I know I need to post more often, but the pace of work has gotten pretty hectic recently, so I’ve been slacking. Here’s some updates:
Last week I hopped over to Florida for a conference on linking customer feedback to business results. Many of the people there were hardcore research nerds and much time was spent talking about regression analysis and partial least squares. It was good times, although I spent much of my time suppressing the urge to call out “NERDS!” in my best ogre voice. When I am overpowered by the nerdyness in the room, you know it’s on.
Last weekend included a nice little party at a co-workers house, in which I talked with a couple of people about life at one of our rival’s companies. Also good times.
Work as I said has been very involved, as I have been prepping a lot of work for a presentation to our company president and senior executives. I’ve been meeting with some of our VPs to get their feedback on the work, and have been living in keynote for the past couple of weeks. Once this month is over, most of the approvals for ongoing work will be done, and i can once again relax a bit.
Tomorrow is my review and I find out raise amounts and bonuses if any. Whee!
I helped out with the black belt demo of one my fellow students at the dojo last Friday, which was a good time. I’m now about 4 months from my own black belt and need to start preparing my own demo, for which I have some interesting ideas. Chiefly fusing different pieces of our curriculum from different levels together. Should be fun.
Got out on Saturday and drove up highway 87 to take some pictures. Skies weren’t great, but I needed to get out and shoot. I’ve finally decided to use Lightroom as my DAM (digital asset management) solution, and while getting metadata slapped into all my images, and getting everything backed up online, I realized I haven’t shot anything since November. Surprisingly I got a couple of shots that I really liked, despite the boring skies.
Sunday I was going to do some urban shooting, but couldn’t find anything that interested my, so I ended up going to the apple store to check out Lightroom’s performance on a quad 2.66 mac pro. Changing metadata on my old dual 2.0 puts a mighty hurt on the processors and takes a good bit of time. A lot of other operations are pretty sluggish as well. The quad 2.66 is actually pretty snappy with lightroom, and the metatdata stuff is pretty much instantaneous. This is in contrast to Aperture, which is just dog slow on any machine, with any kind of adjustment. I played with it on a quad 3, and it is just lag city. Apple really needs to get with it and speed aperture up.
James Duncan Davidson just did his last shoot using Aperture and seemed to like it. Considering the volume of shooting he does, that’s a pretty decent endorsement. I’d love to see dual screen support, and a way to do tethered shooting, but I’m pretty happy with Lightroom.
Kelli made some tasty ravioli last night. And deviled eggs. A good time was had.
Kelli is still fighting a little bit with the Flu. I’m coughing but don’t seem to be getting any worse despite a weird mood on sunday. Today I’m feeling fine.