TranceMist

Sierra Dream

2009-07-09T16:25:00.003-05:00

Enjoy this photo while I reconfigure my blog.
I'll be back soon.

Why I Refused To Pay American Airlines' Baggage Fee - And Prevailed

2008-08-13T10:30:00.000-05:00

I had just spent nine days backpacking with friends in the high Sierra, spending the most of that time well above 10,000' enjoying the world free of the complexities of modern civilization.

Then I arrived at Fresno Airport (FAT) to begin my trip back home only to reminded exactly how ugly air travel has become.

My ticket was issued by Delta Air Lines. I flew to Fresno on Delta operated flights via SLC. However, my return journey included a hop from FAT to LAX via a Delta codeshare flight operated by American Airlines' subsidiary, American Eagle. American has a new checked baggage fee policy, $15 for the 1^st bag, $25 for the 2^nd. Delta Air Lines on the other hand, does not charge for the first checked bag. Furthermore, they allow up to three free checked bags for their Medallion members, which I am.

I arrived at the American Airlines counter a full one hour and 45 minutes before my scheduled departure time. During my 30 minute wait in line, I glanced at the signs announcing their baggage fee (which were all over the place) and wondered if I was going to have to deal with this issue.

Surely enough when it was my turn at the ticket counter, upon declaring that I have two bags to check (each under the 50lb threshold) the agent wanted to collect $40. I pointed out that my ticket was issued by Delta Air Lines, and that I was booked on a Delta flight number (albeit code share), and not an American Airlines flight. I further explained that since my ticket was issued by Delta Air Lines, that their CONTRACT of CARRIAGE prevailed.

As you would expect, the ticket agent would hear none of it and just gave me a blank stare, asking for $40.

I pulled out my Passenger Receipt and and Itinerary issued by Delta and pointed out the following two paragraphs written on the back, under CONDITIONS OF CONTRACT:

“Delta Baggage Policy for Domestic and International Travel. [ ... ] Delta will accept of a maximum of one (1) checked bag free of charge for each ticketed passanger for Domestic travel within the U.S., Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. [ ... ]”

...and...

“11. No agent, servant of representative of carrier has authority to alter, modify or waive any provision of this contract.”

Note: While the CONDITIONS OF CONTRACT clearly state one (1) bag free of charge for domestic travel, Delta's policy for Medallion members is three (3) free bags. I was willing to settle for one and pay $15 for the other had your agents been willing to follow the letter of this contract, understanding that the latter may be a priveledge that is not expressly extended in this agreement.

At this point the ticket agent barked “Sir, if you want to get on the flight, you will pay the fee.” She then tried to shove me asside to check in other passangers in-line, no doubt she would have ignored me until the flight left without me. I replied that I "do mind" stepping aside and will not do so until he checks me in. I also explained that her trying to charge me a fee that is expressly against the CONDITIONS OF CONTRACT that I held amounted to a breach of contract. As you may expect, airline ticket agents are clueless to this.

We even got her supervisor at the ticket counter involved. He was professional, checked some things on his computer, but was unrelenting. Pay or don't go.

I was having none of it.

I proceeded to call Delta Air Lines. I discussed the situation with the agent on the phone who brought in her supervisor. The Delta supervisor confirmed to me that American Airlines should not be charging me the baggage fee under the codeshare agreement and requested that I hand the phone over to the supervisor at the ticket counter in Fresno so that they could speak. At this point I had spent 27 minutes on the phone with Delta and had a mere few minutes left before American's "30 minute computer controlled check-in cut off".

Finally, after 10 minutes on my phone, out of view in the back office, the AA supervisor emerged and proceeded to check me in and to check my bags, without charge. He grumbled something about having to “send an email to corporate” but was otherwise professional. At this point however, there remained only 20 minuntes until scheduled departure time, well within their “30 minute computer controlled cut-off” as the signs at the counter clearly screamed. I was still at the ticket counter.

I hastilly took my now tagged bags to TSA screening, informed them of my impending departure and they graciously agreed to screen them next, ahead of the pile they already had. Fortunately there was no line at the TSA security check point. As I placed my items onto the X-ray machine, the PA system announced my name as being late for the flight, which was about to depart. When I finally managed to run up to the gate, the gate agent was just walking to the door to close out the flight. As I boarded the plane, I saw my bags on the conveyor being loaded into the cargo hold.

In summary, I arrived almost two hours in advance of the flight only to be endlessly hassled by ticket counter agents over a $40 “nickel and diming” procedure which I'm sure enfuriates every customer. Their ignorance of CONDITIONS OF CONTRACT and codeshare agreements is representative of poor training. I almost missed the flight and was frustrated and disgusted with the experience.

Given this experience, combined with American Airlines' policy for charging for checked luggage, I can be very definitive in stating that I will avoid American Airlines at all costs. I will not only ensure that I am never again placed in such a tenuous “code share” situation, but will also be sure to avoid purchasing any tickets on American Airlines directly. I further plan to publicize this situation to my corporate travel department, my friends, family and colleages, send copies of this letter the the media, and publicize on Internet discussion forums such as flyertalk.com, and of course here.

It was a very unpleasant way to end an otherwise fantastic vacation.

I have since then followed up with 10 letters of complaint to various departments and executives with American Airlines and American Eagle, 4 to Delta Air Lines, one to the Consumer Protection Division of the U.S. Department of Transportation and copies to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and American Public Media's Marketplace.

Why I Decided To Buy a Canon 5D Now

2008-05-21T15:27:00.000-05:00

I've wanted a 5D for a long time, since last fall. So I began to do some research and quickly learned of all of the rumors of an impending replacement. It has gone by several names, back then the Canon 7D was a contender (I even jumped in), though now consensus has settled down to the Canon 5D mk II. Canon had revamped every other camera in its EOS lineup except the 5D. Expectations were that they'd announce it at PMA08.

PMA08 came and went (I was there) and no announcement. Then there were rumors around April 22. Nothing.

Then I had a problem with my 20D where auto focus failed. Suddenly I was without an SLR. I bided time playing with several point and shoots and started to think again about the 5D.

I did more research and more thinking. I did a price analysis. I posted questions on Flickr. I discussed it with other contacts and bloggers.

There were several features that I really wanted in an updated 5D:

Higher usable ISO
The self cleaning dust-reduction system in the Canon 40D
Larger LCD (although the 5D's 2.5" is not bad)

Some of the other features introduced in the 40D like original decision data, and live view (because it would be useful for manually focusing macros) would have also been useful. And a Bluetooth link to a GPS for geotagging would have been the cat's meow.

All of my analysis pointed to the next possibility for Canon to announce an update for the 5D to be September at Photokina.

This lead me to also consider the downsides to a new 5D (albeit temporary ones):

September is a whole summer gone by
It won't be available in September (most likely), but one or two months after that
I wouldn't want the first production run, I'd rather wait a few months and make sure there aren't problems like with the 1D mk III [1, 2, 3 and 4].
There'd be a delay before Aperture supported it (most likely). It was months with the 40D.
Nobody knows when it might come out, really
Some people think Canon might not ever upgrade it
The price would likely be much higher. Estimates are around $3500 (body only).

I even considered the following alternatives:

I briefly looked at the 450D (XSi), but eliminated it for its size, durability and lack of a few key features (custom white balance, for one). Also the fact that they crammed 12 megapixels in the same space where my 20D has only 8 or the 40D has only 10 means there must be more noise.
I considered getting a 40D for now until a new 5D is out. I found several good comparisons the two [1, 2 and 3] (my desire for full frame won that)
I considered switching over the Nikon. I found a good comparison of the Nikon D3 to the Canon 5D. However, there are lots of tradeoffs. The D300 is not full frame, and while the D3 is, it is substantially more expensive ($5,000 body only at B&H) and much bigger and heavier eliminating it as a backpacking option. And then there's my investment in Canon L lenses to consider. Also, I like fast primes, Nikon isn't as good at that.
HamWithCam suggested I look at a used 20D, or 5D to bide time for the new 5D. I didn't like the idea of buying another used body where the condition isn't really known.
I even considered the 1D mk III, but it's not a full-frame, and while the 1Ds mk III is it has a lot of disadvantages. Cost ($8,000) size and weight, and the fact that there are 21 megapixels crammed into the same sensor size as the 5D. That cannot be good for noise. (it's a studio camera, anyway)

In the end I decided to buy the 5D now. It still has the best image quality of any DSLR even double its price, or in its size. It's a very well proven camera, and while it may be long in the tooth on "features", image quality is king. Then I found out that Canon was about to offer a $300 instant rebate in a couple of days (at the time). Decision made. I purchased mine at B&H.

Interestingly enough, my 20D came back from Canon Repair working again, even though they didn't fix it.

Now I have the best of both worlds.

Why Feedback Matters (PicLens responds to Flickr Users)

2008-05-21T13:50:00.000-05:00

I've been using PicLens for for a while now to browse the photo streams of my contacts' and discovering new users on Flickr. A while ago I wrote about two enhancements that would make PicLens much easier to use with Flickr. Others had similar ideas.

I decided to write to PicLens (using their Contact link) to let them know what I think.

Here's what I wrote:

I love using PicLens to browse Flickr.

However, I'm often frustrated by having to escape out of PicLens to mark a photo as a Favorite, or to leave a comment.

Adding these two features into PicLens, so I don't have to escape out would be a big improvement.

For example, if I could just hit the "f" (or "*") key while viewing a photo and have it marked as a favorite on Flickr.

If I could hit the "c" key and have a small dialog box pop-up to enter a comment.

That would be nirvana.

:)

A couple of weeks later I got a very nice reply from them in a personally written email (non form letter). Firstly, they thanked me for my thoughts and suggestions and mentioned that they have been "utterly amazed" by the incredible amount of support that Flickr users have shown them. They added that they plan to add "a load of new features" in the next few months, including options to share and save images, and that they would definitely consider my ideas (above).

They've also put together a Flickr community (pool) on Flickr called ImmersiveViews where the entire Cooliris Team is there.

Lastly, they invited me to participate in their beta program for the new features.

What a great response to a few suggestions.

I love PicLens.

Thank You Canon - For Not Repairing My Camera

2008-05-20T13:49:00.000-05:00

I just got my 20D back from Canon's Repair Department (in Jamesburg, NJ), "unrepaired".

However, the camera works again! Here's what transpired...

On April 25th autofocus mysteriously failed on this camera. I had been shooting macros that morning, which while I mostly focused manually, I did also use AF. Later in the afternoon I connected the 20D to my Mac (via USB) and for the first time tried to control it remotely using Canon's CameraWindow utility. While I've occasionally connected this camera to this computer via USB before to download photos via Aperture, I usually take the CF card out and just put it in a card reader. In the 2.5 years since I've owned this camera, this is the first time I tried to run CameraWindow with it. Although I did use the EOS Utility about a year or so ago to set the "owner string" in the camera (both utilities were updated to the latest versions available from Canon's web site). From that moment forward, the camera would no longer auto-focus. I tried 5 different lenses. I tried cleaning the contacts. I called Canon Technical Support.

Alas, that same day I decided to send it into Canon for repair. Canon will provide a free estimate, and if you turn it down they will return your camera and not charge you.

FedEx picked up the camera on April 28th and on May 5th I received a "Repair Estimate" email from Canon for a total of $306.20. The breakdown was $290 for labor, $1.20 for tax, and $15 for shipping.

Upon noticing my Tweet about this, HamWIthCam was kind enough to give me his very strong opinion that I should not have this repaired. Primarily due to the shutter life (100,000 cycles) and that I'm probably very close to that (initially I thought I was way over that), but also that I should instead put the money towards something with less use. A used 20D or 5D was his recommendation. The thinking being that I would want to buy the new replacement for the 5D when it's announced (I'm expecting September). While his logic made sense, the idea of putting money into another used camera (with condition not really known) did not appeal to me.

I gave it a lot of thought. One thing that struck me was that Canon's repair estimate did not contain any parts, only labor. HamWithCam suspected that it was only an initial estimate. I called Canon and they confirmed that it was a final estimate to repair AF, although if they would find something else wrong during the course of repairing AF they would contact me again for approval to fix whatever that might be at a higher cost. He was also adamant that a technician or engineer had not actually looked at my camera before that estimate was made. This I agreed with. However, the "labor only" aspect bothered me. If there was nothing to replace, then could I fix it? This lead me to retrace in my mind what lead to its apparent failure and the possibility that perhaps connecting it over USB and trying to control it with CameraWindow caused some sort of state or software error in the camera that could be rest.

So on May 7th I declined the repair. My plan was to reset the camera to factory default and see if that would clear up the problem. If not I could re-install the firmware. A helpful sales person at Showcase (local camera store) also recommended taking out both batteries (the main BP-511A and the secondary CR-2016) and letting it sit for a few minutes, thus also inducing a reset (presumably).

I waited in great anticipation for the camera to return. Canon took their sweet time returning it. They only shipped it back on May 17th, 10 days after I declined the repair.

So today I have the camera back. I put in a battery, CF card and a 50mm f/1.4 lens. Autofocus Works!
I try the 100mm f/2.8 Macro lens that the problem first occurred with. AF works!

So what happened?

I doubt that Canon actually repaired anything. The settings in the camera appear unchanged. The first thing that I would expect them to have done is reset the settings.

I suspect the problem cleared itself after a while. Note that when I sent the body back to Canon, it had with it only the body cap and eye cup. No battery (BP-511), although the secondary CR-2016 did remain. Perhaps they removed the CR-2016 just to check if it was there? But wouldn't that reset the settings?

I'm not entirely sure, but I like the fact that it works again, and that I saved myself a tad over $300 for what would most likely have been a useless repair. And thanks to HamWithCam for insisting that it wasn't worth throwing $300 at anyway. It seems like I have the best of both worlds now. :)

In the mean time, I did a lot of shopping and ordered a 5D which arrives tomorrow (Canon has a $300 instant rebate now). More on why I still chose to buy one, despite rumors of an imminent 5D mk II soon in another post.

And finally, it's a bit early to tell that the problem has gone away completely. While the camera does auto focus now, I'm hoping that I do not begin to see an intermittent problem develop over the near future.

Camera Buying Analysis

2008-05-15T15:41:00.000-05:00

Having my 20D's autofocus fail a few weeks ago got me to start thinking about new equipment again.

That has snowballed into a rather large consideration project and I've been doing a lot of comparison shopping.

I'm pretty much decided on getting a 5D. The remaining questions are which other lenses, and there's a bit of a consideration of also picking up a 40D body. However, I actually think I can revive autofocus on my 20D when it comes back from Canon (I declined the repair, they wanted $300). Having given that some more consideration, I hadn't tried a hard reset or reloading the firmware.... Canon is taking forever to return it.

I'm also leaning toward the L series prime lenses. But I've also got my eye on the 70-200. I already have the 24mm f/1.4L, 50mm f/1.4 and 85mm f/1.2L which is why those are not on the list.

My other consideration is whether I should get the 24-105mm f/4 L IS kit lens with the 5D, or skip it and get another prime.

The above are prices I've researched. Bold indicates the lowest price. I've eliminated the 2x Extender because the only lens it would work with would be the 135mm f/2L. I've also compared prices against a very reputable local shop. They're not even close to what I can get on-line, and I haven't even factored in the 7% local sales tax I'd have to pay there. The on-line prices do not include shipping. If you think I should consider some additional source, let me know.

I'm certainly not going to get all of this now, but these are the ones I'm looking at.

Finally, I spent a long time considering waiting for an long-rumored and awaited supposed 5D successor. My current analysis tells me that it would be September before Canon might announce one. Add a couple of months before they're shipping and available, and maybe a few more before the bugs get worked out of the first production run and it'd be almost a year (or more) before I'd want to buy one (EOS 1D mk III have had issues). In the mean time, the 5D is a very stable quality product.

Children, iTunes and DRM

2008-05-09T18:37:00.000-05:00

A couple of years ago I bought both of my daughters (pre-teen) MacBooks. Along with that I gave each of them a $10/month iTunes allowance.

At the time I didn't buy much stuff on iTunes myself because of DRM. That has changed now that DRM-less music is much more pervasive on iTunes. Still, for them it was a simple solution and I didn't want to expose them to the non-purchase alternatives.

Needless to say, they've done a great job of spending that allowance and filling up their 80gb disks with all kinds of music, movies and a lot of TV shows. It wasn't long before we had to start to delete some stuff off of their laptop to make room for more. So there was the dilema. I paid for this stuff, I don't want to just throw it away.

The solution I found was a rather simple and elegant one: Transmit

My MacPro has tons of disk space (4TB at the moment). They have logins on it as well.

I use a program called Transmit to synchronize their MacBooks with the MacPro (one way), and then they delete what they no longer want on their MacBooks. The beauty of this solution is that they still have access to everything, even from their MacBook via iTunes sharing from the MacPro.

The trick was to set up the SSH daemon on their MacBooks and use SCP as the transport within Transmit. First I turned on Remote Login under the Sharing tab in System Preferences on their MacBooks. However, I didn't want their laptops open to a password guessing attack (kids use simple passwords). So I set the following two options in the SSH daemon's configuration file (

/etc/sshd_config

PasswordAuthentication no
AllowUsers trancemist kid1 kid2

The first entry prevents passwords as being used to login to the system via the SSH protocol.
Only pre-authorized SSH keys are allowed.
The second line is a bit more security by only allowing specific users to login.

The last step was to generate an SSH key for each account on each laptop, and put the public key in the user's

~/ssh/authorized_keys

file.

When I want to sync (one way) their MacBooks to my MacPro, I just login as them, load the private SSH key into SSH Agent, and run Transmit's Synchronize feature as shown in the screenshot above. I pick their iTunes folders as the source (MacBook) and destination (MacPro) for the syncrhonisation. Transmit updates everything new from the MacBook to the MacPro.

The final step is to go into iTunes on the MacPro and select

File->Add to Library...

and point it at their iTunes Library. Now they have access to it all again.

I also run complete backups on their laptops to an external FireWire drive using SuperDuper!

Two Features That Would Make PicLens Much Better (on Flickr)

2008-05-09T09:25:00.000-05:00

I've been using PicLens a lot recently on Flickr to browse photo streams, photos from new contacts and photo pools. Even Explore (by calendar).
(PicLens is a browser plugin for Firefox and IE on Windows and Firefox and Safari on OSX)

One of the features that I love about PicLens is that I can view most photos at maximum resolution. I have a 30" monitor, so this makes a big difference. What's interesting is that as long as someone has uploaded a photo in full resolution, I can see it that way. Even if they don't allow "All sizes" to be viewed based on their permissions. So using PicLens I actually see a lot more than I would by just browsing Flickr or by using something like FlickrLeech.

However, I find that I don't Fav and comment on photos as much as I'd like to because it's so painful to re-enter PicLens and find the spot where I left off after popping out to Flickr in Firefox to leave a comment or Fav a photo.

So there are two features that I think PicLens should implement for Flickr.

I should be able to use a keyboard shortcut (i.e. "f") to mark a photo I'm viewing as a favorite.
I should be able to leave comments directly within PicLens. A keyboard shortcut (i.e. "c") should pop-up a small dialog box for me to leave a comment.

This would be nirvana.

If you think this would be a good idea, write to them and tell them.

Canon Dilemma

2008-05-05T17:13:00.000-05:00

I have a dilemma.

Two actually.

I. Autofocus in my 20D stopped working last week, and after diagnosing it with Canon, they recommended sending it in. I did, along with a note that the pop-up flash occasionally won't pop-up. Today I received notification from Canon that they want $300 to repair the camera (it's well over a year out of warranty).

So this isn't really much of a dilemma. While some may question spending $300 on fixing a 20D (HamWithCam already has), it's worth it to me. It's been of great use and I'll continue to use it (if the shutter doesn't break next -- I'm sure it's well past it's 100,000 cycle life. Several times over, most likely).

I've wanted a second body for a long time, and have been thinking about it much more since I've been without my SLR for a week.
(in the mean time, I've gotten a few good shots with some of my point and shoots)

Hence the next dilemma.

II. XSi (450D), 40D, or 5D?

Let me preface this with stating that I've wanted a full-frame sensor (i.e. 5D) for nearly a year, and have been holding off for the past six months waiting (hoping) that Canon will announce a 5D mk II (or maybe even a 7D). After all, they've revamped everything else in the product line.

Here are the things I'm waiting for in a revised 5D:

Higher ISO
Highlight priority
Dust vibrator (you know, in front of the sensor, I change lenses a lot)
Digic III (because III is better than II?)

So here are my real questions:

Which of the above three has better ISO with less noise?

Is ISO 3200 on a 5D better than ISO 3200 on a 40D?

Even if that's the case, I still want full frame (think wide angle).

What do you think? Will Canon ever update the 5D?

The Salcantay Trek

2008-03-07T11:47:00.000-05:00

Cerro Salcantay - 6271m / 20,574'

In May of 2005 Marjon and I set out to Peru. The primary objective of our trip was to visit Machu Picchu (although we saw a lot more). As typical for us, we tend to a fair amount of research in advance, but make only basic reservations and figure the rest out along the way. This worked fairly well for us when we arrived in Lima with only an onward flight to Cusco the next day, but no accommodations there and no onward reservations. We'd figure it out along the way.

Plaza des Armas - Cusco

We knew in advance that the Inka Trail now requires reservations which can only be booked through a trekking company (you can't trek it on your own, sadly). So we figured we'd arrange that when we arrived in Cusco. We had already planned to spend nearly a week in Cusco to acclimate to the 10,500'+ (3200m) elevation. So, we had plenty of time, or so we thought. We discovered the hard way that all spaces were booked for months in advance. We ran around to at least a dozen outfits, hoping someone might be able to arrange something. This is South America after-all, doesn't "no" just mean "You look like a gringo and we want you to pay more?" Not so.

Marjon at the Hotel Wiracocha in Cusco

All was not lost though, and in retrospect I'm actually glad it worked out this way. We had arrived with all of our backpacking gear, tent, sleeping bags, food for 5 days, all we needed was to purchase some fuel locally (very easy). I dreaded the idea of being hoarded along by some tour operator, along a crowded trail. Then there was the equipment question. These treks are all inclusive. They provide the gear and the porters to carry it. The benefit is that you can hike along carrying little more than a day pack in splendid comfort and have camp and dinner ready for you when you arrive at the end of each day. This all sounds good to most people. Personally, I don't like to rely on such outfits. I suspected their equipment would be cheap, and -- this being Peru -- their food likely unsafe to eat (poor sanitary conditions). But what to do? Should we then carry our own gear while we're along with a tour operator that provides everything for everyone else? Marjon was up for it. I'm glad that I never had to make this decision.

As we were looking for spaces for the Inka Trail, one of the tour operators suggested the Salcantay trek. It was relatively unknown at the time. Only a couple of operators seemed to be running tours though it. It's through the wilderness well southwest of Machu Picchu. It's not paved, no reservations or permits are required... and here's the best part: very few people go there. Perfect! We decided to go for it, on our own, no tour operators no crowds.

We had actually read in Lonely Planet about a similar trek that also starts from the town of Mollepata, but then crosses on the eastern side of Cerro Salcantay and into fairly dry territory where there are a few small ruins. So we already had an idea of where to start, and the suggestion from that description to hire an arriero in Mollepata. However, we didn't really have any good description of the route, nor any topographical maps of that area. I had my GPS, but it was only loaded with the Garmin Worldmap which is very basic and wouldn't even get us to Mollepata let alone be useful for navigation along the trek (now I would have checked the free GPS MapCenter2). None of the local shops or outfitters in Cusco had any maps suitable for navigation. The answer was South American Explorers in Cusco. There we purchased the 1:100,000 map of the "Machupicchu" sector published by the Instituto Gragrafico Nacional (IGN) in Lima. The title is somewhat misleading as it doesn't actually cover all of Machu Picchu, but it does cover the entire trek from just north of Mollepata to Santa Teresa.

Map of Salcantay Trek with GPS tracks from MapSource (full size)

Our plan was to get to Mollepata and hire an arriero to carry our gear to Santa Teresa. The trek passes over a 15,000' (4578m) pass just below Cerro Salcantay (6271m / 20,574'). We knew that weren't in shape enough, nor acclimated to carry our 50lb packs over that. The only public transportation from Cusco to Mollepata is a colectivo that runs daily at 06:30, the location of its origin was described vaguely and its regularity was in question. By chance we discussed this with the owner at the Hotel Wiracocha where we were staying. He recommended taking a taxi. It would be approximately a two hour ride and would cost about $22! Marjon and I looked at each other in disbelief, at first thinking that was so much more expensive than the $1 or $2 each that the colectivo would cost. Suddenly the reality of speed, comfort, assured transportation and flexible departure time struck us. "We'll take it!"

Views along the route from Cusco to Mollepata

Mollepata (elev. 9,456' / 2882m) is a very small town situated up on a hilltop at the bottom of the Rio Blanco Valley. A tiny dirt road winds serpentine up a dry mountain for many miles before reaching a town that appears completely isolated. We found a small hotel where we got a room with two beds, access to external hot showers and breakfast. All for $5 each. Given how tourism has been growing recently, especially due to overflow from the Inka Trail, this town will likely not last this way for long. However, it was an incredibly beautiful quaint, quiet little town when we were there in May of 2005.

Marjon With The Owner of the Hotel in Mollepata

While the hotel owner's son prepares us dinner, we discusse our plans with the owner and ask if he knows of a good arriero. "Sure, my brother is an arriero, I will get him." A few minutes later, Neptali Estrada Perez appears before us. A man in his late 40s, wide jaw with brimming mustache and a welcoming smile, Neptali strikes me as a seasoned man with good balance and a sense of humor. I instantly like him. We discuss our plans, Marjon conducts a bit of negotiation (he insists on bringing two animals), we settle on a price and agree to meet at 8am the next day for the start.

Neptali has done this route many times. His value becomes evident the minute we leave town. He takes us through a labyrinth or trails and zigzag paths that we would not likely have discovered ourselves. He knows this trail well, he's done it many times. As it would come out later, he's not just our arriero, but considers himself our guide.

Marjon with Neptali (our arriero) two hours out of Mollepata
with Cerro Salcantay visible in the background.

The road winds steadily up on a hill above the west bank of the Rio Blanco towards Salcantay. By the time we reach our intended camp at the Soraypampa meadow we have traveled 12.1 miles and gained 3,135' (955m) in elevation. Soraypampa is a big meadow with a beautiful view of Cerro Salcantay. It's green with lots of water flowing, a few cattle grazing, and a couple of dirt huts at its edges.

Water is plentiful but we're well aware that it contains at least Giardia and probably many other bacteria. I find a good flow of water, filter it with my MSR Miniworks, and then add a few drops of chlorine and let it sit. So we treated all of our water while backpacking in Peru.

Just as I'm walking back to our camp, a tour group with about a dozen trekkers begins arriving and makes camp nearby. Given how large Soraypampa is, we don't really feel crowded.

We pitch our tent, eat some dinner and Neptali announces that he's off to see if he can find a place to sleep in one of the huts. They're homes of the peasants there, but they usually rent out a small space for arrieros for a few pesos. After we've settled into our tent, Neptali returns to announce that the place is full of "pulgas" (roaches) and he won't sleep there. He asks if we have room in our tent. That's a rather silly question given that our tent doesn't look like it will fit two from the outside, and certainly not three. However, I brought along a rain tarp just in case we had to deal with inclement weather and I offer to make a small shelter using two trekking poles to prop up the ends. He seems very happy with that and so we go back to sleep.

Our Camp at Soraypampa. Neptali Slept Under The Tarp.

We awaken to a fantastically beautiful morning at 12,591' (3873m). Marjon has a bit of a headache, probably from the elevation. We pack up and begin our trek to Cerro Salcantay. Neptali knows the way. The views are breathtaking. Salcantay has a few clouds shrouding some of the view, but not enough to hide her completely. The valley is lush green and the scale of everything is very impressive.

We pose for a few pictures and let the animals get some water before beginning the really steep climb up to the 15,000' pass.

Cerro Salcantay

The climb up over 15,000' feet is grueling. As I get over 14,000' I can barely take three steps before I need to catch my breath. I'm wearing only a light trekking t-shirt and shorts. My pack and everything else is mounted on the horse. Marjon decided to ride the mule. She's doing even worse than I am. The air is thin. She's getting a migraine and can hardly think. Sure signs of elevation sickness. But we press on, knowing that we will quickly descend down the other side and not expose her to this for too long. I begin to feel cold. As I approach the top of the pass, warm humid air from the high jungle on the other side blows over, quickly cools and saps all of my energy. I decide to put on a jacket. Suddenly I feel better and can continue. It's a struggle just to put one foot in front of the other. Finally, we reach the pass.

Me At The Pass (4,630m /15,200 feet) below Salcantay

After a short break we begin to descend down the other side into the high jungle. The vegetation is lush. The air warmer and moist. The valleys surreal in their beauty.

The Mist of the Jungle - descending to Huamantay

After another break for water and then lunch, we arrive at what is the most beautiful alpine meadow and valley I have ever seen. Completely unspoiled by people. Though there are a couple of small huts and what appear to be some subsistence peasants with goats and horses, this all blends in perfectly with the environment. Nothing seems out of place, and it looks like it has been this way for centuries. Time appears to have left this place alone.

Marjon arriving at Huamantay

I am convinced that this is where I'd like to make camp. The beauty is breathtaking. However, Neptali is adamant that we must continue onward. That we will not have enough time to finish the trek otherwise. Not having really calculated the distances myself I go along, reluctantly, regretting it as we descend into the jungle. In retrospect I would have preferred to spend an extra day on the trek and camp here. If you do this trek, I highly recommend it. It is the most beautiful place along this entire trek, in my opinion.

As we descend down into the jungle, a couple of guys from the other group with the tour operator catch up to us and ask if they can borrow our mule because one of their women has developed some sort of digestive illness and can barely walk (poor sanitary conditions by the cooks, as I suspected). They are from Isreal, with their heavy accents and not much on charm. Their tour operator appears to have nothing for them, unprepared for such an event. However, their need is real and even though Marjon was slightly limping on a swollen ankle, she agrees to let them use our mule, saying it'll probably be good for her to walk a bit, downhill now. Neptali is insistent that we charge them something. I recognize their desperation and the fact that we're in the wilderness of the high Andes and decide that the higher rules of the mountains apply, you give assistance to those who need it here. We let her ride on the mule, no charge. They are very grateful, and their mood improves.

After several hours of downhill on a steep muddy trail, we arrive at camp just at dusk. It's a small open clearing in the jungle. Crowded with lots of tents and tours at this point. It's exactly the kind of place I wanted to avoid, and I still wish we had stayed at Humantay. We make camp. Neptali recommends we offer a few pesos for the use of the land to the owners in the small hut, so we do. As we unpack our gear, pitch our tent, set up our tiny "pocket rocket" butane stove we notice the porters and guides from the other tours watching us. Later, Neptali tells us very proudly that they've never seen anyone with such "sophisticated gear" go it alone here. They're fascinated. He's proud to have such clients. We think it's charming, but we're tired and just want to go to bed.

Me at Our Camp on Day 2 - Totorayoc

The next day is a long trek down along the Rio Santa Teresa. We're in the jungle. It's warm, there a mosquitos and other bugs now, but not enough to bother me. The terrain is not as interesting as higher up in the mountains, but we do spot the occasional hut or small hand farming area up high on the mountain slopes. After a few hours we arrive at what appears to be a small snack bar. Made out of wood, and selling bags of 10 Pomegranates for a few pesos. These things are growing all over the place, but at the price it's not even worth picking them yourself. We go through 3 or 4 bags of these fantastically ripe and sweet fruit. They were simply amazing.

Another two or three hours of trekking downhill and we arrive at a horribly ugly little settlement called La Playa. It's quite a stark contrast from the natural beauty of the past three days. Trash is littered all over the place and there are only some makeshift sheds around. Nobody seems to care about how this place looks. Neptali informs us that this is the end of our trek. There is a road that leads from here to Santa Teresa, the town along the Rio Urubamba which leads to Machu Picchu. We can walk it in about three and a half hours or pay a few pesos to go in a colectivo.

Saying Goodbye to Neptali at La Playa

We pay Neptali for his three days of excellent service, and I give him the topographical map of the area that I had bought in Cusco as a gift. I'm not really sure he knows how to read such a map (nor does he need it) but he accepts it with great pride. I suspect it will be a personal treasure to him rather than of actual use. We say goodbye and the minute he leaves we instantly miss him. He was an excellent guide, a good friend, and not to mention arriero.

We wait in La Playa for what seems like eternity for the colectivo. Finally, after the drivers have a leisurely lunch they start loading up. In a small Toyota 4x4 van, which seems not much larger than a typical suburban minivan they manage to pack 15 people and all of their backpacks on the roof and set out down the steep, pothole laden dirt road to Santa Teresa.

Santa Teresa used to be a nice town. However, a severe flood on the Urubamba river wiped out most of the town which sat too close and too low to the river. The flood also wiped out the railroad that came from Aguas Caliente (Machu Picchu) and the bridge across the Rio Urubamba. Thus the town was cut off from the rest of Peru. What remains now is an ugly shanty town with muddy streets, all built high up above the original town. We were advised to camp on the soccer field with the rest of the tour groups. A rather anticlimactic end to our journey, but not all bad. We met several of the other trekkers, including the Israelis who said the girl was feeling much better. We found a hot shower in a shack a few blocks away and were advised to keep all of our packs inside our tent overnight due to the possibility of theft. That turned out to make for a rather cramped two person tent.

View from Our Tent in Santa Teresa

Since the railroad and bridge were washed out, the only way to Machu Picchu is to cross a Tyrolean bridge across the raging Urubamba river, hike a couple of miles to a point where a truck picks everyone up and takes them to the hydro electric plant a few miles up river, the new terminus of the train from Augas Caliente.

Crossing the Rio Urubamba in Santa Teresa

So we proceeded with the rest of the tour groups. We crossed the bridge, walked the mile on sand, and rode the truck to "Hydroelectrico" to wait for the train.

Marjon Riding the Truck from Santa Teresa to Hydroelectrico

And in Hydroelectro we wait.

For the train.

Nobody seems to know when the train to Machu Picchu arrives or departs.

Finding out where to purchase tickets is even a mystery.

We feed a skinny injured cat some leftovers from our tuna pouch.

We wait.

Eventually, the train comes.

Waiting for the Train to Machu Picchu

Hydroelectrico is just that. A hyrdo electric station that takes advantage of the sharp decline in the elevation of the Rio Urubamba between the east and west sides of Machu Picchu. They've actually drilled a long hole under Machu Picchu and use the pressure of the water to generate electricity. Little of this is actually evident there, except for the few guards and fences that make sure you don't get too close. However, this is also now the terminus of the tracks to Aguas Caliente.

The Backside of Machu Picchu

In the end the train came and we got to Aguas Caliente and had a fantastic time visiting Machu Picchu.

Photos from our entire trip to Peru are available in my Peru 2005 set on Flickr.

Reference Info

Location of Salcantay Trek in Peru (full size)

Satellite Image of Salcantay Trek (full size)
(yellow is train route between Aguas Caliente and Cusco)

You can download my GPS data from the Salcantay Trek on my Maps download page as either a GPX file or Google Earth KMZ file.

PicLens Rocks

2008-03-06T08:12:00.000-05:00

I've been using PicLens for a little over a week now to explore various streams on Flickr. It works very well on sets, users' streams, pools, etc. PicLens is a plug-in (extension) that works with various browsers (Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer). It's not just for Flickr, PicLens also supports many other websites such as Picasa, Facebook, MySpace, etc. Though I've only used it with Flickr.

The above screen shot is of PicLens in full screen mode (on my 30" Apple Cinema Display) while browsing pbo31's "your favorites" set.

It has a fantastic kinetic motion based interface, similar to what you may know from the iPhone. You just drag your mouse across the screen (while holding the primary button) and the photos fly across your screen. Click on one and it gets bigger, double click on one and it goes full screen. What I find particularly fascinating about this is that PicLens will allow me to view photos in full screen mode from people that have not allowed their full resolution photos to be accessible through the standard Flickr interface! It has really revolutionized how I explore streams on Flickr.

I initially came across PicLens in a comment by Greg Furry posted on Thomas Hawk's article about FlickrLeech 2. While I have used FlickrLeech in the past, its user interface pales in comparison to PicLens, IMO. My only slight gripe about PicLens is that I wish it were easier to escape out of it to leave a comment on someone's photo. You can do that, but you can't get back in exactly where you left off, which is annoying. I also haven't investigated to see if clicking on a photo in PicLens counts as a "view" on that photo page, it would be a shame if it did not.

Home Office Of The Week

2008-03-05T14:52:00.000-05:00

I've been wondering lately why the above photo of my home office that I posed on Flickr has been getting so many views and favs lately (5,287 and 17 as of this writing).

Technorati provides the answer.

It appears Enterprise Nation (a home business website) has decided to publish my photo as their "Home Office of the Week".

And another website, Shedworking decided to echo it.

Do I Travel Too Much?

2008-02-29T10:22:00.000-05:00

A recent thread in the Atlanta Photographers Guild group on Flickr got me thinking about how many of the photos that I actually take do I post on Flickr.

So I decided to run some numbers.

Here is an analysis of my major recent trips since last summer:

Europe, July 2007 - 1531 photos, 217 on flickr = 14.1%
The Palisades, August 2007 - 931 photos, 127 on flickr = 13.6%
Netherlands, August 2007 - 581 photos, 179 on flickr = 30%
London, November 2007 - 151 photos, 42 on flickr = 27.8%
Warsaw, November 2007 - 194 photos, 30 on flickr = 15.4%

Sierra, October 2007 - 741 photos, 47 on flickr = 6.2%
Patagonia, December 2007 - 2517 photos, 144 on flickr = 5.9%
PMA & Death Valley, Feb 2008 - 413 photos, 10 on flickr = 2.4%

I believe the numbers for the first 5 trips are misleading, because I've already deleted a lot of rejects, so I was only able to count the images left. For the last 3 trips, I haven't rejected anything yet, so I believe those percentages are more accurate.

These figures also do not include photos that get deleted during the trip and thus never get counted.

What are your percentages?

Backups for Apple Laptops

2008-02-25T21:42:00.000-05:00

A friend writes to say that he's just gotten an external disk drive for his Apple laptop and asks "What's the best way to backup my iPhoto library?"

Here's my advice.

The first thing you should do is make sure it's formatted for "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" format.

Most external disks come formatted for PCs using the FAT (File Allocation Table) format which is really crappy for Macs.

You can check with Disk Utility, here's a screen shot of where to look:

If it's not this format and your disk is empty, erase and format it anew (careful, it will delete everything on that disk).

Next, the best way to do backups is with the SuperDuper! program. It will just clone the disk in your laptop to the external drive.

Should your internal drive fail, you can just clone it back after getting it replaced. Even better, you can just boot off of the external drive and run from that while waiting for a new laptop drove. Just hold down the Option key on your keybaord when you turn on your Mac.

SuperDuper! makes an entire clone of your disk. So if you just wanted to restore your iPhoto library, you could go onto that disk and drag a copy of it back to your main disk. Then double click it and iPhoto will open that library.

Also, have you upgraded to Leopard yet? If you have, use TimeMachine! TimeMachine does incremental backups and makes things really easy to restore.

If you haven't upgraded to Leopard, you should really consider it. Time Machine is just one of the many great features.

If you do have Leopard, you can create two separeate volumes on your external disk. Let's say you bought a 250 gb external disk and your internal laptop disk is 80gb. Using Disk Utility, split your external disk into two volumes, one of 80gb and the other with the remainder. Use SuperDuper! to clone your internal disk to the 80gb partition, and give the rest to TimeMachine.

You might ask why you want to use both? The answer is that SuperDuper! makes it trivial to restore your system, and it makes a clone partition that you can litterally boot off of. While restoring from a TimeMachine backup is more involved and slower. However, TimeMachine is better for being able to restore individual files (or images). They're complimentary.

The Final Hour

2008-02-25T21:09:00.000-05:00

At first I thought that my quest to get to Racetrack Playa in time to photograph the moving rocks in the golden light before sunset had failed.

In about five hours of driving to get here, I had managed to get a flat tire and then waste time walking around the wrong end of the dry lakebed searching for these rocks and tracks in vain, thinking the sun had already set.

Just as I was about to give up, I thought I'd drive to the south end and see what's there. As I approached I saw another SUV parked and what appeared to be people in the distance. Suddenly the meaning of the word "Playa" hit me and I realized that walking around the middle of a lake, you do not find a "Playa"!

What's more, whereas I thought I had lost the sun behind the mountains, it turns out that at the point where these rocks are there's actually a gap between the mountains. Not only does this gap allow the sun to shine longer than the northern end of the lake (excellent luck for me), but I believe it also contributes to the explanation behind how these rocks move.

In my hypothesis, this low gap in the mountains on the west side of the lake allows for the wind to rush through with great force. The mountains on the southern and southeastern side of the lake form a curve to the north that these winds can bend around and continue to blow at great speed. This, I believe is the force behind the motion.

The second part of the hypothesis is lubrication. Having stepped in a bit of a wet area on the western side of the lake, I noticed how incredibly soft and slippery it was. When this very porous surface receives just a slight bit of moisture, I believe the entire surface of the lakebed becomes incredibly slippery, thus allowing the force of the wind (mentioned above) to ever so slightly and gently push these rocks.

Finally, the bend of the eastern mountains to the north creates a kind of a "wind bowl" where the wind can swirl around, thus perhaps explaining why not all of the rocks move in the same direction (over time).

Special thanks to G. Dan Mitchell for posting this photo that first got my attention and his subsequent advice on getting here.

A truly magical place.

Racetrack Playa
Death Valley [National Park]
California

Published by San Pellegrino

2008-02-25T15:29:00.000-05:00

About three weeks ago I was contacted by Besanopoli the "communication agency that manages all San Pellegrino websites" requesting to use of this photo:

Per their email:

"Official website www.sanpellegrino.com is dedicated to the S.Pellegrino and and Acqua Panna waters - with its extensive sections spanning all the interesting nuances of Italian culture, from the thousands peculiarities of our food and wine tradition to works of architecture, art and design; from the selected tourist itineraries to the best restaurants, their gourmet cooking and the Italian Lifestyle on the whole."

I thought about this request, and the fact that there was no payment offered. In the end I thought it'd be a good thing. It's fun to see your own work published (with permission and credit). I've thought for a long time that the traditional business models of photography and "old media" are quite staid. It's not like they asked me to do a photo shoot for free, after all.

There are photos from several other Flickr members featured on that page, and credit is given to all of them at the end of the article.

Thanks Besanopoli and San Pelegrino.

And above all, thanks to my good friend Carlos, Architect and Chef who was actually cooking this delicious Risotto that night at his house.

Carlos Ostrej

The article will be available for a limited time on www.sanpellegrino.com, under the title "Risotto: simply delicious!"

Where Are They

2008-02-25T08:34:00.000-05:00

Having just fixed a flat in the middle of Death Valley on a long stretch of unpaved road, I decided to continue the remaining 7 miles, now without a spare.

By my calculations, I had given myself plenty of time to get here in time for the hour before sunset. In fact, I was worried that I would have too much time here and might even take a nap.

But now I'm here. 16:07 PST.
Where's the sun?

"Have I missed the sunset?"

"Where are the rocks and the tracks?!"

I walk around the nothern end of the dry lake bed, wondering where all of the rocks are, and still rather perplexed that somehow I hadn't considered the possibility that there would be a sizeable mountain to the west of the lake bed that the sun would go down over a good two hours before actual sunset!

"Did I really just spend nearly 5 hours to drive over 200 miles and miss it all?"

The Middle Of Nowhere

2008-02-24T18:24:00.000-05:00

Let's put this in perspective...

To get to this point I had already driven almost 200 miles from Las Vegas to Ubehebe Crater in Death Valley. The last 20 miles were on gravel washboard.

While the road as you can see isn't necessarily all that challenging, it is evident from this photo that there is at least one hazard.

Had I taken the advice of G. Dan Mitchell, I would have still been about 10 miles back, but with a fully inflated tire.

Not me.

No patiance.

40mph, even a peak of 50 mph on a few long flat stretches. This Toyota Rav 4 seemed to be doing just ifne.

Then a curve. A bit of a drift... overcompensation... and "BAM!" accompanied by an instantaneous "BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!" in the cockpit (flat tire sensor alarm).

Suddenly the toughts go through my mind:

"You idiot!"
"Crap!"
"I hope there's a spare..."
"I hope it's not a doughnut"
"I hope it's inflated."

I'm 20 miles from the nearest paved road, which is then over 50 miles from the nearest town.

I am in the middle of Death Valley.

I am literally IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE (map). With a flat.

I had anticipated the possibility that I might get suck. The low temperature at night was forecast for 25F. I was prepared (down jacket, hat, gloves, etc).

I changed the tire.

I had another 7 miles to go to get to Racetrack Playa.

Now what?

Do I continue?

With no spare?

Aperture 2

2008-02-23T09:24:00.000-05:00

I'm thrilled with the new enhancements in Aperture 2. Among my favorites is the Advanced pane of the enhanced "Highlights & Shadows" controls. It really helped me bring out the definition in this photo.

There are many other great features, and this isn't the only one that I used on this photo, but it made the biggest difference.

Here's the final photo:

.

Note: Aperture 2 doesn't display a side-by side comparison like this, nor does it overlay the controls in this way. This is a composite illustration that I created using The Gimp.

Aperture Adjustments - Under The Hood

2008-02-08T08:53:00.000-05:00

(view the original 1:1 large image)

One of the truly powerful features of Apple's Aperture product is the way that it handles image files, versioning and workflow. In this post I'll explain how Aperture keeps track of your images and the changes you make to them, and why this method is both very efficient on storage and non-destructive.

Highlighted in yellow on the image above is a "stack" of three images. Actually, it's the original photo as well as two versions of it. In this example I happen to be using a RAW image from a Canon 20D camera, but the exact same principle applies to any image file which you import into Aperture. Highlighted in blue are the various adjustments you can make to an image. There are more choices available than I've displayed here. You can add or remove these controls with one of the pulldown buttons in the upper right corner of that blue highlight. One thing worth pointing out here is that there is a section called "RAW Fine Tuning" that only shows up if you're using a RAW image. Otherwise everything else is the same regardless of the image type.

As you can see, all of the controls are in one place. This makes processing of photos very easy and quick as a matter of workflow. If you're working with a RAW image, Aperture automatically applies the pre-defined RAW profile for your camera. You can make slight adjustments here if necessary, but they're not required. I typically increase sharpness as illustrated in this screenshot, although that doesn't work well for certain subjects. The beauty of this interface is that you can do everything by clicking and dragging on the right without having to use any additional pulldown menus or complex navigation.

You can begin to make changes to your image and Aperture will store those changes independently of the original (Apple calls this the "Master") image file. The changes are actually recorded as XML data that gets interpreted and applied on the fly as you view each version. It is not until you actually export an image that a final raster in the format chosen is created with those changes applied. Thus the beauty of this model is that not only can you always come back and undo or modify your changes, but you can also tell what changes have been made!

There is also a substantial disk space savings this way. As each version of an image requires only a few dozen kilobytes of XML to store the information. So in a typical scenario, you'll have the original image file, in this case a 7 mb RAW file plus less than 50 kb of XML per version. Contrast this to Photoshop which saves your image into a PSD file which keeps growing as you make changes. A PSD file based on such a 7 mb RAW file as here can easily grow to 10 times (yes, 70 mb or more) the size of the original file! And you get to save such a huge PSD file for every version (though you probably wouldn't be creating multiple versions for this reason).

A final note on versions. It is not required to make a separate version of an image before applying edits. Aperture automatically begins to keep track of version info when you start to make edits. Again, the original ("Master") image itself is never modified. However, in practice I prefer to create a new version first, and then begin making edits to it. Since version are really, really cheap (< 50 kb) there is really no second thought required about creating them.

Here's a screen shot of what the menu looks like if you right click on an image:

(view the original 1:1 large image)

I generally use the Option-V key combination to create a new version and edit that. In the example above, I have two versions. In Version 1 (the center one in the stack) I've applied all of the basic adjustments to the photo. In Version 2 (rightmost in the stack) I've applied an additional crop to the photo. Doing it this way was merely a personal workflow preference for me. For I can always undo a crop or even duplicate a cropped version and undo the crop in the new version. Just for clarity, the leftmost image is my unmodified master. I could have applied edits to it directly, but in my workflow I chose not to.

Now, let's have a look at how these version files are actually stored. There are two ways you can import images into Aperture. The first and most common method is that Aperture copies the image into its library. The second is that the image remains wherever you have it in your filesystem and Aperture maintains a reference to it, but all versioning information is still kept in the library. I only use the first method, storing everything in the Aperture Library. This has the additional benefit of being able to back everything up into an Aperture Vault (a copy of your entire library in another place), say on an external hard drive. You can have multiple Vaults and they can be "updated" without need to copy your entire library again. I keep three vaults. One on an internal disk, one on an external disk and a third on an external disk off-site. The two externals get rotated monthly.

Here's a screen shot of Finder showing how a specific image and all of the associated metadata is stored within the Aperture Library.

(view the original 1:1 large image)

Taken one step further, here's a detail view of the size of each file. The original image (in this case the Canon RAW file with a .CR2 extension) is highlighted in blue, and all of the changes are stored as Version files with .apversion extensions. These are highlighted in yellow.

(view the original 1:1 large image)

Finally, here's a screenshot of the first part of one of the .apversion files. Note that all of the changes are kept track of as XML:

(view the original 1:1 large image)

There's a lot more on the Aperture Support page at Apple, as well as this Typical Adjustment Workflow video.

Crucial RAM for MacPro

2008-02-04T22:39:00.000-05:00

Today I installed an a 4GB RAM upgrade to my MacPro. The MacPro is one of the first generation, it has two dual-core Intel Xeon processors running at 2.66 GHz.

I had ordered the system with 4 GB RAM (4 x 1GB), so there were still four DIMM slots left (they must be installed in pairs).

Over the past few months I have been fairly unhappy about performance on my MacPro, especially when running Aperture. This won't solve all of the problems. The other two that I have identified are that I need a faster GPU and I need to somehow resolve my disk access issues. On the first one I had made the mistake of ordering the

NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT with the system, thinking I wasn't going to be doing any heavy 3D graphics work (or gaming). Well, it turns out Aperture (and Core Image) use the GPU for all of their computation, so my MacPro actually feels dog slow running

Aperture

. Recently I tried

Pixelmator

(which I got via the

MacHeist

sale with 11 other OSX apps for $47). Pixelmator is even worse than Aperture, to the point that it is almost unusable.

My second problem is that my disk is thrashing a lot. So I've been monitoring memory utilization and have noticed that I have also been running very low on physical RAM when running Aperture and a few other apps at the same time (usually I have Skype, Adium, Colloquy, Firefox, Thunderbird, The Missing Sync, Activity Monitor and maybe even Preview up at the same time, and occasionally I'll add iTunes). This should relieve much of the physical memory issue. Now I need to look at the general disk access issues, I hear it grinding way too much even when there's plenty (i.e. over 2GB) of physical RAM available.

The RAM was from Crucial. The 4GB upgrade that I installed was part #

CT579443

which cost $269.99. It came as two 2GB DIMMs, and the heat sinks look identical to the stock Apple ones that came with the system memory out of the factory. It was trivial to install. I just strapped on an anti-static strap (which did not come with the memory), opened the side door, pulled out the top memory riser card and seated them in. I then pushed the riser card back in, closed the door and powered up. That's all there was to it.

Nikon Envy

2008-01-31T23:51:00.000-05:00

HamWithCam at PMA08 with the new Nikon D3 and a "size matters" lens.

We watched a presentation at the Nikon booth by professional photographer Dave Black who tested the D3 and took photos for the brochure.

We were extremely impressed with the new 3D tracking auto-focus and high ISO (6400 and 12800) capabilities with no noise that I could see (at 6400 ISO).

The D3 delivers what I've been hoping Canon would at least partially deliver in an upgrade to the 5D. Granted this is substantially more camera than the 5D or even 1D mk III. However, Nikon has now leapfrogged Canon into a realm that changes what's possible. Canon can do at best 3200 ISO with a +1 stop expansion to 6400. Now Nikon is at least one if not two (low noise) stops better plus the 3D autofocus.

I'm very disappointed that Canon has not upgraded the 5D. So much so that this has got me thinking about a D3, despite the fact that I have no Nikon equipment to start from, and already a significant investment in Canon L series lenses. Yes, this is not a fair comparison (5D vs. D3). I should really be looking at the 1D mk III vs. D3, and the 5D to the D300. Except the D300 has a crop sensor (more noise). But so what, I'm not bound by theoretical "best in class" marketing categories.

The bottom line is that if Canon had an EOS 5D mk II (or 7D) out now that did 6400 grainless with expansion to 12800 ISO, I could consider it. But they don't, and the 1D mk III can't touch it.

The D3 is very tempting, despite the cost.

Ham's shot of David's presentation.

My first HDR

2008-01-29T20:25:00.000-05:00

Playing with Photomatix (OSX version) to create my first HDR. This was a quick experiment to see how the process works rather than an attempt to create a fine image. Hence you see artifacts of the exposures being taken at a slight delay, such as the moon shifting.

I was returning early this morning from taking my wife to the MARTA station and noticed the moon in an interesting position above the house with the sky just beginning to brighten from the sunrise. Setting up my camera on a tripod and taking my first exposure, I suddenly realized the SBR was too high and instantly thought of this software that QuasiJones had pointed out to me here.

The software is very easy to use. Take three bracketed exposures (preferably in RAW) and load them into the software. It adjusts for slight misalignment and produces the HDR which you then need to weak the tone mapping a little to achieve the final result. You can play with the settings to get anything from a very mild effect, to a very dramatic albeit unnatural one.

Here are my three bracketed* originals.

* Note: I didn't use the bracketing function in the camera, but instead manually exposed these as follows 0.8s @f5, 0.5s @ f8 and 1/8th @ f8. All were at ISO 100 using a Canon 20D with the 17-85mm IS-USM kit lens.

International DRM workarounds on iTunes

2008-01-27T15:08:00.000-05:00

A friend from The Netherlands wites that he's found a way around the idiotic restriction that iTunes has that prevents him from buying certain content that is locked only to customers with US-based credit cards.

The workaround appears to be to either have someone in the US send you an electronic iTunes credit (purchased with a US credit card) or to purchase iTunes Gift Cards in the US and use those codes.

Costco sells iTunes gift cards at a slight discount, almost enough to make up for the currency exchange fees PayPal charges.

Apparently it works.

DRM sucks.
How long before it's dead?

Wear A Full Face Crash Helmet on I-75

2008-01-25T14:24:00.000-05:00

One of my wife's colleagues just wrote in and reported that he was just in a serious car accident, though he's fine.

Apparently two large chunks of marble flew off of the truck in front of him and crashed into the windshield of his car, right in front of his face.

Roy is fine, but writes:

> That’s it, I’m wearing Nomex and a Full Face Helmet on I-75.
>
> The truck driver is in jail… I’m fine, I guess.

That's marble. Think of how much that stuff weighs! It hit the windshield right in front of his face!

He's lucky to be alive.

UPDATE: The driver was arrested for having a suspended license.

More photos:

Where's the Canon 5D Mark II?

2008-01-24T18:28:00.000-05:00

The Canon 5D is long overdue for an upgrade. Rumors, initially of a model 7D (spoof photo above), then 5D Mark II have been swirling around on the 'net for quite a while.

I've been expecting Canon to announce such a camera at PMA in Las Vegas next week. However, from reading this article on Photography Bay, it appears that they may not even do that.

Although they did just announce two new pro telephoto lenses, the EF800mm f/5.6L IS USM and EF200mm f/2L IS USM (800mm at f/5.6L with IS, wow).

I've been putting off buying a 5D because it's way overdue for a replacement. The 20D has been succeeded by the 30D and then 40D which brought forward several new improvements.

Key things I'd like to see in the upgraded model:

Higher ISO (i.e. 6400 and custom 12800)
Anti-static mechanism
DIGIC III

There are other improvements (such as higher MP) for sure, but those are the key ones for me.

But there's another factor: whenever Canon announces this upgrade, it will likely be months before I decide to buy it. My workflow is wed to Apple's Aperture software, which usually takes several months to support new camera's RAW capability. Without Aperture, I can't process RAW. Without RAW it's useless to me. I'm not going to go buy Lightroom even if it did support it. I have tens of thousands of photos in my Aperture library and simply will not switch for this reason. Besides, I really prefer Aperture anyway.

Well Canon?
When will it be?

Los Cuernos del Paine

2008-01-20T23:37:00.000-05:00

We've just spent three weeks trekking through Patagonia.

Our itinerary was as follows.

• Fly Atlanta -> Santiago
• 2 days in Santiago
• Fly Santiago -> Punta Arenas
• Bus from Punta Arenas to Puerto Natales
• One night in Puerto Natales
• Bus to Parque Nacional Torres del Paine
• 6 days backpacking in the park
• Bus back to Puerto Natales
• One night in Puerto Natales
• Bus to El Calafate in Argentina
• Three nights in El Calafate
• Christmas Day
• Perito Moreno Glacier
• Rent a car and drive to El Chalten
• Three nights in El Chalten
• Hike up to Lago de Los Tres Torres to see Fitz Roy
• 12 hour / 16 mile day to go ice climbing on a glacier
• Drive back to El Chalten
• Fly El Chalten -> Ushuaia
• Four nights in Ushuaia
• Ferry on the Beagle Channel
• New Year's Eve
• Rent a car, drive to Estancia Harberton
• Take small boat to island to walk with Penguins
• Fly Ushuaia -> Buenos Aires
• Three miserable nights in Buenos Aires
• Filthy, dirty, hot, run down, neglected, smelly city
• Fly Buenos Aires -> Atlanta

Pictures being posted on Flickr.

hello, world

2008-01-20T23:25:00.000-05:00

After a very busy 2007, I have finally had some time to catch up, update some software and synchronize my blog with Blogger.

My blog is now being posted in tandem on trancemist.net as well as blogger through the use of RapidWeaver 3.6 and the RapidBlog plugin.

Open winmail.dat from Mail.app (Apple Mail)

2007-04-23T11:49:00.003-05:00

Today I came across this neat

Mail.app

(Apple Mail) extension called OMiC that reaches inside an Outlook

winmail.dat

attachment and makes it not only accessible but useful on a Mac!

It's ShareWare... you can use the full functionality, but paying €5.00 EUR will stop the nagging pop-up reminders.

AppleScript: Check to see if an app is running

2007-04-20T06:08:00.003-05:00

As I was writing an AppleScript to control Skype and Adium yesterday, I wanted to make sure that I didn't start those applications if they weren't already running.

There seem to be a number of ways in AppleScript to check if an application is already running, and they all center around using the "

System Events

" method.

Here's the one that I chose:

tell
 
application
 "System Events"
    
if
 (
count
 (
every
 
process
 
whose
 
name
 
is
 "Adium")) > 0 
then

        
tell
 
application
 "Adium"
            
set
 
my status type
 
to
 
away
            
set
 
my status message
 
to
 "I'm on the phone..."
        
end
 
tell

    
end
 
if

    
if
 (
count
 (
every
 
process
 
whose
 
name
 
is
 "Skype")) > 0 
then

        
tell
 
application
 "Skype"
            
send
 
command
 "SET PROFILE MOOD_TEXT I'm on the phone..."

                
script name
 "IM On Phone"

            --

            -- 
Uncomment the following if you'd like to take Skype off-line
            --

            -- 
send
 
command
 "SET USERSTATUS OFFLINE"
 
script name
 "IM On Phone"

        
end
 
tell

    
end
 
if

end
 
tell

Read my previous blog entry for a description of the scripts that I wrote.
They are also available for download.

Thanks to sparrow from Walled Networks for pointing me in the right direction.

AppleScripts to control Skype and Adium from BluePhone Elite

2007-04-19T17:47:00.003-05:00

I have been using BluePhone Elite for a few months. This is a very cool piece of software that connects to your cell phone (if it is among the many supported models) over Bluetooth and among other things can perform actions upon certain events such as starting a call, ending a call, etc. It also has a proximity feature which is based on being able to connect to your phone over Bluetooth. Since the Bluetooth in Macs (and most cell phones) has a maximum theoretical range of 10 meters, and in practice much less, this works quite well. One of the actions that BluePhone Elite can perform upon an event is to run an AppleScript.

I found a number of AppleScripts on BluePhone Elite's download page. However, I found them all quite crude and unsuitable for me. In particular, none of them checked to see if the application was already running before telling it to change the status (here's how to do that). This has the effect of launching the application if it's not already running. Not a desirable effect on an event triggered by you walking away from the system. So I did a little research into AppleScript and wrote my own.

Here are the ones I wrote to control Skype and Adium:

IM - On The Phone
: Sets the away status on Adium and changes the away message in Adium and the "mood" message in Skype to "I'm on the phone..." It can optionally take Skype offline if you un-comment that line.
IM - Available
: This one undoes what the previous one does. Removes messages in both Adium and Skype and sets both to "available". It can optionally put Skype back on-line if you un-comment that line.
IM - Walked Away
: This is like
IM - On The Phone
but uses a different message to indicate that the user has left the computer. For use with the proximity feature.
IM - Welcome Back
: This is like
IM - Available
but also speaks "Welcome back" through the speech synthesizer to give you a verbal acknowledgment that it has detected that you're back.

Of course, these scripts are very easy to edit so you can customize the functionality to suit.

Note: Since I have both a MacPro desktop and a MacBook Pro laptop, I've placed these in my iDisk so that they're available to both. It doesn't matter where you place them, just point BluePhone Elite to that location when specifying the AppleScript you want to run.

Here is a screen shot of the configuration pane to enable the scripts upon incoming calls (I've also enabled them for outgoing calls):

And one that shows the configuration of the proximity feature:

Enjoy!

Casio EX-S600 Camera in video mode

2007-04-17T16:17:00.003-05:00

Today my friend Jay came over for some help in figuring out the video mode on his Casio EX-S600 camera.

There are three recording modes, which translate to the following:

640x480 low compression (high quality)
640x480 high compression (lower quality)
320x240 low compression (1/4 the size of the above)

Here are two of the video samples we took.

Note that you're watching these from YouTube, which transcodes them again into Flash Video and they're both going to be the same size on your screen, so this isn't a scientific test. However, Jay's objective was to see what the difference was, and which of the three he could get away with and still get decent enough quality to record a kid's sports activity and then transcode and burn to DVD.

Test #1 (using option #1 above)

Test #2 (using option #3 above)

Jay - time to get you set up with a Flickr account for all of the stills. :)

Set EXIF data for Motorola Razr and other camera phones

2007-04-17T07:27:00.003-05:00

The Motorola Razr v3t has what turns out to be a very nice 1 megapixel camera (see recent photos taken with mine). This is the 3rd camera phone that I've owned. My Nokia 6600 had a mediocre 640x480 camera (examples). Next my T-Mobile MDA offered more resolution (1mp) but the quality was still quite poor (examples).

However, none of these phones produce any useful EXIF metadata. At least the Nokia 6600 stored the date/time in comments section of the EXIF metadata. While not immediately useable, it was once I wrote a script to extract it and properly write it into the EXIF "CreateDate" field.

The Razr doesn't store the date/time anywhere in the photo itself. However, it does have an option to use the date/time as the file name. So I've written a perl script to parse that date/time out of the file name and and write it into the "CreateDate" EXIF metadata field.

The script also sets a bunch of other EXIF data, such as the make and model of the phone, your name and copyright, name of software used to manage the photos, etc. And you can still use it if you don't have a Razr. It only updates the date/time if it notices that the file name is in the right format. Otherwise it still sets all of the the other stuff.

Here's an example:

In particular, I like that it also sets the EXIF "MODEL" tag so that Flickr can correctly identify the camera (as well as the date/time) from photos taken with your camera phone, which it cannot without the proper EXIF data.

You can download "

exif.pl

" (as a ZIP archive) from my Scripts downloads page.

You'll need perl and also the command line program called exiftool.

If you're unlucky enough to need to run this under Windows, you will also need to get a Korn Shell. I recommend downloading the UWIN toolset from AT&T Research. It installs a complete UNIX-like command line environment under Windows and is a great baseline for a bunch of other open source stuff.

Note: The Motorola Razr V3t is a T-Mobile specific model (hence the t in V3). I haven't tried this with any other Razr V3 models.

Set EXIF date/time for Nokia 6600 camera phone photos

2007-04-16T17:00:00.003-05:00

The Nokia 6600 saves the date/time in the comments field of the EXIF metadata, of all strange places.

This is what it looks like (using exiftool):

So much for proper use of the standards...

I have written a simple script that extracts this date/time and places it correctly in the EXIF CreateDate metadata field.

You can find my script "

nokia-exif

" on my scripts downloads page.

You will also need to obtain the command line program called exiftool and of course, perl. All of these are available for just about any platform.

If you're unlucky enough to need to run this under Windows, you will also need to get a Korn Shell. I recommend downloading the UWIN toolset from AT&T Research. It installs a complete UNIX-like command line environment under Windows and is a great baseline for a bunch of other open source stuff.

My DVD burner is smoking!

2007-04-10T15:09:00.003-05:00

I had read in the past that Disco the CD/DVD burning software I use occasionally had animated smoke. However, my graphics card apparently wasn't supported in previous releases. Needing to burn something (and not wanting to use Finder for it) I launched Disco, which I hadn't used in quite a while. It updated itself with a new version and voila! Ca fume!

The Bear And The Birdhouse

2007-04-02T17:21:00.003-05:00

These photos were forwarded to me through a long chain of email messages...

I will keep this in mind next time I setup a bear bag while backpacking!

My Home Office Setup

2007-03-02T01:17:00.003-05:00

I work from home. I spend a lot of time in my home office.

This week we had painters over, preparing to sell the house. I had to move things around so they could paint the windows. This gave me a chance to clean up my office and take some pictures. Click on the picture above to see all of the notes about what's what.

Jim and Karin's Housewarming Party

2007-02-28T15:41:00.003-05:00

My friends Jim and Karin had their housewarming party this past weekend. What a fabulous job they did. The catering was fantastic, their house so well put together, and we had a very good time.

Naturally, I took pictures. You can view the slide show or go directly to the Flickr page.

Combine PDFs in OS X

2007-02-27T13:55:00.003-05:00

If you want to combine multiple PDF files info one you have several choices under OS X. By default OS X provides a python script that is the basis for an Automator action which you can incorporate into an Automator script. You can also use this script manually from the Terminal (Shell) as described on the Mac OS X Hints website.

To make the command line just a tad simpler to remember and use, I've wrappered that into a shell script called

join-pdf

which you can download from the OS X Software section of my downloads page. Just place it somewhere in your

PATH

and make sure it's executable ("

chmod 755 join-pdf

").

Enjoy

You Break It, You Buy It

2007-02-25T20:37:00.003-05:00

We had a lot of fun during the inspection of the house that we're buying yesterday.
Those are my legs sticking out of the cieling!

Click on the picture for the full details.

Vino Libro

2007-02-14T02:27:00.003-05:00

I discovered this cool little wine lounge in Glenwood Park yesterday after shooting some photos of Vickery's with my friend Carlos.

Vickery's in Glenwood Park

2007-02-12T22:34:00.003-05:00

I went to shoot a restaurant today in Glenwood Park (East Atlanta) for a friend who is an architect, it was one of his clients.

Afterward we went to Vino Libro next door to have some wine and review the shots. The owner came over and asked if we were photographers, she would like to get some photos of her lounge, interesting angles, etc. More on that later.

Sign My Guest Map

2007-02-05T21:51:00.003-05:00

Backups

2007-01-29T18:30:00.003-05:00

There is a discussion going on in the Atlanta Flickr Group about various ways to backup your photo library.

I wrote the following, which after I wrote it realized it would be useful to post here as well.

I'll give you the rundown of what I do, but here's my basic advice:

1. Backup whatever you have to an external media regularly (i.e. daily or weekly)
2. Keep an off-site backup of that, and update often (i.e. monthly)
3. Get a real photo management package with database capabilities (there are many good ones)

I have 12 years worth of digital photos (history) and wouldn't want to lose it. Nobody does.

I recently switched from Windows (where I used ACDsee) to Mac and now use Aperture. Here's my basic setup:

Organization

• High level folder for each year
• Project for each day of the year (A "project" in Aperture terms is where the actual photo files live)
• Albums within each project (if necessary) to organize by topic, location, etc. (An "album" in Aperture terms is a container which holds references to the actual photos. A photo can be assigned to as many albums as you like)
• I can then create additional albums elsewhere to group and organize photos as I see fit, but never have to alter the actual physical location of the files (which is always chronological) because of the album tool/metaphor.

If you're interested, you can see a screen shot of what this hierarchy looks like in the Aperture Library.

Storage

• I keep everything on an internal 500gb SATA disk because it's fast.
• I don't run RAID, I prefer to use the extra disk to keep a seperate full copy (I'll explain why later)
• I bought a couple of external Western Digital MyBook 500gb Dual Interface drives at Costco for $229 each. Dual-interface because single interface only has USB 2.0, and IEEE 1394 (FireWire) is a hell of a lot faster (even at 400 mb/s) than USB 2.0 in actual performance. Though this may not make sense for you if you have a PC instead of a Mac.
• One drive stays at home connected to the system, the other sits in the vault at the bank. I rotate them monthly.
• I run two kinds of backups. 1) daily incremental file-level backups every night. Any file that gets added/modified will get backed up during the wee hours of the next morning. 2) application level backups in Aperture. Aperture has this concept of a "Vault" which is basically a full backup of your entire library (including database, modifications, etc.) that it can update.
• I keep one Aperture Vault on the other 500gb disk in my system, a 2nd one on the external WD MyBook disk, and a 3rd on the (disconnected) disk in the vault.

Benefits

You don't need to have a Mac or Aperture for this setup, though they do automate some of process.

Having the two-external disk method combined with the automated backups gives me the following advantages:

• Multiple copies of data. If I accidentally delete something tomorrow, I'll have today's copy.
• Incremental backups allow me to get something that was deleted 10 days ago, as long as it's within my retention window.
• Off-site backups allow for disaster (i.e. fire, theft) recovery (I keep my Quicken data on there, too) and also provide a longer retention window, in case you realize you deleted something last month that you didn't mean to.

RAID

I don't run RAID for a number of reasons:

• It adds complexity (complexity is the enemy of reliability)
• You have to test whatever RAID (1 or 5) setup you have to make sure that it actually works during a disk failure and that you can recover your data.
• RAID 5 (striping with parity) can slow you down
• RAID 1 (mirroring) doesn't have the performance issue, but you double your cost of storage.
• I decided to spend the money on an external disk and keep a full backup externally and off-site. This doesn't protect me as well in small windows of failure (i.e. between backup intervals), but it does offer better disaster recovery. I prefer this as my short term tolerance for data loss is fairly high (i.e. I could maybe recover today's photos from the memory card still, etc.)

Disadvantages

There are of course disadvantages to this approach.
• Cost may be one of them (i.e. you already have two internal disks you can use to mirror)
• Discipline. If you don't run the backups, you're not protected.

Alternatives

Finally, there are hybrid approaches too... For example, I also bought a Western Digital MyBook 1TB Platinum Tripple Interface (USB 2.0, FireWire/400 and FireWire/800) unit to hold video. This 1 Terrabyte of storage is actually two 500gb disks which you also have the choice to configure as a single 500gb mirrored (RAID 1) volume.

So in this case, you could have an external storage device that is mirrored. This one was about $449 on buy.com. However, I really also wanted off-site backups and felt I was protected well enough that I didn't want to spend another $449 to do that.

Evening Light

2007-01-25T23:14:00.003-05:00

So I picked up a new lens today... not that a lens makes ALL of the difference, but I'm really amazed what difference it does make. Of course, the light this evening was much better than this morning.

The above photo is untouched, just exactly as I took it out of the camera. Much better than the one I took this morning.

While it doesn't have the same level of blur in the background as I created this morning with The GIMP, the light is so much better.

However, here's a good example of DoF (Depth of Field) from another picture taken within moments of the above:

And then later this evening, I took this one which really shows off the DoF effect of the lens:

This one has been cropped and lightened up a bit in Aperture.

Morning Blur

2007-01-25T12:01:00.003-05:00

Before

After

It's amazing what you can do with common (especially free) photo editing tools like The Gimp.

The morning sunlight on my neighbor's tree caught my eye as I was coming back from a walk today. In the few seconds it took me to go inside, grab my camera and change lenses, it had already left the tree I saw it on. However, instead it appeared on this larger one.

I didn't like the sharpness of the rather unattractive house in the background, so I applied a 160 px Gaussian blur to the background in The Gimp and then feathered it at 20 px. The tree however, is untouched except that I changed the color temperature from 5,000 to 6,422 as a last step for the overall image.

I suppose I could have achieved the same effect naturally with a different aperture. That didn't occur to me until I started writing this, though. And the light was gone.

You can also see my post of this photo on Flickr.

Favorites on Flickr

2007-01-25T11:09:00.003-05:00

I recently found fd's flickr toys and used it to generate a mosaic of my currently favored pictures on Flickr.

As well as the image below, which I use as a header in a few places.

Atlanta Flickr Meet-up

2007-01-25T09:21:00.003-05:00

Photo by Slingerdoo

Yesterday I discovered that there is an Atlanta Flickr Group! How pleased I was to find out that there are other people getting together in Atlanta to talk about such common interests.

How even more pleased I was to discover that they were having a meet-up that same night, not far from where I live!

Photo by HamWithCam

Marjon went with me and we had a great time and met some fun people.
Looking forward to another one.

Photowalking Atlanta by Night

2007-01-24T14:56:00.003-05:00

Last night I went out late to do some more photowalking in Atlanta, this time by night, very late at night (i.e. early morning).

The interesting thing about being out well after midnight is that there is almost nobody around. You can stand in the middle of a four lane road and take your time to compose a photograph without worrying about being run over. You can take photographs if places on their own, without people, without cars. And you can often observe some of the seedier aspects of life emerge.

Last night I took about 70 photos. I ended up with 5 that I was happy enough with to post on my Flickr page. I learned a lot. About adjusting for exposure in a different way at night than during the day. About the quality of the lens and f/stop. Composition. And most interestingly of all, after living here for over 10 years, I learned how BIG Atlanta is! When you can travel around from one side of midtown to the other side of downtown freely, unhampered by traffic, and have time to take in the beautiful views and notice how far away you just were, you realize that Atlanta, judging merely by tall buildings from Downtown, Midtown and to Buckhead, is quite large.

Photowalking on Wikipedia

2007-01-23T18:07:00.003-05:00

Today I created the Wikipedia entry for Photowalking.

The idea occurred to me as I was reading a couple of blog posts by Thomas Hawk about his recent run-ins with security guards trying to keep him from taking pictures of buildings from public space. This got me thinking again about the relevant legalities, which I had been thinking about during my photowalk yesterday. While trying to do some research I realized that there wasn't an entry in Wikipedia. In the spirit, I decided I'd start it.

Feel free to contribute.

Last.fm - The social music revolution

2007-01-23T17:41:00.003-05:00

The above is a real-time list of the last three tracks that I listened to on my computer.

Last.fm is this service that keeps track of what you listen to on your computer and then lets you track it in various ways, share those lists with other users, find other music based on your listening habits, recommend events in your area, etc.

It works by installing a fairly non-intrusive program on your computer that keeps track of this stuff and uploads it to the server. Last.fm calls this Scrobbling. What's nice is that software is available for Windows, OS X (Apple/Mac), lots of Linux distros, and is open source, thereby virtually guaranteeing that someone will port and make it available for any other platform you may want to listen to music on.

Furthermore, with a tiny bit of HTML code, you can put live charts of your listening history on your website. I've done this on my Music->History page.

See also:
» Audioscrobbler
» Last.fm on Wikipedia

Working in Aperture

2007-01-22T21:12:00.003-05:00

Today was a rather cloudy day in Atlanta after the rain stopped. I did a bit of photowalking around Midtown and came up with what I thought were half a dozen or so decent shots (out of many more).

I then did some work in Aperture to bring out some of the detail (all my shots are in RAW). Aperture makes this really easy.

Here are two examples of before and after. The latter link to their respective locations on my Flickr page.

"Vanishing Point"

Before:

After:

Note the difference in the clouds.

"Tilt"

Before:

After:

Note the difference in the clouds, color of the building and glass, and the contrast.

Adjustments I applied were:

• Auto Levels (Separate)
• Straighten
• Crop (1st image only)
• Highlights (increase shadow to 100%), this brought out the clouds
• Add contrast
• Edge sharpen (1st image only)

You can also view these in the Atlanta set on Flickr, or see my slideshow.

Ring Tone Collection Posted in Downloads

2007-01-22T11:07:00.003-05:00

Today I posted my fairly large ring tone collection in the downloads section on my web site.

They're all in MP3 format.

There are also some minimal instructions on how to send them to your phone over Bluetooth.

Added Google Analytics and StatCounter

2007-01-21T21:14:00.003-05:00

Interested to know what kind of traffic my new web site is getting, I've added small snippets of JavaScript code for Google Analytics and StatCounter.com.

Each of these services are free and provide me with reports of which pages are receiving how many hits, etc.

I hope these do not cause anyone a problem. Please let me know if they do.

TranceMist.net - hello, world

2007-01-21T17:37:00.003-05:00

This weekend, after several weeks of work I have launched my new website: trancemist.net

I have moved my blog from Yahoo 360° Page, including all of the previous posts (there weren't that many).

I've designed the new site myself on my Mac using RapidWeaver with a few 3rd party plugins. You can read more details on my About page.

Motorola Razr v3t and OSX on T-Mobile GPRS

2007-01-15T21:31:00.003-05:00

A few days ago I picked up a new Motorola Razr V3t from T-Mobile.

I had gotten so tired of the brick that is my T-Mobile MDA (HTC Wizard). That device made a lot more sense when I was using Outlook with Windows. However, now that I'm finally rid of Windows, it didn't make much sense with a Mac (The Missing Sync never completely worked properly for me). Plus it was such a brick, and I hated using it as a phone (dialing is a miserable experience on it).

The V3t is an amazing leap forward in phone usability. First of all, I'm amazed that it actually has speach recognition. And yes, I mean speech, not voice recognition! It also has a MicroSD (a.k.a.TransFlash) memory card and it appears as removable media on my desktop when I connect it via USB to my Mac.

More on the virtues of it as a phone later. However, my first task was to get it to work as a GPRS modem with my MacBook Pro. I found this description of how to accomplish that, complete with Apple Modem scripts. Follow the instructions very carefully, and it works perfectly!

The only two significant down sides that I see thus far are that it does not have an email client (though I can access my Yahoo email via the browser) and it does not support EDGE. The latter is quite disappointing considering the MDA does, and the throughput benefit is substantial.

If you prefer to roll your own, T-Mobile has a support article that explains how to make the connection manually.

Finally, the Razr V3t has Java (J2ME) which the MDA did not. So now I can run Google Maps Mobile!

The notMac Challenge

2006-12-21T23:14:00.003-05:00

I've been hunting for a free way to get around .Mac for synchronization (iSync) across Macs for a while.

Today I came across the notMac Challege.

Interesting idea.

Quicksilver

2006-12-07T22:38:00.003-05:00

I just happened to stumble across this OS X gem.

I won't even try to describe it.

Watch this video from MacBreak. It does an excellent job of explaining Quicksliver.

If you're in a hurry you an also read this brief post.

Fixed MacPro Bluetooth Antenna Problem

2006-09-29T15:44:00.003-05:00

It has been reported earlier that Apple bungled the antenna wires for Bluetooth and Airport modules in the MacPro.

Having further read the posts on the Apple discussion boards, I realized that this was the reason that my new Wireless Mighty Mouse not working properly with my MacPro, while working just fine with three other laptops (two MacBooks and one Toshiba Tecra M2 running Windows XP).

I had suspected from the beginning that it had something to do with Bluetooth range, since the mouse was to my right, whilst the MacPro was to my left under the desk. My Apple Wireless Keyboard didn't exhibit any symptoms at first (it sits between the Wireless Mighty Mouse and my MacPro). However, in the past few days I've noticed occasional sluggishness when I type, and even some odd behaviour like dropping keystrokes.

I finally decided to apply the solution recommended by other users on the Apple discussion boards.

I first read, and re-read several times the message posted by "bosmacs" where the describes exactly what he changed in his system and the result. Right below his is annother posting, this one by John Kohn confirms what the correct positioning of the antenna cables should have been from the factory.

Having done a brief test with my Wireless Mighty Mouse, it now appears to be working correctly. (Though I'll still keep and continue to use my Logitech MX-1000 Laser Cordless Mouse instead)

Another issue that this appears to have resolved is that my T-Mobile MDA can now properly discover my MacPro, whereas trying to "beam" (silly term) files over Bluetooth to it before resulted in the MacPro not showing up (poor implementation by Microsoft. The two are paried, it should show up even if it's not discoverable).

Are there bugs in space?

2006-09-28T12:45:00.003-05:00

Google Maps would indicate there may be, according to this link which shows a rather ugly bug at a high altitude over Germany.

Update: Slashdot has a posting that points to a link which explains what type of bug this is and how it must have gotten there.

My Favorite Firefox Extensions

2006-09-27T14:00:00.003-05:00

If granted a wish, I shall wish for more wishes...

The single best feature in Firefox has got to be the fact that you can add more features through extensions.

The ones I can't live without:

Adblock

wildcards

Adblock Filterset.G Updater

Bookmarks Synchronizer 3

HTTP server

.Mac account via WebDAV

Download Statusbar

Mozilla's download manager leaves a lot to be desired. This little extension shows downloads in your status bar at the bottom of the browser window. Much cleaner and simpler.

Forecastfox

Displays a graphical weather forecast in the statusbar (other locations configurable), very simple, cute, clean and quite useful.

PDF Download

URL Link

URL

And a few other useful ones:

Customize Google

Google

Google Browser Sync

Google

Firefox profile

Google Toolbar

IE View Lite (Windows only)

Microsoft Windows

Internet Explorer

ActiveX

Netcraft Anti-Phishing Toolbar

Netcraft

NoScript

JavaScript

Nuke Anything Enhanced

Lets you temporarily remove any item from a page while it displays in your browser as if it were never there. Can be quite useful for printing a page that otherwise has a lot of garbage on it.

Open Long URL

URLs

Thunderbird

Yahoo! Toolbar

Yahoo!

Skype Web Toolbar (Windows 2000/XP only)

For more fun visit the Firefox extensions home page.

T-Mobile MDA

2006-09-26T17:22:00.003-05:00

Earlier this year I purchased a new T-Mobile MDA. This phone is actually manufactured by HTC and is also known as the HTC Wizard. It runs the Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system.

The key features which compelled me to purcahse this phone were:

Slide out keyboard

Large color screen

MiniSD Card Slot (though I would have preferred an SD Card slot)

USB Connectivity (my Nokia 6600 didn't offer that)

Comprehensive networking capability:

Stereo Audio

Megapixel Camera

Complete Outlook syncrhonization to Outlook Mobile

Included software:

Internet Explorer Mobile

T-Mobile HotSpot

Windows Media Player Mobile

And the fact that it would run other applications I wanted such as Skype and Pocket Quicken

Overall I have been very impressed with the synchornization capabilities via ActiveSync. Synchronization is something that didn't work very well on my Nokia 6600 (it did work, just not smoothly), and I missed it since I gave up my Palm Tungsten T. However, one notable drawback is that unlike Palm, ActiveSync doesn't back everything up for you. Basically it backs up what goes into Outlook and any other other ActiveSync applications (Pocket Quicken and SpashID for me), and that's it. You're on your own to back up any other files or data (unless you keep them all in My Documents on the device, which does synchronize to your desktop by default, but I keep most of my stuff on the MiniSD card).

I then bought a 1GB MiniSD card, which has been plenty of space.

I found the user interface to be more awkward and klunky than my Nokia 6600. On the Nokia I could pretty much do everything with one hand. On the T-Mobile MDA, just about everthing requires the use of the stylus, thus requiring two handed operation. This is a real pain. I also found that the device was somewhat slow. The OMAP processor is clocked at just under 200 MHz, qiute a bit slower than many other PocketPC or Windows Mobile 5.0 devices. The sluggishness was noticable. Boot time in particular was terrible, taking nearly two minutes to boot!

However, recently T-Mobile made available a System Upgrade for the ROM which drastically improved performance. In particular, boot time went down to about 30 seconds! Among several new features, the ones that I really appreciate and enjoy is the addition of the A2DP and AVRCP Bluetooth profiles. I purchased the Jabra BT620s Stereo Bluetooth headphones which work quite well with the new ROM. I can now listen to stereo MP3s and WMA files (which I store on the SD card), switch tracks and pause/resume from the headset. Music also pauses when a call is received or placed. An excellent combination!

In an upcomming post, I will review some of my favorite software for Windows Mobile 5.0.
Tags: |

Geotagging Photos

2006-09-25T14:01:00.003-05:00

I've recently been Geotagging my photos on Flickr. (See my map)

I know I'm not the first to have thought of the combination of a Camera and GPS. This is even confirmed by the fact that my friend QuasiJones said he even thought of it a few years ago.

However, this morning I was going for walk through the park thinking about all of this and an idea came to me. For a while I had thought that it would be really nice to have Geocode data stored by my Canon 20D. The problem was how? Adding a GPS to a camera has many complications; including additional bulk, battery life, and signal reception. Bluetooth is another way to approach this. Bluetooth GPS receivers are readily available these days at reasonable prices. However, my experience with my other bluetooth devices suggests that getting the two to talk regularly and reliably will take more effort and time than I'm willing to spare these days. And probably lead to quite a few missed shots as well.

So how do you go about capturing location data for your shots in an easy, reliable way?

Then it came to me! What if you could use what you might already have? Your old fashioned GPS? For me this is my Garmin eTrex Vista. I recently went on an 8 day backpacking trip during which I had it on most of the time recording waypoints as track data. What if you synchronized the clock on your GPS and your camera and then at a later time correlated the information captured by both? You could then use the clock data to plot your pictures along the GPS track!

This idea has many positive attributes. It doesn't require additional hardware (assuming you already have a Camera and GPS). It will work with just about any camera and GPS (that record time data). And no additional configuration steps are required (except to synchronize the clocks and set the GPS to start keeping a track log, which mine does automatically whenever you turn it on.

I event went through all kinds of scenarions in my mind of how you could commercialize such a service. Upload your pictures, upload your GPS track log and have it done for you.

Unfortunately, as is usually the case, someone's beat me to it.

Today I read the following on Make:

Try http://www.gpstagr.com/. It allows the user to upload a track file saved from a GPS device, then use the track information to geotag flickr photos that are taken in the same time period as the track file. This is a lot easier than geotagging photos manually using flickr organizr, and more accurate, too.

Posted by: guyuan on September 22, 2006 at 11:38 PM

Well, at least it wasn't by long. :)

Backpacking in the High Sierra

2006-09-21T19:43:00.003-05:00

Two years ago I took two months off and went out west to explore the mountains.

Just as I was driving back from San Francisco along US 1 down the coast line, I decided to visit Sequoia National Park. While there and quite by accident, I met a group of guys who were going on an 8 day cross country backpacking trip the next day. I decided to join them.

It turns out they do this trip every year during the same week in August. Although every year there are two or three new guys, and some others don't come, there is always a core crew. This group has become known as the "Wolff Pack".

This year I joined them for the 3rd time. We went backpacking in the Ansel Adams Wilderness of California in an area known as The Minarets. It is just south of Yosemite.

Using the geocaching and annotation capabilities of Flickr, I have put together an on-line photo album of this trip. You can visit The 2006 Wolff Pack album on Flickr. You can also see the photos for last year's trip, The 2005 Wolff Pack album.

Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse and Windows XP

2006-09-19T21:13:00.003-05:00

I've been looking for this solution for a long time. A wireless mouse that doesn't require a stupid USB dongle. Bluetooth mice have been around for a while. However, there haven't been many of them and none which I liked. Some were just plain ugly or ridiculously expensive.

The Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse is fairly inexpensive, very well designed, sleek and can be powered off and stowed in your bag without fear of turning itself back on when bumped by something (unlike a lot of other Bluetooth devices I have).

While I'm not thrilled with the Wireless Mighty Mouse as a general purpose desktop mouse (I prefer my Logitech® MX™1000 Laser Cordless Mouse for that), it does make a perfect laptop mouse.

I'm using it with a Toshiba Tecra M2 running Windows XP. I have the Toshiba Bluetooth Stack installed (Microsoft's is too simplistic). When I paired the two, Windows automatically picked up the Toshiba HID Profile for the mouse.

Not all of the features work. For example pressing the center roller button does not trigger an event. I can scroll vertically but not horizontally. And the side buttons don't work.

However, both the left and right clicks do work. In fact, apple designed this mouse ingeniously. It appears to have only one button, but there are sensors on the left and right side, so you can right and left click.

I like this mouse so much for laptops, I bought two for each of my two daughters (so they don't have to carry them around) to use with their MacBooks. However, on my MacPro at home, I prefer the Logitech MX-1000 Laser. The precision and buttons on it are still superior.

Bottom line: The perfect travel mouse (if your laptop has built-in Bluetooth)

My Favorite OS X Software

2006-09-17T13:05:00.003-05:00

Life with OS X... week 3. Here's what's on my list so far:
(list does not include software that comes with OS X by default)

» Adium

The best multi-protocol chat (IM) client I've seen for Mac.
Check out the Tokyo Train Station Sound Set. An excellent replacement for gaim.

» Aperture

Having become very used to ACDsee under Windows, I was somewhat disapointed with the lack of Metadata management features within iPhoto. I purchased Aperture and have been learning it along the way. Its methodology is quite different, and it doesn't really handle Metadata as precisely as ACDsee, but it does handle it and some of its features are way beyond what ACDsee can do. So far I'm quite pleased with it.

» Colloquy

An excellent IRC client.

» Firefox

Extensions, Extensions, Extensions!
In particular, check out Bookmarks Synchronizer 3 which can sync your Firefox bookmarks with your .Mac account, or anywhere else via FTP, HTTP, HTTPS or WebDAV.

» Google Earth

Requires no explanation

» (The) Missing Sync for Windows Mobile

My friend QuasiJones pointed this one out to me. It does a great job of synchronizing my T-Mobila MDA (HTC Wizard) with both iSync on the Mac and Outlook on Windows XP. I just wish it had support for some other applications, such as SplashID.

» NeoOffice

An Aqua version of OpenOffice, yay!

» PictureSync

This program can sync your photos from a bunch of different applications to a bunch of different on-line services. I use it to upload pictures from Aperture to Flickr.

» Remote Desktop Connection

Do you have a Windows system that you need to connect to via RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol)? This is the tool to use. From Microsoft. PowerPC only binary, but works well on my Intel MacPro.

» SplashID Desktop

Absoloutely the best password & private data management application I've ever seen. I started out using it on Windows XP to sync with my Nokia 6600 (running Symbian 60). Then I bought a T-Mobila MDA (Windows Mobile 5) and have used it to sync with that from Windows XP using ActiveSync. Now I've moved to OS X and run the SplashID Desktop for OS X.

While SplashID Desktop on OS X won't sync with your Windows Mobile (or PocketPC) device (not even with The Missing Sync), you can export an encrypted .vid file and import it on the device. Or in my case, every once in a while I import the .vid on the Windows XP version and then sync over ActiveSync as I am syncing my phone with both a Windows XP and MacOS system.

One huge benefit of using an application like this is that not only can you keep track of all of your various logins and passwords, but you can use different passwords for each web site. Better yet, I generate completly random passwords for each site and SplashID does it all for me.

I highly recommend it!

» Thunderbird

Again, extensions!

My favorite ones include:

• Display Mail User Agent
• Buttons! (just one button I use: Delete Thread, very useful!)
• Quote Colors

» Yahoo! Messenger

During the week I usually run Adium, because of its multi-protocol support. However, on the weekends I'll usually run Yahoo! Messenger. I much prefer the way it notifies you of new mail (using Growl). It also supports video.

» Skype

Skype finally has video for OS X!
It also supports integration with the Apple Address Book now, as well as Growl.

That's all for now. I'm sure that will keep you busy. :-D

Geocaching on Flickr!

2006-09-17T11:43:00.003-05:00

I've just discovered that Flickr now has Geocaching!

I've spent a good part of last night (wee morning) setting geocache data on most of my pictures, including the ones of our trek in Peru.

No More Windows!

2006-09-16T22:47:00.003-05:00

Last month I decided to ditch all of my Windows systems and go back to Mac.

It was 1996 when I seriously used a Mac. The first computer I ever bought was a Mac. My core is actually UNIX. Initially BSD, but for the past 10 years it's been Solaris. However, for my personal computers for some reason I moved away from Mac and to Windows. It wasn't really planned, it just happened.

Well, not for much longer.

I ditched the 5 year old PC I built myself and bought a new MacPro and an Apple 30" Cinema HD Display (Wow!!). I also bought two MacBooks, one white, one black. Both of the "extreme" (Apple's term for 1GB RAM and 80GB disk) config. Gave them to my daughters.

I just have one Windows system left. A Toshiba Tecra M2 laptop (which belongs to my employer). When Apple rev the MacBook Pro with Core 2 Duo, I think that will get retired as well. :)

So. What's next? I'm going to start writing about my transition experience and the software that I'm selecting.

Goodbye Microsoft. May you BSOD in hell.

My favorite Symbian 60 Software

2005-11-15T15:14:00.003-05:00

I've wanted to do this for a long time... to list my favorite software, the stuff I use most often on my Nokia 6600. So here it is.

» Papyrus

A calendar program that adds substantial functionality on top of the basic calendar included with the phone. Most notably, addiitonal views and the ability to edit the notes section of the calendar. Combined with sVCal, this alows me to import .vcs iCal files and actually see (or change) the notes section of the entry.
Developent on this product had been going along nicely earlier this year, but then the developer left. After many months they finally hired another developer. But the new guy doesn't have any experience programming on Symbian 60, so don't expect more new features any time soon. However, the current version (1.0.09) works very well.

» SplashID

An excellent program by SplashData that allows you to manage all of your secret informaiton, such as logins and passwords, URLs, PINs, credit card info, calling card info, etc. encrypted on the phone. It also has a desktop utility that syncs with the phone.
However, beware that v3.12 is the last version that supports syncing. Since then they've removed the ability to sync with the phone. This is really daft in my oppinion, and there's really no reason to use the newer versions, they really don't add anything useful.

» AgileMessenger

This is the best unified IM client I've seen for a mobile device. AgileMessenger supports Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, ICQ, and the newer versions support Jabber, which also means support for Gmail IM. Really cool additional features are that you can take pictures or record voice (via a PTT-like feature) and AgileMessenger will upload it to Agile's web server and send the recippient a URL where they can view the picture (or hear the file). If they're on another mobile device using Agile Messenger, this is transparent and they just get the content.

However, this summer Agile decided to start charging a monthly fee for their service. This is also really daft in my oppinion. So I just keep using the old version and ignore the "New version is available" notification every time I launch it. It works just fine.

» WirelessIRC

This is an IRC client. Works well for the most part, although I do experience occasional application crashes with it, but not enough to be a pain. I licensed v1.82 in June of 2005 and it hasn't changed, even though their web site keeps talking about an upgrade any time now.

» ProfiMail

This is by far the best mail client I've seen for a mobile device. It supports IMAP, POP3, and of course SMTP. I about 5 accounts configured it in, ranging from plain POP3, POP3 with SSL, plain IMAP and IMAP with SSL. It can display in-line HTML, and JPEG images. It also has a built-in file explorer called ProfiExplorer (which is free) and is the best file explorer I've seen. Excellent program, I highly recommend it. I'm currently on v2.32.

» Opera

An excellent web browser. You can view just about any web page with it. It does support JavaScript, but not Java, Flash or Shockwave. The latest version, v8.5 adds a password manager (I wish this where synchronized with SplashID!) and has several other improvements. Very useful.

» PuTTY

A Symbian 60 port of the popular PuTTY program, which is an SSH client. It supports public keys, but not port forwarding or file transfer. Quite useful though.

» Oxygen Phone Manager

The Symbian 60 platform really lacks the kind of synchronization capability that I had with PalmOS. Nokia PC Suite tries to fill in part of that gap, but it's broken and won't sync. And when it does, it wants Outlook (ugh). SyncML could fill more of the gap, but it doesn't work properly on the Nokia 6600 either. So Oxygen is the best thing I've seen to manage your phone from your PC. It supports contacts, calendar, tasks, images, and SMS. My 6600 wouldn't nearly as useful as it is without it.

» TaskSpy

This program allows you to see what programs and threads are running on your phone, monitor CPU and memory utilization, and among other things, restart the device, which is what I use it for most!

» CellTrack

A useful program for monitoring the network and finding out what cell you're in. Psiloc have a more sophisticated cell monitoring program that allows you to perform asks upon entering or leaving a cell, but the cumbersome common licensing software they install on your phone sucks, and so as much as I l ike Psiloc's software, I refuse to install it on my phone. So I use this one instead. Oh, and it's free. :)

» sVcard and sVcal

These are used to import and export vCard and iCal format contact and calendar entires. I find them quite useful for that, though I can't believe that Nokia left out such a basic feature from phone's core functionality! Among many uses, you can export your contacts and calendar in a format to put on your iPod so you can view the data there.

» QuickOffice

Allows you to view Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint and Word formatted files on your phone.
The company's web site would like to charge you somewhere around $50 for the full suite. However, you can download the view-only software for free from Nokia's web site for the 6630 . When installing the software on your 6600 you will be informed that the software is incompatible. However, I ignored this warning and it seems to work just fine on my 6600, albeit slowly.

» XpenseTrack

I really miss not having PocketQuicken. There's nothing for the Symbian 60 platform that will sync with Quicken. However, XpenseTrack does let you enter all of your enxpenses in a fairly rational way and will export them to an Excel spreadsheet for you. It also handles multiple currencies, which was a requirement for me.

» SolvoEd

Excellent dictionary software. I use it for Spanish, English, Dutch, French and German. You install the base software and then add dictionaries. Extreemly handy when traveling.

So there's the basic rundown of my main tool suite. There are many others that I either use occasionally, or have tried in the past. As well as games. I will leave all of that for another blog entry.

Opera 8.5

2005-01-15T15:06:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I upgraded from Opera 6.2 to Opera 8.5 for Symbian 60 on my Nokia 6600. Since I had previously purchased an Opera license key, the upgrade was free. Indeed there are several notable improvements. Key being a password manager, much faster exit (6.2 takes forever to exit), and it appears to render a bit faster. They claim up to 25%. Worth the upgrade.

Stuck at Incarceration Week

2005-01-15T14:46:00.003-05:00

I'm stuck at my company's Incarceration Week, a multi-day training event held at a very remote location in the woods far west of Chicago. The weather isn't nearly anything like what the promotional photo (above) would lead you to believe. It's cold, dreary and wet (at least it's not hot!) What a perfect time to start a blog about the technology that interests me most, mobile wireless phones and related gadets.