This morning, we awoke to a bit of a winter wonderland. Overnight, there’d been a quiet snow, only about an inch, but it sat so pretty on the surfaces of everything. With that view, I thought I needed to get out and shoot, so we headed south to Lone Elk SP.

However, the further south we got, the more the snow disappeared. What we didn’t know was that we were on the southern edge of the snow, which meant Lone Elk didn’t get much more than a dusting. That was disappointing.

The bison were out though, which made up for it. We came across about a dozen head just inside their area of the park, slowly grazing in the snowy grass. That’s when I was pounded over the head — I definitely need to get some work with dark objects against bright backgrounds, as those shots seem to reek pretty badly for me. (See the photos below.)

Ideally, one of Moose’s expeditions into the snows of Yellowstone or Yosemite would be the best place to learn these tricks — the best of all environments, no rushing to beat the melt of the snow, and folks around me that can help me learn this kind of shooting. In The Lou, it’s a real crap shoot about when a snow might come, and frequently, I’ve gotta work around work, or rush to beat the melt. A little focus could do this kid some good!

There’s an scenario out there called The Slashdot Effect. This is driven by the mention of some website in a story on Slashdot, and is the effect of the subsequent flood of traffic to the site mentioned in the story. Frequently, this crashes websites, and is more than a little irritating to the website owner and the network provider supplying its pipe.

Now, magnify that by a gazillion. That’s what NBC did tonight.

On the Nightly News, NBC reported on the floating tool bag accidentally lost during the shuttle mission, and mentioned that a website that shows the tracking of the bag was linked off their site. Like any good monkey, I swung from webvine to webvine. Apparently, I wasn’t alone, and found that the tracking site was cratered. No response. Not a whisper. (BTW, it appears — from the domain name — that this is an individual ham radio operator’s site.)

I can’t imagine the number of folks trying to hit that site, all at once, and probably at a substantially higher rate for days or weeks. I sure hope the webmaster has a lot of time on his hands. I suspect there will be quite a bit of webdust to sweep up after this little event!

I’ve been a fan of music for as long as I can remember, and it seems like I’ve gone to proverbial ends of the earth to get the music I love. However, I’ve always insisted on having the original media — nowadays, that’s CDs. My figuring is that if I have the original media, I can convert the music into whatever format comes next. What I’m coming to find is that there’s a lot of the music I grew up with that just ain’t available on CD.

Enter the iTunes Music Store. I have been finding all kinds of old music — some I’d be kinda embarrassed to fess up to — on iTMS. And at 99 cents a pop, it’s pretty easy to take, and easy to grab the one-hit wonders I remember from days gone by.

However, there’s a fair amount of junk out there too. Many, many of the old tunes are actually re-recordings by the original artists. To me, that just doesn’t count.

So, if you see me bopping around with my Touch on, and it looks like the moves are old-school, just ignore me, and pass on by. It’s probably something you’d rather not listen to anyway!

Over the weekend, I decided it was time to stop waiting on Apple to pave the road that leads to my new screen real estate. I did a bunch of research — although not very well, as we’ll discover later in this tale of woe — and landed on a pair of Samsung T260 25.5″ widescreen monitors. Generally, they got good reviews, and looked as good as they could at BestBuy, given that every monitor in the store was being driven from a VGA signal with more splits than a high school cheerleading squad. I was planning on a single DVI source, so I knew it’d only get better from what I saw.

I unpacked the two beastly panels, and plopped ‘em on my desk. My gosh, were they ever big! I felt like a kid in a candy store as I connected them to Doc Oc, and proceeded to bask in the electronic glory of the two brightly lit beacons on my desk.

My next step (as it should always be) was color calibration. I pulled out my trusty Gretag Eye-One, and calibrated both monitors. The colors looked great to my eyes, although the monitors were pretty bright, so I lowered the brightness a bit to keep the sunburn down. I brought up Lightroom, and began walking through some of my favorite images. The brighter the image, the better it looked on the new panels. And then I hit some low-light images…. and the house o’ monitors began to tumble down.

All my low-light images showed splotches and degradation in the shadowed areas — something I’d never seen on my 20″ Apple Cinema Display. The more I worked to eliminate the problem, the more I began to get concerned that I’d made a huge mistake.

It was back to research, and I learned that the T260′s used a TN LCD panel. Apparently, TN panels use 6-bit color (256k colors), and dither to get to the 16.7m colors that are advertised. And from what I could see, my photos didn’t like that kind of treatment. (For comparison, my Apple ACD uses an S-IPS panel — 8-bit color, and true 16.7m colors without dithering.)

Tail between my legs, battered and bruised, Beck and I took the two Samsungs back to BestBuy for return. Surprisingly, they gave us no guff about returning them, and I didn’t have to get into a philosophical discussion of the religion behind various LCD panels. And, no restocking fee, which I was fully expecting to be asked for.

However, that leaves me back at the smaller screen real estate, but I think that’s a problem I can schluff off until after the first of the year. No reason to rush, and it appears that I have a good deal more research to accomplish!

This week, Apple has announced that the new delicious 24″ monitors are ready for ordering and shipping. These are the brilliant-looking monitors that will only attach to MiniDisplayPort enabled devices, which means you can only attach this new beastie to one of the new laptops from Apple. There’s no love for the MacMini or MacPro, both of which are DVI-based machines, nor for the older laptops out there.

On the heels of that announce, Apple also announced that they are discontinuing the 23″ Apple Cinema Display. While this isn’t a huge surprise, the things that are missing are.

What this seems to mean is that if you have a DVI-based Mac — essentially any recent Mac before the latest laptop announcements — the only two monitors available from Apple for you are the 20″ Apple Cinema Display ($599) and the 30″ Apple Cinema Display ($1799). The 23″ ACD came in around $899, and was a nice compromise for folks like me that wanted more real estate than the 20″, but didn’t want to spring almost two-kilobucks for the 30″. For some folks with twenty Benjy’s burning a hole in their pocket, it might’ve made sense for those in the MacPro crowd to put a pair of 23″ ACD screens on the desk for the same price as the 30″. That’s all personal choice however.

The key log to breaking this display logjam is a DVI to MiniDisplayPort adapter, something Apple hasn’t announced, and something that no one seems to have created (although it appears Amazon may have some third party dongles). From what I gather in reading other folks’ interpretation of the specs, this kind of dongle is possible, but was just never something anyone needed before. That’s the only way an Apple laptop older than a month will be able to connect to the new 24″ display.

For MacPro users, this would work, of course, but I suspect that the best path here would be a new video card. However, Apple has also not announced any DisplayPort-based cards, and even if they were available out there, I don’t know if they’d be compatible with the MacPro or OS X. And then there might still be the DisplayPort to MiniDisplayPort question — is there an adapter that will go between these two sizes of the same video standard?

If anyone from Apple is reading this — and I know Uncle Steve checks this blog daily — please, please, please get your collective product lines together so I can put the new panels on my MacPro!!!! Doc Oc needs new eyes…

When I put the Little-MacBook-That-Could in my stable a couple of years ago, I pawed through every laptop bag I could find until I finally ended up with a Brenthaven. This has been pert near the best laptop bag I’ve ever owned — loads of space to stow cables, adapters, power options and all kinds of other stuff.

Well, the new MacBook Pro won’t fit in my small Brenthaven, so I’m on the prowl again for a new bag. Now BH does make a bag that’ll fit my shiny new beauty, but for some reason, I’m inclined to do something different this time.

So who’s leading the pack right now? Timbuk2 and Booq. They both have gazillions of potential choices, and no one seems to carry them locally, so it’d have to be a purchase based off internet sales sites and opinion sites. Given my last bag purchase experience, I’m not real keen on that, but I don’t think I’ll have much of a choice in the matter.

Any suggestions out there?

With the Little-MacBook-That-Could getting long in the tooth, and my desire to help the economy, I have purchased a new 15″ MBP, and I couldn’t be more pleased.

So, if you haven’t heard about the construction, the main body is carved out of a single piece of aluminum, like some crazy person would do with a bar of Ivory soap and a whittlin’ knife. It’s soft on the hands, feels light, and has a crazy nice feel compared to the lil’ ol’ MacBook. However, it seems that it could be a bit more prone to having marrs from jewelry or other metal-to-metal impacts. Still, it’s a sweet, sweet feel.

Tonight I’ve been working on it for an hour or two, with it sitting in my lap, and it definitely feels cooler… generally. My iStat info indicates that the processor temperature is just a little higher than the BlackBook, but I noticed it more in my lap. There are points along the back part of the bottom of the base — near the hinge — that seem kinda warm. It’s not crazy hot, but there are definitely some places where the rig is warmer than others.

Now the screen. The glorious, glorious screen. It’s new tech — an LED screen — and it’s beautiful. The color is really brilliant, the surface is glossy, and I haven’t seen anything yet that wasn’t just flat amazing on-screen. This is the same tech that the new Apple 24″ monitor will have when it’s released in a week or so. It ain’t cheap, but man is it pretty.

From a speeds-n-feeds perspective, this box is 25% faster at the processor complex, 50% faster across the memory bus, and gazillions faster on the GPU side. The crazy thing about the GPU is that the new MBP has two video cards — one “high performance” NVidia GeForce 9600M GT with 512MB of discrete memory, and an NVidia GeForce 9400M with 256MB of shared memory, designed for lower power consumption. I don’t run on batteries a lot, so I’ve got it configured to use the 9600 — dunno that I’d notice the difference, but the battery’s rechargeable.

I also really like the backlit keyboard. What I didn’t like was the fact that it was somewhat uncontrollable — it lit up when ever the machine thought it needed to be lit. However, I found a little application out of Germany called Lab Tick that allows me to set the backlighting to the level I want, and leave it there. Way cool.

I’m real pleased with this little box, and it looks like a new love affair in progress. Stay tuned for more!

In the news tonight was a court victory for the Navy, giving the Navy the go ahead to use loud, potentially deadly sonar in waters known to be inhabited by whales and other marine mammals sensitive to the sounds. The way it was reported, the court said national security outweighs ecological concerns.

It’s akin to the military deciding that an above ground, high-pitched sonic weapon was necessary for national security, and was allowed to continue working with that weapon in a locale where dogs were. In that case, people would be livid. I suspect the whales were short-shrifted because they’re not cute and cuddly, and living in our homes.

So, how far can this precedent be carried? Could national security interests be put ahead of other ecological concerns? It’s a great question, and one that has some chilling ramifications.

Have you seen the Veterans Day commercial Boeing is running? Take a gander below. It really doesn’t need me gabbing about it.

After 10 hours of data wending its way across the wire from Doc Oc to the new Seagate half-TB, I was ready to try out the new catalog and files on my MacBook. With two machines, it made testing this really easy — try it on the laptop first, fix any catalog problems, and then try it on the Octoputer.

After copying the images, and copying the catalog, I plugged the drive up to the laptop, and found that the catalog was disconnected from the images. I had to point the catalog to the images, but after that, everything was cool.

Shut down LR on the MacBook, move the drive to Doc Oc, and all is well there too. Overall, a very easy operation. I still have some scripting to do to automatically back the thing up when it’s docked at Doc Oc’s, but that shouldn’t be a big deal.

This opens the door to two other portable drive based projects — one for iTunes, as it sure would be nice to have that with me when travelling, and another for my scanning projects. Those I’d like to turn into another LR catalog, making it especially easy to carry that stuff around to relatives to get the skinny on the images.

It’s definitely a new world for me! Now, if Apple would just release a video card for the MacPro that’ll run their new 24″ LED monitor…..