Do I really need that....?

Ah, the therapeutic process of geeks everywhere. Getting a new machine setup is both annoying and refreshing. One such part of the process is thinking through the apps you had and culling out the proven useful from the 'why didn't I get around to uninstalling that'. Here's some picks that carried over:

• Bulk  Rename Utility - great general purpose renamer for files
• Filezilla - my ftp of choice for some time now
• Evernote - I come to really enjoy this note keeper after google notebook went the way of the dodo
• Wing IDE - my coding tool of choice. Just to think this time last year I was still coding some in notepad.
• Dropbox - Oh I can access my import files from anywhere, with revision history and shared project directories with friends and clients? How I ever got along without this before I have no idea
• VLC Player - great all around player that works with most anything.

  This is my first ssd drive machine so I found this post super insightful for optimization.

Hopefully I'll be able to make an announcement on another front in the next week or two stay tuned:)

Things I've been learning...

Waiting on the computer do do some reinstalling and had a few minutes to write...

• Maya doesn't like OSX - Well, that or OSX doesn't like Maya. Crashes. Mel Scripts not working, good times in general. Also Flipbook, my 2d animation software, crashed on me after 45 minutes of work. That coupled with all my Maya crashes brought me to looking into Bootcamp...
• Time Machine is Neat - The ease of use of apple's backup system is a thing of beauty. One, it's simple to maintain. Two, it makes reinstalling the OS a piece of cake. I had to do that to partition my Macbook Pro's drive for a windows partition (see first item from today).
• Slipstreaming - Bootcamp requires a Windows XP install cd with service pack two. I have two initial release copies, but didn't have a SP2 one. So, I made one via a process called slipstreaming. If you ever wanna bootcamp it, might be a good link to keep handy.
• Maintaining computers is a pain - Sometimes I wonder if they're worth the hassle. Justin has been having his own hassles over on his blog. I've been trying to walk my mother-in-law through some of her own issues a state away - looking like a nasty virus has taken hold but that'll prolly have to wait a few weeks for my wife and I to make a trip.
• The Jury is out on macs - The jury is still out for me on whether or not I wanna permanently get my mac on. On the one hand, the user experience is a thing of elegance and ease. On the other, my main apps crashing all the time is not. WHY does apple insist on overpricing their hardware? They could have such a bigger market share if they'd at least get competitive. On a whim I took a look at the mac pro's today...upgrading from 2g to 8g of ram = $1500....a jaunt over to crucial.com = $399. Seriously. Who on earth does that make sense to? Lower the price of your hardware or release the OS so peeps can stop hackintoshing it. For now I'll keep straddling the fence with my new 20gig partition of windows, but I can't see justifying the purchase of another mac down the road compared to what I can build or buy a comparable pc for.

Looks like the reinstall is about done, back to it....

And another one...and another one...

...Yes, another one bites the dust. My friends who know my history with computers can be amazed - Josh has had yet another hard drive die on him. I really don't know how I do it. :(

Adobe Updateage!

The new photoshop and other items on the adobe buffet have been updated. Some of the new features look pretty darn slick, the new pricing...not so much:(

Check it out!

Clean Slates...

In the year 1914, Thomas Edison's "invention factory" (as he called it) burned to the ground. Of that disaster, he is quoted as saying, "All of our mistakes have been destroyed. In a new factory we can start our experiments with a clean slate." Several years ago, I had a hard drive die and I lost a good bit of work for a horrific few weeks. However, I had a good backup and at most lost a month of work. I've actually thought that my back up system I've been following for years now has been pretty sound. I usually have two back up drives backing up my main work drive. That seemed like a pretty good method. Well, after I finished school I let one of my back ups go and only had one. I thought that would still be plenty. Two months ago, I had a hard drive fail. My main work drive that is. I worked about a week on the main drive trying to get it back and it just wouldn't respond. I tried absolutely every diagnostic app I could find (windows or bootable) to no avail. I was in the middle of my freelance gig and didn't have time to mess with it, so put it aside thinking I'd get backup drive and be up and running when I had some time. So, when the project was done, I tried that. Come to find out, the back up drive didn't seem to wanna respond either. I figured I'd be able to fix em...prolly just a bad sector or something. This past weekend, I finally got a replacement drive and installed it and took a hard look at my backup. I ran some diagnostics and.... Dead as a doornail. Uh oh. So, it appears that I've lost the past 6 years of freelance, reference, school and personal work. The only things I have are my most recent project, The Potter and an assortment of 3d projects. Where this mainly sucks is that I've lost all the source files for all of the websites I've done. So, the next update to my site other than the blog is going to be a complete redesign. That's not such a bad thing, it's been a while. However, I did lose a few things I'd have rather not have. Now, I could pay some outlandish $1k or more to try and have a company recover the data, but I'm not gonna do that. It's just stuff and that's a lot of moola. So, like Edison (and pretty much only in this way as he was an absolute genius), I've got a clean slate. Not really all that bad of a place to be when you really think about it.

An absolutely gorgeous day....

Song of the day - "This World" - Caedmon's Call - Self Titled Album Today was amazing outside and I was out most of the day to enjoy it. I headed downtown this morning to meet a friend to go to the St. Patrick's Day parade and spent almost the whole day out in the glorious weather. The parade was a little lack luster, however we did see them dye the river green which was pretty cool. It was a green as lime koolaid which is pretty impressive. It was a bit of a let down to see that they just dyed it with what looked like little cups of dye. I had hoped for giant leprauchan cauldrons spilling green goo into the water...but perhaps there were no cauldrons around:) It was a fun day. So I've decided that I'm not drawing enough, so I'm instituting a new rule - No blog entries without a pic or a sketch (we'll see how long it lasts - and hopefully they're better than this one). One of the guys at work was able to get together enough people to pay for a figure drawing class at work. That's gonna start this Tuesday. That should provide some opportunity to stretch the drawing muscles. Technology is a fickle mistress. I can't seem to get my ipod reformatted on my home machine. I keep getting these weird errors. My options are 1) see if it does the same thing on my work pc and or 2) take it in to be serviced. None of the stuff I've found googling the problem have worked. Ug... In general, I'm on a antitech bent right now (so you've been warned). Also, something appears to be very wrong with my computer. I can't seem to access the disk management utilities via the administrative tools and other such weirdness. I'd like to reformat and start from scratch but I think waiting till my current freelance gig is done is a better route to go. Photography has always interested me to some degree. I think a lot of it has to do with good photography's dependence on lighting. I'm something of a lighting nut (if that's not obvious in my cg work). Getting a good render out of the computer is a lot like painting with light. I'm thinking about splurging and getting a good digital SLR to pick up a new hobby and hopefully expand my understanding of composition, light, and quite possibly - candid shots of friends:) This week I discovered a few cool places on the net:

• My buddy Scott Spencer wrote a review over at highend3d. Holy moly, I want one of those. Want being the operative word there.
• Thanks to Cory, I discovered another friends blog.

A Frustrated New Mac Owner...

So I got my new mac laptop about a week ago. About a week later, Apple announced the upcoming release of Tiger. My friends who are mac owners told me I should get a discounted upgrade since I just bought the computer. Made sense to me. Most software publishers I've dealt with have had pretty generous upgrade grace periods- some as long as a few months. So I called up Apple and was surprised to discover that the cut off date for their "up-to-date" program that would have allowed the discount had a cut off of April 12. 3 days after my Mac shipped. I told the lady that seemed a little short for a grace period window and asked to speak to her supervisor. She transferred me directly and I asked her supervisor who frankly seemed to me more irked that her underling had transferred me than about my issue. She asked for the first girls name and I just said I didn't know because I didn't want to get her in trouble. She said she would transfer me to someone who would help which ended up to be a stupid phone message loop of, "Press 1, press 2, no, you can't talk to someone." So I hung up and emailed Apple my frustration. I've not heard back to any of my emails to them, so I'm not holding my breath. Lesson learned here- If you're thinking about purchasing a Mac and they're "close" to releasing a new OS. Wait till they announce the release date and you'll save yourself $120 bucks or so. Guess I'll wait a while to upgrade.