The Subtlety of Grandness

I’m exhausted. Got up at 0500, and now it’s 2315 and I’m still trying to futz with WordPress. Above is the last photo I’ll ever take of with the iPhone 3G. Yes, after two years I’ve ditched that old battleaxe and made off with a younger hussy, the brand new iPhone 4. Today was launch day, and thankfully I had reserved one at the local Apple Store. (I had to reserve because AT&T crapped the bed when its servers crashed taking pre-orders.) The Early Birding paid off, as I got my phone at 0800, just an hour after the store opened. Meanwhile, there were hundreds of people still in line when I left.

I’m not sad to see the 3G go. It was always painfully underpowered; Apple didn’t bother to update the processor or the clock speed from the original iPhone. So, from Day One, the 3G felt pokey, a situation that got worse as apps were introduced. I didn’t get a 3GS due to the expense of an early upgrade, and by the time I was eligible I figured I should wait another six months for the next-generation iPhone. Though I’ve always envied those with the 3GS due to its responsiveness and speed.

Well, there’s a new Big Brother on the block, and, holy cow, the iPhone 4 thing is amazing. It feels incredible in your hand, like a slab of glass and steel. There’s a heft to it that gives it an authority that the plasticy 3G/3GS lacked. (I always loved the original with its mostly aluminum back.) In terms of performance, it screams. A faster CPU than the 3GS, and twice as much RAM as the 3GS and the iPad. The camera is pretty good, too. I can’t haul my DSLR and lenses with me everywhere, so for the past year I’ve relied on my 3G for photos when I’m out. Well, the iPhone 4 won’t replace a dedicated camera, but it’s pretty darn close to, and it’s a huge leap from the 3G. And, finally, the screen is just razor freaking sharp. It’s incredible to look at. And thank providence that I bought the bumper on a whim, as well. With all the reports of skin-touching-the-sides-killing-reception flying (which have been confirmed by Apple and the Steve himself), I imagine there’s going to be a monster rush on them. I actually like the bumper. It wraps around the steel sides snugly, offering protection. Meanwhile, it also lets you lay the iPhone down without the glass touching the surface.

So, yeah, this was a great upgrade. I finally feel like I have an iPhone that’s also a screaming computer in my hand, as opposed to an underpowered weakling struggling to keep pace in gym class.

WordPress 3.0 was released today, and this blog has been duly updated. The video above will let you know what’s new, but suddenly I get the feeling that I’m going to spend quite a bit time redesigning this site. If it happens, it’ll probably happen this weekend. Keep an eye open!

Oh, Apple, you’ve built a pipeline to my wallet. Let’s see, I’m a Day One’r with the iPad, and on Tuesday I’m going to pre-order an iPhone 4. I had an original iPhone, and when I upgraded to the iPhone 3G I gave that one to my brother. Well, the 3G is two years old (I never upgraded to the 3GS), and it’s time to upgrade. The 3G is just pokey slow; good old dad got a 3GS last year, and it was just snappy in terms of performance. Of course, it had a higher-clocked processor and double the RAM. I need the speed, and the iPhone 4 is a big leap up in performance, not to mention the damn thing looks sleek as hell. Only Apple can make your cutting edge-only-yesterday device and make it feel old and frumpy overnight. I should note that my 3G is also developing cracks all along its back, and the battery doesn’t hold a charge like it used to. Ah, planned obsolescence, you’re a wonderful thing to Apple’s shareholders.

Ya know, Microsoft, those Windows 7 phones might actually tempt me, but the thing is you actually have to have them on the market. It’s insane how long it’s taken for MS to respond to the iPhone. What MS showed of Windows Phone 7 at Barcelona in January looked good, but actual phones don’t go on sale until the 4th quarter!!!! By the time Win7 phones hit the market, the 4th generation iPhone will have been out for 5-6 months. That’s just crazy.

I’m really late to this party, but the past week I’ve discovered the pure joy of TeamViewer, a free application that lets you remote control any PC or Mac from any other PC or Mac (or even an iPhone), and it works perfectly and easily. Case in point, the other morning I was in bed, surfing on my MacBook Pro. I had been doing some remote maintenance on my dad’s laptop in Seattle on my desktop PC in the living room earlier. Instead of getting out of bed, or even just logging off from the living room desktop, I used TeamViewer to remote to my desktop from my laptop, and used the already open TeamViewer on my desktop to remote to my dad’s laptop 2,500 miles away. I remote controlled a computer over a remote controlled computer! That’s how good it is.

Over the past week, I’ve used TeamViewer to perform maintenance on my parents’ computers, as well as my sister’s laptop. Prior to this, I’d either have to talk them through their problems over the phone, or waste a day of holiday vacation spent being the family IT guy. Now, I can do it from the comfort of my bed. It’s brilliant.

The screen above is me accessing my MacBook Pro over my desktop. It’s awesome.

Yup, I’m a Day One’er. This thing is fantastic. Seriously.

My father told me on today that he wants a Mac.

Really?

According to websiteoutlook.com this site is worth $153.30

At this rate, I can retire is about a thousand years.

The hard drive in my very first PC was 20 MB. I just got a 1.5 TB drive delivered. That’s basically 1,500,000 MB, or a 75,000-fold increase in capacity.

That PC had 640 kB of RAM. My current PC has 6 GB of RAM, or 6,291,456 kB, almost a 10,000-fold increase.

That PC had a 16 MHz CPU. My current PC has 4 CPU cores, each rated at 2.66 GHz, or basically 2,660 MHz. Each core can simultaneously process two threads, so I essentially have 8 logical cores.

That’s progress, folks.

It’s been a week and a half since I pulled a ligament in my foot while running. Worst.Pain.Ever. I could barely walk and it was sore for a week, but now it feels 100 percent. Even ran some errands to the Post Office and the UPS Store on foot and it’s fine. I’ll wait a few more days, since the treatment is two weeks to let it heal and I don’t want to push it prematurely, but then I’ll be running again. The conditions have changed in my convalescence, as the Indian summer has made way for a rainy autumn. Oh, well, I’m a Seattelite; wet is our friend.

I did get the 750GB Caviar Green, and I promptly sent it back to Amazon and ordered the 1.5GB model. I’m really serious about this backup regimen; I’m thinking nightly backups should be ideal. The Caviar Green is a great archival drive. Not as fast as the fastest drives (but the speeds remain respectable), but that allows it to use less power and run cooler and quieter than regular hard drives. Since only Windows is going to be writing to it to make backups, that makes it perfect for the task. I must say I was tempted to get a Caviar Black for my main drive, but I did some research and discovered that Dell didn’t skimp on my hard drive; I’ve got a very nice Hitachi Desktar 750GB.

I spent the weekend reorganizing my digital life. I’m in the middle of transferring my photograph collection from Aperture to Lightroom, a process that involves exporting out the master RAW files from Aperture’s monolithic library, transferring them over the network to my PC, and then having Lightroom import them into its catalog. Along the way, I’m having Lightroom convert the RAW files to DNG, which are basically digital negatives. DNGs are slightly smaller than RAW; I’m saving about 300MB for every 2GB of RAW files converted. But it also lets me consolidate my library into a single format rather than having to deal with different RAW types from my SLR and my Sigma DP-1.

Speaking of my DP-1, while I was going over the photos I’ve taken with it I was reminded of why I have such a love/hate thing going on with this camera. The DP-1 is a compact camera that takes SLR-quality images. The reason is it was the first compact camera in the world to incorporate an SLR-size sensor. And this isn’t just a regular, conventional sensor, but a Fovean sensor, which is pretty much the closest thing to “digital film” there is. In terms of megapixels, the DP-1 is rated at a whopping 14, but that’s a bit misleading due to the nature of the Fovean sensor. Nevertheless, this thing takes gigantic images with incredible image quality. When you look at them the photos just pop right out at you.

The downsides are that the DP-1 costs more than most consumer SLRs, is incredibly finicky to use, and is incredibly slow. The user-interface from the buttons to the menu system and settings feel like they were made by pocket protector-clad engineers. Steve Jobs would burn down Apple in a heartbeat if the R&D guys ever gave him anything as kludgy as this. Even worse, due to the many compromises needed to get the SLR sensor into such a compact body, the entire thing is slower than molasses on a cold day. The lens is so slow that taking a photo in anything other than pure, bright daylight is a total crapshoot. It’s difficult to get a clean photo in indoor lighting, and it’s downright impossible when shooting in dim conditions. And when you finally do take a photo, the camera spends several seconds processing it. You aren’t going to be taking action photos with this.

I suppose that’s part of the charm of DP-1, though. It makes you have to think about your photo before you take it. DSLRs let you shoot dozens of photos in seconds, but they’re so fast that you stop thinking about it. The DP-1, on the other hand, is old fashioned in comparison. But when it works, it pays off.

It’s also amazing to go through some of my photographic archives. I’ve shot thousands upon thousands of photos, and I was reminded why I don’t really throw any of them out. As I was browsing through a collection of random photos I found one that I had taken the morning the mother of one of my coworker’s visited San Francisco and toured the office. I snapped a photo for them right before I raced out the door to catch a flight down to LA for an event. It was just one of many random photos taken during a busy of time of the year . I later uploaded it along with all my other photos into Aperture and didn’t think anything of it since then. It was just a single photo amongst tens of thousands. But when I stumbled upon it I realized the significance of what I had. His mother had passed away suddenly in the past year. I sent him a copy and learned that this was one of the last photos he had with her. I’m glad I still had it.