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I recently purchased a Spyder3 Pro in order to calibrate my two main displays: an aluminum 23" Cinema Display and the 15" LCD on my MacBook Pro.

When I launched the installer, I was greeted with a CarbonLib error (in the LaunchCFMApp binary), so to make a long story short, I archived and installed Mac OS X, ran some updates, and pretty much threw away my "Previous Systems" folder immediately. Sure, I'll have to reinstall some kernel extensions ((USB Overdrive, Parallels already)), but virtually everything else should be fine. I did have trouble with Aperture today, but a ProKit software update fixed that.

After downloading the latest version of the Spyder3 Pro software ((3.0.4)), I installed the app and calibrated my two displays.

I'm now kicking myself for waiting so long.

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In general, I agree with this statement, offered by a friend I'll keep anonymous:

I find it awfully disgusting that liberals are imploring the 46% of us who voted for McCain to 'unite' and 'come together' when it was those very same liberals who, the day GWB won in 2004, were spewing things like 'He's not my President' and 'I didn't elect him.' Where was the call for 'unitedness' then?

Hypocritical at least. Heck, I didn't even support GWB for much of his second term, but the fact that he WAS "my" President never escaped me. I think it's incredibly stupid and perhaps entirely selfish to say something like that - and from what I've seen, you're not seeing it from the Republicans this time around. McCain's concession speech was incredibly gracious, and John McCain himself from what I understand has always been a guy to go "across the aisle" anyway. The "divide" that exists seems to be entirely created by the left-wing guys who chose to divide themselves.

I don't particularly care one way or the other who won this election. Again, both candidates had roughly an equal number of plusses and minuses in my book. It's Barack Obama, and I look forward to seeing what he can do.

But just as I was disgusted by the superior attitude of Obama's supporters before the election, I'm disgusted by their incessant "we" stuff now. Where was that same "we" attitude the past eight years?

What is it with actors not holding an iPhone properly on TV?

What's funny is that later in the same scene, Mrs. Ari was holding the phone in the proper orientation.

(Scene: Man holding child in arms, standing in front of a voting machine.)

Me: "Okay, tap that one right there."

Her (not in a whisper, I'll put it that way): "No! I don't want to vote for ______ ______"

I'm giving contacts another try. My prescription - or really, my astigmatism - shifted slightly from where it was in 2007 when I was last checked and got new glasses

As it's been about a decade since my last pair of contacts, I have to do the whole "fitting" thing again. I got a new eye exam last Wednesday and today got a single pair of trial lenses. They're written up as follows:

              SPH        CYL        AX        BC
Right Eye:   -1.75      -1.75       50       8.5
Left Eye:    -0.75      -2.25      150       8.5

These numbers seem consistent with what the doctor told me: that my vision hadn't changed much, but the astigmatism had shifted a little. The right eye was a bit "worse" and the left eye a bit "better."

Unfortunately, with the contacts in, vision out of my right eye is quite blurred. These are weighted (toric) contacts (due to the astigmatism), so I've flushed a few times and tried to re-set the contact to make sure it is in the proper orientation. Still blurry.

Next appointment: eight days from now. In the meantime I'll have to decide if the vision is good enough to wear at the next hockey game on Sunday.

The outrage I'm feeling right now can't quite be put into words.

As I said awhile back, Time-Warner is performing some equipment upgrades, which has resulted in downtime. I was fine with a little downtime (though the complete lack of communication and forewarning on Time-Warner's part is not cool at all) to improve infrastructure.

But not on election day!

I've not had Internet service since I woke up this morning, and as of right now it's 2:15pm. I don't know who else is affected, but it's certainly at least a few hundred homes and a few thousand people. Some of those people are probably also suffering from a loss of their home telephone service, as Time-Warner offers that as well, and perhaps even TV service.

The short-sighted nature of shutting down one to three major forms of communication on election day is appalling. Who on earth thought today would be a good day to perform more work? Internet service has been working, and they choose today of all days to kill services?

WTF?

To the right, you'll see an in-progress version of the iPhone companion application to our cross-platform desktop application Scorecard. It's a "companion app" because it relies on the desktop app for the actual statistics. The iPhone app will simply let you keep your stats while you're playing golf and will sync them back to the desktop app when you return home.

Don't mind some of the little things (like the "Par 5" line at the bottom or the inverted shading in the fairway) - this post is about the stupid slider we've currently got in the "First Putt" position.

The "First Putt" in the Scorecard system is a measure - in feet or meters - of your first putt. As such, we need to keep an integer value that covers a range of 1 (or 0) to roughly 100. There aren't many greens where you'll face 100+ foot putt, but there are plenty where you can face a putt of 75+ feet. So 100 is just a good cutoff point.

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I'm totally making up numbers here, but in the current electoral system 10 million Californians can vote Republican, lose, and get 0 electoral votes, while 500,000 can vote Republican in, say, Rhode Island, win, and get their four electoral votes.

We already have precincts or districts set up for the House of Representatives: why don't we simply assign one vote to each siding with the majority vote in that region? If you don't want to take two votes away from each state (for their Senators), assign the last two to the overall winner.

That way, instead of losing California 55-0, it might be 39-16 or something a bit more representative of how Californians really voted.

I'm not an electoral scholar by any stretch of the imagination, but the current system is baffling and doesn't seem to do much to affect the overall feeling of the nation. I haven't put a lot of thought into this either, so there's probably a good reason or argument why this hasn't changed.

It's not often I misunderstand what software does, but I'm absolutely furious with the "Image Statistics" addon for Pixelpost.

At my photoblog, right after the date, you'll find two numbers in parentheses. The first shows the number of visitors to that image today. The second shows the total number.

The software resets itself every month, but also includes the option to turn on "long-time statistics." On October 1, I noticed it had reset itself, and was disappointed that the few items I'd posted in September had been lost for good. I enabled the long-term statistics, which I took to mean that the "total number" statistic would live on forever, and the "today" counter would simply update every day.

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I saw this post at flickr and I've compiled my own wish list, in order of importance, for Aperture 3.0:

1. Non-destructive plugins. Currently I resist using a plugin and creating a 60 MB "second version" of a file just because I want to perform some simple thing Aperture can't do (like #4).
2. Speed improvements, particularly when importing/exporting/building thumbnails. Right now I've found you're better off - even on a recent Mac Pro with 6 GB RAM - just letting the import finish before you try to do any other work.
3. Buy Nik Software, include all plugins free. Of course, this ties into #1 as well, and if their control point stuff can be made to "just work" with all plugins, #4 might be irrelevant.
4. Simple masking. I want to be able to change the color (or luminosity, or saturation, or whatever) of one thing without affecting another (example: shirt and sky).
5. History for each image. Currently, hitting "undo" a few times can result in unwanted behavior as you'll undo changes on images at which you might not even be looking.
6. A better way to create and share presets. Simple.
7. In-Aperture HDR. Buy Photomatix? Maybe. Apple's got a lot of cash…

What's on your list, or what changes to the order of my list would you make?

Today I noticed for the first time no less than 15 parents (almost all fathers, but not exclusively) drinking beer while walking around with their kids trick-or-treating. ToT occurs between the hours of 6pm to 8pm here, and three of the parents were actually dragging around a beer-filled cooler on wheels!

What's up with that? Is this a new development? I don't recall having ever seen even a single person walking around with beer, from my days as a kid until this year.

Back on October 13 I posted about some Time-Warner/Roadrunner downtime. For about 10-11 days, service was spotty. Oftentimes we'd be online for 30 minutes, offline for 15-45, and back online again for maybe an hour before being knocked off again in a cycle. It made it tough to get any work done because you never knew when the service would crap out.

I wrote to a local engineer about two weeks ago. Today he responded.

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. I just got back from vacation yesterday. I hope the problems you described have gone away. We are about 85% complete of a whole-system upgrade. The workers have been in the Millcreek area for the past 4 weeks or so. I would assume the Internet issues you describe are due to the work being done.

Unfortunately, there is no graceful way to upgrade a cable system without interrupting the customers using it. We are expanding the bandwidth of the cable system from 550 MHz to 1 GHz, almost double the bandwidth. This means that certain cable lines and every single piece of electronic gear in the system must be replaced (including at the hubs). At the same time, the node size (homes passed per node) is being drastically reduced, which will virtually eliminate any network congestion. Once the equipment is replaced in a given neighborhood, other crews go through and "balance" the system for peak performance. The balancing process itself causes brief interruptions while they change "padding" at amplifiers to adjust for optimum system levels. The whole process can take 7 to 14 days. Attempts are made to minimize customer impact including doing a lot of the work during the overnight hours.

As I mentioned, we are also upgrading the equipment in the hubs. This includes the CMTS's used for high speed data. We have installed a new CMTS chassis in the Millcreek hub expanding the upstream ports available. This has allowed us to designate a single node to a single port, insuring a robust network.

I know I am painting a rosy picture. However, if the "picture" is still fuzzy, it should clear up very soon. Of course if you continue to experience ongoing problems we need to take a closer look. I feel confident that we can get these issues behind us. Please keep me updated.

My follow-up email asked him why, if I can get 14 Mbps (or 24 Mbps) down, I still only get 700 kbps up. Download speed isn't the only thing that matters. I'll be interested to hear his response.

"Effected" vs. "Affected" isn't quite on the same level as "their" vs. "there" (vs. "they're) or "its" vs. "it's," and I suppose I should be happy that they didn't write "your" in this promo:

Yes, that's Dr. Phil (and part of the sleeve of my shirt, I think).

Yet another reason to drink Coke. Ugh.

The Mountain Dew bottle isn't so bad, but the other bottles are being compared to male reproductive organs and the logo work, in the words of one commenter, looks as though it's the work of a designer trying to convince the higher-ups not to change the current design.

Happy Birthday!

You're my favorite older woman and the love of my life. 😉