My Pal

This was a tough week for me and my family.  We lost our buddy Donner to cancer.  It was a very aggressive lymphatic cancer that was only diagnosed a week earlier.  He deteriorated very quickly and was brave and loving through it all.  

Donner was a special friend from the beginning.  He was born on the millennium and was the most loyal companion anyone could ever hope for.  He had a wonderful life full of unconditional love and we will miss him dearly.

Donner’s life has spanned the best times of my life thus far.  In these brief 10 years I married the woman of my dreams, became a Dad to 2 wonderful girls and later had our son together.  Donner and Blitzen were there throughout our life changes and are a significant part of our family. 

 In an almost unreal turn of events we had to take Blitzen to the emergency vet last night for what they are treating as Pancreatitis.  She is on iv’s because she cannot have food or water while her enzymes stabilize.  She is expected to make a full recovery and we hope to be able to pick her up Sunday morning.

She will also miss her brother and best friend.

We love you Donner

Is it Spring yet?

Today was as warm as it has been for many weeks.  Still far too cold for my taste but I know it is just a matter of time before all the snow melts and we see blossoms on the trees.  I have a few trips back home to Florida coming up and excited for the opportunity to wear my preferred photography uniform of shorts and a t-shirt.  

photo by Tom Rothenberg

Like many, spring is one of my favorite times to capture landscape images.  From blooming Pear trees to the blossoms at the Tidal Basin our photography palette welcomes the colors we have missed for so long. 

photo by Tom Rothenberg

And for me, it cannot come soon enough.

Watermarking in LR3

In this week's video tutorial I begin a new series to cover some of the new features in Lightroom 3 Beta.

We begin with something that was on everyone's wish list for Adobe -  watermarking.  They delivered and now it's possible to do it all from within Lightroom.  

However, you may not want to.  I demonstrate how to add a standard text watermark and then show a more subtle method using an image of text as a watermark within Lightroom. 

You can download the free Beta of Lightroom 3 here.

Don't forget - use the maximize button within the video player to increase the size of the video.

photowalk with Tom

I decided to take a short photowalk around town today.  Everything is still such a mess with all the snow so I only hit a few spots.  I put this quick slideshow together for you to join me in my travels and share some of the images. 

Also, I just realized I misspelled Expodisc in the slide show. Not going to recompile it again, so were just going to let it go :)

3 things to do this week if your’e a Mac user

1. Create a stunning Keynote presentation to be played on a Windows pc

The Windows world has had the misfortune of hosting slideshows that are typically the product of PowerPoint.  We have seen them a hundred times, basic bullets with a few inappropriate transitions thrown in because the creator thought they were cool.  

Go ahead and create in Keynote as you would if presenting on a Mac.  Now export the file to a Quick Time movie.  This will allow Windows to be able to play back the presentation with all it’s goodness.  The Windows PC will need the free Quicktime player.  Whether your using manual transitions, automated builds, including audio/video -  the QT movie will retain all of your desired effects.  Your Windows colleagues will almost certainly comment on your production and wonder how you did such things in PowerPoint.

2. Download a free trial of a Productivity App 

One of the beauties of Mac OSX is the developer community and the products they create.  A common way for these companies to get their product out is to offer free trial software.  It is almost a given that if written for OSX - a full functioning trial version of the software is available to try out.  A very different experience than a crippled version of the program with only half the features enabled.  This allows you to use the program to it’s fullness and make a qualified decision and determine if it's for you.  Of course, full functioning trials are not a “Mac only” thing, but more of a standard compared to software trials in other operating systems.

3. Check the last time your maintenance scripts ran 

Mac OSX has built in maintenance scripts that help keep your system running in top shape.  The scripts are scheduled to run in the wee morning hours of the morning.  But often your Mac could be turned off, sleeping or another state that may prevent these scripts from running.  An easy way to determine the last time they ran is to simply look at the modified dates of the associated files.  

From the Go menu item in Finder, select Go to Folder....

In the dialog box type /var/log

You are looking for 3 files

daily.out

weekly.out

monthly.out

Notice the modified date for each to determine the last time these scripts were executed.  If all are running on schedule, the daily.out would have a very recent modified date,  the weekly.out could be up to 7 days old and the monthly.out could be several weeks. 

Not to panic if they haven't run in some time.  Just leave your machine on at night to more routinely have these maintenance scripts do their thing.  You can also download free maintenance programs such as Onyx to run these built-in scripts on-demand.  And if your really feeling like a geek, you can learn the syntax and do everything natively in the Terminal.