Megan had the day off yesterday, so I asked Meaghan to take my shift for me, and Megan and I spent the whole day together. Let's just say, it was great.
We started the day with a great breakfast at IHOP, getting my hair cut, and some kite flying, then went back to my room to watch some Avatar episodes and have some other fun time.
We also installed the 32 gig CF card into her iPod. It's a big reduction in capacity from her 80 gig hdd, but it won't break if she accidentally drops it.
Overall, the day was completely epic, and despite being filled with so many things, it was very well paced because neither of us had to worry about being at work or in classes.
One of the things I encounter a lot at my job, and indeed, online, is a bit of a dislike for anything that isn't Windows XP. Many of the Freshman here at NAU who own computers that came with Windows Vista seem to have a fairly big aversion to it. I'm here to openly admit that not only does my main mobile computer run Windows Vista, but I really like Windows Vista.
Ouch. "like" and "Windows Vista" in the same sentence? Many, include some at the ACHD, will ask if it's true, and I'm here to say that basically, yes, it is possible.
Before anybody had the opportunity to try it for themselves, one of the biggest things people attacked was the hardware requirements Microsoft has put forth for Vista. I've included a handy little table showing Microsoft's minimum and recommended specs for XP and Vista.
| XP | Vista | |
| Release Date | October 2001 | January 2007 |
| Minimum Processor | 233MHz | 800MHz |
| Recommended Proc | 300MHz | 1GHz |
| Minimum RAM | 64MB | 512MB |
| Recommended RAM | 128MB | 1GB |
| Minimum HDD | 1.5GB | 20GB, 15 free |
| Recommended HDD | "more" | 40GB, 15 free |
The main observation I've got is that both sets of requirements are very modest. Most people fault Vista for running somewhat poorly on an 800MHz Pentium III computer, when they themselves would never have considered running Windows XP on a computer with a Pentium 233MHz processor.
I'll also admit that we at the ACHD did actually run Vista on an 800MHz PIII, with 512mb of memory and a 20 gig hard disc. Such a machine would've been just fine for Windows XP, having exceeded the requirements by so far. But it ran, and aside from the complete lack of a video driver, it even booted some apps, and would probably have been a pretty useful computer.
The current ACHD Vista Box is a 3.2GHz PIV with 1 gig of ram and an 80 gigabyte HDD. It's actually a really fast machine, as far as Vista is concerned. It launches the Office 2007 apps really quickly, and while they're open, it's all very usable. I would go as far as to say that it's a nicer system to use sometimes than my ThinkPad. (Although I think that's just because so few people actually do anything on the ACHD Vista Box, and I'm running around on a daily basis thrashing about on this ThinkPad.)
Of course, what's an OS without good apps? Vista has a bunch of them built in, and almost better than the built-in apps, are some of the interesting things I've found on Microsoft's website for Vista. (Although, some of them may not be Vista-specific.
One of the tools I've been using in Vista has been Windows Calendar. I've been using it to keep track of what I post to my blog, and when I post it. When I was on the once-weekly schedule, I used it to plan what was coming up, and I kept track of what drafts I'd already written, and what drafts I needed to write.
I've gathered the icons to some of the cool things Vista includes. Yes, Windows Media Player is nothing new, but it's better than Ruckus player. Yes, Mac OS X has long included a Calendar, a contact manager, a photo app and of course, Mail.app, but it's worth noting that these things are now part of Vista, and their combined functionality is nearly as good as that of Outlook.
Although, most of the reason for including a screenshot of a bunch of icons is just to demonstrate just how good Microsoft has been getting lately about value. Microsoft has even been working in the past few years on getting development tools to people for free, thus the "Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition." I didn't feel like downloading or using any of the other development tools. I've also been using Microsoft's free blog management tool, Windows Live Writer. It's been working well for me since December, although I've got to admit I'm unhappy with Blogger's inability to let articles be posted in the future.
Another thing I've noticed about Windows Vista is that it just brings a whole new level of refinement to the Windows platform. A great example of this is the new "My Computer" interface. It's overall just about the same as the old one, but I think the appearance of it is better. At the bottom of the window it shows basic information about your computer, including its name, the processor and how much memory it's got.
On each local hard disc there's a capacity graph that lets you see at a glance the approximate status of your storage capacity, and a numeric output with details on exactly how much hard disc space you've got available. Such a thing, especially the color-coded graph, isn't available from the Mac OS X Desktop.
There are a lot of things about Windows Vista that I really like, and I use and enjoy on a regular basis. But quite honestly, I'm rather much too lazy to run around gather all of those screenshots. Maybe as I notice other things I've been using in Vista I'll gather more screenshots and post them.
It's very quiet today at the helpdesk. I haven't gotten an actual call yet today (knock on wood) and a bit ago, the chatter of the full-time staff mysteriously stopped. I don't know whether it's relaxing, or creepy.
At any rate, I've just been here writing blog entries and working on some photography stuff. I'm getting some of the base adjustments on some of the additional images for my photo class, and finding other images I want to work on. I really should start working on rating and keywording some of the older images too. I can't wait to (whenever it finally happens) to just have that done.
So, I'm just hanging out here, writing blog posts and working on photography. I'll probably hang out here with Meaghan a bit when she comes for her shift later on. She's got some images on which to play Photoshop too.
Recently, this blog received a comment. The comment was posted to an entry I wrote about trying to write a blog entry every day, and to which I attached a horrible horrible youtube video. I've got to admit I'm impressed that anyone would feel the need or desire to post a comment to such a post.
But the important bit is that somebody did. Laurel, one of my supervisors at the Academic Computing Helpdesk, posted a comment reading "Good luck!" to the awful entry including a youtube video.
So this is my official recognition of the first comment my blog has received in a very long time, and I'd just like ot say, "Thank you, Laurel!"
Also worth noting, I do not support or condone Office Terrorism.
I'll start off by explaining that I work in an NAU ITS lab, which is considered to be the standard of labs here on campus. Residence hall labs are also on the same standard image as the machines. The whole system is set up to authenticate and load profile settings directly from dana, which is the definitive student file/mail/web server on campus, and which also happens to be a Solaris 8 box. The problem with the ITS lab image is that it's slow. 2.0GHz Core2Duo machines like our OptiPlex 745 machines feel slow and unresponsive when logging in, and I really do think the organization of everything on the lab image is rather atrocious. The ITS-Labs Macintosh computers are even worse.
The first lab I had the opportunity to see last Thursday was a lab in the art building. It's apparently a very highly gaurded secret, so I will probably receive a talking-to from my girlfriend (an art major) about this blog post, but suffice it to say that from the quick peek I got, it looked clean and well-maintained. There were two labs next to each other, one with Windows and one with Mac OS. The Windows lab was closed though, and the Mac lab appeared to have all Music keyboards. I don't know whether or not this lab authenticated directly from dana, or if it was like the Babbitt LLC described below.
Another lab with which I've had the opportunity to become a bit more familiar is the Language Learning Center in the Babbitt Academic Annex. The lab was very clean, I'd go as far as to say it was imMaculate (horrible horrible pun), and it was filled completely with well-running G5 iMacs. The system authenticates against the same NAU LDAP setup as the rest of the labs do, but I think it does its actual authentication against a server that resides in the Babbitt building. I think home folders on that system may be on the MODL server. I noticed my login was very quick, and the environment was set up in a very very clean way. The dock was filled with only the apps that were really relevant, and my dana samba share was right there on the desktop.
Upon login at the LLC lab, Safari immediately opened and displayed this rather-helpful wiki page. It isn't actually the most helpful thing ever, but the concept is great, and with a bit of work it could become the definitive way to educate self-starting users about what's available in the lab, and how to go about doing things. Also, I really like the OS X Server 10.5 start page, and the built-in wiki/blog/calendaring functions look really cool. I've got to admit, I wish I had a Leopard server hanging around.
There are two departments on campus, just that I know of, that stray completely from the NAU-STUDENTS\ domain and use their own completely Mac or Windows based solutions, which is cool because they are typically much more efficient, having been implemented on a much smaller scale. On the other hand, it makes supporting users from the W.A. Franke College of Business Administration and the School of Communication rather difficult, because we're unable to help them with their passwords, login procedures, or even in the case of the SoC, the exact name of their login account.
The W.A. Franke College of Business Administration uses a windows domain with a really long esoteric name that's super difficult to type in when you're attempting to connect to it from home. On the other hand, what I found out is that it all pretty much "just works" when you're in the actual building. The Sun Ray thin clients are awful, slow little pieces of hardware, but their 2.0GHz Core2Duo OptiPlex 755 systems in the labs are really fast little computers, and they've got a lean and efficient set of software (mostly Office 2007 and VisStudio 2005) installed. The systems are also left in an attractive default Windows Classic scheme, in contrast to the ugly custom colors used on the ITS Labs image.
The School of Comm, whose principal server is called Titan, has a pretty interesting (one-server) setup. It's very similar to the network I set up at Kingman High School last summer, but bigger and with more users. Like the FCBA network, it's fairly efficient and you can usually be logged in and examining files fairly quickly, although they've taken less care to actually transfer all of their students uids over properly, and unlike the IT department in the FCBA, the School of Comm's network is managed only by one person. Also, their datacenter is less impressive, with only three racks, each with only one or two pieces of equipment. For shame. For shame. (Two xserves, an xserve raid, one or two powermac G4s, and the EditShare server.)
It's definitely interesting to see the differences between massive labs like the one here in the S-LAC that has a lot of computers that run slowly, and the smaller school-specific labs that, despite having fewer staff members, always seem to be cleaner and run better. I wonder if it's an effect of the fact that the S-LAC is open twenty four hours daily, or the fact that ITS labs have so many employees, whereas some of the smaller labs are either unmanned, but maintained by their full time staff, or if the size of the computer facility even has something to do with it.
My guess is that it's a weird combination of all of the above. The SLAC is a great lab, but from what I can see, the staff aren't all that well connected, the fact that the lab runs 24/7 means that there's often not enough time to do maintenance or things like shuffling computers around, and I've noticed that the whole arrangement of the lab just isn't as attractive as some of the other labs on campus. The feeling I get from the S-LAC is that it's primarily "a room with computers in it," whereas from some of the other labs on campus, I get the 'workspace' feeling.
I also think that the design of the S-LAC gives people a certain attitude about its use. Because they think of the S-LAC as merely a room with computers, it doesn't matter so much to them that they leave trash around, or draw on the desks, because it's not so much their responsibility to keep everything looking nice, as it is with users of labs in individual colleges. Either that, or in the smaller labs, staff are responsible for picking up after the users on a regular basis, which I can tell you based on my experience with the overnight shift, does not happen at all here at the S-LAC.
I really do think it's possible for the S-LAC to be an even more top-notch lab than it already is. We've got great equipment, and the building really is a pretty good design as far as labs go, but I'm going to end this rather long post here. I may elaborate a little bit in the future though, on what changes I would make to the SLAC to turn it into a better work environment for students.
Eric J. from work has been posting blog entries daily, and has been including snippets of video with his blog. Actually, it's apparently rather common at the helpdesk to participate in such shenanigans. I've personally, as you know, been shooting for once per week, but maybe what I'll try to do is post short entries daily, and big significant posts once or twice per week, depending really upon how often big signficant post worthy thoughts come up.
So, look out for blog posts on a much more regular basis!
As per a thread on the 68kMLA Forum about the total cost of owning a computer, I'm currently merely dating photography. In order to extend our relationship to marriage, I need to go and meet photography's parents: the darkroom. Not only, of course, have I been in the darkroom for nearly three years now, but I'm fairly certain that photography just doesn't care if I meet her parents. Also, I'm apparently not fit to even be allowed to view the 68kMLA forum, because of my affinity with things like "getting my schoolwork done" which can't be done on something with a 68k processor. Well, let me just say, rude newbies. I'm not worthy, really. Luckily though, Photography and I have talked it out and we're fairly comfortable with our open relationship, I'm also dating German, Megan, CIS, and History.
I struggle with managing my images constantly. It seems like the photos I come out of my camera are always either receiving really esoteric naming schemes, or are being put into some trendy new piece of photo management software. On the other hand, images I download from the Internet, or are sent to me by people are stored haphazardly in an ill-conceived folder structure that tries to separate "pictures of friends" from "pictures of trains" and "pictures that are random."
My main problem with my personal photo collection at this point in time is the fact that it's poorly organized. Even when I find a great piece of organization/management/processing software such as Aperture, which is where my images are right now, I have problems with the actual tasks of applying metadata, coming up with a naming scheme, and deciding where in my library to put each image. It looks organized, but because I've got images from two or three different eras of management, and even a bunch of images that simply don't have good naming applied to them, it's difficult to decide where an image goes, or to find an image once I've put it in its place.
The answer, quite simply, is that I need to beef up my use of metadata and keywords. The thing I need to decide really quickly here, as I continue working on gathering even more images, is whether or not I want to continue using Aperture for my images, or if I want to look into other Mac-only programs, or switch to Adobe Bridge.
Enter Photography 382. This class is pretty amazing so far, the instructor is very energetic about the subject, and does a great job of explaining thing, which is awesome. The focus of PHO382 is preparing digital image files for output, and the beginning of this is setting up a good workflow for acquiring, storing, backing up, and organizing digital images. The main tool for the class so far is Adobe Bridge CS3. We've been learning about batch renaming, applying metadata templates, and adding keywords to images. I expect we're going to continue learning various things about Bridge and picking things up about it as the semester progresses. So now, I just need to decide if I want to switch to it for managing my images, and when I want to do that.
I'll admit that Aperture isn't the best solution for everything I do, especially when my photos are considered, because Aperture lacks an equivalent on the Windows platform. I can't just copy my library or my folder structure out to a file server or onto a FAT32 disk and open it on a Windows computer, like the ones at work, or even my mobile computer. In addition, it's more difficult than it needs to be when I copy images from my mobile computer to my Mac, because the images are still in an unprocessed form, I have to apply my naming convention and do my organization when I get back home.
Another advantage of finding some other system by which I can organize my images is that I am not necessarily tied to the Mac as a platform. I love my Mac dearly, but I'm simply not sure if I'll ever buy another mobile Mac again, and I may not even buy another desktop Mac, depending on what Apple ends up doing in the next few years. Chances are very high that I'll have a Mac as my next desktop, but just in case, I like the idea that my option to switch to Windows is open. (In fact, I once needed to do just that, during my first semester at NAU my G3 PowerBook was always on its last leg, so I moved my then-Bridge-based collection of photos onto the Dell OptiPlex machines I'd gotten from surplus sales. The transition was really quite easy. Oddly enough, that Pentium III/933 machine got better SETI@Home scores than my 1GHz PowerBook G4 ever did.)
The main problem with having that multi-platform solution for image management, of course, is that I have no large-capacity storage areas that work with both Macs and PCs. FAT32 would almost be acceptable, except I doubt that a 750 gig fat32 drive is going to work too well. Add to that, I don't have Photoshop CS3 for Windows anyway. I may need to do research on software that lets Mac OS use NTFS drives, or software that lets Windows use HFS+ drives, because sharing drives tends to be a general problem for me, not only a photo management problem.
A big disadvantage I can see of using Bridge for my photo management is that it's not the best app ever for actually searching for things I need. Even the PHO382 instructor I have mentioned that he uses a piece of image cataloguing software, instead of only using Bridge. I'm going to investigate this more as an opportunity for how I use Bridge (and maybe Aperture!) because I like the idea of having Bridge for setting up a lot of the metadata, naming, etc, as well as having Aperture if I want to search/catalog and do some of the things at which Aperture is great.
So I haven't actually made my decision yet, but there's a good possibility that I'm going to be moving my photo operations back to Bridge. Stay Tuned however, for Part 3 of the first-ever Strapped to a Desk multi-part series, on "how Cory manages his photos."
Well, I've gone and done it, I suppose. I've impulse-bought a new camera. It's not a half-bad camera either, I got the Nikon D300, and an "AF-S Nikkor 18-135mm 3.6-5.6G ED DX" lens for it, along with a filter for the lens, and a fast 2 gig CF card. I bought it at Ritz Camera after Megan and I had dinner at Ruby Tuesday's. The images in this post should link up to full-resolution versions of the images that came out of the camera. I did minimal work on them using the included Nikon Capture NX software. Unfortunately though, my ThinkPad's display is not calibrated.
I decided to buy it at Ritz because the D300 is new enough that it costs just about the same amount of money everywhere, and because it was a situation where I could have it and start using it right away. And right away did I start. The very next morning after my shower, I unpacked the D300 and its lens. What an exciting feeling, that of unpacking a new piece of equipment and starting to use it. I carefully removed the D300 and the lens from their boxes, taking care to take a variety of hopefully-interesting photos with the D50.
So far, the difference is rather amazing, especially in the lens. The lens isn't that different from my old Quantaray 18-125mm lens, except for the fact that this one seems much sharper so far. I haven't used under all of the same types of conditions as the Quantaray, but I'm sure it'll be less than a year before I can tell whether or not I really think this lens is a better lens. I can tell you now though, I think this is a better lens.
The body is extremely well-built, its heftiness, speed and overall build quality show that it's a higher end camera than the D50, which in and of itself is an excellent piece of imaging technology, from a usability as well as a quality standpoint. The difference in the amount of pixels is readily apparent, especially on my mobile computer, which has been suffering performance problems as of late anyway. The other most apparent differences are in the speed of shooting, which is immense. I have always thought of my D50 as fast, but this thing can rapidly fire off nine or ten shots without even blinking. Said images will be properly focused too, because the AF system on this body is amazing. The other immediately noticeable difference is the review screen. The review screen on this camera is nothing short of amazing. It's significantly larger than that of the D50, which back in 2005 and 2006, I remember saying was very large and bright.
I took it out for a test drive after unpacking everything and getting used to controlling it. (Not to say that I'm very good at it yet, but I'm getting used to it.) My initial reaction to shooting with it is that I feel like I'm getting the shot I want, when I'm framing and shooting, even if I'm shooting something I didn't expect to be, or if I'm walking around and I happen to see some people I recognize, such as the image above of Tracy. The only bad thing I've got to say about the body is that when I was setting it up and hooking up the camera strap, I did so in a retarded way, and while walking around,
I took it to the overnight too, and although it's not necessarily as great a low-light performer as the D300, I'm sure that between the onboard flash and the Nikon SB600 I've got hanging around, I'll manage. I used the SB600 on the image of the D50 at the top of this post. Although even at relatively high ISOs, the D300 does still procure nice images. The image of the Dell OptiPlex in the SLAC was shot at ISO1000. (The D300 supports all of these weird ISO numbers I've only ever seen on Olympus cameras before.)
One of the things I think some people may now be thinking is "what about that non-full-frame sensor?" Unfortunately, that was one of my biggest desires for the camera upgrade, and it's the one thing I didn't get. I'm not too terribly sad at this point though. For one thing, getting a full-frame sensor requires either saving a few additional years to be able to afford the Nikon D3, or a switch to Canon.
I was seriously considering that switch to Canon too. However, the thing about that is that I've already got four different Nikon lenses, the Nikon flash, the off-camera Nikon flash sync cord, and in general, I'm pretty decent at using my Nikon stuff. The other thing is that the currently-available Canon full-frames are the 1Ds-Mark II, the 1Ds-Mark III and the 5D. None of which can be had new for less than $2000. BH has the 5D for $2100, compared to the D300's $1800, and the lens I wanted for the Canon was just shy of $1300. That's a pain in the wallet. And really, being that the 5D was released in 2005, it's out of date and due for a replacement. A replacement that will most likely cost significantly more than the 5D's current price anyway. Aside from the sensor thing, for the savings, the D300 is a significantly better camera in nearly every way.
Although, they say that what makes a great camera isn't necessarily the megapixels or the image processor or the brand or the size of the sensor. It's the ability that the camera has to let the photographer create an image. And while I think that one of my talents as a photographer is to be able to get the results I want out of nearly any piece of equipment. The D300 just happens to let me be even more sure of the images I'm making, and it lets me make them a little bit faster.
When I got my first digital camera (A Kodak EasyShare CX6220, for those of you who want to make fun of me for having owned a Kodak), I just imported my images into iPhoto. It worked well for the first thousand images, and I always thought of it as being fairly speedy. I painstakingly named and even added descriptions to many of the images, and some of my best, I posted to deviantArt. After awhile, and a trip to Michigan, iPhoto became unstable. Unstable enough that I actually lost what I think amounts to about two or three hundred pictures I'd taken while I went to visit my grandmother in Michigan. I was, of course, unhappy, and to this day I still go on random searches for those images. They never turn up.
Then, in Fall 2005, I got my first taste of real photography, in Kate's Photo I class. I used dad's Canon AE-1 film camera for that class, and subsequently decided that I really needed to do more photography. I was, you could say, hooked on film. That Christmas, dad, knowing that I now intended to do more photography classes, and possibly even use it as a career for my real life, gave me the Nikon D50 I use to this day. It was a great camera, and it remains so, but it had something I didn't know anything about yet: Camera RAW, and more specifically, the Nikon Electronic Format.
A month or two earlier, Apple had released an exciting-looking new photo management application geared toward the needs of professionals, called Aperture. It looked like a super exciting program, with the ability to do most of the stuff I needed with my photos right in the interface of the program. I eagerly downloaded and watched tutorial videos, wanting to know more about its functionality. I decided it was the program I needed for my photos, since iPhoto had already failed me a few times, and I didn't have a modern enough version of Photoshop hanging around.
I downloaded Aperture, but realized I couldn't use it until I upgraded my computer to Mac OS X 10.4. This is an entirely separate debacle, but after getting and installing 10.4, twice, I finally got Aperture 1.0 working on my below-spec G4 PowerBook. It was an amazing program, I spent most of my time waiting for it, but it was amazing nonetheless.
Of course though, later on I decided that Mac OS X 10.4 and the speed of Aperture were unbearable, so I "found" a copy of Photoshop CS2, exported my photos out of Aperture, and installed 10.3 back on the PowerBook. At this point, I'd also acquired my first laser printer, and the solution seemed clear, I started right away creating my second photo organization scheme.
Using a MacBook Pro at the high school, I renamed and exported all of my images to one big folder. I then started using Adobe Bridge to rename the images a certain way. PIC_XXXXX.ext where XXXXX was a unique number I assigned to each image based on the date it was taken. Starting at folder zero and working my way through about two hundred folders' worth of images (at least that many) with thirty images per folder, I organized all of my images into neat little buckets of images, perfectly sized for printing contact sheets using Photoshop CS2. The idea was pretty good, I thought. I print out a bunch of contact sheets of my images, and it takes me less time to findt he image I want. Then, I pull the image out of my collection, do whatever to it, and save the derived file to a separate place. It turns out, I wasn't actually all too far off with this sytem.
Although soon, I was separated from my contact sheet binders, and since I'd gotten the much faster iMac in December, 2006 anyway, I decided I could safely move back to Aperture. And move I did, which was amazing because Aperture is very speedy on that iMac, I found myself tagging and naming and describing and sorting, until I stopped, which was cool, I guess.
Organizing photos is a difficult thing, and I'm currently not sure what exactly I am going to do in the future, with that. I'm currently in a class called PHO382, where one of the first things we're learning is all about managing images using Adobe Bridge CS3. At this point I haven't changed from Aperture, but in the next few weeks, I am going to try to decide whether or not I want to use Bridge or Aperture for my photos. This will be a permanent decision, and as I now have almost thirteen thousand images, it's a pretty important one. I'll keep the blog posted, so definitely consider this to be "part one, of an unknown number" in a series of "Cory talks about how he manages his images."
Well, it's happened again. Monday, I was struck down by the gods of massive headaches, yesterday I ran errands with Meaghan, got pancakes with Megan, and then updated UTV62.com. And this morning... Well this morning, I'm finally addressing Monday morning's task of posting a blog entry.
I'm not going to lie, I do have others already written, but I feel like this is a good time to give a bit of a general update, instead of a canned blog post about photo management or whatever. So here it goes.
In the world of Megan and I, it's been sickness abound as Megan is currently battling the flu, and prior to that, with almost no break whatsoever, was battling "Something completely unrelated" (but almost as bad, it seems.) As a result of that, I was commanded to get the Flu shot, so Meaghan and I did that before her midterm yesterday.
Classes are going pretty well,I'm mildly depressed about my CIS120 because I keep forgetting to check WebCT Vista, therefore keep missing assignments. This weekend, I intend to power through all of the Word tutorials so I can rock the Word exam, just like I excelled at the Excel exam. Photography is going well, we've got a cool shooting assignment coming up in the studio, which I hope to work on this Friday. The shooting assignment is exciting because this'll be the first assignment where we actually start working on something destined for "delivery to a client" which will be JPEG files ready for the web. Other than that, German is going well, learning new stuff all the time is a pretty nice change, and the things that are review are definitely helpful, as reviews go.
In other news, I'm apparently merely dating photography, as per a thread on the 68kMLA forum about the total cost of owning a computer. I will expound upon this issue significantly in an upcoming blog post.
Work is going fairly well for me too. I come in, take calls, and when I am not completely struck down by an epic headache, I leave work quite happy. The two overnights haven't killed me yet, but it always seems like people want to come visit me from Kingman right before or after one or both of them.
So that's my two-days-late, and probably poorly written blog post!
Well aren't I just a happy clam right now. It's about eight in the morning on this fine bright Monday, and I'm just kind of hanging out in the room, listening to youtube videos, copying SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop to the ThinkPad R61i to be burned to a DVD, and relaxing before my helpdesk shift at 1:30 later in the afternoon.
Classes are canceled today, which I've got to admit, almost never happens here at NAU. It snowed up a pretty awful storm yesterday and last night, and at about 5:45 this morning, an e-mail was sent by NAU's reporting system Inside NAU saying classes are canceled and that only essential employees are to report to work.
What makes an NAU employee essential? Well I'd like to think all NAU employees are essential, but as it turns out, those of us working at the Academic Computing Help Desk are considered to be essential, so I'll be reporting to my shift later on today. I've got to admit, it's a nice little ego boost for the day to know that the ACHD is considered essential, and that if it's within my ability to remain alive while going to work today, I'm to do so. Luckily, I only live like 500 feet from the ACHD, so it's by no means a hardship for me.
Well, I can't say I actually expected it to happen, but over the past month, the helpdesk has hired almost ten new people. I won't name them individually, because that would be rude, but suffice it to say that I'm no longer exactly one of the "newbies" at the helpdesk. Not only am I no longer a newbie, but all three new phones staff so far have shadowed me on the phones, listened into some of my calls, or in general, received some sort of training or advice from me.
It's interesting to think about, especially since we had to hire so many people in the middle of the year, how many other new ACHD student workers I'll see while I work there, and I'm also, of course, interested in exactly how long I'll be working there myself. I suppose one thing I've got to admit is now that I work at the helpdesk, I can't really imagine myself working anywhere else on campus, and in fact, much as I hate to say it, I might not even mind working in a real call center.
I've read blogs of and spoken with people who work at various help centers, mainly a few from Apple and Dell. The biggest thing is that it sounds like a very satisfying job in terms of helping people, and it seems like the benefits and pay aren't the worst ever, but that in the phone support world, there is very little in terms of advancement. Becoming a product specialist, moving to another company, or finding a career are apparently the most frustrating parts of doing support professionally for a corporation.
That said, I'm fairly certain that I still want to do something in my life related to photography. If at all possible, I would absolutely love to be a professional photographer, doing events and weddings, or commercial product shots, or anything of that nature. The biggest challenge of course, for that, is getting my degree and actually finding the work, which I think when it comes down to it, won't be as hard as I may think it is right now.
So, new helpdesk people, ponderations on the rest of my life... This looks like a blog post well-executed.
Every blog and forum I read has had a commentary on MWSF 2008, universally considered the Christmas of the consumer Mac world. Having bought an iPhone just shy of five days before the keynote, I'll start off by saying I was somewhat worried that my shiny new device would already be out of date. Luckily, not only was the iPhone not replaced, but it received a nice software update. The most important feature is that which allows me to manually manage the music and videos on the device, just like my iPod.
The first thing Jobs revealed was Time Capsule. It's a relatively simple device, it's basically Apple's Airport Extreme base station hooked to a 500GB or 1TB "server grade" hard disc. The gist of the device is that you can easily set up Time Machine to automatically and wirelessly use the Time Capsule as its backup drive. You can use it with "all the Macs in your house." Simple enough, and I think it's a cool device, the only questions I've got so far involve whether or not you can add to the storage in your Time Capsule, or if it would be possible to own more than one Time Capsule, and concatenate the available amounts of storage.
Afterward, Jobs demonstrated some iPhone software updates. I installed the iPhone software update recently, and without a doubt, my favorite feature, the feature that might actually cause me to keep the iPhone, is the ability to manage my music and movies manually. It's how I use my 30-gig video iPod, and I'm glad it's available for the iPhone. The third major announcement of the keynote was new iTunes movie rentals. I'm really excited about that one because like Jobs says, I'm the kind of person who doesn't really watch movies more than once. In a way, it's a lot like a daily ticket on satellite TV, where I can watch the same movie several times in one day. It'll be like in December when I watched "Chuck & Larry" about five times.
Part of the iTunes update involved AppleTV. In this part, Jobs admits that they'd gotten the concept of AppleTV wrong, and provides updates on the software of AppleTV, including the new user interface and renting an HD movie. The whole experience looks really well designed, and I've got to admit that the AppleTV with its software update looks really nice. I don't really want one, but I also don't really have an appropriate television with which I'd be able to peruse the content.
By far, the most important part of the keynote, the one causing the most controversy online, is the MacBook Air. Let me start by saying that I think the MacBook Air is an awesome product, and it's something Apple hasn't had in awhile. Let me also say that it's not something I'm going to be buying any time soon. Even though I think it looks awesome, and would love to be able to bust one out during class, but the high price and the fact that I've already got three working IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads, all of which have reasonable battery life, and good capability as note taking machines.
The main problem with MacBook Air, of course, is the price. For $1800 (retail) you get a 1.6GHz Core2Duo, from the new Penryn platform, 2 gigabytes of memory, and an 80 gigabyte hard disc. You don't get much other than that, of course, because being so thin, Apple had to make compromises somewhere, and they did it in reasonable areas I think. The backlit keyboard is full size, and the LED-backlit display is a full 13.3" glossy display, similar to the MacBook's display.
Not included are an optical drive, and a few "essential" ports. What I've noticed is that the biggest grouching people have been doing is the result of the ports. The MacBook Air features only a MagSafe power port on the left side, and on the right side behind a little door, one USB port, one "Micro DVI" port, and one audio output port. The biggest things the MacBook Air is missing is apparently another four USB ports, audio input, an internal optical drive, and FireWire. What bugs me about that is that the inclusion of those things basically turns the MacBook Air into a MacBook Pro, plus a few extra USB ports.
The problem with this, of course, is that the entire point of the MacBook Air isn't the thing those people want. Those people want a $599 mobile machine, as fast as a full-sized MacBook, with discrete graphics, basically adding up to a 12" PowerBook G4.
My take is that the MacBook Air is really intended as a companion Mac to a powerful desktop computer. I can see a lot of Mac Pro owners, or people whose desktops are high end iMac systems wanting one of these to use as their mobile systems, especially if they, like myself, prefer doing as much computing as possible on their desktop systems when they're in their offices or homes. MacBook Air is great then, for people who need something they can use on a plane or train, and that they need to be as light as possible. When it comes down to it, there will be people who are willing to pay this price for such a mobile computer.
Maybe if I were more patient, and hadn't already bought the ThinkPad, I would've gotten one, although I'm really happy with the ThinkPad, and think I'll have it for quite some time to come as my mobile computer. Maybe my next mobile machine will be some kind of MacBook Air successor.
I know it's Sunday morning, not Monday morning, but I've got to admit that I'm really jazzed tonight by the fact that apparently my PowerBook G3 isn't completely dead. I was getting ready to harvest it for parts when I looked at the processor daughtercard, realizing that it was still in the system, but it was not secured too well. I pressed down on it, securing it once again in its slot.
Lo and behold, the pismo booted straight up, although it looks like it's developed a few more lines in the screen, but the fact that it's working at all still makes me quite happy. Basically, we all now know that Megan isn't a killer. I intend to keep its 10.3.9 and 9.2.2 loaded, although I may transfer some of my actual data from the Pismo to the R61i.
So yeah, that happened today and I thought it was worth posting off-schedule for that.
Well, I can't really say that it's the beginning of all school or anything, but Spring 2008 is officially in full swing. I even took out the garbage this morning. That's how committed I am to my schoolwork and the like.
I'll admit that I do really appreciate repeating events such as the beginning of semesters, because of their value for blog posts. I'm sure I've got something really special stowed away in the calendar of things about which I should be writing, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I will be writing about those things. Luckily, I do believe that it was a "kickoff of the semester" that my blog-writing calendar has called for. The exact calendar entry calls for "Well wishes to everybody for Spring 2008."
Well... Well Wishes for Spring 2008! I'm going to go ahead and use this post to give a few life-related updates as well, so go ahead and let me list those.
That's pretty much what I wanted to say. I'm sure there's some philosophical discussion about the iPhone or some awesome response to WWDC for next week. I'll probably write the epic blog post on one overnight, and edit it on the next.
Posts
All Comments
