Rare change this afternoon with me feverishly working on my Mac Pro getting a bunch of stuff done. Running a ton of apps and everything working hard. It’s clear I need more cores though. It’s all just busy.

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A few months ago I took the plunge back into aquariums. I got a small, mini-reef setup and put it in the basement. We were trying to figure out where to put it and considering a lot of things including shade from natural light, viewing options, cleaning clearance and very importantly proximity to electricity. Relative to the last item we placed it conveniently 1-foot from an outlet. It is important to note that up to this point, we had never had an occasion to use this outlet.

We put the tank in place, filled it with water and salt, and went to start it up but nothing worked. We quickly figured out the electric outlet wasn’t working. Noting that we have dozens and dozens of switched outlets (however only the top plugs) we tried a bunch of stuff and nothing worked. There was no electricity there. Needing to get the tank running I ran the cord in front of some stairs and plugged it in a few feet away to deal with later.

Today my father-in-law, Don Olson, came over and lead the charge dealing with this. I’m more than happy to dive head first into the most complex of networks and spiders web of 10Base-T cables, but when it comes to 110v AC I haven’t got a clue. Don on the other hand is the reverse and feels totally at ease with these odd white and black wires.

We spent 2 hours flipping switches and breakers and trying to reverse engineer what the three sets of wires were that came into this box. We found out it was switched, but the whole outlet was switched, and the switch was upstairs while the outlet was downstairs. We needed that to change but had to first figure out what everything did. After ruminating about future legislative requirements to leave an electrical blueprint of a house after construction, Don was able to reconstruct what was going on.

Drawing that picture and putting the right 1’s, 2’s, 3’s and 4’s next to each thing took a little over 2 hours. Getting it working the way we needed it to work took about 10 minutes. Reminded me of debugging a network problem. Same sort of ratios.

Anyway, I now no longer have an extension cord running across the stairs and the tank looks better, at least the outside of it does. It’s still a mess inside the water. Big thanks to Don! Great to have handy father-in-laws!

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Lightroom 2 was just released today and I immediately got the upgrade. After waiting a bit to get the serial number for the new version I installed it and upgraded my catalogs. Everything worked perfectly.

One of the first things I wanted to test was using Lightroom in 64-bit mode. My Mac Pro has 7 gig of RAM so enabling 64-bit would give Lightroom some room to stretch. Here is the 32-bit snapshot of memory usage after some extensive usage.

and here we are after unchecking the “32-bit” checkbox on Lightroom 2.app.

Note that at launch Lightroom loaded into it’s typical footprint. After I scanned through a few thousand photos though it had allocated itself out into some nice 64-bit space. And as a user, it’s very noticeable. I was able to flip around in my catalog so much faster than in 32-bit mode and I noticed that I seemed to be thrashing the hard disk a lot less.

Lightroom is the first application that I’ll use on a regular basis where 64-bit makes a big difference. Sure server applications benefit from 64-bit, but seeing Lightroom perform so much faster in 64-bit makes me really hope that most of my applications are there soon.

Congrats to the Lightroom team for getting this milestone in!

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I just installed the WordPress application on my iPhone and am testing it out. It will be fun to be able to post and edit on the road!

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Cup Plants Flowering, originally uploaded by thingles.

The cup plants have decided to pop open their flowers. In a week there will be a couple hundred of these yellow flowers in the yard, along with a fleet of bees harvesting pollen.

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We just returned from the 2008 Winnipeg Folk Festival. Every year we pick up around 20 albums from performers this year. We’ve gone entirely digital for our music now so this year I just did it all online after we got home. It’s nice to not have to rip everything. We got 19 albums this year, and there are 3 more that I can’t find digitally and have mailed the artists to see if I can get. Here are our picks for this year.

• The Beautiful Girls - Water, We’re Already Gone and Ziggurats
• Charlie Louvin - Charlie Louvin
• The Fugitives - In Streetlight Communion
• The Infamous Stringdusters - The Infamous Stringdusters
• Jakob Dylan - Seeing Things
• Jim White - Drill a Hole In That Substrate and Tell Me What You See, Transnormal Skiperoo
• JP HOE - The Here In Review EP
• Justin Townes Earle - The Good Life
• Little Miss Higgins - Junction City, The West Was Burning
• Martha Scanlon - The West Was Burning
• Ndidi Onukwulu - The Contradictor
• Old Man Luedecke - Hinterland
• The Red Stick Ramblers - Made In the Shade
• Spider John Koerner - Star Geezer
• The Weakerthans - Reunion Tour

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A few days ago the driveway was removed and prepared for a brand new asphalt driveway. I had charged my camera to get a good time-elapsed movie of the asphalt being put in. It’s a pretty cool thing to watch. Okay, the video is a bit long…

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This past Thursday the contractor got started with our driveway removal. I was watching, and realized it was a great time-lapse opportunity! The music for this one may not be to everyone’s taste — but the theme seemed spot on!

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Mazie and I had our very first Tiny Tonka T-Ball game last night. Sorry, no pictures or video from it. Tammy had plans, and I’m one of the coaches! Next week we’ll get some media coverage.

Of course Mazie just turned 3 a couple of weeks ago and you may be asking how exactly t-ball works with 3 and 4 year olds. Let me explain a bit.

First, this is for fun and there are no scores, no strikes. In fact, there isn’t much left of the “game” and it’s more just fun for the kids. And fun they had!

The first “inning” the kids were really into it and having a blast. It was funny to watch the different kids. There is only one girl other than Mazie on the team and they became fast friends. They were standing in the infield with their arms around each other. On the other hand, some of the boys didn’t feel like taking turns and were pushing and shoving each other to get at the ball. By the second “inning” our entire team, with one exception, was sitting on the infield with their gloves next to them playing in the dirt.

Our team, the yellow team, now known by unanimous vote as the Yellow Bees has one ringer. One of the kids is a future hall-of-famer. He can hit a line drive right up the middle, has a heck of an arm and can play all bases equally well. He was not playing in the dirt.

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“#1 on the sides, high, to a #2 finished with a #3 on the top.”

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