I haven’t done very many craft shows this fall. Dunno if it’s my energy level, or just not enough time, but I haven’t had the excitement about getting out there this fall. However, there’s a couple that I always try to do — they’re tried and true, and always bring me some business, along with giving me the chance to talk about my images. That alone’s worth the price of admission sometimes!

Today was the show over in Belleville, and I usually get a fair amount of traffic, and a fair number of sales. Today though… nothing. Not a single sale. It’s the first time I’ve been skunked at any of these shows.

I knew times were tough, and I changed what I brought with me to cater to that — smaller pieces, all unframed, with lower prices than I’ve typically run, and yet still…. nothing sold! It wasn’t just me either. The other vendors had the same problem. There just weren’t very many customers through the door, despite a lot of good advertising by the organizer.

I’m beginning to wonder if it would make more sense for me to focus on the gallery (I badly need to get new material up there), my web site (badly needs work), and some of the bigger juried shows in town. Those shows still seem to be drawing, as does the gallery, so those would seem to be some good points of focus, as opposed to schlepping my wares across a 50-mile radius of the house. Even if I sell one or two items at those little shows, I’ve still got to think about the gas, effort and time involved in doing them. If the sales aren’t there to make the event worthwhile, then I need to rethink where my focus is.

Man, I’ll be glad to see the economy turn around!

When I was a kid, I can remember my dad and one of his buddies, David Kroppf, building model airplanes, flying them at the vocational school at which my dad taught. I remember crashes, and even losing an aircraft on top of the Sears warehouse building across Amnicola Highway from the school.

There was even this huge aircraft they built called the Cherokee. Neither of them ever had the gumption to fly it, so it wound up for sale at a hobby shop in Chattanooga.

I thought that Cherokee was huge, that is, until I saw this video. This is a model of a C-17 Globemaster. It has an almost 20-foot wingspan and four turbine engines. It sounds like a jet! (You can see some photos I shot of a real one here.)

Now that’s cool!!!

Today, Uncle Steve made good, and announced new goodies from the Mothership. In other words, new Apple products were released.

The lust? Well, that’d be the new MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops. They’re just stinking beautiful, and loaded with the power to back up the beauty. I love the idea of using LED panels — I’ve heard a ton about their color correctness. Of course, how good that’ll be will depend on how the machine is designed. Faster processor, faster graphics, faster memory… what’s not to love?

And now my disappointment. I was following the announcements as they were being made this morning, and was thrilled to see a 24″ LED panel with a built-in iSight camera. The price isn’t crazy high, and is way more real estate than my 20″ Apple monitor. But…. (and there’s always a “but”)

It appears that the new monitor will only work with the new laptops — I can’t hang it off my octocore MacPro beauty sitting under my desk. What kinda design is that? And frankly, the troops are restless enough about the $900 price tag. Combine with no path to connect it to the MacPro line, and you’ve got some unhappy campers.

Count me in that number.

I would loooove to put an LED monitor on my desk, especially with more real estate, but the reality would seem to be that Apple has turned its back on the guy who’s invested a buncha scratch in a pro workstation, and instead focused on supplying a big ol’ monitor that has the same feature set as the only machines — the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros — that support it. (Yeah, yeah, there’s probably an adapter to hook it to the Little-Macbook-That-Could, but definitely not to Doc Oc.)

Apple has some of the sweetest panels out there, but the Cinema Displays have essentially been frozen in time for four years, and the Dell’s are starting to look pretty attractive. Essentially the same panel, but at about 60% of the cost. With that math, a 24″ really high contrast monitor (LCD, not LED) is sitting around $700.

Once last complaint… because I know The Steve reads this!

With the new announcements, the 17″ MacBook Pro will become defunct. No new 17″ MacBook. That also means no Apple laptop can use a 30″ Cinema Display at full resolution. Again, it almost seems like the pro user, power user or serious hobbyist has been left out in the cold with the new announcements.

The new laptops are sexy — no doot aboot it — but I’m really questioning where the product lines are headed, and am more than a little concerned for my little empire here at the Deauxmayne.

UPDATE: It looks like Apple has a cable (for a C-note) that will allow all the new laptops to drive the 30″ Cinema Display at full res. That’s cool. I’m still waiting for a way to connect the new 24″ monitor to my MacPro!!!

Like a good doobie, I applied the Apple security update last night. Little did I know that one of the fixes would debilitate the mail server. It kinda looked like a firewall problem, and after poking around a TON, I finally found that the security update had (apparently) made a change to my Postfix configuration.

Now, I can claim some responsibility for this little outage, as I didn’t look at the notes for the update before applying them. Guess I’ve got a little too much trust in Apple.

Anyway, it’s working again, so now the spammers have another target available again.

One of the things that most of my photographer buddies know is that I’m a freak about backup copies of my work. My work is my work, and my work is my life’s blood. To protect that, I am freaky about making sure I have abundant copies.

My primary working copy sits on a 1GB spindle. I have a backup of that work that sits on a separate spindle. I have another copy on DVD. And then I have another copy on a different brand of DVD, to help insure against early disc rot.

Scott Kelby has written a piece about backup strategies (in general) and his backup strategy. His strategy works for him, and features a piece of gear that I’ve been lusting over — a Drobo. That’s not what forced the muse through my fingers tonight though.

The thing that caused a pause for me was Scott writing about using a USB jumpdrive for backups of his shooting sessions for his clients. I’ve been pondering that concept — it’s relatively cheap, physically durable, and extremely small. The thing that’s made me question this is the durability of the data on the drive. If it doesn’t have a lifespan at least as long as DVD media, then I’m not sure how much it buys me.

The other thing that has me on the fence with this move is the cost to go back and store my old stuff. I think I’m in the 300GB range for my digital imagery since 2001, and that doesn’t even capture my scans of old film and video conversions from old VCR tapes. We’re talking a bunch of drives!

I wonder if part of the storage strategy with jumpdrives would be to, once a year or so, engage in a “refresh day”. This would involve copying all the data from each drive to a harddrive, and then back to the jumpdrive from which it came. This would freshen the storage, but I have no idea if that’s even needed with the technology jumpdrives are based on.

Just some more random ponderin’……

About a year ago, I bought a new router — a Belkin N1 Vision — and until recently, it’s been rock solid, just chugging along serving up pages, and letting me see the world from my little ol’ office.

Lately though, things have been a little less rosy. I came down one morning, finding the router powered down, and have found it “confused” to the point where it wouldn’t handle data four or five times since. After doing some reading on the ‘net, I’m inclined to think it’s a heat problem. There’s a bunch of anecdotal stories out there to support that. And with that, I thought I was in for buying a new router. It’s hard to fix a design problem… although I did read about someone who gutted their N1, and installed a cooling fan!

In some of my reading, I found some talk about a new router firmware level that was released this summer. I’d upgraded to v1.00.15 in mid-July, as I try to stay up-to-date on things like that. I had had some difficulty with the speed display on the N1 not working, and I thought the new release would help. My reading over the last couple of days has had some folks linking the overheating issues tied to the new firmware. Dunno if that’s true, but I do notice that Belkin’s site no longer lists 1.00.15 as a firmware download. Hmmmm……

So tonight, I’ve devolved my router, and we’ll see if things quieten down. Watch this space!

For the better part of a year now, I’ve been lucky enough to be part of a Yahoo mailing list group that some of my high school classmates put together. It’s a great conversation, covering politics, genealogy, and “where are they now.” And when it gets tough — one of them has been caught up in the Hurricane Ike mess — it seems like they are there to help each other.

It’s been kinda cool, as most of them and I weren’t all that close in school — I was a bit of a basketcase, and really introverted — and now we’re sorta rediscovering each other again. Really slick.

One of the guys from my old homeroom, Glen Wood, has just had a piece of his writing published in Memoir magazine, and the piece can be found here. It’s a great peek into Glen’s musical tastes, along with a little self-discovery along the way. I can remember Glen having a pretty healthy appetite for music in the late 1970s and early 1980s — I think I remember buying his LP copy of Talking Heads Fear of Music as his musical tastes changed — and this great bit of writing captures Glen’s view on music nowadays.

Take a peek, and enjoy!