Friday, January 28, 2005

Famous People from Carencro

Turns out I know some other famous people from Carencro.

Marc Broussard, whose album Carencro has impressed me immensely, is famous. He's also damn good. Marc and his dad Ted owned the lot behind ours in Lexington Heights during the 1980s, and slthough I'm a bit older, my dad tells me Marc and I used to play under the gum tree behind our lot before it was cut down.


Eric Mouton, a middle school friend, showed me how to ride a horse properly and is a famous rodeo guy. Eric and I were good friends for a long time; his family was the epitome of Cajun hospitality.


Doug Broussard is a famous photographer and digital imaging luminary who is also me.

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Thursday, January 13, 2005

Apple's announcement...

will sell a ton of Mac Minis in two years. When people realize they can't run the latest and greatest, they will have to buy a new machine to keep up with the Joneses.

Given the creeping resource requirements of Longhorn, you'll need something relatively powerful to run it. Powerful usually means big and loud. The mini suports quartz extreme with it's 32MB Radeon, but $500.00 mass-manufactured PCs definitely don't, Buy a new PC today, and when Longhorn finally ships, you get to spend money and time upgrading your curent piece of shit - or you can just buy a new machine.

Now remember, these people already have monitors, keyboards, and mice. The mini comes with none of these. Just replace your old, decrepit PC with a Mac mini.

Apple is introducing this new idea and expression of the home computer now, because it gives them time to gradually inform the market, generate buzz, and work up to a similar condition to what we see with the iPod today.

They will learn from this first, good product, and make something even better. The iMac was the first example of this thinking; iPod was the most successful. Start with only the best ideas and build upon them. Kill the bad ideas quickly. Drop the size, drop the cost. Apple is innovating at hyperspeed, catching up for years lost wandering in the wilderness.

If you're going to spend $500.00 on a new machine so you can run a new OS, what's to keep you from geting one of these Mac Mini things anyway? Especially when you can just hook it to the TV, put it in Simple Finder, and give one to granny for e-mailing pictures of her fancy dog to her friends with fancy dogs?

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Adobe and Apple's Recent Announcements

Watch the MacWorld keynote - The iPhoto demo starts about 35 minutes in. It's getting very close to what Elements once was. Cool Blade Runner-style zoom and pan.

Adobe ought to rethink how they approach the entry level photo collection and editing market before Apple puts a sizable dent into their revenue stream with the Mac mini and iPhoto 5/6/etc. Adobe wants you to use one or two pieces of software to do what iPhoto does in version 5 - and the Adobe software isn't nearly as well integrated.

All they can think about how to do is how to be like Microsoft. They keep killing or hobbling Mac products like Framemaker and Premiere because they are certain that they cannot compete with Apple - so they decide to write software for what appears to be a platform now beginning to lose it's dominance. If it's taken Adobe this long to move to a very Windows-centric business (since 1995 or so, when they really started trying)...

Adobe, you are going to have to innovate hard to survive. It's not looking good from where this Photoshop user sits. Apple is shipping a $599.00 computer that a video camera owner can use to create high definition DVDs - WITHOUT BUYING A THING EXTRA.

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Sunday, January 09, 2005

Smoky Rolls-Royce engines on Delta 757

It's worth mentioning and wondering aloud in the websphere: does Delta or Rolls-Royce do something different with engine maintenance that makes for hard, smoky starts?

i've noticed over the years at airports from one coast to another that Delta RB-211s on L-1011s always started amidst huge puffs of white oilsmoke. I was told by some veteran pilots that this is normal for the RB211 on an L-1011 - especially near the end of the 'plane's useful lifetime, as Delta's aircraft were.

On Christmas eve, Patrice and I took a Delta 757-200 to Atlanta on the way to Baton Rouge. After pushback from the gate in San Francisco, the engine start seemed to take longer than the normal 30 seconds or so, and some shadows drifted by in the early morning sunrise light illuminating the cabin. Seated aft of the wing, I had a good view of the right engine lighting in a smallish puff or white smoke - and a not-so-great view of the left engine lighting in a HUGE and protracted steam of blue, then white smoke.

So, any pilots or turbine mechanics out there have insight? One would think with turbines that this might be a wet start caused by an oil overfill during overnight maintenance or an overly rich mixture keeping the combustion chamber cold during start. I understand that with the original RB-211s on L10-11s, the white smoke on starts was due to oil gaskets cold-soaking while the ket sat at the gate.

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Tuesday, January 04, 2005

No more politics.

Just photography.

I've moved back to the Bay Area to live with my fianceƩ Patrice.

While I'm no longer a resident of California's "Red Belt", I'm still concerned about the creeping Boboism in our state, as the suburbs of cities like Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno, Redding, and others encompass ever more of the state's wild places.

With this post, I'll mark the change of this blog to more things photographic and fewer things political. Perhaps by showing people the most effective and moving ways to view the world around them, we can convince them that California and by extension the rest of the United States is not simply a place to be developed, but an entire world to be preserved and cared for.

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