My 20″ iMac which has broken down repeatedly in its two and a half years of service has been shipped to Singapore to Apple to see if they are going to replace it with a new machine for me. This iMac which must have been one of the first ones shipped has had the screen replaced 3 times. The power pack replaced x2 and the motherboard replaced x3. The mouse was even replaced once. The most recent failing was the DVD drive which decided that it could not burn discs anymore. After trying everything to fix it, DiscWarrior, System Archive and ReInstall…none of it worked, the DVD drive would not burn discs, it spits them out with an ERROR code. Well enough of this I thought so I contacted Apple and requested to speak to the senior person at Apple Customer Service. A nice lady Veronica came on the phone and she was very helpful and explained the whole process. She said a courier would come pick up the machine, it would be shipped to Singapore where it would be evaluated and they would determine if a replacement will be issued. She also told me to back up all my data. So after backing up everything important, I did an ERASE and REINSTALL from the original DV that came in the box. Well what do you know after doing this, the bloody DVD drive works.

So I dressed it up like a Lemon wrote a note to the good folk in Singapore and sent it shipping. Fingers crossed it does not come back. If it does I might just have to make LEMONADE!!!

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UPDATE

When I woke up this morning I had an email from Apple saying they have checked the iMac and have issued a REPLACEMENT REQUEST!!!! YAAAAAAOOOOOOPPEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

Ok this is stupid. Leopard will not allow you to do a Archive and Install with Preserve Network and User Settings. So basically if I want to go back to TIGER I will lose all my data, thanks whomever the Microsoft mole over at Apple is for that one!

Oi my liuliu… this ones for you. Liuliu…

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After almost a week of running Leopard on my MacBookPro I have come to the conclusion that for the timebeing I have to uninstall it. Neither Canon’s EOS Capture, nore CaptureOnePro work under Leopard, and since my computer is a major extension of my camera, until there are updates, I will have to go back to TIGER, RA RA… I am really going to miss my six SPACES. I was getting used to the screens flashing over to a different desktop every time I switched apps, wicked…

Leopard is a really really great OS, and I can’t wait til Canon and CaptureOne update their apps. Apple also need to iron out a few bugs from Leopard, so once we have all the updates working properly we are gonna get little Nick to build us a Hackintosh. Apparently there are patches out for Leopard and with these you can run Leopard on pretty well any new PC, and it runs fast!!! I asked Nick what he could build me if I gave him HK$10K, his reply “A turbo charged ferrari Enzo” in a beige box… ha ha… Stay tuned for the adventures of Hacintosh…

Holy Dueling Macs Batman… the iMac is still rendering Sunil’s DVD while I just put the finishing touches on a new Daisy video and have set that to render in iMovie on this here lappy. The new Daisy Video is about 8 min long about 3.5Gigs of .avi
files, something like 33 mb when rendered for iPods, which is the quickest way to get them ready to upload to youtube. Youtube limit to a maximum of 50mb so I had to cut this vid down from almost 10min.
Well lets just see which render finishes first… (The iMovie won by a mile…) uploading now.
And just a note on this Spaces thing, it makes it feel like you have multiple computers all running at once and interconnected… remember that movie Minority Report where Tom Cruise  operates a computer with his hands flipping through things in 3D, , its the start of that type of GUI (Graphical User Interface, the thing that Apple invented in 1981, every remember typing commands into a Commadore 64?). Well they have done it again, reinventing the GUI… oh you PC people have no idea…

The new iMac, we got the 20″, 2.4g, 4g ram, 320GIG HD variety for a nice sum of HK$14,100, with the Apple Care Protection plan 3 year extended warranty. Always get this, these computers are complex machines and in variably breakdown sometimes.

Anyways I am putting together an animate slide show for Sunil Balani. iDVD makes it a breeze, fist it imported all 961 .jpgs without a hitch. You can then select an animated title screen add your photos or videos and add menu selections, just like on a real DVD. You can then add music from iTunes. You first set up a playlist in iTunes, then in iDVD you just select the playlist and it adds music to your slideshow. You can preview the whole thing in realtime or scroll through it while it renders instantly and the music scrolls in time too. Once you are done editing you hit the DVD swirl icon at the bottom of the main window, it asks you to instert a blank DVD and then tells you to wait 2 hours… 2 HOURS! I WANT MY DVD NOW!!! LOL:)

This software is wonderful. I just finsihed editing the Balani’s 50th Wedding Anniversary, 1680 images in total. I used the rating system whereby you just press a number on your keypad to rate each image. 1 for rejects, 2 for +1 stop exposure, 3 for +1/2 stop. After going thru all the images rating them, you then filter the whole shoot by rank and apply exposure and white balance corrections to that series of images. It worked beautifully. Only took about 5 hours in all, this would have taken me days in pre LightRoom era. Once that was all done, LightRoom then created a web gallery which I have just uploaded. Now if only my computer would burn discs.

Shooting the Balanis party really put this new kit to the test. The recycle times were good, almost instantaneous at first on full power, but we quickly started chewing through massive amounts of batteries before we turned the power down two thirds of a stop. It takes 12 AA, 8 in the pack and 4 in the flash unit. On lower power I was able to have fairly instantaneous flashes and managed to end the night on only one set of batteries. So if you dont blast the flash off like a madman this thing works well.

TTL metering as I said earlier, its bullet proof. and cause a post just aint a post without a photo so introducing Kal our do it all assistant, here he is cranking it on the video cam
.

Looks like he is not going to run as he is joining a Venture Capital company to oversee the funding of Green tech start ups. Picked  up the story over at John Batelle’s Searchblog. He is very smart old Gore, if he was elected Prez he would be left to clean up the mess that his predecessor made. He probably figures he can do more good from the private sector anyways. This is where the lead must come for “Greens” to happen. We need to clean up our act, but change has to come from within.

Just back from shooting The Balani’s 50th wedding anniversary party at the Venetian. I love working for the Hong Kong Indian crowd always so much fun, and just really classy people. This event was no exception. They flew in a troop of singers and dancers from India, including a famous Bollywood singing duet. They performed for at least 5 hours and kept the crowd dancing all night. I’ll post some photos soon, but lets just say it was really fun night.
This was the perfect event to test how many .jpgs you can get on an 8GIG card. Somewhere in the region of 1710, this will vary a little with the different sized of files.

I am now suffering from ShutterLag, a condition that comes about from staying up past ones bedtime by repeatedly pressing the shutter button…

One of the things I picked up at the GSMA conference is that there will be a big push of Mobile Broadband enabled laptops in the next 18 months. The GSMA is sponsoring a competition to see who can come up with the best lappy which they will then endorse, or something like that. Anyways what this means for us is cheeper mobile broadband, right now SmartTone VodaPhone Hong Kong offer a 1.5 megabit unlimited monthly package for HK$488. A bit stiff!

Just back from Mr. Pun’s with a new Canon 580EXII flash unit and CP-E4 battery pack. We now have almost instantaneous flash recycle with no less than 12 AA batteries powering the unit. Daisy did not like the test run…

and since one of my 2gig memory cards went walk about in Macau, I also replaced it with a new SanDisk 8gig Extreme III card. It has a capacity for about 474 RAW files. As the image counter on the 5D only goes up to 999 we will have to wait til this weekend to see how many .jpg files will fit on this card.

Ah, good old Kal, he found the missing 2Gig card, as I said “we are not the kind of people who lose things, we just forget where we put them sometimes :)”…

This is a good thing as we now have 20Gigs of memory cards for the cameras, I think this might be enough, well that is until the 1DsMkIII arrives.

My 550EX is shot, the recycle time is up to about 10 seconds with a fresh set of batteries after just a few shots. Its either sucking them dry or the recycle circuits are done. Anyways Ike loaned me his new 580EXII and it is TTL buttet proof. I am buying one tomorrow.

Contact http://www.photogenix.hk/

Ike is teaching this weekend, should be a good one for anyone interested in learning the basics of studio photography.

We just got back from photographing the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress in Macau held in the worlds second largest building, The Venetian Macau Resort Hotel. This is the United Nations of Mobile phones. Wow… Did you know that there are more mobile phones in the world than Televisions by a factor of 3.

A gathering of the top executives from the mobile industry, expert speakers from around the world. The GSMA is the trade industry association that represents over 700 mobile carriers accounting for some 2.9 BILLION people who have a mobile phone. This is the organization that facilitates the operation of roaming agreements, so that we can now get email, Tv, music, games and so much more in the palm of our hands no matter where we happen to be.

The highlight of the week had to be a live performance by Craig David and Taiwanese pop star Elva. With whom this photo was taken, how about that for my %#&@ eating grin, ha ha..

A very interesting week for a keen geek such as myself and one of the exhibitors gave me a great deal on a niffty new Blue Tooth headset, looks alot like the iPhone one… it talks to you… “Call Connecting”…

Just spent the last 4 nights in Macau staying at the New Century Hotel. 5 Star my ass…

Dont belive a word of what they say on their web site or on any of the hotel booking sites. This hotel is run down dirty and just generally disgusting. CSI would have a field day with the UV lights… uuf!

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Well done Bobsy… Over HK$15,000 raised for CWS at Lamma Fun Day 2007

R*E*S*P*E*C*T

________________________

and just so a little reminder of why we do this…

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and a big shout out to Bob and Infected Mushroom for the inspired tunes. I know they wouldnt mind, its for a good cause…

Peace

Just been browsing thru Apple store to see which new computer we are going to get for the studio. Probably go with the new 24″ iMac, however, if i had a spare HK$133k and change, I’d get one of these rigs. MacPro 12Ghz + 16 GB RAM, 3TB Raid storage, 2xDVR, & 2x 30″ Cinema displays etc etc… I wonder if I could ever crash one of these. It would be great fun trying…

SubtotalHK$ 133,860

Two 3GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 16GB (8 x 2GB) Mac Pro RAID Card 750GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s drive - 7200 rpm 750GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s drive - 7200 rpm 750GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s drive - 7200 rpm 750GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s drive - 7200 rpm NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 512MB SDRAM Apple Cinema HD Display (30″ flat panel) - FE Apple Cinema HD Display (30″ flat panel) - FE 2 x SuperDrive Airport Extreme & Bluetooth 2.0+ERD Apple Wireless Keyboard & Mighty Mouse AppleCare Protection Plan for Mac Pro/Power Mac (w/or w/o Display) - Auto-enroll

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