Happy Easter!

Happy Easter! I think I will stop backdating blog posts and try harder to stay caught up on the blog. Today, Olivia is spending Easter with the Korts clan in Santa Cruz. I'm staying in Berkeley in an attempt to get caught up on some work. Of course, it's too beautiful a day to spend looking at databases, so I'm looking at photos of Olivia instead.

When my parents were kids, photography was expensive. Our parents had a few photos which they treasured. Photo equipment and printing prices became cheaper while we were kids, so we had albums full of photos which we'd peruse every now and then. Now that we're taking most of our pictures digitally, the marginal cost of a photograph is zero -- but the value of each image has also decreased. We take so many photos that it's hard to decide which ones to keep. And honestly, Olivia looks the same in most of the pics we take.

There are also a lot of questions about how to store digital photos. We store most photos on an external hard drive. But what happens when the disk fails? We're also sending images to my parents (who are presumbably also storing on their computer.) This is our backup, although it's doubtful that we'll ask my parents to copy the photos to an external drive when they dispose of the computer.

I suppose I should probably take some time each month to select some good images and store them on alternate media, say, burning them to a DVD. But the longetivity of DVD storage is debatable (I'm told that some people question whether digital data stored on DVDS will be recoverable 15 years from now.) Imagine if your parents gave you your old photos on 5" floppy disks.

Well, like all things, if you think about it too much it just creates more work. Perhaps my interim solution will be to put my father in charge.