Swift Sweet Rush

Swift Sweet Rush by Jim Charanis

Took a bunch at Maia’s recital but this one of her and her friend running across the bridge in euphoric enthusiasm before the performance was candid. Funny how things work out - life is what happens when you are making plans.

instructables : String Tripod

instructables : String Tripod

I love reading tidbits during my lunch break. This is a great idea - esp when I’m hiking.

Pruning and Watering - Frost Burned Plants

Eco-Terra Landscape Consultants has a great article on what to do with this frost damange here in the South. Here is the little Maple I planted last year, It had come in so nicely and I had pruned it back a bit on the interior to give it a nice look. That’s probably all that would have survived, so I blew it. I have dead wood all the way down to the trunk. I’ll cut it back and hope for the best. I just deep watered them, will do that once a week.
Here is one of the Crepe Myrtles that got wacked . I had just pruned them The Article says to just let them grow, they should come back.

Mac Pro for digital pictures and video

I can’t stand it. I’m getting a Mac Pro. I have a Compaq Presario Intel Win XP box I’ve been running for over 5 years and my trusty PowerBook G4 1Ghz. It just takes too long to process the RAW photo’s from my Nikon D200 (10MP) on the powerbook and if I’m going to upgrade my Win XP box I might as well run it on an Intel Mac now that I can. It also takes too long to process movies even in iMovie. I like my transitions and titles, pan and scan. Every time I change something it renders for a good 5 minutes. Sure iMovie is smart enough to do that in the background but on a Quad Core Intel box it will tear through this stuff. No I don’t need the 8-Core. I’m researching a Mac Pro to run Final Cut Express, Aperture, Adobe Dreamweaver and Flash. I’ll upgrade FC Express and the Adobe Web suite and buy a new copy of Aperature.

I spoke with a Mac guy at the Apple store and he confirmed that the processor speed isn’t the challenge for me. I’m not doing heavy engineering or gaming that might require intense calculations. So figure a Two 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon (that’s 4 2.66 GHz processors!). $2,499.00
Upgrading the memory both Ram and HD is the key. I have looked into it and I think getting the RAM from Apple is probably the best bet. When they configure the box they will fill all of the memory slots so getting 1GB will fill 2 slots with 512MB RAM, 2GB will fill 4 slots. I have also heard the Apple memory is built to be cool in a box that doesn’t have many fans. So figure a $699 upgrade to 4 x 1GB 667MHz DDR2 fully buffered ECC RAM in 4 of the FB-DIMM slots.

Then I take the standard Hard Drive in Bay 1 – 250GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s. The upgrade to a 750GB drive is $299, for that price I can get two 500GB drives and create one RAID 0 volume. That’s right – these drives are now selling for as low as $0.23/MB! This type of RAID, also referred to as a striped array, reads and writes data to and from all the drives at the same time, which can really speed things up. In fact Macworld tests show that this gives more critical applications almost as much throughput as moving to the 3.0MHz CPU costing hundreds more. Add the RAM upgrade and my photo and movie editing should fly. Less waiting, more creating.

The Apple rep also suggested upgrading the Graphics card to the ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB (2 x dual-link DVI) for $249. This doubles the onboard RAM and the ability to support two 30” HD Displays. Not that I’ll ever afford such eye candy. In fact I will probably have to keep my SyncMaster 20” for now. But when we build the home theater – POW! Another reason to upgrade is that it uses a special double-wide slot designed to accommodate its on-board fan and vent. If I got the standard Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT it would be in this slot and really a throw away if I ever needed to upgrade – unless I wanted to drive more then two monitors. Doubt it. Having said all of this there was a comparison done by Christoph Vonrhein for Final Cut Pro. Based on this review and the kind of work I’ll be doing it probably won’t make much of a difference and I should save the $249 upgrading later if I need to.

In fact, I should put the $249 towards AppleCare to protect the purchase and provide onsite support for 3 years. Not that I expect problems but it did help with my PowerBook for a power supply and great tech support. In fact, if I purchase a monitor with it that will be covered too. And I’ll include an Airport Extreme card with Bluetooth.

Grand Total $3,526.00
With a 24” HD Flat Panel Monitor $4,425

Add the two hard drives (2 x 500GB @ $125 each) $4,675

Add Aperture ($299) and an upgrade to Final Cut Express ($99) $5,073

Tax at 7% ( $355) $5,428.11

Add Windows Vista to run my old stuff (or I could just install my old copy of Windows XP). $99 to $150 more.

Okay, maybe I’m not. For a while.

Alternatives:

Other World Computing for the memory and Newegg.com for the drives. I have purchased drives and batteries for my power book from them before. Should be able to get the 1GB RAM model and then purchase 4GB RAM from these guys for $430.

For the CPU - mail order saves tax and shipping less then $70: Small Dog, Power Max ($200 rebate with AppleCare, $75 with RAM), MacConnection ($150 rebate), MacMall ($150 Rebate, free printer, bundles).

I ran in Chicago- three days there

New Feature: Running in Chicago - my route on Google Maps

The weather was great in Chicago - a bit rainy but none the less, I always run along the lake when I go to Chicago. This was a 6 mile day, Check out the route on Google Maps, above.

Its particulary interesting if you go the satellite view.

Appalachian Trail - 2007 Trip Planning

I think BJ has done the work for us this year. Terrific site and one Andrew and I can use to plan this leg of our trip. Check this out: Appalachian Trail Adventures - 2007 Trip Planning

We are trying to find a place to hike on the AT this year. Perhaps not to many hills as neither of us have been conditioning. I suggested the Shenandoah in VA beacuse its on the Blue Ridge. My issue with flat areas in VA is too many people and pollution.

In 2005 I finished the last section of GA. I would like to continue on in NC. It would be too difficult to get to Bly Gap to start where NC starts - only option is to hick south and north from .
This is pretty much what I did in 2005 to get to Bly from the south. A shuttle guy dropped me at Blue Ridge Gap and I walked 3 miles norht to Bly, then turned around and walked back.

So this year I don’t know where we will go - Here is my idea:

Appalachian Trail Adventures - Trail Log

Appalachian Trail Adventures - Trail Log

Hiker’s blog

Lost my head, forgot my shoes

I ran 4.8 miles today without my foot pod and in new shoes.  I’m in california - Mountain View - http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=773874

 I had to use this cool Google hack website to figure out where i just ran in 40 minutes.  It was a little scary - thought I would never get back. Its 8:30 - pretty dark out.

 

 

Chattahochee Road Runners 10K

Chattahochee Road Runners 10K
354 JAMES CHARANIS
42 M 40-44

46:52.75 @ 7:34/M

Crazy fast race - what I mean is its a great deal downhill. I warmed up 1.2 miles but the start was crowded and I started a bit in the back of the pack. First few miles were steady - 4 was fast and 5 was tight. 6 went really fast until the end, up a little hill for the last 100 yards then around the corner to finish with tight thighs.

This puts me in Time Group A for the Peachtree Road Race 10K on July 4 - a goal posted earlier

For my Nike Triax Elite fans - I have to adjust my offset again! Here is my calculation based on my spreadsheet

And my pace based on the same spreadsheet (XLS that gives you your pace and helps you change your offset to the correct setting based on that race)

Here is the Graph from the Nike Software

Full Review of the Triax Elite Watch Here - along with a lot of reader comments.

MyPublisher | Beta Test of BookMaker 2.0 Mac version

MyPublisher | Design your own Photo Book to be printed as a beautiful hardcover book!

I have used this service and commented here in the past. They gave me the chance to Beta Test the new software for Mac. I have used the iPhoto Plug-in before. This is a stand-alone program that allows you to create a book, using photos from any source including iPhoto.

Thanks for letting me participate in the beta of the Mac OS X Beta program. I did the survey but not sure if all comments will make it though. I’ll do a full review after the final release.
When adding pictures from an iPhoto Album it would be better if you could drag and drop the album and have it add the photos in that album in order. Or if when you select all photos in an album it drops them in the same order. You can much easier order pictures in iPhoto then on the add photo bar.
The only way to add them in a specific order is to drag them one by one.
I like the big picture view that lets you organize the photos. I like the unassigned feature too. But you can only multi-select and select many by stretching the mouse over. A shift-select would be good. In other words click one then shift click one further down the line selecting all in the middle.
When working in the page layout I like the double click to get to the image controls. That gives comfort and control over pictures as you work on layout.
There seems to be a bug in the image control window. I forgot to click done after editing a picture and then going to add another picture to that page. I went up dragged the new picture down and it worked but didn’t close the image control menu. Then I clicked done on the image control menu and it wouldn’t go away. I saved the book. Then I went to the next page, okay, but when I went to drag a picture down to the page the application crashed. I had to restart and good news the book opened to that page again.
The zoom in on text is cool, would be good to incorporate the spelling check feature of Mac OSX.
It would be nice to move composed pages around. In other words, when you go to the pages film strip view up top, you cannot drag and drop pages back and forth. You have to unload and reload pictures. Or am I missing something.
For example, the All pages view is nice to move pictures around the entire book, it would be good to be able to move pages too.
I moved a picture to a page that had a black background and the text didn’t change to white - so it didn’t show up.
When adding and deleting pictures from pages, moving them around there seemed to be some random placement of pictures at the top film strip. I lost track. But when I went from pages film strip to photos film strip (or whatever its called at the top) the pages were okay.
I changed the layout background from white to black and it ended up replacing a picture on the page. I also noticed that at these glitch/random events it leaves the picture up top. Actually it grabbed a picture from the next page, because when I tried to replace it back it replaced one on the next page. Maybe its trying to autofill but its acting strange. Now its locked in a picture and when I try and delete or correct it sticks, won’t let me delete. I’m quitting and restarting. Didn’t help.
I went back and did some reworking, not sure if pictures disappeared or not. I then ran into the same image control bug - window stuck. So I saved and quit and restarted.
You cannot seem to go back and get photos - well you can but when you do, any unused photos in the filmstrip disappear. I did go back to get more and when I went to the pages view it only had the 4 I added. Well I went to the organize page and it had put all the unused pictures on page 15, not sure what that means. There isn’t a page 15 yet.
I deleted all the empty pages and they went back to unassigned.

Login and upload went fine. More options here then with iPhoto plug-in. That is a bonus.
In the end, I think it is easier to use iPhoto’s book maker, except for these publishing options.