I’ve been battling the flu for the last couple of days — nasty stuff, too.

Gene sent me home early on yesterday with teeth-chattering chills, and probably a good thing. I came home and slept for almost eight hours before getting back up just before dinnertime.

Beck came home with this on Thursday, and I’m convinced that I’ve picked this up from her. It’s brutal stuff too, as I don’t have the strength God gave a fly. If I get up to do a few things around the house, I have to flop down and relax for a while. Blecch.

The bad thing is that Beck and I have a tradition of getting together with the gang for New Year’s Eve festivities. This year though, we’ve opted out. Since Mary’s pregnant, we’d especially hate to give this mess to her.

So, it’s a quiet, probably early, New Year’s Eve for us. Hope yours is better!

This slower and shorter work week has folks’ brains in some really odd places.

After a brutal morning of meetings, we took a late lunch, and the next odd lunchtime conversation questions came up.

• What song would you have played at your funeral?
• If you were trapped on a desert island and could only have 10 CDs with you, what would they be?

I haven’t thought hard enough on either of these to have an answer ready. For the first question, the range of music I like is so broad that I’m finding it tough to narrow it down to one song. Would you pick a tune you loved? Or, would you pick something that reflects your philosphy of life? Perhaps you’d pick something silly to make folks giggle at your funeral.

For the desert island question, I’m also struggling with an answer. Some albums come to mind instantly — Meat Loaf’s Bat out of Hell, for example — but I need to ponder this a bit. After all, we are talking music you’d be listening to for a long, long time on your coconut powered CD player.

Ahhh, nothing like a little philosophy to end the year with, eh!

Last night, Karen from SullivanGray DesignWorks came by to help wade me through some of the steps needed to get Colin Wright Photography off the ground (from a legal and tax perspective). She had some great info and some good ideas — all of which will help move my little upstart along more quickly.

The coolest part though was just talking shop. We talked about gear, shooting concepts, business plans, my experience at DLWS… basically all things photography. That was terrific! I don’t get those opportunities very often, and I really relish ‘em. It’s that kind of conversation that really fuels my dreams for my photography. She’s (primarily) a wedding photographer, and it was fun to hear about that segment of the photography business, and reinforce why I wouldn’t want to shoot weddings!

So why would I want to avoid what is probably the most lucrative bit of photography I could get my hands into? Stress, stress, and….. oh yeah, stress! I have enough self-generated stress on a daily basis without adding the stress of trying to capture a couple’s most stressful day accurately and error-free. Photography for me is my release, my stress-buster, my refuge. I enjoy sitting back and watching the sun rise or set, or tromping through the woods or desert, looking for subjects that interest me.

That’s photography for me — me, God and nature… communing, listening, speaking and relaxing.

This week of lighter work has folks’ brains burning their extra cycles on some odd questions. Some are frivilous, like whether Steve Austin had one or two bionic legs. Today’s lunch though follwed a deeper, more philosophical path.

Gene asked us to consider a scenario where, after stepping into the Great Beyond, you were given the opportunity to witness five events from anytime or anyplace. You would not be a participant, but you would be in the midst of the event, with all your senses at your disposal.

Beck and I came up with a couple of events in common: the birth of Christ, and His death and resurrection. Someone else added the Second Coming. Once you get past those huge events, where to go from there?

Do you visit the grassy knoll to see if there was a second shooter? Are you at Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969? Do you enjoy the life of Michaelanglo, or Mozart, or Galileo? Do you visit the New Mexican desert in 1947? Maybe you’d elect to witness your own birth.

So what are my five events? I really haven’t decided on all five yet. It’s certainly something to ponder…

So today at lunch, our nutty little minds started talking about Steve Austin — The Six Million Dollar Man, not the wrestler! — and one of our gang waxed on (and waxed off?) about the challenges Steve would’ve really had, as he only had one bionic leg, not two.

Randy’s contention was that while Steve may be able to run 60mph, he would only be able to do it in a circle, as his more human leg wouldn’t be able to keep up. Kinda like a big Curly, just doin’ doughnuts.

Now, I’d always believed that Steve had two bionic legs, thus making him able to not only go straight, but turn in whatever direction was necessary to thwart the bad guys.

So, who’s right?

Well, there seems to be no official answer that we’ve been able to find. There are anecdotal pieces at Nostalgia Central and the Wikipedia supporting my theory of symmetry. The closest thing I can come up with for proof is the opening sequence, which can be found here, and clearly shows that Steve had two bionic legs.

However, Randy was able to find other folks’ websites whose memories were different, and that Steve was not as symmetrical.

In his own defense, Randy found evidence of Mike Power, The Atomic Man, who was constructed with but one mega-leg. In fact the center panel on the comic strip confirms that Mike was not a dazzling marathon runner, but was more a 200mph pogo stick… despite visually appearing to run on a treadmill. Blatant disregard for the laws of physics!

(BTW, there’s tons of data out there about the show, too many fan stories, lots of speculation on the whole world of bionics and why it would or wouldn’t work. Wow…)

So we have no definitive answer. None. A whole day’s mental cycles spent, and no answer to this glaring question of ’70s pop culture. Oh well. I think I’ll still be able to sleep tonight!

Ya know, it’s kinda funny how many hopes and wishes we put on having a white Christmas. And I expect, the farther south you are, the less likely it is. I mean, you’re hoping for a very specific set of circumstances to happen on a specific day. After a week of the weather guys telling us that our chances were way slim, we awoke this morning to two inches of snow on the ground. It was a beautiful sight, and I couldn’t help but compare my view of the snow to Ralphie first looking out upon the new snow in A Christmas Story. It was indeed beautiful.

We got a pot of coffee started, and started tearing into our gifts. With just the two of us, opening presents is an odd deal. We try to take turns, knowing (mostly) what the other one is opening, and trying not to spoil the surprises beneath the tree as we rip the paper from the boxes. It always goes so fast, and with no children around, the suspense of what’s next isn’t quite as prominent, but it is still a grand time.

Becky was overly generous to me, as were Mom and Kevin, and I have no complaints in the “loot” department. No lumps of coal, either, so I must’ve done something right this year!

After we opened presents, we went to church. The pastor is out of town, so the music minister genned up a nativity play for the kids to do — unrehearsed, unpractice and no idea what was going to happen. In fact, he invited kids in the congregation to come down, and they’d find a part and costume for them. It was wonderful. The story of our Lord’s birth could be told no better than acted out by children. After some hymns and prayers, we were released back into the slowly melting snow.

Beck and I offered up our home for the Day family Christmas shindig, so we spent the afternoon cleaning, and Beck prepared all manner of deserts. Yum! The invasion of the clan began around 6.30, and it couldn’t have been nicer. As always happens at these things, there were Days I hadn’t met before, and some I hadn’t seen in a long time. It was great to see them all, and have time to sit and talk, and listen to stories being told. And, of course, the spread was scrumptious!

So that’s how Christmas passed in the Wright household. Quiet, kinda low key, and filled with snow, family, presents and observance of the real meaning of the season — the birth of Christ.

Well, in my case, it’s capitulated in favor of my tablet — the pen is indeed mightier than the mouse!

Joe Sliger (from Wacom) told us at DLWS that if you used a tablet for three days, you’d never use your mouse again. I thought those were awfully strong words, but….. Here I am, weeks into having my Intuos3, and I never pick up a mouse. In fact, I didn’t even install the Mighty Mouse that came with the Quad, despite wanting to check one out a few months ago when they were announced.

I’m a convert, I guess. I do everything with the tablet (except typing!), and have no challenges with it. The biggest thing I think I had to overcome was this sense that I might press too hard, or that everytime I dragged-and-dropped that I was somehow hurting something. Once I got past that, I relaxed, and starting figuring out the fine motion that’s needed to make this thing fly. I really get a kick out of the tablet, and sure do see it as a huge help when editing my photos.

This is cool stuff!

I’ve now had the new PowerMac Quad for seven days — one full week of enjoyment and amazement. Quite frankly, I’ve not had as much time to do some of the cool things I’d like, but that’s ok.

However, as I’ve been playing tonight, I started to notice the fan noise…. just a bit. So, I started poking around on Google to see if this was common, or just me. As it ends up, there’s a lot of folks yapping about the fans in the big box. Well, they’re a little noisy, but not horribly so, and way less than the noise from some of the old Intel rigs I’ve owned over the years.

Would I prefer it were quieter? Well sure. I also want a machine that will work via telepathic commands too, but….

During my searches, I found some blogs detailing the experiences from other early adopters of this cool technological beastie:

• Jim Frost has his Quad, and his experiences sound like mine, and it certainly sounds like what he’s using it for aligns well with where I’m headed. Great benchmarking of real world photo application functions, too!
• Alex King ordered early, had big ol’ delays, and finally got his. Poke around a bit to see his out-of-the-box experience. It’s worth reading, especially his software list. He elected to do RAID 0 inside the box, something I’ve thought about, but haven’t pulled the trigger on.
• Adam Tow had all kinds of problems getting his Quad to come up correctly. Looks like the biggest part of his challenge was 3rd party memory that didn’t play well in the box. I’ve got some third party Centon memory in mine, and it seems to like it well enough.

And now, with Kung Tunes functional again, you can all read what I’m listening to…. enjoy the trip.

So last night, I upgraded to JAlbum 6.1. This version is touted as being multi-processor aware, and a little smoother to work with.

It was, and it was.

I set up a job to run through about 11,000 photos in the 2005 archive, creating new pages, thumbnails…. everything. You could watch the counter drive onward an upward at a much improved pace over the iMac. On the iMac, it was about five seconds per image. On the PowerMac, it was about 2-3 seconds per image, and this was happening on multiple processors — I think as many as three of the four. Astonishing performance.

Unfortunately, there are still some glitches with JAlbum 6.1. I still encountered two java out of memory errors along the way. I just restarted the album build, and it took right off, so no issues there. I’ve been reading about some ways around that though — one is to invoke from a script that uses the java command line memory allocation parm (JAlbum by default will use no more that 256Mb), and the other is to change an XML properties file somewhere inside the app. That’d be the best answer, but I don’t yet know how to do it.

Anyway, the new machine and new code rocks, and I think I’m back to getting good albums posted!

(BTW, as a note, there are occassions where the image can’t be displayed when the thumbnail is clicked on. I know why, and just have to fix the code. Patience! )

Yeah, I’m an idiot. I bought bigger gear. Story of my life. So sue me! (Poor Darla!)

Last night, I finally finished the chess moves that would allow me to put a dream workstation at my desk: a PowerMac G5 Quad. Two dual-core 2.5Ghz G5 processors are steaming along inside the brushed aluminum case, and are making merry inside my creative world. To that, I added an Apple 20″ Widescreen Cinema Display — the same size and resolution as my iMac that is now redundant.

Last night, Sio powered the thing up for its first light, and I began the process of moving my iMac’s brains into the shiny new canvas of the PowerMac. That process was incredibly easy — the migration path involves connecting the two boxes via firewire, and it takes care of the rest. About 3.5 hours later, the PowerMac was mine. The only thing I’ve noticed that wasn’t quite right was my hostfile, which was easy to change. A very impressive migration! And with this machine, I can keep all the photos and music on the internal SATA drive, rather than a firewire attached PATA drive. Verra nice.

Frankly, with the new monitor on the desk, my workspace seems less cluttered — something Beck also noticed. It’s nice, and allows me to have a little more elbow room on the glass desktop. I’ve spent the better part of the afternoon re-cabling and trying to clean up my office. Both are daunting tasks, but I’m making headway, and expect to be in good shape later in the week.

So, it’s faster, easier photoprocessing and overall snappy performance for me. I can’t wait to try JAlbum with this rig. The creator of JAlbum has created a multi-processor aware version, so I expect that building the photo part of the site will be much less painless!