What is the most useless technology ever invented?

 I take attendance by having the students answer a question (previously 2019).

What is the most useless technology ever invented?

By popular vote, the general category "social media" is the winner (6 votes). Some people voted more narrowly tiktok (4 votes) and snapchat (2 votes) were singled out for specific contempt. Other physical debris got votes: electric toothbrush (3 votes), smartwatches (2 votes), and furby (1 vote).

Some votes went to other things, some explicable and some not:

• bombs :(
• nukes :/
• shoes
• chat GPT trying to identify word count
• everything
• it's hard to tell
• none :(
• sundials
• wheel

I think the "everything" and the "none" person should compare notes.

This post's theme word is Momus (n), "a carping critic" (the Greek god of censure!). The tech journalist was a Momus at the product launch.

Spring 2021 quotes

 I forgot to write attributions so here are some more-scrambled-than-usual quotes:

"Thank you! You've been sucked into the trap alongside me."
"I like being sucked into the trap."

"Are you going to issue some futures on that party?"

"There's two people in the house, so 'who ate it?' has an air of mystery."

"... the robot spy in your house who you just yell at."

D: "Nine times out of ten, if I have banged my head against it, it turns out the reverse triangle inequality does it."

Z: "That's a good question and I should have asked it, but I was a little flustered."
K: "The title of your memoir!"

D: "Um... this is when I need to have two copies of this book open, to flip back and forth."

"All curly-haired girls have an opinion of which founding father their ponytail looks like."

Z: "I like the policy of 'visitors should be neither seen nor heard.'"

S: "I think these [meetings] will be better in person."
J: "They can't be worse!"

Z: "X and I get into arguments about how to pronounce things. I'm like, I don't know if this is because you are 4 or because I came from a weird place."

G: "Why is that cat looking at the thermostat?"
Z: "I have no idea."

"pull request: check yourself before you wreck yourself, [username1]"

D: "Which is why, when your dog asks you a question, you say, 'That will be answered in the next paper.'"

L: ""My toenails are sore from being inside my socks yesterday."

K: "I'm five minutes into butts."

I: "At some point you can drive this probability high enough that your computer will spontaneously *crumble* with higher probability [than that this will fail]."

D: "I have to say that, until this morning, I was convinced that the three musketeers were mice."

Q: "The kid's clearly a knucklehead."

O: "If I need to, I can buy another computer, which will increase the number of computers in this house by... 1%?"

Z: "Python is the language that has unlimited late days."

Q: "I meant to put myself on mute but I turned off my video because I have no idea how Zoom works anymore."

Y: "I'm [X]'s niece, we won't get into how."

C: "Scraping the hair off your face every day is messing with nature."

Z: "Geocaching --- that's where you bury a server in your backyard."

I: "Beautiful. I did a probability."

J: "Hey, let's completely change everything at once and then try to cope with the ensuing disaster."

G: "Friends and the internet are about the same level of uselessness." 

Z: "Students will misunderstand, no matter what we do."

L: "That was Dad! I never used the word 'dynamite'. I prefer 'plastique'."

M: "You know these kids with college educations --- they can read!"

I: "Alright, what else is new, besides bad weather and rain and your illegal activities?"

K: "How about malaria?"
L: "Malaria is just... very inconvenient."

Z: "I think the idea of food and drink is insane."

Q: "They join the major late and are like, 'I picked up CS35 on the street.'"

I: "This hypercube is reaching the limits of my artistic sophistication."

Z: "Your department seems comparatively... cohesive. You all agree on stuff..."

I: "Knock yourself out on Complexity Zoo. But don't do it for the next half hour, we're in class."

This post's theme word is autokinesy (n), "self-propelled or self-directed motion or energy." The instinct to write down out-of-context quotes for my later self is a bit of psychic autokinesy; it goes back in my notes for more than twenty years.

Live theatre, sort of

WHEREAS the ongoing pandemic and various other elements of environmental, social, political, economic, and biological disaster loom large, and

WHEREAS the rational fairly strict self-quarantine (of those who are able) has, since March, severely limited occasions to socialize and gather in groups for the purposes of mutually enjoying culture and company, it is

HEREBY ACKNOWLEDGED that having so many performers shift to an online method for displaying their art to a geographically disparate crowd has, in fact, WIDENED this reader's ability to financially support the artists she loves while appreciating their performances in real-time.

Everything's on a screen, and frankly having to see my family only in delineated, buffered, pixelated windows feels much more limiting than having to see live performers in windows. Realistically these performers would have been mostly inaccessible because they were not touring my locality; so I find a tiny sliver of redemption for 2020 in the broader access to live art. The rest of 2020 should consider itself still on blast for its shortcomings.

This post's theme word is rort (n), "a wild party." I have tickets to watch shows three nights this week, from the comfortable pajama-clad rort of my own sofa!

Happy birthday, Turing!

Today is the 106th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing. (Of course, at birth he was probably very bad at abstract reasoning and proofs, like most babies, but he overcame these difficulties and grew up to be truly excellent at math.)

Just in case you haven't seen this yet (HT: I saw this on Twitter several times, then on slatestarcodex), it is amusing and recursive and cultural and involves computers:

Humans often post on the website reddit, which hosts many, many different message boards and oodles of subcultures and conversations on specific topics. Each specific message board is called a subreddit and has its own adherents, community standards, topic(s) of conversation, style, level of activity, etc.

There is a subreddit called r/totallynotrobots where the posts claim to be written by humans, but are written in all-caps and a style suggesting that they are actually written by robots. Redditors writing these posts are humans, so these are humans writing as if they are robots who are unconvincingly trying to pass as human.

There is a recent and extremely impressive system called GPT-2 which unsupervised-ly learns English and performs some really impressive computational linguistic feats, including writing mediocre high-school-style essays and writing very interesting and totally feasible poetry.

There is a subreddit called r/SubSimulatorGPT2 which trains GPT-2 on subreddits and automatically writes "coherent and realistic simulated content" for each subreddit. Of course, this subreddit is just going through other subreddits, training GPT-2, and writing new (automated, simulated) posts for that subreddit.

Now the subreddit-simulating robot has trained on r/totallynotrobots, which means that there are posts on the internet which are written by a robot imitating a human writing in a style pretending to be a robot who is unconvincingly trying to pass as a human. (Or, as slatestarcodex put it, "a robot pretending to be a human pretending to be a robot pretending to be a human.") You can see those posts here.

It's turtles all the way down, and every. single. turtle. is a Turing machine!


This post's theme word is anastrophe, "the inversion of the usual order of words or clauses." Silly grammar mistakes and anastrophe are used to denote unfamiliarity with human language.

We're done, Verizon. [mic drop]

... and I'm out (previously: In which I am about to cancel my Verizon home DSL and Verizon update). The service continued to be terrible, intermittent with bad. Both options were disagreeable to me, as a customer, but the variability was even more frustrating. Could they not simply deliver a consistently bad service?

I priced it out, measured my usage and the bandwidth available, and I'll get more consistent, sufficient service by doing almost anything else. My personal favorite is to inscribe individual packets by hand on nuts, and pass these off to squirrels and birds, who by means of their own mysterious communication networks, eventually pass me back the data I requested. (Current bug: this arrives in the timing and placement of bird poops on my car windshield, which I must decode by hand. Don't worry, I'm writing a script to do it automatically.)

In a practice which apparently recurs annually, I add to my list of "forsworn companies" every August. This time it's Verizon: never again, Verizon. You have forced me to listen to at least 10 cumulative hours of your "on hold" music. Never again.

This post's theme word is inveigle (v. tr.), "to get something or to persuade someone to do something by deception or flattery." They could no longer inveigle me into subscribing to the service.

In which I am about to cancel my Verizon home DSL

I have not had home internet service since July 18th. My provider is Verizon DSL. At this point I have called, emailed, tweeted, and interacted with their phone/troubleshooting menu so many times that I am bored and incredibly frustrated with the system. I might just cancel --- which would be functionally indistinguishable from my current situation of no internet connection, with the exception that I'd know I could stop trying to get them to fix it, and also stop anticipating that they'll send me a bill for this non-service.

Are you a Verizon agent, customer service representative, or technician? Let me answer your questions.

• The DSL light on my modem is blinking red.
• Yes, it continues blinking red even if I reboot the modem. Go ahead and "run diagnostics" from your end.
• The modem is plugged directly into the phone jack, with no splitter.
• This situation persists even if I use a different phone cable to plug the modem into the jack.
• I do not use my home phone service and don't have a corded telephone, so I can't tell you if the phone is working.

Previously (see my outage from July 4 -- July 7, for which you have a ticket in your system), you sent a technician (the helpful Joe!) to my home. He confirmed that the problem was in your wiring infrastructure that delivers the signal to my home, and not inside my home itself. 

"There is a ticket for the Central Office." since July 19th... but no progress. 

• I called on July 19 --- I was told that someone would come to my home July 20, and I needed to be at home from 8am to noon.
• I called July 20, at noon, when no one had come --- I was told that no one was coming, after all, because the problem was in the infrastructure of Verizon's wired network, but it would be repaired by 4pm today.
• I called July 21, in the evening, when I still had no service --- was told that they're working on it, it will be fixed in 24-48 hours, and to stop calling. Verizon would certainly call me with any updates.

There have been no updates.

• I tweeted @verizon today --- got three different replies, asking questions answered by the bulleted information points above, then got sent to a Verizon chat window.
• In chat, was told that "there is a ticket for the Central Office", which will take 24-48 hours to reply via email, at which point I'll get an update from "Verizon Social Media Team" on Twitter.

I'm not optimistic about actually receiving any promised update. (I'm going to wait until the end of the day today, though, before cancelling --- on the off chance that they do actually manage to make progress and get back to me.)

Alternatives? Verizon FIOS (recommended by my neighbors on NextDoor) is not available at my address, so my only alternative internet provider is Comcast. By consensus on NextDoor, Comcast service is terrible and customer service is worse. At this point, tethering my computer to my cell phone looks like the cheapest and most effective way to get home internet service. 

This post's theme word is pernancy (n), "a taking or receiving of rent, profit, etc." Charging for a nonexistent service is atrocious pernancy.

Proper system revision documentation

Dear readers,

If you can read this, then an incredibly unlikely sequence of steps has succeeded. Huzzah!

There is currently some sort of eldritch alignment of planets whose main influence is to rewrite critical boot sectors of all my hard drives. (Perhaps concomitant with finishing a semester?) Alas! Time to reformat and reinstall, in every operating system known to man. If one more computer fails, I'll be reduced to publishing tweets via carrier pigeon. This blog post may have been written via telegraph STOP

This means I get to start a new "installation notes: what I did" file. And so I am revisiting my past logs, little missives from my past self, to make sure I set up all the bells and whistles just right. (Keyboard shortcuts are the main way I interact with these light-boxes I relentlessly stare into.) Usually these logs are curt and useful, but sometimes they range into quite colorful and narrative tales, for example (details and lengthy intro expurgated to prevent your eyes from bleeding):

After fiddling with [hardware], I find that [software flag] is again disabled. Augh. The following commands did not work to re-enable it: 

sudo [heinous and expurgated set of commands]

This time, banging around wildly on [list of unusual keyboard keys] and crying openly into my hands worked.

... it's important that every log includes instructions for how to replicate the steps that ultimately led to a successful setup. Apparently at the time I felt that the strange wizardry that made my keyboard commands work included crying, and included the notes necessary to replicate it.

Don't worry, I have extensive notes on which "fiddling with [hardware]" caused this weird thing, and I am very carefully not reproducing that. Also, according to the logs, I have not solved any computer problem by weeping since 2012. My streak continues!

Writing to you from the edge of known OS support forums,
 --- Lila

P.S. While writing this post I jinxed my wifi card and it refused several times to maintain a connection. Go figure. I also managed to get exactly the perfect alt-tab behavior, so it's a wash.


This post's theme word is lazaretto (noun), "a medical facility for people with infectious diseases", or "a building or ship used for quarantine", or "on a ship, a space between decks used as storage." I fear my brain is the lazaretto between different computer systems.

Course message board

There is a homework due this morning.

The single most popular post on the course message board occurred last night.

1:10am: "do we have to finish the problem set even though Trump is winning? we have no will to continue."

Follow-up comments throughout the night:

• "please, I second."
• "Well with the way things are going, will there really be a GPA left for this to ruin anyway? "
• "fourth'd. why is this happening."
• "Murica is now NP Complete"
• "Please Lila"
• "make my GPA great again"
• "Not gpa that doesn't matter right now as much as general health and sanity"
• "not that wall street doesn't matter as much as minority citizens"
• "please reply, we're crying"

My reply upon waking: "It is very important to be educated, as this election highlights." We'll see if  I can remain as anodyne in my not-on-the-permanent-and-searchable-record aloud delivery of lecture this morning.

I'm considering scrapping my network flow lecture to discuss social choice theory and voting (lecture tentatively titled: "Arrow's impossibility theorem, or how math is the reason why we can't have nice things"). On the other hand, the problems we face in the real world are usually not theoretical problems of design and feasibility, but implementation detail problems (e.g., how to check election results) and issues arising from grandfathered-in historical systems which had no rational design to begin with.

This post's theme word is peripeteia (noun), "a sudden or unexpected change of fortune, especially in a literary work. A classic example is Oedipus learning about his parentage." Too crushed by peripeteia for cleverness, the characters shouted "I want out of this novel!" in a fourth-wall-breakingly desperate plea for clemency.

Courtship tokens

My desk already had fun math puzzles, as decoration and to occupy my hands and mind while I spin my brain-wheels on research problems.

To these I now add recently-received wooing tokens, these two octopuses.

As far as romancing goes, I cannot think of a more attractive feature than access to a 3D printer and willingness to print tiny, creepy cephalopods.


This post's theme word is cumshaw, "a gift or tip." This cumshaw octopus collects scrimshaw.

Manhood and the gender-parity inflection point

Ack. Here's an article on manhood, with many not-what-I-expected statistics that women are out-earning men, adapting to new social and economic standards, and leaving them behind. Yes, that's right.

It's interesting and befuddling that, in low-income settings, women are so outperforming (and outnumbering) men, while in high-income/status settings (the technology sector comes to mind, as well as higher education) women are discriminated against and an extreme minority. Is there an inflection point,* somewhere on the socioeconomic scale, where men and women have achieved parity?**

I recoil at the suggestion that school needs to be made more "boy-friendly", probably because every other article in my inbox is about how science education needs to be made more "girl-friendly". Dissonance! Although I am soothed by the author's explicit mention that suggested changes to the classroom are "all helpful, and all things that might be appreciated by girls, too."

The article jumps all around, from broad and depressing statistics to accessible anecdotes and prescriptive suggestions from Sweden***. The takeaway message was bafflement, and the unusual and welcome thought that my worldview had been slightly widened to include a world with the statistics and anecdata of this argument. I'm also puzzled why the article is  framed as if gains for women equals (necessitates, requires, produces) losses for men.**** Why must it be a zero-sum game of employment?


This post's theme word is inosculate, "to join or unite." It's intransitive. Who would want to inosculate home, health, and fate with an unpleasant, violent, ill-mannered, uneducated partner?


*An intermediate-value-wish like this one seems unlikely, because the statistics probably aren't dense enough to be continuous. Big discontinuities at: high school diploma, college diploma, parents' socioeconomic indicators, etc.

**On the one hand, I'd like to live at that point, where men and women are equally employed, equally caretakers, equally-represented, equally successful. On the other hand, I probably don't want to move down the socioeconomic scale to reach that point, if I am currently above it.

***This is the parallel of Godwin's Law for articles on issues of economy, family, employment, education, health, or any other aspect of society: the article will, eventually, hold up Sweden as an example.

****On the other hand, the article illustration of a see-saw has a man on one side and no one is playing with him on the other side; yet he is still, inexplicably and in defiance of physics, up.

Accents on blogspot

Weirdly, blogspot.fr crashes every time I try to publish a post which includes accented characters.

How is this possible? The language has accents.

I wanted you to know that it's not me, it's the software.


This post's theme word is micawber, "an eternal optimist." The micawber believes that this issue will be resolved.

Set-your-own-price reverse marketplace

Amazon will let vendors -- who own items -- post those items for sale at a fixed price. Ebay lets vendors post items for sale by auction, where buyers have some power over the price they pay. On Kickstarter, speculating vendors attempt to rustle up (financially) committed customers before spending movey on overhead and setup costs. This business model makes some amount of sense, because the market
for your fantastic idea may not exist. It's a way of crowdsourcing market research, pinned to a method of getting startup money from a mob.

I dream of a reverse marketplace, a sort of backwards kickstarter (but not kickstopper, as amusing as that is). It would be a website with a huge inventory (possibly borrowed from Amazon's databanks, like swap.com) where buyers can post offered prices. Then the vendors can browse this collection of data and determine if, e.g., there are millions of dollars to be made if they decrease the price of that CD from $10 to $5. (This still provides more control than the pay-what-you-can and pay-what-you-want models used by JoCo and AFP.)

A secondary benefit of such a site is to reverse-kickstart things. There are books, music, and games that I _would_ buy -- at their present prices-- if they were availabe WITHOUT DRM. So I'd reverse-bid on those. But they're currently only available WITH DRM, which is a no-go and worth $0 to me. This would show vendors, publishers, and creators how many sales they are MISSING because of DRM. It could also show publishers other data about formatting (this movie is in high demand on DVD but not Blu-Ray; this music will sell as vinyl but not CD, etc.).

Think about it as voluntary market research data. I am willing -- WILLING -- to give advertisers, publishers and vendors this data. This VALUABLE DATA ABOUT MY SPENDING PREFERENCES AND HABITS.

Do you hear me, online sellers?


This post's theme word is samizdat, "an underground publishing system used to print and circulate banned literature clandestinely. Also, such literature."

Netflix overfitting

How can you tell that I've been watching movies on R.'s Netflix account? One glance at this screen should explain it:
That's right: the top two recommended categories are "British period pieces featuring a strong female lead" and "critically-acclaimed mind-bending movies." This screen made me laugh for several minutes. Netflix is parodying my own preferences back to me with a straight face!

My comments are thus: (1) machine learning should be applied to more areas of my life. It is obviously useful, hilarious, and interesting. Also, (2) I am not terribly worried about the filter bubble so bemoaned on BoingBoing. Partially because I am aware of the automated personalization that is happening around me, I'm not worried about being trapped in a bubble with only my own viewpoints mirrored back at me. I constantly tweak my catalogued "browsing behavior" to see what sort of changes it induces in automated systems. For example, I rated a lesbian romantic comedy/thriller (season 5) as five stars on Netflix just to see how that would affect the action/adventure/scifi/British-period-...-strong-female-lead balance of recommendations. (This was also a joke on R., who didn't know I had done this and was quite puzzled by the temporary diversion of his Netflix recommendations.)

I think Netflix overfitting is an interesting case of the filter bubble. As long as Netflix's genre suggestions are interesting, I always find something I'd like to watch before I get to the point of browsing all videos, or looking one up by search. So most of the time, Netflix's suggestions are good and I watch them and like them and so Netflix is working me into an overfitted profile. Hence "British period pieces featuring a strong female lead."


This post's theme word is prolepsis, "anticipating and answering objections in advance" or, apparently, "the literary device of referring to a thing by its future state." Certain applications of predictive machine learning seem to evince prolepsis.

Internet usability

I have become recently frustrated at the unusability of teh internet [sic]. No, I don't want your cookies or to run Flash... and as a consequence, many pages simply don't load, or they load forever, taking up memory and bandwidth without ever deciding to display some frakking content. I don't understand why the internet has trended this way. There must be other users like me out there, who are increasingly shut out of miscellaneous internet browsing.

Do most users not notice? Is this because, in my reluctance to buy any new hardware, I have finally fallen behind the lagging event horizon of "supported"? Are my computers' software/hardware combinations now actually too old to browse the latest, grooviest incarnation of teh internets [sic]? Maybe most users:

1. Regularly destroy and cannot rescuscitate computers, and thus purchase new computers every... 2?... years. (I remember hearing a statistic like that once: the average laptop lives for 1.5 years. My last store-bought new computer is from 2005.)
2. Accept cookies.
3. Accept and install whatever plugins claim to be required.
4. Don't block ads. (<-- N.B. this must be the case, since otherwise the advertisers would figure out a different way to attack our eyeballs.)
   

It's frustrating, and I feel like a whiny old dinosaur. I long for the "good old days" that are so old I never witnessed them: text-only browsing, with pure content right at one's fingertips.


This post's theme word: anomie, "social instability and alienation caused by the erosion of norms and values." Modern anomie is based upon flash cookies and banner ads.
This post written like Cory Doctorow.

Building Turing machines

Two recent items of internews (internet+news = stories that are popular for a few hours) regarding Turing machines, my second-favorite type of machine.*

Massive in-game Turing machine built inside a mechanical game (via BoingBoing).

Actual real-life Turing machine built inside this universe (via BoingBoing, HackADay, Slashdot, Gizmodo).


This post's theme word: sedulous, "involving great care, effort, and persistence." Any Turing machine construction, whether engineering or mathematical, is of necessity quite sedulous.

*Printing presses. Nothing can beat 'em.

iTunes bonus song?

I just got an email from iTunes informing me that, because I had purchased an album online, I was eligible for an extra song, for free! I hadn't heard of this song (apparently it's a new single released after the album), but it's by the same artists and I like it.

Why didn't I see this advertised anywhere? It seems like it would be a good incentive to buy albums online, and there's no profit in keeping it secret. Although I guess this method did get me to blog about it, and blogs are the new social-media-netlinked-viral-buzzword-buzzword-buzzword advertisements.


This post's theme word: Pickwickian, "marked by generosity, naivete, or innocence," or "not intended to be taken in a literal sense."

DVD playback

I spent the last hour getting Paradelle to play DVDs, following a series of unilluminating error messages across the vast wasteland of Ubuntu message boards. Now that DVDs are playable (thank you, hundreds of forums, two of which had the answer to my particular instance of the "known bug," given my hardware), it's too late to watch anything. Tired, slightly sick Lila signing out for the day. Goodnight.


This post's theme word: contumacious, "stubborn, insubordinate."

Why can't we all just get along? (copyright edition)

I just watched this lecture by Lawrence Lessig.* It inspires me to do good out in the world. Maybe I should have gone to law school? I like to write and I'm killer at logic puzzles; being a lawyer might really agree with me. And I care about all the enormously, outrageously bad things that are happening in the way that we -- a society, a species -- treat ideas.

Why can't we all just get along? Why do court cases take so long? (And how dramatically different would the entire world be if the US had a time-limit on court cases?) Why is it so hard to get people to do the right thing?**

I have trouble believing that there is some Recording Industry Executive sitting up in his mountain retreat, stroking a cat in his lap, and ordering his minions to go forth, and shower the fuel of money upon their army of lawyers. Why is this the way things work? Perhaps it's a gradual accumulation of small negative decisions which leads to this massively evil, broken system. The RIE needs to make a payment on his yacht, so he has an underling sign a new artist, so... and the lawyer can charge $100 more per hour if he works for the RIE's company, and... so on and so forth.

How can I help? Perhaps I can help devise a more realistic model of this profit-corporation-courts-makers model, and then a game-theoretic strategy where it is in the interests of all parties to be nice. Then the next step is to change the entire political/social system to conform to the rules of my game.***

So I can't really help, or at least I feel that I can't really help, and this feeling will cause me to fail to help. sigh

*Via *Emergent Chaos*, who has some interesting thoughts on the term "non-commercial." More on Creative Commons' research project into "non-commercial" via Boingboing.
** I know that it is more complicated than just "do the right thing," because people have different opinions of what "the right thing" is. That just makes me more frustrated.
***Oh, algorithmic mechanism design, how I love you.


This post's theme word: quodlibet, "a subtle argument, especially on a theological or philosophical issue" or "a musical medley: a whimsical combination of popular tunes." As in, "we had a quodlibet about whether the quodlibet was legal."

Pictures on Ubuntu, update

I've been playing around with Picasa. It's missing some features I really liked about iPhoto.

1. I can't import my albums from iPhoto. This fact is still incredibly irksome, and will continue to be so for as long as it persists.
   
2. I can't make folders of albums. This means that if I have more than 20 albums, they clutter up my sidebar and I have to scroll through the entire list to find the one I want.
3. There's no way to scroll through ALL the pictures in full-screen mode; photos are sorted by year, then month, then day. And full-screen mode will only allow for scrolling through a single day's pictures -- then to jump to the next day, I have to exit full-screen mode, pick the next day, and re-enter full-screen mode. Yuck.
4. Although Picasa is set to recognize .avi files, it doesn't.
   

The struggle continues. On the positive side, Picasa is not terribly slow. And lets me see my photos. That's nice. Standards lowering... lowering...


This post's theme word: moue, "pout or grimace."

Managing pictures on Ubuntu

I have amassed 30,000+ pictures since I got my first digital camera six years ago. For the past few years, I have been using iPhoto to organize these. (It is now very slow, since it tries to preload thumbnails of every picture on startup, or something similarly unreasonable.)

I like four features of iPhoto:

1. Photo files are stored in directories by YEAR/MONTH/DAY . This makes sense.
2. I can use albums to group together photos of the same event taken on different days.
3. If the camera date was set wrong, I can change the metadata on the photos.
4. My entire library is in iPhoto and organized in a way I understand.
   

I am trying to find a similar way to manage photos on Ubuntu. I have so far been unsuccessful. F-spot satisfies (1) but there doesn't seem to be a clean, working way to grab the albums from iPhoto. (Manually re-creating the albums for thirty thousand photos is not an option; I haven't found a hack that works yet, either.) Also, I can't figure out how to change the metadata with F-spot, or with any other Ubuntu software, for that matter.

I have heard good things about Picasa (Google's answer to organizing photos) but also bad things (it's slow; too many bells and whistles).

Suggestions? I've been making myself cozy on Ubuntu, but this is really irking me.

[Update, two hours later: I installed Picasa to try it out. After an XKCD-like series of events, something -- possible a hidden preference file? bug reports online are unclear -- is quite borked about my entire setup. Also, Google now gives me search returns in French and Portugese, but not English. Now everything I try fails, not just with Picasa but also basic OS functionality. Aaaiiieee! But there are no sharks. Yet.]

This post's theme word: nidicolous, "nesting."