Oh Hai. So much going on here in Atlanta. I am neck deep in wedding planning. I am also going to Texas on Thursday for SXSW Interactive. Some links from my MarsEdit dashboard to start your week off with.
New Nine Inch Nails released online. I paid the five dollars to get a copy, but they are being crushed by the traffic. The ohmpark article I linked to talks about the genesis of this "experiment." White people like experiments. Also amusing, the name of the company payments go to is "The Null Corporation."
I went to see Jose Gonzalez at the Variety Playhouse last night. Mini-Review: After missing his last three Atlanta stops, this show met up with all my lofty personal expectations. Jose is a marvel, and you should check him out.
I received my new point and shoot camera on Friday, and spent much of the weekend playing with it. It's an impressive little beast, and I am happy to have a point and shoot that offers most of the manual control that my SLR does as well as RAW file output. Unlike the previous models, where the Panasonic was the same as the Leica, this one has some Leica fiddling with the image processing. Look in my FLickr stream for some examples.
It's true. I am in love with, and now engaged to, a stupid Red Sox fan. I asked Sue to marry me this weekend on our four day jaunt to Puerto Rico, and for some reason she said yes. I don't post a lot about my feelings and personal stuff on this site, so I will keep this short. I am a lucky man, and I am very happy.
I am giving Things a test drive. Definitely an easy to learn application. Looking for some tips and tricks posts online, haven't found any.
The new Beanie Sigel (iTunes link) is really good stuff in a sea of stale commercial hip hop. In other music news, a Twitter from Merlin Mann has led to me listening to way too much Entombed this week. Wolverine Blues (iTunes Link) was one my favorite CD's of the Early ninties. Man was I a badass in my own mind back then.
I took a lot of pictures of the newly engaged Brian and Lori. You can find some of them in Lori's Flickr Stream. I loved taking them, and would be happy to do it for you too. Shoot me a message.
At home I use a Corepad C1 XXXL Deskpad. It's essentially a gigantic mousepad. I like the thing so much that I just ordered one for my desk at work, and a backup in case I wear the one at home out and they stop making them. I have paranoia that they will stop making anything I like these days.
Bitesize. A Flickr set by one of my contacts who makes magic with toys and a macro lens. Must see.
Reinvented Software started a support forum for Together. This was one of the reasons I wasn't going to use Together instead of Yojimbo. I seem to be back to that same argument again now...
It's a matter of perspective First time I have ever linked to an Amazon blog post, but this one, talking about lens focal length and area of view, is an excellent quick read for you photogs.
This deserves a post unto itself. I was present at the first ever meeting of Brian and Lori. (At an Atlanta Flickr meetup no less.) I learned first over Facebook, then email, that they got engaged New Year’s Eve. Great people both, and made for each other, my life has been made richer by knowing them both. Congratulations.
A day late, but Happy New Year to those of you who read this. 2007 was an awesome year in a lot of ways, but I still have hopes to make 2008 even better. One way will be increased posting here, on Flickr and on Twitter. I plan on carrying my 4 months of being smoke free through all of 2008. Who knows what else the year will bring.
iTunesFS is a read only MacFuse filesystem of your iTunes library on Mac OS X. “A friend of mine wanted to copy some files from an iTunes playlist to an external drive, but iTunes wouldn’t allow her to simply let these files being dragged to the intended destination folder in Finder. She asked me what she could do about it.”
Yojimbo, which has become my Mac OS X choice for the management of my todo list and transient information on my work machine, was updated to 1.5 today. (Anyone know of an application like this for Windows?) I haven’t spent much time with the update yet, but the biggest update in terms of day to day use seems to be the addition of images as first class assets in the Yojimbo database. It’s really an excellent application for the management of transient information like notes, web archives of articles you want to read or passwords and serial numbers. (Those last are really not transient information, but it’s usefule to have them in an application that you have open all the time.)
In related news, I have been testing out Together, an application which is somewhat similar to Yojimbo, for the last few days. It's got a different approach to the storage of the items, and I honestly like it's UI a bit more than Yojimbo's currently. I imported all the items in my Yojimbo database in about five minutes, and I was off using it. Since it doesn't support .Mac syncing like Yojimbo, I set up some Chronosync scripts to copy the application, it's preferences, and the directories where it stores it's data to my 160Gb iPod, and to sync this stuff back on my laptop and Mac Pro. It's a somewhat tough call as far as which of these two apps I will end up sticking with long term, especially with Yojimbo being updated. Together has a few annoyances, and there's no user community like the mailing list that Bare Bones has for Yojimbo. Of course, I am still using Devonthink Pro to keep anything I might want access to long term.
I was afk for the better part of the last week as my younger brother Paul got married over the weekend. It was our second family wedding in six months, so we are old pros at it now. I also now have two awesome sisters-in-law. I posted some photos in a Flickr Set, and you can expect more there as time allows. I will try and have that closed out before Christmas, since my Uncle gave me such a hard time about not “sending him a CD” of the pictures from the last wedding. Most of the pictures up there now have been modified with Lightroom somehow, as I try to learn to process my work with that tool.
Anyway, I'm back in Atlanta, and will probably be posting a bit between now and Christmas. Speaking of posting, MarsEdit is the deal on MacSanta today. It's the application I use to write posts on my desktop and post them to this site. I recommend it, and Red Sweater Software seems like a good steward of the application since they acquired it earlier this year.
Only some of my friends will understand why I am posting this. Turns out that Sweet Caroline was Caroline Kennedy. I believe that this will be the first, and last Neil Diamond post ever on bump. Hat Tip to Papi.
Burial's new album, Untrue, came out on November 5th. (Amazon | iTMS) It's really interesting combinations of a few different styles. (The Wikipedia article refers to it as dubstep. I don't really know what that is.) It's pretty dark stuff, music for abandoned cities, but at times it approaches clubiness. I couldn't stop listening to it last week.
Eliot Lipp might be the greatest electronic musician you have never heard of before. I referred to his newest album as the "soundtrack of my fall 2007". I'm still listening to it. It's very beat driven, and mostly stripped down, great for putting your headphones on and getting some stuff done, or just for hanging out reading. If you want to check him out, I recommend starting with his The Days EP from 2006. (iTMS) Listen carefully. My favorite song is definitely "Koreatown Minimall" on that EP.
Obviously, still listening to the Saul WIlliams and Sigur Ros with a regular mix of other stuff thrown in. I wouldn't have easily guessed that I mostly listened to electronic music last week. Seems like I am going in the other direction this week, more rock.
I had all sorts of issues with my Mac Pro yesterday. It's one of the first generation Intel towers, and over the last couple of months, I have been seeing the video card get very hot. After installing Leopard, the card has actually been overheating to the point where I see artifacting on the screen. If I run Spaces for any extended amount of time, the machine locks right up. It's got an ATI Radeon X1900 XT card in it, and it seems these cards are prone to overheating. Using iSlayer's awesome iStat menus (pictured above), I watched the Northbridge temperature in the machine go North of 170 degrees F.
My first inclination on this overheating, since it's something I had only started to see over the last couple of months, was that the video card cooling system might be clogged with dirt. I took the machine apart last week to put some RAM in, and cleaned the card, which was, in fact dirty. However, this did not make the problem go away. Yesterday, I stayed home from work, so I was using the tower all day. Sure enough, last night it started overheating. I searched on Google a bit, and it seemed that most of what I found were references to MacBook Pro's overheating. Thankfully, one of the solutions employed to fix that issue on the laptop also solved my issue. There's an excellent piece of software named smcFanControl. It lets you manually control the fans in your machine. The stock fan settings in my Mac Pro seemed to be around 500 rpm. That was clearly not enough to cool my machine, which also has 3 SATA internal drives in it. I bumped (no pun) the fan rpm's for two of the fans up to 750 rpm. The cooling issue seems to be completely solved. I highly recommend both iStat menus and smcFanControl to other Mac Pro owners.
Also yesterday, I noticed a strange constant read pattern from the drive bays. Some of my apps were lagging. I would type something into an iChat window, but the text wouldn't appear for several seconds. I spent some time with the Activity Monitor, and couldn't find an obvious culprit. So I rebooted my machine from the Leopard disk and ran Disk Utility. As is sometimes the case, it found a ton of errors that it coud not repair. My theory became that all the crashing from the overheating problem was slowly damaging my hard drive file system. Not the physical drive, but the directory information on it. In the past I have used Disk Warrior to fix this issue. Currently, Disk Warrior is not compatible with Leopard in that it has issues if you run it while booted from a Leopard disk. Laziness paid off in that I have not upgraded the external utility disk I use for such tasks. I booted from that disk (Jeter) ran Disk Warrior, and fixed all of the issues. I recommend keeping an external disk with Tiger on it for such ocassions until the verious troubleshooting vendors update their software, and I highly recommend Disk Warrior.
We pushed a new build of Super Deluxe today. Nothing too exciting, just pushing more videos at people.
What's in a Project Name? One of my favorite moments at work is getting to name the releases. It's my one chance to make my SVP say things like "Hammerhead". Some good naming ideas in this post.
I am going to try to upload my top artists each week, and maybe write a thing or two about that week's listening starting this week. As you can see, I listened to a lot of Sigur Ros this week. Mainly because Hvarf - Heim was released and listening to it reminded me how much I like Sigur Ros, and so I ended up listening to some of the older stuff too. Also last week, the J Dilla album, Jay Loves Japan (iTMS link) became available via the ITMS, and I bought that, and listened to it a couple of times. It's quite good. I'm not crazy about the new Jay-Z, and I really did give it a chance.
