After installing Leopard and playing with everything it’s got, I got bored so I decided it might be time to take a look at Aperture. For people who don’t know, or who haven’t had the latest updates, I’ve nowgot more than 12,000 total photos, not including versions. (That number does include one or two events that were accidentally duplicated when I started my Bridge-Photoshop organizing system last year. I am going to be working at some point on eliminating those.) What this means is that photos are difficult to find, especially since I haven’t been tagging or keywoarding them at all, so I can’t exactly go through and search for “Megan” or “7300.” Tonight I’ve just started surveying the damage, but as I have more free moments, I’m going to start finding the best photos and starring them, as well as creating smaller projects out of my initial two groupings. For those who don’t know, when I first switched back to Aperture, I had one folder, with many smaller folders, totaling about 10,500 photos. The maximum amount of images an Aperture project can hold is 10,000 images, so I just split the groups of photos down into “older” (Kodak-era) photos and “newer” (dSLR Era) photos. It was a good approximate grouping, and now I’m going through and taking out specific events, and seasons. Right now for example, I have a project for Fall 2007, for KHS Graduation, for the 2006 talent show, for 2007 summer in Kingman, plus my August trip to Flag, my October trip to Tucson, my Summer trip to Tucson, and I’m going to start putting some of my Real Estate adventures into a folder, and I’m sure as soon as I get done with seasons, I’m going to be making albums for individual events. Another part of this project is to find more of my older photos that I’d like to share with the world. Believe it or not, there are good photos that I took either before I signed up for Flickr, or during periods where I was not paying attention to it. Also worth mentioning is that I’ve given thought to getting a pro Flickr account. It’s $25/year, and the bandwidth limit goes away, my photostream will show an unlimited number of photos, and I can show really big, archival-quality JPEGs. I’m currently at about 300 or 400 photos total on Flickr, and I have reached 97% of my bandwidth limit for October, uploading some of those nice archival-quality JPEGs that I do so love. I’ll probably get Flickr for a year or two once I actually get that RAID1 hard disc for my Aperture library.
Well, I received my Leopard on Friday and ran the standard Upgrade installer. Everything went off without a hitch, it’s almost as though I’ve been running Leopard this whole time. Spaces, the unified interface, and Time Machine are all great. The only problem I’ve experienced is an issue with the BOINC client, which I use to do SETI@Home, but that’s not a big deal at all. Spaces is amazing, I currently have six of them, one for file management and music, the next for chatting, the next for web browsing, the next for eMail, the next for “productivity” and the next for “creative” type apps. Although, I may rearrange all of those again at some point, to put web/email back with chat, and break down creativity a bit, or return to only four spaces. For now, I’ve got bigger chat and Internet windows than I’ve had before, and I don’t feel the need to I am very happy about the unification of the interface too; it is something I was complaining about for a very long time. Yeah, a few people’s visual cues are gone, but as somebody who uses Windows as well as Mac OS X on a regular basis, my visual cues (and indeed, keyboard shortcut usage) are already out the window. Time Machine is my new main backup scheme; I went ahead and formatted my 200gigabyte “backup” volume for use as a Time Machine volume. I may eventually get another drive to do the superduper backups to, on a weekly or monthly basis, but for now the time machine has got me covered well enough that I’m comfortable. (Now all I need is the raid1 box for my Aperture library…) Now we just need to see how this thing holds up in heavy use. It looks like it was optimized for leaving big/heavy apps open on a regular basis, especially since the “new, brighter app-is-running indicator” is so difficult to see under normal conditions. Plus with Spaces, not everything is necessarily immediately visible. Earlier today I had Aperture running for several hours when it didn’t need to be, because it was in another space, and the app running indicator didn’t stand out very well. Overall, a great new release, they’ve tidied up a lot of things, and there are significantly more things in this release that make me happy than unhappy, which is pretty good.
It’s almost here! It’s the end of October, and I’m comfortable with using my ThinkPad in a variety of situations, and I’ve got an amazing word processor, and I’m ready. That’s right, it’s nearly NaNoWriMo again! Although I’ve got to admit, I’m starting this year with a tad bit fewer ideas than I had last year, but hopefully this means I’ll be able to get more. I’ve got a few ideas, a few character names and of course some locations, as well as a lot of dares I’ll be doing this year – I just need to start writing on November first, and hopefully not stop (more than 50,000 words later!) until the end of November. This December/January, I may even take on the task of editing my creation!
So, I know that this post is very late, but it’s worth noting anyway that Megan and I went to Tucson last weekend to see some of her friends and watch Avenue Q. The show was basically amazing, there was more and better music than on the CD, as well as some plot points that you really don’t get just from listening to the cd. It was really cool to see the show in person with the other people, arranged very similarly to the original Broadway setup too, just with different actors. Before the show, was Donald’s football game, which was a decent photography opportunity, and after the show was a trip to Takamatzu (sp?), which is one of Megan’s favorite foot spots in Tucson. The ways there and back were okay, except for the whole thing about the traffic in phoenix, and on the way there when Megan and Glenn freaked out at each other because of a stop we had to make in Casa Grande. One thing I noticed is that whenever Glenn wants to do anything with friends, he has to have them come get him, and they bring him home. I’m giving Megan’s mom points for noticing this, but I’ve got to admit that in my universe, it’s always been a given that the parental units of both parties share the responsibilities of child transport. And while Glenn, Megan and I aren’t exactly children anymore, it’s worth noting that over the weekend, doing that would really have helped us, especially when on Sunday we were running late and Glenn’s mother freaked out because he left without warning. Overall, it was a great weekend, aside from the whole thing about “almost no sleep.” Megan experienced the very-little-sleep even harder than I did, because she was apparently faced with a few more than normal adverse conditions at work. (That is, of course, to say nothing of my busiest-shift-ever at the helpdesk.) Oh, and there was the carpal tunnel, which Megan seems to be getting really hard, I need to teach her how to fix that, the wrist massaging thing really does work.
Sometimes I wonder whether or not any given piece of technology will actually be worth my time, will actually be something into which I should look for good qualities and useful abilities. Not today however; as I’ll admit I’ve dived right into pre-ordering Mac OS X 10.5, “Leopard.” I can’t say what I do and don’t like about it yet, it’s very early for that. I can however, say that I’m not impressed by Apple’s pricing scheme. Retail Leopard is $129 as always, and Educational Leopard is $116, which is about twice what Apple has charged for Educational copies of Mac OS X in the past. Could I get it for less at the NAU Bookstore? Probably, like iWork and iLife, I could get it for much less if I waited for it to be in stock at the NAU Bookstore. But when will that be? Purportedly, with having preordered it, I’ll get Leopard on October 26th, the day it will be released. Not too bad given my existing track record, where I purchased Mac OS X 10.3 Panther only the day after it was released. Just that this time, there will be no cool giveaways or Apple Store bag for Cory. I’m going to admit, some of the features of Leopard to which I am most looking forward are Time Machine and Spaces. I’m looking forward to Time machine because of my awful track record with data preservation, and Spaces because of my awful track record with window management. The potential to keep every application or group of application in its own area is great. I can already imagine having a UTV62.com space, a chatting space, a music space, etc. I’m also interested in the new iChat, Mail, and iCal applications, and would also love to see more of the integration between the Leopard client OS and the Leopard Server system. I’ve heard that setting up managed workgroups is much easier this time around, but I’m only going to consider it significantly so if it’s actually easier than using Windows NT 4.0 or Windows XP and Server 2003. Anyway, I’m writing about it as though I already have it, or like I’ll have enough machines to test its group capabilities, which isn’t true in either respect. I did preorder it though, so I will have it eventually.