07.19.07
Time Changes All Things
Agent Smith: You hear that Mr. Anderson?… That is the sound of inevitability.
Indeed, Agent Smith for all his faults definitely had the right idea about time and inevitability. Time is inevitable and the change that comes with it even more so no matter how much we kick, scratch, fight and wail about it. Things begin and things end. I have been reminded of this more so of late with the the new and final Harry Potter book coming out. My oldest daughter who has pretty much grown up on Harry Potter complete with wall posters and a bit of a crush on Harry himself is now almost 19 years old. And this last book is the time where she will not be in costume or at the store at midnight to get her copy of HP. Her life is too busy in her mind and she is too grown up to be part of such things, not that she will not read the book, she ordered from Amazon and so she will close out that chapter. I watched as she started the adventure down the road of Harry Potter and JK Rowling’s world of magic, wizards, gold, wands and the classic battle between good and evil. We started the journey by reading the book out loud on our week jaunts into the city which took a few hours each way and after about half of the first book, she asked for her own copy to read. So her first real book was HP and she read the entire book, cover to cover several times. On book two she was beside herself that the UK was going to get it a whole year before we would in the states. But Dad (me) being relatively clever at times, order it up via Amazon.uk and had it airmailed to us. And it was better in a way because they had not altered it to “American” english, it had the full flavor of the English humor and dryness.
We went on the ride with each book and for each book came the midnight opening of the book stores, the frantic calls to friends of who was going to be there, the making of costumes, the arguments over plot points and my bringing home made popcorn for her in line one night. I knew this time would be different when I could not get a straight answer months ago if she had ordered her copy. And so my little girl has grown up one book too soon.
I wonder if my other three daughters which are much younger will have the same experience of a captivating story to enjoy and live in for a while. If would be shame if the naysayers were right in their argument that books are dying and that story telling is a dead art form in the age of the internet. I would hope that HP is not the last hurrah for serial stories like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and other fantasy tales that one can lose themselves in for a brief time and be part of an epic quest.
In the same thinking, other aspects in my world are changing yet again. A very close relative is dying, well, we are all dying at different rates but she was just told that she has roughly four weeks to put her affairs in order. Maybe a bit more with chemo but chemo is nasty business and sometimes I think it would be kinder just to let the person fade out on their own and not dying by being poisoned. I watched a close friend die from cancer and it’s my personal belief that the chemo ended up killing him much more quickly than the cancer would have if they had left it alone. His last days were just misery and almost as hard for us watching helplessly. Time marches on and things constantly change but not always in the ways we wish.
There has been much discussion lately of Apple without Steve Jobs at the head and how could it possibly survive. Just like any family, it will survive but it will be painful for us all. Steve is unique and a true visionary but he is not irreplaceable. Nobody is irreplaceable and sometimes people forget that truth. It may be a painful transition or not but it will be a transition and I suspect that Steve, not being a fool, knows this and has put plans in place for this event.
But like Neo, we will fight against the inevitability because it is our way, it is burned into our DNA to fight against it and it makes us better and stronger in the end. In the very end when it is all said and done, it is our choice how to face inevitability.
07.25.07
Photoshop Accessories
Posted in Commentary, OSX Software at 10:32 pm by hackamac
Like the camera, Photoshop almost requires you to have various accessories. In my case, I bought a color coded keyboard cover from zCover which has a thin skin cover with keyboard shortcuts printed on the top. Its nice but hard to read at times and hard to type on as a touch typist. Yes, you can peel it off but that got old quickly since I tend to have several windows open plus email even when I’m working with Photoshop. So then came the keyboard caps from World Tech Devices. These are replacement keyboard caps for the Apple USB and wireless keyboards. They are very good for the typist but the symbols are not as clear as zCover’s. I know, I just complain and complain. But I was a WordPerfect freak and I love keyboard controls over mouse clicks so I will put in the time to learn the commands. The quality of the WorldTech caps is ok, I say OK because two of them would not fit right on the keyboard and jammed in the depressed condition. But the rest went on fine.
The cool red installer tool is a keeper.
Other treasures is Avenir, The Writers Workshop which is a tool for those of us who either write fiction or wish to write fiction. It gives you a controlled place to write chapters, keep track of tasks, actors, scenes, locations and research. One of the two templates is for the “snowflake” method of writing a book and if you have not heard of it, you should go to Advancedfictionwriting.com and read what Randy Ingermanson has to say about it. I was very interested in it after being a published author of several technical books and I could see right away the logic behind it. I find that Avenir is a good tool for myself, not maybe the best tool but it cheap and it works for me. So check it out and you might find it works for you too.
Other cool stuff around here has been a way cool web based photo editor. Yes, I know that in the past these sort of things really sucked but this one is “cool”, almost “Google cool” but since they have not been bought yet, they are not. They are called “Picnik” and it is one of those things that just works, even with Safari. They have hooks to Flickr and Picassa Web albums so they can grab the image from Flickr for example, and edit the time and put it back. Very nice with the editing tools complete with a basic histogram, exposure, highlights, contrast, color, red eye and the ever popular “automatic” setting.
And with the release of the final Harry Potter book and audio CD, I finally got to test a fun 10 dollar app called “Audio Book Builder” which will rip the audio Harry Potter CDs, add cover art, convert it to a bookmarkable format and break it into sections automatically. When this cool app is done, you can not see any difference between your ripped CDs and the books you get from Audible or other Books on Tape type of sellers. It will even drop it into itunes for you and itunes in my case, dropped it right in to the audible book playlist. So now I have my new Harry Potter CDs on my Nano and it works just like the other books I have bought directly in the ipod format. Nice since Audible.com does not have ANY of the Harry Potter books yet. I’m not sure what is going on there since the CDs are available and have been for a few years now. Jim Dale does an outstanding job as the narrator for the series.
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