Hummm…

I’m not a big Ed Burns fan, but I’ve enjoyed a few of his movies. As someone with a significant investment in home entertainment, and an Apple enthusiast, I’m intrigued by his upcoming movie…

Ed Burns Talks to Us About ‘One Missed Call’, ‘Purple Violets’, and Digital Distribution – Cinematical:

Purple Violets will possibly be the first film ever released exclusively on iTunes. Starting October 9th, the film will be available for four weeks on iTunes, and they’ll see how the numbers are after that.

Go Gators

There may come a day this season when Tennessee looks like a poor test, but going into this weekend I was a little worried. Partially, this is because I am a worrier by nature; but you’ve got to admit, the young Gator defense gave you a little bit of discomfort in the second half against Troy State, right?

There may come a day when I regret saying this, but the Gators looked like they picked up right where they left off in January on Saturday. The only cause for concern was the pass rush, but the run defense was pretty good, so they must have been doing something right in the trenches. Further, all I heard about going into the game was how big and athletic UT’s offensive line is/was. Well, if that’s how we stack up against a good offensive line, I’ll take my chances with the group we’ve got on the D line.

The extremely young secondary looked like they at least held their own. There were some mix-ups in coverage, but it looked like there were some pretty good tacklers in this mix.

And the offense? Even if UT is having a down year, it’s still an SEC defense – and if I recall, the product of some pretty good recruiting classes brought in by Coach Fulmer. Even in a down year, UT isn’t Troy State… and that was a world of hurt the UF offense put on UT.

Yep, Saturday’s game has me excited.

iLife

My last copy of iPhoto dated way back to version four. (And yes, this is another Mac entry… it’s all I’ve got to talk about… I haven’t been doing anything else.) I haven’t fiddled with any of the other iLife apps, but the new version of iPhoto has really impressed me. There aren’t a lot more editing tools, but the ones I’ve used are better. In particular, the touch-up tool has worked wonders on some of my scans of older pictures.

In the past I’ve opened images in Photoshop (Elements) and painstakingly touched up blemishes, scratches, and dust artifacts with a brush tool (sampling adjacent color and painting in the scratch a pixel or two at a time). There was probably an easier way, but I’m a hard way kind of guy. The touch-up tool in the latest iPhoto works like a brush, but it does a pretty good job of picking up the surrounding color and just filling in the scratch, without smearing or coloring over the stuff that was o.k.

Color me impressed.

.Mac web galleries

I’ve been playing with the new computer, and it’s pretty cool and all; but I was looking forward to playing with the new iLife apps just as much. Here’s a few quick albums I threw together, including some sentimental favorites from a trip to Sanibel Island (FL) ten years ago.

http://gallery.mac.com/johnkauffman#gallery

I’m just getting started, but I’d really like to find a simple way to embed individual web gallery images in a WordPress blog. Maybe I should save a little fun for next weekend.

Decisions

The first think I thought when I saw the new iMacs was, “oh that looks cool.” The second thing I thought was, “that keyboard might take some getting used to.”

Think calculator with large buttons. There’s not a lot of travel to the keys, and they’re pretty sensitive, so your fingers can really glide over the keys with little effort. However, I already miss contoured keys. I think I rely on the feedback the touch of a contoured key gives when my fingers don’t strike the center. Even the keys on my iBook and PowerBook keyboards aren’t flat like the iMac keys. It’s not bad, but the real test will be when I do some work with it. Maybe I’ll try plugging it into the Dell at the office and give it a work out for the day. (This kind of thing qualifies as fun around here.)

As someone who’s never discarded an old computer (or its peripherals), I’ve got plenty of keyboards to choose from if this one doesn’t pan out. I’ve got a cordless Logitech keyboard that’s itching for more use.

The time is now

Friends, have I got news for you. A “girl’s shopping day” turned out in my favor, due to the efforts a friend of Cheryl’s. After a fair bit of arm twisting, Cheryl was convinced to surprise me with a new 20 inch iMac and iPod Nano yesterday evening. (My birthday is right around the corner.) It was quite a surprise… when I received the email from the Apple Store containing the receipt… three hours before they got home.

I thought I might feign surprise when Cheryl got home, but I’m a terrible actor. Then she asked me straight up: “are you surprised?” The correct answer would have been an enthusiastic “yes,” but I couldn’t bring myself to lie under direct examination. Now I feel like a heel… albeit one with a great new computer.

Love is in the air.

Too much reality

My wife spends most of her time at work behind a desk. It’s that little bit of time that she doesn’t that gets interesting. It can be hard to reconcile the high school girl I met over a peeled cat in anatomy class, with the person who straps a gun on a few times a year. My wife is not in the military, the reserves, or with the police, so she doesn’t face the kind of danger many people do. Even so, it’s kind of weird to see her go off into the night dressed like a TV drama cop dressed for a raid. Usually it doesn’t bother me, but the other night I was standing next to her when she retrieved her handgun from it’s locked hiding place. I stood there while she loaded it to capacity, each round having one purpose: to kill someone.

She’s never fired it anyplace other than a shooting range, and I don’t think any of her coworkers have either. Still, it’s hard to look at that thing we keep locked away and not see what it represents. It’s hard not to imagine the reason she carries it, and why she might need to use it.

If it gives me pause to see my wife leave home armed at night, to make sure folks on probation are where they’re supposed to be, how much more difficult must it be for the families of those who leave home certain they will have cause to fire their weapon? Sometimes I hear about the cavalier attitude others in her department have. Sometimes there’s a joke involved when she leaves. Sometimes I think there isn’t anything funny about it at all.

It’s been said that our capacity to make war has gotten too easy, that too few of us need to make any real sacrifice. A mostly annonymous few place themselves in danger while the rest of us carry on untouched, as if nothing has changed… except the stickers that adorn the backs of our cars. I thought about it again as my wife slid her handgun into it’s holster at her side, and said “bye,” in her customary, tender way.

I wonder what is more absurd; my flair for the melodramatic, my wife having to carry a gun, or a world that requires it.

Gorillas Now ‘Critically Endangered’

Newsvine – Gorillas Now ‘Critically Endangered’

“Great apes are our closest living relatives and very special creatures,” Russ Mittermeier, head of IUCN’s Primate Specialist Group, told The Associated Press. “We could fit all the remaining great apes in the world into two or three large football stadiums. There just aren’t very many left.”

“In the last 10 years, Ebola is the single largest killer of apes. Poaching is a close second,” said Peter Walsh, a member if IUCN’s Primate Specialist Group, told the AP. “Ebola is knocking down populations to a level where they won’t bounce back. The rate of decline is dizzying. If it continues, we’ll lose them in 10-12 years.”

All wet

We recently had a Wii family gathering. Beth, Adam and mémère were playing golf on Wii Sports, and Adam was having a grand time hitting his ball in the water.

Mémère: “Adam, you don’t really want to hit your ball in the water do you?”

The rest of us: “Yeah, he really does.”

Adam: “Ta, DAAAAAA!” (With a great big smile on his face.)

A day later, a little opinion

It’s widely assumed that the administration scheduled General Petraeus’ testimony before congress on 9/10 and 9/11 to emphasize “what’s at stake,” but to me, it only emphasizes why I can’t fully trust what I’m being told.

If the administration dishonestly linked 9/11 and Iraq to start a war, if they cherry picked or invented evidence to justify the war, if they strong-armed the White House press corps to suppress dissent on the war, how can we believe their evidence to justify continuing the war?

I want to trust someone. I want to believe General Petraeus is an honest, principled man. However, I can’t ignore what appears to be this administration’s tendency to surround themselves with “yes” men. Do we believe the general when he tells us Iraqi deaths are down, or do we believe some press reports which suggest they may still be trending up? (The AP suggests it’s still trending up, but some other surveys do tend to agree with the General’s assessment.) Do we believe the general when he tells us the progress in Anbar can be attributed to the surge, or do we believe common sense which tells us the violence started coming down several months before the surge started? Do we believe his comments that Anbar may be evidence of reconciliation, or do we share others’ fears that it is evidence of Sunnis consolidating their power for an inevitable clash with a Shiite dominated government in Baghdad? (“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”) Do we celebrate the evidence that fewer people are being killed in Baghdad, or do we morn the evidence that there aren’t nearly so many Sunis left in Baghdad for Shiites to kill? Do we take the General at his word that the Iraqi security forces are getting better, or do we worry that the predominently Shiite Iraqi security forces seem to focus on Sunni militias? Should we be optimistic because of his reassurance that al-Quaeda’s presence in Anbar is declining, should we be wary because others feel al-Quaeda’s numbers are rising in Ninevah, or do we once again shout out in frustration that al-Quaeda may not have been there at all if not for this damn war?

I want to trust someone, but these days has to be earned. Thanks to Bush and Cheney it won’t come cheap.