I just discovered that the Kindle has The Onion now! It is definitely my favorite (and I suppose only) satire-”newspaper.” All for a reasonable $2 a month, a small price to pay for guaranteed laughs pushed straight to your Kindle via WhisperSync.
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Update your bookmarks people, PhilipWang.net and TehPhil.com are now one-in-the-same. Ughhhh now I need to remake my website/watermark logo… I’ve been considering re-aquiring an old domain (philipwang.net) lately and pointing the database for the blog to that domain instead of this…decisions decisions. Western Digital sent me back my replacement external HD today, which works out to a 7-day turnaround from the day I mailed my busted one in. I’m sure it helps that their factory is only 40 miles away from me, but no complaints here. I sent in a 500 GB My Book Pro and they mailed back a 500 GB My Book Studio. I believe the main differences between the two models outside of some cosmetic differences is the addition of eSATA and removal of dedicated Firewire 400 on the latter model. The new HD sounds about 10 dB quieter than the old one too, so that’s a giant plus! In the mean time, I need to figure out what to do with the drive now. Before I realized that my My Book Pro was still under warranty, I went ahead and picked up an iOmega 500GB USB 2.0 drive off of Amazon for a reasonable price to continue doing Time Machine backups. Now that the My Book is back, I have no idea what to do with it. Maybe use it as a scratch disk for editing videos in Final Cut? Put my movie collection onto it? Hmmm….possibilites possibilities. The Apple tablet is supposedly being announced tomorrow, hopefully along with some iPhone OS 4.0, next-gen iPhone news or AT&T exclusivity-deal details. I can’t wait to see what they have up their sleeves, although I secretly hope the rumors of the extent of it’s eBook capabilities are false, since that would cast my poor Amazon Kindle G1 into the stone age I originally took this picture of the desert floor almost as a throwaway while we were walking back from the sand dunes in Death Valley. But once I got home and looked at the series that I took, I ended up really liking one of them enough to print it. I found this great rustic-looking frame at Michaels that accents the picture well, so after matting and signing my name with gold leaf paint, I had myself a new wall decoration!
Here’s one of my favorite sunrise pictures from Zabriskie Point in Death Valley. This took about 7-8 exposures, which I stitched together in Photoshop CS4. After adjusting the curves and levels, voila! Panorama! Definitely view this one in higher resolution because WordPress compression algorithm really desaturates the colors.
Well, I prematurely hacked open my dead external hard drive, because:
Well lo and behold, I searched through my e-mail archives and it turns out that I still have a few months remaining on my warranty. I created an RMA through Western Digital, packaged the drive up and sent it off to their facility in Riverside. Now it’s just playing the waiting game to see if they honor the warranty and send me a new or refurbished unit. Oh, and this is AFTER I ordered a replacement drive off of Amazon. Crud. Well…if they DO decide to replace my drive, it can never hurt to have more storage, especially FW800! After ~26 months of launching this blog, I’ve finally decided to update the look a little bit. I’m still working through the kinks of this new WordPress theme, but so far I’m liking it. If you see anything peculiar (alignment issues specifically) post a comment in this post. I’ll be switching between my old theme and new theme for the next couple of days, so…yeah. (I’ve been having some problems with my WordPress Media Uploader and have been dealing with other server-related issues, otherwise I would have uploaded this much sooner!) I went on a photographic trip to Death Valley I took with my dad and brother-in-law Vu. We did a whirlwind tour of Death Valley, meaning up at 4 AM to make it in time for sunrises and back late at night after capturing sunset and star trails. We were able to hit Zobriskie Point (three times!), Furnace Creek, Badwater (lowest point in the Western Hemisphere), Artist’s Drive, the sand dunes, Mosaic Canyon, Dante’s View, the Devil’s Golf Course and the Devil’s corn field. Notice a lot of hell/devil-related place names? Hehe. Next time I go, I want to check out the Racetrack Playa and Ubehebe Crater. The weather was pretty good all things considered, mid-60s during the day and 40s-50s in the early morning, late at night. That definitely beats the searing-hot 100+ degree temperatures in the summer. I can’t imagine who in their right mind would go in the dead of summer. So anyways, my first photo from my trip I’m sharing is a night exposure from Zobriskie Point at Death Valley. The foreground was lit up a little bit by a passing car, which was a blessing and a curse at the same time. Overall, I am pretty pleased with the way it came out.
(Equipment/exif info: Canon 5D2/17-40L, 17mm, f/4, ~240″ exposure, focus set to infinity) That’s my external HD that I keep my Time Machine backups on. This doesn’t look good I have four external hard drives that I keep for various things, which is has the same HDs as my configuration I back in May, but with the addition of two more drives:
Go figure that this happens 2 months after Western Digital’s 3-year warranty ended. I just tried taking the hard drive out of the enclosure, but that didn’t end well. It looks like I am now in the market for an external HD…it’s a shame they don’t make many Firewire 800 drives anymore |
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