John Siracusa is at it again, this time with his 20 page review of Tiger, the latest version of Mac OS X. Siracusa always does a good job of making the complex easy to understand. I’m looking forward to using Tiger on my computer. With the announcement of the new speedbumped PowerMacs, perhaps it is time to upgrade my venerable 4-year old QuickSilver PowerMac to a dual-processor G5.

Alex mentioned to me over email that Automator can replace our Read It To Me. This was exactly what I was thinking after reading Page 20 of the review. There are in fact a number of features in Tiger that harken back to projects I’ve been involved with in the past — Dashboard reminds me of DoDots (sorry, Konfabulator) and Automator shares features and design philosophies of Read It To Me and Soybo (yet another ambitious project of mine which has sorely been neglected).

Some time ago, I had to transfer files from an old PowerBook 180 to my PowerMac. At first I thought that I was out of luck, because I had no machine which could read floppy disks anymore (I had sold my Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh a year ago). Although I found a solution using my Farallon iPrint Ethernet Adapter, I was irked that the floppy disk, so prevalent just 10 years ago, has been rendered obsolete.

Today, I store my files on CD’s, DVD’s, and hard drives. You would think that these formats are here for the long run, but who’s to know in 10 or 20 years down the line?

A similar situation exists in the digital camera space. Although JPEG is the dominant image format for the time being, many manufacturers have proprietary RAW image formats. As any RAW enthusiast will attest, shooting in RAW is much better than shooting in JPEG. You can adjust the exposure, white balance, and several other settings after the fact. Sure each image takes up more space on your memory card, but the benefits in my mind outweigh the size disadvantage. I wish I had started shooting RAW earlier, but back then I was more concerned with the number of photos that I could take as opposed to the number of good photos that I produced. In a nutshell, RAW is the digital negative.

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Last night, I attended a Photoshop Users Group meeting at Adobe, where they previewed Adobe Photoshop CS2. Can you believe that Photoshop has been around for 15 years now? I still remember using PS2 back before layers support!

There were over 150 people at the event, of which 75 people who RSVP’ed. This meant all of the pizza that had been purchased for the event was gone by the time that I arrived 15 minutes before the start of the meeting! I was really looking forward to that pizza because I had just come back from exercising!

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Canon is offering rebates on camera bodies, kits, and lenses. You can get $500 back from the purchase of a EOS-1D Mark II! $100 back from a EOS-20D? Is this a sign that new cameras are coming soon?

Canon Rebate Program

smugmug spoke at the April COBA meeting last night. Chris and Don MacAskill and J.T. were on hand to demonstrate the various features of their popular photo web site. Their passion for their product struck me the most during the presentation. smugmug is very much of a family-owned business, with father and son team of Chris and Don forming a formidable business and technical duo. Their stories of the company’s beginnings and how they settled on a printing fulfillment house were very interesting to hear. In their first month of business, they got 5 subscribers; at the time, they were happy. Today, with more than 60,000 subscribers and 20 million photos, they must be thrilled!

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While Eric is off swimming with the sharks, he had shipped to my house a new Canon Digital Rebel XT. My first impression after opening the box was, “This thing is soooo small!” I had always thought that Canon would release a G-series digicam with interchangeble lenses to go with a bigger image sensor, but I was wrong. Canon was able to shrink an EOS camera into the size of a PowerShot G-series camera!

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I’ve rejoined the ranks of those without long hair! On Saturday, Rae and I went to diPietro Todd Salon for my free haircut, courtesy of Alice 97.3, Locks of Love, and Rogaine. I wish I had set my appointment for noon instead of 2:00 pm, because I missed the radio broadcast, television crews, and newspaper photographers! I did get a chance, however, to meet with Alice DJ Sterling James! It’s always cool to put a face behind the voice on the radio.

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I heard on the radio yesterday that diPietro Todd Salon is having a promotion with Locks of Love and the makers of Rogaine where if you donate at least 10 inches of hair, you’ll get a free salon-style hair cut. Since the wedding is coming up, I can’t pass up on this opportunity!

I had first heard about Locks of Love a few months back while looking for sites where I could donate or sell my hair. The company is a non-profit organization that provides hairpieces to financially disadvantaged children 18 years and younger suffering from long-term medical hair loss.

Readers, I need your help in deciding a new hairstyle!

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I bit the bullet last week and ordered an Infrant ReadyNAS 600 1TB RAID NAS box from AJump. Longtime readers will note that I’m currently using two [periodically] mirrored 250GB hard drives. I filled up the hard drive in February and have been using an 80GB “scratch” disk to store my recent photos. This was not a good solution because (1) the data wasn’t being backed up and (2) I didn’t like the idea of my photos residing on multiple hard drives, and (3) I’ve already had one hard drive crash in the last year. Since my data is priceless, I was eager to find a better solution.

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