A quick happy birthday to Tessie and Tiana!!!  

farrah and I wish we could be there to help you celebrate!

I need to start labeling my photos, either locally or on my Flickr account, but preferribly locally.  Part of the whole tagging and captioning bit is to easily find photos, right?  It’s going to take some time to go through all 14000+ photos I have. 

I’m using Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 to label my library of photos.  I’m not sure it’s the best tool or the best method to manage photos, but I’ve been using Photoshop Elements since version 2.0, so I have considerable time invested into this software.  The tagging slash commenting method is more open then proprietary (thank goodness) - being able to write the comments to the file.  If I decide to change software, then I’m (hopefully) assured that the information I have put into the photo will still be there.

Next year, I hope to be fully on the Mac platform only.  I’ve been pining for the new  Mac Pro, foolishly thinking that getting such a beauty will help me tame the organization beast.  Though iPhoto is an interesting program, I don’t know if it is robust enough for my needs.  I’ll need to see what else is available on the Mac.

Wait a minute, did I say 14K photos?  Oh my gosh! I thought I only had about 7,000 photos.  I have about 6,000 posted on Flickr, so I only have half of my photos backed up online. 

So I made a deal with my wife, farrah, that if I get my computer room in order I can get that sweet Mac Pro.  Sounds easy, right?  Well if you know me, and if you’ve seen my computer room, it’s easier said than done. 

I guess you know what I’ll be trying to accomplish this weekend.

I can’t seem to fall asleep yet.  My wife farrah went on a mini-vacation to Hawaii this morning.  The bed feels a little different, so I’m sure this is why I can’t fall asleep.  Or it might also be that I watched that stupid 20/20 episode tonight called ‘Last Days on Earth’.                

The show was counting down how the human race will cease to exist.  If you didn’t watch it, here are the seven way that scientist feel how life on Earth will end (from least likely to most likely):

• #7a - Death of a Star - Gamma Ray Burst: It's something like massive heat from a dying star.  It will rip off the ozone layer and we'd fry.  Nice.
• #7b - Death of a Star - Black Hole: I learned that we don't necessarily need to worry about our sun turning into a black hole.  But we need to worry about nomadic black holes that wander the galaxy sucking up everything in its path.  Nice (again).
• #6 - Intelligent Machines - Terminator and HAL come to life.  I'm not too worried.  John Connor will travel back in time to set things right.
• #5 - Supervolcano - Yellowstone Park becomes one massive exit point for molten lava that needs to expel itself from below the Earth's surface.  Fun for the whole planet.
• #4 - Asteroid - Well, we've seen this one on film as well.  I guess we discovered a hunk of rock that might come very close to Earth on April 13, 2029.  Depending on how Earth affects the asteroid, it might just hit us when it comes back 7 years later, on April 13, 2036.  Uh, will Bruce Willis be available then to blow the sucker up?
• #3 - Nuclear War - I guess the fear is that Russia and the USA will still (accidently) duke it out.  I guess there are about 80,000 nuclear war heads still pointed at one another.  Oh, and it will only take 20 of them to do the whole planet in.  Talk about having a surplus.
• #2 - Plague - Either a flu pandemic, a man-made virus, or something else, scientist feel this is inevitable.   There have been 10 pandemics over the last 300 years.  I guess were due.  I'll need to look at Enoch Choi's PowerPoint presentation on the Pandemic Flu.
•  #1 - Climate Change - Previously known as global warming.  Climate change is meant to cover all the effects of global warming (storms, floods, heatwaves, etc.)  Of course Al Gore was there to give his two cents about climate change.

Wow, looking over the list, I’m not surprised I can’t sleep!  I need to stop watching television news.

Take a photo of something orange.

Koi Fish Pondering

It seems that anything with a modicum of success is cloned.  For this entry I’m focusing on the cloning of Jack Bauer.  At least, to me, it seems that is happening this year.  For those of you who don’t know who Jack Bauer is, he is the hero in Fox’s 24.

24 - Season Four

I’ll be the first to tell you I didn’t catch onto 24 until last year.  While I was working at Yahoo!, friends in my group would watch and talk 24 for days on end.  Well, I checked out season 1 and 2 - easy when it’s on DVD - and I was hooked.  I then quickly added season 3 and 4 followed in my Netflix queue.  For the two weeks all farrah heard was the theme to 24 on our television screen.

This fall season there seems to be a series of shows that are, in essence, trying to capture the flavor of 24.  Neither of them, however, successed on any scale.

First up is Kidnapped.  I watched this show on DVD.  It seems NBC wanted to release two of its pilots on DVD before the start of the fall season.  The other show on the disc, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, looks very promising.  But I’m writing to talk about Kidnapped.  It stars the guffy likable Jermey Sisto from Six Feet Under as a man who can get retrieve a loved one who has been kidnapped.  Get this: he only charges you if the kidnapped victim comes back alive. Oh, how nice of him.

Kidnapped

Jeremy must also must deal with the FBI in the form of Delroy Lindo - who is basically playing the same role he did in the movie Ransom.

The parents of the kidnapped victim are played by Timothy Hutton and Dana Delany, both in pretty much wasted roles.  You can see the writers trying to setup the twists-n-turns that will weave there way through the season (Why was he kidnapped?  What’s the wife hiding? What did Jeremy Sisto’s character leave the FBI?  Should I really be watching this show?)  There is no ticket clock on this show, but I’m sure the show is set to resolve itself by season’s end.

Vanished

The other kidnapped based show is Fox’s Vanished.  It stars former Queer as Folk actor Gale Harold.  Gale plays an FBI agent with “something to prove”, trying to find the missing wife of a US Senator.  His acting in this show is pretty flat and emotionless.  If he’s supposed to be the tough guy lead, at least exude some charisma, will ya?  I’m not really going to get into this much, as the show is as flat as Kidnapped. The only thing going for this show is it has Ming-Na in it.  Too bad they don’t give her much to do.

I guess I’ll turn off my television and wait until the new season of 24 starts.

Show us some rules.

No Swimming @ North Shore, Hawaii

Take a picture of something that someone put a sticker on.

Tiana with Stickers.

Fun with stickers!!!

Give a child a sheet of stickers and they will handle the rest.

Look, I did what she said with the brick.  I didn't know it was bad, but The Pin's on it now for poor Frisco, and they're playing it all on me.  -- Emily from the movie Brick.

farrah and I watched this movie last weekend.  I’ve wanted to see it ever since I saw it’s preview during another DVD we watched several months ago.  It looked like classic film noir set in high school. 

It took a while to get into the nuances in the the dialog, but once you got into the rythym it was easy to follow.  In a way it was sort of like watching Trainspotting for the first time, not knowing what is being said.

I enjoyed the movie overall, giving it four stars.  I like the characters and the look of the film.  The pace of the story was spot on, moving from scene to scene at a good clip.  I figure if Sam Spade went to high school, he Brendan, the lead character in the film.

Go add this movie to your Netflix queue (or rent it at Blockbuster if you must).

If you haven’t seen this, it explains all there is to social networking.  So many online friends, so little time.

My website is down for the second time in about six months.  The reason my hosting company gives is hard drive failure - again!  Two times, on two different servers, in six months.  I think it may be time to make change.

So does anyone have a suggesting for a web hosting company? I’m looking for about 5GB of storage (for a small photo program I maintain),  PHP and mySQL, and not much else.  I’m not looking to break the bank on monthly fees, but anything under $25 is worth considering.  I’m currently with Midphase and have been with Hostgator (who wasn’t bad at all).

If anyone has a suggestion I would appreciate it.

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“500.0”] I dropped by 12" PowerBook[/caption]

I’m a recent Mac adopter.  I bought my Powerbook last October and I just love it.  I probably will never buy another Windows machine, unless something drastically changes.  Last April, I did drop my PowerBook.  It didn’t go boom but it did bend a bit.

I know accidents happen, so I was able to calm myself after the mishap.  Given the mobile nature of notebooks accidents are more likely to happen.  I’ve heard the life expectancy of a notebook is three years, give or take a year.   I understand this.  Imagine my suprise when I came home yesterday and couldn’t power-up the PowerBook.

My thoughts started racing.  Did I drop this the PowerBook again?  Did the previous accident just have a delayed effect?  Did the cat sabatoge the PowerBook?  Can I convince farrah we should just buy a new one?  Oh crap, when was the last time I backed up this baby?

I started to freak.  farrah and I tried several steps before I started Internet searches on 12" PowerBook No Power.  There was several forum postings, and one off blog entries about this problem.  None of the solutions were working.  Stress on the old ticker was building.  

I then decided to go straight to the Apple support site for PowerBooks.  Can you guess what the first problem listed on the front page was?  It was “My computer won’t turn on"  All I needed to do was a simply hold down the Shift-Control-Option-Power for five seconds, then power back up.  Whew!

   [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500.0"] My damaged 12" PowerBook[/caption] 

Disaster avoided, but a lessen learned.  Boy, do I need to do a backup and soon. 

Eh, maybe next week.

What's your cell phone's ringtone? What made you pick it?

U2’s Vertigo is my default ringtone   You know the part?

Hello hello
I’m at a place called Vertigo
It’s everything I wish I didn’t know
Except you give me something I can feel, feel

I just never get sick of U2.  I’ve seen U2 several time in concert, both with BossaNova and farrah.  They always put on a great show.