EPKPhoto's Tidbits

It is 27° F outside with snow on the ground, and more snow is forecast every day at least through Thursday. I guess this makes up for the 70 degree temperatures last week. There are less than three weeks until I can escape this weather again to head south for the holidays. In the meantime…I just received two DVDs of movies I saw recently: An Inconvenient Truth and Who Killed the Electric Car?…two movies that are must sees for anyone with the remotest interest in not destroying the Earth as we know it. I guess you could always look on the bright side; that is, if we are cruel enough to the environment, the human population will eventually become extinct and after some thousands or millions of years the environment will rebound. Have a happy few last weeks of fall!

Big news regarding the MacArthur Center Apple Store. A time has officially been set for the grand opening: this Saturday (Sept. 9) at 10:00am. The first 1000 visitors to the store will receive free T-shirts, a normal practice for Apple Retail. If all goes well, my parents should be in that number 🙂 since I am in Rochester. For more info, visit the store's website, which finally went live with the grand opening announcement. You also may have noticed I posted the Camp Stella Maris photos. All were edited in Apple's Aperture software. I'll tell more about that when I post the second gallery.

Yesterday I got the notification from the Post Office that my Mac Pro had arrived. I rushed from work to the residential side of campus, carried the hefty box to my room, and hesitantly bid the box farewell until I could return from the 4:30pm CIAS Honors dinner. Ever since then, I have been configuring my new Mac Pro, transferring data, and testing its incredible speed. This is quite a step up from my 1GHz PowerBook G4. The good news is that I am currently working with two sets of photos that should eventually make it to the website. If anyone has questions about the computer, feel free to ask. Yipeeee!

Well, I can finally say that my Mac Pro is on its way to me and will arrive in 2 to 3 days!!  It's about time considering I ordered it on August 8th.  In the meantime, I have been at RIT since this past Wednesday acting as an orientation mentor to the new freshman in the Honors program.  You'll have to wait until later for the photos I took during our camp retreat…I want to wait for my Mac Pro to test a new photo workflow.  Be sure to read on to hear about the runaround Apple made me go through to get this computer. Read the rest of this entry »

Summer is just about over for me. I finished my last day of work and am preparing to head back to RIT. As far as Apple's announcements last week, you may have heard about the new Mac Pros and Xserves. Apple jam-packed these things with enough features to make the geekiest among us drool. I should mention I have altered my plans to get a MacBook Pro…that would be because I ordered a brand new Mac Pro the day they were announced!! I have yet to post this because I am a little frustrated with Apple's shipping plans, but more on that later.

The upgrade to Fedora Core 5 on the router computer went pretty much flawlessly, except for problems I anticipated. The main slowdown came after the actual system upgrade that is applied by booting from the FC5 installation media was finished. More on that in the full post. My main interest now is what Steve Jobs will announce tomorrow at his keynote (10am PST) to kick off Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) 2006. I hope he has some impressive things waiting. I'm sure I'll comment on that when I know more. Read the rest of this entry »

One thing I mention little of on epkphoto.com is all of the fiddling I do in my spare time with Linux and our home network.  Since I got the chance this past week to work on the network a bit more than usual (being off from work for my wisdom teeth surgery), I thought now would be a good time to introduce more ramblings from this area of my life on my web log.  As much of a security risk as it may be, I'll let out that the Linux nodes of our network run on either the Fedora Core or Ubuntu Linux distributions.  More recently I decided to finally upgrade the computer that acts as a gateway/firewall/router to Fedora Core 5.  I'm finishing up that process with one reboot remaining…so more on that later.

Just so no one worries, my wisdom teeth surgery went well. All four are now gone, and all that is left are dissolvable stitches. I don't know whether it is the pain medicine, but I do have to say I feel much better than I was planning. I'm still working my way to harder foods, but I think my gums will heal quickly.

The time has finally come. Tomorrow I will have all four of my wisdom teeth removed. Fortunately I will be unconscious for the procedure. At least it will give me a sort of second weekend as I recover before going back to work. Not much else to say, so I'll leave it there.

You may remember my story from April about the RIT Juggle-In and how I won a set of juggling clubs. At that time I was taking a juggling class at RIT. This past week, I finally ordered myself four juggling bean bags (ie, vinyl material filled with birdseed…referred to as balls from here on) to diminish my juggling withdrawal. For those interested, I ordered the balls from Renegade at a reasonable price for the quality. You may also notice that I ordered decently large balls that feel more comfortable in my hand than normal smaller sizes. I often find myself casually juggling three balls while working on something else. See the second photo in the full post.

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