The Post Office is talking about eliminating one day of their current six-day-a-week deliver schedule. Oddly enough, they’re suggesting about eliminating something midweek, maybe Wednesday, which I would figure businesses would scream about. I have two observations about their observations about their business.

The USPS have indicated that they moved billions fewer pieces of mail from 2007 to 2008. Dunno about you, but with the elections in 2008, and the amount of junk mail I received — several pieces of election-related real/junk/hate mail each day, frequently several from the same folks on the same day — I can tell you that my mailbox got loads more mail in 2008.

They also indicated that they are losing money, I guess because of the billions of pieces of mail they didn’t move in 2008. It seems to me that if you set the rate, you can set yourself up to be profitable. Had this been during the summer, when fuel prices were so high, then I’d maybe give it some slack. But with gas prices easily half what they were during the summer, it’s gotta be getting cheaper to deliver all my junk mail.

I guess once the fall of civilization takes place, I’ll still have my junk mail — five days a week — to put in the fireplace to keep me warm.

Take a gander at yesterday’s post on the All Things Jeep Blog, and see if you recognize anyone!

I know there’s all kinds of new things out there that I’ve never heard of. Having just been the recipient of a meaningful (to me) piece of vinyl — Carl Douglas‘ 1974 release of Kung Fu Fighting and Other Great Love Songs — I was intrigued by a site that I stumbled upon through a listing showing some neat trick photography with books and magazines over at Toxel. The stumbled-upon site is called Sleeveface.

Essentially, this is a site dedicated to taking a phonograph album cover and manually replacing your face or body part with the stuff from the cover. It’s a hoot. So much of a hoot that the site author has now released a book of sleevefaces. There’s even an entertaining training video, showing how to sleeveface.

I am intrigued, and that’s usually bad…..

Obviously the internal heat generated by my iPhone increases the temperature by a skosh, as it only indicated flat zero!

Supposedly this is the coldest air mass to hit The Lou in almost ten years… And tomorrow, it’ll be even colder. Stay tuned for the fun!

With the hoopla that is MacWorld going on last week, there was a note from Uncle Steve, talking to why he was away from MacWorld — an easy-to-treat hormone imbalance. Today, the other shoe fell, and it appears that things may have been something more serious.

Man, this really sucks. Not just for the brand, or the markets, or the company, but for the man himself. Regardless of what you think of Apple gear and fanboys, Jobs has led a brilliant campaign upon his rejoining Apple, and with that, his folks have designed some beautiful gear that works very well, and has re-shaped two industries — the home computer market, and the music distribution and listening market. If indeed this is something serious, then we stand to lose someone that I see as a visionary.

Yep, I’m a fanboy — not because it’s Apple, but because Apple makes really good stuff. I have the same view of Jeep, and have had with Icom, Garmin, Bose, Canon and other brands over the years. Companies like those make great gear that does what I need to do without a whole lot of “happy accidents” that I have to work through. That kind of stability has allowed me to explore, and not worry about whether the products I was relying on would work well or not.

My best wishes are with you Uncle Steve — I hope all goes well with the recovery, and I look forward to your hand on the rudder come summer.

After reading sooooo many things indicating that I’d have to completely reset/reload my iPhone, I was building myself up for an evening’s worth of working on my iPhone. Until…

I found a comment to a blog post that pointed to a piece of code called DiskAid. This little piece of code lets you explore the filesystem on the iPhone (or iPod), and from there, I was able to resolve my issue without a long, tedious battle waged between iTunes and my iPhone.

So what did I do?

Well, I went into the file system, and deleted all the music subfolders in the /iTunes Control Folder/Music. Once I did that, I hard reset the iPhone, and then fired up the little dude, synced (syanc? syunc?) the iPhone, and suddenly, I had music, and a reasonable amount of “Other” space taken up on my iPhone (about 300MB).

I feel like I snatched victory from the jaws of defeat!

Last night, I dropped my iPhone and iPod Touch into their little cradles… and began my descent through various layers of USB-based hell. This morning, I sat at my little workstation, getting my news and feeds to start my day, and found error messages on my screen indicating that my iPhone couldn’t be found by iTunes, and that my Wacom tablet was not alive.

Best as I can figure, the USB hub dropped it’s communication, which confused my tablet, and may have interrupted the sync process to my iPhone. Apparently that had caused everything that was once called “music” ok the device to now be called “other”… making that space untouchable and unmanageable. From what I’ve been able to gather from Da Goog, it appears that a full restore is in my future tonight.

Blecch!

With all the dust having settled from yesterday’s Macworld keynote, folks are starting to look back, and see what was missing. Here’s my list.

• New iMac — There were rumors all over the place about new iMacs, perhaps with screens as big as 28″.
• New MacMini — This was the rumor that seemed to be a sure thing, but like the iMac, was a no-show.
• Snow Leopard — This version of the OS has been rumored to be just over the next hill for months. I can’t believe that didn’t show up at Macworld. With the new bundle of iLife ’09, iWork ’09 and Leopard (10.5), I suspect Snow Leopard (10.6) is a ways off.
• 32GB iPhone — This wasn’t a lock, but it sure had been rumored a lot.
• iPhone Nano — This little device really seemed to be another sure thing for announcement, but also was a no show.
• New MacPros — This was an outside shot, at best. I figured this might happen to placate folks (like me) that wanted a path to use the spiffy new 24″ LED monitor with the high end workstation hardware, with the hopes that some fallout would enable my not-so-old MacPro to run against the new screen.

I’m sure there were many other missing devices and code from Macworld’s announcements, but these were the ones that seemed glaring in their omission to me.

Apple gave its last keynote at Macworld today. There’s been a lot of buzz about the fact that Apple was going to pull out of Macworld, and even more buzz about the fact that Uncle Steve wasn’t going to deliver the swan song. However, at the end of the day, Apple went on stage today, and spilled the new goods. My opinion?

Meh.

Three big things were presented, plus “one more thing.” Updates to software were two of those — iLife ’09 and iWork ’09 — along with a new 17″ MacBook Pro and the announcement of the death of DRM in the iTunes Music Store.

The software updates to iWork didn’t grab me. However, the updates to iPhoto (part of iLife ’09) really impressed me. Apple has introduced face recognition in images — a kind of holy grail for archivists, I think — that will allow iPhoto to find all photos with a specific person’s face in them… within reason. If someone’s face is distorted — being kissed on both cheeks, for example — then it appears it may not work as well. But gosh, the number of images it will work on is going to be such a wonderful thing! There’s also support for geotagging, Google Maps, and all kinds of things that will make the iPhoto experience that much better.

For me, this brings a pretty good quandry to the surface. I’ve been using Adobe Lightroom as my DAM tool. However, it doesn’t have some of these nice bells and whistles promised in iPhoto. iPhoto couldn’t handle big image catalogs like mine, although I hear it manages large catalogs much better nowadays. LR also does a great job of non-destructive editing, and iPhoto seems to touch on that a bit, but I’m not clear on just how well that’s handled. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to playing with iPhoto later this month when it’s released.

On the hardware front, I fully expected to exhale a giant “D’oh” after the MacBook Pro announcements. However, the only thing announced was the obviously-needing-to-be-updated 17″ MBP, and frankly, for about $300 more than my 15″ MBP, you don’t really get that much. Bigger screen, sure, but the rest of the things that make the machine work bigger/better/faster/more just don’t seem to add up to the difference in price… and the extra pound of weight to carry around. So yeah, the new machine is an incremental improvement over my 15″ MBP, but it really does seem to be just a tiny evolutionary wiggle.

As for the DRM free iTMS… well, it’s about time. I hate that it’s 30¢ per track to “upgrade” existing purchases to DRM-free formats, but I think it’s gonna be well worth it. Higher sample rates and more freedom to use tunes I’ve purchased on gear I own will make this a worthwhile uptick. Frankly, I’ve got less than 200 tracks that I’ve purchased through iTMS — I’ve always just bought the CDs and pulled them into iTunes. With the new future of iTMS though, I may be a bit more inclined to purchase full albums digitally. It does seem as though the record companies have finally come to terms with electronic distribution, and I’m pleased that I’ll be able to take advantage of it with iTMS.

So, in general, meh. But there were some jewels today in iPhoto and iTunes that will bear some watching.

Two years ago, I entered a juried competition called Beyond the Lens at Framations. That experience encouraged me to start displaying my work, and I’ve been showing pieces at Framations ever since. BTL III is here, and once again, one of my pieces has been juried into the competition.

I got a call from Framations, and “Dark Crystal” has been selected for the exhibit. It’s an image I shot during one of the big ice storms here in St. Louis, and has been a favorite ever since. Once again, ice is being very, very good to me.

The reception is this Saturday, January 10th, from 1pm to 4pm at Framations, with the awards presented from 2.30pm. The exhibit will be up through February 8th. C’mon out to St. Charles, and join the fun!