Trey’s Blog|brain spillage!

Anyone who knows me, knows I’m fond of most things indigenous to the Chicago Area. I’m not from there, but I grew up with cable and watched a lot of WGN programming including the Chicago Cubs games. When I met my wife, she took my up to Chicago and I fell in love with the city. Anyway, besides the obvious Deep Dish Pizza, there are several other things that I think of when I think of Chicago. One of them is Fannie May Chocolates. My wife was shopping at Walgreen’s last week and noticed they now carry Fannie May chocolate in little two packs for $0.99 each or small boxes from $5.99 to 9.99. So far I have found Pixies, Trinidads, Eggnog Creams, Mint Meltaways, and one other I can’t recall at the moment. If you haven’t tried these chocolates, you must try them.

http://www.fanniemay.com/

First of all, let me say there is probably nothing more heinous than a sex crime because it involves both mental and physical abuses. With that said, I think requiring registration (that is made public) of sex offenders or anyone for that matter is a huge violation of privacy. This is not to say that I think sex offenders should be walking around freely doing whatever they’d like, but we should definitely rethink our judicial system that let them back out. If we think these people are so risky that we must register them and have the rest of the world monitoring their every move, then perhaps we shouldn’t be letting them out in the first place. If some one’s actions warrant their home be listed as **SEX OFFENDER**, giving the public the all of the information they need for vigilante justice, then perhaps we are doing things all wrong. To thwart this malicious behavior, we should have steeper consequences. In no way, should we allow these people out in public, where they can strike again, or be stricken against. Am I the only one who thinks that the public register is a violation of privacy? Or do these criminals that haven’t been given proper justice lose that right to privacy?

Like the majority of digital camera owners, I have a huge collection of digital photos.  Since 1998, I had been using ACDSee to view my collection because of its speedy interface.  Somewhere along the way, ACDSee became another one of the many shops to incorporate a Photo Manager into their application.  Some may find this useful for tagging or labeling photos for quickly locating photos of a particular subject, but I have found that I mainly deal with photos in a date manner.  Since date is my primary classification, I have created directories such as 2001-11 and 2006-11 to hold photos taken within those months.  I haven’t had any issues with this as ACDSee did not force me into using their Photo Management features.  However, when I made the switch to Mac, I was without a good viewer of photos and directories of photos.  iPhoto is included, but it is completely wrapped around Photo Management requiring each photo be imported so it may append additional meta data with each one.  I don’t really care for this much overhead, so I just did without and continued the search for a application that better suited my needs.  QPict seemed to have a lot of following so I gave it a try and it seems to do a good job of giving my everything I need, but only one caveat is with the sorting of directories listed on the left.  There is seems to be no rhyme or reason to the sorting being used.  QPict costs $35 for their Standard license.  Today I found a FREE program that does a great job viewing photos and integrating with OS X as the primary photo viewer.  JustLooking offers the speed and ease-of-use I’ve been looking for, but it lacks a tree view for quickly navigating through my photo directories.  This is a tough call, but free always has a ring to it.  I’ll probably continue to use both and see which completes the package first.