After a night full of coding on the photo side of the site, and some iTunes data manipulation, I went to bed, leaving my iPod charging in my office.

As is my habit in the morning, I checked my e-mail and the blog, and picked up my iPod out of the charging stand, dashing out of the house…. only to forget my headphones.  Ugh.

For most folks, that probably wouldn’t be a huge big deal.  However, I hadn’t realized what I was missing each morning in the office while I worked hard and grooved to my iPod.  The amount of chatter, inane and otherwise, is amazing and totally distracting to me.  From the time I got to work (6.30am), I’ve endured listening to too many conversations and too much to listen to.  From American Idol chit-chat, to conversations about one management chain or another, to just normal hellos….. wow.  I’d no idea how much of that I was drowning out in my music.

I guess I’ve discovered that I enjoy the solitude of my music in the morning as I wake up and get my feet under me.  What’s funny is that I keep thinking I wanna do that when I go photographing, and never do.  The rustle of the wind, the calls of the birds, and the sound of nature are all appealing to me.  I enjoy listening to the heartbeat of the earth as I tromp around in the great outdoors.

Then again, I’m decaffeinating again, so that could be impacting how sensitive I am to all the ruckus in the office!

Technology based on science fiction seems to come closer to life every day.  This morning, Information Week had a nice article about a British firm who have managed to cram 300GB on a single disk with 20mB/s throughput.  That’s cool!

What’s even cooler is that they think they will have disks ready for market later this year, with plans for disks as big as 1.6TB.

This is the holy grail for storage, IMHO.  Compact storage, unaffected by magfields and presumably most RFI fields, and hopefully cheaper as more is made.  I can’t wait until I can have a RAID array of these drives!

I’m a nut for digitizing things around the house — home movies, photos, documents.  Storage capacities and survivability like these drives promise is the key to digitally archiving a family and their history.  With enough interest by folks active in doing these kinds of historical preservation, families’ history could get more detailed, more than just a chart of begats and a shoebox of photos.  Video, audio, and stills could be storage in massive quantities.

That, for me, is the payoff of this kind of storage technology.  I’m looking forward to it!

Beck rented Walk the Line tonight for a fireside viewing. I’d been wanting to see it for a while, and just didn’t get to it while it was still on the big screen.

Wow. What a film.

First off, I’d no idea that Johnny Cash had been around so many luminaries of the 50s and 60s: Elvis, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, Waylon Jennings and Jerry Lee Lewis among others. For some reason, I never lumped him in that group of early “rockabilly” artists, and always thought of him as an artist that came along after the first wave of that music struck the virtual shores of radio.

Obviously, Cash had a huge dependency on pills — that’s been well documented. How much it affected his life was a surprise. One could say that his addiction to his demons is what brought his salvation at the hands of the Carter family. I loved the scene with Mother Maybelle and family chasing off the pill dealer, shotguns in hand. The real South!

I don’t know why this film didn’t also pick up Oscars for best film and best actor. Joaquin Phoenix was outstanding as Cash. You believed it was him, and even though the voice wasn’t always exactly the way I remembered Johnny Cash’s, the way Phoenix delivered his lines made you believe it was Cash. Simply wonderful.

I also liked the fact that the film closed on the high note of his and June’s engagement. Fitting to end a film with so many low points on such a high one. As Darla will attest, I have problems with films that end “the wrong way” — the guy doesn’t get the girl, etc. This one ended right, and I applaud the folks that made this film for letting it do that!

Last night, John and I went to see the Blues take on the Flames at Savvis Center.  This was the first hockey game I’ve been to in at least two years, and it was nice to be back in there watching a game.  The Blues had held the record for the longest streak of appearances in the playoffs among any pro sport — 25 seasons! — and if they lost tonight, they would be eliminated from the playoffs, and the streak would be over.  This was also the 3000th game in franchise history.

To sum up their performance, it was bad.  By the time John and I left with 10 minutes in the 3rd period, the Blues were down 7-1.  Ug-ly.

On the bright side, it was coffee mug night, so I now have yet another mug to add to my shelf! 

Last night, I was trying to research some of the stuff I needed for my script to build the photo side of the site, and noticed problems getting to sites.  I saw this on both the PowerMac and the Mini.  I was panicky that something bad was happening on the network, or worse yet, from outside.  Being the good troubleshooter I am though, I jumped on Beck’s WinXP box, and noticed no problems at all.

Hmmm….

I did some (very slow) searches on google for DNS lookup issues (since that’s what it looked like) on Macs, and found that a bunch of people had problems out of the latest security updates.  I tried a couple of things, and finally happened on a hint that applying the security update again.  I pulled it down from Apple (long DNS, but quick download, which again pointed at a DNS problem), applied it and still had the problem.

Then a stroke of genius — what if I changed the order of the DNS servers that Charter supplies me?  I did that, and all was great!

So, what’d we learn kids?  Well, it seems that WinXP handles flakey DNS situations just a tad better than OS X, going to the secondary DNS server in the list with little noticeable delay.  I think OS X was trying the first one, and waiting a long time before failing to the second one.  Or, maybe the first one was slow, but just alive enough to keep OS X’s interest, preventing it from going to the secondary DNS server.

Either way, this was a weird thing to deal with!

Well, it wasn’t wining and dining, or even whining and dhining, but it was success.

As I’ve been trying to write code to replace the JAlbum-based photo albums on the site, I’ve been struggling with getting Applescript code to make Photoshop do what I want it to. There were a whole slug of things I bumped into over the last few weeks of learning and experimentation. Most of it was driven by wanting to use the “Save for Web” functionality in Photoshop CS2 without do Automator actions, or some other method that would be likely to change with any change to the GUI of CS2.

Why was this important?

‘Cause when PS CS2 finished manhandling my thumbnails, they were over 80k each! Using “Save for Web” manually in CS2, I could get them in the 8k range, and that’s where they needed to be. After all, if you can draw a picture faster than the site can come up, what’s the sense in having the site?

I have searched high and low for this functionality through Applescript, and hadn’t been able to get quite close enough. There were lots of alternate paths, and I expect that some far-off, distant corner of the web has this documented somewhere, but I never could find it.

All the scripting PDFs from Adobe alluded to a “export options save for web”, but I could never get that class to work using a save command in the script. As it ends up, the “Save for Web” functionalty is accessed via an export, rather than a save. It’s as simple as:

set myOptions to {format:JPEG, quality:100, optimized size:true}

export current document in file applyFileNewName as save for web with myOptions

That’s it. Just that easy. Once I get the code ready for making the photoalbums, I will be posting it. Hopefully someone else can use it too. I still have a lot of things to tidy up before I can start generating the photo albums programatically, but this is a HUGE step in that direction!

(BTW, there’s no dis to David of JAlbum fame. JAlbum is terrific code — I just can’t support my habit of shooting RAW files with it natively. I have to convert my RAWs to JPGs, and then let JAlbum process them, and I’m trying to streamline my workflow as best I can.)

Finally, the snow I’ve been waiting for all winter has arrived…. and I’m stuck in a cubicle in a building with widely-spaced 6″ cubes of glass for windows.  Doesn’t it just figure!

The drive this morning was gorgeous, and I so wished I could just stop the world and my morning, and pause to listen and photograph the wonderous white landscape before me.  Last night, when the ice and sleet came down as a precursor to the overnight snowfall, I opened the back door, and just listened to the sound of the fall of winter from above.  There’s no sound better than that, except perhaps the sound of big snowflakes falling on a cold winter’s day.

I expect by this afternoon most of the fun stuff will be gone.  We only had about 2″ at home, with places 50-75 miles north of us having 6″+ of snow overnight.  However, just having the beauty of winter clinging tightly for the first day of Spring certainly has energized my imagination.

While looking for Vincent Versace’s new book on Amazon, I noticed that there was a money-saving option available to me.  I clicked through to see what a9.com was, and why they had discounts with Amazon.

When their page came up, it knew my name.  Huh?  How?  Why?  I explored and discovered that it’s a part of Amazon, and through my Amazon account, it knew who I was.  OK, that’s a little less scary.  However, in reading the pages, it looks like you get 1.57% (PI/2) off your purchases by using A9 “enough”.  They are wanting you to use A9 for searches, diary entries (blogging?) and who knows what else.  They will even suggest things for you to investigate based on your searches and purchases.

So, for 1.57%, I trade my search habits to Amazon.  I expect that they would use this for marketing, purchasing, and nudging me toward things that will help their bottom line.  Without knowing more about how they would use that information, I’m not sure 1.57% is quite enough.  I mean, will they be as vigilant about keeping my search terms out of the hands of subpeonas, like Google has?

I remain skeptical…..

The family truckster arrived in the driveway yesterday afternoon, marking the end of our spring break trip to The Smokies.

The house was still standing, the dogs were excited to see us, and it seems like everything is in order.  All cool things to find upon arriving home.

Over the next couple of days, I’ll be doing my daily trip summaries — watch for ‘em!  I’ll also get back to working on getting the photos up from the trip so all my fans… both of you…. can enjoy them.

It’s good to be home.

We’d been dodging construction events at the cabin all week.  From giant cement pouring devices blocking the road to jack hammers and other noisy tools interupting the silence and peacefulness of the mountains, the weekdays were filled with reminders of progress.  They are building the heck out of the ridges around Pigeon Forge, and are, frankly, ruining it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad there was a cabin up there to go crawl into to get away from the world, but I’d have been much happier if someone wasn’t building another line of them just below me.  Today’s incident was the most intrusive.  About 9.30 this morning, one of the workers asked us to move the truck up to the top of the hill so they could lay asphalt… right up to the porch of the cabin.  This made the outside areas of the cabin pretty useless, so we packed up our stuff for the day, and headed out to look around the arts community area of Gatlinburg.

Of course, getting to the truck now meant tiptoeing around the edge of still-hot, freshly-laid asphalt.  Not fun, and kinda silly that we had to deal with that.

The arts community area was great though.  This is a many-mile loop of little shops with everything from pottery to photography to musical instruments to tea houses.  Really nice.  We spent the biggest part of the day wondering through shops of all kinds, finding all kinds of goodies to oogle.

This was a nice end to the trip — a little touch of the country before heading back to the city and our day jobs.  This really was a relaxing trip, despite trying to cram too many things in a short week.  Next time, I’d like to take more time, less schedule, and more excursions into the park.  I need to get in better shape for that though!