April 2009 Archives

Lies or idiocy, which is it?! The president was Gerald Ford, not Jimmy Carter.

Good News: Adobe Photoshop CS4 rocks my world. It's awesomeness that glows brilliantly on my Mac monitor. I love it.

Bad News: The Adobe customer product selection and purchase experience is unspeakable, sheer, tragic, horror. Let me count the ways:

To read the 39 items in the list, click on the continue reading link.

So why did I document all of this? Adobe makes great products. But in my opinion their customer support experience is beyond really, really bad! I'm sure they don't make it that way on purpose. Surely they don't have the customer suffer through outsourced, poorly paid customer support 5 times for an extended period of time hoping the customer will hang up before having to be sent to someone that really can solve the problem and has to be paid a lot more. Surely they just have no idea that this is how bad their user's support experience can be.

1. Simplify your product line. [Adobe has too many complicated purchase choices that confuse the customer.]
2. Focus on a vastly improved customer purchase and user experience. [more "hands on" and "high touch" with real people that are as pleasant as the last customer service guy I purchased from.]
3. Vastly improve your user experience in downloading and installing the software. [by not deviating from the the user's standard OS download and install procedures, and if two versions of the software will not run on the same machine, make it impossible to install the second version while including a dialog box that explains this. Tell the user when s/he clicks on download, how long the download is estimated to take based on connection speed. I had no idea I was going to be downloading a 1 gigabyte file. Even on fiber that took forever!]
4. Vastly improve your user experience with quality support. [from the very beginning (rather than at the very end) or have no support experience at all.]

I've listed 37 reasons why Adobe must change or they risk putting even more very bright and creative people out of work. Check them out in the extended post that documents what I went through to buy and install my very favorite Adobe product.

A while back I posted about a tragic day: the day my last container of Gillette series Cool Wave Clear Gel deodorant ran out. They no longer make it.

I recently stumbled upon an unopened container! I will start using it tomorrow. When it's gone, I get to be sad all over again.

Conrad has a rapidly growing fan base. And what's not to love? He's furry, loves to purr, wants to be around people, loves for anyone to pet on him, and will carry on a lengthy conversation with you. His disposition is more like a dog than a cat.

Unlike your typical cat, Conrad just loves people. He wants to be on the desk while I work. He wants to lick my fingers as they type on the computer keyboard. He likes to sleep with his head on top of my feet while I work in the office.

When I was in Canada for a couple of weeks, the next door neighbors took care of the beast. Their son, probably 5 or 6 years old (I'm a really bad judge of young children's ages.) got to come over and play with Conrad for about 30 minutes during his feeding time. Apparently they became big buds.

His mom told me today that the daily Conrad visits were the highlight of their son's day. In fact, I cancelled a trip to New York this week end. They had planned to take care of Conrad during my trip. The little boy was so disappointed he would miss playing with Conrad that he asked his mother if Conrad could come over for a sleep over!

In her work, she made me laugh for many years. Her work will live on for many, many years to come, I'm sure.

LOS ANGELES – Beatrice Arthur, the tall, deep-voiced actress whose razor-sharp delivery of comedy lines made her a TV star in the hit shows "Maude" and "The Golden Girls" and who won a Tony Award for the musical "Mame," died Saturday. She was 86.

Arthur died peacefully at her Los Angeles home with her family at her side, family spokesman Dan Watt said. She had cancer, Watt said, declining to give details.

"She was a brilliant and witty woman," said Watt, who was Arthur's personal assistant for six years. "Bea will always have a special place in my heart."

Arthur first appeared in the landmark comedy series "All in the Family" as Edith Bunker's outspoken, liberal cousin, Maude Finley. She proved a perfect foil for blue-collar bigot Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor), and their blistering exchanges were so entertaining that producer Norman Lear fashioned Arthur's own series.

[Source: `Golden Girls' star Bea Arthur dies at 86.]

I have two of Apple's 30' displays running on my desktop machine. I tend to work late into the night (early in the morning, depending on how you look at it) When I am working late, I dim the monitors so I don't feel like I'm kneeling before the throne of God. The brightness is too much with no ambient light in the room.

Problem: I have a devil of a time finding where the cursor is lurking in the night. Which monitor is it on? Where is it on that monitor?

I needed a utility that will enlarge the cursor, and it would be nice if it would allow me to jump to the corners instantly as well. (I use corners to "do things" like put the monitors to sleep.

Well, I found the solution to one problem, the biggest problem for me, at any rate. Under System Preferences ➜ Universal Access ➜ Mouse and Trackpad one can adjust the size of one's cursor! Lovely! I had no idea.

It adjusts the size of all of the cursors, including the spinning beach ball and the hand. When the hand tool appears and the cursor setting is at largest, I feel like the hand of God is reaching out to touch me. Sorta creeps me out, so I settled on the half way mark!

Here you can see the actual size of the cursor with the setting at half way. I can actually find it now with ease.

Below is a screenshot of the relative cursor size on the large screen when set to Normal. Can you even see it? What if it were 3 in the morning and your eyes were tired and blurry???? And I cheated and placed it in a really bright area of the screen for additional contrast.

Then we have the relative size with the new setting: half way on the slider. Now you can find it.

So you hopped onto my website just now and... Wait, what's that? I mean, am I hearing things? What's going on? This is strange.

Well, what if everyone on the planet could have their own television station and broadcast to everyone else on the planet. And, what if it were free?

Well, that's what I've done. Welcome to Tyson-TV! Broadcasting 24/7, you can now watch and listen to some of my selected internet videos. You can watch my Tyson-TV stream in the footer of my blog because it was the largest area of screen real estate I could keep constantly on the screen for your viewing pleasure.

The "channel line up" will change from time to time as I think to add new content. Maybe every once and a while I will actually broadcast myself as well--perhaps you will catch me live from whatever city I happen to be in at the time.

And you notice the "ticker" scrolling across the TV screen? It's the last 20 posts in my RSS feed. If you see one that strikes your fancy, just click on the title and poof... that post window will open! Cool.

And you can click on "Full Screen" to have my TV channel fill your monitor screen. Click on "Embed" if you wish to embed my TV channel in your own blog or web page.

Clicking on the "Menu" button gives you several options. The "On-Demand" menu allows you to select specific videos to play from the playlist I've put together. So you can replay your favorites.

And the power button in the bottom left will allow you to turn off my TV channel.

There's so much that could be said about this technology. I can invite co-producers, like you, to broadcast with me, even live, even with your cell phone, any where in the world. So check it out at Mogulus.

Network television is rapidly going to become so last century. News reporting is about to really change. Life will never be the same. The medium is the message, and you are the medium and can control the message as well.

AT&T and the Ma Bell monopoly... Hmm...

I recall the difficulty my grandmother had attaining her phone service after my grandfather died, and she moved into a maintenance-free apartment. The newly split up phone company set the stage for innovation but confused and frustrated her simple efforts to get a phone. In "the old days" you just made a call providing the new address and date of move. But in the days of divesting upheaval, she bemoaned the difficultly of just getting a physical phone, a phone line, a wiring service plan, deciding on the calling feature set, picking a calling plan... I recall seeing in her face how difficult this was for her at that time in her life.

I dabble a lot in the digital world, but I suspect that the changes I will be forced to confront when I am the age my grandmother was when she was trying to wrangle with new phone service, will be far more daunting. I already find myself more frequently and more intensely annoyed by the onslaught of digital noise in my life, by the rapid upgrade and update paths, by the latest digital venture. I seem to spend increasing amounts of my energy abating distractions. The younger crowd finds this all so energizing. I am increasingly put off.

This morning (or would you call it tonight) I read this thought-provoking and well-written article in the Wall Street Journal by Steven Johnson. For those who love to read physical books, this digital transition may well put you in a completely different world from everyone else. Will it be a better world of greater clarity, insight, and meaningful possibility or just more overload, more fragmentation, and more disengagement? Will this inevitable transition bring greater wisdom or simply the micro-monetization of the word. Yes.

Hopefully these little citations will entice you to read the entire article, linked at the bottom.

...the book's migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways. It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years. ...

Every word in that library will be searchable. It is hard to overstate the impact that this kind of shift will have on scholarship. ... Imagine a software tool that scans through the bibliographies of the 20 books you've read on a specific topic, and comes up with the most-cited work in those bibliographies that you haven't encountered yet. ...

[With the eBook reader] the bookstore is now following you around wherever you go. ...

... an infinite bookstore at your fingertips is great news for book sales, and ... the dissemination of knowledge, but not necessarily so great for... attention.

... print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading [thinking??]. ... when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against ... distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.

The Kindle [an eBook reader] in its current incarnation maintains some of that emphasis on linear focus; it has no dedicated client for email or texting... No doubt future iterations ... will make it ... easy to jump online...

As a result, I fear that one of the great joys of book reading -- the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author's ideas -- will be compromised. ...

Google will begin indexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatter about them. (... every page reads all the other pages.") You'll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage's true meaning. ...

... a permanent, global book club. As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore.. ...

Increasingly, readers will stumble across books through a particularly well-linked quote ... instead of an interesting cover on display at the bookstore, or a review in the local paper. ...

Imagine every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked. The unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google's attention. ...

... citation will become as powerful a sales engine as promotion is today. ...

... will undoubtedly change the way books are written, just as the serial publishing schedule of Dickens's day led to the obligatory cliffhanger ending at the end of each installment. ...

Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. ...

For centuries, we've had an explicit system for organizing print books in the form of page numbers and bibliographic info. All of that breaks down ... The Kindle doesn't even have page numbers ... because the pagination changes constantly based on the type size you choose to read. ...

... until we figure out a standardized way to link to individual pages ... books are going to remain orphans in this new [digital] world. ...

Readers will have the option to purchase a chapter for 99 cents, the same way they now buy an individual song on iTunes. The marketplace will start to reward modular books that can be intelligibly split into standalone chapters. ...

[Source: How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write - WSJ.com]

Isn't that always the case? Give us the unprecedented, and we want the unimaginable. What ever becomes of Steve's roll at Apple due to his health issues, the company, under his leadership, has done the impossible.

It’s not just that the company is making money, or that it's just re-entered the Fortune 100, or that it’s kept growing at 40 per cent per year even as it hit $33 billion in sales — though in the teeth of the worst recession since at least the early 1980s, those two accomplishments alone would be remarkable. It’s that Apple has become a cultural icon. Apple sells us lustrous white laptops and impossibly slim music players and software that transforms bedrooms into recording studios and cell phones that function as fabulous electronic toys and wireless hubs — wireless hubs! — that look like desktop flying saucers.

Apple has confronted first the music labels and then the mobile phone carriers, forcing change on two of the world’s most monopolistic and hidebound industries. Apple papers our cities with dancing silhouettes and exhorts us in banners to “think different.” Apple is not just a source of profits; it’s a source of joy.

[Source: The End of Innocence at Apple: What Happened After Steve Jobs Was Fired | Epicenter from Wired.com]

For all the news, it really is a big gorgeous world out there. Check out this Pano and the others linked to it...

Sunrise at Robert's Grove in Belize

Conrad goes by numerous names: Conrad, Conrad the Kat, the iBeast, Beast, and lately Animaux Sauvage.

He has been out of control lately––always jumping up on the desk while I'm working, requiring constant petting, and demanding his "fresh kill" by stalking the cabinets all over the house through the night.

He can actually open them in his search for unsuspecting prey--which of course he never finds as his food is kept up high in the pantry. How do I know he's been in the cabinets? He doesn't always close them back!

Fortunately he can't reach the knob on the pantry door, or he would stalk in there as well, I'm sure, and weigh 20 pounds more than he already does.

I've spent the better part of the last couple of days adding a footer to this blog. I do these things so I will know how to do them on my professional blog without "blowing it up."

I have to confess that this was a much more difficult task than I first thought, for several reasons:

• I'm learning to better use Coda, a great web publishing tool.
• I love CSSEdit, but it requires a web connection through an FTP software application. Transmit, which I once loved, constantly drops my web connection for some inexplicable reason. This means I can't upload the edits I just did in CSSEdit--maddening! So I started forcing myself to edit CSS, already a royal pain in the tush, in Coda, without fully understanding the application yet.
• CSS is enraging. My style sheets are huge. Everything is interconnected.

I could go on, but, as my mother will tell me when I call her later today, "We don't care about all of that technology stuff the way you do."

But installing the footer taught me several things, caused me to revisit some old accounts, and is an initial attempt at pulling more things together on my blog, which needs a lot of attention.

The style sheets are a mess once you get off of the main page. I'll get to those before 2037. I'm more interested in continuing to work on my photographs, publishing them in SlideShowPro. This process is unfolding at a tediously slow pace!

What better way for the ladies to celebrate Earth Day than to wear LeeAnn Herreid's fully functioning Thermoscope Earrings, which are attractively set in sterling silver. Of course, lots of guys are now wearing earrings as well. So I guess you too can get in on the action.

The earrings, while fully functional, do not have actual numeric values for you to watch the earth heat up. Order yours for only $34 from uncommon goods.

Uncommon goods has an interesting collection of things, including a solar powered backpack that will charge your small electronic gadgets (iPod, digital camera, cell phone, etc.) while you save fossil fuels by walking to work. For just $40 you can store sunshine in a mason jar that will glow at night.

And for those who are difficult to gift because, well, they just have it all, I bet they don't have a laptop case made from reclaimed, recycled US highway billboards! (I always wondered what they did with those old signs!)

Certainly you have heard her sing by now. But, just in case you haven't, you need to watch her clip on YouTube.

In 5 days an ordinary lady with an extraordinary gift has brought elation to our entire world, offering hope, joy, and dreams in a time of global depression. From cynicism to celebration and worldwide support in 2 seconds flat!

Here's an interview she did with American Idol.

I mentioned a day or two ago that I spent almost two weeks in the Canadian Rockies--about a month ago now. I spent some time today working on an album which will still require a few more days to complete.

This picture below is a collection of about 16 photographs (2 rows of 8) that I aligned using Photoshop. It's not really a panorama in the sense of the usual panos that I publish. However, I did create a few of those as well.

Right now, I'm sharing the image below. If you click on it, a larger version will open that will not fully fit on your screen unless your monitor is one of the very large Apple Cinema Displays (2560 pixels wide and 609 pixels high). You will need to scroll from left to right to see the full image. The original file (of the 16 combined photographs) is over 4 gigabytes and 22,000 pixels wide!

The grandeur of these snow and ice covered mountains simply can not be captured with a camera--even in 16 shots stitched together.

Click the picture above to see the larger image.

As everyone knows, I've been exceedingly busy, traveling all over the place. I've not even mentioned the fact that I was in the Canadian Rockies for a couple of weeks, several weeks ago now. I shot almost 2,000 pictures of the glorious drama that makes up that part of the world.

But this week, I'm home all week! I've been catching up with the domestic rituals and have plans to just enjoy being home for a few days. I hope to shoot some photos, upload lots of photos, continue working behind the scenes on my new photo album presentation system (which will one day go live), post to my blog, and walk/bike by the ocean--a lot.

Lots to do. But I still marvel at the weather here on the ocean. It's simply paradise!

Pasta, anyone.

I've posted this one (below) before. But I just love it!

For other great examples of creative thinking, check out this source link .

I hear rumblings among the Republicans about distancing themselves from the religious right wing extremist. Few things could be healthier!

Click on this graphic below to see the larger version. (Source)

So gun and ammo sales are skyrocketing. Yes, lets get every American an assault rifle because, by God, it's their right. And lets do it while more and more people are cracking under the pressure of the horrid economic mess the Republican party created in a mere 8 years while enriching the greedy and wealthy. No matter that more and more people are using their weapons to kill random groups of people before killing themselves because they're loosing their jobs and their sanity.

And then lets get the Governor from Texas to announce that his state should consider cessation from the Union.

I stay fascinated that Texans are so incredibly warm and friendly, but have the most bizarre political thinking.

Thank you Republican party for wrecking so many people's lives while bankrupting this nation and the world. I hope you're happy.

I love my iPhone but hate AT&T's network. I remember way back in the days of their monopoly when long distance calls had so much "snow" in the call that often the person to whom you were talking just faded away into the noise.

Well yesterday, my iPhone had 3 bars of signal. I placed a call 6 times before the network rang the call through. Sort of makes "more bars in more places" a little meaningless!

I eat up more hard drive space than I eat chocolate, and that's saying a lot!

I never have enough space! I've been wanting terabyte drives for my laptops for years now. When I purchased my latest laptop five months ago, I ordered the largest hard drive available for the machine: only 320 gigabytes. What?!

Even while I am vigilant about purging unneeded files, I am forced to continuously play this ridiculous data juggling game on external hard drives that must travel with my laptop wherever I go. Why can't I just have a 1 terabyte drive on my laptop to make it truly a portable all-in-one device?! It's not even as if a 320 gigabyte drive is anywhere near sufficient for my needs.

1. I offload all of my music, podcast, TV (I'm a Lost junkie), and movie files from iTunes (a total of 260 gigabytes after deleting all but the 10 most recent TED presentations) onto a separate external 500 gigabyte drive.
2. And I offload all of my application support files (photographic clip art, music loops and instrument sample files, production-based royalty free music purchases, and Final Cut Studio support files, themes, etc.) for production work onto a 250 gigabyte hard drive that is completely full and needs to be replaced with a 500 gigabyte drive before it explodes.

Now that I shoot only in camera raw, a single photo and its 1:1 preview render consumes over 30 megabytes of disk space; so, I only store photos from my current photo shoot on the laptop hard drive. As soon as I get home, I take the photos off of the machine and import them to my desktop machine, which has access to 8 terabytes of disk space. My current photo library exceeds 160 gigabytes. My last photo shoot exceeded 30 gigabytes. I really need another external hard drive to make this export/import process substantially faster.

I have had friends suggest I consider cloud storage solutions like Amazon's S3. Not only am I not keen on renting hard drive space, even with a fiber connection here at the house, data transfer rates exceed my concept of painfully slow--so slow as to be useless. I actually now use the cloud to do an offsite backup of my most important data. At a blazing upload speed (for a home) of 15 megabytes per second, the initial upload has taken over two months and is still going strong!

Perhaps I'm the exception and work with far more multimedia files, which gobble up disk space, than most people. But I really believe that today's data storage options are the weakest link in the digital workflow. Solid state drives are now all the buzz. While they are faster, they are far too expensive when compared to disk storage and therefore have even greater capacity limitations.

I'm frustrated.

At any rate, I'm posting a link here to two pages about Mac laptop hard drives. This link contains this excerpt:

MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and Mac minis use a 2.5-inch SATA drive, while PowerBooks and iBooks use a 2.5-inch ATA/IDE drive-SATA and ATA interfaces are not interchangeable. Likewise, recent Apple desktops (the Intel iMac, Mac Pro, iMac G5, and Power Mac G5) use a 3.5-inch SATA drive (the Mac Pro uses a SATA II drive), while older desktops (the iMac G3 and G4, and the Power Mac G3/G4) use a 3.5-inch ATA/IDE drive. O

And this link contains currently available 2.5 inch SATA hard drives of varying capacities and drive speeds. While the prices seem reasonable, the largest size as of this writing is 500 gigabytes.

If anyone has a better solution than I am using, one that is working comfortably for you, please share!