April 2005 Archives

Great news for all Macintosh afficianados. Mac OS X Tiger, the newest version of Mac OS X is being released to the public on Friday. All Apple retail stores will be hosting events to debut the new system and included in those events is a chance to win a Powerbook G4 an iPod and other great Apple merchandise.

The real story here is the operating system in-and-of-itself. It brings over 200 new features to the already greatest platform on the planet. At the same time, it actually functions faster than previous releases. I have no clue why it is that every subsequent version of Mac OS X is faster than its predecessor. Granted I'm not complaining. I look forward to Dashboard, Automator and especially smart folders in iPhoto and Sherlock. Check out http://www.apple.com/macosx/ for more information about these and all the other new features included in Mac OS X.

Ok, so I'll admit it. I thought that the statements that NAB2005 was going to have shoulder-to-shoulder people, was grossly overexagerated. I'm not too big of a man to say, I was wrong. Las Vegas opened its doors and its arms to the National Association of Broadcasters conference. I was there. It was a whole lot of publicity and certain things actually deserved that publicity.

Final Cut Studio...very cool multi-camera editing, MIDI controlled motion graphics and SoundTrack2 has the greatest ability to remove background ambience. All very neat stuff. Avid did what they did best and Adobe Premiere came screaming back into the mainstream with Premiere Pro 6.5. Audition 1.5 was interesting, and had some good capabilities, but it really had nothing on SoundTrack for film work.

Panasonic had some interesting stuff with P2, but again, not shipping until the end of the year. The Kodak Look Manager System brought viable film origination for HD back to the forefront of everybody's minds.

All-and-all it was a good time. NAB was interesting, but Las Vegas I can really do without. I've explained it like this to most people I've talked to. Think of any adjective you'd like to. Big, small, skimpy, white...anything. Now add an "-er" suffix to the end of the word. What do you get? Bigger, smaller, skimpier, whiter...this is Las Vegas. Everything is an extreme there and really, I'm not an extreme kind of guy. The moral of the story, be it ever so humble, there is no place like home.

This is a forward I received from my mother and I wanted to post it to share it with everyone that considers themselves a crackpot. I know I do.

----Begin forwarded message----

A lady had two large pots, each hung on the ends of a pole which she carried across her neck.

One of the pots had a crack in it while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water.

At the end of the long walk from the stream to the house, the cracked pot arrived only half full.

For a full two years this went on daily, with the woman bringing home only one and a half pots of water.

Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments.

But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection, and miserable that it could only do half of what it had been made to do.

After 2 years of what it perceived to be bitter failure, it spoke to the woman one day by the stream.

"I am ashamed of myself, because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your house."

The old woman smiled, "Did you notice that there are flowers on your side of the path, but not on the other pot's side?

That's because I have always known about your flaw, so I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back, you water them."

"For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate the table. Without you being just the way you are, there would not be this beauty to grace the house." Each of us has our own unique flaw. But it's the cracks and flaws we each have that make our lives together so very interesting and rewarding.

You've just got to take each person for what they are and look for the good in them.

To all of my crackpot friends, have a great day and remember to smell the flowers, on your side of the path.

After wanting to redesign my logo for many weeks, I finally went ahead and did it, and at the same time, redesigned my whole website around it. So if you are reading this, you have already seen it. At the same time, I went ahead and installed JS2Feed to my web server to make the conversion of my RSS feeds from my Gallery, and from this blog faster and more reliable. I hope everyone looks around and enjoys.

I have been a loyal Hostony user for many months. They have been serving my email for the past year and everything has been great. However, in the last month, their service has been mediocre at best. I've had DNS server problems and just this morning things were down on all my sites as a result of a problem with Apache. While everything is now back up and functioning flawlessly (like I'd expect), I haven't been happy in recent months. I hope that this is the last event for a while so I can regain my trust in a service that I really did appreciate.

After many years of development and a brief hiatus from working on it. We have seen a tremendous surge in development initiatives for the School of Film and Animation Internship Resource (SOFA-IR). The website (http://www.sofa-ir.org) was initially begun in April of 2004 and after a year of development and a semi-inconsistent year of coding the site was completed this morning at 2:00. Thanks go out to Michael Kurdziel who came through when a MOD on PHPBB2 definitely failed to work correctly. But things are up and running and working great so all Alumni and current students of RIT's School of Film and Animation should come on out to SOFA-IR.org and register. I hope this is the beginning of something great for the school.

I think I have this RSS feed thing in the bag. Its going to do, pretty much what I need it to do which is feed my index page with news updates about SoundSpeed.net. This is going to be my last post for a while as I'm moving into finalizing the development of my new site with all of the fun information included in my old site but with a much more streamlined, pleasing, design. At least in my opinion.

Yes indeed I'm here at Dave's House.