I apologize for the sparsity of David photos. Here are a few from playing around on the floor tonight.
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When it Rains, it Pours
It started with no video output, and ended with a non-booting computer with an unreadable external hard drive and potentially unusable RAID array. Yeah that’s not good.
Yesterday evening my monitors went blank. An hour of troubleshooting left me with the determination that my “good” video card had failed. I removed it and was able to boot into Vista using the lesser of the video cards. I started the RMA process and figured that was the end of it.
HA! Today I was remoted in and noticed I couldn’t access the external USB hard drive (Western Digital MyBook). The eventlog was showing NTFS errors saying it was corrupt and needed to be scanned, but I couldn’t do anything with the drive; so I rebooted. And it never came back up!
All signs indicate the motherboard is toast.
The external drive has all of my videos on it (raw footage and edits), and that is copied nightly to the mirrored RAID array where the first copies of photos live. No biggie, right? Well I had a little scare when I started reading about moving RAID arrays to new machines – as in, most of the time you have to have the same brand (or compatible) RAID controller or you’re screwed. I’m using the onboard nvidia NVRaid on a board that is no longer sold, and couldn’t quite find documentation on compatibility between versions.
So, I pulled one of my mirrored drives out and put into my SATA dock attached to my laptop. Big relief – all of the data is readable as a standalone drive! Wooo!
Now back to the external MyBook – I plugged it into my Windows 7 laptop and was promptly asked if I wanted to fix it. 30 seconds later, the filesystem was checked/fixed and my data was available. Wooo Wooo!
If my RAID array would have been unusable, I have backups of the important stuff across my network and across town. But I definitely didn’t count on my external drive AND the array being down at the same time, so that freaked me out a little bit and I’m thankful that the drives are all fine. Thinking about it more, I probably would have ended up paying a pretty penny for the out-of-production motherboard or some of the RAID recovery packages out there.
Anyway, when I get my desktop rebuilt I’m going to have to find room for another copy of 100GB of video somewhere.
And finally, the hardware I ordered tonight is as follows:
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400
- ASUS P5Q motherboard
- 4 more GB of RAM
- NVidia 9800GT
You know what they say, a file doesn’t exist unless there are at least 3 copies of it.
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Perfect Weather for a Trip to the Zoo
We couldn’t let a 70 degree day in mid July pass us by, so we took a drive down to the St. Louis Zoo this morning. I’m still pulling in photos but I really like these two.
The one of all of us was taking by a stranger that kindly offered. It took a few moments and fumbling to remember how I needed to set the camera up for someone else to use, turned out great though!
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Monitor Calibration with the Spyder 3 Pro
Over the past few years as I have gotten into photography more, I have been farily successful at ignoring the fact that my monitor(s) weren’t the best and probably weren’t outputting color correctly. Every now and then I’d tinker with Adobe Gamma but give up after nearly going cross-eyed (you know what I mean if you’ve used that tool before). So instead of having a good baseline color profile to edit photos with, I would just keep in mind the color casts or contrast issues my monitor has and try to adjust accordingly. Photos would end up looking decent on my machine and a little crappy on others’ and in print. I could live with that.
As I added multiple monitors to my PC, the situation became maddening. I would get done tweaking an image, only to slide it to another monitor and have it look like crap. Which one was correct? Or more accurately, which one was closer to correct?!
So about a month ago I gave in and purchased the Datacolor Spyder 3 Pro, and I must say that I’m very happy with it.
It goes like this – after you install the software and drivers you’re asked to calibrate your monitor(s). Monitor by monitor, you’re asked questions about the display controls you have available to you (brightness, contrast, etc) and are then instructed to attach the device to the screen at a location indicated by the software. You can attach it with the built-in suction cup or by slinging the counter-weighted cable over the monitor and dangling it there. I have only used the suction cup method and not bothered with dangling.
After getting the device positioned, the software cycles through the spectrum to figure out how your monitor is outputting color and what needs to be done to correct it. When it’s done, the result is a system color profile that gets installed so that any “color managed” applications (fancy term for applications that know how to use color profiles) will display images more accurately.
The Spyder 3 Pro also keeps an app running in the background that uses the hardware device’s ambient light sensor to detect when the light has changed sufficiently that you’d need to recalibrate. And finally, you can have it notifiy/remind you at sent intervals to reclibrate the monitor – because over time your monitor changes.
Initial calibrations take 7 minutes per monitor, and those periodic reclibrations take 3. I don’t have anything to compare this to, but have read that older models took considerably longer.
To date, I haven’t really found any negatives with this thing. I am glad I purchased it, as it has taken alot of the second-guessing out of photo editing. If you’re someone that has invested heavily in your camera equipment, computer and editing software, you seriously owe it to yourself to get one.
OK, that’s all.
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Tickles
David was all laughs tonight before going to bed. Here are a couple shots of the tickl-er and tickl-ee
As they say.. “and fun was had by all”.
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VMWare Server 2 and Windows 2003
A couple times now in the past several months I’ve needed to install or upgrade VMWare Server 2 running on Windows 2003 and ran into a problem that takes a little while to re-discover the solution for. This is for future reference and to help others that may hit this in the future.
The problem is that after installing or upgrading VMWare Server 2, my host machine will no longer be able to be reached across the network. It can communicate (ping, etc) out, but not the other way around. Hosted virtual machines also have full connectivity, and they can receive communications from the networks. It’s very strange, but the solution has been to Disable Routing and Remote Access, reboot, and re-enabled it.
Once that’s done, everything is normal. Fun Stuff.
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Concentration
This afternoon, David layed on our floor with a pencil and pad of paper and “drew” for over an hour. Just quietly flipping pages and drawing all over them. He even insisted on taking his tools to dinner with us where he continued to scratch his thoughts down. All-in-all, he spent about 2 hours at it.
It’s so fun to watch him problem-solve and learn things. As he was scribbling he couldn’t keep his pencil as still as he wanted, so he steadied it with his other hand as he slowly and deliberatly moved the pencil to where HE wanted. Then talk to himself and start on the next page.
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Happy Birthday Ana!
Today is Ana’s 30th birthday! The day didn’t go quite as smooth as she wanted for her birthday (leaving work later than desired, having to get a raincheck for dinner out thanks to David’s head-first, running swan dive off of a couch, etc.) but it’s looking up!
Here’s Mom and son after having enjoyed the birthday cake (made by your’s truly).
The cake wasn’t a looker, but tasted pretty good. And I think you’d be hard pressed to find another one with “11110” in candles…
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Busch Stadium
Friday night Ana and I were able to make it to our first Cardinals game of the year. The weather was fantastic, the food was delicious, and the Cards handily defeated the Royals. What a great way to spend a Friday night.
I of course took my camera and grabbed a few frames. This is my first multiple exposure blend, courtesy of Photomatix, and I think it does a good job of capturing the great weather we had. Click to enlarge.
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