Still in Nashville. No, not flooded, but came close.
Had a moderately good orchid chasing season with one excellent trip in which I was chauffered around a private preserve of about 700 acres conducting a survey with the owner of the population of Cypripedium parviflorum var. pubscens (Large Yellow Ladyslipper).
Here are some pictures: http://tinyurl.com/29l5acp http://tinyurl.com/23djcs7 http://tinyurl.com/24yjc86
Otherwise been a quiet photographic season. No new camera gear. I am thinking about hitting the Smokies next weekend for some purple fringed orchids, but otherwise it will continue to be quiet, as it is already in the nineties.
I like your photo of the guys fishing. Looks like a topographically interesting location.
Oh, and I'll be an Apple owner again soon. It's been a while, but I finally caved on the iPad after using it today. I've been wanting a tablet for years and was waiting for Apple to make their move. It is just about what I was hoping for on first impression. As in, NOT a full computer but also not a darned smartphone. Darned jumbo hands
I'm going to say this - I will post a proper reasoned response tomorrow.
Suffice it to say for now, though - good to see you are still kicking around. Sounds like life's been a little less than productive for everyone, photographically speaking. Lord knows my K20 has seen enough graduation photos to last a lifetime since April 30, but that's of little value here. Anyway, I have been churning away at things so maybe i'll get some stuff up, and maybe when I get done with the backlog, I'll have incentive to go shoot.
What has been killing me this month is that I am now 3 hours from the Smokies, and I'm stuck in Nashville, missing the azaleas and rhodos. I had a wicked bout of vertigo a few weeks back, and although the room has stopped spinning, the darn fluid behind my eardrum still hasn't evacuated itself. So... No high elevations until it does. Since Nashville sits in a basin at about 500ft, and everything interesting (and not sweltering) requires a 1000ft+ elevation change, I'm stuck here where it is too darned hot to do anything already.
My Mexipedium xerophyticum, a very rare slipper orchid from Mexico, started blooming yesterday. Talk about a hard plant to photograph. The blooms are about the size of a dime, are WHITE, and are shiny with metallic flecks. The only way I could photograph it was to put it in front of closed blinds at stupidly slow shutter speeds for macro work. Never thought I would ever use live view until I realized how great it is for macro work. Being able to zoom into exactly the spot I want in focus is really helpful. Plus, you can't see CAMERA shake in the viewfinder (since you too are shaking), only subject movement, whereas with live view and a shutter release cable you can actually see both. Really useful when using a sand and dirt crusted tripod for delicate work.
Interesting little flower... I can see what you mean about it being hard to figure out. It's like most of the yellow flowers out and about - you blow the flower out or the whole photo's underexposed, there isn't much of a middle ground. I guess that's why we have tools like ACR, but even then, the background inevitably ends up noisy or the flower is the wrong color.
1) Those are some great looking wildflowers. I really wish I had taken the time to go exploring more this spring, since I feel like I had pretty good luck at stumbling upon things nobody else was noticing at Great Falls.
2) No new gear or plans for using existing gear on the horizon except for the fact that I'm shooting a wedding apparently in October. I wish I had other things to go photograph... I may parlay an opportunity out of the fourth of July, but we'll see.
3) Bahia de Banderas, where Puerto Vallarta is, is one of the most interesting places I've ever been - the mountains literally dump off into the ocean right there. The whole city sits on an alluvial deposit that drained out of the mountains over however long, and goodness - the mountains you see on the way in and out are awe inspiring. Go, if you ever get the chance. You wouldn't regret it.
4) I wasn't and still am not very impressed by the iPad. It doesn't offer me what I need, whatever that is. I will say - I've been using an HTC Hero through Sprint since late January and Android feels better to me than iPhone OS ever has. I couldn't tell you about iOS, since A) that's a dumb name and I hate it and 2) it doesn't exist on anything I can use it on yet. My old iPod Touch isn't supported. I am somewhat excited about trying a tablet with Android on it, but I - to be totally honest - don't think a lightweight client tablet like the iPad will ever do what I need it to. I really liked the small form factor of the Dell Mini 9, and I've even gotten to the point where I'm good at typing on it. Too bad they don't make it anymore.
Hey - Quadra made sense, those were the 68040 machines, and from what I remember, they were the fourth product line - Compact/classic (128k etc), Mac II, then LC.
Performa, as whoever it was (probably David Pogue) wrote many years ago, sounds like something Sylvester Stallone would say.
As for me, I don't know... I don't know I really care who has an email or whatever. I don't really trust either company, but eh. The iPod Touch soured me for whatever reason. I can say, though, that I foresee another round of Classic Mac OS vs. Windows brewing with iOS and Android. I have a feeling Android will end up being a far more advanced and otherwise superior operating system by its fourth or fifth major version. I don't know where Apple has to go from here, or if there's even that much development room due to the nature of being stuck on phones (or other similar portable devices). I guess Android is stuck with the same problem, but iOS is only as good as Apple will make it, whereas Android can and probably will end up being forked at some point. I have already seen evidence of the tenacity of the development community - Sprint outright said they're done working with HTC on updates for the Hero, which means no official Froyo. Meanwhile, I'm running Eclair/2.1 that was built from the ground up by a guy using the AOSP source repositories. Everything works - camera, multitouch, GPS, etc - and in some cases, works even better than the official release - Bluetooth is outright broken on 2.1 official. That same guy is a few days away at most from having a working compilation of the new source release for 2.2, which brings speed improvements among other things.
The one thing I detest, though, is the promotion of Flash in Android. This whole "FLASH 10.1 IS COMING" thing irritates me because flash is fundamentally broken without a mouse and it seems like Apple is the only company that realizes that. That's not fair, entirely - Adobe made a decent API, I guess - but everyone that has built flash apps since 1999 has done so with the assumption that the user has hover. I don't think this addition of a real flash plugin is going to do anything to advance mobile computing and it's detestable to even imply otherwise.
One thing I said wasn't clear enough... What I mean isn't that linux is too complicated for the desktop user. I have my mom using Ubuntu right now, actually.
What I mean is that I don't think the benefits of Android are going to be enough to overwhelm Apples marketing machine re: the iPad in the tablet market, because I don't think those benefits matter to the target audience for the device format, and Apple is just so damned good at getting people to spend more on something they didn't even need to begin with (look at the iPod). I think those people are more likely to buy a "real" computer to begin with. The real benefit Android devices might have is cost, since Apple's markups are historically obscene. We won't have an answer to that until the devices show up.
But... Again, I think iOS (and BlackBerry, too) may be in deep doo-doo in the phone market with Android keeps proliferating at this speed.
Comedy aside: Windows Mobile has yet to be referred to as a viable operating system for the smartphone market.
I wouldn't really go so far as to say that the requirement is for Android to fork, but the very fact that it's open source is going to encourage development and problem solving from all sorts of exciting fresh perspectives not generally available to Apple.
Perhaps one of the main strengths I'm seeing at this point is the same thing I used to enjoy about the Mac. Since nobody cares about the platform, the applications that are written for it by and large seem to do things. I used to see things come across my radar on the App Store that were phenomenally pointless and only existed to generate revenue or publicity - see the commonly referenced fart apps of years past.
The Android proliferation is the biggest thorn in Apple's side, and I actually am starting to think the iPhone is not long for this world as in its current dominance. I don't know that Apple will kill it outright, but seeing as how it was a distraction until the iPad became technologically feasible, I don't think it was the market they wanted to be in. If anything, a tiny Mac OS X machine in everyone's pocket was probably a brilliant strategy to build brand awareness and acceptance - note the number of Macbooks you see traveling around instead of Dells and Gateways (poor, poor Gateway). Anyway, I bet you're probably right - Mac OS X has always generated tablet rumors on its own because of how big and candylike it is, and seeing it end up on the iPad or an iPad-alike is probably inevitable. That said - I don't think it will be OS X through and through; I think they'll end up using the Frameworks and most of the APIs existing in iOS, since they've proven somewhat compatible with mobile phone usage. All they'd have to do is recompile Quartz to run on top of it and create a new Finder.
By the way - You talk about Mac Plusses running for years, I imagine there were a lot of shops that pushed the Power Mac G3 and G4 for years past their intended purpose. I know I was using my Power Mac G4 for day-to-day computing until last year, and that was on 10.4 because I wasn't stuck with trying to run outdated versions of Photoshop or PageMaker/InDesign on it. Actually, as long as I don't swap out to a new camera at any point in the near future, I should be able to run this Mac Mini for another 5+ years. The component desktops are still wonderfully built machines, in my opinion. The iMacs are ... well, how many iMac G4s are still being used? Beautiful idea, those, but...
I was always impressed with the G3 notebooks innards (maybe not technically, but from a sheer design perspective), but I didn't get much exposure to G3/G4 desktops.
I definately see what you are saying about Android and application development. Reminds me of when I had a Royal DaVinci, or with the Handsprings, that isolated and mostly unrestricted development environment that cool stuuf came out of.
Oh, incidentally, I'm now of the opinion that Apple didn't really lose the OS war. They lost a decade earlier with the Apple III. They stopped marketing the Apple II as anything but a toy in support of a flawed product, allowing IBM to catch up. Had they given the II the marketing and development support it deserved, things might have turned out very differently.
I don't even want to think about what might have happened has Woz stuck around. Probably would have found some way to rig multitouch in a 6502 with a screen covered in plastic wrap. ;)
Strictly speaking, Apple didn't lose the OS war because they still exist and market an OS. Had they lost, they'd be out of business or selling gussied up commodit oh wait
Anyway, if anything, they deserve kudos for their perseverance. Being hardware AND software is rare, of course, and it seems like Apple is doing pretty well compared to any other individual hardware manufacturer. I can't help but wonder what will happen when Jobs has to leave and Phil Schiller gets to start making his own decisions. Whether he stays at the helm or hands things over to someone else, either way, the future of the company will deflect notably from there. I hope they don't get into gaming consoles (though now that I have fact-checked that, it seems Gates approved of the Xbox... I could have sworn he was more hands off by then, but it also says the Xbox happened in 2001, which is earlier than I thought).
I'll update with a little more experience but I'm posting from the thing right now. You can actually type pretty fast with one fat finger, but numbers and passwords are a bit tedious. But... You can't beat a keyboard with spellcheck.
One thing I am noticing is that the Internet is very small. ;)
Been a while since I checked in here.
ReplyDeleteStill in Nashville. No, not flooded, but came close.
Had a moderately good orchid chasing season with one excellent trip in which I was chauffered around a private preserve of about 700 acres conducting a survey with the owner of the population of Cypripedium parviflorum var. pubscens (Large Yellow Ladyslipper).
Here are some pictures:
http://tinyurl.com/29l5acp
http://tinyurl.com/23djcs7
http://tinyurl.com/24yjc86
Otherwise been a quiet photographic season. No new camera gear. I am thinking about hitting the Smokies next weekend for some purple fringed orchids, but otherwise it will continue to be quiet, as it is already in the nineties.
I like your photo of the guys fishing. Looks like a topographically interesting location.
Oh, and I'll be an Apple owner again soon. It's been a while, but I finally caved on the iPad after using it today. I've been wanting a tablet for years and was waiting for Apple to make their move. It is just about what I was hoping for on first impression. As in, NOT a full computer but also not a darned smartphone. Darned jumbo hands
I'm going to say this - I will post a proper reasoned response tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteSuffice it to say for now, though - good to see you are still kicking around. Sounds like life's been a little less than productive for everyone, photographically speaking. Lord knows my K20 has seen enough graduation photos to last a lifetime since April 30, but that's of little value here. Anyway, I have been churning away at things so maybe i'll get some stuff up, and maybe when I get done with the backlog, I'll have incentive to go shoot.
Nat,
ReplyDeleteWhat has been killing me this month is that I am now 3 hours from the Smokies, and I'm stuck in Nashville, missing the azaleas and rhodos. I had a wicked bout of vertigo a few weeks back, and although the room has stopped spinning, the darn fluid behind my eardrum still hasn't evacuated itself. So... No high elevations until it does. Since Nashville sits in a basin at about 500ft, and everything interesting (and not sweltering) requires a 1000ft+ elevation change, I'm stuck here where it is too darned hot to do anything already.
Nat,
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of Mexico...
My Mexipedium xerophyticum, a very rare slipper orchid from Mexico, started blooming yesterday. Talk about a hard plant to photograph. The blooms are about the size of a dime, are WHITE, and are shiny with metallic flecks. The only way I could photograph it was to put it in front of closed blinds at stupidly slow shutter speeds for macro work. Never thought I would ever use live view until I realized how great it is for macro work. Being able to zoom into exactly the spot I want in focus is really helpful. Plus, you can't see CAMERA shake in the viewfinder (since you too are shaking), only subject movement, whereas with live view and a shutter release cable you can actually see both. Really useful when using a sand and dirt crusted tripod for delicate work.
http://tinyurl.com/2w77cks
Interesting little flower... I can see what you mean about it being hard to figure out. It's like most of the yellow flowers out and about - you blow the flower out or the whole photo's underexposed, there isn't much of a middle ground. I guess that's why we have tools like ACR, but even then, the background inevitably ends up noisy or the flower is the wrong color.
ReplyDeleteTo follow up on your first post up there:
ReplyDelete1) Those are some great looking wildflowers. I really wish I had taken the time to go exploring more this spring, since I feel like I had pretty good luck at stumbling upon things nobody else was noticing at Great Falls.
2) No new gear or plans for using existing gear on the horizon except for the fact that I'm shooting a wedding apparently in October. I wish I had other things to go photograph... I may parlay an opportunity out of the fourth of July, but we'll see.
3) Bahia de Banderas, where Puerto Vallarta is, is one of the most interesting places I've ever been - the mountains literally dump off into the ocean right there. The whole city sits on an alluvial deposit that drained out of the mountains over however long, and goodness - the mountains you see on the way in and out are awe inspiring. Go, if you ever get the chance. You wouldn't regret it.
4) I wasn't and still am not very impressed by the iPad. It doesn't offer me what I need, whatever that is. I will say - I've been using an HTC Hero through Sprint since late January and Android feels better to me than iPhone OS ever has. I couldn't tell you about iOS, since A) that's a dumb name and I hate it and 2) it doesn't exist on anything I can use it on yet. My old iPod Touch isn't supported. I am somewhat excited about trying a tablet with Android on it, but I - to be totally honest - don't think a lightweight client tablet like the iPad will ever do what I need it to. I really liked the small form factor of the Dell Mini 9, and I've even gotten to the point where I'm good at typing on it. Too bad they don't make it anymore.
Hey - Quadra made sense, those were the 68040 machines, and from what I remember, they were the fourth product line - Compact/classic (128k etc), Mac II, then LC.
ReplyDeletePerforma, as whoever it was (probably David Pogue) wrote many years ago, sounds like something Sylvester Stallone would say.
As for me, I don't know... I don't know I really care who has an email or whatever. I don't really trust either company, but eh. The iPod Touch soured me for whatever reason. I can say, though, that I foresee another round of Classic Mac OS vs. Windows brewing with iOS and Android. I have a feeling Android will end up being a far more advanced and otherwise superior operating system by its fourth or fifth major version. I don't know where Apple has to go from here, or if there's even that much development room due to the nature of being stuck on phones (or other similar portable devices). I guess Android is stuck with the same problem, but iOS is only as good as Apple will make it, whereas Android can and probably will end up being forked at some point. I have already seen evidence of the tenacity of the development community - Sprint outright said they're done working with HTC on updates for the Hero, which means no official Froyo. Meanwhile, I'm running Eclair/2.1 that was built from the ground up by a guy using the AOSP source repositories. Everything works - camera, multitouch, GPS, etc - and in some cases, works even better than the official release - Bluetooth is outright broken on 2.1 official. That same guy is a few days away at most from having a working compilation of the new source release for 2.2, which brings speed improvements among other things.
The one thing I detest, though, is the promotion of Flash in Android. This whole "FLASH 10.1 IS COMING" thing irritates me because flash is fundamentally broken without a mouse and it seems like Apple is the only company that realizes that. That's not fair, entirely - Adobe made a decent API, I guess - but everyone that has built flash apps since 1999 has done so with the assumption that the user has hover. I don't think this addition of a real flash plugin is going to do anything to advance mobile computing and it's detestable to even imply otherwise.
One thing I said wasn't clear enough... What I mean isn't that linux is too complicated for the desktop user. I have my mom using Ubuntu right now, actually.
ReplyDeleteWhat I mean is that I don't think the benefits of Android are going to be enough to overwhelm Apples marketing machine re: the iPad in the tablet market, because I don't think those benefits matter to the target audience for the device format, and Apple is just so damned good at getting people to spend more on something they didn't even need to begin with (look at the iPod). I think those people are more likely to buy a "real" computer to begin with. The real benefit Android devices might have is cost, since Apple's markups are historically obscene. We won't have an answer to that until the devices show up.
But... Again, I think iOS (and BlackBerry, too) may be in deep doo-doo in the phone market with Android keeps proliferating at this speed.
Comedy aside: Windows Mobile has yet to be referred to as a viable operating system for the smartphone market.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't really go so far as to say that the requirement is for Android to fork, but the very fact that it's open source is going to encourage development and problem solving from all sorts of exciting fresh perspectives not generally available to Apple.
Perhaps one of the main strengths I'm seeing at this point is the same thing I used to enjoy about the Mac. Since nobody cares about the platform, the applications that are written for it by and large seem to do things. I used to see things come across my radar on the App Store that were phenomenally pointless and only existed to generate revenue or publicity - see the commonly referenced fart apps of years past.
The Android proliferation is the biggest thorn in Apple's side, and I actually am starting to think the iPhone is not long for this world as in its current dominance. I don't know that Apple will kill it outright, but seeing as how it was a distraction until the iPad became technologically feasible, I don't think it was the market they wanted to be in. If anything, a tiny Mac OS X machine in everyone's pocket was probably a brilliant strategy to build brand awareness and acceptance - note the number of Macbooks you see traveling around instead of Dells and Gateways (poor, poor Gateway). Anyway, I bet you're probably right - Mac OS X has always generated tablet rumors on its own because of how big and candylike it is, and seeing it end up on the iPad or an iPad-alike is probably inevitable. That said - I don't think it will be OS X through and through; I think they'll end up using the Frameworks and most of the APIs existing in iOS, since they've proven somewhat compatible with mobile phone usage. All they'd have to do is recompile Quartz to run on top of it and create a new Finder.
By the way - You talk about Mac Plusses running for years, I imagine there were a lot of shops that pushed the Power Mac G3 and G4 for years past their intended purpose. I know I was using my Power Mac G4 for day-to-day computing until last year, and that was on 10.4 because I wasn't stuck with trying to run outdated versions of Photoshop or PageMaker/InDesign on it. Actually, as long as I don't swap out to a new camera at any point in the near future, I should be able to run this Mac Mini for another 5+ years. The component desktops are still wonderfully built machines, in my opinion. The iMacs are ... well, how many iMac G4s are still being used? Beautiful idea, those, but...
Nat,
ReplyDeleteI was always impressed with the G3 notebooks innards (maybe not technically, but from a sheer design perspective), but I didn't get much exposure to G3/G4 desktops.
I definately see what you are saying about Android and application development. Reminds me of when I had a Royal DaVinci, or with the Handsprings, that isolated and mostly unrestricted development environment that cool stuuf came out of.
Oh, incidentally, I'm now of the opinion that Apple didn't really lose the OS war. They lost a decade earlier with the Apple III. They stopped marketing the Apple II as anything but a toy in support of a flawed product, allowing IBM to catch up. Had they given the II the marketing and development support it deserved, things might have turned out very differently.
I don't even want to think about what might have happened has Woz stuck around. Probably would have found some way to rig multitouch in a 6502 with a screen covered in plastic wrap. ;)
Strictly speaking, Apple didn't lose the OS war because they still exist and market an OS. Had they lost, they'd be out of business or selling gussied up commodit oh wait
ReplyDeleteAnyway, if anything, they deserve kudos for their perseverance. Being hardware AND software is rare, of course, and it seems like Apple is doing pretty well compared to any other individual hardware manufacturer. I can't help but wonder what will happen when Jobs has to leave and Phil Schiller gets to start making his own decisions. Whether he stays at the helm or hands things over to someone else, either way, the future of the company will deflect notably from there. I hope they don't get into gaming consoles (though now that I have fact-checked that, it seems Gates approved of the Xbox... I could have sworn he was more hands off by then, but it also says the Xbox happened in 2001, which is earlier than I thought).
I'll update with a little more experience but I'm posting from the thing right now. You can actually type pretty fast with one fat finger, but numbers and passwords are a bit tedious. But... You can't beat a keyboard with spellcheck.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I am noticing is that the Internet is very small. ;)