Over the top in Courchevel

If you’re headed for Courchevel 1850 you should know it is the place place for the international jet-set. Like its stylistic rivals, Megève and Gstaad, a high proportion of its designer-clad visitors come here to see and to be seen.  You will definitely find your range of Porche’s, BMW’s, Bentley’s and Merc’s parked along the streets. A covered mall houses expensive boutiques, and a couple of supermarkets cater for the more mundane needs of self-caterers. The secluded Jardin Alpin sector is a Millionaire’s Row of sumptuous chalets and shockingly expensive hotels tucked away in trees that provide at least an illusion of privacy.

Accomodation

Beyond glitz however there are ways to holiday in this town at more reasonable expense. With a little digging you can get  a catered apartment right in the heart of town for about 550 to 750 EUR/wk. We chose to go with Powder White, and were not disappointed. Their service was excellent in all regards and the in-room catering offered us a level of intimacy and personalized service that can not be matched by a regular hotel. Add to that the fact that the seasonaire catering to you has the inside track on the best deals for going out and you’re pretty much set for the week.

Night life

Once you’ve set up your accommodation and ski pass, Courchevel has plenty of ways to get you separated from your hard earned cash. As you might expect Courchevel has an upscale nightlife scene. The Purple Bar in Courchevel 1850 just pulses with techno music and serves cocktails from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. Either folks come here for early nightlife or warm up for early morning adventures at Le Cave or La Grange.To put a curb your spending you may want to start your evening by paying a visit to TJ’s bar. The price of a pint is at TJ’s comparable to that of other cities and they are famous for their wide range of shots which makes it a good launch pad for the evening. One word of advice though: If you’re over 30 you will be raising the average age of the place. If you’re still standing by 1 a.m. then Kalico’s is night club is where reps, bar staff and seasonaires all flock to. Unlike some of the other night clubs, it is affordable enough for you to buy a round without having to remortgage your house.

Good skiing

For riding on powder days you have to head for Couchevel 1650 for easy access off-piste lines and natural drops. Our personal favorites were the off piste on the right hand side of the Chapeletsand Bel Air runs which start from the top of the Signal and Bel Air lifts respectively. If you are considering going off piste do note that these are not are for beginners as the runs will have some technical bits through trees or steep narrow passages. If you are a seasoned boarder and willing to put in a little walking the off piste at Chapelets has some gems to offer. That being said if you are willing to walk a mountain guide will be your best bet to rewarding off-piste runs.

The snow park at Courchevel 1850 is a bit of a let down and you should head over to Meribel where there are two good parks.

For those days that you just can not be bothered to ski you may want to rent a luge and head to the luging run at the center of town. It is well groomed and will get your heart racing a few times as near crashes and a sore bum are nearly unavoidable.

Here’s what happened:

He began with “Chaconne” from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor, one of the world’s most difficult pieces to master.

Three minutes went by before something happened. Sixty-three people had already passed when, finally, there was a breakthrough of sorts. A middle-age man altered his gait for a split second, turning his head to notice that there seemed to be some guy playing music. Yes, the man kept walking, but it was something.

A half-minute later, he got his first donation. A woman threw in a buck and scooted off. It was not until six minutes into the performance that someone actually stood against a wall, and listened.

Things never got much better. In the three-quarters of an hour that he played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run — for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.

source: Pearls Before Breakfast - The Washington Post April 8, 2007

Over the course of the entire performance only one person recognized the artist. Joshua Bell was playing some of the world’s most beautiful masterpieces on his Gibson ex Huberman, a $3.5mio instrument, in near complete indifference. Three days earlier he had filled the house at Boston’s stately Symphony Hall, where mediocre seats went for $100. Two weeks later he would play to a standing-room-only audience so respectful of his artistry that they stifled their coughs until the silence between movements. But on that day at the L’enfant Plaza metro stop, Joshua Bell was just another mendicant, competing for the attention of busy people on their way to work.

What does this teach us? Are we all “touched by genius” but only a few to have fortune to find the approriate context to have it expressed in? Kant argued that one’s ability to appreciate beauty is related to one’s ability to make moral judgments. But there was a caveat. Kant felt that to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing conditions must be optimal. Optimal doesn’t mean heading to work, focusing on your report to the boss, maybe your shoes don’t fit right. Maybe I’ll get lucky one day and pick up a Manet at a flea market.

badsoda logos feb 2009

Now that I see them here on the page, I find there are about 3 out of the lot that I actually like. Wonder if… nah I’ll have changed my mind tomorrow.

So why leave?

It is true that after the acquisition the site ran a little slower. That in an of itself is not reason enough to leave though - certainly not for a site with this readership. It’s also true that their service, as I said earlier, is pretty good . You would think their price of $9.25/month is pretty sweet as well. Well this has now become the sticking point for me.

I’m leaving because of pure cost. This website uses about 150MB of space and 0.15GB of bandwidth a month. My plan provides for 1GB of space and 200GB of bandwidth a month. While $9.25 may seem cheap for the plan it’s darn expensive considering my usage patterns.

This discrepancy has led me to a wide search for more affordable, and appropriate hosting. After a couple of false starts and a few evenings of intensive investigation into hosting reviews, plan comparisons and cost calculations I think I’ve finally found a partner matching my needs on all fronts: financially, support wise and ethically - OK that last one was not on my list but a nice bonus that my new hosting partner just happens to support. In short, I’m moving to nearlyfreespeech.net

Free speech what?

They’re one of the few hosting companies that successfully provide pay-as-you-go web hosting. The bottom line on them is that they have really decent reviews, a no nonsense approach, a business model that I support and best of all I’m likely to pay between $20 and $25 for my hosting annually. That’s about an 80% saving compared to what I’m paying today.

Their model is pretty simple:

• Data Transfers (Bandwidth): Starts at $1.00 per gigabyte and goes down
• Disk Space (Storage): $0.01 per megabyte-month

If you’re considering swithching hosts and you run a pretty low-traffic, low-disk usage site you might want to check them out too.

Now fast forward, a couple of months and someone has actually gone ahead and built it…. well kinda.

Back in mid Jan, the fine people at Apple released iPhoto ‘09. It is, as far as I’m aware, the one piece of software which comes closest to what I would like a familiy oriented piece of media management software to be. It has all the feature I’ve described my “PictoSense” post except for the neat integration of time, keywords and location in a single pane. It’s a shame they didn’t push their software that far though.

That being said the bright minds at apple did come up with a feature I truly find astounding: faces. Or rather, the facial recognition within the faces feature of iPhoto. Now that’s what I call a time saver. On the few hundred images I’ve let it loose on it has managed a hit rate of over 80%. That’s so many pictures I don’t have to manually tag, Great!

I truly hope that someone will end up putting all thee elements on a single screen.

Since then the idea has continued to pop into my thoughts demanding refinement. As a follower of GTD principles I figured that if I was to ever stop my brain from tinkering with this I’d better start jotting things down. Hopefully that’ll save me from having to keep track of things in my head and this constrantly rummaging around up there.

So where does this leave us? Being a visually oriented person, my first stop is the main screen and how it should work.

The PictoSense screen layout

Borrowing ideas from existing applications I managed scape together a first stab at a screen design without too much effort. Below you’ll see one of several screen mock ups that I’ve come up with: “map room”. Other designs, yet to be illustrated, will follow the same idea but instead of having a world map you see the “image carousel” or the “relationships map“.

The map room screen

The main features of this screen are a map with tagged locations, a timeline browser and a keyword browser. All 3 elements will interact with each other such that changing say the zoom level on the map will influence the timeline and keywords displays.

Features of the world map

The user is able to zoom and pan the map (1), switch between several views (2) such as Sattelite, Map or hybrid. On the map the user will find either markers (icons or thumbnails) representing locations where pictures were taken. The location of the markers is derived from the picture’s latitude and longitude meta data fields.

The number of markers on the map is constrained by all of the following criteria:

• Area of the map: you will not see any markers for locations not directly visible on the screen. (This may sound silly but you would not believe what I’ve seen coded across my professional experience.)
• The “current window” of the timeline browser: You will only see markers for images for which the capture date (an Exif metadata field) falls between the start and end dates that the “current window” specifies.
• The selected keyword(s) if any: You will only see markers which relate to the selected keywords. If no keywords are selected (or available) the map contents will not be constrained by this criteria.

Markers on the map can be either pictures or icons. Clicking on a marker will pop-up a larger version of the image along with selected meta data information (e.g. caption, keywords, capture date, etc.)

Features of the timeline browser

The user is able to see a timeline representing all the images in the library. Within this timeline he can set a “time window” which acts as a constraint for the world map, carousel or relationships map. The timeline has a histogram representing the number of images captured at a given point in time.

The timeline will be constrained by the earliest and latest caputure time of all images in the library. The time interval markers (eg. year, month, week day) will vary depending on the time span of the library. Several implementations are possible (see example 1, example 2, and a really neat one).

Features of the keyword list

The user is able to see keywords of all the pictures within the current “time window”. The size of the keywords is relative to the number of times each keyword appears within the set of images. Selecting one or more keywords will constrain the number of markers on the map. Unselecting a keyword will remove the constraint.

The selected keywords will not cause the size of the histogram to change. They will however cause the histogram bars (dates) of the related pictures to be highlighted. This will occur for the entire timeline and not just the current “time window”. This gives a visual form of feedback to the user of the times at which selected pictures were taken without modifying the height of the histogram which would be distracting.

Further thinking

The screen design and features are very early in their lifecycle at this stage. There are many more things which need to be considered and which during the writing of this have tickled my brain. What options should be provided, what happens to slections on changes in the “time window” etc.

For now though, there’s enough on paper for my brain to stop playing tricks on me by calling this topic to the forefront at the most inappropriate of times.

The libary

As you may recall, I’m pretty anal when it comes to the family’s picture archive. When we purchased our first digital camera what feels like eons ago, I quickly realized that we would end up with fairly large library over the years. And as with any largish library it would need management. So I set about tagging the images, a tedious but necessary evil if we were ever to make sense of the thing 20 years down the line. I won’t go into the details of the workflow here and just mention that I tag pretty much anything for: who took the shot, the person in the shot and the location it was taken at.

Recently I’ve started wondering how this data can be put to good use. My current toolset can very nicely tell me what I generally need to know, where something was taken, by whom etc. It will only tell me those things because I know the tools. That’s fine as long as I’m the only user, but that’s not really the point of the library. How could this library be made accessible to others (e.g family and friends) and if so what are the salient features I would put at their disposal given the meta-data at hand?

After a little pondering a couple of things seem essential: a timeline, locations, and people. Whomever would have access would like to have the ability to sort and filter data based on these criteria. These are fairly simple features which I’m sure can be found in a number of user friendly pieces of software.

Architecting a new libary

Yet how do you bring those to the user in an entertaining way? The idea of entertainment also seems a key criteria. Whomever would view our library would likely not be looking to trudge through thousands of pictures. Rather, this person would be interested in the story that the pictures tell.

Figuring out what the libary viewer, for lack of a better name, would look like and how its usage could be desinged is what’s been prickling my mind. The way I go about figuring this out is to answer the following question: “What are the storylines one could derive from the meta-data in the library?” It’s not the easiest of questions to answer and If you’d like to participate then please feel free to comment…

Time and space:

For one we can use locations pictures were taken over time using the location information and the time a picture was taken. For this I envisage a map of the world with a bracketed timeline. The map would display pictures, or rather some form of reference to pictues for a given time bracket. These references could be bubbles which vary in size with the number of pictures that were taken around a given location for instance. The timeline would function very much like the one found on Google Finance. It would allow you to set the width of the bracket (i.e how many days, months etc. to take into account) and allow you to slide that bracket over time. When you slide the bracket the references on the map would change in accordance.

The timline and map would work in conjunction to filter the pictures to those that you’re interested in. Other features would include the ability to zoom in and out on the map and the ability to click on a reference (bubble) to further filter the pictures. The pictures themselves could be listed in several ways although my personal preference would go to a filmstrip type of listing.

Relationships

Another idea would be to use the people in the shot. As each picture has an author and one or more people in the picture one can establish a sense of relation both between the author of the shot and his subjects as well as betwen people in the shot.

The first thing that springs to mind in this regard is a graphical representation of relations between the people. The strengh of the relation would be relative to the number of times any 2 people were in the same shot together. Something like the Visual Thesaurus would be an interesting start piont The central weight points could be around the authors as they’d could be considered to be in every shot - that’s debatable though, one should see how this works out in the data representation.

One could thus navigate the picture database solely based on the relations of people. Selecting one or multiple people would filter the number of people in the shot.

A second feature which could be added is the timeline. This could be achieved in very much the same way as with the “Time and Space” idea such that selecting a time-frame would restrict the number of people shown.

Further afield

I’m sure that there’s more ways to view this information, but for now my brain is fried - I am sick after all… To be continued then.

Do leave me a comment or two in case you want to contribute

For reasons yet unexplained I plugged in his URL this morning and lo and behold there it was: Memorio Technica. Today’s going to be a good day it seems.

As could be expected of such an intriguing piece of software it had a bit of a rocky launch. The public’s enthusiasm overwhelmed the servers and Microsoft had to shut down part of the service to add some more capacity.

At any rate. I’m sure I’ll be testing it out, as soon as they release a Mac version.