luggage was delayed at O’Hare Airport in Chicago. The passenger was berating the person who could help them. Not the wisest thing ever. I got my bag a few hours later, I wonder if the “gentlemen” ever did…

Being nice to each other is just a way to make the world a better place for everyone.

Previously I wrote about how one can store too much data. I was guilty of that personally. I have way too much data hard to sort through easily. This collection of data was not just images I have taken; it is also documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. What is often overlooked is that there are tools out there to address the issue head on, but most of us don’t use them. It is the power of Metadata.

For those of you not familiar with the term metadata, it is data about data. Yes, that sentence is circular, on purpose. Metadata is a way to describe data using additional data. A few examples to illustrate the idea could be thought of as the “Tag Cloud” to the right on this blog. I manually go in and add descriptive tags for each post so that people can find them easily. That is just one example; another one is key wording or captions in pictures. The actual data is the image itself; the metadata is describing the data that is contained within the image.

The key is to actually fill it out and use the metadata options in pieces of software. This can make finding something much later, much easier. Metadata is not limited just to photographs and blog posts; the much-maligned Microsoft Office products include the ability to add metadata to the file. Microsoft does not call metadata “metadata”, they call it “Properties”. This data can be very helpful.

Let’s say that you were writing a letter to an airline about the difficulties you had with booking a flight with frequent flier miles. Now when you save the file, you might give it a filename such as “United July 2011”. Now later you go looking for the file, will you be able to find it just based on the filename? What happens for something less directly identifiable? It becomes a little harder. However if I add a brief sentence that says “Correspondence about trouble booking a flight using frequent flier middles” and put in keywords of “United, Frequent Flier, Reward, Travel”. Both Mac and Windows operating systems provide utilities to find files using metadata. It is the search tool built into the finder.

You might be thinking to yourself, “I do not need to do all this extra work, I can keep track of my files.” I would like to leave you with perhaps the most compelling reason to fill out your metadata – media files.

All the MP3 and other media files that are organized in iTunes are organized using metadata. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to go through 4,730 files to find one specific piece of media? How about if you have multiple versions of the same song? Without metadata, media management would be very difficult.

Now if you will excuse me, I have to go fill in some document properties.

Document Properties Dialog
Click for larger image

I was originally going to write a blog post about the conversation topic I alluded to in a few Tweets on the evening of June 29, 2011; however United Airlines changed the topic. This blog post is about the frustration when technology does not actually make things easier. It also gets more frustrating after asking for help when the technology fails.

I wanted to book an award fare to fly myself and the L&T Wife to California on United. So I went to the United website, logged in with my frequent flier number – you know the one that literally has almost half a million miles in the past 11 years. I went through and looked at all the options for flights before finally picking one. I signed myself and the Wife up for it, picked our seats, continued to the payment page and entered my credit card number. Clicked the Submit button, and nothing happened. Clicked button again, nothing happened.

I changed browser from Firefox to Safari and tried again all the way from the beginning I could not save or hold my work. Nothing happened under Safari as well. I then decided to call United Rewards Reservations, which is when the frustration started. This is a basic synopsis of the conversation

“Hello, I am having trouble booking reward travel on the website.”
“When and where are you trying to travel to?”
I respond with the information
“No, there are no seats available for the dates you want.”
“But the website shows many open seats.”
“I am sorry sir the website is wrong.”
“Okay, so what are my options?”
“There is a flight three days earlier for outbound and two days later for the return.”

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot I thought – I did not say it. I was polite to the agent as they are just reporting what the screen is showing.

We go round and round and finally get the exact same itinerary, as I had created online. I did not care if it was a mileage saver fare or not, her system was defaulting to fares that take less miles. If I was asked I would have said, I had picked specific flights online.

Then came the time to make payment. Online it was 75,000 miles per person; via the phone it was 100,000 miles per person. I ask why the difference.

The agent had no good explanation, so I asked for a supervisor. During this time I was placed on hold, without music or other audio so I had no indication I was still connected. The supervisor could not assist me.

As we passed the thirty-minute mark the supervisor indicated I should be transferred to Web Support to assist. After a few minutes with the Web Support person I was able to book my flight.

It was extremely frustrating. I tried to do it via self-service on the web. It did not work. I tried to call for help and that did not work for the first 40 minutes. It took approximately 45 minutes on the phone and three agents to finish the transaction I already had details for. If the first person I communicated with listened to my original issue they might have thought to transfer me to the web team earlier. Instead I believe that they were just going off the script, not really helping the customer.

I tweeted out my frustration and decided to wait 24 hours to see if there was a response before posting. So far I have heard nothing.

Now some people may be thinking that it is only 50K miles, ~10% of your tally. To put the value of that in context, 50K miles is a round trip somewhere in the US with the right planning. Now that this trip is booked, I will get to call again to add my dietary needs as I can’t do that from the website. I think I will wait a day or two.

For those of you that have an impact on customer interaction, think about what happens when your website doesn’t work. How will you help that person? Have you provided them with enough information to know where to go for help? Is the first point of contact going to listen and respond or just follow a script? That one decision can change a customer interaction from a phone call to a frustration and wasting time for everyone involved.

Another airplane flight, another blog post. This one is about the “new modes” of audio delivery. As many of my readers know I work in the audio industry, I do not often blog about it as I am concerned about the impact my comments could have. Not that I would get in trouble with my employer, heck I was looking for a job when I got this one; but more that people would take my comments and opinions as if I was speaking for my employer. So let my blog, my domain, my opinions, written in my nonworking hours and me unequivocally state that these are my personal thoughts and opinions.

The new mode of delivery I am thinking of is digital distribution of audio products. I purchase music as a digital format less often than most people think. The reason is that most delivery methods are compressed. I believe that compression should be applied judiciously. Not all compression is bad, as I sit listening to music on my iPod on a plane. I decided the quality of music is the item I want for this application.

That is the key; the application is that I want to travel with a large selection of music. It does not have to be pristine as the listening environment is less than pristine. I do however want for airplane flights and time in hotels to be able to have music. I do not always know what kind of music I am going to want to listen to three days from now. I would rather have the selection at a compression ratio that I find appropriate.

I am purposefully omitting numbers, as too often when numbers are listed it becomes a contest by numbers, such as one saying that they will only listen to music at 96kHz sample rate. When I ask why, the answer is often well it is a higher number it must be better. I wonder if that person would be able to tell the difference between 48kHz and 96kHz recordings in the listening conditions I am currently in; a tin can traveling through the air at 300mph with an internal ambient noise of 70dB SPL A weighted through noise canceling ear buds. Probably not so easily, I am not going to say it is impossible; I am going to say it is improbable. I believe and can hear that there is a difference between sample rates in other environments.

At the same time, other listening environments that are acceptable applications for compressed audio for some people are not for me. In my car I have CDs loaded in the changer and a smaller election of non-compressed audio files on the attached iPod. In that environment I can hear a difference between the full quality and the compressed audio. I do not listen to satellite radio music channels in the car often as that compression annoys me and I can hear it. For other people they do not find it objectionable.

The key is that I am deciding. I can control how much compression and the amount of data that is important and acceptable to me. Often buying audio products as digital downloads that decision is someone else’s and I might not agree with it. Paying 99 cents for a compressed piece of music that is just for “fun” can make sense. Paying $15 for a digital download of a CD that is compressed as 11 separate songs versus buying the CD for $15 is something I will not do.
Why you may ask? I have done it, and I have regretted spending the money. The digital download has some audio artifacts that the CD does not. I then can also decide if I want to compress the audio to put it in another format. Not only that, I get to decide the compression protocol as MPEG3 is not always the best. If more people had uncompressed delivery methods I would buy more audio via digital distribution.

The key is to use the best test equipment that we have, our ears, to make the decision for yourself. The way I approach it, is your source should be as ideal as possible and then you have the control to decide what is acceptable compression tradeoffs.

Also please remember that one answer is not the right answer for everyone. The amount of compression that I find objectionable might be perfectly acceptable to someone else. So don’t turn your nose up and ruin other people’s enjoyment just because it doesn’t meet your standards. If people are having fun or the message is getting across isn’t the most important parts of audio being accomplished.

And yes my photographer friends the same thing can be said about JPEG compression. I start with RAW and then I decide how to impact the image as I process it to JPEG or other formats.

An Update: The Logitech G13 is no longer compatible with the latest Mac updates The replacement I am using is the Elegato Stream Deck, as it provides cross application features. I was considering a Razer Tartarus V2 as it is Mac Compatible

Bradford
October 4, 2020

Often times the controls for a piece of software are not the friendliest locations for one-handed operation. By one-handed operation I mean one hand on the keyboard, one hand on the mouse. When working in graphic programs I find myself working that way quite often. It could be as basic as a drawing program where I need to use the Z key to initiate the zoom function and then using the mouse to decide where to zoom. Other times it is more complex, such as selecting an image, zooming into a one pixel to one pixel rendering, panning, and then marking the image as a keeper or a chucker. It could just as likely be a drawing program where I am documenting an idea. For my #AVTweeps, just think  AutoCAD.

Recently I found myself being sore at the end of an image review session from unnatural movements. My data management workflow is outlined at previous blog post. However looking at the actual process I began to find lots of moving of the hands. My review process is based around the use of Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® (quite the mouthful so Lightroom for short). The program itself is very powerful and does help me manage my images, pictures, and photos. The program lacks some ergonomics for the one handed user.

The way I cull images is I go into the library mode and review the images at a resolution to fit onto the screen. I then quickly look at it and decided if it is a Pick, Unmarked, or a Reject. These selections are done using the P U and X keys. Notice how they are laid out on the keyboard.

Keyboard with PUX highlightied

Not very easy to navigate with one hand. Now let’s say I want to zoom into an area, one can either use the mouse to enter a 1:1 view or press shift and spacebar to enter the same mode, then use the mouse to zoom to areas. I do this to see how much aberration is viewable and if it is in focus, once again I decide if it is a pick, unfledged, or rejected. Lightroom has a setting to advance to the next image after assigning a value to the image.

That setting seems like it would save time, and it does quite often. However if I want to assign two things to an image, I have to back up to the image. If I find an image of the same subject later in the batch that is better than a pick I decided on, I go back to unmarked the previously picked image. So now I have a few options. I can expose the filmstrip at the bottom of the application window and click on it with the mouse and then press U. If this image was just the previous image I can use the arrow keys. If you notice both of these options require me to take my right hand off the mouse and place it on the right half of the keyboard. Now I could also just use my left hand on the right side of the keyboard however that still means changing positions.

Let’s say I want to see if a crop makes an image better. An example of a crop changing an image happened at the baseball game I took pictures at, since I was sitting in the stands some of the images have the back of people’s heads in them. Cropping the heads out made the pictures better, but some were still chuckers not keepers. In Lightroom I enter crop mode by pressing R, this would enter Develop module, where I would use the mouse to make the crop. I would then finish with the crop. I would then want to mark the image as a keeper or chucker. I cannot do that in the Develop mode, I have to be in Library mode. To return to Library mode I would either  take my right hand off the mouse to do the keyboard contortions or move the mouse away from the work area. Neither solution is very ergonomic.

There are keyboards available that are designed to fix some of these issues by changing the keyboard layout and having labels on the keyboard. However some are more expensive than the program itself. Also they are dedicated to the program, so I would still need my regular keyboard for such things as entering text. Not really an idea I was looking for.

I started thinking about it more and more and came up with a more practical solution in my not so humble opinion. I purchased a customizable gamer keypad, a Logitech G13 Programmable Gameboard with LCD Display as it is Mac compatible – yes it is also Windows compatible. (If you decide to buy one after reading my blog, using this link will give me a little commission.) This would let me decide how the keystrokes would be used. I could lay them out to my satisfaction.

I then determined what keys I used most. They are both left and right handed, and some of them require multiple hands, such as entering Library Mode (Command + Option + 1).

Commonly Used Keys on 110 Key Keyboard

These main keys were then assigned to the keypad as I found would work best for me. (Drop me a line if you would like to copy of the configuration file.)

Key Assignment for Gamer Keypad

I had 200 plus images from a business trip and figured that would be a great way to test it out. So I went through the images, did the rating, cropping, and keywording in about an hour including uploading to a SmugMug gallery. There was another benefit that occurred that was unexpected, I was able to hide all of the tool palettes in Lightroom so the images were bigger on the screen during the review, remember bigger is better. I do not have exact times for similar tasks using the “standard” keyboard commands but the important thing is I was not sore and it was not as tiring to me.

The keypad allowed the thing that I think all tools should do, get out of the way and let me work. It did just that. Other than when I had to type in keywords, I used just the keypad and the mouse. I did not have to move my hands around the keyboard and mouse.

I also learned a couple more tricks in the process. I can use the keypad in more than one program, but keep the key functions the same. By key function I mean that the same key that sends an R to enter Crop mode in Lightroom can be configured to send a K in Photoshop or Command + K in Preview to perform the crop functions. The same key press to me, sends different keystrokes to the application. Much easier than having to remember all the different commands, similar to Cut, Copy, and Paste being the same in almost every program. That is a fine example of what I was trying to accomplish; cut (Command + X) copy (Command + C) and paste (Command + V) are not great mnemonic devices at first blush but the arrangement of the keys makes it very easy to use.

As things are becoming more and more automated, I feel that the understanding of the process is being lost. I believe that tools should make my life easier and allow me to spend my time doing other things. However there is a downside, does one always understand the automation that is being accomplished? While these can be great timesavers, what happens when it doesn’t work or you don’t like the results? Understanding the process that the automation process is simplifying is key.

A common example is defining an IP network. Most people simply connect to a network and let a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server assign the address. This happens at the office, the home, the coffee shop, pretty much everywhere. When it doesn’t work for whatever reason understanding where to start troubleshooting is a mystery to some. I use DHCP quite a bit; I also do know how to do the entire process manually. I can manually – not that I want to – calculate the subnet network and assign the addresses. When there is no DHCP, I am still able to get connected. If I am still unable to get connected, I am able to call tech support and describe the problem effectively.

While IP networking is a common example it occurs with other technologies as well. I do have an interest in photography and have been doing more processing on images. For some of the process I do it manually, for others I do use automation tool. An example of this process is this picture of Martin Brodeur I took.

Straight out of camera, no processing

I took the shot in a manual mode, shutter priority, I also told the camera where to focus to get Brodeur in focus and the background blurry. I could have accomplished a very similar effect using the Portrait Mode preset in the camera, but I wanted to control the look of the picture. After I took the picture I did some work on it in Lightroom, and Nik Software. In the process I adjusted for the lens, applied a vignette, applied noise reduction, and converted it to black and white. This process was a mix of manual and automated. I could have just clicked a few buttons and called it done. Instead I made decisions along the way, and I understood the impact of those decisions. I was able to decide the final mood of the image as a result.

Processed picture, click to see entire gallery

This result is much better because I controlled the process and got the result I wanted. Did using the automation for part of it save time? Yes it did save time. Since I had taken the time to learn about the conversion process http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=114917 I was able to understand the questions and obtain the result I wanted. Now if you will excuse me, I need to troubleshoot my network as the Wii is not connecting to the Internet.