It’s hard to understand how little I like Adobe Reader. Once again I needed to use it today to fill out a form that refused to display in anything else – and after downloading and installing it, it told me that it wanted to update based on “customer issues and security vulnerabilities”. The copy I just downloaded. Not 10 minutes ago. Why can’t they post the most current version?

So, the install starts, but stalls when it gets here:

It throws up a window in the background – that I can’t make active – telling me that the Adobe PDF Viewer Plugin isn’t installed in Safari:

First off, I don’t want Reader to supplant the PDF viewer in OSX – especially in Safari. Apple’s done a nice job implementing their PDF viewer, and I don’t want to override it. Second – I can’t install the security update. I can’t click Cancel or Continue on the Repair Setup window, and I can’t click Cancel on the Adobe Reader Updater window. Adobe – this is why Mac users hate you.

I just got the notice inside my wordpress dashboard that 3.0 has been released. Like an idiot, I went ahead and installed it without thinking. I can do this because I keep a nightly backup of the wordpress database contents *and* the wordpress directory files. If it had blown up, I could easily revert. I’m working on a post about my backup strategy, and how you can implement it yourself.

Also, FWIW, 3.0 looks pretty slick. It feels faster than the older versions, and the dashboard is a little gentler on the eyes. I’ll work up a full feature change post soon, as well.

This morning, I made my weekly login to Facebook. And this is what the friend suggestion box contained:

Stay classy, Facebook. Stay classy.

Recently, the sales have bee running strong, offering 750GB and 1TB hard drives for dirt cheap ($40 for a 750 kind of cheap, with free shipping). I’ve seen 2TB drives popping up around the $100 mark. Why are prices falling off a cliff like this? Is it just a function of drive density? The news suggests that we’ll be seeing 2.5TB and 3TB drives Real Soon Now, with 4TB drives coming sometime next year.

Once I get my new camera, the next move is to upgrade my storage array. I’m looking forward to where we’ll be in 6 – 12 months.

It’s foolish to think that times aren’t changing. Why can’t the traditional media outlets accept that? More to the point, why are the newspapers hanging onto their outdated model? It is really that they are too scared to move? Too short sighted? Perhaps not.

It’s more likely that they have missed the memo: the delivery of news is changing. The content isn’t. To look at it another way, the cable news networks aren’t complaining about how the Internet is killing their business model. They are “broadcasting” their content online all the time, often linked to AP wire stories or simply transcripts of their video feeds. They show their local ads, as they would on local television, to the internet at large. (I’m sure their advertisers hate that. All those extra eyeballs…)

So what’s wrong with the newspaper? Why can’t they adapt? Broadcasting text across the Internet is what the World Wide Web was originally built for. There aren’t the costs of publication and distribution in physical forms. So why is this so hard for them? That they can’t make money when they are showing a whole bunch of ads on every page – even the navigation pages that are devoid of article content? That they can’t make money when doing that – and further breaking up articles to run on multiple pages to force even more ad views?

They seem to have a rather strong sense of contempt for their readers. They never recovered from that little incident in 1990 when CNN lucked into a live video feed of the first Persian Gulf war. They never bothered to change anything about their business model, and 10 years later, when the Internet really took off, they ignored it. Now, 20 years after they lost the fight, they are complaining that people are linking to their content.

Get real. Savvy consumers of the news now live in RSS readers where blogs (like this one) get equal time with twitter bots and Facebook status updates. Most savvy consumers now digest hundreds of news articles every day. Adapt or die.

My brother and I have started training for running a half-marathon this Fall. Yesterday was the first morning of exercise. Today, the agony. Soreness, stiffness, and all around aches – and it’s not for a lack of stretching. It’s simply that I’m way out of shape and I need to get myself back up to form.

My brother has been running on a treadmill for a long time now – a few years – so he’s got a bit of a leg up on me, and has to slow down to accommodate my speed. Time for me to set up – I need to get into a regular routine of aerobic exercise and endurance training if this is going to work at all.

So – here’s the plan. 100 days to 10 KM is a decent place to start, but I need to move this a little faster, as 100 days takes us to the half marathon in Raleigh – and 20KM is 13.1 miles, not 10KM. This means I need to do at least 3 miles on the bike every evening as a baseline aerobic training. Ideally stepping that up over time to 10+ miles a day. And, the hard part: getting up even earlier every morning and putting in 30 minutes of jogging/walking, switching to mostly jogging as I go.

Over 5 years ago, I purchased my first DSLR and started posting a picture every weekday, in preparation for a trip to Barcelona, Spain. I soon expanded to every day, weekends included, and became more versatile in my shots. I purchased a 50mm macro lens, a medium zoom, a wide angle, a fast 50mm, and a 70-200 telephoto. I’ve sold off some of those lenses over the years, and upgraded my camera from a D70 to a D200. I think I’ve come a long way in the journey.

The important part to me, however, is that I am now a photographer. That’s part of who my friends know me as – someone who can pick up a chunk of precision machinery and produce something that (at times) is hard to tell from Real Art. I’ve always claimed “If I can do it, it’s not art.” That is less and less true these days. I’ve posted over 2000 pictures to my blog, most better than the ones that came before them.

It means I take less and less time for my writing (over the years), as does my work for Shufflegazine, but I’m ok with that.

I Am A Photographer.