So Tuesday night, Allie and I got back from vacation with my family. We spent six days in Colorado and had a really nice time. I didn't know what to expect since I hadn't been on vacation with my parents in about a decade. To thank my parents for taking us on vacation, Allie and I bought them a Canon A720 IS since my mom's old digicam was starting to show its age. More about that later since we're still recovering from everything that happened since we got back.
First, my landlord fixed the heat for good. The last repair to the system was a quick fix to get through the rest of the winter. But he also decided since his heating bills have gone up so much that during the six cooler months when the heat is on, he wants an extra $150 per months to make up for it. My first response was to move, but after looking through craigslist, it turns out that even with this 6 month increase, a better deal cannot be found. It's not the best news, but it's OK. After talking with my landlord, it turns out that depending on cost, he's will to install new windows, run a second circuit and look into more insulation, which should help.
Second, before I left for vacation, I sold my Mac Pro for $2200 with the intention of ordering a $1300 24" refurb iMac upon return. I ran one last Time Machine backup before formatting the Mac Pro and shipping it off to my ebay buyer. When the iMac arrived on Saturday, I plugged the Time Machine drive in and told it to restore. It only ran for a few seconds before it stalled. I restarted the iMac and tried again, this time with the harddrive hooked up directly to the iMac, not through the USB hub built into the keyboard. I got the same result. So I disconnected the harddrive and hooked it up to my G4 PowerBook, hoping to just see the files and copy over my photos and Allison's photos. Didn't even recognize the partition this time.
The rest of this weekend was spent trying various non-destructive data recovery tools hoping that something would work. It's Monday and I've resorted to sending the drive to OnTrack at the referral of MetaFilter. I've been quoted $1000 to $2700 depending on how much data (the drive is 500GB but only contains 171GB worth of data that I want) and how bad the drive is (hopefully not bad since it was working a week ago).
Is it worth $1000? Yes. I was going to sell my 24" monitor and just use the iMac's 24" screen. While glossy and thus full of reflections during the day, is much nicer to look at than my old monitor. A used Samsung 244T sold for $300 or so, so I would actually come out $1200 ahead by downgrading to the iMac, which isn't much of a step down due to the fact that the video card in it is comparable to the one in the Mac Pro in terms of Aperture performance. Aperture also never really stressed the 8 cores (except when doing a large export) so I'm OK with the step down, especially since it was going to save me $1200.
Is it worth $2700? Eh. I can't afford $2700. Allison said she would pitch in whatever she could afford, but I feel bad having her pay for what I consider my fault. Even if I paid for $1800 and she paid $800, I'd still feel horrible. Right now, she's lost a year's worth of photography since she get her DSLR a year ago. It's our vacation to Philadelphia, a few museum trips, family get gatherings and her freelance work for the Long Island Herald. I've lost a little over three years worth, including my trip to Hawaii, our vacation to Philadelphia, a few museum trips and family gatherings. We're really sad about this.
It looks like I will spend at least $1000 on data recovery making this entire thing a wash. It may even have been cheaper to stick with the Mac Pro. Either way the Time Machine harddrive would have died, but it would have died while I still had the original data. There was no click of death nor were there any S.M.A.R.T. failures, so this caught me completely by surprise.
In the future, I'm going to have to keep two backups of everything and rotate one off-site since I can't deal with this again. The cost of a second harddrive to store all our photos on is a small fraction of the cost to possibly recover them.
I've been looking into geotagging my photos and finally got around to purchasing a GPS logger. Initially, I just wanted a script to automate the merging of the latitude and longitude from the GPS log into each image's EXIF information, after which, I'd just import the images into Aperture as normal. But then I found out that even more useful would be to reverse geocode the images. This would mean the the IPTC fields for city, state and country would be automatically populated, saving me from the task of manually entering each in Aperture.
Well, HoudahGeo does it better and more elegantly than any other software out there. After downloading a demo and reading Brett Gross' write-up on Aperture and houdahGeo I was sold.
The one glitch is that HoudahGeo saves both the city and the state into the IPTC city field, separated by a comma and a space, e.g., Great River, New York. I sent an email to the developers and was told that the next version, 1.5, would have this fix. Until then, I've whipped up an Automator workflow with a bit of bash scripting that calls exiftool that splits the IPTC metadata properly and will work with cities and states with any characters, including spaces, but not commas. Here's the guts to the Split IPTC City And State Automator Script:
# This automator workflow is licensed under the GPL, v2
for f in "$@"
do
CITYSTATE=`exiftool -City -s -s -s $f`
CITY=${CITYSTATE%,*}
STATE=${CITYSTATE#*, }
exiftool -overwrite_original -City="$CITY" -Province-State="$STATE" $f
done
So my workflow is now:
- Copy photos from memory card to temporary directory on my harddrive along with GPS log
- Use HoudahGeo to tag each image with longitude, latitude and altitude, along with the city/state and country
- Save the GPS log away in case I need it later
- Run the Automator script on the images to fix the city/state issue (installing it as a Finder plugin is recommended)
- Import the images into Aperture
