Drobo, uh oh.

Are you familiar with Drobo? That link gos right to the support page because you are going to need it if you own one. Google "Drobo won't mount, but shows up in Dashboard". Basically, it disconnects and then won't remount but I can see it in the Dashboard app. I can even get it to blink it's lights at me and see it in Disk Utility app. But it won't mount come hell or high water. To fix it I shut down the computer, unplug the firewire cable from the Drobo, wait for it to go to standby mode (one light), then unplug the Drobo power cord. Wait 20 seconds or so and plug the cord back in to power it up. Meanwhile I boot up the compter and launch Dashboard. Once the Drobo is done booting I plug the Firewire cable back in and have 60% chance it will show up. Repeat if it does not. Not exactly fun.

This time after doing this I get some Dashboard red lights saying it's going to take 100 hours to rebuild and data protection is in progress. The tech support person blames the new WD Caviar Green drives. Saying any of them could be bad. So by their logic you are adding more possibilities for failure by having more hard drives in a RAID? Really? Is that not the opposite reason for running a RAID?

I also found out that Drobo uses a proprietary RAID system. So if it does crash, you can't get your data back witout another Drobo bay to plug them into. Not cool. Time to go back to a bank of mirrored hard drives as a back up. One fails I can pull it and still have data. I have been using eSATA Drive Enclosures by Mac Gurus for about 5 years now and have never had a hiccup. Been using Drobo since Sept 08 and have had to call tech support 3-4 times and now I have a serious system crash on my hands that I can't do anything about for 100 hours till it gets done with it's rebuild.

This Drobo does not inspire confidence. If a car keeps breaking down you are not gonna take it cross country on a road trip. The Drobo keeps breaking down, I don't trust it with long term storage needs.

And to people who say RAID is not backup, yeah I know, but it's part of my redundancy here and I use it as my library in Lightroom and iView Media. So shush. The idea of having to rebuild those libraries over the weekend while finding another back up solution to phase out the Drobo is not fun.

A life well wasted

A Life Well Wasted

Robert Ashley wonders why he spends his free time playing videogames, asks random people on the street about it, talks to a researcher whose work attempts to harness the brain power wasted on gaming, gets to know an eccentric, forward-thinking game designer who lives sustainably with his family of four on $14,000 a year, and gets a first-hand account of what it’s like to work on terrible games (and what it’s like to get terrible reviews) from an anonymous game developer.

Question

Give 40 laptops and a unmoderated forum to a room full of monkeys and record the time it takes for them to mention Hitler. How long would it take?

And motion comes in.

Megan Fox Photo Shoot with Red One Video Camera - Esquire

Have you watched that enough times yet? You probably noticed there's something different about this Megan Fox cover tease for our next issue: It wasn't shot with a camera. At least not a still camera. For the first time in Esquire's history (and, we imagine, magazine history in general), a cover image was shot as a video. Using the RedONE, a video camera that captures images at four times the resolution of high-definition, photographer-director Greg Williams (see below) recorded ten minutes of loosely scripted footage with Fox — getting out of bed, rolling around on a pool chair, inexplicably lighting a barbecue.

Soon the AD will put a video camera on a tripod and edit from the frames?

Whoo hoo!

Don't Mess With Texas ... Get Rid Of It : NPR

Texas asking Blue America for a divorce is like a woman asking her boyfriend if he'd like to sit around all day drinking Miller and watching football, or like the Patriots offering Tom Brady to the Redskins for a 19th-round draft pick. Befuddled liberals can only shake their heads in gratified amazement while they pop the cap on their first beer, settle into the sofa and watch Brady pilot the 'Skins to the Super Bowl.

ScribeFire goes to the dark side

ScribeFire, Zemanta, and a hidden tracking image at Simon Scullion

A comment on Brent’s blog explained how to deselect this “option” in the ScribeFire settings, under the ‘Publishing’ tab, look for ‘Automatically insert invisible tracking pixel for statistics gathering’.

So I noticed scribefire adding this shit to my posts recently and a little googling came up with this nice gents site explaining it and how to kill it. The offending gif it loads is "zemanta-pixie-img". Thats just not cool to me. If it plugs this code into all my posts there is nothing stopping them from changing that into a banner ad.

Bad Scribefire, very bad. Now go to your room.

Navel Gazing.

My work has been very technical as of late which I am finding odd as I like to think of myself more in the vein of the imaginative  worlds. But the simplicity of an object  has been very relaxing and satisfying to capture. I think my ideal project would take elements from Joel Peter Witkin, Kim Cheever, Lucas Samaras, The early Starn Twins and a touch of Crewdson. But that is a high hill to climb and the fall is quite long.

The table top work has been really nice in that it helps me with learning to work on that scale with lights. It's really simple and commercial, not super challenging, but a obtainable goal for an evening. I am working my way towards breaking the bond between photography and illustration, where the camera supplies the source files for the final composition. And this is a nice break to just focus on the craft of photography and lighting.

Ahh, changing times

I miss the day when you could buy something without feeling the need to google it for two days and read 40 pages of reviews....

Remember that? You would go into a store and walk out with something?

...sigh.

The rise of smart drugs

A Reporter at Large: Brain Gain: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

And yet when enthusiasts share their vision of our neuroenhanced future it can sound dystopian. Zack Lynch, of NeuroInsights, gave me a rationale for smart pills that I found particularly grim. “If you’re a fifty-five-year-old in Boston, you have to compete with a twenty-six-year-old from Mumbai now, and those kinds of pressures are only going to grow,” he began. Countries other than the U.S. might tend to be a little looser with their regulations, and offer approval of new cognitive enhancers first. “And if you’re a company that’s got forty-seven offices worldwide, and all of a sudden your Singapore office is using cognitive enablers, and you’re saying to Congress, ‘I’m moving all my financial operations to Singapore and Taiwan, because it’s legal to use those there,’ you bet that Congress is going to say, ‘Well, O.K.’ It will be a moot question then. It would be like saying, ‘No, you can’t use a cell phone. It might increase productivity!’ ”

From Metafilter.

And I do not know where I stand on this. One side of me wants to throw the towel in and just say the Rat Race is officially past me by and fuck it. Now you have to take drugs to get ahed in the job market? BAH! Then another says, wouldn't it be great to get my brain fired up like it was when I was 16? There is a scary and a fun side to it but knowing human nature I'll go with the scary side prevailing.

Awesome!

The painful truth about trainers: Are expensive running shoes a waste of money? | Mail Online

Come race day, the Tarahumara don't train. They don't stretch or warm up. They just stroll to the starting line, laughing and bantering, and then go for it, ultra-running for two full days, sometimes covering over 300 miles, non-stop. For the fun of it. One of them recently came first in a prestigious 100-mile race wearing nothing but a toga and sandals. He was 57 years old.

When it comes to preparation, the Tarahumara prefer more of a Mardi Gras approach. In terms of diet, lifestyle and training technique, they're a track coach's nightmare. They drink like New Year's Eve is a weekly event, tossing back enough corn-based beer and homemade tequila brewed from rattlesnake corpses to floor an army.

Rattlesnake beer..... that sounds very, well, insane.

Low

So I took my guitar
And I threw down some chords
And some words I could sing without shame

And I soon had a song
I played it around
For some friends but they all said the same

They said music's for fools
You should go back to school
The future is prisms and math
So I did what they said
Now my children are fed
'Cause they pay me to do what I'm asked

I forgot all my songs
The words now are wrong
And I burned my guitar in a rage

But the fire came to rest
In your white velvet breast
So somehow I just know that it's safe

Low, Death of a Saleman

Do something today.

::: wood s lot ::: "the fitful tracing of a portal"

An Old Man

At the noisy end of the cafe, head bent over the table, an old man sits alone, a newspaper in front of him.

And in the miserable banality of old age he thinks how little he enjoyed the years when he had strength, eloquence, and looks.

He knows he's aged a lot: he sees it, feels it. Yet it seems he was young just yesterday. So brief an interval, so brief.

And he thinks of Prudence, how it fooled him, how he always believed - what madness - that cheat who said: "Tomorrow. You have plenty of time."

He remembers impulses bridled, the joy he sacrificed. Every chance he lost now mocks his senseless caution.

But so much thinking, so much remembering makes the old man dizzy. He falls asleep, his head resting on the cafe table.

Poems by Orhan Veli Translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat

Wood S Lot, one page you really should go to everyday.

How to compose?

The Lazy Rule of Thirds | Whimsical Fashion Photography

To find the real story behind the “rule of thirds” we need to go back in time, not to the renaissance, not to the Greeks, and not even to Adam nor Eve… even further. We need to go to the creation of the universe, why is that? Well I’ll tell you why. There is a number that determines how a sunflower’s seeds grow, it determines the path a hawk takes when diving at it’s prey, it is echoed in the breeding habits of rabbits and it even determines how the spirals in a spiral galaxy are laid out. It’s all very simple in it’s beauty and best of all, it’s all true. If you want to wrap your head around it further then I highly recommend the book The Golden Ratio by Mario Livio