Taking time away from iTunes for a volunteer day out on the farm. On February 19 I started recording our somewhat vast collection of CDs and scanning their covers, but after nine straight days of that, I needed a break, and out to Tonopah Caroline and I went. After returning from our snowshoeing trip to Yellowstone I have been immersed in the world of my and Caroline’s computers, migrating both of us to Windows 7. Between upgrading from the various Windows betas that are being released and recording, scanning, and organizing our music, I have not taken much time out on the farm this season. Sure is nice getting caught up with my stuff, though.
Put Your Hands in The Air
Listen, up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, nope, that’s a helicopter – and it sounds really close! Time to investigate, look out the front door, and what do I spy? Six policemen with weapons drawn and aimed at a man who apparently hadn’t been as cooperative as the officers would have appreciated. With the potential for fifty-four bullets to bring the suspect fully to his senses, he unflinchingly followed orders to the letter and immediately turned into what appeared to be a model arrestee.
Dion & Tassia
After many a year not being able to visit with one another as every time Dion would visit Phoenix, Caroline and I were on a road trip, we had the chance this evening to sit down for dinner and catch up. All those years Dion would visit on long holiday weekends, the very same long weekends that offer us great opportunities for travel. And, unfortunately, our destination so far has never been San Diego where Dion lives, as nature is our draw. Dion and his girlfriend Tassia were on a short road trip of their own this time, only stopping in Phoenix to say a quick hello to friends and family before continuing on to Gallup, New Mexico, Window Rock, Arizona, and other points on the Navajo Reservation from which Dion hails. Though we only had a short three hours to talk it was nonetheless nothing short of wonderful to see this old friend. While not traveling Dion practices the starving artist routine, check out his blog MuttonDagger.
Racism on Drudge Report
There are times at the Drudge Report where my skin crawls and I bristle at the manipulation of the news this service provides. Today, the top left column of the Drudge Report features the above headline, “NY Muslim Charged with Beheading His Wife!”. The original headline from The Buffalo News phrased it as, “Prominent Orchard Park man charged with beheading his wife”. No exclamation point but way more importantly, no mention of the man’s religious affiliation. When the Drudge Report reports about the “average” American, such as the girl last week charged with setting seven arson fires in the Philadelphia area she was just a “Woman” charged, not a Christian Woman charged with arson. My other pet peeve regarding the Drudge Report is my perception that the reporting is misogynist, has anyone else noticed how there appears to be a propensity to feature some of the worst photography when it comes to Democratic women and liberal female celebrities?
35,405
Thirty-five thousand four hundred and five – days that is, that Eleanor Burke has been alive. Today celebrates the 97th year of my great aunt Eleanor’s life on earth. My aunt has been the inspiration for my interest in gardening and a great help for me in my pursuit of photography. I must also credit her for my sense of compassion to help others due to her selfless dedication to my great grandmother Josephine during her long life and being in my sister and my lives for much of our first years. Auntie as she is known to family was in her late sixties when she first married. In the years prior she cared for her mother who also lived into her nineties. Her husband Kenneth Burke passed away some years ago, since then Auntie has lived with my mother who is caring for her as my great aunt has become quite frail. Knowing a relative whose life has been so long, someone who seems to have always been happy, who is maybe the sweetest person one may know throughout one’s own hopefully long life is a treasure. I wish to always know her.
Windows 7
On January 27 I bought the components to build myself a new computer. What motivated this was the rave reviews I was reading regarding Microsoft’s beta release of Windows 7. As a lot of what I do with a PC revolves around photography, moving to a 64-bit operating system that would allow me to go beyond 4GB of RAM was appealing, upgrading to the 64-bit version of Photoshop and Lightroom also held sway. I started with downloading the Windows 7 beta and then began my search for what it would cost to build a new computer. One of my hopes was to upgrade to a solid-state drive if I could afford it. Turns out the prices for components in comparison to what they are delivering are fantastically low right now.
Not long after lunch I was on my way to Fry’s Electronics to buy a new motherboard, an Intel 3.16Ghz Core2Duo CPU ($189), 8GB of DDR3 PC1600 RAM ($240), a 1.5TB hard drive ($129), an NVidia 9600GT video card with 512MB DDR3 RAM ($99), a 650W power supply, a new case, and a 64GB solid-state drive from Patriot. The rest of the parts would come from my old computer. What really amazed me about today’s purchase more than in previous years was the exponential difference of this computer to the ones I was building in the early to mid-’90s. For example: in 1993, my 486DX-66 cost about $400 for the CPU alone and packed 1.2 million transistors. The E8500 from Intel on the other hand has about 410 million transistors, is approximately 648 times faster than the 486, and cost me $189. Six hundred forty-eight CPUs running on 648 motherboards 16 years ago would have cost about $2 million.
But that’s not all. I bought 8GB of RAM. Back in the day, I had three PCs for rendering and modeling 3D images, each had 64MB of RAM – the maximum. I will never forget that we paid $100 a megabyte. If memory were still to cost that much, I had just purchased $800,000 of RAM. This new PC will inherit two of the 500GB hard drives plus the new 1.5TB drive and the 64GB SSD (solid-state drive). This amount of storage capacity would have cost $2,564,000 in 1993. I’ve tried to price a video performance comparison but this has proven too difficult. I’ll leave this with that today’s expenditure of $1200 would have cost approximately $5.6 million in the mid-’90s.
Windows 7 – wow. This operating system has been performing flawlessly, so much so that I took my old PC, added a new video card, a new solid-state drive, a 1.5TB drive, and installed Windows 7 on it for Caroline. For a beta o/s, this is amazing. I had tried Vista for a short while before going back to XP feeling Microsoft blew it and maybe had lost its touch – it has not. The only thing not working for me is my old discontinued Garmin GPS, not a deal-breaker. There have been some minor glitches getting the networking to function properly but forums and trial and error have ironed those speed bumps out. The performance is astounding, the load time for Windows 7 from the solid-state drive is well under a minute, and that’s with Yahoo and MSN Messenger loading along with Kaspersky Anti-Virus, Southwest Air’s Ding, Skype, and EA Download Manager. Once the o/s is up and ready, opening Photoshop CS4 64-bit takes less than 5 seconds. iTunes with 4678 songs opens in about 4 seconds. OpenOffice needs maybe 3 seconds to launch and be ready to type. Finally, Lightroom opens and is ready in about 20 seconds, mind you, it is managing more than 200GB of photos, that’s about 70,000 digital photos.
There are some great new features in Windows 7 and IE8, together they bring some of the fun back to my computer – it has been a long time since I felt so enthusiastic about spending time on this box that in its own right is a bit of a miracle. I can’t wait for the next release from Microsoft.