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I caught a classic bit of the Today programme this morning. They had Falim Khoury (the head barman at the Savoy Hotel) shaking cocktails for everyone, and it was fairly evident from the general level of merriment that a certain amount of actual drinking was going on. Poor Charlotte Green had to try to read the news with sounds of shaking cocktails in the background, and she got a serious case of the giggles. The cocktail in question was a ‘Corpse Reviver’—she evidently needed an anti-corpse reviver to stop her corpsing. In the end, she had to wheeze, “Stop it, Jim!”. I assume that he was making faces at her and making it even worse.

Even if you didn’t start your celebrations quite that early, have a good time tonight, and I hope that you do a lot of giggling.

Since I’ve got a bit of spare time over the holidays, I’ve been trying to sort out my collection of digital photos and inspire myself to take some better images. I’ve had iView Media for a while now (I got a cheap upgrade from a version bundled with Toast), but I hadn’t got around to really investigating the new version.

It’s one of those bits of software which is simple to use without reading the manual, but has a lot of hidden power. Adding images to the catalogue is easy via drag and drop, or you can import images directly from a digital camera. There’s a lot of scope for batch processing files to rename them, resize or convert them, or to add metadata like the location, event, caption or category. Furthermore, you can add your own custom fields (I have ‘camera’ to distinguish shots taken with different cameras, and ‘quality’ to sort out the good shots from the duffers). Moving or copying files within the application is also very easy, so you can sort out the whole digital workflow without having to go to the Finder.

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