vágyálom

Photoshop World

I’m a geek, so I think it’s great fun to spend my vacation going to a conference in Vegas to learn Adobe Photoshop.  I’ve just returned from my first Photoshop World, and I had a blast.  It was great to get away from everything and spend some time focusing on something I really enjoy.  Ironically, I ended up taking relatively few pictures during the trip.  I brought a new Canon T1i DSLR camera to try out.  Below are a few pictures taken with the camera.  I was a bit surprised about how noisy the T1i was at high ISO.  Other than that, I really liked it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As for the classes, I found they were more inspiring then practical.  Some involved more Photoshop work then I care to do on my photos, while others manipulated the images more then I’m comfortable with.  Yet, they gave me ideas on how I can do more with Photoshop, and let me some what someone really comfortable/familiar with the software can do.

Sign Failure

I was going through some old e-mail and found this photo from 2001 taken in Las Vegas.  Look carefully at the Paris sign, and you'll see what I think is the Windows login screen.  As someone who has had to do digital signage (albeit on a smaller scale), I'm sympathetic.

WWDC 2009 (San Francisco)

I'm in San Francisco this week for WWDC.

New camera

My new Canon 5D mark II arrived today, and I was luck to have some wonderful weather to go out and take some test shots.  Most recently I've been using my Canon d60 (circa 2002), and I have to say, we've come a long ways since then.  The controls have changed, and overall become much more complicated.  Lightroom is much much much much slower at dealing with the 21 megapixel images from the new camera vs. the 6 megapixel images from my old camera.

Windows 7 on Fusion

I decided to download the beta and give it a spin.  I thought I would try it under VMware Fusion.  I'm not sure if the problem is with the beta or Fusion, but it's too slow to be usable.  I'm actually holding out hope that Windows 7 will make a good virtual machine.  I've heard plenty of talk about targeting Windows 7 so it would work well on Netbooks.  To me that sounds promising for a virtual machine.  I guess for now, I'm sticking with XP.

VMware ESXi on Fusion

In both the VMware class I'm taking, and at work, we use the fulll version of VMware ESX.  I wanted to try out the relatively new and shiny ESXi and like many before me, didn't actually want to setup a server just to fool around with it.  So, as pictured above, I've installed it under VMware Fusion. I'm running their high end virtual server product under their Mac desktop version.  On a laptop.  Pretty cool.

VMware ESX has a customized version of Redhat Linux runing on top of the VMware kernel.  This interface can be used to manage the box from the command line, and run various management software.  More recently VMware has released ESXi which does not have this interface.  It results in a much smaller install (32MB), and is intended to be more secure and reliable.

Instructions on how to do this can be found at: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-6590

Geeking it out VMware style

I've been spending this week attending a class on VMware Virtual Infrastructure.  The class runs from 8am to 6pm, and has been making for some pretty long days.  One cool new find, the VI: Ops website.  Full of handy technical tips and best practices on actually using VMware VI3.

So far, the class has been 90% review.  But that last 10% is handy, and reinforcing the first 90% is a good thing.  I think the rest of the week is going to cover material I much less familiar with.

Since I had some questions on the iSCSI portions of the class, I did some Googling, and found an interesting blogs post on performance and using iSCSI with VMware.  What's particluarly neat, is that folks from VMware, NetApp, EqualLogic, EMC and Lefthand Networks all colaborated on it.  It's nice to see competitiors working together for the benift of their customers.

The class also fulfills half of the requirements to become a VMware Certified Professional. 

Obama

I've noticed that sometimes I get too caught up in the irrelevant minutiae, and miss the big picture.  Case in point, today I was watching President Obama's inaugural address, and he didn't make it two paragraphs into his speech before I caught a mistake, and was off googling it to confirm I was right.  The detail was completely irrelevant, and distracted me from the larger message.  Lucky, it seems the inauration was on a constant loop today.

Anyways, since I like to share my pendantic nature, here for your reading pleasure is the mistake:

"Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath."

While Obama is the 44th president, there have only been 43 Americans who have taken the oath of office.  No, it's not because I think Obama is not a natural born citizen, or that he renounced his citzenship.  Nor do I think that the flub during his oath of office somehow invalidates it.  No, it's because while we count Obama as the 44th US President, that's counting Grover Cleveland twice.  He served two non-consecutive terms as the 22nd and 24th President.

Still, I'm surprised that his fact checkers got this one wrong.  I mean this little detail is on the shinny new White House website.  At least we now have a President who can make a mistake.  Unlike the last guy, who at least in his own mind never did.

Year End

As 2008 is rapidly coming to a close, I am in a reflective mood.  This year has been quite tumultuous for me.

My jaw surgery and the associated recovery turned out to mentally much more challenging then I expected.  The pain and swelling was anticipated.  Being unable to care for myself (even briefly) and having to rely on others was difficult.

On the professional front, I presented at an industry conference, won an award, and had an article published.  At work, I chaired a committee, and accomplished a great deal of work with my team.  This past summer, I was able to attend three conferences. 

Starting in March of 2007 I began actively supporting Barack Obama for President.  At first it was by volunteering my time at the national headquarters.  Mostly working on their computers and network.  Tier 1 type work—not something I’m used to.  This was the first time I actively became involved in a campaign.  I was thrilled to participate in the Grant Park rally and witness Obama’s acceptance speech.

Economically it’s been a dreadful year.  My portion of the medical bills for the jaw surgery was significant. Even with good health insurance, I had to pay a lot out of pocket.  My remaining savings and retirement got hammered along with everyone else.  I find myself ending the year much poorer then when I started it.

Overall I feel very fortunate, but I am hopeful that 2009 is a better year.

Back from SF