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Right around the time that Blue’s Fest was on, we found out about another festival in Montreal called Osheaga. Checking the line-up, I saw, much to my delight, Peter Bjorn and John were set to play. Tickets were purchased as soon as we could get them.
Here it is, the week of the festival, and Peter Bjorn and John are no longer on the list. Checking the bands site, both Canadian appearances have been cancelled. Turns out, MTV has put them in the running for Best New Artist, and the show is this weekend so the band decided to go there instead.
Thanks, now I have no reason to go? Arctic Monkeys? Smashing Pumpkins? Who the hell are these people?

It has long been rumoured that Canada is one of the most connecting countries, yet we’re years behind the States in online shopping. I recently needed some computer parts so went over to Tigerdirect.ca to make an order up. I’ve spent a small fortune with Tigerdirect over the years and have come to enjoy using them, despite all the rants I see about the American version. The Canadian version has always been great. Until now. I noticed the packages started coming from the States, which means it takes over 4 business days to get delivered to my door. Recently, I tried another order, and it took 6 days for them to tell me the power supply I wanted wasn’t available any longer.

Enough being enough, I tried to order something from NCIX.com, the other large online computer parts retailer, this time out of Vancouver, where I would save the PST since I’m in Ontario. Yah, took them 4 days to even put the parts in a box!

I read a quick forum discussion once about ordering things online. One guy can order something online in the morning, and it shows up at his door that afternoon. That’s the service I want here. The logistics system works fine, since packages can go across the country over night without hassle. It’s taking 3-4 days it takes to fill the order that needs help.

UPDATE: I just can’t win. Bought a camera from a reputable ebay seller. This seller is the ebay/online branch of Carmens Photo, a popular branch in Ontario. The camera had that “Too good to be true” price point, but from a seller with over a 99% rating. I waited 10 business days. Apparently the shipment of cameras they were expecting (and pre sold!) was sent to England instead of Canada, so I had to wait for it to make the return trip before it was shipped to me.

I read somewhere a little article about how people of a certain craft, lets say photography, scaled themselves at a different percentile from where they were actually placed. People in the 95% percentile skill-wise would place themselves in the 80% area. People in the 20% and lower would see themselves a smooth 85%. Everyone in between was pretty solid about where they were. Sometimes, I really envy those folks in the 20 below area.

The old saying “Ignorance is bliss” goes a long way. I’ll sit down, get a little creative spark in my head and set out to achieve it. Often, I’ll run into road blocks that require massive tangents to perfect. I’ll check my list of “To-Dos” and just can’t find a blank spot on the A1 sized paper to put it in, so rather than produce a half assed attempt, I just scratch from my list. I know it won’t be perfect, and that really bothers me. I just can’t bring myself to spend the time on something if it won’t be done right. Do it right, or don’t do it at all. Sadly, I take the latter more often than not.

Other’s not so much. Some folks, like those in the below 20’s, don’t really feel the need to do it right. They always think they’ve got it down perfect, despite the tremendous amount of evidence to the contrary. Their creative juices will flow and they’ll vomit it all over the desk and proceed to show it to everyone. Some will even go as far as to tell everyone else how to do it, and call themselves a teacher of the arts and a master.

I’m so jealous. Imagine going through life knowing that your the best at whatever you do. Imagine the happiness that comes with that. Imagine setting out to do a task, doing it, and doing it perfectly every time. Not me. I’m smart enough to know that what I’ve done isn’t quite the best I can do, and that there will be someone better. But I try. I try to keep bettering myself and the tasks I take under my perfectionist wing. From time to time I am quite happy at what I’ve created, and that’s what keeps me going.

Now don’t take this for how it obviously reads. I call myself a perfectionist only because I won’t leave it alone. “I wish I could just get this area here a little better.” “Yah, it’s nice, but wasn’t exactly what I had in my head.” I’m not sure there’s a better word for it, so I use perfectionist. I’ll just keep trying and keep being disappointed until I stumble on that one that just works for me. That’ll be great for a while and I’ll slump down again.

But oh how I wish I could be ignorantly happy.

Found GiveAwayOfTheDay via the LifeHacker RSS feed. It happened to have an audio converter as the daily give away, which I was needing, as I’ve recently converted to using iTunes, and couldn’t make use of the OGG files I had kicking around. Anyway, GiveAwayOfTheDay has a different piece of software available each day. Normally, this software would have a modest fee, but for one day only, you can get it free.

Having recently left the hussle and/or hassle of working from an office full of people, and into my own home office hundreds of kilometers away, I found I needed a few more network supplies than I used to require. During this transition, I also migrated away from running my own server and into a hosted environment. This left me with only my desktop PC and my work Thinkpad running, which means I couldn’t use my server for backups anymore. After many minutes of searching, I came upon the Dlink DSM-G600 NAS device, which ran Linux, and used Samba for network shares, and came at a decent price. I just bought a Dlink Gamer Lounge gigabit wireless router, I figured another Dlink would make an excellent choice. I wasn’t totally wrong.

I ordered a 500G drive to put inside it, thinking I could use the 2 USB2.0 ports for expansion later if I needed it. The setup software went through alright and I had it up and running in no time. Loading up the web interface, I wondered if this was made by the same company as the Gamer Lounge. It’s just terrible. Nothing is where you think it should be, and it’s all very basic stuff. Looking for the share configuration, I wasn’t impressed to see a full share of the entire drive open read/write to everyone. A quick firmware upgrade, just cause I like doing that, and I set out to start copying data over. Using the network shares first, from my WinXPsp2 desktop, I found the share quickly. My data transfer ran about 6-7M/s according to gkrellm. Not exactly the gigabit performance I was looking for. Trying FTP instead (cause it’s a bad idea to copy 50G+ over a network share), I hoped for faster speeds, but was disappointed again. 6-7M/s. This is barely 100M network speeds.

I was pleased to see I could create email alerts, but was disappointed to see I couldn’t change the SMTP port, which I have to do on Bell Sympatico, since I use my hosted server for a mail server. Suppose I could try and figure out Bell’s mail servers, but it seems like more trouble than it’s worth.

Despite all these negatives, I’m going to keep it, and hope firmware updates will make things better. If not, there’s always a few hacking projects out there that may eventually provide a decent software base for it. I’m not running it as a media centre storage (though you can), I’m just rysncing my pictures to it every now and then.

I recently moved (I won’t pretend that’s why I haven’t posted anything lately), and started working from home full time.  Thought I would treat myself to a nice new keyboard and mouse, so I hit the Best Buy down the street from my new house.  They had exactly the two things I wanted, in stock.  I also wanted an LCD, but they didn’t have exactly what I wanted, so I thought I would wait and find exactly what I wanted.  LCDs are difficult to purchase at the best of times, but I do a lot of photo editing and some gaming, so I need what’s right for me.

Read some reviews, a few other things, and check out tigerdirect.ca for pricing.  I find the keyboard and mouse I just bought, except about $20 cheaper.  Each.  Back to BestBuy.ca to check for a price guarantee, and there it is.  “Either prior to purchase or within 30 days of purchase should you find a lower advertised price, including those on the internet from an authorized Canadian Dealer, we will match that price and beat it by giving you an additional 10% of the difference.

Sweet, money back, plus 10%.  I grab my receipt and head over there, ready to pick up a few more things I wanted.  “We’re sorry, we don’t price match tigerdirect, they have a restocking fee, and then there’s the shipping costs.”  Huh?  Tigerdirect has a restocking fee, so you don’t price match them?  Failing to see the sense in that, I opt to leave the nice girl alone and pay for my other supplies (which were only a few dollars more expensive).

That above quote should read “We price match, but only if it’s in our favour.”

I was quick to download the Windows beta of Adobe’s Lightroom the moment I saw it was available.  It runs with decent enough speed on my mobile powered notebook, slightly better on my aging PC desktop.  Having tinkered with it on a Macbook Pro recently, I can see an upgrade in my future.  This is some serious software.  I would seriously consider buying a copy, if I weren’t already getting a copy for free.

In a wonderful surprise (at least for me), Adobe has stated they will offer a free download of Lightroom V1 once it’s released to all those RS|P owners (who purchased prior to July 12).  An associate of mine with a nice new MacBook Pro is coming over so I can give Lightroom a kick since there *still* isn’t a Windows beta available.  Good time to drool over a new MBPro too

I’m going to steal an idea from http://www.unphotographable.com/.  This is a picture I did not take of two Menanite girls, dressed in standard issue Menanite clothes, complete with white aprons double wrapped around the waste, bonets strictly secured to their heads, traveling down the highway shared with 120km/h SUVs, on a pair of brand new roller blades.

So, Adobe buys Pixmantec’s technologies (as if the significance matters), and the world ends in a fireball. Well, not quite, but the net would have you believe so. Adobe is the devil and owns all that is evil. Anyways, the up and comer that is Bibblelabs takes advantage of the situation and offers RSP licensed users a discounted upgrade to Bibble Pro. “Good for them!” I thought. Smart play all around. I used to use Bibble Lite back in the Linux desktop days and was happy with what I saw, but annoyed that I couldn’t migrate that license to Windows, so I went elsewhere. A lot has changed since then, not the least of which is Bibble now includes Noise Ninja, a software package I was going to purchase anyways! Heck, might has well give them a try again, even go the Pro line.

It took about 20 seconds after installing to find it was worthless to me. Doesn’t support DNG RAW files. Cruel irony. I’ve converted all my Pentax PEF files to DNG and deleted the originals, thinking it was a clear choice, given the ease of support and the 50% disk space savings. No such luck converting DNG back to PEF either, why the hell would anyone want to do that? Showed them.

If anyone’s reading this, and would like Bibblelabs to support DNG files in their products, please, let them know it. Enough requests and they’ll do it.