Month: January 2007

Adobe Lightroom

Adobe has released it’s new application Lightroom today. In their own words:

New Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is the perfect complement to Adobe Photoshop. Use Lightroom to import, manage, adjust, and present large volumes of digital photographs, and use Photoshop to more thoroughly refine individual images.

Together, Photoshop Lightroom and Photoshop work the way the digital photographer works, letting you efficiently and seamlessly process all of your digital images. The picture is complete.

I’m definitely looking forward to this once I can squeeze it into the budget. This looks like “the” application for processing workflow for me, sort of a unification of all the types of tools that I would use in any normal circumstance. All else, I would defer to Laura’s exceptional Photoshop skills.

Bike Battery Battles

Over the past couple of weeks, I have not been riding the bike as often as I normally do. Nor do I ride as far as I used to. I used to go over 40 miles each way every day to the office, but now, I’m only riding 2 to 3 miles per day – and it’s cold so I’m stealing Laura’s car more often. Due to all of that, my battery has started to fail. By “fail” I mean it doesn’t start in the mornings or evenings. I’m simply not riding it long enough or often enough to keep it charged.

So, I now have a solution. My dad had a special charger for his bike since it sat in his garage for long periods of time, so I thought I’d look into it. Sure enough, they are fairly cheap and I picked up one for $32. I installed the permanent leads and started charging it. Not even half an hour later, the bike started up clean. This morning, after an overnight charge, it started even better than it normally does. I guess I should have gotten one of these things sooner.

Snow!

[Finally…] It’s been a while since we’ve had snow, but today we now have a couple of inches on the ground and more still coming. This has been a strange winter – almost Houston-like. It hasn’t been very cold, nor has it really snowed until today.

I’m totally stoked since I love snow. But, it looks like I may not make it to the office tomorrow. The roads were slick only a couple of hours into the snow and when more is coming, the outlook for “good traction” is not so good. Oh darn.

Motorcycles!

Sunday [tomorrow], I am going downtown to DC to visit the Cycle World International Motorcycle Show. Sound like fun? I think so. My main purpose is to check out some BMW models that are not yet in the showrooms and see what other manufactures are offering. Oh – and to drop of my sweepstakes entry to win a new BMW. That would be nice, ya?

I’ll let you know if I see anything cool.

Home Network Fiddling: Complete?

2012-01-08 23:29:55

For a while anyway. Today, I spent quite a bit of time learning about how ISA server works and configuring it to provide people with the various web sites that come out of my house. It took some doing, but I think everything is working. I had to re-install it because my multi-segmented home network plans didn’t work out – I couldn’t get the routing quite right. I’ll have to do that on a different box – one that’s not the firewall.

Now that is complete as well a an upgrade to a second UPS battery backup. Now that I have two, I can have my systems and home network [as well as phone since I do VoIP] up for about 20 minutes during a power outage. I had everything on one and that would have given me less than 10. I eventually want one UPS per computer, but I like what I have now and it will last me for a while.

So – I’m not going to fool with it anymore this week. All I’ll be doing is working with what I have on some virtual machine projects for work and hoping that I’ve found the problem with my main server – the old CPU. If it’s bad, I hope there’s a warranty!

Fun With Networks

Today, I have been having a blast configuing my new ISA Server 2006. I have to say it has been quite a learning experience. It can do some really cool things, but sometimes I think it’s too smart for itself. It goes off and does “stuff” in the background. Now, that “stuff” has sometimes been helpful, like earlier this evening it repaired itself. Slinky! But, then sometimes the “stuff” made the whole network unusable. I don’t know if I like that, but I do think that if the server stays as it is right now, I’ll leave it alone for a bit. Everything is working… I think. I’ll find out more when I go outside and try to get in to see if the configurations I set up work as I thought they should.