I find that has become my new solitaire - anytime I'm just killing time in front of the computer - or I'll just open it up in the background to start cataloging away.

One interesting side effect is it adds people to your Gmail contacts - so now I have the likes of Freidrich Nietzsche, Hugh Hefner, and Salma Hayak listed in my address book with other people I know.

I never initiated the actual link to my Google account. Seemed like it would become a little to invasive for my taste.

I'm done with the first level cataloging, I've got names on all the faces that Picasa picked up on (or told it to ignore all of the faces in crowds, photos on walls, and disneyland photo mosaics that it picked up on). Now comes the even more time and labor intensive phase of manually tagging faces that it didn't pick up on because they were slightly tilted or whatever.

I'm still working through phase 1

Have you discovered the "threshold" settings? (Tools->Options->Name Tags). I found that dropping the "Suggestion Threshold" down to 70 gave a pretty decent correct match::false match ratio that reduced some of the manual tagging without adding too much manual work of fixing wrong matches. Lower than that started to return too many false positives.

Dropping the "Cluster Threshold" below 85 started to screw up the grouping of faces to a degree that was leading to too many incorrectly tagged names, so I wouldn't go lower than that.

You haven't found a keyboard shortcut for the "Add Person Manually" button have you?

I save a lot of potential tagging work by almost never taking pictures of people, and in those rare occasions when I do take pictures of people they are almost always people I don't know.

What I would need is for Picasa (or some other program) to have an auto-recognize feature that could say "oh, that's the meadow at Yosemite" or "that appears to be the view of the bay from Point Pinole."

I wonder how long it will be before you can Google/Picasa those photos you took and identify the people in them.

Thus why I have chosen not to take "advantage" of the feature that connects it to my online account.

True, but once Google starts data mining photos there are a lot of sources for photos. Like your facebook page for example. Of course you still have the beard there.....

Oh and just FYI: Glenfiddich is not really single malt. It's a blend.

It's also set to private.

The common usage of "single malt" is to indicate that it's distilled in a single distillery, not necessarily that it's bottled directly from a single cask. So while the whiskey/scotch sold commercially by Glenfiddich (or any other whiskey distillery) is indeed a blend from different casks, it is still considered a "single malt" as they have only the single distillery. A "blended whisky" is used to refer to a bottle that's a blend of single malt whiskey and "grain whiskey" (i.e., whiskey made from something other than barley), which Glenfiddich is not. A whiskey that is produced by blending single malts from different distilleries is called a "vatted malt".

So...

I'm doing laundry. I took the first load out of the dryer and put it in a basket. I then took the wet second load out of the washer and put it in the dryer. I started the washer for the third load, and poured the detergent in. Then I started putting clothes in the washer. I was about 3/4 of the way emptying the basket when i realized that it was the basket of clean clothes that I just took out of the dryer...
:mad:

Old age really is setting in.