Yeah, I’m pissed. (And, my apologies to Pinkard & Bowden for appropriating the title of one of their albums — seems to fit the crowd my blog entertained today!)

Today I came home to find that some yahoo from an IP registered through RIPE spambombed the Deauxmayne. It was a clever approach, and I think it is someone doing the initial leg work manually. There were a couple of blank comments that seemed to be checking if they could leave visible comments. Their first two failed, probably because there was no comment text. They tried again a couple of times over the next few hours, with text this time, and found they could post. Then over 30 minutes, they generated over 110 comments, all filled with loads of spam links, and conveniently alphabetized.

Snoop first, then drop the bomb.

So, I’d recommend not trying to discuss drugs here. Comments with certain drugs mentioned will be dropped summarily, and I’ll never even see them. And, I’ll probably go to a challenge question to keep things interesting — probably one of those nifty graphic things that makes you enter the number you can see (but computers can’t read) in order to leave a comment.

Watch this space!

Last night, Beck and I went to Laura’s wake.

This was such a familiar scene to me — it was so very reminiscent of Dad’s wake three-and-a-half years ago.  There were bunches of folks from the office — including a fair number of people that no longer work with us — there to support Suli, along with family and Laura’s friends.  It was hard to see the obvious pain on Suli’s face, but every once in a while, that broad smile of his would shine through.

There were little pockets of folks here and there, talking about Laura and Suli, remembering them happy, and her well.  We sat around with a big group and just shared good memories of the both of them, trying not to let the hurt show through too much.

This was hard for me to go do… so many things about Dad’s wake and funeral sprang back to the forefront.  But Suli was there for us during the joyous time of our wedding though, so the very least we could do is support him during this tough time.  And that’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it?  Being there for friends.  In the end, being surrounded by our friends and family is what keeps us sane.  With that in mind, Suli must surely be the sanest person in the world at this time.

Did you know there’s a Google page specifically targeted to search Apple-related websites?  Neither did I.

It’s here, and it’s very cool.

Yes folks, I’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid again, and once again, have found the taste pleasant! 

But it’s not necessarily fun.

Yesterday, a dear friend of ours, Suli, lost his wife, Laura.  She had been fighting MS and cancer, and yesterday the combination took its final toll.

I first met Suli when I had just begun my career with my current employer.  Suli was a contractor, and was helping with our OS/2 Warp deployment on the campus.  It wasn’t long before he was hired permanently, and has been with us here for eight or nine years.  He was an usher at mine and Beck’s wedding, and we’ve watched his kids grow up over the years.

And now, Laura’s gone.

I just hate this for Suli.  I know this is a tough, tough time.  I just hope Suli realizes that Laura is now beyond where her illnesses can hurt her, and she’ll be waiting for him when one day they’ll be happily reunited.

It’s been a while since I’ve added to the Deauxmayne. Work’s been a bear, and it’s just sapped every ounce of juice I’d normally use for creative playing. In fact, I’ve only just tonight gotten around to cleaning up some stuff in the photo archives that’ve been begging for cleanup for a good long while. Maintenance sucks, but it’s a necessary evil.

I did grab some new software over the weekend: Comic Life Deluxe, iLife ’06 and Virtual PC. Here’s the scoop on those.

Comic Life Deluxe allows you to put a comic strip twist on images. You can add balloons of speech, special effects (like the old Batman KA-POW effect) as well as applying comic strip filters to images to make them look like real comics. It’s a cool tool, and one I’ve been looking at for a little bit. Sure, it’s fluffy, but sometimes fluffy is good, and it’s real easy to use.

iLife ’06 is a pretty major upgrade to iLife, and includes upgraded versions of the old code, along with some new stuff. The big influence for me to get this was support for 250,000 images now in iPhoto. Realistically, I wonder how well that will work, but that’s a whole lot better than the 10,000 images supported in iPhoto under iLife ’05. That alone could help with my cataloging and maintaining my library. The other real cool thing is new, and it’s called iWeb. iWeb is used for publishing web content — photo pages, blogs, and more. I’ve not had the time to generate a lot of material with it, but it sure looks like it may be a key to making good photo pages for the site. I’ve had to keep jpg versions of every photo in the library that was shot in raw, just so JAlbum could see them and create pages for them. OS X natively supports raw, and its tools do too. So, my thinking is that the combination of iPhoto and iWeb could help keep the photos on the site, and up to date. Time will tell!

Lastly, Virtual PC allows me to run a Windows XP session on my Quad. Why is that important? Well, in my support role at work, I need to be able to VPN in, and that just isn’t possible without a recent version of IE, and that just doesn’t exist for OS X. With this code and XP Pro (which came with it), I look just like an XP client running IE, and our work network knows no different. It’s very cool, and works extremely well. With that, my Gateway laptop can be recycled into someone else’s hands, and I can wait for the right time to move into a Mac laptop (once the 64-bit multicore versions are around — probably late this year or early ’07). There’s definitely no rush on that — my bread and butter, Photoshop CS2, doesn’t yet have a native version for Macintel platform.

So, some new toys to play with, and hopefully some fun stuff, too. And along with that comes the big projects of coverting the old home videos to DVD, scanning the old slides and negatives, and trying to womp my digital life upside its virtual head, while at the same time trying to get my new business venture off the ground.

As I typoed once, I am a gluton for punishment!

Yep, filming.

One of my Canon cohorts sent me a link this morning to a short film, Between You and Me, shot by Patryk Rebisz…. all on a 20D! His site is very slow to load, but it is worth it. He’s included an article describing the project, and it’s a great read.

When I did the Big Drive in November, I had toyed with the idea of doing something similar to capture the change in the landscape between here and there. However, I didn’t get set up in time to pull it off. Now, I’m encouraged into thinking that’s an even cooler idea than I had imagined at first.

Yet another project for the pile!

The

So now, Bill Shatner has a blog. In fact, his daughter even has scribble space on it.

I know what I write is no great shakes, but… Bill Shatner? The last several entries are his state of the world message, an announcement that he’s now formed his own DVD movie club, and include some back-patting for winning the Emmy as a member of Boston Legal. (BTW, I really enjoy the show — funny, but not quite as quirky as Ally McBeal.) And, oh, the ads! Loads of ‘em: buy a communicator, buy Bill’s CD, buy Bill’s movie, join Bill’s movie club, buy EZ Stairs (for which Bill’s a spokesperson). A little too much self-promotion for me.

In truth, there’s probably worse out there. I did stumble across a Kirstie Alley blog a while back when she was doing Fat Actress. I remember fluff, and buy this product (in this case, Jenny Craig, I think).

Good luck with the blog, Bill. I’m… sure… you’ll… find… it… re… warding…

And with a few backup commands, and a panicky guy at the keyboard, I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.0.  Very, very easy, and it worked much better than previous upgrades.  There’s still some dust here and there from the re-construction, but in a few days, everything’ll be as it should be.

I’ve even been contemplating some visual changes, but that’ll have to wait for a while.  I’ve got a few things in the pipe prior to that, and that’ll keep me busy for a few weeks, I’m sure.

Anyway, enjoy the shiny new site, and let me know if you find anything amiss.

…There’s more. At least for me. When I got home tonight, Software Updater had 10.4.4, all shiny and new and waiting for me. So I upgraded, and decided that the server also could stand it (it was running 10.4.2 with patches).

The Quad did well, the server…. well, not quite as well.

While the upgrade went fine on the Mini, it broke something in the plumbing between PHP and the database. It appears that PHP was updated as part of the upgrade, and that busted the plumbing I had in place. I think I had a self-installed version of PHP, and I guess 10.4.4 comes with its own. I’m happy to use Apple’s version, but I had no idea it was happening. Oh well!

Anyway, it all seems well now — just had to play with the socket for the database, and all was cheery again. Woo-hoo!

Now if I can just convince Apple to give me iLife ’06 since I just bought my machine…..!

BTW, I noticed that WordPress released 2.0 a few days ago. I gotta figure out if I’m brave enough to try that!

Today’s a big day in MacLand — Steve Jobs is on the stage right now delivering the Gospel according to Cupertino, and it looks cool so far. New OS, new iLife (including updates to iPhoto that will get my attention — 250,000 images in a single library, which will be enough for me for a while), a new iMac based on a dual-core Intel processor that is allegedly 3.2 times faster than the old one, and a promise that the whole hardware platform will be on Mactel before the end of the year. Dang — had those things been announced, I might not have bit on the Quad. OK, OK, I probably would’ve bit on the Quad anyway, but I can act like I wouldn’t've!

Of course, with my shiny new machine and the announcements today, that means my OS and iLife are already “old”! Wonder if there’s a cheap upgrade path for recent purchasers?

One of the things I’ve been harping about is the lack of native code for the new Mactels. Well, it looks like Apple will “dual-head” things for a while — a universal binary that will work on both Mactel and PPC. That’s cool, especially given my concern about the performance of Rosetta with hogs: Photoshop CS2, etc. In fact, even Steve Jobs indicated that PS may not be good enough for professionals under Rosetta. Sounds like Apple’s making the decision I made to pounce on the Quad a little tougher to justify, but for PS alone, I still think I made the right decision, and can’t imagine being on any other platform right now.

On another note, I also found a really cool Lightroom primer at Luminous Landscape. This article just underscores how much I wanna play with this code. Read through it, and see what you think. For me, I believe this will be product that will manage to do things the way I want to, and still give me the features I want.