Category Archives: technology

technology

My Four Things

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As if I didn’t have enough to do, I was tagged and need to post my response (more examples of the Four Things meme here).

Four jobs I’ve had in my life:

  1. Thrifty Hardware & Supply Company clerk – worked for my dad, doing fun things like working the pipe cutting machine and getting covered in the lubricating oil. I’d come home looking like I’d been in one of those Wesson-oil wrestling matches.
  2. Waltham Camera & Stereo counter sales – back in college, I earned extra $$ working at this high-end stereo and photo store. We’d spend hours listening to our favorite music on these $25k systems, and I was able to buy all sorts of gear at cost. Heck, I still have some of the speakers I bought back in the day.
  3. Photojournalist – I was a stringer for the AP during college, then a staff photographer and editor for the Savannah Morning News and The Augusta Chronicle. Amazing experiences during that time – from travelling with the U.N. to Sarajevo in ’92 to photographing the antics of the ill-fated ’86 Red Sox, to covering the darker side of my home town during the violent crack-gang violence in the early 90s. 
  4. Turner Broadcasting – that would be my current job, and it’s been a blast, from the annual Swimsuit Edition for SI.com to iTV projects for CNN and the rest of our brands, it’s been a great experience. PS – Swimsuit 2006 launches on Valentines Day next week!

Four movies I can watch over and over:

  1. The Princess Bride
  2. Local Hero
  3. Rear Window
  4. Monsters Inc.

Four TV shows I love to watch:

  1. 24
  2. Survivor (yeah, I know)
  3. Curb Your Enthusiasm
  4. Family Guy

Four places I’ve been on vacation:

  1. Isla Mujeres, Mexico – wonderful small island off Cancun – peaceful and beautiful
  2. Haifa, Israel – rather like Carmel, California. Went before the Intafada, when the only worries were rockets coming in from Lebanon
  3. Volcano Village, Hawaii – among the many places we went on our honeymoon, by far the most magical
  4. Highlands, NC – a great escape from Atlanta – wonderful hiking, amazing food and wine, and good geocaching!

Four of my favorite dishes:

  1. Toro!
  2. Osso Bucco
  3. Lobster, pretty much any way you serve it
  4. Berries

Four websites I visit daily:

  1. CNN.com
  2. Digg.com
  3. SI.com
  4. HDBeat.com

Four places I would rather be right now:

  1. The aforementioned Big Island of Hawaii
  2. At home, with my wife and son
  3. Savannah, GA (my hometown)
  4. Boston (my adoptive hometown)

Four bloggers I am tagging:

  1. Lee Clontz
  2. 3Gs
  3. Hollandtower
  4. Boblog

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Photography, technology

iPhoto ‘06

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Forget about Aperture’s ‘beta release’ – it’s all about iLife ’06! I installed the yearly update late last week, and good lord does it rock. The improvements to iPhoto alone are worth the price of admission.

Image

My iPhoto’05 library was over 28k images. So I was surprised to hear various reports that the ’06 installment increased capacity from 25k to 250k. Hmmm – perhaps that’s why my old install was so sluggish – but never any errors or warnings about the size of ye olde library. Anyway, the new version is blazingly fast – like WOW!

It also upgrades handling of RAW images. In iPhoto5, your edits to RAW images were to a JPEG version. You could also edit in an external editor, but you were still working with the JPEG version. 2006’s version enhances this by letting you open the actual RAW file in the external editor. It doesn’t automagically import the RAW edits back to iPhoto (though I wish it would), but you can fairly easily re-import the edited RAW version.

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technology

Such Low Heights

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In an interesting case of ‘who had the rights,’ it’s been widely reported on the web that Apple’s first video ad campaign promoting the new ‘Intel Inside’ Macs is a blatant rip off of one of my favorite bands music videos. Here is an excellent sie-by-side comparison created on the ‘Cult of Mac’ site.  The Postal Service is one of many side projects of Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard, and their video for ‘Such Great Heights‘ is a frame-by-frame match to the Apple spot, showing bunny-suited lab techs in a clean room, carefully lifting out some precious silicon, etc. It turns out that the same director created both the Apple Intel ad and the Postal Service video. Unclear if he had rights to essentially duplicate a product for a commercial service without the band or label’s blessing, though. Ben chimes in on the controversy with a note on the band’s website saying that “We did not approve this commercialization and are extremely disappointed with both parties.” The band’s label could, conceivably, have approved reuse of the video which one would think they might own.

Long story short – I love the Postal Service, and can’t wait to get my hands on a MacBook Pro (at least when the 12″ is available). But like the controversy over the recent ‘orange’ Eminem iPod ads which bore their own uncanny resemblance to a Lugz campaign, this is fishy. I hope Apple comes out and clears this up soon.

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technology

360 Time

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To complement our spiffy new HDTV, I managed to find an Xbox360 on eBay for not-too-high a premium. JoeBobATLThe Fedex guy came a day earlier than the tracking said it would (who knew that was even possible), and I was like a kid on the first night of Hannukkah as the delivery dude came up the front steps. In a word, the image this thing produces on the SXRD is stunning. I had picked up Project Gotham Racing, Madden 2006 and Kameo – and every one of them is just mind bogglingly beautiful. PGR is especially slick – driving the streets of NYC and seeing the skyline come hurtling toward you, driving past the casinos of Las Vegas by your headlights – all the while seeing true-to-life reflections and dirt on your windscreen. I’ve also partially hooked this up to our Dell PC running Media Center Edition 2005. I did have to update it to this year’s patch, but once I did, the two machines saw each other easily. Now I can get photos, video and music from my desktop on the Sony in the living room. Spiffy! Embedded here in this post is my XboxLive ‘GamerCard’ that shows my current reputation, score and ‘zone’, whatever that is. It will also show any games I’ve gone online with.

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