Category: Etc

I’m a bit of a photography nut, especially this no longer new-fangled digital stuff. I’ve been an avid Photoshop user since version 4 or so and I really enjoy using the product. One of the great things about Photoshop is the third-party plug-in community. I use a utility from the folks over at PixelGenius called PhotoKit Sharpener for all my sharpening needs. The product kicks butt and makes easy a lot of the advanced sharpening techniques you read about in the trade rags.

Anyway, the point of this post is this: if you decide to buy one of the products from the folks at PixelGenius, there’s a hidden benefit. By purchasing a product, you get access to their private forums. These things are worth the purchase price alone. I had a whacko Photoshop problem crop up today where it would totally hang when launched. I posted my problem and had a number of suggestions on how to work-around it in about two hours. One of them actually worked (I had a corrupted font) and now Photoshop is happily processing pixels once again. I can’t say how happy I am with these folks. They’re prompt, courteous and extremely on top of what they’re doing. If you’re someone who lives a lot in Photoshop, I would highly recommend taking a look at their products.

I have an eBay Auction running for my old Kinesis Maxim keyboard, a great little ergo keyboard that I barely used. I’m a bit of a collector of ergonomic input devices (10 mice, 4 keyboards), so it’s time to let go of some of the extras. I’m currently using an Apple Pro USB keyboard and loving it, so the others are hitting the road. No reserve so it could go quite low…

I’ve got Trillian up and running against Google Talk. If you want to chat, leave a comment and I’ll send you my gmail address.

I got a call from my friendly neighboorhood network security technician today indicating that I had been pushing a fairly heavy bit of traffic and opening and closing UDP ports with abandon, over about a four hour period. Fearing the worst, we started ransacking my machine for spyware, but nothing obvious turned up. I fired up TCPView from SysInternals and started watching the activity on my machine, and lo and behold, Skype was doing all sorts of interesting things. It looks like I was turning into a supernode on occasion, which resulted in some odd traffic and port patterns. This tripped our edge triggers and I got a call.

I recently heard about a Skype competitor, the Gizmo Project by the guy behind mp3.com. Looks promising, so I installed it this evening and I noticed nothing in the terms about using my computer to route other folks calls. I’m not completely sure this is a better solution, but I’ll give it a shot for a while and see how it floats. If you want to reach me, I’m benlowery on Gizmo.

I think I’m finally going to cave in and admit that if I’m going to be spending 90% of my riding time on the road, I should probably look into getting a proper road bike instead of riding my mountain bike with slicks on it. So, here begins the journey. First off, I need to sell my mountain bike. It’s a Gary Fisher branded, Trek made OCLV (all carbon fiber frame) bike and it’s a bit special. It’s the Paola Pezzo team issue bike from 97 or 98 and it was only given to folks who rode for Fisher (or so I’m told). I picked up the bike off a semi-pro racer friend back in Michigan when I was riding more often and it’s served me fairly well, if infrequently. The bike is kitted with full Shimano XTR components and V-brakes and front suspended, so it’s one of the lightest mountain bikes you’ll ever ride. If I remember right, I think it’s a 17″ frame and the original owner was around 5’8″, 140lbs. If you’re interested in taking it off my hands, drop me an e-mail at mtb@blowery.org. I’m looking for $1000.