I’d expected to be back on the blog around the first of the year after taking a bit of time off. And I look around, and I’m headed towards mid-February. But as it’s turned out, the year’s started amazingly busy, with a trip to SoCal for the holiday followed by a week off work used primarily to catch up on “stuff”, another trip down to Morro Bay for the Elephant Seals and a jaunt through Carrizo Plain, and now, I’m up against one more trip down to SoCal for a couple of days with Mom, and then back to the Morro Bay area for a class on photo printing at Light Photographic Workshops.
So I must ask your indulgence for a while longer; I really need to do some homework on the printing before I head out for the class; last fall, after I bought the R2880 printer, I simply wasn’t happy with the prints, and I put it on hold until I had time to focus on it. Then I realized the class timed perfectly with my trip south and added it on, but I’m about a week closer to it than I’d like.
The time so far this year has been productive, if not used for blogging. I decided the theme for 2013 was to be ‘stop letting it slide”, and so I’ve been identifying and working on all of those damn things you know need to get done but you never seem to get around to. I’m finally at the point where the list is shrinking, not growing — but three years of non-stop chaotic firedrill life at Palm (my motto: “if it ain’t on fire, it can wait…”) has built up a bit of, shall we say, deferred maintenance around the other parts of my life.
I’ve also been opening the hood on the computers here at home — Laurie has a new Mini for her photography, I replaced my aging monitor and upgraded my disks. I also made a decision, which seemed simple at the time, to get ready to upgrade the laptop to an SSD, but the reality of an SSD is that I’m not going to buy larger than a 500Gb drive due to cost, and that meant rethinking how to shift around where my data lives so I can shrink from a 750Gb disk inside the machine. At the same time I decided to pull a large hunk o’ data off the NAS onto local disk so I could work with it more conveniently — including about a terabyte of photos from my “retired” files. Suddenly a simple “replace the backup disks and upgrade to a RAID” turned into about two weeks of massaging stuff and throwing old crap away and figuring out where it “should” live, and…
Oh, the joy of opening the hood on something. you never know what you’ll find. but I now have things set up so my laptop only holds about 250Gb of data, everything’s now living on mirrored RAID drives that isn’t in the laptop, everything on ALL of those drives is backed up to a 3TB drive (that’s slow-mirrored with an offsite copy) via both time-machine and Superduper, and I actually can find stuff again. (the problem with the NAS: it doesn’t support Spotlight searches, it didn’t support Time Machine or Superduper so I can’t use it for backups, and putting it all over the network just slowed things down too much. It took me about 2 days to copy 1.2 terabytes off of it just to start the process.
The NAS is still in use, but JUST as a media server, which it’s good at; not for archival storage or backups. But that means I only need to manage one set of offsite backups now, for my system, since the media server is mirrored out from there and doesn’t need a backup. So I simplified my life a fair bit.
But it took some time…. And here we are almost to Valentines day.. whoa.
When life settles down a bit we’ll talk about some of this in more detail; I’m well overdue to update my backup article. And I’ve been spending a bunch of time in Lightroom fixing things and building up some new workflows — how to take an image from shutter click to a final resting spot in any of a number of places — Flickr, my portfolio, as a desktop or iPad wallpaper, as an iPhone wallpaper, or on the wall as a print. Each of those requires somewhat different workflows and not every image goes through every workflow. I kept finding that the “do things at random and hope you remember next time” wasn’t scaling, and so I’ve been figuring out how to keep track of everything to the final product for each kind of image I want to produce. Now that this is (mostly) done, I’m rather happy with the results, so it, too, is worthing of some discussion here.
But first, I have to get back at the printer, so I have fresh habits printing before I go to the class. And so tonight “identify some image candidates” night, followed by “clean the inkjet heads” night, followed by “replace the failed ink cartridge” night, followed by “oh, dammit, I have the wrong ink cartridges” night. So my night with the printer is done — and I head off to get the right inks after I wake up..
So I’m sneaking a quick blog post in, just to say “not dead. just busy. sorry”.
But busy in mostly good ways, although I spent most of today just sorting out the office, and now I can find it again. but I’ve snorted enough dust to keep me sneezing for days…
And after this next trip, I’ll likely not be going anywhere for a while, and won’t have as many deadlines for a while. At least, I hope…
This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at You blink and it’s February….. This article is copyright 2013 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.