Another photographer’s harddrive bites the big one, as documented on Flying with Fish today. Documented are the trials, horror, tribulation and eventual cost of recovering a drive with important, unarchived data. For folks like me, the numbers are staggering, at well over $2K per drive. Incredible backup strategies could be had for the cost of one of these failures… and this guy has gone through two within a year of each other. Blecch.

With some first-hand experience twice in hand, the author points to a couple of nifty sites, as well as having a glowing recommendation for a harddrive recovery. One article he points to is something called “Hard Drives Die!” … to which I’m sure he’d give a resounding “Amen!” This piece lists five rules for data storage and preservation: store your data in two places, changes out drives periodically, use an automated backup procedure, rebuild your system when you replace your drives periodically, and if a drive is making noise, start figuring out what you’re gonna do about the data on the spindle. The article goes into much more detail about each of these, and is well worth the read.

His other link is to some specific information concerning the harddrives in some Macs. Specifically, this info speaks about the problem some MacBooks have had with a certain revision of Seagate drive. The good news is that my MacBook doesn’t include that drive in its configuration. The bad news is that my MacMini server does. Not the best news in the world. Now, the scary point here is that when the drive crashes, it crashes bad, scratching the platters, essentially thumbing its little electronic nose at any recovery attempts. So, if you back up a lot, you’re in good shape. If you can replace the drive before it fails, even better.

So… OWC has 320GB harddrives (and at the same 5400 RPM as the current 120GB that the Little MacBook That Could sports) for just under $148. You replace the MacBook drive, take the evicted 120GB and put it in the MacMini. And the potentially disaster-waiting-to-happen 60GB Seagate? Put a case around it, and turn it into an external drive for storing the backups of the shoots the MacBook carries around when traveling. It’s not too likely that both drives would fail…. is it?

The key point here kiddies is that storage is cheap, relatively speaking. For the price of recovering one drive, you could put a Drobo on your desk, and still have enough coin left over to fill it up with 1TB drives, and still have enough left over to put an external drive outside the laptop for Time Machine backups. The alternative universes of data loss just ain’t pretty…..

OK, so I’m a little late to the party on this one, but I thought it was worthy of mention.

I was going to Google something (yeah, yeah, I know Google isn’t supposed to be used as a verb), and I noticed that the background of the page was black, with a link about Earth Hour.

Tonight was the night for Earth Hour, in which folks would turn off their lights from 8-9pm (local time), and take a little bit of pressure off the Big Blue Marble. Obviously, I missed the event, but the website has good info about how to make every hour Earth Hour.

Below’s a video talking about the project, and this year’s event. Enjoy!

WordPress has been upgraded to v2.5 out in the wild as of about 10 hours ago. I’ve just upgraded, so if you see any rough patches, please let me know.

There’s blurbs about built-in galleries…. Maybe that’ll solve some of my family photo album issues.

Anyway, enjoy!

I struggle daily between the creation/capture/manipulation/production of my content, and the consumption of others’ content. With all the web play-pretties out there, it’s a hard journey to weed out the things that are just fluffy entertainment from the things that can challenge me, my art, and make me see things a little different. I’ve contended for years that the MTVisation of my generation has killed our ability much of the time to focus on any one thing for very long. We seem to consume content in short spurts, just the way the old MTV used to feed it to us. Interestingly, those timeframes aren’t terribly dissimilar than the amount of time a quarter would buy on a video game or pinball machine.

Periodically, I go through a big purge. For example, I have well over 2000 emails to myself from work or other places, informing me of some website I found, some idea I had, some concept that I thought would be good to write about. This “note to myself” has been pretty helpful for some things, but generally, I never look at them again, except in a fit of housecleaning my inbox, finding these voices from my past so old and outdated as to be useless in the here and now.

NewsFire (a *terrific* newsreader on the Mac platform) has 782 RSS feeds waiting for me right now. At times it has been over 1000. I have updates I wanna do to MySpace, Flickr, Deviantart, Classmates, Twitter, Plazes, LinkedIn, and my own sites, in order to drive some exposure for my work. I have 60,000 images in my library, most of which need to be cataloged and keyworded, and many of which could actually turn into saleable art. I have easily 10,000 scans of images from my family that need to be posted somehow, and made available for comments so that the far-flung family can tell me who’s who, where they are in the images, and why, before there’s no one left who knows or remembers. I have cycling I want to do. I have a horribly stale gallery space in St. Charles that desperately needs some attention and rework. I have at least two photography-oriented organizations in town that I want to begin working with. And my copy of WordPress is telling me there’s a new release that should be installed tonight. And I have half a dozen or more books that I wanna read, each of which will have nuggets o’ knowledge that will help my work my images.

I’ve got a lot of consumable content queued up.

The challenge between creating the content my soul needs me to create, and enlightening it with new concepts from around the net without falling into a pit of self-indulgent web-based clickery is… well, it’s hard. Somehow, I’ve got to get better about filtering out the inspiring from the inane, the deeply funny (because laughter is a great thing!) from the guy getting his privates compressed into an octave or two higher singing voice on a outdoor stairway rail while skateboard sliding down it, and the beautiful animals in nature from the little dog who can grunt out “I love you” to the camera.

It’s all about priorities. When I went to the Mac platform almost three years ago, one of the big banners I marched beneath was the “it just works” banner. The good news is that it does. The bad news is that it does it almost too well, making it entirely too easy for me to chase the shiny objects, and not push my dreams into reality. The time has come to dull some of the shiny objects, and get the priorities in place.

So will you, the reader, notice anything different? Probably not. At least, nothing drastic. I will be doing some facelifting here and there, and things might be down from time to time as I work on upgrading stuff. But generally, I hope the biggest thing noticed will be a little more attentiveness to this site and the others, and more new content on all the sites.

Photojojo made mention of a piece called The Ones We Love. (Click on the “photographers” button at the top of that page, if you follow the link.) This is a fascinating exhibit of photos by folks half my age (and that hurts!), exhibiting a few photos centered on someone they love.

What a great concept!

In fact, it’s such a great concept, that I think I might just borrow it, and put some links on the side of just that concept. Simple, easy, and meaningful. That’s what photography’s for, isn’t it?

Snow? On Easter? Yup.

This morning, we awoke to about an inch of snow on the colder surfaces — enough for me to make snowballs to lob at Becky and Sio. Quite a surprise. And it’s snowed and melted about four times today. Really weird day, and likely our last snow for the year, although I’m sure we could have more, it’s just not likely.

Easter was nice, spent with my family, and that’s just the way I’d like it. The snow’s just a bonus.

Earlier in the week, we got over 10″ of rain across two days. The farther south you looked, the more rain had fallen by the time it was done, with places reporting well over a foot of rain. Unbelievable. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen rain like that.

Given where the rain had fallen, the impact to the rivers south of St. Louis was major and significant. Whole towns were underwater, with crests only being seen this weekend. After seeing so much of this, I decided to take the family out on a little safe sightseeing, and understand what was going on around us.

There were two areas I knew would be pretty safe, and reasonably easy to get to. One was just over the ridge from us, near Eureka High School, and the other was the major intersection of I-44 and Highway 141. Both were major roads, and should give us a good view of what the Meramec River was doing.

We started over the ridge on Old State Road. The radio (and the flashing signs) were indicating Highway 109 was closed at Old State, and only halfway down the hill, we were stopped by a police officer. As it ends up, he was directing traffic around an SUV that had run off the road into a tree. We breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that we hadn’t yet been stopped by the water, and continued over the hill towards Glencoe. When we came off the hill, and onto the flat at Glencoe, we came face-to-face with the Meramec, and realized just how bad things were.

Eureka High School’s ball fields were completely underwater. In fact, they were so underwater that folks were kayaking on the flooded fields. The Eureka police made that a short-lived event, calling the kayakers over, and having some words with them. There was quite a crowd parking on the side of Highway 109, shooting photos, and all talking in amazement at the level of the water. We stayed and shot for a while, and decided to head to Fenton, where I-44 and Highway 141 meet, and to see first hand the incredible depth of water covering Highway 141. We got in the truck, marvelling at the water lapping at the edge of Highway 109, and headed south to I-44 at Eureka.

We drove east on I-44, again seeing the water close to the road, and decided to pull off at the Route 66 State Park site. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t let us onto the bridge, which is where the best view of the water was. However, they did allow us access to the decking off the welcome center, and from there, we could see the Meramec flowing swiftly, beating up everything in its path. That was pretty doggone impressive. The crest had already hit there, and the water was now a foot below that crest… I’m not sure we would’ve noticed the difference.

From the park, we headed east again on I-44, knowing that we’d need to figure out some way to come up Highway 141 from the south. We passed the intersection, and hit the next exit (Bowles), and circled around to Highway 141, coming at the flooded intersection from the south. Two things struck me as we pulled off the road. One was the sheer volume of water. The other was the circus that was taking place there.

There were hundreds of people, and more than a handful of news crews, all there to cover the flood from what was probably the most photogenic spot around. I’d already seen this intersection on the NBC’s Nightly News, and could tell from the crowds that everyone had decided this was the place to come. And frankly, it was a pretty well-behaved crowd, and despite the throng, and the IQ lowering effect that usually has, I didn’t see anyone trying anything stupid. The police were good natured about it, and were letting folks gather and watch, taping and photographing this incredible muscle flexing of nature. It was truly amazing.

While we were there, a Coast Guard rescue helicopter flew over us, presumably just looking around, just in case. That’s definitely an unusual sight in Fenton!

It was a fun tour, a thing of sheer amazement, and left us with a sense of thankfulness that we weren’t party to any of its destructive force.

When I was growing up, I was an avid science fiction reader, and voraciously chewed up just about anything I could get my hands on. And as part of that, we all knew about the ABC’s of science fiction: Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke. This morning, I caught the news that Arthur C. Clarke had died, leaving only Bradbury from the ABC’s.

I always enjoyed Clarke’s work, and have been reading his work since I was a kid. In my opinion, he had a better grasp of the science end of science fiction than almost any of his contemporaries. His writing went beyond just the science though; for me, he could spin quite a yarn. Just read the first part of Chapter Seven of The Songs of Distant Earth. If that description of the end of our solar system doesn’t touch you, I don’t know what will.

Happy trails, Arthur C. Clarke. Enjoy what’s next.

OK, color me gullible, color me masochistic, color me with rose-tinted glasses, but when a software update is released, I kinda expect it to work reasonably well. I don’t expect the update to be pulled, and I don’t expect me to have to uninstall an app and re-install just to recover.

On the 13th, Adobe released a new version of Camera Raw and an update to Lightroom. Neither of these had earth-shattering implications for me, but I try to stay pretty current on things, just in case. In my world at work, the first question the dude in support asks you is if you have the latest versions of everything, so that flavors my judgement to trust the vendors when they release patches and fixes. So, swallowing the Kool-Aid, I pounced on the upgrades, and loaded them on both Doc Oc and the Little MacBook That Could.

Fast forward to today, and there’s word all over the place about both packages being pulled, and how it’s necessary to uninstall Lightroom to downgrade to the previous version. Now admittedly, that’s not a tough thing, but that ain’t right!

So tonight, it’s the uninstall-o-rama, along with the downgrade-o-rama, and a little bit trepedation of whether I’ve hurt anything by using the new version, and whether I’m gonna lose anything by performing the surgery necessary to fix the fumble by Adobe.

In their defense, Adobe usually does a good job of keeping things on the right side of the error-line. Why two packages released together would be withdrawn so quickly is beyond me, but I’ve gotta hope that the next update will go a little better!

The company I work for and a law firm in town each sponsor a band for competition annually in a “battle of the bands”, designed to be a fund-raiser for Our Little Haven, which provides care for children who’ve been abused, neglected or affected by drugs. It’s a great cause, and these two bands have been duking it out for a few years now.

The bands canvass their workplaces and friends for weeks leading up to the event, and on the night of the event, each band encourages folks to vote for their favorite band by stuffing boxes with cash and checks. I’m proud to say that the E-Rockers won the battle last night by almost a two-to-one margin. The big winner was Our Little Haven though, and that’s the important piece to the night.

So since we knew the lead singer of the band real well, I started asking around about doing a little shooting of the show. I’ve never shot a concert before, and knew it would be a neat opportunity to play, and maybe to learn something along the way. For just shy of three hours, I shot, enjoyed some really good live music, and was hoarse and deaf by the time the thing was over. I had a great time!

So what did I learn from the shoot? Well, faster lenses are a must. I shot most of the show with the 50/1.8, although I tried the 28-135 once or twice, but it’s just too slow for a barely lit stage. The other thing I had problems with was the lights on the stage. Most things showed up in this funky yellow glow, although some of the purples showed through nicely. I’m sure there’s a filter solution to help with this — of course, a big ol’ flash would’ve helped too!

It was a great time, and I feel pretty confident I’ll be back again next year, and once again trying to shoot, enjoy the music, and help out a great cause.