I just blew in last night from OOT (out of town). I have not had a chance to
get in on this short thread, because the phone lines in the hotel were sub-par.
You can have the greatest laptop in the world, with all the gizmos and
whatnots, but if the infrastructure fails you...
The "Great Texas Showdown" was a lot of fun. At one point I wasn't even sure I
would attend as I was OOT doing an installation at a customer site.
Fortunately everything went great and we finished a day early. (I love
knowledgeable and technically astute customers, they make my life easier and
this one is amongst the best I have dealt with.)
The evening before, Alfredo and I had dinner together and we indeed did chat
about a lot of things. We spent about 30 seconds discussing the format of the
presentation. As Alfredo has already mentioned, I discussed how have been able
to get back into photography via the digital route. In the late 60s and
through the 70s, I carried a camera like most people today carry a cell phone.
I had access to a fully equipped darkroom for some years at the university.
After university, a darkroom was not at the top of my priorities. Later on,
with kids under foot, the last thing I wanted were corrosive chemicals in the
(small) house. Still later on, one hour developing shops started appearing.
The results were never what I wanted but they were good enough for recording
events and memories. Not for photography for the sake of photography.
In the nineties, I watched as digital cameras first appeared and evolved. At
first the results were "less than good." But they evolved rapidly. When they
hit the megapixel range, I looked closer but continued to wait on the
sidelines. I almost jumped in when they hit the 2 megapixel range. I
ultimately did not jump in then, but I did start focusing (pun intended) on the
brands that I would consider later. I narrowed it down to Nikon, Kodak,
Olympus and Canon. Then the 3 megapixel cameras arrived and that was it. I
ordered a Nikon 990 and it arrived in late May of this year.
The learning curve on digital photography, at least for me, was quite steep.
The camera itself comes with a voluminous user manual. Yes, it can be used in
fully automatic mode, but where is the fun in that? It can also be used in
semi automatic and manual modes. Next comes the computer side of things.
Photoshop has a very steep learning curve and is buggy to boot. Finally,
comes the printing part. For this I selected the Epson 875DC printer. If I do
everything right, it can produce 8X10 pictures that are indistinguishable from
regular color prints. The first prints were nice, but as I learned more and
tweaked the settings, the results became, to my eye, quite sensational. This
was what I wanted to be able to do with a camera.
But coupling the camera with a computer, I can do so much more compared to what
I could achieve in the darkroom 25+ years ago. I can correct composition er
rors, get rid of objects and people in pictures, change the lighting effects,
all sorts of things. I feel like a little boy again discovering a whole new
world. I have started an album in which I am placing selected results. This
is the album that Alfredo perused. So far since I acquired the camera about 5
months ago, I have shot over one thousand pictures. I have printed about 30
8X10s and maybe 100 4X6s, many are duplicates for family. This is the fun part
with a digital camera, you can shoot a huge amount of pictures and only end up
using a few. You use up nothing but a little energy. You save an awful lot of
money that way. For example, at the pumpkin patch recently, I took about 50
pictures of my daughters running around the pumpkins. A polarizing filter
really enhances the shy and the clouds.
Now, I am looking into and experimenting with specialty papers for the printer
and that opens up to me, yet another dimension in the realm of digital
photography.
Perusing the web, I come across sites that discuss DP and the various aspects
and I learn. It's great.
As for the actual presentation at GHRUG. It was short and people had lots of
questions. I must say that Alfredo has a nice tool in his PowerBook. Even the
power brick is very futuristic-looking. It looks a lot better than the one for
my Compaq, which simply consists of a plain 10 foot long black cable. (The
brick is inside the machine.) Alfredo can swap devices in his PowerBook by
just pressing a button. He can put in a CD-ROM and swap it for a DVD-ROM or an
extra battery. On my machine, with Windows 2000, I have to tell Windows that I
am stopping the device. So for example, let's say I want to take out the CD-RW
and the LS-120 drive at the same time and replace them with say a DVD-ROM and
an extra battery for the plane ride. If the system is running, I have to stop
the CD-RW and the LS-120 (this requires some mouse clicks,) pull them out and
then insert the DVD-ROM and the extra battery or the extra drive. If the
system is off, thankfully, I can just swap the devices in a few seconds.
We ran over on the time and they kicked us out. Alfredo's PowerBook shut down
within a few seconds. I had to wait an extra 4 minutes because I had stupidly
started burning a CD-R with our software for someone that requested one earlier
that day and was leaving within the hour. The Armada is not sophisticated
enough to stop burning a CD-R and allow me to restart it later. I did move the
laptop from the front of the room to the back while it was burning the CD-R,
but I did not want to walk any further than that. I was afraid of dropping it.
Kind regards,
Denys. . .
Denys Beauchemin
HICOMP
(800) 323-8863 (281) 288-7438 Fax: (281) 355-6879
denys at hicomp.com www.hicomp.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Bailie, Jack [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, November 14, 2000 1:49 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The great showdown in Texas?
>From an audience member perspective:
It was very civil and informative. Both gentlemen showed their road warrior
equipment - some necessary for business and some to help occupy those boring
hotel room and airline hours and help find your way when you get lost.
Since I've never owned a laptop, my objective was to learn what I might use
in my retirement (next year) when I'm doing more leisure travel. I learned a
great deal from them - the main thing - that a good laptop can now very
effectively be your only machine. That's how I'm leaning now. I'll almost
certainly stay a Wintel user, not because of anything I heard from Denys or
Alfredo, just because that's what I've been using since I gave up my Apple
IIe many years ago.
Thanks Denys and Alfredo and GHRUG for the presentation.
Jack
-----Original Message-----
From: F. Alfredo Rego [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, November 14, 2000 12:02 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: The great showdown in Texas?
I just received a private message:
>P.S. What happened during the great showdown in Texas? Since neither
>you nor Denys is talking about I assume it was a draw.
There was no showdown, really. Denys talked about his Laptop PC and
I talked about my Mac PowerBook. It turns out that Denys and I have
more similarities (in terms of what we do with our portable computers)
than differences (in terms of the computers themselves). I learned a
lot about Windows 2000 (which I run on my Mac PowerBook using Virtual
PC) and I hope Denys got something of interest about Mac OS. I also
hope that the audience got a better feel for the differences and
similarities of both kinds of systems.
Denys was a very gracious host and he took me out to dinner the
evening before the conference. I had the pleasure of enjoying his
wonderful digital photographic work because he brought some pictures
along. Bits are bits and pixels are pixels, regardless of the
particular computers that we may happen to use to manipulate them.
The main difference, then, has to do with the eye of the photographer.
Denys is a very good photographer and his work will look as good when
done on a PC or on a Mac (well... perhaps slightly better when done
on a Mac, but that's another story :-)
We both agreed that travel takes a tremendous toll on us. Denys
seems interested in continuing to travel whereas I am more interested
in staying at home, programming away in the nice development environment
that I have set up through the years. This is the only significant
difference I see :-)
I was impressed to see Cecile Chi (of Pittsburgh fame in Pennsylvania)
in Houston. You travel a lot, Cecile!
_______________
| |
| |
| r | Alfredo [log in to unmask]
| e | http://www.adager.com
| g | F. Alfredo Rego
| a | Manager, R & D Labs
| d | Adager Corporation
| A | Sun Valley, Idaho 83353-3000 U.S.A.
| |
|_______________|
|
