D700 Laziness and Lenses

Ever since the Nikon D700 was introduced, there have been a deluge of messages in the dpreview.com Nikon Lens Forum to this effect:

I am going to buy a Nikon D700 soon. Please help me choose some lenses. I shoot things from 10mm to 600mm. My primary interests are candids, architecture, landscapes, people, events, sports, products, insects,  and pretty much everything. What are the best lenses for the job? Oh, and I don’t want the Nikon 14-24 or the 24-70 lenses so suggest something else.

What I find remarkable about such posts, aside from the fact that the person is willing to fork out $3000 on a camera body with an apparent total lack of knowledge about camera lenses, is the fact that these people are so lazy. To begin with, they’re naiive to even think that they can get a straight-up answer to begin with. But the least they could do is spend a little bit of time Googling on prospective lenses to survey what’s out there. As if having Google in your life didn’t make things easy enough! I remember the days when my father wanted to buy new car. We went to the library (yes, a physical building) where he would pore over the Consumer’s Reports to help him decide what car to buy. It seems that “knowledge” today—regardless of the quality of it—is simply too easy to come by now with the Internet and people have become lazy to the point of even doing cursory amounts of research.

On the flip side, there are those who seem to think that using sub-$1000 lenses on the D700 is doing some sort of injustice to the D700. It certainly does seem, to me at least, rather silly for people to put on crappy 18-55 and 55-200 lenses on a D700 but I don’t agree with all the posters who seem to think that the D700 should only be mated with the 14-24, 24-70, and 70-200 and that everything else is unworthy. As far as I’m concerned, with my recent experience with the Tamron 28-75, I don’t think things are as clear-cut. There seems to be enough sample variation across all lense manufacturers—even Canon and Nikon—that I think it’s hard to ever conclusively say that Canon and Nikon will be better than other manufacturers all the time across all samples, at least from the optical perspective. If build quality is a key issue, then, of course, the Canon and Nikon pro lenses are vastly superior. But for 99% of the population, this isn’t the case. So many photographers have constantly reiterated the fact that “your equipment is good enough.” It would seem to me as though many have gotten caught up in the technical hoopla and have forgotten what photography is really all about.

Incidentally, I’ve had a chance to shoot with the Tamron 28-75 a little more recently and I have to say that it appears to be, optically, a nice lense. Even wide open, I find that the images are as sharp as what I got out of the Nikon 17-55. It’s difficult to comment on colour rendering and contrast since I can’t compare them side by side anymore. However, my view, these days, most photos are so grossly processed anyway (a rant for another day), colour is not a paramount issue.

Mac OS X Mouse Madness…fixed!

Ever since Mac OS X 10.4, Apple did a disservice to the computing community by severely crippling the mouse movement behaviour. The mouse acceleration and movement is simply too erratic and not very smooth compared to the Windows and Linux motions. There are, no doubt, proponents of the movement that will say that this is the proper behaviour and that Apple got it right while everyone else screwed up but I disagree. I struggled long and hard to adapt to the mouse acceleration curve but after a few months, I simply couldn’t handle it anymore and used USB Overdrive to alter the mouse movement behaviour. I might add that as good as USB Overdrive is, the movement still doesn’t feel quite right. Now before critics slam me for this post, I should point out that this mouse movement wasn’t always a problem. Back in the days of System 6 (6.1.3 was when I first got my own Mac—a MacSE), the mouse movement was normal. Same in System 7. Somewhere between System 7 and OS X, I stopped using Macs. I came back with the advent of Tiger where it was first reported that the mouse acceleration problem existed.

Many people have reported this problem and, likewise, equally many people have probably posted to say that nothing is wrong. But to me, something is wrong! The Mac platform is supposed to be providing the best user experience out of all operating systems. How can it do this when they’ve purposely crippled the control panel to not allow customization to ones liking in even something as primal as the mouse movement? To me, this is tantamount to fixing the key repeat delay to 5 seconds at a rate of 10 characters per second and purposely not providing a vehicle to change the setting. Or perhaps, it’s tantamount to setting your display resolution to 1024×768 no matter what resolution your panel supports.

Of course, the Mac platform has always been about doing things one way. I suppose the mindset is probably something to the effect that any user should be able to use a Mac and feel at home. You can only feel at home if you are familiar with the interface. Hence, the purposeful limiting of user customizability. Sure, you can change the selection colour and the size of the dock, but that’s about it. You can’t change the fonts used or the size. Wanna theme those windows? No way! As with most things in life, this has two sides of the coin. Those who love the UI wouldn’t have it any other way and so, they don’t really care. Those who loathe the UI are repulsed by the inability to change things to their liking.

Linux is a perfect example of where this issue sort of mentality applies. There are those who love Linux because of the ability to customize nearly everything. My window manager of choice back in the day was FVWM and I had everything customized—including the keyboard and mouse bindings to manipulate windows. When other people came to use my terminals, they couldn’t do anything properly because of all my customizations. But, the customizations definitely made me more efficient—much more efficient. Today things are a little better with Gnome and KDE providing somewhat familiar interfaces but the two camps are pretty divided in philosophy. This is one of the reasons why Linux has had trouble gaining traction with mainstream computer users—perhaps this will change with the advent of netbooks like the Asus EEE PC which comes with Xandros Linux.

Anyway, back to the mouse issue…. I never did pay for USB Overdrive—not because I thought the author didn’t deserve it (quite contrary, I’m very sympathetic to shareware developers)—mostly because it just never felt quite right. When I bought a new Macbook Pro with Leopard, I read somewhere that Microsoft Intellipoint was the solution for some. Well, I had a Microsoft Wheel Optical mouse lying around, so I plugged it in, installed Intellipoint and voila! normal mouse movement! So, for many months now, my Logitech mice (including the G5 version 2) have just sat there collecting dust. It wasn’t until I came across this post: http://groups.google.com/group/alphagrip/browse_thread/thread/4174e7cf5ed909aa that I found the solution I had long needed. For my Logitech G5 v2 mouse, I added the following lines of code:

<key>USB Gaming Mouse</key>
<dict>
<key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
<string>com.microsoft.driver.MicrosoftMouseUSB</string>
<key>HIDPointerAccelerationTable</key>
<data>
AACAAFVTQioABwAAAAAAAQABAAAAAQAAAAAgAAAQAABxOwAATOMA
BE7FAA03BAAFRAAAFIAAAAcsAAAj4AAACQAAADSwAAAK2AAARfAA
AA0IAABXkAAAD2AAAGkAAAASEAAAeoAAABUAAACJAAAAF8AAAJEA
AAAawAAAlrAAAB2QAACZsAAAIKAAAJswAAAj8AAAnDAAACewAACc
MAAAAIAAABIAAHE7AABWfwAESgAADqAAAAY6AAAfQAAABygAACkA
AAAI2AAAPGAAAAm4AABHQAAACrAAAFMwAAALwAAAYDAAAAzAAABs
IAAADuAAAIQgAAARYAAAnSAAABQAAAC0AAAAFsAAAMcAAAAZoAAA
1AAAABzgAADbAAAAIIAAAOAAAAAkQAAA4wAAACegAADjAAAAALAA
ABQAAHE7AABhTgAESgAAD2AAAAUyAAAXYAAABjIAACCgAAAHLAAA
LCAAAAgIAAA3oAAACOQAAENAAAAJwAAAUIAAAAqgAABfIgAAC5AA
AG1wAAAMcAAAewAAAA6AAACYoAAAEMAAALYAAAATQAAA0gAAABZg
AADpAAAAGiAAAPoAAAAdoAABAwAAACEgAAEHAAAAJIAAAQoAAAAn
oAABDAAAAADgAAARAABxOwAAbXcABBoAABHwAAAFGgAAG/AAAAXw
AAAmYAAABvwAADQAAAAITAAAT+AAAAlsAABt4AAACngAAI3AAAAL
sAAAtkAAAA1QAADZgAAAEQAAAPeAAAAVwAABEQAAABlgAAEgAAAA
HUAAASgAAAAhAAABLgAAACSAAAEyAAAAJ4AAATUAAAAAUAAAEgAA
cTsAAEuwAARMAAAOAAAABUAAABVQAAAHJAAAJiAAAAi0AAA1wAAA
CpAAAEmAAAAL6AAAVoAAAA0gAABiAAAADhgAAGrQAAAPGAAAdAAA
ABGQAACHgAAAFFAAAJoAAAAXYAAAqYAAABpgAAC0AAAAHVAAALkA
AAAg0AAAvIAAACQgAAC9gAAAJ7AAAL6AAAABAAAAEAAAcTsAAFZ/
AAO4AAASoAAABSAAACVAAAAGCAAAN4AAAAbwAABfAAAAB/AAAIoA
AAAJKAAAyyAAAArwAAD3gAAADSAAARyAAAAQAAABOAAAABRAAAFK
AAAAGQAAAVMAAAAc0AABVwAAACDgAAFbgAAAJCAAAV2AAAAnoAAB
XgAAAFJwAAAJlNEAWTAAAAoSaQBf8AAACpAAAGawAAAA4AAAHAAB
GFUAATAAAAGyKAAC8AAAAlNpAAagAAADb0oAENAAAAOteAAUWAAA
A+ulABfgAAAEKdMAG2gAAARoAAAe8AAABKIBACKYAAAE2VYAJiAA
AAUUqwApaAAABVAAACywAAAFgAEAMcgAAAW1VgA2QAAABeqrADq4
AAAGIAAAPzAAAAZiAABD3AAABp6rAEh4AAAG21YATRQAAAcYAABR
sAAAB3oBAFbcAAAH2VYAW/gAAAg4qwBhFAAACJgAAGYwAAAJFgEA
bAAAAAmRVgBx0AAACgyrAHegAAAKiAAAfXAAAAEAAAATAAEYVQAB
MAAAAbIoAAMQAAACU2kABxAAAAMvSgARgAAAA6z7AByIAAAEOqsA
KOAAAASBVgAwiAAABMgAADgwAAAFDVYAQJgAAAVQAABI8AAABcar
AFKwAAAGOAAAXHAAAAbxVgBnwAAAB0yrAG1YAAAHqAAAcvAAAAhM
AAB5BAAACPAAAH8YAAAJlAAAhSwAAAo4AACLQAA=
</data>
<key>IOClass</key>
<string>MicrosoftMouseUSB</string>
<key>IOProviderClass</key>
<string>IOUSBInterface</string>
<key>bConfigurationValue</key>
<integer>1</integer>
<key>bInterfaceNumber</key>
<integer>0</integer>
<key>idProduct</key>
<integer>49225</integer>
<key>idVendor</key>
<integer>1133</integer>
<key>bInterfaceClass</key>
<integer>3</integer>
<key>bInterfaceSubClass</key>
<integer>1</integer>
<key>bInterfaceProtocol</key>
<integer>2</integer>

With this code added to the Info.plist, I rebooted, and now my Logitech G5 v2 is being controlled by the Microsoft driver providing smooth mouse movement. What’s more, the two thumb buttons operate as Forward and Back in the browser even though they can’t be configured as such in Intellipoint. Currently, Intellipoint only sees three buttons. I believe the tilt buttons of the scroll wheel appear on a different USB interface (bInterfaceNumber 1 and 2) so they may be a lost cause.

Anyway, I’m not much happier to have my Logitech working in what I view is the proper manner.

Lens Prestige over Practicality?

For the last two years, I’ve been shooting the Nikon 17-55 AF-S f/2.8G with my Nikon D70s as my primary bread and butter lens. The lens is delicious: AF-S fast and silent focusing; superb construction; full-time manual override; internal focusing. Of course, all this comes at a price—and a mighty hefty one at that. When I bought the 17-55 it was espoused as one of the great lenses for the DX format. It is nice but something about it just never sat well with me. In fact, my gut feeling is that I prefer the images out of my 80-200 a little more than the 17-55. Perhaps it’s the fact that the lens cost so much and my expectations of it were out of this world. Either way, what was clear to me was that the images coming out of the 17-55 weren’t vastly superior over the images of many other lenses. How could this be? I spent countless hours shooting test charts just to see if my lens was problematic but it checked out to be pretty perfect. The users who espoused the virtues of the 17-55 posted some marvelous pictures. That definitely swayed me to make the purchase. However, it seems that many people were taking equally marvelous pictures with “crappy” lenses, too. And so it became obvious that equipment makes not a photographer. Yes, we’ve heard this time and time again but sometimes, you have to take a personal beating before you can fully understand what something means.

With the announcement of the D700, my personal feeling is that the DX sensor format will be relegated to cheap consumer bodies while FX will rule under the rubric of serious amateur/pro shooters. But what does all this mean for my glorious 17-55? It’s a nice lens but I know that some day I’ll probably go full-frame because of the high ISO performance (which is most of my shooting). Proponents of DX may argue that DX high ISO performance is bound to improve and they’re right—it will. But a larger sensor will always offer the possibility for even better performance (assuming we don’t hit quantum limits at some point). And so it came to pass that after a lengthy struggle, I decided to part ways with my 17-55 and sell it to someone who was more capable than I was. I figured, at some point, I’ll go full frame.

Meanwhile, I struggled on what lenses to get after selling the 17-55. Originally, I was set on getting the 24-70 since it, too, has received such high accolades. However, the cost of the 24-70 is very high and I realize that a f/2.8 still isn’t fast enough for most low-light situations. I’ve also decided that the elements of prestige that are associated with having the highest end Nikkors isn’t really something that should care about anymore…at least not as a hobbiest who has no chance in hell of making a single penny off of my photos. After many sleepless nights, I finally decided to get an 85mm f/1.8 (though the 1.4 was the front runner for quite a while—but again, I couldn’t stomach the cost, especially knowing that a replacement was likely due in a few months). For a mid-range zoom, I debated between the Tamron 28-75 (which has received relatively high praise) and the Sigma 24-70. Both are f/2.8 lenses as well. The camera store didn’t have the Sigma in stock and so I decided to get the Tamron instead. By all initial accounts, these two lenses appear to be quite good. While I haven’t had much of a chance to use them in the real world just yet, initial testing is that they’re both reasonably sharp wide open and extremely sharp when stopped down to the usual sweet spot of f/5.6.

Through this entire transaction, I’ve lost AF-S focusing, sturdy construction, and a little bit of prestige (the last of which, obviously, didn’t help me take better photos). I never thought I would buy another prime beyond the 50 f/1.8 but now primes have really whet my appetite. I never thought I’d buy a non-Nikon lens either. I’ve come to realize that part of the reason I didn’t want to sell the 17-55 was the fact that it was regarded as one of the highest end DX lenses available. How could I get rid of it? People see it and know that I’m serious about photography!

The lens set that I have no consists of no expensive lens but the expanded repertoire certainly allows for more flexibility for different shooting conditions. A woodworker I once corresponded with said to me, “in the game of life, it’s the guy that has the most tools, not the biggest, that wins.” With the 17-55 now gone, I am without a single lens that has AF-S. But the screwdriver driven lenses that I once so loathed (offset only by the wonderful images the 80-200 makes) actually seems like not such a bad thing—I have no statistics to say one way or the other but my guess is that these lenses are less likely to have long-term mechanical problems. Even if they do, they aren’t that costly to replace. Aside from the noise, on a D200, the screwdriver focusing seems pretty snappy.

Anyway, only time will reveal whether or not this decision was the right one to make. I’ll let you know how things unfold as I shoot with the new lenses.

Aperture for Photo Management

Digital photography is a wonderful technology. Gone are the days of having to pay for a roll film or paying to have it developed even though several frames in the roll might be duds. I don’t need to store film in the fridge or worry about sending my camera through the XRay machine at the airport. And the added convenience of being able to select ISO settings on the fly is simply a freedom that film didn’t really afford.

But such convenience can (and does in my case) come at a cost. The freedom to snap pictures indiscriminately means that I’m generating a lot more photos than I probably would have were I to shoot using film. And with the gigabytes of photos taken comes a commitment of time that I must expend in order to sift through the virtual rolls of digital film. Furthermore, I must be careful to backup my digital shots since the chance of a hard drive failure is much more likely than the chance of a fire in my house (knock wood). Having lost lots of data over the years due to hard drive failures, I’m now particularly concerned about backing up what is precious to me. Most important data is backed up to an external hard drive connected to my Mac and also copied to a FreeBSD server running ZFS raidz.

When I first got my dSLR I tried to use iPhoto as a means for managing all my photos. The problem is, I’m a bit of a filesystem control freak. I couldn’t stand the fact that iPhoto was importing my photos into another library and sorting using their own folder structure. It also seemed to me that after having a few thousand photos in my library, it would take forever for iPhoto to start up. So not long afterwards, I stopped using iPhoto and opted, instead, to simply copy photos off my CF cards into dated folders that I would create. I would use Adobe Bridge to rifle through my folders to examine my photos. After a while, it became clear that this solution also wasn’t working out too well because I didn’t really have any ability to organize the photos short of moving files around on the filesystem.

When I sold my PowerMac and got my MacBook Pro, I once again considered using iPhoto ’08 with its added improvements. However, Adobe was running a promotion for Photoshop CS3 upgrades for a mere $299 so I went for that and got the latest version of Adobe Bridge as part of the deal. Almost at the same time, Apple release Aperture 2.0 and my 30-day trial had just ended. They also lowered the price! I ruminated on my options for a few days and decided to buy Aperture 2.0.

What appeals to me about Aperture 2.0, aside from it’s fairly easy image editing capabilities, is its ability to use reference images. This means that I can have an organizational topology that is different from how I’ve structured the files on the filesystem. Why is this such a boon? Because it means I can store digital images in any manner that I please (whatever is conducive to my backup and sharing infrastructure) while still maintaining the ability to organize them into virtual folder/projects/albums. For example, I can have the photos stored on the FreeBSD server making them accessible to all computers in my house and still choose to organize the files differently within Aperture.

Anyway, I’ve only just started to learn the Aperture ropes but so far, I’m fairly happy with its functionality. It isn’t without its bugs. For example, there have been times when thumbnails have gotten out of sync with the actual photos. In those cases, I’ve had to either rebuild the Aperture library by holding down Command and Option while starting Aperture or even so far as deleting all the AP.* folders in the Aperture library and having Aperture regenerate the thumbnails. This is a pain but hopefully it will be fixed soon.

Engineer vs. Photographer

I’m torn.

While I don’t consider myself an artist in any way shape or form, I did at one point in my life, possess a fairly keen artistic sense. One medium of “art” that has interested me since childhood was photography. However, I never really had the financial means to explore it and no one in my family had an interest in photography either. By the time I had a real job as an intern student working at Nortel Networks in Ottawa, I was already studying to the engineering field. As a fairly poor student, I simply couldn’t stomach the temptation of spending piles of money on camera equipment. Many years later, when I finally graduated from engineering and decided to look at pursuing photography as a hobby, the world was just hitting the inflection point of the digital photography age and so I waited again. Finally, in 2006, by ultimatum of my wife and the fact that our baby was just months away, I decided to plop the money down on a Nikon D70s and a set of lenses.

Of course, being an engineer has absolutely nothing to do with being a photographer. However, after having owned the D70s for a couple of years now with newer models sitting comfortably in the model lineup, I struggle continually with equipment envy even though I have nothing photographically to show for that merits getting better equipment.

So, I might as well just admit it now. I’m not a photographer. I don’t have the photographic eye that bestows me with the ability to take pictures to which people will remark, “Wow!” Instead, I’m always the one saying “wow!” whenever I see photographs taken by other people—sometimes using vastly inferior equipment. The people who say “equipment makes not a photographer” (not quoting anyone specific here) were right! But I suspect that I’m not the only person in this camp. A simple stroll down forum lane at such sites as dpreview.com will almost certainly prove it, too. There are countless threads discussing sharpness problems, high ISO noise performance, auto-focus accuracy, etc. and, truthfully, not a lot of “meat” photographically-speaking. I’ll freely admit that I’m a pixel peeper. I’m always after the oh-so-elusive qualities of razor sharp images with zero noise that seem to pervade the works done by other people. It’s almost damning in some ways to see other peoples’ photographs because the only question that I end up asking myself is “why aren’t my pictures that sharp?” rather than “why don’t I see that as a photographic subject or composition?”

Thus, I’ve come to a conclusion. I am an engineer first and foremost and many of the qualities that pervade engineers exist in me. I tend to have an eye for details and I can get excessively consumed over the technical merits of one technology over another. VHS vs. Beta, Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD…I’ve resolved that I’m simply one of those kinds of people that has strong technical convictions who’s always interested in how technology will improve. I’m the kind of person that will spend hours researching which rechargeable batteries are the best or which $100 rotary tool is the best. This is just who I am.

I love photography if for nothing else than to be able to look back at the photos later and get a good chuckle or reminisce on some breath-taking scenery. I also love the fact that photography forces one to make decisions about trade-off. While I’ll likely never amount to being a photographer of any kind, I suspect that won’t stop me from wanting nicer equipment. At the end of the day, the camera is a tool and there’s nothing really wrong with wanting to use a tool that has luxury written all over it—except, perhaps, being somewhat materialistic. Some people will never understand this obsession just as I don’t understand the obsession some people have for expensive cars. To each his own, I say! Touché!

The Mac 360

My first exposure to the Mac was either the Mac 512k or the Mac Plus that resided in my mother’s office at the University of Waterloo. What a remarkable machine it seemed to me at the time, especially compared to the Sun workstations and VT Terminals that were prevalent at the time. The sexy GUI was such a radical departure from the command-line interface (CLI) which was beyond my mental capacity at the time.

Not long after, I gained much greater exposure at a friend’s house who happened to have a Mac Plus. The machine always reminded me of a chicken nugget and I can assure you, my mouth watered at the very sight of one. I played quite a few games on the machine including Wizardry and Dark Castle and was totally enamoured with the amazing output quality produced by the ImageWriter II. It comes as no surprise, then, that when it came time to get my first computer, it had to be a Mac. At that time, the MacSE was largely the only thing I couldn’t afford. By this, I mean that it was pretty much the only Mac (i.e. the bottom of the line one save for the Mac Plus) that my parents would be willing to buy me. Good thing, too, since it was expensive commodity for someone of my age. Getting a Mac was certainly enough to foment anger and possibly even jealousy from my brother who had paid for a lowly PC by himself.

Over the course of high school, I would become consumed with all things Mac. I subscribed to MacUser and bought MacWorld regularly with my allowance. I got Guy Kawasaki’s “The Macintosh Way” and read through it in no time. I met several other Macheads in high school and was pleased to discover the presence of several Macs in our high school—a Mac IIci and a Mac IIcx. Every new Mac from the Mac SE/30 to the Mac IIfx and even some non-Macs like the NeXT Station or the NeXT Cube, became objects of covetous desire. But I loved my lowly Mac SE. I lived with having only two 720k floppy drives for quite a few years until I realized that a hard drive would really speed things up. So, I ended up getting an enormous 80M external hard drive. A couple years later, monitor lust set in after seeing the high resolution displays on the Sun workstations at the university and the tiny built-in screen of the SE just couldn’t cut it anymore. I then ordered a Mobius Full Page Display which also came with a 68030 accelerator and memory upgrade—but that’s a story for another day.

At the dawn of university days, I finally sold my Mac knowing that the Mac, while venerable (at least to me), was simply too old and not supported by the university curriculum. The Mac sold extremely fast and this was well before the days of EBay and Craigslist. I’ll never forget how heart-broken I was when the fellow came and took the Mac away. I felt like I had given up a life-long friend. I lived with my brother’s old 286 computer and our old Commodore 64 for a few months before driving up to Toronto to buy a brand new, cutting edge, 486 computer with VESA Local Bus!

And so for the next 12 years or so, I would live in the land of the PC, content with the brainwashing that the Mac was way overpriced. The truth is, in the day, the Mac WAS terribly eclipsed. Co-operative multitasking was proven to be inferior to pre-emptive multitasking and the System 7 just didn’t seem all that stable to me. With my uber PC in one hand and Internet access on the other (remember, this largely predates The Web), I would learn the ropes the computing world. I soaked up scads of information about Unix and installed Linux (kernel at 0.98alpha or somewhere around there) by downloading some 80 floppy disks that made up Slackware. Like most geeks, I went through DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups 3.11a, OS/2, and WinNT 4.0 to fulfill my productivity needs (read gaming and word processing). Linux, however, remained my main workhorse OS until about 2 years after I graduated from university. My fully-customized FVWM setup was starting to look pretty antiquated even though functionally, it was wonderful. With university assignments clearly out of the way and Window starting to actually look like a reasonable alternative, I finally dumped Linux and started using Windows, reveling in the application panacea.

Turning the clock dials forward to about 2005, life was markedly different. I was married and had just bought a house. The Mac platform that I had abandoned long ago, had moved to a Unix-based machinery and sported a sexy UI (as always). So, in 2005, I purchased a PowerMac G5 Dual 2.3GHz machine. As if almost by fate, my company suddenly offered employee discounting for Apple products and the new operating system, OS X 10.4, dubbed Tiger (my Chinese zodiac sign) was released. Soon after, I was back in Mac land! Getting up to speed on the new Mac platform took a bit of time. QuickDraw and the tome of Inside Macintosh manuals were long superseded by Quartz and the online documentation that accompanied XCode. For the next two years, the Mac would reign as my main computing platform. I would use it to dabble in photography and music. But there were some things about the Mac that drove me bonkers. The one that I gripe the most about is the mouse acceleration under OS X. It’s inaccurate and can’t be tweaked via the native mouse driver. The inability to tweak the mouse acceleration showed me Apple’s attitude about giving their users little latitude for anything. While the UI was beautiful it was not consistent with some window frames being brushed metal, others being gray, and still others retaining a bit of the Aqua interface. As a programmer, consistency for me trumps most other things. The other thing that bothered me about the Mac I had was that the power supply made definite squeaking noises (to which Apple never even acknowledged existence of despite countless reports let alone offering replacements to the power supplies) and when the fans for the computer were running in full tilt, it sounded like a turbine engine was in my office. In the spring of 2007, the nerves got the best of me and, after reading about how much the Linux community had advanced in both the graphics and audio arena, I decided to build a new PC and install Linux on it. Soon after, Fedora Core 7.0 was on the machine running as my main machine. I had to try and find all the open source equivalents of what I formerly did on the Mac. I used all sorts of applications for my photos including the then free LightZone as well as RawTherapee. For IMing I used Pidgin. Of course, WINE, Qemu, and VMware were all freely available to give me access to Windows applications but I was primarily only interested in old games such as Starcraft. Maybe that was the only game I was interested in.

And, thus, all my daily computing would take place on the Mac. For a short while, it was fun getting back into Linux and there truly has been substantial improvement in all areas of the Linux community including the availability of applications to the general usability of the desktop environment. But some things were frustrating. Suspend to RAM would work sometimes and not others. I jumped through hoops to try out all the different power management systems, compiled new kernels, installed new drivers, etc. It just wasn’t reliable. On top of that, the audio system was a mess. Drivers for my new ALC 889a weren’t yet available and getting audio working was another nightmare. When Fedora Core 8.0 came out, I promptly upgrading hoping that PulseAudio would be an end to my audio problems. I finally got sound working but it wasn’t always reliable either. Not having good Flash support for Firefox under Linux was a pain (yes, there’s a Flash plugin but it’s not hard to demonstrate that it’s not really that stable) for web browsing.

It didn’t take me too long thereafter to realize that my life has changed. While I still feel at home recompiling kernels and hacking configuration files using vim, I realize that these are simply things I do not enjoy doing without having the copious free time I once did in my earlier days. It was a long struggle and a tough decision to make but at the beginning of the year, I decided that I wanted a nice quiet Mac that was nimble on power consumption. I wanted for MacWorld to see what Steve would announce and when the best he could do was reveal the Mac Air, I put in my order for a 17″ Macbook Pro. The Intel-based system definitely feels faster than my old G5 though I can’t really make a true comparison since some of that might be attributed to Leopard (though I doubt that’s the case). Along with the Macbook Pro I finally bought Photoshop CS3 and Aperture 2.0 and have, back at my disposal, Logic Pro and iMovie (which I made quite a few videos with previously). This time around, I’m trying to give the Apple applications a go—choosing Mail.app over Entourage and Keynote and Pagers over Powerpointer and Word. So far, I haven’t been disappointed. I might fork out the $79.99 to buy iWorks.

One thing is certain: the computing world will continue to evolve like the Dickens. I can only hope I don’t get caught up in the whirlwind of technological advancement again…at least not for the next four or five years. I have no inclination to upgrade my WinXP boxes to Vista and I think, at least for myself, the machines of today offer almost enough computing power (can one ever truly have enough) to handle 95% of what I do. For the other 5% of the time, I’ll let the computer sip away at the electricity and use the spinning beach ball or progress bar as a reminder to spend more time with my wife and kid.