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Well, I finally got a new computer, though the process itself wasn't particularly smooth. Apple made it difficult for me to give them money, something that neither the consumer nor the Apple shareholder in me appreciates.

As I mentioned the other day, I'm finally going to ditch Windows, an operating system I've lamented having to use ever since, well, having used it. The new quad-core all-in-one iMac with a 27" screen announced recently seems to be an incredible value, both in terms of performance/price and of “tidiness” (since you need just one wire to it, the power cord). It was irresistible.

But I resisted. The geek in me decided to pay an obscene amount extra for the large, clunky, heavy Mac Pro, because of how it can be expanded.

The long tale of woe (and, ultimately, awesomeness) that follows is mostly as a diary entry for my own memory. Long story is long.... and boring.

Take My Money, Please!

So, I wanted the quad-core Mac Pro, with a few simple customizations: I wanted the US wireless keyboard instead of the Japanese wired keyboard, the new Magic Mouse, and 6GB of memory instead of the 3GB that came standard. (Apple's prices for extra memory are hyper-inflated, but this particular upgrade cost the same as if I were to do it myself.)

So, I go to Apple Japan's web site to place my order, and when I select the Mac Pro, it says “ships in 24 hours”. Cool. Shipping is extremely fast in Japan – you can even get same-day shipping from places like Amazon – so I expected to get it quickly. But after choosing my customizations, I noticed that it now said “ships in 3-5 weeks”. Doh!

It turns out that selecting the memory customization makes it “1-3 days”, selecting the US wireless keyboard makes it “2-4 days”, and selecting the Magic Mouse makes it “3-5 weeks”. Yikes. After much experimenting, I found that if I ordered the mouse and keyboard separately (as opposed to as part of the machine's customization), it would cost a bit more, but arrive much faster, so I did that.

At Amazon.co.jp I ordered an Intel 160GB solid state drive (SSD). It has no moving parts, more like a fast/big camera memory card than a hard disk. I intended to use this as my main boot disk because its very low latency (its very quick response time) means that the system can access applications and data much more immediately than with a normal disk. I also ordered four 2TB drives to be used for other storage.

We then left on a short trip about which I'll post once I get my photo workflow up and going, but while on the bullet train I got a call from Apple: there was a problem with my credit card and I'd have to contact the credit-card company. Sigh. This is my own fault – the first 20 times my credit-card company froze my account (“suspected fraudulent activity”) I was appreciative that they were watching out for me, even though it was always just my normal day-to-day use that triggered it. But somewhere among all the inconvenience they caused time and time and time again, I got sick of it and should have dumped them. Believe me, it's high on my list now.

Anyway, we returned home late the next day and I called the credit-card company and cleared things up (and resisted the deep-seated desire to bite the head off of whomever answered the phone). The next morning I called Apple to have them re-process the card, but that department was closed for the weekend. Rather, it would be quicker to cancel the order and resubmit it, so I did.

The next day I checked the order status, and saw that it was again held up due to the credit card. Arrrrgh. I called the credit-card company and inquired about any denied charges in the last day, but they said there was no activity except $300 from Apple. Apple had successfully processed the fee for the Apple Care extended warranty, but hadn't even tried submitting the charge for the computer itself. Arrrrrrgh.

I thought that perhaps they had blacklisted my card, so I used my card's “safe shop” feature to generate a new, temporary card number that would appear to the merchant as an unrelated card, and re-submitted the order yet again.

It, too, was held up “due to the credit card”, so I was stuck until they came in to work on Monday.

So, Monday morning rolls around and I call, only to find out that the “ships in” dates they quoted were from China, and that it might take quite a while after that before it gets to me. There seemed to be no sanity in my immediate future. Dejected, I told the guy to cancel my order.

Amazon.co.jp had the computer in stock, with a note that I could get it the next day if I ordered within the next 3 hours. Schweet! I couldn't do the customizations, but those were small issues that I could handle myself later. In placing the order, I was looking around for where to choose the “expedited shipping”, and somehow ended up submitting the order without it. Oops. Amazon lets you change a lot about the order after the fact, but I didn't see how to change the shipping, so I canceled it and immediately tried to reorder.... but they didn't have any more in stock!

I waited around for a while to see whether they'd put the one from my canceled order back, but it never showed up, so I guess someone else got it. Sigh.

Time for Plan C, which should have been Plan A. I called around Kyoto-area stores and found one that had the item in stock, put a hold on it, drove over, bought it and the US wireless keyboard, and took them home. As a bonus, I got them for less than I would have at Apple or Amazon, and I had them in my hands now.

Behold the Awesomeness!

Apple's Mac Pro is the physically largest home computer I've ever seen. It's forty pounds (as much as 7-year-old Anthony), 20” high, 19” deep, 8” wide. It's huge. This is not a good thing, except that at least they put the size to good use in that it's an absolute breeze to service. I thought that the Dell that I got three years ago was a beauty of inner tidiness and easy-to-access precision, but compared to the Mac Pro it's a rat's nest of cheap, chintzy kludge.

The Mac Pro is precision machined and laser etched from a single block of granite, or so it seems. Lift a latch and the heavy brushed aluminum side of the chassis effortlessly falls away to reveal absolute order and tidiness. Not a single cable or wire is visible.

The first thing I did, before even powering it on, was to yank out the 650GB disk that came with it, mark it, and place it into storage (where “storage” in this case means "somewhere among the clutter on my desk). I replaced it with the 160GB SSD, then plugged it in and booted from the OS-install CD. This was made somewhat more difficult than it should have been by the fact that the instructions for booting from CD – hold down the C key while booting – neglected to mention that you had to already have the CD in the tray, or the whole thing would be ignored. Once I figured that out, I booted from CD and installed OSX 10.6, Snow Leopard.

Once that was done, I powered off and slid in the four 2TB disks mentioned earlier, and booted again. The OS immediately told me that they weren't formatted, and brought up Disk Utility to let me have my way with them.

It's shocking how easy the next steps were, even though I'd never done it before: I configured two of the drives, Bay 1 and Bay 2, as a 2TB mirrored RAID array, and the other two drives, Bay 3 and Bay 4, as a 4TB striped RAID array. The former basically wastes the bay-2 drive to keep an exact copy of what's on the bay-1 drive: the redundancy allows me to continue working if the bay-1 drive were to fail. The latter pairing essentially combines the two disks in such a way to make a double-sized partition that has no redundancy, but allows for fast reads and writes.

I then named the first “Main” and pointed Time Machine, Apple's backup solution, to the second.

So, my setup is now like this:

• 160GB solid state disk · Very fast, very silent boot disk. Holds the OS, applications, my home directory, and will hold my Lightroom catalog database (but not the photos themselves, which are much too large).
• 2TB mirrored array “Main” · Two terabytes of fault-tolerant main storage. Big things like my photos and iTunes library will go here.
• 4TB array “Backup Storage” · local high-frequency backup storage for the first two.

This kind of local backup is important, but it doesn't protect me from forces of nature (earthquake, tornado, children) or theft, so I'll backup off-site as well. I currently backup all my photos to a server on a different continent, but may also try a service like Backblaze, which I've heard good things about. ($5/month for unlimited storage is very good if you can trust it.)

The nice thing about having 8TB of disk inside, and being able to configure it as I have, is that it allows me to avoid an external disk for local backups, thereby allowing “one step forward” in the march against home-office clutter.

One step backward is Apple's previous-generation wireless mouse. Maybe we got a bad one, but it was unusable with both Fumie's Mac Mini and my Mac Pro – it was twitchy and slow – so I appropriated my wireless Logitec mouse from my Windows box.

I spent last night and today copying stuff from the Windows box and from my mishmash of external drives. I've been configuring Firefox and other applications, and generally trying to get settled.

I was in the midst of downloading Lightroom from Adobe's site as I started writing this post. It's finished, so I'm excited to finally be able to give that a try. I think it'll be fast.

NOTE: Images with an icon next to them have been artificially shrunk to better fit your screen; click the icon to restore them, in place, to their regular size.

I think my computer senses that I'm about to ditch it because we came back from a short trip and I loaded new photos, but the graphics-card hardware acceleration doesn't seem to work anymore, turning my use of Lightroom from a zippy-responsive experience to a painful, laggy frustration.

So, no new photos for a while... I ended up ordering a Mac Pro, and currently have 8TB of disk sitting in a box by my desk waiting for the Mac to arrive.

So, today I'll post about a new addition to my blog that I quietly added a week ago, highlighted with the red arrow in the screenshot at right, of my blog's home page: an interactive Google Map overlaid with photos from my blog.

The default location is Kyoto where I live, but like any Google map, you can visit anywhere in the world, and if I've posted geoencoded photos on my blog from that part of the world, they'll start to show up. When you're zoomed way out to the country or state or city level, you'll see only a few if there are any at all, but as you zoom in, more will pop up.

Most of the 4,000+ geoencoded photos are in Japan, but at the moment there are also some in Malaysia, California, Oregon, British Columbia, and Ohio.

Clicking on a thumbnail brings up a larger version, the date it was taken, and info about the blog post it was from. Double-clicking zooms you up to the immediate area.

Sometimes you have to zoom all the way in to see multiple pictures because they're taken in the same immediate vicinity, and sometimes you have to switch to the satellite view to zoom in even further. Often I'll have multiple photos taken from the exact same spot, but only one can be shown. Clicking on it shows a link under the larger version that pops up, along the lines of “there are 20 other photos within 100m of this one”; clicking on it jumps over to my blog's photo proximity search showing all photos in the immediate area.

I figure that this will of most interest to the same set of users that find my blog most interesting, which is to say, me. But perhaps the photo map might be useful for someone planning a visit to Kyoto, or wanting to do some virtual sightseeing.

Other ways to browse all my blog-posted photos – not just geoencoded ones – include the Prettiest Blog Photos link (highlighted by the green arrow in the screenshot), which brings up a page of themes (Japan, Autumn, etc.), each of which brings up a screen full of hopefully-pretty pictures to browse.

For more of a firehose effect, check out the yearly index of photos (highlighted by the blue arrow in the screenshot). At this point the page for 2009 has a grid of 1,605 thumbnails, a portion from September which looks like this:

It'll probably take a while to load the first time. 🙂    Clicking on a thumbnail brings you to the associated post.

I build this stuff mostly for myself, but I've put up links in case anyone else might find it interesting.

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Nikon D700 + Zeiss 100mm f/2 — ¹/1600 sec, f/2, ISO 200 — full exif
Starting to See a Bit of Color
Autumn 2009, Kyoto Japan

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 110 mm — ¹/400 sec, f/3.2, ISO 2000 — full exif
Relaxing at Sunset
more subdued, balanced colors, with a splash of waning light on the far wall

Nikon D700 + Zeiss 100mm f/2, cropped — ¹/200 sec, f/2, ISO 5000 — full exif
Anthony's Contribution

Kyoto is starting to see splashes of color all around, quite earlier than I expected (which says something either about an early season, or my failing memory). These pictures were from yesterday, which was a mix of sun and clouds.

The previous day saw some rain in the morning, and when Anthony came home and opened his umbrella to air it out, this acorn fell out. He had apparently picked it up somewhere along the way home and deposited it in his folded umbrella for transport.

Yesterday he brought home a pumpkin seed that he procured somewhere, so we're off to a good start on this year's plate full of Autumn.

I love fall in Kyoto... it's just glorious.... just one of many reasons that I hate living in Kyoto.

I've done many posts with autumn colors over the years, a list of which can be found in my Fall Colors category. Three “Fall Color Preview” posts from last year (parts I, II, and III) and a post about a temple foliage lightup event give a good overview of autumn in Kyoto. In preparation for the next month of photo opportunities, I should review my “Making the Best of Bright Light in Fall-Color Photography” post from a couple of years ago.

There are some downsides to fall, such as the falling temperature and, well, the falling leaves....

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 150 mm — ¹/400 sec, f/5.6, ISO 2500 — full exif
Not Glorious All the Time

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I remember when Microsoft's first operating system came out, years before Microsoft® Windows™ appeared. My work at a medical school had me using DOS 1.0 on a first-run honest-to-goodness IBM PC. It was the beefier of the two initial configurations offered by IBM, with a full 64k of memory on the motherboard. I'm sure that my current desktop computer has more memory than all of those sold, ever, combined. The eventual DOS 1.1 update was a big deal: it introduced directories (now commonly called “folders”). Prior to that, all files where in one big flat area with no hierarchy. Except with only a 5¼” floppy disk for storage, there was nothing big about anything.

I also remember while using DOS and directories and such, that wow, much of it was similar to the Unix that I'd been using at the university, or the CP/M on my Dad's computer at home.... except that the Microsoft version of everything was often gratuitously different, and not in a smart way.

I recount all this to illustrate that I have been around Microsoft software for as long as there's been Microsoft software... almost 30 years... and I realized even back then what most everyone knows now: Microsoft technology is kludgey, and limits you to the least-common denominator instead of to your own skills and potential.

So it has been with considerable and constant irritation, like that of a pile of glass shards in one's shoe during a long hike, that I have been using Windows as my desktop at home since moving to Kyoto five years ago. (I needed to run some applications that are not available on any other system.) I helped ease my pain by setting up a Unix-like terminal-based system in which I can do my development (such as my Lightroom plugins), and I do so through a MacBook laptop sitting on my desk next to the PC's keyboard.

Even with those steps to ease my geeky heart, it's been a miserable pain. The real irritant, besides Windows' clunky UI design, is that it seems to be considered normal for Windows to just suddenly stop working smoothly and to require a reboot. I'll be working for a while (a day or a week) and suddenly applications won't be able to paint the screen correctly. About 1 in 10 times I reboot, the graphics driver is gone and I have to reinstall it. Folder settings (such as whether to show thumbnails or lists) revert to a random setting... randomly. It's moronic.

I also administer my wife's computer, and my in-laws' computer, which also had Windows... nothing but pain for years. They would grow slower and slower and slower over time, and no amount of virus scans and disk defragmenting ever seemed to help.

This summer, I moved them both to Apple's OSX, getting a Mac mini for my wife and a 20” iMac for my in-laws. Neither are who you would call tech-savvy, but both immediately loved the new systems.

They.   Just.   Worked.   Intuitive, no-fuss tools.

These are the same phrases that the uber-geeky crowd at the 2002 O'Reilly Open Source Convention used to convince me to try a Mac in the first place. I'd been mostly a Linux user and was extremely skeptical, but I gave it a try and have had (and loved) a Mac laptop ever since.

When the non-tech-savvy mother-in-law and the uber-geeky computer crowd both agree that Apple computers are easy and thrilling.... non-sucky... to use, maybe that's saying something important.

So why am I still wasting time being irritated with Windows?

I have no idea, but I aim to fix things.

Apple came out with new models last week, so I've decided to punt my Dell desktop and replace it with a quad-core iMac. It's not the most powerful Apple computer, by far, but it's the most powerful one with a clean-desk one-wire (the power cord) design.

I'll also get a Time Capsule, which provides high-speed wireless internet, wireless printer access, wireless remote-disk access, and wireless backup. The same thing without a built-in disk is called Airport Extreme, and I got one for my in-laws last month. Even though I expected it to do a lot and be easy to set up and use, I was amazed on all levels. I didn't even need to be a geek to set up with dual wireless networks (a secured network for their computer, and an open network for guests, like me with my iPhone) in minutes. It just worked. Wireless printer access just worked, too.

And for my Windows-only applications? I'll use VMware Fusion to run Windows XP in, well, a window on my iMac desktop. With my current Windows box and the two that I replaced this summer, I've got three valid Windows XP licenses at my disposal, so I'll just use one there.

Apples computers are beautiful, but in trying to squeeze so much into such a minimalistic design, they push the boundaries of what's possible, and in my experience, they tend to break the moment the standard warranty expires. It's worth adding 10% to the price to get the 3-year warranty; the computer will still likely break, but now with the warranty they'll fix it really really quickly.

So, before I place my order, does anyone (uber-geeks to non-tech-savvy grandmas) have any words of wisdom to pass along?

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In last month's post “Delighting in a Chasm Between Artistic Senses”, I introduced Kyoto friend Stéphane Barbery as an artistic guy with an artistic sense quite far from my own. The other day when Lightroom 3 beta was announced, I sent him a note about it, and that evening he replied with a note about how much he loves the results from the new rendering engine, and as evidence supplied his photo set from Kyoto's Jidai Matsuri, which he had finished a few hours earlier.

With his kind permission, I'm showing a few of his photos from that set. I've retained his original French captions.

The Jidai Matsuri (lit. Festival of Eras) celebrates Kyoto's more-than-1200-year history, with a long parade of groups in many different periods' period costumes. One great feature (for me) is that it runs right by my house, but a lamentable feature is that it runs right by my house.... in the city... with traffic lights and cars and utility wires and buildings and such. For the most part, photography is just not worth it. (The also-famous Aoi Matsuri runs right by my house, too, but the only pictures I've taken or posted of either are from inside the imperial-palace park.)

Anyway, these photos from Stéphane's have been highly processed in Adobe Lightroom 3 beta, with stunning results, hiding the modern backdrop as if Stéphane had just returned from a trip back in time. I would have never thought to do this, and if I had thought of it, would have never thought that I could pull it off.

Some of the others in the set are indeed a bit too dark for my tastes, but he's got a lot of gems in there (though Flickr doesn't make browsing photos very easy).

As I mentioned before, he's got a new photo book, “A Year In Kyoto” (Un an à Kyôto) coming out this month.