Hallelujah! I just noticed that Sony released their driver and utility updates for Windows Vista.
http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-list.pl?mdl=VGNSZ381P&UpdateType=Everything&SelectOS=29
Update: Sony just updated the Sony Utility Series update yesterday to fix an issue with the “S” buttons that several users have reported.
For a long, long time I’ve always loved photographs and way back in 1996 I got my first 35mm film camera that I used on a 3 week trip to South Korea and Japan. I always felt dealing with film was not only inconvenient but expensive since you were developing entire rolls of film and finding you only liked a fraction of the resulting photos.
In 1998, I saw a photography exhibit while walking about downtown Vancouver. The exhibit itself was unremarkable, and quite frankly, I don’t even remember the photographer. However, what did strike me was how some of the photographs were able to capture a moment, and even shape the way you perceived it. The photography seed was planted.
Over the next few years, digital cameras were taking the consumer market by storm, but being a starving college student, I was never able to get my hands on one. The promises of a digital viewfinder and no forced photo-finishing costs sounded like a dream come true!
In 2000, I was shocked when I got an Olympus 3030Z as graduation gift from my parents. This camera was just plain bad-ass with it’s 3.3 MP sensor and promises of producing stunning photos. Back then I didn’t know much about taking photographs at all, other than I knew I wanted to shoot photos all the time.
Admittedly, my photos back then weren’t all that great. The harsh reality was that the camera I had was great, but the photographer was terrible. I was shooting pretty much blindly with no real training or knowledge about light, composition or even how to use my own camera.
Along the way, I managed to develop a better eye for photography but was still shooting a ton of bad photos. I was snapping off some good ones occassionally, but they were nothing to write home about. I started to read some books and references online and coupled that with buying a Canon S200 which was a smaller camera. Yup, a smaller one. My Olympus 3030Z was just too big of a camera and it was never around when I really wanted to take a photo. The tradeoff, of course, was that my new Canon camera has absolutely no manual controls, had a lower resolution and the flash was piss poor to say the least. But the fact that I always had this camera with my in my pocket allowed me to take some really great photos because of the moments I was able to capture with it.
As digital cameras got cheaper, I upgraded my camera a few times within the Canon digital elph series. The sensors were getting far better over time and resolutions were increasing from the paltry 2MP on the S200. Sometime in 2004, I made the jump into more serious photography by buying a used Canon 300D (aka Digital Rebel); this is when my photography bug really got serious. I read more and more, and took countless photos to try to improve my technique. Along the way, I went through a bunch of different lenses as I discovered what type of shooting I really liked.
I realized that I had a strong preference for photos shot in low light and of people. I’m not particularly keen on posed photographs; in fact, I pretty must detest them. What I do love, is candid photography or playing with perspective. This ties back to my love of using the lens to capture moments and the resulting memories that ensure.
For the last year, I have been increasing the size of my portfolio, reading more, and learning more about post-processing in Photoshop. Along the way, I settled on 3 Canon lenses that I absolutely love — the 50/f1.4, 17-55/f2.8 IS and the 28-135 IS. I’ve done a decent amount of traveling both for work and personal, which has given me a tremendous opportunity to take photos in places like London, India and even the Czech Republic.
I’m still a long ways away from getting to my goal of expertise, but I’m light years ahead of where I was 10 years ago. I’d like to think the photos I now have in my portfolio are good enough such that people would want to hang them on their walls.
Part of my goal setting for this year, I vowed to sell 1 photograph by the end of this year to someone I did not know. While I’d be happy to sell my photos to people I do know (ahem), there is something meaningful to me about a complete stranger liking my work so much that they’d pay for it.
In order to try to achieve that goal, I started an online portfolio built on top of SmugMug. While I love Flickr, it’s not a service I can use to really try to market and sell my photographs. SmugMug has some great features, including the ability to completely customize the UI and set my own pricing for my photographs.
I would love for you all to check out my portfolio, let me know what you think, and even buy something if you like my work. My portfolio can be found at http://www.twenty01photo.com. Even pass along my portfolio website to someone else I don’t know, and maybe I can achieve my year-end goal early!
Maybe one day I can achieve my longer term goal of having my own photography exhibit?
I was in San Diego most of this week on a business trip with Jascha and Herman. Due to the timing of the trip, I missed this week’s episode of Beauty and the Geek. I purposely avoided any of the websites that might cover the outcome of the show, and even avoided signing into Facebook since I’m part of a group dedicated to my pal Niels (who’s on the show). Don’t get too creeped out at my participation in the group :) it was started by my best friend, Craig, who was Niels’ college roomate.
Luckily, since I have I have FolderShare installed on my Media Center PC back home in Seattle, I was able to snag a copy of the show remotely and watched in on the plane ride home tonight.
Much to my disappointment, Niels was givent he big ole boot tonight. He was in the elimination room but got his second trivia question wrong. How could this have happened to the guy who scored perfect on his SATs? Damn.
Needless to say, I was hugely disappointed. Is there any other reason to follow the show, other than to watch beautiful Megan? 
I’m bombarded with information all the time. It comes from email to blogs, and news headlines to stock tickers.
All this information fits neatly into my life and I use tools to help me triage it effectively. My work email gets pushed to my smartphone through Cingular where I can process it in between meetings, or even while I’m standing in line at the grocery store. I use Yahoo webmail for my personal mail so I’m able to access it from any machine, including pocketIE on my smartphone.
With blogs, I use the excellent Google Reader to aggregate all the blogs I follow through RSS. I can flag things for later review and even publicly share specific blog posts through their cool “share” feature.
The exception to all of this is voicemail. Voicemail has such an arcane method for accessing it. I have to press and hold “1″ on my cell phone, and listen to all the prompts including the timestamp of the message. I then chose to save or delete the message using the numeric keypad. I’m a big fan of SMS, but there are lots of people in my life that will never send me an SMS message (hi mom!). Generally, I think voicemail is a pain in the butt because:
A friend of mine just sent me a link to Callwave (affiliate link), which replaces your cell provider’s voicemail and gives you the following features:
Because you get notification by email (with the voicemail messsage attached), it alleviates every single problem I mentioned above. I had to try this thing out.
I signed up for the service a few hours ago, and am very impressed so far. You go through a brain-dead simple sign-up process through which you select your carrier and provide your cell #. I specified “Cingular” as my carrier and they gave me sequence of numbers, # and * to enter which re-programmed my service to route my voicemail to Callwave. Cool.
After doing this, you then call Callwave from your cell phone which proves you own the number (they utilize Caller ID). The last thing left to do is call yourself to record your voicemail greeting, and TADA! Your registration is complete.
Optionally, they have some features you can tweak in your account settings. By default, “Deliver voice mail messages as email attachments” is not enabled, so make sure you toggle this on.
I did a simple test and left a voicemail for myself. It received an email from Callwave in my exchange inbox literally 5 seconds after I hung up and that same email was pushed to my smartphone about 5 seconds after that. Very cool. I was able to open the message on my smartphone, click on the WAV file and Windows Media Player was playing the voicemail back. No need to listen to assinine menu prompts!
Down-sides of the service:
The ideal service to me would be one that could convert speech-to-text send me the translation. I’ve seen a few services promise this, but their reported accuracy is something left to be desired or charged too much.
Update: Based on one of the comments I received, I added a mention that the link to Callwave is an affiliate link. My blog is always 100% objective in the stuff I review — I don’t hold any punches However, I do try to recoup my hosting costs through ads (google adsense) and affiliate revenue like Amazon.
So far I’m loving wordpress and my move from Windows Live Spaces has been a great choice. Wordpress has done a phenomenable job in creating an extensible platform; the sheer amount of plugins, widgets, themes and advice on the web is utterly amazing.
Wordpress makes it very simple to get a blog up and running with features like themes, categories, easy “page” creation and even queueing up posts for automatic posting in the future.
Since migrating all my blog content over, I started to indicate which “categories” each post belonged to. It didn’t take long for me to notice that the way I was using the wordpress categories wasn’t how it was originally intended to be used. I was instead using them as tags, which normally don’t have an implied hierarchy, unlike the hierarchical category system that Wordpress offers.
The beauty of tags is that the origanization system is super flexible and allows you to link together content that is hard to do with other methods. Another reason I love tags is duality it provides for content creators. On one hand, the meaning of tags can be similar across sites, which allows your users to find simliar content despite the flexible nature of the tags. On the other hand, since the meaning of tags can differ per application, it gives the content creator flexibility to create new meanings within their own scope. This duality may be percieved as a drawback, but I personally see this as a powerful, and flexible framework for blogging and to allow users to explore content more powerfully than just following it chronologically.
However, this isn’t to say that categories are now defunct in favor of tags; categories can be more useful in some cases, or even be a secondary source of meta-data that helps in your content organization. As a content creator, you have to choose carefully which you use, whether it be one or the other, or both.
For my blog, I see tagging as the only content meta-data I’ll need and categories only hindering the evolution of my blog since I don’t need the structured hierarchical meta-data it provides. (more…)
