Monday, February 12, 2007

Chairs Or Art?

It was late Sunday night and all the stores at the food court in Grand Central Station have closed for the evening. Only a dozen or so people were still lingering around waiting for their trains to arrive. I was on my way home, walking to the subway terminal located inside the Grand Central Station.

I saw this interesting sight -- chairs neatly stacked on top of the tables. It got me wondering. Did someone with an artistic flair put it together or was the person a little obsessive compulsive? Or is this just a routine way of stacking chairs on top of the table? I admit, I have never seen anything like this before. What do you think?

N.B.: Since we are on the topic of organization, please share with me how you catalog your photographs? My laptop automatically catalog them by dates. I also keep a separate folder for the photos I have selected, resized and PhotoShopped for this blog.

13 comments:

Kate said...

These tables and chairs are better organized than my photos. My files are a mess--no clear sense of organization. You raise an interesting question.

Sally said...

Hi Ming - love your Grabd Central Station series. What a beautiful building it it. The restoration is superb. Perhaps the chair-stacker used to be a primary school teacher, used to instructing the little ones to put their chairs on their desks at the end of the day!

I use the My Pictures folders in XP. Whenever I download new pics I go thru them and decide which ones have potential. They go into a foldr called "The Vault". Then, if I use one to draft a post, it goes into a sub-folder called "Drafts". having chosen one of often 20 or more to post, I don;t want to necessarily lose them, so they either go into another sub-folder called "Don't Use / Used similar", or a new folder out in My Pictures gets created with th date and topic name. If, when creating the daily Blog I decide to do an adjunct "Sydney daily Photos Extra", then the pics that go on that also go in a "Photos Extra" folder.

When I actually POST the daily pic, a copy of that goes in a folder "Used For Daily Photos" I name it and date it so that they get filed in date order, thus:

2007 02Feb 12 "Beers -R-Us" That dating ensurs that all Jan gets filed before April, which they wouldn't if you arrange by name, as "A" precedes "J". This was a minth is numbered.

I do that admin every day as i proceed, otherwise it would get way out of hand and I'd be reposting all the time.

Can you tell I spent many years as a high school librarian?????

Sally said...

And can you tell I should have spell checked that entry??? Hope you can follow it!

JaamZIN said...

I guess its just routine...and this kind of routin is already an art:)

Olivier said...

dans la ville où Andy Wahrol a ete roi, je dirais art ;o).
Grand Central Station est un endroit sublime, dire que la ville a voulue le detruire à une epoque


in the city where Andy Wahrol was a king, I would say art; O). Grand Central Station is a sublime place, statement that the city wanted to destroy it at one tim

Z said...

Aren't chairs stacked like that all the time, to allow the floors to be cleaned properly? In order to get them all to fit without toppling over or getting in the way of the person pushing the mop, one would have to be a detail-oriented, I guess. Maybe I've been in Switzerland too long?

My organization scheme is a little like Sally's. I have a "source" folder on my laptop where I take in photos from iPhoto (from my desktop) that I think I might use for the blog. I have a "worked on" folder to keep a version of the photo I use, before I resize it to 640 x 480 or what have you (this is to preserve editing work). Once I resize, I move them to "posted" folders. I have folders for each month, e.g. 200701 for Jan 2007, where I stash the photo that I upload to the blog. I number the photo so they appear in the order I post them. If you look on my blog, you'll see that the date format I use is in line with all this. :-)

Ming the Merciless said...

kate, sally & z - Thanks for sharing your cataloging techniques.

sally - Your message was perfectly clear.

zsolt72 - I thought it was art too.

olivier - We have Jackie O to thank for the building.

z - HAHAHA! New Yorkers are not always as neat as the Swiss.

Dsole said...

wow... I see I'm a disaster with organization, i have all my photographs together.. :S

Nice shot Ming, I love this organization!

Z said...

I'm passing through again. Thanks for visiting my blog and commenting! You know that there are 3 Sprüngli shops in the main train station, plus 2 on Bahnhofstrasse, plus one at the airport, plus another 3 or so outside Zürich now, don't you? If I come to NY, I'll be sure to bring you some Luxemburgerli :-)

angela said...

I stack my chairs like that when cleaning. Does that make me an artist?
Thanks to sally for the tips but I suspect I'll just leave them hanging round in Picasa till the computer crashes then I'll cry...
Angela

Oya said...

Chairs:I beleive it is their routine. They do it so often, they got used to it and they are even not aware of how well organized they are...:)Photos:as of today, they are all together...

Unknown said...

i love the way the stairs are stacked after a days work, then they can start cleaning the floors etc.

i have not seen any as elaborate as this one!

----

for organizing, i used to have folders for this and that, found that too tiring and tedious, and i can't find the pictures i want! (even with careful labelling of directories).

when i started DP blogging for both my DP and the Food Blog, i make use of my iMac. I use iPhoto to import pictures from my camera. The originals are all stored in iPhoto. (every single photo from the camera, i dont delete lousy ones, i keep everything hehe)

when I have decided to use a particular photo to blog, i drag it into Macromedia Fireworks. Resize them to 50%, add in keropok.com and that's it. I save these processed photos to a directory called 'blog'.

The top layer directory is by year, then next layer, months, the next layer, days. eg
/blog/2007/Feb/14/photoname.jpg
/blog/2006/Dec/25/christmaspudding.jpg

kuanyin333 said...

I like the abandoned feeling tone of this photo...good work.