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  • SoCal Traffic Observations – 2017

    SoCal Traffic Observations – 2017

    Once a year (at least), I make the trek to San Diego to visit my folks. This year, I did it for Thanksgiving (as I did last year). This time, I was traveling alone, as the boss (aka my wife) was staying in the Bay Area to be with her family. Knowing how awful traffic is on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I made the decision to shift the travel days to avoid the crush leaving on Tuesday early, and returning on Saturday.

    That was a wise decision, all around.

    I woke earlier than usual on Tuesday, and left the house at 6:15. Out of San Jose, through Pacheco Pass, and down I–5 all was smooth. I got through the grapevine by 10:00. Then I hit the 210.

    Hoo boy. (more…)

  • Guilty Pleasure – the Resident Evil Franchise

    Guilty Pleasure – the Resident Evil Franchise

    I have a confession to make. I enjoy the Resident Evil movies. An adaptation of a 1990’s vintage video game, and an early vehicle for Milla Jovovich (who plays the key protagonist, “Alice”), the first episode in this series was released in 2002.

    Having never played the game, it was a new concept to me, and for some unexplainable reason, I just enjoy the movie. Having watched the entire series, through the middle movies that were less enjoyable, I still can circle back and watch them over and over.

    Set in an underground fictional city, “Raccoon City” the bio weapons lab is working on viruses that can animate the dead, and augment other living organisms. While the original video game was a first person shooter, in the “Doom” genre, where the creepy/crawlies are out to get you, the adaptation is not directly tied to the video game, and the script is surprisingly good.

    That said, I can’t explain why I like this series of films, but I do. Part of it is Milla Jovovich, whose other efforts are greatly enjoyable (Fifth Element, Ultraviolet, etc) and turns into a consistent character during this series (how does she look the same over 2 decades?)

    Or perhaps it is the action. Lots of violence, zombie apocalypse, and human interest themes. Not sure why, but it hangs together, and the sequels aren’t as sucky as they often are (Matrix Reloaded anyone?)

    The real bummer is that none of the common video streaming services have these movies. That means I must rent or buy them. Or wait until my Tivo captures them from a broadcast. Still, that is a small price to pay for my enjoyment.

    My guilty pleasures…

  • The new king of Streaming – Spotify

    The new king of Streaming – Spotify

    Throughout 2015 and into 2016, I was evaluating the streaming music services, Spotify, Google Play, Amazon, and Apple. The result of that initial evaluation was that the then new Apple Music plan was the winner. The combination of all my music collection in their cloud, plus the access to their enormous library, and arguably at the time, the best streaming over wifi at home and on cellular data. I ended up keeping Apple, and ditching Spotify, when

    Fast forward to today, late 2017. I dropped my Spotify account in early 2016 due to a stretch of unemployment, and grooved on Apple. But lately, I am souring on the Apple ecosystem. Not enough to ditch my Mac and my iPhone, but having experienced iTunes on windows (that is truly a trying experience) I knew I needed an alternative for general use. (more…)

  • The Drobo Saga Continues

    The Drobo Saga Continues

    The Drobo Saga continues

    The last episode was about the arrival of the new Drobo 5Dt, and a couple of NAS optimized disks. The installation was trivial, moving the disk pack from the original Drobo to the new Drobo was easy-peasy, and after about 2 hours of “rebuilding”, I added the first of the new drives.

    A 4 TB WD red series, “NASware” drive. This caused a “rebuilding” event, but it took less than an hour to subsume it. The next two drives replaced the old drives in the pack, a 1 TB Seagate Barracuda, and a 2TB WD “Green” drive (optimized for DVR’s and low energy solutions). (more…)

  • Missed Opportunities – Photography

    Missed Opportunities – Photography

    Damn Shame – Photography edition

    As part of the migration to Lightroom CC, I have spent a lot of time mucking around my photo collection. Lots of good memories, and some retouching (for some reason, I am terrible at having level horizons), and I noticed an oddity.

    In 2006 we took a three week vacation to Italy, starting in Rome and headed south. Unlike our earlier visit, where I was shooting film, this time, my main camera was my trusty Canon EOS 20D, my first DLSR.

    So far, so good.

    The camera uses the ol’ workhorse of storage, the Compact Flash cards. At the time, all I had were less than 1 gigabyte. In fact for this trip, I purposely bought 2, very pricey 1GB cards, for the trip.

    Hippodrome of Domitian
    The ruins of the Hippodrome of Domitian, in Rome, Italy

    The 20D, when shooting RAW format, each image is about 8.7 megabytes. A 1 gigabyte card can only hold 115 or so RAW images. Naturally, I wasn’t going to be shooting RAW. So I was shooting JPGs. Unfortunately as the time went on, I was running out of cards (I traveled without a computer to offload cards). So, instead of full resolution images, I had to downshift to medium resolution.

    And it shows with the resolution of the images.

    Oh well, c’est la vie.

    Cefalu, Sicily
    View east from the water in Cefalu, Sicily. A wee bit o’ processing.

    Today, fortunately, this isn’t as much of a problem. Yes, I am shooting with a newer (relatively) camera, the Canon 5D “classic”, whose RAW files are about 12 megs each, and a 4 gig card delivers about 277 raw images. But, 16 gig cards are about $20, and I travel with a laptop to offload. My other camera, a Canon G12, has a 32 gig SD card, and it gets well over 1,000 RAW images (also at ~ 12 megs each), on the card.

    2006, a lost opportunity.

  • Arrival: New Drobo

    Arrival: New Drobo

    New Drobo

    A few weeks ago, I noticed that my trusty, long in the tooth Drobo external direct attached storage device was getting flakey. Long time to spin up, unreliable connection, and using the FW800 (IEEE1394b) to Thunderbolt interface was iffy at best.

    system failureAdd to that the fact that it was definitely slowing down, its transfer speed not even able to keep up with streaming a standard definition rip of a classic cartoon (The Jetsons for those who are interested), it had been relegated to “near line” storage. But even that had become worryingly unreliable. Not “lost data” unreliable, but “when I plug it in, it doesn’t mount” unreliable. It did work as expected when plugged into a USB port, but it is a pre-USB3.0 device, so that is painfully slow.

    Apparently, the upgrade to OS-X 10.13, or “High Sierra” put a higher bar on attached devices, and the thunderbolt to FW interface was squiffy at best, and very unpredictable.

    Having bought this in the last decade, and using it for both near line storage and system backups, it has served me well, but it was time to retire it.

    Yesterday, hot off the press from Amazon, arrived the replacement Drobo 5Dt, which has significant upgrades from the ancient Drobo Gen2 unit that I have. First is support for much larger drives. When I bought the unit, 1TB drives were common, and 1.5 or 2 TB drives were coming onto the market. Right now it has three 2TB drives, and one 1TB drive, for a total of 7TB, or 4.66TB usable space (for the parity and recovery capability.) The new Drobo has 5 bays, and supports much larger drives, which I will systematically replace the lower capacity drives to improve the performance. Lastly, it has an mSATA port to add a small-ish SSD to act as a cache, and boost for the data transfer. Populated with a 128GB SSD by default, it certainly helps the responsiveness of the unit.

    Upgrading is dead simple. There is a quick guide to follow, but it is simple. Upgrade the firmware in the old Drobo. Plug in the new Drobo without any drives, and update the firmware. Power both off, and move the drives to the new Drobo, and power on. It will “Rebuild” the disk pack, but is perfectly usable while this is happening. In fact, to test this, I fired up VLC and pointed it at my Jetson’s directory and started watching episodes. Perfect. (The original unit, with firewire-t-thunderbolt adaptor couldn’t serve data fast enough to have smooth video playback.)

    I will admit that I was tempted to just create a new blank disk pack, and move files over, but the thought of 3TB of data being moved by the glacial USB 2.0 interface was a non-starter.

    I have added one new 4TB drive (a WD NASware Red drive), and will replace two more drives with them after the rebuilding is complete, that will bump the total usable space to about 8TB, a comfortable cushion.

    It does take (an estimated) 7 hours to rebuild the pack (on the move, and the replacement of a drive), but that is not a huge deal. So it takes a week or so to get to normal, replacing 2 of the original drives. I can deal with that.

    So far, great experience.

  • Bicycle Dreams

    Bicycle Dreams

    Lately, I have been back in the saddle again. Riding, at least on weekends, it gets my heart rate up, and I enjoy putting the miles on. But, I begin to get ideas. Could I ride to work? What would make that more pleasant? This bike is old, I need something new.

    Yeah, that is pretty much the discussion I have with myself. My roadbike, reviewed here (my most read blog post by far) is getting old. A 2002 vintage Lemond Buenos Aires, a reynolds steel frame, Shimano Ultegra equipped, road bike. Minor upgrades, the standard bottom bracket failed early (it was a cheap downmarket unit), and replacing the standard Bontrager wheels with much better Fulcrum Racing units. (more…)

  • Photography Workflow Musings

    Photography Workflow Musings

    I never heard or really used the term “workflow” until I worked at Open Text, but subconsciously, I always had some sort of workflow, regardless of how skimpy it was. Unlike some of my more serious photography friends, who have a ton of discipline, and rigid practices, I remain somewhat chaotic.

    Part of that is legacy. Starting with iPhoto as a photo management system, I just imported, and organized into albums or collections that were related. Trips, family and friends, work, dogs, and critters were easy categories to setup, and to use. That worked until two things happened.

    First, buying a DSLR, and starting to shoot in RAW format quickly swamped iPhotos. Second, Apple iOS-izing iPhoto and Aperture, finally replacing it with the homeless abortion that is Photos. (more…)

  • Souring on the Apple Ecosystem

    Souring on the Apple Ecosystem

    Along the recent grumbling and the pending cancellation of my Apple Music subscription, a wider topic is how the Apple Ecosystem has become less an asset and more of a liability in the world of Apple. At one time, the bundling of great applications, like Garage Band, iPhoto, iTunes, and iMovie was a huge benefit for those who bought Mac computers. These applications just worked, were plenty useful, and very usable for even tyro computer users. Just compare early versions of iTunes, and the homeless-abortion that is the “Windows Media Player” and you got a pretty clear picture.

    Throughout the ’aughts, this was true, especially iPhoto, where when you got your first (or second, or third…) digital camera, you just plugged it in and like magic the iPhotos application would load, import your images, and give you ample opportunties to do minor tweaks, and management of your library. (more…)

  • Music Streaming changes

    Music Streaming changes

    In the wayback, about 2015, I did a pretty thorough personal review of the music streaming services. Apple had just launched their “Music” offering, I spent time with the then-new Google Play subscription service, and Amazon’s subscription service, as well as Spotify.

    The result was that Apple’s Music had better curated playlists, and their “Radio” function was head and shoulders above. I ended up canceling my Spotify and Google Play all-access account before the trial was up.

    Later, I discovered that Amazon’s subscription service was quite good, and added that to my listening options (paying for both Apple Music and Amazon.) I find myself listening more and more to Amazon, over the Apple service, mainly because, there are native apps for windows that ahem doesn’t suck. (more…)