Shoot Different

I’ve been using Aperture ever since I bought a DSLR about a year and a half ago. In terms of functionality, I can’t even imagine what post-processing would be like without it.

I can plug in a memory card from any one of dozens of different DSLR’s and Aperture knows exactly how to handle it.

I can save presets for any of the post-processing techniques I use, and apply them to any of the photos that need the same work done. (Note to Apple, being able to apply presets in batch to a set of images would be the best thing ever. If that functionality exists, and I just don’t know about it, someone please enlighten me).

With the Flickr plugin, I can publish my photos in just a few clicks. The built-in gallery publishing feature is also very intuitive and useful.

So I’m sold on the functionality, but there’s a downside. This program gives me more of the dreaded Spinning-beach-balls than I’ve ever seen. I have a 1G Macbook Pro 1.83 Core duo, with maxed out (2GB) RAM. Photoshop CS3 runs like a dream. So does everything else I throw at this machine. Unfortunately, if I open up Aperture and click "Import All" on a card with 50-400 images on it, I can kiss my system responsiveness goodbye for at least 10 minutes.

Granted, I shoot RAW, but I also shoot with a Nikon D2H, which is a mere 4MP, and filesize is about 5MB. If I’m having trouble, how are people using this program with D200’s, D2X’s, or D40X’s.& Not to mention what it’s going to be like when someone plugs in a Canon 1Ds Mk III (Canon’s new 21MP behemoth pro body).

Am I doing something wrong? Or is my barely-a-year-old top-of-the-line laptop already obsolete? If only I’d waited a month to get a Core-2 duo. Though not any faster, I could’ve ran 4GB of RAM.

In searching the web for "Speed up Aperture," I did find a couple tips. The most obvious was to reindex the database. I’ll give it a try, but I think this will really only speed up browsing photos. I just want to be able to start post-processing pictures as they’re being downloaded from the CF card. 

Any tips on speeding up Aperture would be greatly appreciated. I think it’s time Apple says "The functionality is there, lets start optimizing."

It all started last night.  George put his newly hacked iPhone on eBay.  It started at $540.  Keep in mind there are other ways to unlock an iPhone, but he did it the hard(ware) way. 

This morning the phone was up to $2,000.  I thought wow.  Good for that kid.

At 3PM it was up around $4,000.  Huh.

Then the NY Times covered the story.  Cnn followed.  The phone jumped to over $10,000.  This was about 4:30PM.

I went to dinner, came back.  Now 6:30.  This is what I saw:

WHAT?

What happened?  Is Apple bidding on it? Does some company want to reverse engineer what he did?  The instructions on how to do it are on his blog, which is linked in the auction.

So what’s going on?  What’s the scam? 

Last week, a guy known as geohot succeeded in unlocking the iPhone. This technique actually requires opening up the case, and shorting a circuit on the board.  Tiny little solder joints needs to be desoldered and resoldered.  All sorts of software hacks need to be applied.  Apple has really made this tough.

And of course, it still happened.  The iPhone was unlocked in a matter of weeks.  So what was the point of all this?  Geohot has unlocked a second phone, and it’s on eBay right now.  Look:

Update: It’s now up over $35,000,000. If this wasn’t a scam before, it is now.

The auction was posted a little over 12 hours ago and bidding is already over $2k.  I foresee this hitting $5-8k.  This is how desirable it is.  And this is a 4GB iPhone.  You can get a refurb 4GB for $399.  Unlocked it’s worth more than 5 times that, apparently.

I’m not going to start complaining about Mac fanboyism.  I’m just as bad as anybody.  I get excited when there’s a keynote.  I head over to one of the major Mac news sites doing live coverage and hit refresh like a fiend.  I’ve got Macs in my house from Color Classic to Bondi iMac, all the way up to Macbook Pro.

I wanted to like the iPhone.  I really did, but I need tactile feedback.  My cell phone is a simple Nokia flip phone, and I was itching to get rid of it in favor of the latest, greatest gadget from Apple.  But no buttons?  When my phone rings, I pull it out of my pocket and flip it open without looking at it.  I can send a text without looking at the screen, for the most part.  How do I do that with no buttons?

I do admit the interface is gorgeous, though, and that’s what Apple is great at, innovation in design and look and feel.  And everybody is chomping at the bit to use it with their current service providers. 

Hear that Apple?  WIth their current service providers.  People are out there who will pay thousands of dollars to get an unlocked iPhone.  They’ll just keep hacking at it until everybody’s done it.  Open up the interface a little and let people do what they want.  You’re already making a killing on the hardware, why not open it up to a larger audience and sell way more of them?

I got a Wii back in March, so it’s been 5 months now, and I’m still not tired of Wii Sports.  I don’t know why I still go to Gamestop and look at new games.  Every few weeks, I’ll come home excited about a new Wii game, and what happens?  I play it for about 20 minutes, get bored, and pop in Wii sports for a round of Bowling or Golf.

The great thing about the Wii is that it doesn’t matter.  Who needs 10 new FPS’s that all look the same? Nintendo realizes it’s about the experience.

Because you know what’s just as much fun as playing Wii?  Taking pictures of your drunk friends playing Wii.  I tried this on several occasions with interesting results.  I want to see what everyone else can come up with, and theres a little reward to sweeten the pot.  I’ll post the entries as they come in.

So send me your most hilarious photos of drunken Wii-tards.  I’ll pick the best one entered by 9/31/07, and the winner gets a 2000 WiiPoints card.

Upload pics here:

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Here’s a few to get the idea.

The creator of Livejournal, Brad Fitzpatrick published a rant/solution/manifesto for the Social Network problem.  The problem, succinctly put is:

People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site.

His idea was to develop an open-source, non-profit piece of software that aggregates the "Social-graph" into one place.  Social graph basically refers to a virtual map of who everyone is, and how they’re related.  This way, if a new social site pops up, and offers new or unique features compared to the current monopoly of social sites, a user could sign-up, and have access to all the same "friends." Fitzpatrick has begun work on these protocols, and has started development of API’s, as well as a Firefox extension to make the process even easier for users.

If this catches on, it opens up huge opportunities for startup social networking sites, who would’ve had no chance in the environment we have now, due to myspace/facebook dominance.  Who knows what will happen in the near future.  Especially with google hard at work on their own social networking site.

This presents a great opportunity for all the major sites involved as well.  If I’m on myspace, and have 100 friends, and I know 3 or 4 people who are on Facebook, I may just sign up for Facebook if I knew I could easily access all my friends on both sites. The best thing that could happen for everyone, would be for this protocol to significantly increase the user base on all the sites using it.  Sounds like win-win-win-win.

I went out to see The Simpsons movie the other day.  I’ve heard all sorts of reviews for it.  Die hard fans who love it, and die hard fans who hate it.

I think it’s a matter of putting the movie into context.  We all know the Simpsons’ humor in the past few years has evolved a lot since (what I would call) the hey-day from 1993-1999.  It’s a lot more tangential and absurdist than it used to be, without as much biting social commentary.

So the movie is an extension of what the Simpsons has become, not what it used to be.  And in that light, it was pretty funny.  I laughed out loud several times.  Luckily, there were actually funny one-liners that weren’t in the trailer.

Anyway, the website for the movie is pretty cool.  Several good interactive elements, games, and- my favorite- the ability to create your own Simpsons avatar.  You can see mine to the right.  This is how the creation tool in The Sims should have been.

Give it a try, and feel free to post your results here.

The social networking phenomenon has hit critical mass.  Myspace and some of the other major social networking sites have been enormously successful because they don’t fill a specific niche.  They basically target everyone on the entire internet.  It’s the same kind of monopoly that eBay has on the online auction market.  People join because there’s already an established user base in the tens of millions, rather than joining some startup with 15 users.

But the internet is a funny thing.  Niche marketing is king, because there’s no overhead to targeting a relatively small audience.  In fact it’s much easier to target a smaller audience because you can get a lot more specific with keyword targeting, SEM, PPC, affiliate campaigns, etc.

So of course, niche social networking sites have started popping up all over.  Many have just copied the myspace formula, letting users setup profile pages, upload pics, post messages on each others profiles, make friends, and so on.

My favorite example of this type of site has to be Bowlspace.com.  It’s basically myspace for bowlers.  It’s a pretty good idea if you think about it.  These guys (and girls) probably don’t want to setup a myspace profile, just to get inundated with spam about "Winning a PS3" or finding out that these girls who "really want to get to know them" really just want them to sign up at their adult website.

So bowlspace lets bowlers congregate on a social networking site.  They can share their averages, tell bowling stories on their blogs that would only be remotely interesting to other bowlers, and do general bowler-y stuff.  It must be working, because they’re just about to hit 10,000 members.

Currently, they’re running a contest where users submit videos of their best bowling-celebration-dance.  What a brilliant way to solicit hilarious viral videos for their site.

It just goes to show, it’s all in how you market a site that can make a silly idea like bowlspace into a gold mine.

I read a post on this blog yesterday, and it left me dumbfounded.  Apparently, this poor guy got to the front page of digg with one of his posts.  He was on a shared hosting account on pair, one of the bigger, more reliable, and definitely highly recommended hosting providers.  He received this email from them:

Hello,

It appears nsharp.org is on the Digg.com frontpage.

Unfortunately traffic to this site had to be firewalled, as it was overwhelming the server and caused the server to become unresponsive.

We will only be able to lift this block when traffic to this site has significantly decreased. We appreciate your understanding in this matter.

If you have any questions, please let us know.

Thank You,

[name removed]
pair Networks, Inc.
http://www.pair.com

This is wrong on so many levels.  They obviously know how much of a big deal it is to get digg front page.  Yet, instead of calling the customer and trying to work out a solution, or moving him to a dedicated server temporarily, and then trying to upgrade him later, they just pulled the plug.

It’s a shame he wasn’t running any ads on his site, or he could have said that they lost him ad revenue and filed a claim.

He was taking all the necessary precautions, too.  It had been wordpress blog, and he replaced it with a static HTML page to try to ease the load.  The traffic he received was well within his monthly limits, albeit all within an hour or two.  Crazy stuff. 

I have a godaddy hosting account that costs me $15 a month, and it was able to handle getting dugg.  And to top it all off, this guy is now on a free wordpress-hosted site, and they’re more than happy to handle the load for him after the digg-effect.  Let me repeat that.  His current hosting is FREE, and they can handle it.

Great job, pair.

DSC_0184, originally uploaded by beardedjoecom.

Saw this guy at a farm last week. This has to be the oldest looking horse I’ve ever seen.

We were fostering a litter of brittany spaniel puppies a while ago, and one of them was completely bewildered by my two dogs being themselves.

DSC_0028, originally uploaded by beardedjoecom.