Don’t Stop Believing This Love Story

I’m still collecting my thoughts on the new Apple iPad, but I wanted to share with you a side-by-side comparison shot of the iPad Case and the Newton MessagePad Keyboard Case from 1996. Back when laptops were 6-7 pounds, bringing around a 2-3 pound Newton, external keyboard, and Ricochet wireless modem was perfect for checking email and writing short documents.

While on tour with Autumn Gem, Rae and I having been traveling with two MacBook Pro laptops. It certainly gets heavy lugging around 15 pounds of computers, adapters, and cables around. We’ll still need to bring one MacBook Pro with us on our next tour, but I can see the iPad replacing the other one. With the iPad-VGA adapter, we’ll even be able to run our presentation and film straight from the iPad! While the output is not HD, it’s more than adequate in the venues we’ve been screening Autumn Gem in. The iPad really is a great device for creative professionals who want to showcase their work: photos, videos, illustrations, you name it.

Here’s a photo of me from the Apple Special Event introducing the iPad. More thoughts to come soon!

This past Saturday, Petrice, Rae and I attended the 10th Annual Edwardian Ball in San Francisco. The event was held in the Grand Ballroom at the Regency Center, which was — in my opinion — a better venue than the other ones we’ve been to in the past: The Great American Music Hall in 2007 and the Cat Club in 2005.

In place of the top hat and corsets from previous years, Rae and I decided to wear our Qing Dynasty era costumes from our documentary film Autumn Gem. Fortunately for us, these outfits were from the same timeframe of the Edwardian Era (turn of the century, 1900s). We received several, “Your costumes are great!” comments from people in attendance. Rae and I had just watched the pilot for Caprica, and I remarked to her that it felt like we were in the virtual nightclub from the beginning of the episode!

Although I took a few photos during the event, I concentrated mainly on video Saturday night. Between all the waltzing, the crazy costumes and the on-stage performances, there was plenty of great moments to capture. The off-stage lighting was quite dim, making focusing a challenge. For those interested in technical details, I shot the video with my Canon EOS-5D Mark II camera, 24/1.4, Nikkor 50/1.8, 135/2 lenses, and a Zacuto Tactical Shooter with the Z-Finder eyepiece attachment.

The next day, Rae and I created this three and a half minute music video from the Edwardian Ball 2010. Ladybug’s Pas de Deux from Rosin Coven provides the soundtrack. Click here to see the HD 720p version on SmugMug.

And here’s some photos from the event.

I got an email today from Sir Izaac reminding me that today was the 16th anniversary meeting of the Stanford Newton User Group. I had completely forgotten about it. Man, has it been that long since the first SNUG meeting and seventeen years since I’ve owned a Newton?!? There are kids today who don’t even know that Apple once had a tablet-sized computer; next week at its Special Event, the company is rumored to be announcing the much anticipated tablet. Whether it’s called the new iBook, iSlate, iTablet, iPod book, or iPad, it’s set to change the game in the burgeoning netbook, e-reader, and portable computing marketplace. I for one have been wondering how people will hold and manipulate a device with a 10-inch screen. Will it come with a handle (see my mockup to the right), or will that void be left for the third-party case manufacturers to fill? I’ve dropped my iPhone a few times without any incident (knock on wood), but I shudder to think what would happen if I dropped the tablet!

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A few days late in getting these photos up. I hope 2010 will bring a few more entries to this blog than 2009! On New Year’s Day, Susan, Bryan, Kai, Petrice, Eric, Flora and their two kids met up in Milpitas for lunch. We originally wanted to go to Maru-Ichi Ramen, but they were closed for the holidays. So, we walked across the 99 Ranch Market and ate instead at this Taiwanese Noodle House. With kids, people having moved to another state, and work, it’s getting harder for everyone to meet up regularly. So, I’ve come to cherish these times when we’re able to get together to recap the past year and look ahead to the future!

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Last night, Rae and I went to Vienna Teng and Alex Wong’s performance at The Independent in San Francisco. It’s been quite some time since we last saw Vienna perform; once again, she did not disappoint. I especially enjoyed the additional musical layers in her live song renditions; she’s certainly come a long way from just using the piano at her performances.

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Yesterday evening, Felix, Rae and I went to the San Jose Tech Museum to see the Star Trek: The Exhibition exhibit. We went as part of a private event, which meant the usual prohibition against photography and videography was lifted. I hope that also means that I can post these photos up on my web site too!

Everyone who knows me knows that I’m a huge Star Trek fan (Star Wars too, I’m an equal opportunity sci-fi fan). I’ve been to other Star Trek exhibits in the past, but this one was clearly the best. For instance, they had recreated several sets from TOS and TNG, including the bridge of the original Enterprise! It’s too bad that I didn’t have any Star Trek uniforms in my closet, or else we really could have had a blast role-playing throughout the exhibit. Another set that was recreated was the Guardian of Forever from the classic TOS episode: City on the Edge of Forever. I just had to jump through the Guardian just as Kirk, Spock and McCoy did in the episode! A TNG-era hallway and transporter room rounded out the rest of the large-scale set recreations. Having gone through the process of building a set in our garage for Autumn Gem, I could appreciate the work that went into building these pieces for the exhibit.

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Over on our Autumn Gem blog, I posted a recap and analysis of our packing strategy for our 25-day, 17-stop tour of the documentary. We’ve gotten packing light down to a near science, but there’s always room for improvement. Ideally, we’d like to go from three pieces of luggage to just one. Identifying what worked and what didn’t will help us reach that goal in the future! In an ideal world, I’d love to travel for months at a time with just a backpack. Computing and camera decisions always factor into the ability to do this, however. Carrying around a full-sized, 15-inch laptop (two of them on the tour!) and a digital SLR makes this nearly impossible.

When Rae and I traveled to France and Spain, I made what was at the time a painful decision to leave the computer and camera behind, taking only a small Canon PowerShot with me. In hindsight, it was a great choice, as the reduced bulk made moving from place to place much easier. Despite wheels and handle, rolling suitcases really do a number over time. At the time we went to Europe, the iPhone and iPod touch didn’t exist, but these devices today can replace a laptop for email and basic browsing tasks. Finally, a newer cameras like the PowerShot G11 or S90 offers the manual controls and RAW image support that I’ve come to rely upon in my DSLR.

The other benefit of packing less is that you have less to worry about losing. It was pretty easy to make sure that we had everything we needed before traveling to the next tour location; there wasn’t much to begin with!

Read the rest of the article on the Autumn Gem web site for more about our packing strategy during the tour.

MsgFiler has been updated to version 2.0.6. The only change is to add support for Apple Mail in Mac OS X 10.6.2.

I noticed today that all of my posts integrated with my SmugMug galleries using WP-SmugMug were broken. SmugMug has been changing the permalink structure for albums and images lately. A few weeks ago, albums gained the ability to have pretty permalinks. Now, it looks like those changes have made it their way to the image permalinks.

WP-SmugMug parsed out information from the image permalink to determine the link to the thumbnail size image. When the permalink structure changed, all of the links to the thumbnails broke along with it.

I’ve released version 2.0.6 of WP-SmugMug to address this issue. Let me know if you see any issues with the release!