A little late, but I’ve been procrastinating… a lot… lately.

I was in Best Buy last weekend searching for a case for my new Canon G10 (more on that over at CWP… sometime), and worked with a guy who was willing to open packaging for me so I could slide my G10 into a variety of housings. As I talked with him, I discovered he had worked for many of the camera outfits in town, and had done some super-sized Apple consulting gigs, and was a BB Apple dude.

Cool.

I asked after a FW400-FW800 converting plug for my MBP, and we strolled over into Appleland at BB. And what did my wandering eye see… but a 20″ Apple Cinema Display. Now, Apple stopped selling these months ago, and at the price they were retailing for, I wasn’t surprised to see one left on the table at BB. However, I noticed that it had a yellow tag next to it. Discounted? Nobody, nobody, nobody discounts Apple gear… but there the tag was, beckoning that I come by and look. Sure ’nuff, the monitor was discounted 200 bucks! That’s a huge discount, and I expressed some concern about this being the floor model, and not knowing what kind of trauma it’d beeen through. My BB dude walked over to a rack, opened a package with a display connector in it, and fired up the monitor off a conveniently placed iMac. It looked great. He warned me that they probably didn’t have the box or books, but as it sat it was functional, available and discounted. While he went behind the curtain at the store display, I was weighing whether I really needed this monitor.

You see, I’d been wanting a second display for my MacPro, and had settled for a 20″ “square” Princeton monitor for my second. I’d had it for years, but it didn’t profile the best, and frankly, it didn’t look very elegant in its charcoal plastic case as it sat next my 20″ all metal ACD beauty. But, with the recent changes at Apple in their display and display card technology, they’d taken a path less trodden, leaving me in the dust quickly with no upgrade path… unless I wanted to go a pair of 30″ ACDs. Cool, but way costly — I could put a pair of really nice lenses in my bag for what that would set me back.

So I stood there paddling this floor model back and forth… and my guy walked from behind the curtain with a 20″ ACD, brand new in the box, never opened.

After a little mumbling under my breath, I asked him if the discounted price went for this new, boxed beauty. When he said yes, I eeked out “Sold!” and proceeded to thank him profusely, ringing out, and leaving BB like I’d stolen something.

Finally, a great second monitor sits atop my desk, flanking my four year old 20″ ACD. Folks have said that Apple’s long in the tooth on these displays (despite them looking terrific both esthetically and visually), but I, for one, am glad of that, as it’s given me the opportunity to pair mine up. And at a bargain price, to boot.

There is one big difference I’ve noticed. The new ACD is a little cooler than my original — whether that’s a manufacturing difference or just the effect of the years on my older ACD, I dunno. But the old one is definitely warmer. I’ve calibrated them both in the same setting and lighting, and suspect I should do that again, now that the new one has had a chance to “burn in” a bit. For normal work, I don’t notice it, but in dual screen Lightroom, especially working on a black and white image, I can really see the difference.

In any case, I’m happy to welcome this twin son of a different mother into the fold, and look forward to a nice, long relationship with it.

For quit a while, I’ve been struggling with my trusty ol’ Epson R1800. Struggling to the point where I’d pretty much decided to kick it to the curb, and either outsource my printing or replace the printer. Replacing the printer has been a tough thing to think about — I’ve got too much indecision between the R1900 and the R2880, and I didn’t want to buy into another set of printing problems if these printers manifested the same printing challenges I’d been having with my R1800. And outsourcing the printing… well, I’m a bit of a control freak with my hardcopy, so that was also tough.

In a nutshell, my printing was horrible. Images were waaaay too dark as compared against my color calibrated screen. This was making for two elements of workflow — one to get the image the way I wanted it on screen, and then monkeying with that copy in order to print it appropriately. Or, I could work the image on my Mac, bring up a virtual Windows XP session, and print from there. Eitehr way, it was twice the workflow, and a bunch of trial and error for each image, leading to wasted ink and media, and a general disinterest in printing my work. What good are my images if I’m not printing them?!?!?

As Vincent Versace taught us at DLWS, we work in service of the print. However, my passion lies in the creation of image, and the tuning of it to get it the way it looked in my mind’s eye, not with monkeying around with print settings to get the print even remotely close to my on-screen image. Printing should just work (or be pretty dang close to just working — I’ll take a endure a little tuning). For me, printing had become a distraction, and was taking me away from the joy of working with my images.

I’d researched this print issue before, and had seen loads of other folks running OS X Leopard having the same problems with their printers, with no real solutions in hand. Then I happened upon a website that pointed to this being a common problem with Macs that had been upgraded to Leopard, rather than having fresh installs. That fit me exactly. I went through the steps on the site — many, many steps — and was finally ready to print. A couple of days of life got in the way, but today, I ran some test prints…

And it was glorious.

Colors looked like they did on the screen. Shadows were good. Bright areas were actually bright again. And now I’m churning out print after print on both matte and glossy media, and once again discovering the joy that’s there when you can hold your image in your hands. There’s a tangible quality to a print that transcends the image itself, and makes it even more real.

Welcome back to the fold lil’ ol’ R1800 — I’ve missed ya.

I haven’t been putting much on the blog lately. There’s been just too much life in the way.

On Friday, June 5th, Becky’s father passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. It’s been a tough, tough week or so. But Becky’s seeing the right way, and in that, there’s some real comfort:

Not to get into it too much — but want a great Lord we have — Dad just went under the anesthesia for the surgery and they started losing him even before a single incision was made — so into ICU for Mom and me where we met him and were able to be stay with him as the angels took him home. He just went sleep on the table, never knowing the risk he was at. Through his dementia, God shielded him from the knowledge and the fear. He never was afraid — was very lucid and peaceful before the surgery.

And now, he has his 10 fingers back, his mind is solid again, his vision back, and his heart is going pitter patter. And I bet he has wings that rival St. Peters! And hey — I bet he does own all that land the thought he did for all these years, and much much more.

He just went to sleep, never knowing the risk he was at. What an awesome way to go. We should all be this lucky!

Becky found a poem that really sums it up:

I couldn’t have put it any better. I’m gonna miss ya, Glen.

Well, today was the day — the new iPhone OS was released, and I’ve pulled it down, dumped it on my iPhone and iPod Touch…. and I’ll see whether it was worth the wait.

In a real quick spin through the screens, it doesn’t look or feel much different than the previous version. However, tomorrow will be my first real chance to see any differences, and it’ll be interesting to see what the real-world experience will be like.

In reality, I wish I could get one of the new iPhone 3Gs phones that’ll be released of Friday. After checking with AT&T today though, I’m not eligible for a discounted upgrade until August of next year, and that means a difference of $200 (plus an $18 upgrade fee). It’s a crying shame, as I’d really like the faster network, as well as the higher storage capacity. When I bought my iPod Touch and iPhone, I was moving from an 80GB iPod, and I wanted something with a high storage capacity. And getting away from a hard drive was a good thing. However, the iPhone was only available as big as 16GB, and that wasn’t gonna cut it.

Now, the iPhone 3Gs offers 32GB of storage, and that would allow me to do a little convergence of devices. But…. at $499, I’m pretty sure I don’t wanna be pulling the trigger on that right now!

Last night, the transition from analog to all-digital television began. Becky and I watched it until the gory end. We watched our PBS station on channel 9 drop off, and within a couple of minutes, all the locals (except channel 5) disappear. Channel 5 appears to be acting as a “night light” station, broadcasting DTV transition information. I have no idea how long that’ll last.

However, there were still a lot of stations on the air. Some were broadcasting DTV transition info, and others were still transmitting regular programming. With the St. Louis stations out of the way, I was able to see some stations that I ordinarily couldn’t have because of the locals. It was nice to see some of those before they disappeared.

It’s been my theory that once the US analog stations were gone, it would clear the path to seeing analog stations from both Mexico and Canada with greater ease. I could have been more right. Within a few minutes of the local channel 2 switching their analog signal off, I started seeing XEPM out of Mexico (near Las Cruces). Cool.

I stayed up until about 2.15am, spinning the antenna, looking for fresh signals.

This morning, there were still quite a few analog stations up and running, much to my surprise. And this morning, I was treated to another opening, this time to the Atlantic coast — Charleston, Daytona Beach and Charlotte. Once again, if the locals had been on, I would never have seen any of it. For all I know, signals have always been like this, I just couldn’t see ‘em. I even saw some signals from Canada this morning.

Tonight — in theory, the last night of analog broadcasting — almost every station is gone. I’ve seen a few signals from Mexico, and a couple of locals, but most of the analog signals are gone. However, there’s still one stubborn station, WSIL, sitting on channel 3, running normal broadcasting. I’m a little surprised at that, and am wondering when they’ll turn out the lights.

Transition has been fun, and if the signals from Mexico and Canada have been any indication, there could some real fun to come!

I was thrilled to come home tonight to find that Software Update was bouncing, awaiting me with news of a new version of iTunes becoming available. And on the list of updates? Compatibility with the new iPhone 3.0 OS upgrade. But…. no 3.0 upgrade. Anywhere.

Dunno why I’m so excited about the promised new upgrades for my iPhone and iPod Touch, but for some reason, I’m kinda jazzed about it. I don’t develop on that platform, and I haven’t done enough research to have a real good reason to move to 3.0. But, I know I will, as soon as it’s available.

And I’ll probably find things to complain about. I know me well enough to understand my tendencies!