No, my family isn’t so famous that actual Paparazzi stake out my grandmother’s house and hound the streets and yard for photos.  In my family, we are our own paparazzi.

You see, every year, we have a huge family party, and there is a distinct moment in the party where everyone gathers to take photos.  This family.  That family.  The cousins.  The aunts & uncles.  The kids.  The grandkids.  Etc.  It’s a complex form of set theory.

In any case, instead of there being just one camera (a good one) with a photographer, everyone has to have the shot taken “with their camera”.  Sometimes, you get 10 cameras taking the picture at once, with everyone in the shot looking in a different direction, like some sort of carnival funhouse picture.  Other times, one person has several cameras dangling, saying, “OK, now with this one!”

Ridiculous.  At first, it was just annoying.  Then it became upseting.  Now, I just get pissed off.

You see, digital cameras should have solved this problem.  But they didn’t.

One camera.  Many shots.  Files can be shared for free.  Everyone can get their pictures.  There is absolutely no reason for multiple cameras to be used (especially when you have iPhone cameras without auto-focus competing with full digital SLRs).

Yet there they are, every year.  In fact, every year, it seems to get worse.

One theory is that most people don’t know how to download or get digital photos developed.   So they use their camera because they know how to get those pictures.  Problem is, in my family, I know for a fact that many of the people with cameras have never, ever successfully downloaded or developed their own pictures either.  But maybe it’s a safety net… they know that someday, they’ll figure it out.  And then they’ll have those pictures on their camera.

Historically, the only way to really get a picture was to have the negative.  You couldn’t count on someone else getting the role developed and sending you the shots you were in.  So that could explain why baby boomers express this behavior – it’s an anachronism.

But what explains my Gen Y cousins and siblings doing the same thing?  (Besides the obvious upside of irritating me, of course.)  My guess is that the current social assumption is that everyone has a camera, all the shots are terrible, but all are uploaded and shared.  In this worldview, not having “your photos” to share almost means you don’t have an opinion, a voice, something to contribute.   So, once again, everyone has their camera, even in situations like group still photos, where one camera is a much, much better solution.

I’m probably more irritated than most because, in general, as long as Eric isn’t around, I typically am the one that everyone depends on for “high quality” pictures from these events. And it’s sad to find out later that, because everyone was looking a different direction, there is no good picture of one of the families this year.

When I am not irritated, however, I do think about how, despite all these integrated photo editing and uploading services, we’ve still failed as an industry to really solve the photo sharing problem for families.  They are all too techie, all too hard to really use.  And that’s a piece of why, to this day, everyone insists on getting “one more with my camera!”

I’m thinking of banning any other cameras in 2009.  Too heavy handed?  How do other people solve this problem?

Well, Eric has managed to extend that experimentation to a pair of new OCZ 120GB Solid State Drives (SSD).

Two OCZ Core Series v2 SATA II 120GB SSDs in a MacBook Pro

The blog post is here, with detailed photos and benchmarks.  A must see for any digital photographer and/or Mac geek who is into performance-pushing customer expansion.

My favorite part of the walk through is the brief commentary on the Apple-like packaging for the SSD drives:

The OCZ drives arrived in a plain package, but once the outer cardboard layer was removed, it was clear that OCZ had taken some packaging cues from Apple. The inner packaging was beautiful, and made it clear that you had just purchased a quality product.

That was the part I expected.  This is the part I didn’t:

Even though it was pretty, I don’t like excessive packaging and would have preferred something simple and biodegradable.

For some reason, I have a distinct mental image of Eric’s facial expression when saying this, and it made me laugh out loud. 

I’m not a LOLCATS fan, and I don’t own cats, but I do love a good Dune reference.

Hit 800 feedback on eBay today.  Of course, I’ve accrued more than 800 positive feedback over the years, but the score only reflects positive feedback from unique users.

Most of my feedback is from selling, not buying, although I’ve done a fair bit of that too.  703 feedback items as a seller, 166 as a buyer, last count.

I was selling much more earlier last year, as I ramped up the sale of the new US Presidential dollar coins.  However, lately, I’ve been too busy to sell much more than my typical odds and ends, so the ascent to 1000 has been delayed.

I remember joining eBay in 2003 with a feedback rating of just 43, all selling.  As a product manager, I believe heavily in using and living your product as much as possible, which is why I scaled my eBay selling over the years, experimenting with different models that I learned from the eBay community and from old-hands within eBay.

Originally, my goal was that purple star at 500 – a rare commodity to be sure.  But once you hit 500, is 1000 really that far a way?

Here is what my eBay feedback page looks like now:

My first positive feedback on eBay is from December 15, 1998, and it’s from Mr. Eric Cheng.  This is back when you could receive feedback from anyone, not just people you had sold to.

“I’ve bought from Adam before — he’s honest, and everything went smoothly.” –echeng

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

This snapshot is now the earliest known couple photo Carolyn & I have.  Friday, August 22, 1997.  At this point, we had been dating all of 12 days.

This is also, I believe, the very last Apple ATG Picnic, since this is also the year that Steve returned to Apple and officially disbanded ATG.

So a little nostalgia on the blog tonight.  Big thanks to Eric for the great picture.

Gizmodo: Canon Expands Rebel Alliance With Live View 12-Megapixel EOS XSi

The rumors are true. Canon’s took power features from the high-end EOS models and creature comforts from the PowerShot line, and merged them into the 12.2-megapixel EOS Rebel XSi DSLR, with Live View LCD view-finding (previously only seen on EOS-1D Mark III), a 3″ LCD screen with 230,000 pixels, and the Digic III processor found in nearly every new Canon model. There will be two kits, body only for $800 and one with a starter 18-55mm lens for $900.

After over 6 years with point-and-shoot digital cameras, my friend Eric finally gave me the courage to jump to a full SLR a couple of years ago, and I haven’t looked back.  The pictures are so much clearer, the camera so much more responsive, I can visually see in my photo library the line between my pre & post DSLR days.  I can’t imagine going back – I’d rather just use my cell phone camera for quick shots.

I got the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT, which was the 2nd generation.  The XTi moved the bar to 10MP, an updated processor, and some other features, but I could resist the minor upgrade.  The XSi seems pretty compelling, though.

I’ll have to ask Eric about it…

A gorgeous lunar eclipse took place that was visible from most of Asia-Pacific, and even stretched to full visibility over California.  But with peak viewing at just past 3:30am, I just couldn’t make it.  One of the liabilities of having two kids under 3 and a full-time gig at a start-up, I guess. 

Fortunately, Eric did stay up, and since he is an incredible photographer, I’m feeling better about it.  Tell me that these aren’t gorgeous shots:

Eric’s full post on how he took them is here.  His web gallery, where you can buy his more famous prints, is here.  Full data from NASA on the eclipse is here.

My friend Eric has done it again.  You may remember my last post here about his efforts to get a 320GB Raid 0 array into a MacBook Pro.

Well, he recently ran out of storage on his Mac Pro, and upgraded it with six (6) 1 TB drives, for a total of 6 TB storage.  Check out this configuration:

Not only does he have 6 drives, but he has an optimized configuration, layering both RAID 1+0 over different partitions to create the optimum mix for system boot, scratch, and photo storage:

A2: 20GB partition x 6 = 120GB RAID 0 (striped) fast partition for PS3/Final Cut scratch
B2: 65GB partition x 6 = 195GB RAID 1+0 (striped over mirrored) boot partition
C2: 850GB partition x 6 = 2.5TB RAID 1+0 (striped over mirrored) data partition

For the full article, with benchmarks, click here. If you want to buy some prints of his more famous photos, go to his new web gallery.

I’ve posted here about Eric before. He is a professional photographer, with a specialty in underwater digital photography. He also runs the website wetpixel.com professionally.

What you may not know is that Eric has a storied history with the Mac. Eric was a PC-focused freshman when he came to Stanford, but during his years on the farm he relented and ended up working on Macs. He even did an internship with the famous Apple Technology Group, in that last summer before it was killed.

Eric went back to PCs at the end of the 1990s, being extremely rational about his technical needs and the advantages at the time of the platform. But every now and again, maybe once every year or two, I’d catch Eric seriously considering going back to the Mac. Well, he finally did it a little while ago, and he’s been working off a MacBook Pro.

Eric is a pretty tough cookie to please when it comes to computers, and he demands a lot of performance out of his machines. He also really focuses on his specific needs as a photographer who travels the globe constantly.

So, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see the pickup of Eric’s article on a lot of sites. On Lifehacker, I take some delight in seeing Eric referred to as “Mac user Eric Cheng“- it’s nice to see Eric publicly wed to the platform.

There has been a lot of discussion on Digg about the merits of running Raid 0 on a laptop. Personally, I wouldn’t question Eric when he gets into the zone like this on an upgrade. The stats in his article are pretty compelling, as are his experiences running Windows XP in Parallels on the upgraded machine.

My favorite comment of his, however, is directed at the Digg comments:

Some folks on the second Digg page are saying that it’s stupid to use RAID 0 in a computer, because there are “no real world benefits” and because it’s too dangerous.

I disagree. My machine is clearly running much faster, and it doesn’t seem to be running that much hotter. The fans still only spin up with high CPU usage. Battery life has always sucked on the Macbook Pro, and the estimates of losing 10-15% seems to be accurate so far. Finally, I back up frequently onto bootable, external media, even when I’m on the road, so losing my internal volume wouldn’t be catastrophic. At home, my system backs up automatically to NAS every night. The only problem is that I would have to work off of an external drive, if the RAID failed. I’d have the same problem even if I wasn’t using RAID.

I used to use a Thinkpad T-series notebook, which was a great machine because it allowed the use of two hard disks at a time in a supported, modular way. I loved that thing.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I’d love to hear about the negative Digg commenters’ personal experiences with running RAID 0 in a notebook. I’ll bet none of them have ever done it, and are speaking without any facts to back up their claims.

Cheers to Eric for his super cool MacBook Pro and for standing his ground.

In case you missed the link at the top, Eric’s article on adding RAID to a MacBook Pro can be found here.

Maybe it’s because this sums up every shell experience I have on Mac OS X, when I’m getting into the weeds fixing something.

I don’t think Carolyn is set up to take shell commands, but I have to try this out tomorrow.

However, she said for a personal blog, I’m not including enough “Baby & Puppy” pictures.   Which is fair since I’ve posted at least two posts about my tomatoes from my garden, but no puppies.

Well, here’s a teaser picture.  A great image, captured by the famous Eric Cheng, of my son Jacob (2) and my first Beagle Newton (4).

Enjoy.

I think it’s just an amazing shot. Having taken approximately 30,000 shots myself now, I can safely say that inevitably any photos that Eric takes are noticeably better than mine. Thank goodness for our family that he humors us with trips out to the suburbs once in a while.

Most of my shots these days are not of anything quite so exotic. I’ve been spending my time trying to get the perfect shot of my new son, Joseph Isaac Nash.

After leaving E.Piphany, Eric decided to pursue his interests in digital photography, becoming one of the first to really specialize professionally in digital underwater photography. He now has one of his pictures hanging in the Smithsonian, and travels the world constantly on diving expeditions.

You can find a blog of his travels and insights at his blog:
Eric Cheng’s Journal

He also runs the site WetPixel, which is dedicated to digital underwater photography.

I’m lucky to count Eric as one of my close friends. If you are interested in either diving or photography, it’s worth subscribing to his feeds.