Over the course of the week I've been moving all my data and other odds and ends off my old Windows PC and onto a new Macbook Pro and for the most part it's as simple as you would expect. The only times when things get a little more tricky is when you are trying to move application data that maintains paths to files on the system, such as Lightroom and iTunes do. Luckily in the case of Lightroom the move was fairly simple.

Note: Adobe says that the official way to move files from one computer to another is to use the export catalog feature, move the catalog over, then import. Well, that's nice, but 20K raw photos would take forever to export and I didn't want to mess with that if I could avoid it.

So, plan B was to simply move everything over to the Mac, open up Lightroom, and hope for the best. Here's what I did ...

1. Make sure that you have the same exact Lightroom version on both computers as there can be differences in the catalog between versions. I did this using 1.4.1.

2. Copy all your Lightroom data from Windows onto your Mac either via an external drive or if you want you can just do it over the network. In specific, you need to copy the Lightroom directory under your "My Pictures" folder which holds your catalog file, preview files, etc, plus you need your original image files. Hopefully you don't have your original photo files spread out all over the place because if you do then this will be more of a pain, so you might want to fix that first.

3. Simply remove the Lightroom folder on your Mac (assuming it's empty) and replace it with the one from you Windows PC. Since Lightroom uses the same exact catalog format on both OS' it won't have any problems reading the catalog off your Windows PC.

4. Now open up Lightroom on your Mac and you should see all of your images (with previews), your collections, metadata, etc. In the Library view you should see all the folders in the Folders dialog marked in red, which indicates that Lightroom can't find where those folders are on the system.

5. For each folder in the Folders dialog just right click and select "locate missing folder", then use the file navigator to point to wherever you copied that folder to on your Mac. Lightroom should then go through all the files that were in that folder and check that they are there. Once it's done that folder should be back to working as usual. Just repeat this for all your folders and you're done.

This process worked out great for me and it only took a few minutes to fix up Lightroom after I had copied everything over to my Mac. One thing that definitely helped the situation is that I had been letting Lightroom manage all my original photos and it was storing them in simple date based folders where the top level folder was the year the photo was taken. So I only had 4 folders for 2005-2008 which needed to be updated with their new location. If you use tons of different folders then this part would take you a bit longer.

My Ferrari 3400 has aged pretty badly and now that the defacto laptop option in our team has become MacBooks it is finally time to give in and be assimilated. So here's some impressions after my first day on a Mac. Note that Windows holds no dear place in my heart and I have actually wanted to rid myself of it for quite some time. My main computing goals outside of work are stability and simplicity.

• So far the change in keyboard is probably the most annoying difference. I'm sure it's just a matter of learning the differences, but nonetheless it can be frustrating. Things I'm not particularly fond of on the Mac are the loss of having both a backspace and delete key, and the addition extra command key. That and the fact that the control key is in a different position. blarg.
• The touchpad is sweet. I still need to get a bluetooth mouse 'cuz it's just faster and more useful, but the touchpad is silky smooth. It took me 'til this afternoon to figure out you can scroll by using 2 fingers. super sweet. I do still long for the right click, but it's not a big deal.
• The overall look is just much more comfy than Windows. You can tell Apple goes the extra mile to apply little details that make your desktop look and feel nicer. Shadows between overlapping windows, lots of little animations, things bouncing in the dock. I'm sure you can do all that in Windows, but on a Mac they are default.
• I wasn't impressed with my first attempt to install an app though. I went to download and install Firefox and since I didn't know anything about .dmg files it was a little confusing. I actually ran the app out of the mounted .dmg at first because I hadn't realized you need to copy things into the "Applications" folder to install it. Once you sort that out it's fairly straight forward, but as a total newb it was not apparent to me at all.

Most of the rest has been more or less equivalent to the Windows experience IMO. The "System Preferences" on a Mac does seem much better organized and easier to modify than the Windows "Control Panel". I actually learned a number of things just be fidgeting around in there a bit.

Now the one thing I want more than anything is the ability to paste-selection using a mouse center click. I sure hope that's possible on a Mac. That's probably the only thing I have felt my Solaris desktop at work does so much better than Windows. Oh, that and the ability to have a window roll up on a double click rather than minimize. Those two features are gold.

Supposedly the U.S. government felt that it would be saving folks some energy costs by extending daylight savings by an extra month, but reports of that actually happening have been inconclusive. What it definitely has not done, at least in my case, is made me more productive because just when sunrise and morning light were hitting that perfect time of 6:30am here in the bay area, DST kicked in and it's now still dark out well past 7am. What's up with that?

I am generally a morning person, but there is one thing that I cannot handle and that is getting up when it's still dark out. Won't do it, no way, no how. Not unless I am forced. So thanks to the new DST policy my work schedule is out of wack and on days where I do have to get up early I am grumpy.

So thanks for nothing you lame-o U.S. government peoples. You've ruined daylight savings for me and I'll likely never forgive you.

P.S. i didn't even mention how messed up by cell phone is with the new DST times. all of my calendar appointments are off by an hour. again, productivity down the tubes thanks to DST.

From my aunt's ranch in Sonoma, CA on a foggy morning.

This is probably true in other states as well, but I was recently surprised to find out that voters who are registered as "independent" in California have an opportunity to vote in the Democrat Party primary if they wish. Simply ask for the ballot when you get to your polling station and that's it.

So if you're a registered independent and feel like you would like to take part in the Obama vs. Clinton showdown, then do it! I know I am.

I've only been home a matter of days and already 5 months worth of travel seems to be officially making its way into the "past". For those that somehow missed it and are interested, I spent 5 months traveling all around South America from Ecuador to Antarctica and all the way back to Colombia. You can read about the trip itself via the Wandering Gringos blog and browse the Wandering Gringos photos on Flickr.

I thought it would be strange and in some ways uncomfortable the first few weeks being home but actually it has been really easy. It's truly amazing how fast you can adapt to a virtual 180 degree turn in your life without even missing a step. So, welcome home me!

The travel blog for the South America trip is here

I never mess with the MT blog software I use because quite frankly I don't need to, it's simple, it's stable, and it just gets the job done. I had been running MT 2.64 for well over a year and I wouldn't even have updated it if it weren't for the fact that I wanted to do some research on the latest features from MT to compare with Roller.

Here's some quick notes from the upgrade and first impressions ...

1. The MT upgrade process is very slick and nicely automated, something I think we should definitely aim for a bit more in Roller. The most notable benefit being the automation of the entire database upgrade process, schema updates and all. It would be very nice to see Roller offer a way to simply drop new .war files into a container and handle all the db upgrade (the most significant part of any upgrade) stuff via a tidy GUI.

2. The MT interface is still a bit more polished than Roller, but that's to be expected considering that Roller is an open source project and doesn't get the same level of commitment. However, despite the MT interface looking "prettier" I would say that for the most part the features and usability are fairly comparable. With a modest amount of additional work I think that Roller can be equal or better than MT as far as features and usability are concerned.

3. MT offers a wider assortment of tools for system admins for getting insight into what's happening across all the blogs controlled by the installation. This is definitely one of Roller's shortcomings in my mind, but it makes sense because we just don't have as big a need to invest in that part of the software considering that it's not nearly as visible to most users. We have bigger things to work on, for now.

4. MT still does not set the published date to the date the entry is actually published, which has always surprised me. Instead they populate that field at the time that entry editing first starts and so if you take 20 minutes to publish an entry like this one then you have the wrong pubtime, and certainly if you draft entries and finish them on different days you have an entirely wrong date. This is one of the small things that bugs me for some reason.

5. The entry posting interface is very similar to Roller (I suppose there is only so many ways to do a blog posting interface) and works well, but all in all I think that WordPress has the best posting interface I've seen. I think that WordPress' interface may be a bit cluttered but they have all the right pieces for publishing available on one page, which Roller is currently missing because you can't A) upload a file at publishing time and B) add new categories at publishing time. Those are 2 important things we really need to fix in Roller.

I'm sure I could go on with a handful more, but I'll leave it at that for now. At the end of the day I am happy to say that Roller has what I believe is a very comparable interface to MT, which is good news because MT is the most used blog publishing software on the web (i think).

personA: "I don't like the word 'hike', it just doesn't sound like a fun thing ..."

personB: "Well, then throw in a power bar and call it a picnic."

=)

Took my new 18-200mm VR lens out for a spin on Saturday evening at the Palace of Fine Art in San Francisco and the photos are now online. This was really the perfect situation for the VR lens and to be honest it was even better than I had been imagining. The lens alone is great and has produced some great quality images, but then add in the VR technology and you've got a seriously awesome lens. I took plenty of shots using shutter speeds less than 1/50 sec and for the most part they turned out clear and crisp. Now I'm just bummed I didn't have it for my Asia trip, but oh well.

It's not too often that I consider it a bummer to be living here in California, but unfortunately today is one of those days. There is a total lunar eclipse happening today and basically the western U.S. and eastern Australia are the only places where you won't really be able to see it. Bummer, because this could have been a good photography option.

This diagram says it all ...

Over the past couple of years I've gone through a number of feed readers, each one improving over the last and the lastest in that line is Google Reader. I switched to Google Reader a few days ago after deciding that Newshutch just wasn't cutting it anymore.

Now I'm not what I would consider an avid feed reader or data junky, but I do have a modest and growing list of feeds that I keep up with and of course you need to have a decent tool to do that. When I first started reading feeds I was using desktop tools because I didn't think the online offerings were all that impressive. I used Thunderbird for a little while but found the experience uninspiring. RSSOwl got a bit of usage time but I never really felt comfortable with it. BlogBridge was pretty nice and I used it for a while but I never felt that their feed list synchronization stuff worked properly and ultimately once there were better online readers I had to jump ship. Newshutch was the online reader I had been using up until now, but after a few days using Google Reader I am officially pulling the plug on Newshutch.

It's not that Google Reader is anything miraculous, but it's certainly a step up and fixes some of the very annoying behaviors of Newshutch that I can no longer stand. The big things that forced me off of Newshutch is that they had problems with updating the feeds regularly and that gets really annoying with feeds that change frequently, so that's the main reason they got dropped. The big wins for Google Reader over Newshutch are that they let you view a composite of all entries in a folder rather than forcing you to read one feed at a time, which was really lame. Google Reader also auto marks things as read while you scroll through them which is a nice little perk because I hated having to manually mark all the entries as read, and if you ever forget you end up re-reading things =(

omg, omg, omg! i finally got my VR lens. whoot!

seriously though, it's been tough to find these lenses and after months of looking i've finally succeeded. unfortunately i haven't had much of a chance to play with it since it was night time before i got home today but after messing around with it a bit i am very satisfied. i plan to do an experimentation series to really test out the VR technology and see well it works, but if you click through to flickr and check the properties from the image above you'll see that it was shot at iso 200, 1.3 sec shutter and it turned out pretty darn good.

anyways, i'll have something more interesting to look at after the weekend ;)

I finally finished processing all the photos from my Indochine Trip back in December/January, so they are up on Flickr now.

I have to say that I am amazed at how much work it is to process a large batch of photos like this one (2500+ in this case). I knew it would be a fair amount of work, but I definintely underestimated how much. Makes me really appreciate good photo processing software.

weeklyshot.org is probably one of the best photography sites I've found in a while. You get lots of beautiful pics from a talented group of photographers, constantly being updated, and all the photos follow a specific theme so you get to know what the photographer was going for with each shot. Careful though, it's easy to spend hours trolling through all their photos =)