Apple Unveils New Product-Unveiling Product

Here's some great humor for everyone; especially those of us who have watched Steve Jobs launch new products. He is truly a master showman. Now Apple has a new product that automates Steve's product launches.
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/apple_unveils_new_product

VRA 2007 national conference - Kansas City

This is the silver anniversary of the Visual Resources Association. This year's conference takes place in Kansas City, Missouri, from March 27th through the 31st.

We have supported this fine organization for many years. We donate lots of gift certificates for the raffle each year and I often teach workshops. This year, in addition to four $250 gift certificates, we are supporting the conference by attending as vendors. I look forward to seeing many friends at the conference, and even meeting some clients for whom email and the phone have been our only contact.

I will also be doing some free consulting. If you are interested, please contact me by email or phone....or find me in Kansas City. I'm sure we'll have no trouble finding somewhere to sit quietly and talk (or have a beer!).

http://www.vraweb.org/

We love these external hard drives

We generate a lot of data in our scanning business. Most is delivered to clients on archival gold optical media from MAM-A, but for many clients we also include an external hard drive. This really speeds up the client's process of cataloging the scans and transferring thousands of files to servers. Another copy is generally kept on our own file servers for some period of time.

Over the years we have purchased drives from many different companies. Recently we discovered "Newer Tech." This company mostly advertises in the Macintosh world, but their drives work fine on any platform. The one we like is the MiniStack v2. We are now filling up the third of ten 500gb drives with the 50,000 scans we're doing for the American Institute of Architects. These come in small but very well made cabinets. They match the Mac Mini. In addition to the usual external USB2 and/or Firewire ports, they also act as a hub. They're also available without drives for those who want to add their own. Only problem is the internal drive has to be the older ATA type; not the newer (and faster) SATA.

http://www.newertech.com/products/externalhd.php

Adobe Tackles Photo Forgeries

These days we take for granted that most advertising photos, and many portraits, have been retouched. Adobe Photoshop is such a standard imaging tool that "photoshop" is even used as a verb. Well, when it comes to recording history, we need to be able to believe in the "accuracy" of a photo. And what better company to figure out a way to test for this than Adobe.

A recent Wired News article by Randy Dotinga talks about this new venture:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,72883-0.html?tw=rss.index

Phoenix Art Museum

Phoenix Art Museum is the latest cultural heritage institution to take advantage of our digital strategic planning services. I spent last week at their impressive facility, meeting the many stakeholders in this important transition and reviewing their existing analog and digital assets. We are now analyzing the many bushels of data and preparing our draft report.

If you find yourself in Phoenix, it is worth a day of your time to visit.