The Eye-Fi 2gb SD card automatically uploads your pictures to your website over WI-FI (here's a map of the hotspots). Seriously cool. The Eye-Fi Explore also geo-tags your photos. Eye-Fi Cards work with virtually all digital cameras that accept SD memory cards.

Teddy spent a couple of days in the hospital. Here he is on his IV drip and wrapped in a blanket.

He was extremely lethargic at this point and we really didn't have an idea of what was happening. We were very worried. It also was a difficult reminder of what we went through with Jack over the holidays. But by the end of the day he was feeling better. The hydration, stabilizing his temperature, and some medications perked him up. We left him in the hospital overnight. At around midnight he backed up the grate on his cage, like a dump truck backing up to the landfill, and let fly. Projectile style. And amid the staff diving out of the way, out shot a makeup sponge. Diagnosis complete. After that he was fine. We kept him under observation for another day but he's back to his normal self. That was the most expensive makeup sponge in the history of mankind.

Here he is about to get his followup examination yesterday, which he passed with flying colors.

Bill Wadman writes about why good lenses are critical for photography here.

I can't tell you the number of people I see who have this all wrong. Last year at the Grand Canyon, I saw a girl with a high-end Gitzo tripod, 5D body, and some crappy consumer level zoom lens on the front. Honestly, I almost pushed her over the edge.

Yesterday we noticed that Teddy was feeling lethargic and didn't have an appetite. Today he was throwing up from both ends, and was clearly very sick. I took him into the Veterinarian today and they're concerned. He'll be spending the day there and getting an IV, x-ray, and some TLC. We don't know what's wrong with him. He's only five months old!

Just upgraded to a business account with Comcast for my home internet (around $90 per month). I went with a business account because the upload speeds are faster and I get static IPs with it. They also have a promotion going now so the install was free and the monthly cost is reduced. I did have to sign a two year contract, but that's okay.

With DSL, I was getting about 4800kb/s down and 600kb/s up. This was as fast as DSL would go with AT&T unless I switched to U-Verse. But I didn't want U-Verse. The TV channels and DVR don't meet my needs (missing HD channels and only 1 HD channel at a time) and the DSL is only marginally faster. Plus I haven't heard great things about it.

With my freshly installed Comcast cable I'm getting, wait for it, 17500kb/s down and 2700kb/s up! Holy cow poo! They promise 16000kb down and 2000kb up and to my surprise it actually seems to be faster. I haven't hooked it up to my network yet, but that's what the installers speed report said on his laptop. I'll let you know how fast it is according to www.dslreports.com when I hook up the LAN to it.

I can't believe how fast this is. And because I've switched to Vonage for my home phone, Comcast + Vonage is much cheaper than ATT DSL + Phone. And the speeds are a bit mind boggling.

Here is my DSL speed report:

Why? One word. Man babies. Ok, that's two. Leave me alone, I'm grumpy.

GET MORE AT ManBabies.com!

Now you can. Ride along in the new ZR1 a test track in Germany. The ZR1 is the new $100,000 corvette made out of carbon fiber and ceramic. It has 640hp supercharged v8 in it and is truly a supercar. This car is sick.

I'm finding this folder to be a pain in my sitting place. Not all the applications use it, and I frequently am wondering where the heck my files are getting downloaded to. Also, I just realized I have a two hundred and six terrabytes of random stuff in there. I've changed Safari and Firefox to download to the desktop so this stuff gets managed properly. I'd delete the folder from my User folder, but Leopard won't let me. I will, gleefully, delete the shortcut from my dock. Take that, folder. Not so hot now are ya?

Edit: I changed the permissions on this folder to "read only". Now nobody can save shiznit there. Powned.

This article on www.wired.com caught my interest because they have some pictures of diagrams that show how the photographer, Brent Humphrys, lit Steve Carrell for the photoshoot for the cover of this month's issue.

Portrait photography is something I'm very interested in and have been studying up on. For example I'm currently reading a fascinating book called "Light: Science and Magic: An introduction to Photographic Lighting". I recently bought a bunch of light stands, a backdrop stand, and I have a few off camera flashes now. For now I'm doing the strobist method, but eventually I plan to buy some real studio lighting. Anyway, I love to see how these photographs are made.

Looks like he used a ring flash, a couple of grids and gobos, a soft box, and a couple of bare strobes. Nice. Seems like a complicated arrangement, but you can't argue with the results.

Adding keywords to my photos is something I've been struggling with. It's just a pain. The website www.organizePictures.com has a good article on how to do this efficiently here. I also see some other interesting articles on this organizepictures.com that might be worth reading. Keeping my pictures organized is a big struggle. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. Sigh.

If you want your head to explode, and you want to do more with keywords, go check out the website www.controlledvocabulary.com. I've been tempted to buy their keyword library, but at $70.00, this prices seems about twice as expensive as it should be. If you buy this library, you can import it into Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture and go from there.

I really enjoy Erin Vey's photography. She specializes in pets and children, especially her Great Dane, Gracie.

Microsoft Office Entourage Sound Sets is one of my pet features I added to Entourage a bazillion years ago. A sound set is basically six sounds that you can change so that when you get new mail, you can hear a duck quack or a clip from your favorite movie - "I'm in the pipe, five by five". This feature was really fun to add, though generally I like my computers to be as quiet as possible so I don't really use it. But today I'm working at home due to a sore back so I want Entourage to ping when I get a work email. I want a very quiet, short sound, which is why I dug this feature up again. I find the default sound to be too long and annoying.

Here's a nice tutorial on how to make a sound set. And here's a website with a bunch of free sound sets on it. Very cool. Go ahead download them. Annoy your spouses and coworkers. And think of me when you do it.

Edit: I just tried one of these sound sets and Entourage doesn't recognize it. Turns out the old sound sets aren't compatible with Entourage 2008. You have to convert them. Here's how. I find this to be disappointing (but I understand why they did this). I just can't be bothered to convert over the sounds sets linked above. It would have been nice if Entourage converted them for you. To me this is a little thing that goes a long way toward pleasing users. There's a fair amount of people who got bit by this.

Here's some more info on Sound Sets in Entourage 2008:
Google Groups
Apple Support Discussion Group
An Entourage Blog posting
Erik Schwiebert posts about Entourage Sound Sets on arstechnica.com
Another long thread with people banging their heads against this

Sigh. I'm giving up. I can't get it to work. How sad.

One of the biggest barriers in the way of me posting to my blog is convenience. It's got to be drop dead easy. Logging into a web page to post is way too painful. Also, it's way too easy to loose your post if something weird happens. Which happens way too frequently. This is why using a blog posting application is the way to go. First and foremost, you have support for drafts. Save often. Then come back to it.

I've recently switched my computer life back to Macintosh. One of the first things I did was look for the best tools for the stuff I do frequently, like post to my blog. Here's what I discovered.

Bottom line - Ecto is the program to use if you blog on Mac OS X. It has all the required features. WYSWYG editing. Support for all the blogging engines (even Das Blog, which I use). It also has some nice integration with Apple technologies like iTunes and iPhoto. It also has a Amazon.com feature that looks cool, but I haven't really used it yet. Ecto also has a plugin architecture. For example there are plugins for posting to twitter and flickr.

There are two items I'd like added to the Ecto toolbar - "insert picture" and "insert link". Ecto supports both of these fine, it's just a bit awkward to invoke these from the menus. I've spent too much time hunting around trying to find the UI to do this. Of course I can drag a picture into my post from the Finder, but this typically isn't how I want to do things. Ecto costs $17.95, which I gladly paid. I've been using Ecto for a while now, and it's never crashed, and I don't recall having any problems with it at all. This is a great track record.

I tried Mars Edit as well, and it looks like a fine program but it lacks WSYWYG editing which, for me, is a instant deal buster. And I understand HTML. I think this was be really painful for a less technical person to use. I will certainly look at Mars Edit again when it supports WSYWYG. I really like the Mars Edit icon though, so it has that going for it. Mars Edit costs $29.95, which I think is about twice as expensive as it should be.

As an aside, if you use Windows, there's no better tool than Windows Live Writer. This program is one of my favorite Microsoft applications ever. In fact before I found Ecto, I blogged with Windows Live Writer from Windows XP running in Parallels on my Mac Book Pro. I think this is the gold standard for all blogging applications to judge themselves by. Oh and by the way, Windows Live Writer is free.

My truck was on fumes today. Filled it up. Took two tries because the pump shuts off when you hit $75.00. Now I accept I'll being paying more at the pump because of what I've chosen to drive. But, sheesh, this is getting a tad ridiculous. I'm aware that at some point I may be looking back on this as having it good. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

Oh, and my truck takes regular. In case you were wondering. Which you probably weren't.

Now, some stuff annoys me. I'm annoyable. Maybe easily so. Ask anyone. But there's a scale. For example, getting a bowie knife thrown at me, Alanis Morissette singing about ironic incidents that are about as ironic as a plucked nosehair, or getting pooped on by a bird as I was leaving to photograph a wedding - these are annoying. Teeth grindable. Kitten throwable, perhaps. But the picture below, however, represents an annoyance so epically annoying that I personally called Condoleezza Rice and asked her to have an f-15 fire a sidewinder into a Smucker's grape jam factory storage vat's ass. Boom! Splat! (Martha, ya'll git me a spoon!)

This annoyance comes from the Microsoft Office 2008 for Macintosh My Day application. It's part of Entourage, an application close to my heart, since I worked on it for so long entire species of insects evolved into sentience and then killed themselves with Carbon Dioxide emissions and political correctness pamphlets. Now, you may be asking. Um, why is that annoying, you grumpy nut-job? I mean, besides the Barney inspired, nauseous inducing color scheme? (Hello! The grape cool-aid called. She wants her color back! (Yes, the cool-aid is a she. Move on.))

Ok, here's a clue. I didn't run My Day. Ever. Never wanted it. (Ok, maybe I opened it once, screamed, ran out side and blew up my neighborhood's power transformer with Coke and Pop-Rocks to cut power to my computer). But today I simply installed a update from Apple on my Mac Pro that required a restart. This annoyance foists itself on me every time I restart. Yes. Foists. Look it up, you curmudgeon. The picture was captured from my desktop about twenty seconds after the restart. The first thing I did was open the preferences.

Get it yet?

My fix for this? Compress the MyDay.app in the Microsoft Office 2008 folder with ZIP. Delete original. Go to my happy place. Breath, Mike breath.

One last thing. My happy place does not have purple anything. Even the lollipops, jawbreakers, and bubblegum are confused by the word purple there. Because they've never heard the word before. Purple! Huh! Whu? What is the word you are speaking sir, is it Mikelish? (My happy place, my language). Clearly, they don't have to run Entourage. Which I do. Entourage, Damn your purple Barney hide!

So, quick story.

It was a dark and stormy night. Johnny Cash was playing on the Jukebox, singing about his empire of dirt. My battered Harley was parked out front. A half ashed Marlboro Red hung from my dry lip, the smoke stinging my eyes, as I nursed another highball. The bar was worn oak, threadbare, from a thousand average joes like me, with a thousand stories, sobbing into their beers. The light was dim, like my prospects, lit, mostly, from the screen of my Mac Book Pro. I was trying to forward a important email to all my friends and family. It was an important email about an exiled prince from Nigeria who has a million dollars he wants to split with me (I met him on craigslist when I was trying to sell a set of Hello Kitty tire stem caps). The kicker was I just needed to come up with a couple of thousand bucks to lend him so he could get on a plane ticket to Houston where the money is. I knew my friends and family would want in on this deal. It was a sure thing. It had to be, dammit. But the button on the computer was all clicked out. I had no click. No clickage. Click? Nope, don't got any. The trackpad button wouldn't work. I couldn't send off the email. The dammed thing. That's my hard luck story. One story in a million in the big city. Bartender, slide me another...

Turns out, the battery on my Mac Book Pro suddenly swelled up. Not good. Next stop, explosion city and the eleven o'clock news. I figured this out because it swelled enough enough to eliminate all the space for the track pad button to depress inside the case. No battery equalled plenty of click. After some head scratching, tinkering, a sandwich, a ten thousand piece three-d puzzle of stonehenge, and a episode of CSI (you know, for the sleuthing vibe) I figured this out.

Next stop, Appleville. I took my battery into the Apple store and showed it to to the frickin' geniuses there. (Now, could that sound more sarcastic? I submit that it could not.) Some genius there quickly took the old battery off my hands, see, and recycled it, see, and gave me a shiny new one, see. For free. Keep in mind, my battery is almost 3 years old. The replacement is a $130.00. I couldn't believe it. I kept looking over the shoulder for a guy in a suit, dark glasses, and an ear piece to come hot, weapons drawn, and talking into his sleeve about taking "the shot".

I have another random story about Apple customer service. A while back I took apart a Mac mini to upgrade the Ram. This procedure is tricky, requiring the use of two paint spatulas, a m-80 firecracker, a backhoe, and some warm chewing gum. Yes, it has to be warm. Midway through the procedure, things, um, got away from me, and I did an impression of an old timey vaudeville act. I ran around screaming "I got it! I got it! I got it!" bobbling the naked motherboard around in my hands like NFL receiver trying to haul in the game winning catch. All to the sounds of some honkey tonk ragtime piano music. Then, of course, I screamed "I don't got it!" which was followed by a sickening crunch, a small fire, and a rift in the space-time continuum. I broke the IR receiver right off the motherboard. So after I nearly burned down my neighbors house trying to solder it back on (you don't think I solder at HOME do you?). I took finally took it into the genius bar, fully expecting a bank busting bill. When the Apple genius asked me what happened, I fessed up and told the truth (cause, that's just how I roll, McDuff), and, much to my shock, they said that since I didn't lie, they'd fix it for free. Seriously. Me dropping an open computer onto the ground and breaking something off the motherboard is NOT covered by ANY warranty that I know of. Sweet.

Mike is happy Apple customer today. Also he's hopped on the goofballs. Of the over the counter cold medicine variety.

Peace out, crime fighting dog.

My buddy Rob invited me to go with him to the North American Buggy Expo (NABX) this year. For you that don't know, a kite buggy is a little three wheel cart that you sit in and get pulled along by a kite at insane and terrifying speeds about three inches off the ground. People live for this shiznit.

This event takes place in the Ivanpah dry lake bed in the Mojave desert near Primm Nevada. This lovely casino is on the border between Nevada and California, about an hour or so out of Las Vegas. We stayed in the Buffalo Bills casino and hotel and went out to the desert every day. I had a lot of fun practicing my photography and just relaxing. I also went on a buggy ride across the desert at about fifty miles an hour, which is just insane when you're a couple of inches off the ground. Here's one of Rob's pictures of me about to set out for my first ride. Notice my pristine white rooky gloves.

It wasn't too hot most of the time with the wind blowing and I met some very interesting people who I probably wouldn't normally run into. People that live to do wind sports. Lots of tattoos, mohawks, and other folks who live for getting dragged around by the wind from all over the world. Ultimately, I don't really think the kite sports are my thing, but I really enjoyed the trip and would go again just to hang out and take more pictures.

I just posted my pictures to my site here. Thanks to Rob, my photo mentor, for the crash course in sports photography I got over the weekend.

Thanks for the fun trip Rob, and remember, "He Drive Slow!".

http://photographyvoter.com. Nice. Kinda like Digg but for photo stuff. Also has a RSS feed if you're into that kind of thing.