EPKPhoto's Tidbits

I have been updating more often than usual, a trend I hope to maintain. In that same vein, I just posted a new gallery of photos! Check out the photos of some of my floor mates taking target practice. It is a Baker Shooting Range, Nerf style :). This week is turning out to be quite a busy one as we wrap up some things at RIT before heading off for our winter break (the measly two weeks of it 🙁 ). I can't argue with the weather, though. We've only had two mild snows so far this year and temperatures well above freezing.

Well, as it turns out, the problem I described earlier seems to be due to a lack of memory. MailScanner takes up quite a bit of memory, and when it attempted to start a child process for scanning, memory ran out, so the server killed the process…thus leading to the endless cycle (until memory became available). I'm glad that's over with. Also, I made a small change to the site navigation links on the left. I removed the Services link and added a direct link to my blog (of which this post is a part). That should give more visibility to the WordPress installation on my site and its archive of posts.

Ever since I switched to a new hosting provider in October, I have had full administrative control over my epkphoto.com web and mail server. That has been going great, but…for the life of me, I could not get a decent spam filtering setup working. For some reason, when I enabled MailScanner's spam filtering via SpamAssassin, an endless loop occurred where MailScanner would start up, see that mail was present to scan in the Postfix queue, and then restart. Read the rest of this entry »

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!

Finally, a new post and a new photo gallery! It's starting to get nippy here in Rochester. We certainly don't want the RIT tiger to get cold out on the quarter mile at night. Stevie set out to make sure the tiger remains warm in a brand new, custom sweater! Hand-knitted and the perfect size, I'm sure we made the tiger happy by dressing him up tonight. Enjoy the gallery of photos I took of the event. Also, while the sweater lasts, be sure to try out the RIT Eastman Quad webcam. You may have to take control of the camera to center it on the statue.

I have been waiting for this store to open for several months now…too bad I was back in Rochester before the grand opening. Fortunately, my parents went all out to cover the event for me. They arrived early enough to get complementary shirts and enter the grand opening sweepstakes. Most importantly, they brought along a camera and snapped a bunch of photos. I just posted them, so go take a look. Finally an Apple Store in Hampton Roads!!

It's about time…I finally got around to finishing editing the photos from last week's Toga Party here in the Baker dorm. A few Honors freshman organized this one, something that wouldn't have happened last year ;). Go ahead and check out the toga party gallery. I'm really enjoying this Aperture software for managing and doing quick editing of my photos. It truly provides a streamlined workflow, and although it is advertised as a RAW photo manager, Aperture handles non-destructive edits on jpegs just as well. From my evaluations of Adobe's beta software, Lightroom still has quite a way to go until it is as feature-filled as Aperture, especially when handling masses of photos.

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 »