David Pascoe’s Take on the World

Here are some more shots from my trip to Cork. It was a work trip, but still had some time to take a few photos. Just doing a dump using the wordpress gallery feature.

Here are some shots from this week in Cork. Have been lucky enough to have a few moments to get out and take some shots. Hope you like them.

http://m.flickr.com has a nice web interface to flickr.com that is quite useable on an iPhone.

Finally gave in and got the 2.1 firmware for the iPod touch. I figured that as I got it for free it wasn’t that bad to give the evil Apple empire an extra $13. Seeing the new iPod Touch 2.0 makes me feel sad that I have the first version though Also the thought of having to upgrade iTunes and suffer the bloat that comes with that really didn’t appeal to me.

Anyway I installed a few apps and had a quick play. The whole experience is quite nice. I installed the facebook, wordpress, smugmug, twitterific and google apps.

I uploaded a heap of screen dumps here SmugShots. The SmugShots app is really simple to use, especially since I’m already a SmugMug user. There is no camera of course, so you can only upload screen dumps or stuff already in your image library.

One of the more interesting or geeky shots is catching the image slideshow between 2 images.

Here are some more screen dumps, just for the pure colour of it all

This is a test from iPod touch firmware 2.1. Have to fight with the keyboard to get anywhere

Here is the table for my traffic to rosacea-support.org in August. Showing that my visitors are run-of-the-mill computer users (and not geeks) you can see by far and away IE on Windows is my meat and vege. In fact IE 7 on Windows XP is still king.

Other data points

• Windows Vista users 16% vs. Mac OS X 8% (XP is 66%)
• 556 visitors from Windows 3.xx !!
• IE8 had 157 visitors
• still a huge 27% use IE6, with 18% using all versions of Firefox
• Mac is 8% vs. Windows 88% – perhaps close to the supposed world wide market share ?

I imagine that these sorts of stats are quite typically for non geek sites.

http://www.kelbytraining.com/springsofhope/

Today, August 25, 2008, you can have your passion for photography help build that orphanage, because if you pre-order my new book, "The Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers" today (before 6:00am tomorrow, Tuesday, August 26, 2008 Eastern Standard Time), I will donate 100% of the entire cover price of the book to the Springs of Hope, Kenya, the non-profit grass-roots group put together by Joseph and Molly.

This is great, well done Scott Kelby. There are lots of creative ways that people can support charities (actually sending straight money is a good option too !) – and this really encourages me.

I wasn’t going to get this LightRoom 2 book this time round (I got quite a few LR1 books), but decided that I was so impressed he was making this offer, I couldn’t hold back any longer.

So I reletend recently and paid for the upgrade from Lightroom 1 to Lightroom 2. I was always going to upgrade, but wanted to wait and see what Adobe had to say about their international pricing. I had a good hunt around the blogosphere and saw that Adobe was firmly entrenched in their current pricing regime. It is absolutely their policy to charge more for international delivery of their products. They do have some reasons for this, and I can’t see them changing any time soon.

Annoying but hey that is how it is.

Just thought that it was interesting that I have paid $315 for LR1 and $165 for LR2 upgrade being $480 to be able to run Adobe Lightroom. This is the cheapest/easiest path I could find. The initial $315 was a special short-term price at the end of the Lightroom 1 beta testing period.

By contrast I paid $149 for the OEM copy of Vista Home Premium that I use. It does seem a bit strange to me that Adobe has already extracted more than twice as much as Microsoft.

OK I neglect to mention the $226 I paid for Office 2007 Home and Student – but I can claim that as a legitimate business expense and I get a GST receipt.

Adobe domecile their Australian online sales through Ireland so I don’t even get a GST receipt to claim the input credit (should I be eligible to do so as a business expense).