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.

James Kim, C|NET News Editor, Rest in Peace

“The body of missing CNET editor James Kim has been located, authorities announced Wednesday. Arrangements are being made to transport Kim to an undisclosed location, according to police. Kim had been missing in the remote southwestern Oregon wilderness for 11 days and was found at approximately noon Wednesday about half a mile from the Rogue River, authorities said. Kim, 35, left his family’s stranded car Saturday morning searching for help and never returned. “He was very motivated…he traveled a long way,” Josephine County Undersheriff Brian Anderson said at a press conference Wednesday afternoon. The Kim family has asked not to be contacted at this time.”

A very sad story – most of it transpired while I was away in Hawaii. I feel like I knew James, having linked to his reviews, news stories and videos over the years. It’s shocking when something like this happens, even more so when it happens to someone I consider to be a peer of mine in this industry. There are many lessons to be learned here (such as staying put when people are looking for you), but James tried to save his family and I have nothing but respect for that.

When Software Should Stop Bad User Behaviour

In grinding through the 1614 email messages I had when I opened Outlook this morning, one email in particular stood out to me: it was an email with an attachment that was 31 megabytes in size. THIRTY-ONE FREAKING MEGABYTES. That’s beyond ludicrous, that’s well into the “will crash some email clients even if it happens to make it through and doesn’t kill your entire Inbox and cause all your other email to bounce” category. Now, the person sending it likely didn’t realize it was so big (I sure hope they didn’t), but here’s where smart software should come into play: an email client simply shouldn’t allow a user to send an email attachment that big without a polite warning, stating something such as “The attachment you’re trying to send is very large – it may not be received properly”. The threshold would be set fairly high – likely around 10 MB before it would trigger the warning – and there should be an option for users to ignore the warning if it’s something they do often and know that the person on the other end can accept large files. No one wants a return to irritating Clippy-like helpers, but there’s just no way that intelligent software should let users do something as foolish as send a 31 MB email attachment.

Middle Button Click to Open a New Firefox Tab

On all of my PCs, I have the middle mouse button configured to act as a browser back button, allowing me to quickly go back to the previous page I visited rather than having to click the back button or use the ALT+left arrow key. I spend so much of my life online, saving a few seconds or (more importantly) wear and tear on my mousing arm is important to me. So I was a bit frustrated that I couldn’t seem to configure Firefox 2.0 to allow me to use the middle mouse button on my Microsoft mouse to open links in a new tab when I used the middle mouse button to click on a link. At first I thought I needed a Firefox add-on, but after some research it turns out that by default the middle-click button opens links in new tabs – but I never saw it working because my Microsoft mouse software always overrode it. By going into the Control Panel > Mouse > Buttons settings, and selecting the check-box for “Enable Program-Specific Settings”, I was able to select the Firefox executable and set the Wheel Button to Middle Click. Now in Firefox the middle click on the mouse button will open up links in new tabs, while in other programs it will go back. I thought it might have been easier to streamline everything to work the same, so I tried making the left zoom button on my Microsoft mouse function as a middle-click button, thus keeping the real middle mouse click button for the Back function, but ergonomically the zoom button is slightly out of position for easy use – which is why I very rarely use it. So it’s back to the previous configuration: Firefox-specific middle mouse click to open a link in a new tab.

Back from Hawaii

Ashley and I made it back from Hawaii, and we had an amazing time! Hawaii is a beautiful place, and a bit different from what I was expecting. Traveling on a cruise ship was likely a bit different than we expected, but overall a nice way to travel. The journey home was a bit long and frustrating – a five hour wait at the Honolulu airport, followed by a six hour red-eye flight to Seattle, then a five hour wait at the Seattle airport – but we’re glad to be home. We went there with two bags, and came back with four, so we have a lot of souvenirs for friends and family, along with Christmas gifts, and a whole lot of food and goodies. As per usual, we didn’t buy much for ourselves: Ashley got some new jewelry, I found a line of clothing I really liked and bought a few shirts. The real reward of travel for us is the experience, and for me specifically, the photography. I purchased my Nikon D200 with this trip in mind, and the camera performed amazingly well. There’s nothing quite like aiming the camera at a surfer catching a wave, and capturing four photos per second – I love that I never have to wait for this camera! I have an ungodly number of photos to go through – I was capturing in RAW+JPEG for 95% of the trip, so that slows things down tremendously (and is one of the reasons I find RAW so frustrating to work with). Most of my work will be culling though – I have 6288 photos in total, so if you figure that roughly half of those are RAW files, I have around 3100 images to go through. I suspect I’ll end up with around 800 to 1000 images in the end, perhaps less once I start to compare images of tropical scenery and flowers – odds are I shot much of the same thing, only in different places. The Canon Powershot SD800 served me well as a video camera and secondary photo unit when I didn’t have time (or the desire) to un-sling the big D200. I also had a chance to test out some new gear, including a very hardcore Kata camera bag, a new hard drive enclosure with a CompactFlash slot, and my Zune got a real road-test. More to follow later, though I suspect it will be at least a week before I’ll have my photos finished. Here’s a shot below of the sun deck on the cruise ship. This is one of the only times we were up there – we didn’t even go in the pool.

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I have so much email waiting for me I’m scared to open Outlook, but tomorrow I’ll dive in and try to get brought back up to speed. I’m so amazingly thankful I can rely on the awesome team of volunteers I have, which allowed me to go on this vacation. Those guys truly made this trip possible.

Under Pressure (Or Lack Thereof)

After fumbling out of bed this morning at 3 AM, Ashley and I arrived at the airport via taxi cab at 4:30 AM. We made it through the long US Customs line (we were near the front), though the tightened security (all shoes come off now), and finally, onto the plane – where we proceeded to nearly freeze to death for 20 minutes as they kept the door open. It took off, and we noticed a strange thing – our ears kept popping and popping…but it didn’t quit like it normally would. Lo and behold, ten minutes into the flight, the pilot comes on the intercom and tells us that there’s a problem with the internal pressure system, and because of the altitude they have to rise to for the flight, they had no choice but to turn around and fly back to Calgary. We landed, hoping it would be a quick fix and we could stay on the plane – no such luck. We went back into the airport, and eventually they fixed the same plane, moved it to a different gate (just to psyche us out I think) and off we went – leaving at 9:30 AM or so. Much to our frustration though, our connecting flight into Honolulu was slated to leave Seattle at 8:40 AM, so we missed the flight. What sucks even worse? The next flight wasn’t departing until 5:30 PM. And today being Thanksgiving in the US of A, none of the local shopping malls or stores are open – so no visit to Fry’s Electronics for this geek. We wandered around the airport, got a 30 minute massage each, did some shopping/browsing (we’ll pick up some stuff on the way back when we ALSO have a five hour layover…). We also had to cancel our Cirque du Soleil tickets for tonight, because the new flight gets us in too late to catch the show. Double suck! Thankfully a kindly worded explanation to the ticket lady resulted in us getting a full refund (despite the stern warnings on the bottom of our receipt). It’s 4:48 PM Seattle time, and we’re just about ready to board the flight to Honolulu – let’s hope it’s uneventful and we get there on the first try!