Month: December 2006

Three Days Before Christmas

I always enjoy Christmas time, because it means spending time with my family getting away from the stress of constant incoming email, and not staring at my table of review items that are taunting “Review me…review me!”. This year promises to be extra fun because Ashley and I bought presents for each other that the other doesn’t know about – quite often we want such specific things the other person knows what they’re getting. I’d tell you what I bought Ashley, but she reads this blog so that won’t be a good idea. 😉 Some random thoughts…

  • This Christmas we had the opportunity to reach out and help three groups of people in three specific ways, and we feel extremely blessed to have the financial resources to do so. I’m not a believer in being generous only at Christmas – responsible stewardship of our resources is a year-round task – but this time things just kind of fell into place. It brings Ashley and I tremendous joy helping others – I think people from the richer nations in the world would give even more if they knew what giving felt like (only a small percentage of the population gives on a regular basis).
  • My cold is finally breaking today – the past three days I’ve had congested sinuses, swollen glands and a touch of a cough. I very rarely get sick – I think the last time I had a cold like this was when I was in Scotland in 2004. I’m really hoping that when I wake up tomorrow it will all be gone. Here’s hoping! I haven’t been very productive lately because of this cold – it’s hard to think straight. I took some Benadryl yesterday morning, and I didn’t realize it was the “drowsy” version. I was half comatose for most of the day, feeling veeeery sluggish and more or less brain dead. Watched a lot of TV – The Lost Room miniseries was very cool!
  • I set up the R1800 printer last night – the geek paralysis was broken – and did a few test prints, including my first 13 x 19″ printer. STUNNING quality. I did a sunrise print on Epson semigloss and it looked amazing. I’m doing up a print for my mom, a 13 x 19 print of a sunset over the ocean in Hawaii, and I’m confident it’s going to turn out fantastic.
  • Today is the day that a very cool piece of hardware is supposed to show up. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say what it is yet, so I’m not going to say anything…other than I’ve been told it’s coming with 2 GB of RAM and two 400 GB hard drives in a RAID 1 array. Mmm. Tasty!

Geek Paralysis

There’s a certain type of “geek paralysis” that occasionally happens when I buy a new piece of technology, but then I hold off on installing/unboxing it because an issue has come up and I’m not sure I’m going to be keeping it. That lovely Epson R1800 printer I bought a couple of days ago? I’m in geek paralysis over it. As someone very correctly pointed out on Digital Media Thoughts when I posted about it, what about Vista drivers? Will Epson release Vista drivers for the R1800, or will they use this as an excuse to release the R1850 that’s identical but has support for Vista? Back in the pre-XP days, I remember companies doing exactly that: I was running Windows 2000 and went to upgrade to Windows XP and I think it was my scanner that lacked drivers for XP. The company released a near-identical scanner, only with support for XP, and never released drivers for the scanner I had. I’m concerned that the same thing is going to happen with my R1800. The printer was $549 CAD + GST + environmental disposal fee, a complete set of ink for it is about $140 CAD, and the paper…oh man, the paper. 20 sheets of 13 x 19″ glossy paper is $83.99 CAD – over $4 each! Check out Epson Canada’s pricing – I’m gagging on my tongue. Worse yet, it’s really hard to find this stuff – my local stores carry 13 x 19″ paper for HP and Canon printers, but not many for Epson – watercolour and some velvet-finish type. I found a place in town that carries pretty much all Epson papers – The Camera Store – but in my current state of geek paralysis I don’t want to buy any paper until I know if I’m going to keep the printer. I’ve got an email in to an Epson PR person, hoping that he’ll respond with something to indicate to me if I should keep this printer and wait for the Vista drivers (which Epson Canada tech support said were coming for all models of printers – but do I believe them?).

25 Megabit Internet Access Now Offered…

Shaw, my local cable company, is the provider for my Internet access and our home phone (think high-grade VOIP). I currently pay an extra $10 per month to get 10 megabit per second Internet access, but they’ve recently started offering a package the blows everything else I’ve seen away, both in price and in performance. They have a 25 megabit offering that costs $99 CAD per month – the question is, would paying for this actually enhance my day to day Internet activities? As you can imagine, I’m online day in, day out, and am typically doing ten things at once – email, FTP, streaming video/audio, you name it. So I need a lot of bandwidth – but there’s a limit that most servers will be able to kick out at a time. I’m downloading 330 MB of video files from one of my servers now, which isn’t serving up much at all late on a Sunday night, and I’m only getting 600 KB/s of total downstream bandwidth. If you do the math, that’s 0.6 megabytes per second, and my 10 megabit connection can theoretically dish up 1.25 megabytes per second. So would going for the 25 mbps connection benefit me? Not really. I see this 25 mbps offering as a stepping stone for eventual delivery of HD movies on demand. I’d be better off getting a DSL line and figuring out some way to bridge the cable and DSL connections together for added speed and redundancy. I know Robert X. Cringely did the same thing, but I have no idea how…

A Lust-Worthy Printer: The Epson Stylus Photo R1800

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A few hours ago I picked up an Epson Stylus R1800 for the great price of $549 CAD, normally $699 CAD. Long story short, I was using my local Wal-Mart to do some holiday greeting card prints, and the colour reproduction was horrific – we’re talking truly pathetic. I couldn’t even find anyone that knew anything about colour to talk to, so I gave up and printed the photos myself at home on my R200, which turned out great. The reinforced my belief that being able to create great-quality output at home was of great importance to me, and being able to do larger prints has always been on my geek lust list. It’s also part of the re-configuring of my work area to better serve my goals of upping the game of my photography.

So, tonight I drove across the city to the one place in Calgary that had this printer that was open late on a Sunday, and picked it up. I was looking for a printer (available locally) that would do 13 ” x 19″ prints, but also printed on CDs and DVDs – and the list of printers that met those requirements was one item long: the R1800 (unless my research was inaccurate). I was initially a bit hesitant on getting this printer because it was released in February 2005, so it’s a bit old, but Epson made no move to replace it with a newer version at Photokina 2006, so it seems it’s still the most modern printer of its type – especially for $549. I haven’t even un-boxed it yet, but I’m really looking forward to it! Much to my dismay, the store was out of Epson 13 x 19″ paper, because someone bought an R2400 the day before and all of the 13 x 19″ stock at the same time. So I’m off to another store tomorrow AM to pick up some big paper to make my first prints.

Alienware Superman Laptop

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Ok, this absolutely rocks: a Superman-themed Alienware notebook! The colouring and design of the case is simply awesome. I thought at first the logo was raised plastic or resin, but it turn out it’s flat and airbrushed. Still very cool. The laptop itself is no slouch – the base config sells for $2239 USD, but you can deck it out with a Core 2 Duo processor at 2.33 Ghz, two 200 GB hard drives in a RAID array, 2 GB of RAM and dual TV tuners…for a mere $4206 USD. This would be one fast notebook, and it looks so damn good! I’m not notebook shopping until Q1 2007 when the new Vista models come out, so I won’t even consider this…but it sure looks nice! I’m intrigues by the branding partnership here as well – it’s not something I’ve seen very much of, but I’d sure like to see more. I’d kill for a Wolverine-themed notebook. 😉

I Went a Little Monitor Crazy This Week

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Two days ago I did something kind of fun and scary at the same time: Dell had their 24″ wide screen monitors on sale for $699 CAD yesterday, and I ordered three of them. Yes, three – that’s 72 inches of monitor goodness. Why? Well, I’ve had my eye on an upgrade to my dual 20.1″ Dell LCDs for a while now, and I’ve been looking hard at how I use all my computers in my home office, and I think some different hardware will help me get more done, faster. The three Dell monitors are part of the plan…more details to follow later. I also opted to lease them, which is something I’ve only ever done with computer equipment once before. Three of these beauties for $58 per month over four years – I qualified for their best financing rate (9.99%), so it’s not too bad in terms of overall cost of leasing ($490.86). And, yeah, these are the same monitors that I bought back in August ($50 less now) and ended up returning a few days later. Am I a glutton for punishment? Maybe. I want big monitors, and I’m really hoping that four months later, Dell has addressed this issue. There aren’t any monitors on the market that compare to these for $699 each. I read up in their forums before ordering, and it seems like the latest batch of revision A03 monitors no longer have the banding problem. How am I going to use such big monitors? Well that’s a tale for another day…

[as a side note, I’m realizing now one of the dis-advantages of having a template with a non-white background…if I end up posting images designed for white backgrounds very often, the background might need to change]

Dec 12th Suburban Sunrise

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They say that most of what good photography is amounts to being in the right place, at the right time, and pointing your camera in the right direction. I was doing a Christmas photo with Ashley and Keiko, and the sun was just starting to peek over the horizon in my community of Tuscany. I have far more sunset photos than sunrise photos because I’m a lazy photographer (trying to change that) and I’m not much of a morning person, so I thought this was a good opportunity to see what I could come up with. Those are the raw JPEGs out of the camera, no adjustments were made at all. I have the RAW images to process, but I have a hard time believing I’m going to get anything better than what the JPEG captured. I’m going to put the set of sunrise photos onto my photo site soon, but I wanted to share two of them with you now…I think one of the reasons why sunrise and sunset photos move my spirit so much is that, to me, they’re crystal clear evidence that the world was created to be a beautiful place.

TV Worth Watching: Deadwood

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“The outlaw camp of Deadwood marches slowly towards civilization, facing its first elections. But the power struggles continue over everything in Deadwood—influence, money, and whores—as the founding camp members form strategic alliances to face down the threat of a powerful newcomer, seeking to remake Deadwood in his image. Created and executive produced by David Milch (“NYPD Blue”), Deadwood is one of most acclaimed dramas on television. The series was nominated for 22 Emmys® and won 7 and earned a Golden Globe® Award in its first two seasons for Ian McShane.”

With all the dross on TV now, it can sometimes be hard to find really good TV shows. There aren’t many that I watch, but with the advent of TV shows being released on DVD, there are new opportunities to find great shows that I never had a chance to watch on TV. In fact, many shows are more enjoyable on DVD – better quality, no commercials, no waiting for the next episode. One such show is Deadwood, a gripping drama that covers the harsh world of a small town caught up in a gold rush. Amazing acting, superb writing, excellent cinematography…the show is top notch in every way. But it’s also rife with swearing, nudity, and violence – so it’s not a show I’d recommend to everyone. Zip (think Canadian Netflix) is great for getting TV shows like this, because I can queue up several discs at once and really absorb the show. If you’re not squeamish and can handle a harsh tale of life in the old West, give Deadwood a serious look.

No, Really, I’m Not the Jason Dunn You’re Looking For

I’m sure many of us have been mistaken for someone else with our same name at least once in our lifetime – myself, I get a phone call about once a year from debt collectors looking for a deadbeat named Jason Dunn who grew up in Eastern Canada. They ask me questions about where I grew up and went to school, then figure out I’m not the Jason Dunn they’re looking for. But, year after year, I keep getting calls. Hopefully someday that other Jason Dunn will clean up his credit and I can stop getting those phone calls.

In the online world, getting mistaken for someone else is less common, usually because there’s context around how you found them – a Web site, a search engine, a forum posting. It’s not always enough to get the identity right though – I keep getting email messages to my Gmail account meant for another Jason Dunn (one located in the UK) because he doesn’t seem to know what his own email address is. It’s rather bizarre – especially since a few of the messages I’ve received have been of a rather personal nature. But I digress…

In the online world, at the moment, I’m the #1 ranked Jason Dunn in Google. Sure, that’s not as cool as being the #1 ranked Chris, but hey, we can’t all be Lockergnomes. I’ve checked my rankings now and then over the years, and I’ve always jostled for Google position with a 6 foot 6 inch 274 pound NFL linebacker and an unfortunate fellow that died of an accidental gunshot wound. But in the past year, there’s a new contender: the lead singer of a Canadian band named Hawk Nelson, who’s name also happens to be Jason Dunn. They have a light punk/Blink 182 type groove. The other day, I received an email that gave me a good chuckle, because it finally happened: someone thought I was a “famous” Jason Dunn. Here’s the email:

Jason, I just want to know.
How Do you write such AMAZING lyrics.
You are a huge influence to me in my band. But i need help with my writing.
could you help at all? i know you are busy. But hey!
its worth a try.
Thanks,
[name withheld]

Now isn’t that a nice email? I’m a musician, and I’ve written a couple of songs in my life, but I had a hunch he wasn’t emailing the Jason Dunn of Thoughts Media Inc. to ask about song lyric writing. I wonder which one of us Jason Dunn’s will be around in Google a decade from now? Time will tell…but I’m hoping it’s me. 😉

Geeks Who Don’t Understand Not Everyone is Like Them Drive Me Nuts

One thing that causes me to bang my head into my keyboard, repeatedly, is when I get into a “discussion” with a high-tech geek like myself who doesn’t grasp that not everyone thinks like they do. I think it’s the height of hubris to feel that the way you perceive the world is the way that everyone else does (or should) perceive things. This thread over at The Hive is a good example of this form of massively flawed thinking. One of the people I’m talking with there believes that the only differences between a Zune and a Pocket PC is that the Zune has more storage. He doesn’t understand that one (the Zune) is designed to work like a simple appliance – simple user interface, easy to understand, quick navigation, highly focused around specific behaviours. The Pocket PC, on the other hand, is a computer. It has a start menu, dozens of applications multiplied by dozens of menus, giving you hundreds of functions. Given enough time, sure, an average person could find the media player and listen to music on the Pocket PC, but the difference between that scenario and handing someone a Zune and watching them use it (which I’ve done several times) is enormous. I’m so incredibly thankful that people who think user interface doesn’t matter are no longer the ones in charge of projects like the Zune – though I think sometimes they are, if you look at the horrid Archos products.