Sorry, I've been lax about the site lately. Work has been monopolizing most of my time lately. I should be able to return to regular blogging over the next few weeks.
Some of the things I'll have to update the the site with:

• I did end up getting a Mac Pro and had a few (mis)adventures with it. Expect a full review with the gory and glorious details soon. Here are a few specs to tide you over: Mac Pro 3Ghz Quad, 4GB FBDIMM memory, ATI 1900XT graphics card, 30" Cinema Display, 3x 500GB HD in a 1.4Terabyte Stripped RAID-0 set, external Mercury Elite RAID Aluminum 1Terabyte HD for Maintenance Boot and Backups, and lots of other goodies. My Powerbook is now in my Wife's hands. And Ricky retains the Mini (used for the RickyCam).
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• I've been editing my long overdue photos from my South East Asia trip in the newly updated Aperture 1.5. I'm about 80% done. I'll have an update for my SmugMug galleries and some technical notes on my latest Aperture experiences soon as well.
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• I upgraded my primary camera body to the Canon Digital Rebel XTi (400D). I'll probably have a technical review of this camera body and it's differences with my old Rebel XT (350D) and how it works with my L lenses sometime in late December. One caveat, Aperture/OSX still doesn't support the 400D/XTi version of RAW. It's the same CR2 file wrapper as the 350D but new contents. I'm hoping for an OS update to support this and the rest of the newly released cameras (Nikon D80, Sigma SD14, Sony Alpha 100) RAW formats sometime before the end of the year (crossing fingers). Two of the best reasons to get the XTi/400D instead of "upgrading" to the 30D or 5D include: The new Anti-Dust features (image sensor filter shakes dust off on startup and shutdown...and manually if you want) and all my current accessories including the Battery Grip and the batteries themselves from the old XT/350D will work with the new camera. The 10.1 MPixel upgrade is only slightly noticable from the old 8MP but is still more than the 30D.

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Tags: macpro, mac, apple, xeon, woodcrest, raid, aperture, asia, 400d, rebelxt, xti, canon

My... wallet... itchy....

       My... credit.... card... hurts....

Financial Solvency or Mac Pro.... oh well, there goes that idea...sigh.

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• All models built to order with 3 levels of QUAD processing (dual dual-core cpus) up to 3Ghz
• All based on Intel WoodCrest based Xeon 5100 series 64bit CPUs
• Fully Buffered memory up to 16GB
• 4 Harddrives with tool-less install (each 3Gbps SATA)
• Dual optical drive capable (SuperDrives available only right now, but I bet Blue-Ray would be a nice thing to add yourself)
• Multiple GPU options including capability to fit 4 video cards including one double-width card without losing slots
• Priced less than comparably configured Dell systems (are there any dual dual-core Xeon's in Dell's repertoires?)

My Aperture sucking, Final Cut hanging PowerBook dreams it had this amount of power. Unfortunately they did not announce updated MacBook Pros as well with new Merom chips at today's World Wide Developer's Conference Keynote. That would have made a purchasing decision easier since I value my mobile computing capability....double sigh. Still, if I can configure correctly and use the proper discounts (Edu or Corp)....hmmmm....we'll see.


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Tags: mac, macpro, apple, xeon, woodcrest, aperture, finalcut