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20, 10, GO!
Jan. 5th, 2010 02:45 pmHmm. This is another one of those sporadic updates, because I'm working and thinking aloud a bit, but like to keep updated.
Christmas happened, and it was awesome, with lots of family silliness and food and a wonderfully sane approach to presents.
My Birthday happened, seeing me trip over to the half-way point to the allotted 70 years - yeay, I'm old. Not that anyone else this young is old, you understand, just me. For my birthday, Pru & I headed up to Scotland. On the Sunday after boxing day. It was traffic fun, icy, and a lovely day with my parents, Ailsa and Colin and dinner in the Cobbles in Kelso. I got rather nice presents, too, including a top of the range TomTom which I now argue with when using it in the car with built in satnav, when in fact both of them were right and I was on a new variety of crack. It has a GPRS modem built in and does lots of clever live traffic stuff, and world maps.
2010 happened, which was seen in in lovely company with Mel & Sarah; I am not convinced that Coffee Absinthe was a hit, but a roaring fire, comfortable sofa and lots of chatting and music definitely was.
Getting decidedly sick of the ice.
Cars are broken; well, the ones that aren't essential but are nice to have are - the Mercedes SL has developed an ignition fault which has progressed to simply not starting now, and the Golf has a broken gearbox (but also now has a towbar, or will have soon when I paint and fit it). The C6 is lovely as ever but is really quite annoying in winter due to the stupid windows freezing shut and the doors not opening if the windows can't move.
House is the house. We've decorated a couple of rooms so I've got a yellow studio now; having sold most of the kit, the studio now consists of:
Roland XV3080 - module
Korg Electribes - EA, ER and ES-1
Korg Trinity Pro X V3, still slogging away
Waldorf Blofeld
Use Audio Plugiator (which is a Creamware-alike box, and I've rambled about it before as I think they're an incredible bargain for what they do)
broken DX-11
And a few bits of outboard. Not much stuff now really!
I've upgraded my camera kit for 2010, and am set for a clean, highly productive workflow. The D3 is now a D3S, I've added an AF 135 F2 DC and a Nikkor 70-200 F2.8 VR II to the kit (the Sigma 70-200 still hasn't been replaced, which is annoying because I want to compare them - as well as being a much cheaper lens the Sigma does focus closer). The surplus Sigmas have been sold, so I just have an SD14 with 18-200 OS now; with a Fuji S5 Pro as my second body, and Pru has the Olympus E510 kit. My lighting setup has gone nuts, with more Elinchrom stuff to be collected (modifiers, rather than sources), and I sold all my computer gear (bar the old iMac which is currently in the studio) and upgraded to an i7 quad-core iMac 27" with 8GB RAM.
This is making a big difference to my workflow, as it's fast enough to let me sort out my images properly in Lightroom (I've also sorted out an upgrade to CS4 stuff, finally) - and replacing the smattering of external USB and aging FW800 drives with a new 1.5TB FW800 disk should speed up the library even further. Currently it resides - by fate, not design - on the slowest 320GB USB drive I have, a little passport drive bought for backups when travelling.
It's quicker to get files out of Aperture by deleting the projects, then fetching the files from the trash, than doing the exports, but I am finally free of it (having had to use it with the Hasselblad for a while and getting sucked in to it - stupidly).
Finishing off the "clean sheet" start to 2010, I've got a 32GB iPhone on the way for Vodafone, and am selling all the old phones - T-Mobile comes up for renewal in March and I'm going to either take the upgrade with a lower tariff, or drop to a really low tariff, as the G1 does mostly what I need it to. Having a netbook with 3G makes tethering less important.
Of course, there's still a lot in the air, but the important things are in place: I'm feeling considerably happier on a base level lately, even when mundane things are being suboptimal. Hopefully there will be more time for friends, and less "stuff" in 2010
And here's a couple of snaps from today...
Christmas happened, and it was awesome, with lots of family silliness and food and a wonderfully sane approach to presents.
My Birthday happened, seeing me trip over to the half-way point to the allotted 70 years - yeay, I'm old. Not that anyone else this young is old, you understand, just me. For my birthday, Pru & I headed up to Scotland. On the Sunday after boxing day. It was traffic fun, icy, and a lovely day with my parents, Ailsa and Colin and dinner in the Cobbles in Kelso. I got rather nice presents, too, including a top of the range TomTom which I now argue with when using it in the car with built in satnav, when in fact both of them were right and I was on a new variety of crack. It has a GPRS modem built in and does lots of clever live traffic stuff, and world maps.
2010 happened, which was seen in in lovely company with Mel & Sarah; I am not convinced that Coffee Absinthe was a hit, but a roaring fire, comfortable sofa and lots of chatting and music definitely was.
Getting decidedly sick of the ice.
Cars are broken; well, the ones that aren't essential but are nice to have are - the Mercedes SL has developed an ignition fault which has progressed to simply not starting now, and the Golf has a broken gearbox (but also now has a towbar, or will have soon when I paint and fit it). The C6 is lovely as ever but is really quite annoying in winter due to the stupid windows freezing shut and the doors not opening if the windows can't move.
House is the house. We've decorated a couple of rooms so I've got a yellow studio now; having sold most of the kit, the studio now consists of:
Roland XV3080 - module
Korg Electribes - EA, ER and ES-1
Korg Trinity Pro X V3, still slogging away
Waldorf Blofeld
Use Audio Plugiator (which is a Creamware-alike box, and I've rambled about it before as I think they're an incredible bargain for what they do)
broken DX-11
And a few bits of outboard. Not much stuff now really!
I've upgraded my camera kit for 2010, and am set for a clean, highly productive workflow. The D3 is now a D3S, I've added an AF 135 F2 DC and a Nikkor 70-200 F2.8 VR II to the kit (the Sigma 70-200 still hasn't been replaced, which is annoying because I want to compare them - as well as being a much cheaper lens the Sigma does focus closer). The surplus Sigmas have been sold, so I just have an SD14 with 18-200 OS now; with a Fuji S5 Pro as my second body, and Pru has the Olympus E510 kit. My lighting setup has gone nuts, with more Elinchrom stuff to be collected (modifiers, rather than sources), and I sold all my computer gear (bar the old iMac which is currently in the studio) and upgraded to an i7 quad-core iMac 27" with 8GB RAM.
This is making a big difference to my workflow, as it's fast enough to let me sort out my images properly in Lightroom (I've also sorted out an upgrade to CS4 stuff, finally) - and replacing the smattering of external USB and aging FW800 drives with a new 1.5TB FW800 disk should speed up the library even further. Currently it resides - by fate, not design - on the slowest 320GB USB drive I have, a little passport drive bought for backups when travelling.
It's quicker to get files out of Aperture by deleting the projects, then fetching the files from the trash, than doing the exports, but I am finally free of it (having had to use it with the Hasselblad for a while and getting sucked in to it - stupidly).
Finishing off the "clean sheet" start to 2010, I've got a 32GB iPhone on the way for Vodafone, and am selling all the old phones - T-Mobile comes up for renewal in March and I'm going to either take the upgrade with a lower tariff, or drop to a really low tariff, as the G1 does mostly what I need it to. Having a netbook with 3G makes tethering less important.
Of course, there's still a lot in the air, but the important things are in place: I'm feeling considerably happier on a base level lately, even when mundane things are being suboptimal. Hopefully there will be more time for friends, and less "stuff" in 2010
And here's a couple of snaps from today...
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