Here in the Midwest, conventional wisdom about the weather is that if you don’t like it, wait five minutes, and it’ll be different. Today was one of those days.

So Beck and I were out at lunch, watching a storm front move in. It was a record-setting 73. By the time we were finished, it was blustery, and 61. Now, about six hours later, it’s 14. Yup, the temps have dropped SIXTY degrees in just about six hours. And to add some flavor to the day, we’ve had snow and winds between 30 and 40 miles per hour.

Of course, I love it!

And now, we’re looking at six inches or more of snow on Friday. I can’t wait!

Tonight, I placed the Quad G5 into the hands of its new owner, with kinda mixed feelings.

On one hand, I knew when I bought it, that there would come a day when its technology would be outdated… or that I would simply want bigger, better, faster, more! (with apologies to 4 Non Blondes) That doesn’t diminish the fact that the Quad was the biggest, baddest box I’d ever bought prior to last week. I’d always built my own PCs, and had never put anything like that kind of horsepower together.

However… how sweet is the new machine! I’m thrilled with the performance (aside from gasping for memory at times), and am just pleased as punch about where this places me for the next several years. Now, Becky would say that I’ve said that before….

And, boy am I eating some crow at work. If you look back at what I’ve written over the last 18 months, I de-glamorized the ocotobox, saying it was something I’d likely never move into. OK, so, I was wrong, and folks are letting me know!

I’ll take that abuse though — after all, I did say all that stuff! — and smile as I play with my new toy, and have fun merrily playing in the digital landscape I’ve crafted in my office.

The trick I’ve never quite been able to pull off is getting all these family photo scans up on the web where the far-flung family members can comment on them. Ideally, I’d have something where they could add comments about the who/what/when/where for these images.

Another requirement would be to be able to post big batches of photos all at once. It’s not unusual for me to scan large groups of photos and slides, sometimes totaling over a thousand images. I’d really rather not have to put something together for each individual photo, as that could really be time consuming!

Options for doing this seem to be slim. Seems like they are:

• 3rd party code, like Gallery or JAlbum
• something out of the web galleries in Lightroom
• something out of the web galleries in Photoshop
• some kind of WordPress plugin
• use of some Apple utility, iWork or iLife, for example
• perhaps some kind of Apple-based scripting

Truthfully, I like the idea of keeping stuff within the realm of WordPress. It buys me the ability to do searches, and extend the functionality of the web photo gallery to other things that I haven’t thought of yet. I expect I’d still keep the data about the image in some kind of EXIF or XMP format, but if the gallery piece was smart enough to pull the EXIF/XMP data out, and display it in real time, that oughta give me some ability to do some searches.

WordPress has some CMS features to it. If I could figure out some way of leveraging that functionality, that’d be ideal. However, it appears that the “pages” feature in WP doesn’t support comments.

Ultimately, I figure I’ll probably have to do some combination of “roll yer own” and use of other plugins.

Any WP folks out there who’ve tried tackling this problem?

So as I’m continuing through the big scanning project, the thing I’m noticing is that the OctoMac is taking a smoke break every now and then. By that I mean that when I swap from one app to another, not only am I swapping, but the machine is too … to disk, that is.

This beasty ships with 2GB of RAM, which is not nearly enough to satiate eight-cores worth of work. In fact, I’d say it’s barely enough to keep two cores happy. So, swapping to disk is a frequent occurrence. I never really had that problem on the soon-to-be-rehomed Quad G5 — I had 8GB RAM in it (2GB/core, although I’m sure things never really worked out that way), and it rarely ever let me know there was anything but speed going on. The next logical bump up for the OctoBox is to 6GB, and I expect I’ll do that soon. If that doesn’t quite get the performance where it should be, then it’s up to 10GB. This thing’ll take up to 32GB, but 4GB DIMMs are apparently crafted out of priceless material — they ain’t cheap. Pairs of 2GB DIMMs are about $200 from OWC, so 16GB would seem to be my likely maximum.

Just an update from the land of Oc….

With the Macs circled about me, it only seems fitting to use more than one of them for some work. This weekend, I’ve been scanning flats on the OctoMac, and slides on my MacBook. This also implies two different sources — the flats are from Becky’s family, the slides are from Uncle Roaul.

While this is a really time consuming effort, I really am getting a kick out of it. Most of the images I’m scanning from Beck’s family date from about 1920-1970, and are mostly folks I’ve never met… with the occasional childhood photo of someone I do know now as an adult.

Tonight, though, there was a surprise among Roaul’s slides that bowled me over. Most of what I’ve scanned so far from Roaul’s slides have been travel shots from his and Merilyn’s travels throughout the US and Australia. I got into a series of slides sporting images taken at my grandparents’ place in Bokeelia in the late 70s. Those have been fun — just the way I remember my grandparents from when I was a kid — and have brought back some real good memories for me.

If for no other reason than that, I continue marching through all these images. So, below is a “discovered” image of my grandfather in his ham shack on Pine Island. Enjoy.

As I’ve hinted recently, I’ve put a new eight-core Mac Pro under my desk. Thought I owed a little blog time to my first impressions, so here goes.

From outward appearances, not much has changed when comparing the case of my two-year-old Quad G5 Powermac with the new model. The ports and card slots have been moved around, and a FW800 port has been added to front, along with a second bay for a DVD burner, but the essence of the machine is the same. It’s still a beautiful metal tower, and despite the case design having a few years on it now, it still stands apart from most of the other white-box PCs out there.

Inside, there’s some pretty cool changes. The first thing I noticed was that not so much real estate was spent on cooling. The G5 is a hot processor, and the Quad G5 complex is liquid-cooled, including a bunch of fans to ensure everything stays within specs. The new Xeon-based box seemingly doesn’t have much internal real estate dedicated to cooling, although there are fans that are evident with a little looking.

There’s also faster memory and a faster bus, both of which have great promise for faster speeds.

I mentioned the second removable-media bay. This is a user-installable option, and with OWC carrying drives faster than the Apple drives for about $35, that’s a no-brainer upgrade. Expect this addition soon. Do I need two optical drives? Probably not, but for $35, it’s hard not to do it.

Also inside are four hard drive bays, rather than the two the Powermac sports. This is a welcome change, as two drives simply aren’t enough for today’s space hungry media formats. In fact, there’s a handful of solutions to cram as many as seven drives in the Powermac. With four bays though, I’ve gotta think that the Mac Pro will handle most folks’ needs, especially with terabyte drives plentifully available. The other nice trick on the drive bays is that they are cableless. Attach a drive sled to the drive, and slide the sled into the chassis, where the connectors on the drive easily connect with their mates on a backplane. Simplicity, although I wish the drive sleds didn’t need a diminutive phillips screwdriver in order to attach them to the hard drives. Thumbscrews would’ve been a nice touch.

Upon power up, the biggest thing I notice is the lack of noise. The change in cooling and power requirements really make the Mac Pro a quiet machine. Now, I’ve usually got iTunes cranked when I work, so that’s not a huge big deal, but when the music’s off, it is noticeable.

Another change since my Powermac is the keyboard. I really disliked the supplied keyboard with the Powermac. I know it has lots of fans out there, but I like a “clicky” keyboard — probably a remnant of my waaaaay back PC days, when IBM keyboards ruled with their light-touch clicky-feel. I’ve been using a Kensington keyboard since shortly after I brought the Powermac in the house, but I thought I’d give the new Apple keyboard a shot. Frankly, it’s not bad. It’s got a short keystroke, and a slight, sorta mushy click, so it doesn’t rank as high as the Kensington, but it does match the machine very nicely. It sure feels fragile though…. it’s tiny thin, and weighs almost nothing. Despite the size, it still has a couple of USB ports on it, which is a nice touch for connecting the supplied Mighty Mouse.

And about the Mighty Mouse…. either you love it or hate it. Up until a few years ago, Apple had always used a single button mouse, and then the Mighty Mouse hit. It looks like a single button mouse, but has some voodoo under the covers to allow sensing for left and right click actions, and added a teensy scroll ball in the top surface. That’s been the rub for most folks, as the little scroll ball doesn’t ward off Cheetos stickiness very well, and in short order, many folks report failures of the scroll ball. Not a problem for me — I rarely use a mouse anymore, and use my Wacom Intuos tablet instead.

I’m sure you’re asking how’s the speed. Well, it’s a little hard to tell. I’ve only got the default 2GB RAM in the Mac Pro, while I’ve got 8GB in the Powermac — it’s somewhat of an apples and oranges comparison. With OWC hawking memory for the Mac Pro in the 4GB/$200 range, I expect the bump to 6GB to come soon. The Mac Pro will support 32GB, but I doubt I get there. A much more likely place to land is in the 10GB-16GB range, given a little time. I don’t know if there’s any benefit to having the same size memory across all four pairs, but for some reason, doing that makes sense to me. I guess it’s the symmetry gene in me being appeased.

So what’s missing? Well, it’s obvious that Apple is courting USB over Firewire. Three USB ports on the back, two on the front, and only a single FW400 and FW800 on the front and back tells me that USB is what Apple is banking on. Frankly, most of the peripherals out there nowadays are USB, a necessity in a Wintel-centric world. However, there are plenty of Firewire pieces of gear out there — card readers, scanners, printers — and having more of those ports on the box would’ve been nice.

eSATA would’ve also been a nice touch. There’s tons of external boxes that support it, and I know I can add it with a card, but having it included wouldn’t have added that much to the bottom line, and really helped make up for the small number of Firewire ports, especially for those of us wanting lots of redundant storage.

With this change in the corral, that takes me to an all-Intel Mac lineup, and just about two years after the first Intel Macs hit the streets. In fact, that puts me on all three Intel platforms: my MacMini is a Core Duo, the MacBook is a Core 2 Duo, and Mac Pro is Xeon-based. And in the almost three years since I made the switch to Apple from Wintel, this makes my sixth Mac across my three lines of work (server, laptop, and workstation).

I’ve gotta find a cure for this sickness. Or not….

Not because I have funny eyeballs, or extra limbs in funny locations, but because I made the leap last night to the latest octo-core Mac Pro.

These little guys were announced last Tuesday — since the announcement date was my birthday, I told Beck it was a sign — and they are slick, slick boxes. Physically, there’s not much difference I can see between the previous generation Mac Pro, but inside, things got a little cooler… newfangled Xeon processors and faster memory, in particular.

Tonight, it’s light duty for the new machine. The personality from the Quad G5 is being transferred across the Firewire 800 ports, and I expect on Wednesday to get the final configuration done.

Stay tuned — this should be a fun ride!

Well, a few reasons.

First, the holidays. We had so many holiday-related things going on that I barely had time to get my brain engaged in breathing, eating and walking, much less blogging.

Second, an office move. Becky and I are still in the depths of swapping offices. The redecoration of her old office is complete, but there’s still a ton of moving around to come, and I suspect that’ll make things a little slim for another week or so.

Lastly, a huge scanning project. I’ve been archiving a bunch of family photos for my family, and a member of Beck’s family came through with a boatload of images that I’m crawling through. It’s fun, but man is it time-consuming. The good news is that these will be preserved and sharable with other parts of the family. Still gotta work on a delivery model for that, but I’ll get there.

Anyway, mind the dust, endure the silence, and I’ll be back as often as I can!

How do I know?

Well, I’m spending my lunch, sitting at a local Arby’s, with my MacBook on the table, Sprint wireless broadband plugged in, and three different feeds of Steve’s keynote at MacWorld in SF.

Yup, I’ve got the sickness. Me and thousands of other folks!

I have my own Mac-related news, too…. but that’ll have to wait until tonight or tomorrow. Stay tuned!

And not just Elvis, but David Bowie…. and me.

Beck took me out for sushi for lunch, and Greek cuisine for dinner, along with a bevy of co-workers and friends at both meals. What a great treat! In her generous way, she also showered me with gifts, but two really stand out.

The first is a Katherine Hepburn film I’ve wanted for years, Desk Set. I just love this film, partly because Hepburn’s in it, but also because of the gigantic computer depicted in the film. In typical 1950′s fashion, the thing bleeps, has gazillions of flashing lights, and can be fixed with a bobby pin. Now that’s technology!

The other thing she did was feed my feet. I’ve been walking a bunch lately, and have been really faunching for a pair of walking shoes, as my tenners have been shot for a long time. With the help of Kirkwood Shoes, she plopped my feet in a pair of Keens. I believe they may be the most comfortable shoes I’ve ever had my feet in. To paraphrase John Hurt in The Big Chill, “I’m never taking these off.” I can’t wait to get them out on the trails and roads over the next few days.

Yup, it was a good birthday, filled with friends, food and goodies. What else can you ask for?