I’ve committed Snow Leopard to Doc Oc, but not without a few things to ponder.

Despite it’s 64-bit yellings and screamings, the OS is designed to boot in 32-bit mode out of the box. How big a deal is that? Well, I don’t really know. There’s loads of rantings out there talking about whether it matters or not. I look at it this way: if my OS is 64-bit capable and my hardware is 64-bit capable, why wouldn’t I run in 64-bit mode? From Apple, there’s no way to permanently change which way you boot. But, there’s unofficial ways. Here’s one. MIssion solved.

That leads me to my color calibration puck. I have an Eye-One Display2 from X-Rite (well, it was GretagMacbeth when I bought it), and it appears that the code that runs it only runs under Rosetta, which means it’s PowerPC code, not Intel. I never realized that, and wouldn’t have except that Rosetta isn’t installed by default with the OS. I’ve read about the puck not being detected, but I didn’t have that problem on the MacBook Pro, and now it’s all nice and calibrated.

All in all, things have gone pretty smoothly, although I won’t do the server for a couple of weeks — gotta bake the new goodies on the gear!

Remember the photographer we met in Santa Fe? Well, as a refresher, his name was Simon Biswas, and I’ve been following his journey. I dropped him an e-mail Friday to see if he’d be interested in stopping by in St. Louis. As it ends up, he was in Chicago, and was coming to St. Louis anyway. Through a flurry of e-mails, we figured out that he would be in St. Louis last night.

Beck pulled out all the stops — steaks, baked beans, corn on the cob, and a homemade apple pie. And we waited. And waited more. As it ends up, it took Simon a little longer to get here than he thought. I fired the grill up at 10.30pm. Dinner was great, conversation was great, and it was a hoot to hear about his travels. I think we overwhelmed him with our late-night hospitality, and we all finally crashed about 1.30am.

Today, it was a late sleep in, and loads of conversation over breakfast, image backups, laundry and some story swapping. I learned a lot about life in New York City (where Simon hails from) and the world of a freelance photographer. There’s surely a lot of day-to-day security in a 9-to-5 job, but man does freelancing sound good… at times. I definitely recognize it’s a ton of work, and likely not in my sweet spot.

After an afternoon of talking shop, Simon left, and left for his next destination. I really enjoyed talking shop with him, and am looking forward to following his journey to its conclusion in a week.

Yep, 45 minutes to install Snow Leopard on the MacBook Pro. Not bad, in the big scheme of things. However, there are some warts.

The first is that the reminder application from X-Rite that prompts me to profile my screen every now and then requires Rosetta to run. Boo. The other is that iStat Menus is not yet Snow Leopard compatible (per their site).

Neither of these are show stoppers for me (although I’m curious if I can calibrate my monitor with the current X-Rite software; there does not seem to be any mention of any issues with a quick look on X-Rite’s site).

Stay tuned kids… Doc Oc is next!

My copy of Snow Leopard has just landed on all fours on the doorstep. Less than five minutes after FexEx dropped it off, I have begun installing it on my MacBook Pro. There are rumors running rampant that it could do an upgrade in as little as 15 minutes. When I inserted the disc and began the installation (which had very few options), the installer said it had 45 minutes to go, and now it’s up to 54 minutes. I suspect the 15 minute upgrade will be nowhere to be found.

Stay tuned for more as I get through the upgrade, and start getting some first impressions.

Through some lucky monitoring of Twitter today (before it apparently crashed in fire, flame and swarms of locusts), I saw a co-worker pre-order Snow Leopard, the new version of OS X for the Mac. I guess I wasn’t paying close enough attention to MacLand, and didn’t realize we were on the cusp of the new OS dropping.

So tonight, I’ve ordered my little kitty, and am expecting delivery on Friday (based on Apple’s website). I’ve gotta admit, I’m hoping for some performance improvement, especially with Lightroom. My catalog is almost 95,000 images nowadays, and I really do see some odd slowdowns on Doc Oc occasionally. The odd thing about these little slowdowns is that they don’t really manifest themselves as metrics I can see — the cores aren’t busy, the system is responsive, but LR is living in spinning beachball city. I realize I have a crazy large catalog — I’m a bit of a pack rat, and I like searching through all my keyworded files at once — but it’s my DAM solution, and I’m sticking with it. The least it could do is run well on eight cores with access to 16GB of RAM!

Anyway, come Friday, we’ll see just what the new cat’s guts are like…

Becky’s told me that Cousin Mark just called to tell her that Aunt Helene has passed away today. This was her father’s sister. This sure leaves a big hole in their family.

Man, I just hate seeing the days, months and years pass by, and watching the faces fall away. Of course, it’s not all bad. We’ll get to see ‘em all in Heaven one day, and that’ll be as cool as it gets.

Name these beasties! (The video is big — sorry ’bout that!)

After the excitement of our tour of the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory yesterday, we decided we needed another dose. Actually, we remembered that one of Becky’s girlfriends needed a customized bat for her birthday, so that drove us back to Museum Row.

We got to the museum just as it was opening, expecting to be in and out, given the speed the Slugger folks turned out my bat yesterday. However, they were having computer problems today, and that meant we were delayed for an unknown amount of time. We’d been reading out the museums on Museum Row, and decided to visit the 21C Museum and Hotel.

The museum is billed as preserving the best of 21st century art. Given that we’re only nine years into the century, I’d say they’ve got a pretty good shot at that goal. I guess my roots are a bit more traditional. There were photos and sculptures of what appeared to be naked people of various ages — that doesn’t do much for me. There was a significant amount of space dedicated to experimental photography treatments. Those were sometimes enjoyable to look at, but didn’t really inspire me to go out and do anything really different. There was one interesting treatment that I saw, comprised of a traditional photograph, along with another print of the photo on translucent fabric stretched across the front of the frame. It gave a real dimensional quality to the image that I really liked.

They had a couple of interactive exhibits. One was a well placed camera that allowed you to be the art. Another was a series of videos (a la JibJab) that were political, humorous, and probably not in the best of tastes. In all though, the visit to the museum was quite fun. Beck and I have decided that we might stay there should we visit Louisville again… assuming they’re not crazy expensive!

We walked around the museum area, snapping photos of the area, and headed back to the Louisville Slugger folks to see if the bat was ready. It was, we said our farewells to the city, and pointed the Jeep home, satisfied with ending our vacation on a high note.

So what were the stats on the trip? We drove 3315 miles this time, and shot just a shade over 5000 images. On the first eight days of the trip (home, west, and back again), we had long drives six of those days, I was sick three of the nights, Beck was sick two of the nights, and we didn’t accomplish much of what we’d set out to do. However, adding on the trip to Louisville put a nice shine on the trip. And the trek west wasn’t a total loss. We learned some things about how to do that trip in the future, and we learned about the area, and will feel pretty comfortable back in the four corners area in the future.

With a couple of days of rest behind us, and a bit of wanderlust still in our veins, we decided to extend our roadtrip a bit, and add another unplanned stop on the trip: Louisville KY.

Why Louisville? Bats.

For years, I’ve wanted to go to the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory. I’m a baseball junkie, and have been since I was a kid. As I told Beck, there are three baseball meccas for me: Cooperstown, Field of Dreams and the Louisville Slugger site. This was the attainment of one of my baseball dreams.

Louisville is a quick drive from The Lou, and seemed like a easy place to add to our roadtrip. We left early, and hit the road — this time, eastward.

The drive across Illinois and Indiana was really uneventful. There’s not much to see, and few places to stop with much civilization. We decided to stop for lunch just west of Louisville, and that was the most entertaining stop of any we’d had on any part of the trip. Just across the parking lot from our lunch spot was an incredibly decked out van towing an old VW bug.

We parked the Jeep, and took a look at this weird combination of vehicles. They were touring from Art Car Agency in promotion of a film called Automorphosis. The California Fantasy Van had almost any kind of brass object you could imagine, along with about $15,000 of change riveted to the body. It was definitely eye-catching! The VW that was in tow, named Pico de Gallo, was musically themed and had all kinds of musical instruments and contraptions attached to it. There was even a stage atop the bug.

We watched a dozen or more people stopping to look at this strange configuration of vehicles while we were there. A few people were photographing them too, but most people just swung by for a look, shook their heads, and drove on. For me though, there was so much to photograph. I think you could spend weeks photographing the widgets on the California Fantasy Van alone.

Eventually, we hit the road again, and continued on to the Louisville Slugger site. The building is an old-style looking brick building in Louisville’s museum row, and has a gigantic Louisville Slugger bat leaning against the building. There’s no missing that. In fact, if you look on Google Maps and zoom in close, you can see the bat:

We went inside the building, and bought our tickets for the factory tour. While we were waiting for our tour to start, we looked around the museum a bit. I looked at a bat from Babe Ruth, which was amazing to see. But the biggest thrill was getting to hold a Mickey Mantle bat. There’s a special section where you can don some white cloth gloves, and hold a game-used bat from one of a few major leaguers. I had to go with Mantle’s bat, and it was awesome to hold a piece of history like that in my hands.

Our tour was pretty cool. They wouldn’t let us photograph inside the factory, but we got to see the whole process, including the carving of bats, both retail/minor league bats (about 30 seconds each) and major league bats (about 40 seconds each). We watched the application of signatures to some major league bats, and learned about the different wood and finishes authorized by Major League Baseball. It was a great tour, and taught you just about everything you’d need to know about baseball bats.

We ended our day with a stroll through the gift shop, where I arranged for my own bats! If you look through the photos from the trip, you can see one of them as it is processed and engraved. The other bat will come in a couple of weeks. That one’s a signature bat, and apparently it takes them a little while to get my signature on it. Can’t wait for it to show up!

The visit to the museum and factory was wonderful — I learned a bunch, and was in awe of the sense of history in the place. Definitely worth the drive!

After yet another night of illness for me last night, we decided to point the Big Green Box for home. In truth, we were dancing on the fence about possibly heading to Suck Creek Mountain as late as going through Oklahoma City, but we decided to just push for home, and get me back into some familiar territory. It’s always nicer to recover in your own bed.

Today’s was a long leg of driving. It’d be long when feeling the best you could, but with a none-too-well-functioning body, it seemed interminable. We crossed from Texas to Oklahoma, and then to Missouri, and the end of the line for this trip could be seen. We arrived home, Beck went to pick up the dogs, and all seemed right with the world.

You can’t control illness, and I’ve been very fortunate to have been lucky enough to not fall significantly ill during our travels. This year, though, the odds caught up with me, and our vacation planning was cratered. We’ve decided to call this a “scouting trip” for travel in the future. We’ve also agreed that next time, we’ll do Monument Valley first, which forces us on a southern route to travel west. We’d then travel up to Moab, and return again through a southern route. Those steps will keep us out of the really high mountains in Colorado, and perhaps spare us some of the struggle we had along the way.

We definitely want to stay at The View at Monument Valley, and see the dark skies and rock formations. I don’t know that we have to time that visit around a meteor shower (although that’d be cool), so we may end up splitting up as two trips the voyage to Monument Valley and Moab. Regardless of the pairing or splitting of those trips, they will definitely be made in spring, autumn or winter — no more treks into the desert in summer for us!