Back in the 70s, a Dutch group named Focus had a flash in the pan hit called “Hocus Pocus”. Who knew the Dutch could yodel? Well, Thijs Van Leer showed us that the Dutch can yodel, whistle and flaut with the best of them. Enjoy the video, and then scroll down for more fun and games.

So, having this little ditty embedded in your mind… Through the magic of YouTube, some twisted, sick individual decided that you could only improve on Dutch yodeling by speeding it up. Again, enjoy the video, and then scroll down.

And with that in mind, someone decided that the magic yodeling could also be served by a little slowness. Here, in at its molasses-induced best.

In this last video, you can actually see Thijs Van Leer’s eyeballs trying their best to achieve escape velocity!

Once upon a time, I said that I hoped my ’08 Wrangler was my last gas-fueled Jeep. While Chrysler’s latest announcement ain’t entirely dinosaur-friendly, it could be a great baby step.

Chrysler has spun up a website to talk about the Jeep Wrangler EV, an hybrid electric/gas Wrangler. They say that it’ll go 40mi on batteries, and another 400mi in the city on a combination of 8 gals of gas and some electric whizbang.

I have to admit that I’m more than a little interested in how this new-tech Jeep would perform in the big out of doors. I mean, 400mi of city-based hybridicized driving isn’t likely to equate to a whole big bunch of climbing when on all-gas.

The proof’ll be in the pudding, I guess, but I’m hoping this stuff takes off, and is able to perform like my fossil-eater. ‘Til then, it’s happy expensive trails for me!

This week was full of announcements about the forthcoming Adobe Creative Suite releases. To me, the important part of that gaggle o’ code is Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended (CS4E). I picked up CS3E less than a year ago, taking advantage of an upgrade path from CS2 to CS3E for a premium cost over an CS2 to CS3 upgrade. More on that later.

With the announcements came the confirmation that CS4/CS4E on the Mac platform will still only be 32-bit. I lamented about this a while ago, but it’s worth mentioning again that I’m not happy about being boxed in to only 4GB of addressable memory space. Nothing I’m doing right now is using anything beyond a GB of RAM, so it’s not the end of the world… yet. Adobe is dismissing this as a non-issue, as they measure the impact with an eye toward speed. Speed is great, and I want all of that I can get, but I also want to have wide, green pastures available to me, even if I don’t use it all. 64 bits of addressing would definitely help.

The other interesting thing about the new Photoshop is utilization of hardware acceleration on the graphics card for a variety of typical tasks. However, it kinda reads that the Nvidia cards (GeForce and Quadro) are the favored cards. I’m still trying to see if there’s any benefit from my stock ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT card. To upgrade the video card, Apple sells the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT (512MB) for close to $300; a Quadro is easily twice that. Unless my card will drag some love out of Adobe, I’m probably outta luck on getting any benefit from this upgrade.

This release is the first upgrade to the CS Extended environment, and I expected to see a similar price for CS3E to CS4E as there is from CS3 to CS4. That ain’t the case. CS3 to CS4 is $199, but the move to CS4E from CS, CS2, CS3 or CS3E is $349! I already paid that version change tax once, and it’s ludicrous of Adobe to expect that same path to be paved in my gold twice, especially when there’s not that much benefit in the CS Extended versions for me… for now.

With the lack of functional benefit for me, the appearance that the hardware accelerator may pass me by, the lack of 64-bit love, and the crazy upgrade policy, I believe I’ll end up waiting for CS5E, and see if the pot’s a bit sweeter.

Last week, I hinted that there might be a new iPod Nano in my future. A yellow one, in fact. I even put the mock ups of the engraving as a teaser. That didn’t exactly happen.

I’d ordered a yellow Nano over a week ago, thinking that I’d have it before this week end. It kept not shipping, and not shipping, and not shipping, so on Thursday, I grimaced in pain, and cancelled the order. Now I didn’t know what to buy — a 16GB Nano or a 32GB Touch. Off I went camping Thursday night, still twisting over what to buy.

Come Saturday morning, I drove to the Apple store after confirming they had both models in stock, and even driving into the parking garage, I still hadn’t made up my mind. After spending the better part of 30 minutes with the Apple dude, I walked out with an iPod Touch.

It’s a nifty little box… small, light, and has a huge screen. Frankly, I’ve been spending more time getting video material ready for it, as opposed to music. It’s definitely gonna be a different world for me — I’m used to having every piece of music I own with me, and 32GB simply won’t give me that.

So far, I’ve got nothing but good to report on the little device, and it looks like my most listened to music is gonna fit. The biggest bugaboo has been video. Videos that used to work on my 5G 80GB iPod don’t seem to wanna work on the new device, and videos formatted for AppleTV out of TubeTV no longer seem to wanna work with the new gear. It’s just a guess, but I’d venture there’s some kind of flag being set somewhere that’s disallowing this. We shall see.

Stay tuned as I play with all the goodies this thing’ll do!

Twenty-four hours after I believed I had cratered my iPod whilst trying to restore it resale, it appears to have come back to life, fully functional, and back at factory defaults. Here’s what transpired.

From iTunes 8, on both my MacBook and MacPro, I tried to restore my 5G iPod to its original state. From both machines, I got the message Ipod could not restore. An unknown error occurred 1418. And after the last time it happened from the MacBook, the iPod would no longer function. It acted as through the firmware or hard drive were corrupt, leaving the iPod in a state where it couldn’t be seen by iTunes, and couldn’t be seen by either of my Macs or Darla’s Windows XP machine or my VMWare XP environment. After a lot of frustration, I wrote the thing off as a loss.

Tonight, Apple had an OS upgrade sent out, and I thought it’d be worth a try to see if that upgrade would help any. It didn’t. I saw the same things. I googled my error message, along with some other pertinent keywords, and I found someone describing how a hard drive replacement is done in an iPod, and he mentioned Disk Mode.

Disk Mode allows the iPod to act like a portable hard drive to the OS, and was mentioned by Apple as one way to help force a restore of the iPod. This guy had figured out the hidden iPod command keystrokes necessary to do a hard reset of the iPod (Select+Menu), enter diagnostic mode (Select+Play/Pause) and enter disk mode (Select+Prev).

I decided to confirm that things were working ok, and entered diagnostic mode. Sure enough, everything seemed to check out, so that ruled out anything insidious like a hard drive or logic board failure. (BTW, eventually, the diagnostics will eventually ask you to plug in a firewire cable. The 5G iPod isn’t supposed to support firewire, and I gave away all my iPod firewire cables years ago, so I couldn’t comply. I just did a hard reset at this point, and figured everything was ok.)

Upon the reboot from diagnostics, I held down Select+Prev…. and there was Disk Mode! I plugged the iPod into the MacPro, and the MacPro promptly complained about the hard drive being in some funky unformatted state. This was the first time in 24 hours that my iPod had been recognized by any system. Leopard was even nice enough to offer to format the drive, which I politely declined, favoring instead to let iTunes manage putting the Hands of Steve on my iPod, exorcising its demons.

I cranked up iTunes, and it promptly told me that I appeared to have a damaged iPod, and that it would be happy to restore it. I allowed it, iTunes starting shoveling bits down the USB cable, and in just a couple of minutes, my iPod was whirring happily, charging, and being the happy little dude it used to be.

This was quite the recovery for me, as I had really written this iPod off, and just lucked into finding the right information I needed to recover. I guess the lesson here is to make sure all your homework is done! Now I have an iPod to sell, and can recoup some of the costs of….. waitaminute! I can’t talk about that yet!

Over the weekend, I mentioned our neighborhood gas station that was out of fuel. Well, this morning, I encountered more of the same.

The gas station near the office was down to only a few pumps with fuel available. The good news was that the price was the same as I paid over the weekend ($3.799), but for the first time in many, many years, I had to wait in line to fill up. And I found more stations that were devoid of gasoline.

I’ve been corresponding with some folks in Chattanooga, and it looks like the shortage of gas — at least there — is quite real, despite the promises that there’s plenty of gas to go around. And others in east Tennessee are paying almost $5/gal for gas.

I’ve gotta say, I’m getting very nervous about what the next few weeks will hold…

In preparation for what’s-on-the-horizon, I set about trying to restore my 5th gen iPod to factory settings, thinking that I would try to sell it this week. That was not a pretty experience.

From both Doc Oc and The-Little-MacBook-That-Could, I consistently got an error message (#1418), indicating that this iPod could not be restored to defaults. Not a huge big deal…. until on the last attempt from the MacBook, my iPod apparently cratered.

Near as I can tell, it tries — real hard — to reboot itself every few seconds, only to fail, and repeat. Do while more electricity. The drive doesn’t appear to be bad — there’s no cute icon indicating a sad ipod, which might indicate a disk failure — the thing has just lost it’s brains, and doesn’t know what to do with itself.

Unfortunately, in that state, it can no longer be seen by iTunes as an iPod, or either Windows or Leopard as a mass-storage device, so I think it’s done.

That leaves my iPod Shuffle as the only functioning iPod in the Deauxmayne. RIP 5th gen iPod. You went before your time.

Overnight, what was left of Hurricane Ike stomped through the midwest, hitting The Lou around 3am this morning. By the time the rain and winds were gone nine hours later, we’d had almost six inches of rain, and a bunch of limbs downed in the yard. Nothing serious at the Deauxmayne, but once again, the city came under the focus of the national media due to flooding. If you looked at the video of folks being rescued in boats from their homes, you would’ve though you were looking at something from Texas rather than Missouri. There are still folks without power — we were down for 2.5 hours — but nonetheless, things are getting back to normal.

Like most of the country, we’ve seen gas prices spike up this week. As Ike bore down on Texas, local crystal ball readers were predicting gas in $4.50 range out of this. Mom tells me that the prognosticators are reading prices above $5 in their tea leaves. With promises of ready supply, there’s been no rationing like Mom has reported in Chattanooga. However, I did see something I haven’t seen in a lot of years…. a gas station with no gas available. In fact, there were almost a score of stations reported without gas this morning. I’m betting that’ll be more widespread before the next week or so is done, and I’m not gonna be surprised to see gas climb well above $4.

Call me a pessimist.

However, the silver lining is that the weather has changed, feeling more like fall than summer, with the promise of a couple of rain free days, which means the doors come off, and the roof is dropped.

I can’t wait.

The winners for the Tetons trip have been announced, and it appears I wasn’t anywhere close. Here’s the winners. They’re all beautiful, and indicative of just how much farther I have to go with my work.

Still, beautiful photography is beautiful photography!