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In news that will likely sadden fans of Fox's House, M.D., the Pittsburgh Steelers will today announce that they've hired Omar Epps as their new head coach.

Actually, of course, they hired Mike Tomlin, as I hoped they would. You can mouse over the picture for the real Mike Tomlin. Tomlin is 34 - the same age as Bill Cowher when he was hired - and is a defensive minded person who has shown some creativity and passion. He's got a spark in that brain of his, and I think he'll be with the Steelers for quite some time. It's obviously very early, but I'm predicting that he'll win at least three Super Bowls in the next fifteen years with the Steelers.

There are also rumors that Bill Cowher is headed to Dallas. Fine by me - they can have 'im. Since he's still under contract to the Steelers, the Black & Gold would get draft picks.

P.S. Suck it, Patriots! And go Bears - I don't like Payton Manning either. 😉

/me twiddles thumbs waiting for WordPress 2.1 to be released.

Coming… ehh… eventually:

I spent some time playing with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom yesterday and found that I liked a lot of the things it did, but for me, Aperture beats it in a few key areas. The cross-platform nature, Adobe's Camera Raw platform (which isn't tied to the OS and which, by most accounts, beats Apple's in terms of quality), and the years of experience editing digital images all give the Adobe app a lot of strength.

One of the areas in which I feel Aperture could really stand to be improved is image processing. While the basics are covered, some of the more advanced techniques still require trips to Photoshop. There are a lot of good noise reduction Photoshop plugins (or standalone apps) out there. Or good vignetting software (both to add or remove). I shouldn't have to go into Photoshop to apply a white gradient margin to product shots I want to place on websites with white backgrounds.

There may be various reasons why Aperture doesn't yet support "processing" filters of this nature (I have two plugins, currently, but they're both for exporting). APIs, once opened, are tough to move, so perhaps Apple is holding off from opening up the API until they're certain they've got it right. Or perhaps they never intend to open it up, or they're preparing a separate Photoshop competitor, or they simply don't see the need, or Adobe has threatened to stop developing Photoshop, or… it's all speculation. I just know I'd like to see some image processing plugins.

Gosh I hope so. He's the best candidate and has what appears to be a brilliant mind for football. Ron Rivera? Russ Grimm? Ugh.

Update: 01/22/2007: Yay!!!!

About a week ago I told Josh about a Korean website that was doing some interesting things with bokeh. Josh and I talked on AIM one day and devised a simple way to build your own "shapertures" ((Full credit for the creative name belongs to Josh.)) and he took some test shots and published his instructions.

My wife has a scrapbooking machine called a "Cricut," which cuts shapes out for scrapbooking. Unfortunately, the smallest size "hole" for a 135mm lens is about 0.9 inches, and the Cricut can only cut 1" shapes at the smallest. So, my results (in the extended entry) aren't quite as compelling as Josh's. But hey, we've proven the principle sound, and the Korean website is really the one you want to visit to see pretty pictures with "shaperture"-driven bokeh.

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Why don't any news articles mention the Mac Pro when they're talking about the 802.11n capabilities for which Apple's going to charge $1.99? Example:

Apple on Thursday confirmed reports that it plans to charge customers a fee to download software that will enable the 802.11n capability in the Wi-Fi chips found in some MacBook and MacBook Pro systems. But it won't cost $5, as many reports indicated. It will cost $1.99, and will be available on Apple's Web site, said Lynn Fox, an Apple spokeswoman.

Apple's 802.11n page lists "Mac Pro with AirPort Extreme card option" as having 802.11n. I've got that. And yet every news story I've read fails to mention the Mac Pro at all. Can I "obtain" the "$1.99" upgrade?

All Erie has in the way of camera stores is Van Tuil, a store that appears to cater to people wishing to have their photographs developed more than anything. They carry very little stock, charge a good bit more than B&H, and aren't even terribly helpful half the time.

So, I'm looking for a big huge camera store within two hours of Erie, PA (Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh). I want to look at some backpacks, hold some cameras, feel the weight of some different lenses, look at a tripod or two, etc.

Does anyone know of such a store?

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I drove over the little creek between the Humane Society and I-79 today on my way to Wegman's early when the light was striking. I drove back at about 9:15 to see if the light was still there. It wasn't.

I took some pictures anyway with the XTi. It definitely "underexposes" if you don't quite know what you're talking about. The XT tended to blow out the highlights a lot more easily than the XTi. Thus, with more highlight data preserved, it's easier to get better shots with just a little RAW manipulation.

I also set up a new blog-specific export in Aperture complete with little watermark.

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A friend just sent me an email from Cingular saying:

Cingular Wireless has noted a nation wide outage since 4:00 AM today. Some subscribers have been able to get their blackberrys working again by taking out the battery and the sim card, leaving it out for a few minutes and reinstalling them into the blackberry. Cingular does not have an estimated time for the outage to end.

He then says "that would be a bit difficult with the new iPhone, no?" I agree.

I think the lack of a user-replaceable battery on the iPhone is a huge mistake, and one I hope Apple can correct by June. People abuse their phones, and two years is a long time for a battery to last. Power users will be charging their iPhone once or more per day. Unless the batteries are rated for 1500 charge cycles, they'll fall short of expectations.

Also, imagine if the iPhone batteries suffered the "exploding battery" problems we've seen from time to time. On a computer, if I'm not mistaken, you simply get a new battery. Is Apple really prepared for the possibility of replacing everyone's entire iPhone should such a problem be found with them?

The "Sunny 16" Rule says that: in sunny light and with an aperture of f/16, if you use a shutter speed of 1/x (where x = your ISO), you should get a reasonable exposure.

I recently (re-)discovered the Radiant Vista site, and the thing I like most about it is the Daily Critique. I cannot imagine the amount of time the author puts into each image, and to do them daily is astounding and awesome.

At The Sand Trap, we published a private "full entry" feed so that GolfWRX (one of our partners) could post the content to their forums. Our general subscribers just get the excerpts, of course, so they visit the site and see the ads (and to keep bandwidth down).

In MovableType, of course, I just created a separate template, published it to the hidden, password-protected directory, and that was that.

Can WordPress be made to publish a single, separate feed (RSS2 is fine)? If so, how?

Today, as Adam pointed out, marks the 1000th day since Carey first emailed me back in, uhhh, 1000 days ago. Since then, this happened, and so much more, of course. We were married, bought a house, have sent a kid to school, and so much more.

All because of one 14-word email sent 1000 days ago today.

I've begun using Aperture for anything that goes beyond the "point and shoot" variety of pictures, and I find myself annoyed with a few things that aren't a matter of my ignorance (as are most of my annoyances with the application).

Both of these annoyances have to do with the list smart searches you see to the right:

Annoyance Numero Uno
I can't delete some of the smart albums. I don't have any images from 2004, 2005, or even 2006 in Aperture. Yet Aperture will not let me delete these smart albums. They'll never be used.

Annoyance Numero Duo
I like to group my images into stacks. It makes choosing the best image from a set (the "stack pick") easy. I also dump (hit the "9" key to mark as rejected, or "X") the bad shots when going through the stacks, too.

Yet the smart search for "Rejected" doesn't look inside the stack. In fact, it only looks at the stack pick. The same is true of the other star ratings ("* or better" and "*****").

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Here is a list of apps I'd like to see on an iPhone:

• Terminal (like, duh!). Being able to SSH into my server would be awesome. Heck, I'd settel for a shell-looking SSH client.
• Something to post to my blog (and not via the blog's Web interface - I know I could use Safari. I mean something like Ecto.
• Actual GPS-aware maps. Why not obliterate the market for hardware GPS maps while you're at it, Apple? What has Garmin ever done for you?
• A dedicated front-end to ________ (IMDB has been suggested, but clearly people are going to want dedicated front-ends to lots of sites - IMDB, Flickr, etc.). It would come in handy when you're watching TV and don't want to get the laptop. If you're out, a dedicated front end to your favorite sites could save bandwidth over using Safari.
• An encrypted password wallet would obviously come in handy. Can't remember your kid's social security number at the doctor's office? Check your iPhone.
• An image sucker (to suck images from a digital camera's card). This would require an add-on piece of hardware, but so be it!
• Multi-service IM (like Adium). Duh. SMS may be fine for some people, but if you're gonna pay for unlimited bandwidth, I say use it!
• iChat screen sharing (or VNC or the like)! Imagine actually logging in to your home computer from the road. This kind of app could almost eliminate the need for many of the apps above. It'd be a bit clunkier, of course, but it'd work.

What are your suggestions?