Watching the waves
I had a different picture up earlier today, but the more I looked at it the more I didn’t like it. So I pulled this one out. From Chicago back in September near the Navy Pier.
Dead Dell Precision M70
We have a project going at work where we need several higher-end laptops to act as mobile servers. So we purchased a Dell Precision M70 (2.26ghz, 2gb ram, 80gb HDD, extra 80gb HDD for backup purposes), PowerNotebooks NP5720 (same specs as the Dell), and a IBM Thinkpad T43 (similiar specs except only 1.5gb ram). Up until Saturday I have been highly impressed with the Dell laptop. It has a solidly built, good design. Remember that I am a super picky user any wierd creaking or excessive fan noise or heat etc. I will notice and complain! The performance from the Dell has been super. Running Photoshop with full sized raw images went smoothly. Heat tends to be an issue that I’m particularly sensative to and the Dell certainly got warm as you’d expect but the heat is situated in the lower back section so if you use a laptop tray like I tend to use then I don’t even notice the heat. Many times to combat the heat there will be loud annoying fans and that isn’t the case with the Dell either. There are fans of course but they aren’t noticeable. So all this good news and then Saturday comes along and the Dell quits working.
I used it for a couple of hours Saturday morning with no problems. Then I went to turn it on Saturday afternoon and nothing. How often do we tell people to always backup their data? I have a program I’ve been working on for days and I hadn’t done any backups. I thought I was going to cry. I found the hard drive, removed it from the laptop and connected it to an external USB enclosure. These USB hard drive enclosures are great. If you haven’t tried one you should. I had an 80gb laptop hard drive laying around so I got one of these enclosures for $15. It’s awesome for fast portable storage.
Anyways I took the hard drive from the dead Dell and it fired right up in the USB enclosure. I got my files off and was safe.
So I called Dell support on Saturday and sat on hold for 45 minutes before I hung up irritated. This morning I called and was talking to a person within 5 minutes another 15 minutes of trouble shooting and the support guy came to the same conclusion that I had…it must be a circuit board of some sort within the laptop that was fried. He gave me a dispatch number and a case number and said someone should be out tommorrow to get it fixed. Check back later tommorrow for the results. Considering the quickness of the support I’m still hopefull on the Dell’s being a good solution.
Brandon is going to write up his review of the PowerNotebooks laptop and we just ordered the IBM Thinkpad the other day so we’ll write up something when we get it.
Take off, eh?
Time for something a little different than nature stuff…
And it was good…
Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that it was good. Then he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day” and the darkness “night.” Together these made up one day. Let their light shine down upon the earth.” And so it was.
For God made two great lights, the sun and the moon, to shine down upon the earth. The greater tne, the sun, presides during the day; the lesser one, the moon, presides through the night. He also made the stars. God set these lights in the heavens to light the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good.
Genesis 1:3-18
Casper the Friendly Ghost
My son’s birthday was a couple of days ago and he got a radio controlled hoover copter. It was interesting for a couple of minutes, but all it really did was go up and down and could only go a couple of minutes before it needed recharging. After two days it almost quit altogether, so we took it back to Walmart and he decided to get something different. He knew he had $15.00 to spend and wanted to get the most for his money. This is something he picked up from his mother I suppose. She is the queen at getting the most for her money whether it’s clothes or grocery shopping. So he got a Matchbox Semi-Truck, a Fly Wheel thing (pull the cord and a wheel that takes off, and he got 5 DVD’s with different cartoons all for $15.00! The cartoons are older ones, like Popeye, Mighty Mouse, Woody Woodpecker and Casper the Friendly Ghost. It was interesting watching these cartoons that I watched so many years ago. It’s funny how cartoons have changed. There are so many cartoons these days that I won’t let my kids watch. Shows like Sponge Bob Squarpants and others are just too crude. I find them amusing and I’m not so nieve to think that my kids will be protected from crudeness all their lives, but there are certain things that just aren’t appropiate. What I find so ironic is parents who let their kids watch that stuff and can’t figure out why they talk the way they do and do some of the things they do. Duh…
White tree
Yet another shot from my nature walk day from a couple of weeks ago. It’s time to get out and do some shooting. I did some snapshot kinda stuff of family over the past couple of days. Nothing I’d really post though. This shot struck me because of the sharpness and colors. I didn’t do anything apart from resize it for the web. I need to learn to slow down and be more aware af settings and such so I don’t have to do much editing. Not that editing is bad, but I tend to shoot away and go to fast. I think it’s probably one of the downfalls to digital photography because there is no worry about wasting money on film. This is a good and bad thing in my opinion. Brandon and I attended a meeting of a local camera club and one of the ladies said something that has stuck in my mind. She said to use your tripod as much as possible because it helps your shots be more sharp and it causes you to slow down.
Park bench leaves 2
A different view of yesterday’s park bench.
Park bench leaves
Another shot from a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t shot much new stuff. Happy Thanksgiving!
Apple Pie
Happy early Thanksgiving! I get two big Thanksgiving meals this year! Read my blog post for the full story.
Batman Birthday party
Yesturday was my son’s birthday. Oh to be a kid so that recieving a radio controlled flying saucer would be enough to send one into shouts of joy.
Early Thanksgiving
We had a Thanksgiving dinner at our Church for our College class. I teach our College aged Sunday School class and since many of them are going home this week we had a good meal. In preparation for this past Sunday’s lesson I researched Thanksgiving and learned some stuff I didn’t know. There are many stories as to the origin of Thanksgiving. The one I kept running across had to do with an Indian named Squanto. Legend goes that he was kidnapped and taken to England where he was taught English and was then used for interpreting. He returned to America and was promised to be returned to his tribe only to be kidnapped by another English Captain and taken to Spain. Some Spanish Friars heard about how Squanto and other Indians were being sold into slavery and they took them and taught them about Christianity. He then returned to America with another English Captain and returned to where his tribe had been 10 years previously only to find they had all died from a plague. Squanto then settled in near the Pilgrims that had come and ended up helping them with growing food, building homes and other things. That winter nearly half of the Pilgrims died and the following year they celebrated what is traditionally known as the first Thanksgiving feast after having good crops that season.
Like I said earlier, I’ve already had a really good turkey, mashed potatoes, corn, sweet potatoes, green beans, rolls and apple pie meal. I’m thankful to God for how he has blessed my family and how he shows himself to me all the time through family, friends photography and many other avenues.
- Camera: NIKON D70
- Aperture: ƒ/3.2
- Focal length: 50mm
- ISO: 400
- Shutter speed: 1/40s
Water pump
Mallard duck
Howdy
Woody says howdy!
Driftwood
Alien egg
I don’t believe in aliens, but if I did this is what I think their eggs would look like.
Fuzzy seeds
Interface lift
Golden leaf
This is another shot from my walk a couple of weeks ago. I think that day was probably the most productive shooting time I’ve ever had. Many times I’ll go out and come back with one or maybe two that I like enough to post. I ended up with 10 to 15 that I really like from that one day. I think the light was about at perfect as it gets for an autumn day. Hopefully you enjoy them as much as I do. As far as processing on this shot, I did a duplicate of the main layer set to overlay then unsharp mask to sharpen it a bit. Then a couple of selective burns.
Out of Bounds
No more hoops
Park bench
Buildings of a bygone time
Felt like breaking out of the nature shots. This is an old abandoned building downtown. I’d like to venture in for some shooting, but it’s all locked up and the police probably won’t take kindly to my entering uninvited. I stood there thinking about what sounds and sights might have been around this place in the past. What kind of business ran in and out of this? What sort of people were employed there?
OQO Handheld PC
I’m not sure how they pronounce their name but I guess it’s just how it looks OQO. I’ve had many handhelds, both Palm and Pocket PC based. I like both of those operating systems equally.
There are things the Palm does better than the Pocket PC and vise-versa. Both of them irritate me in different ways as well. What I really want is Windows XP on a hand held. The OQO Model 01 is just that. Far from perfect, I’ve been pretty impressed with this little machine.
The fact that this device runs Windows XP means you have all of the same applications you normally use on your laptop or desktop available to be used. Not that you are likely to use Photoshop on the 5″ screen, but you could! One deterent for using this as a replacement to your Palm or Pocket PC is the price. You can pickup a fully packed handheld for $500 and you can get a good one for under $200. The OQO Model 01 is $1600 and the Model 01+ is $1900.
The OQO is bigger than all other handhelds, but it also sports a much larger screen at 5″ diagonally. It’s not really something that you will slip into your pants pockets unless you are sporting the old parachute pants and unless you are MC Hammer that’s probably not a good idea.
Performance is suprisingly snappy. I wasn’t so sure about the processor since it’s a Transmeta Crusoe, not a processor I’ve had any experience with using Windows. I had no problems running Firefox, Outlook and several other applications and unlike Palm and Pocket PC you can truly multi-task and have several applications open at once. I did some tweaking of Windows to slightly improve the performance, like turning off XP’s themes and turning off a bunch of services that aren’t really used or needed. The 20gig hard drive leaves plenty of room for the OS, applications, documents and mp3’s. There is no speaker, which I think it should have at least a little chincy one for the occasional Windows beep or notification. I connected it to my car stereo through the headphone jack and was impressed with the sound.
One small irritation is heat. It does get warm after extended use. The fan in it tends to ramp up to deal with this heat and in quiet situations it can get rather loud. The battery life is pretty good. Their website says upto 3 hours, depending on usage and this seems pretty acurate. The device has built in WIFI and Bluetooth. I had no problems connecting to wireless access points at home and at work. I don’t own anything Bluetooth so I can’t report on that. One little issue seems to be with losing the WIFI when you turn off the WIFI radio and Windows comes out of Stand By and or Hibernation. An update available on their website seemed to help this, but not totally cure it.
It takes a little getting used to waiting for it to boot up since we are used to instant on of Palm and Pocket PC. Boot time is a little over a minute, though if you hibernate instead of turning off this waiting time this is greatly reduced.
Here is my wish list of improvements:
1. USB 2.0, transferring files through USB 1.0 is slow. The device has Firewire but I don’t have anything Firewire.
2. Heat, not sure how to handle this and still keep up with good performance
3. Boot time. It’s XP so I’m not sure how they can improve this.
4. Lower price. I understand the limitations of this but it’s pretty steep at $1600. If I hadn’t of got my hands on this because of work there’s no way on earth I’d buy it on my own.
5. Speaker. Even a cheapo little one. I don’t want to listen to music through it, but I’m used to hearing Windows notifying me, plus calendar/alarm sounds would be useful.
6. Video Ram. 8mb of video ram just doesn’t cut it these days. It needs to be at least 32 and 64 would be great!
The packaging for the device was very sharp and reminded me of the quality packaging that Apple tends to use. I like how solid the desktop stand is that comes with it.
It also came with a docking cable that is a bit odd.
I plugged a monitor, network cable, keyboard and mouse into the docking cable and it became a full fledged desktop PC.
Since it’s not a Palm or Pocket PC it doesn’t have any sort of syncing software for contacts, calendar and such that you would normally want on a handheld. At my work we use Microsoft Exchange server, so running Outlook 2003 with an Exchange account running in cached mode takes care of this quite nicely. Simply open Outlook while connected to the network with your Exchange server and it gets all of your email, contacts, tasks and calendar up to date. When you run Outlook while disconnected from the network it uses a local copy of your Exchange mailbox and you have access to all those important tasks and appointments!
The transreflective screen means it looks absolutely great even in direct sunlight! Windows runs at 800×480 and with an external monitor attached it can run 1280×1024.
As far as input is concerned there are several ways to interact with Windows. The keyboard has an eraser head pointer with left and right mouse buttons on the far left. Their placement makes using them quite comfortable. There is also a pen like what tablet PC’s use. It’s performance is a bit sluggish and when you get to the edges of the screen it can be a bit troublesome. Along the bottom edge of the device is also a wheel that can be used to scroll through documents and can be clicked to change volume, switch applications (alt-tab function) and launch applications that you select.
Overall it’s a really impressive device and I’ve been using it alot. I’m excited to see Model 02 that I’ve read is supposed to come out sometime next year. Now, let’s combine all this functionality with a camera and phone (with decent monthly rates) and I will truly be in heaven.
Check out this video from their main site it does a good job of introducing this sharp little device.
- Camera: Canon PowerShot SD300
- Taken: 10 November, 2005
- Aperture: ƒ/2.8
- Focal length: 5.8mm
- Shutter speed: 1/8s
In the woods
Goose head
Standing still
As I was walking along this deer and a smaller one stepped out into the creek and were drinking water. I had my shorter lens on and was a good distance from them. I slowly and quietly changed lenses and snapped a few, but they just seemed too far away. So I slowly crept along the edge hiding behind trees. Every so often they would pause and look my way but they didn’t take off. So I moved in closer and closer. Then I paused and snapped this one which turned out the best. I had to crop it because I was down in some trees and brush without a totally clear view. I started moving closer when they either heard or smelled me and they left in a hurry. There was another moment when I was sitting on the railroad tracks shooting when a larger deer stepped out onto the tracks not far from me but too far for the 50mm. I went to change my lens and as I lifted it up to shoot he took off.
Along the Burlington Northern
Water across rocks
Ps 46:4 There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High.
Joh 4:14 But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.
Forest trail
Oh my goodness, the 50mm 1.8 rocks. Brandon and I ventured out today for some shots. Check out his duck shot for today, the colors will knock your socks off! Unfortunately Brandon wimped out early and I ventured on alone to find some great trails. At first glance anyways, I think some great shots too. (At least I think so :)
Update: Since a couple of people said something about Black and White I did it up. I still prefer the color because I just love the browns and yellows in it.