Eric'o'theque

Wow, that’s a (bad) surprise:

So long, Circuit City (CC).

In a bankruptcy court filing, the electronics retailer disclosed that it has reached a deal with liquidators to sell the remaining merchandise in all 567 of its U.S. stores after failing to find a buyer or a refinancing deal, the AP reports.

From: Tech Trader Daily – Barron’s Online : Circuit City To Close All Stores; More Than 35,000 Jobs Lost.

The nearby Circuit City has been a place to at least get good deals week-to-week, although with their corporate mis-management the local store had drifted from well organized to a more hunter & gatherer focus.

Besides smaller local stores like Hard Drives Northwest I guess that leaves our area with Best Buy: well organized and very well stocked, but not very convenient + awful traffic.

I saw a demo today of Ben Vincent’s Tassography.com photo website. He’s done an amazing amount of tagging in his photos and has a workflow that allows some pretty interesting view of his photos on his site.

Recently, Ben started using the latest Windows Live Photo Gallery to tag people in his photos and wanted to be able to get the same effect you have in WLPG of when you hover over a face it tells you who it is. For this, Ben extracted the new meta data that WLPG stores in each photo when you tag people:

The most compelling new feature for me is the new people tagging capabilities. Not only does it store who is in a photo but also where they are. Unfortunately there’s no real standard for where to store people, let alone their location in the picture. Facebook does something similar but doesn’t store it in the photo and most applications just store the name in a keyword or the People XMP field. So the decision was made to store this in a private XMP namespace, which at least provides a standard way of accessing the data. The good news is, Microsoft channels lots of this thinking through a single group, so Windows 7 also uses the same format.

Ben’s full post: Understanding how Windows Live Photo Gallery’s People Tags are Stored – Windows Live