I went to the 48th annual Eeyore’s birthday. It was crazy crowded and trying to find parking was a definite problem.

There were a couple of drum pits with people dancing and playing different drums. But it was very odd. They were closely surrounded by people watching and taking pictures. I think at least half of the crowd had cameras of one type. Maybe about 10% had professional DSLRs. I definitely felt out of place. Did people want to just dance and play music without being watched or photographed? Did they mind photographers taking their pictures from a long distance? Or from a close distance? Or at an extreme close up position? I saw Kirk Tuck there taking pictures. He posted his view about this here. I wonder if he was talking about me? I was using my Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L lens with the lens hood on. So it might look like a “big ass zoom lens”, but it is pretty equivalent to a 50mm lens. 70mm does not get you that much farther away from a person. Some more viewpoints about street photography are here.

There was a game of unicycle tag football going on. I don’t know what it had in common with Eeyore. But it was interesting to take pictures of.

More after the cut, including some possible NSFW pictures of painted costumes…

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With the new computer setup, the following is my workflow.

• Take pictures/video.
• Backup the data from the compact flash card to the Colorspace UDMA.
• Copy the data from the card onto the computer via a Lexar Professional Firewire 800 CF Reader.
• The data resides on the OCZ RevoDrive. This is known as the temporary drive (because I don’t care if I lose it at this stage). But the PCI-E interface combined with 4 SSD drives in RAID0 mode makes for blinding access rates (read up to 740 MB/s, write up to 690 MB/s).
• Preview the pictures with Adobe Bridge.
• Process the data with Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Premier Pro/Adobe After Effects. 16 Gb and 6 3.2Ghz cores make for fast work.
• Save the data on the temporary drive.
• When happy with the final product, copy the data to the local Seagate Terrabyte drive.
• Back the data up over Gigabit Ethernet to the Synology NAS RAID6 array.
• Occasionally sync the NAS RAID6 array to a duplicate NAD RAID6 array (which is kept offsite at my office).

As for timings, for 200 files (2758MB) on a Photofast 533X Plus Compact Flash Card, it takes:

• 3 minutes, 35 seconds to backup to the Colorspace UDMA.
• 1 minute, 8 seconds to copy from the Lexar Professional Firewire 800 CF Reader to the OCZ RevoDrive.
• 1 minute, 28 seconds to copy from the Colorspace UDMA (via USB 2.0) to the OCZ RevoDrive.
• 1 minute, 56 seconds for Adobe Bridge to cache thumbnail and preview images on the OCZ RevoDrive.

I am curious how fast the Lexar Professional USB 3.0 Dual-Slot Reader will be on my system.

I like my new computer. It is pretty fast. And great for picture processing and video editing. The only drawback is that it generates a lot of heat. My house air conditioner is not well suited for keeping my office cold while keeping the rest of my house warm (79). Maybe I should buy a window AC?

It’s always a little scary putting a bunch of components together. You never know if the computer will work correctly when you turn it on for the first time.

Here is what I purchased:

Antec Nine Hundred Two Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case

GIGABYTE GA-890FXA-UD5 AM3 AMD 890FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard

AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition Thuban 3.2GHz 6 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 125W Six-Core Desktop Processor

Thermaltake Black Widow W0319RU 850W ATX 12V v2.3, EPS 12V v2.91 CrossFire Certified 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply

Kingston 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Desktop Memory Model

Intel X25-M Mainstream SSDSA2MH160G2R5 2.5" 160GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive

OCZ RevoDrive X2 OCZSSDPX-1RVDX0240 PCI-E 240GB PCI-Express x4 MLC Internal Solid State Drive

Seagate Barracuda XT ST32000641AS 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5"

Pioneer Black 12X BD-R 2X BD-RE 16X DVD+R 5X DVD-RAM 8X BD-ROM 4MB Cache SATA Internal Blu-ray Burner Blu-ray Disc/DVD/CD Writer

Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit 1-Pack for System Builders – OEM

Synology DS411J 4100 4TB (4x1TB) DiskStation 4-bay NAS Server for Small Office and Home Use

Synology DS411+ Diskless System DiskStation 4-bay All-in-1 NAS Server for SMB Users

While I technically did not buy them when I bought my computer, I did buy some more toys for speed and reliability recently. They were the RevoDrive and the two Synology RAID NAS drives.

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with the reliability of my data storage. I used to have Buffalo Terrastation NAS drive. This used RAID5. Now RAID5 is good for reliability. But if a second drive fails during a rebuild of the first failed drive, then you can lose your data.

While doing research, I came across Synology. They supported RAID6 (among all of the others) and they supported a bunch of other features. They are actually small computers running Linux. I liked the fact that I would not need another computer to synchronize my data between the two NAS storage units. I could ssh directly into the NAS box and perform my rsync there.

So I bought a Synology DS411J with 1.78 Terrabytes of storage. I definitely made a mistake here and under-bought for my future needs. Because when I was satisfied with the Synology architecture, I bought a Synology DS411+ with 5.6 terrabytes. They are both 4 drive bay systems. But the 411+ has a faster CPU which will help in computing checksums during rsyncs.

Another thing that worried me is what would happen if my house burned down or some thief stole my computer equipment? There were no backups. So I decided to have two NAS drives. One would be in my house and the second would be at work. I could easily keep them synced up. And I would have backups in those two scenarios. Of course, if Austin got nuked and I survived, I would still lose my data. A slightly better scenario would be to keep the second NAS in some other state (like Florida).

My friend, Ryan Harper, made another home-brewed beer for me to try out. He called it a Winter Warmer. Unfortunately, I was not able to notice the subtle tastes that he was associating with it. But it was a good beer!

I woke up on a narrow ledge, bleeding profusely. Large clouds of dust are swirling around within the confines of my safe haven. But the muffled sounds of explosions are steadily growing louder. I must move on. I roll down and splash into a muddy drainage tunnel. Dim lights are receding off into the distance. It must be other survivors leaving the area. I start running in an effort to catch up with them. But I must have been mistaken. There is only one light now. I am not giving up. Even one person can make a difference now. However, my hopes dash when I see that it is not a human. But a steadily plodding machine. I’m too tired to care now what happens. I only have enough energy to tie a rope around a protruding plate and hang on for the ride. My efforts seemed to have uncovered some stenciled letters. GeekBot 000000010000000? A one in a sea of zeroes? At least the writing is in English. I pass out again…