河國榮, An Aussie in Hong Kong

For the past 6 months, I've tussled with trying to set up a reliable backup system for my digital photographs and film scans. I have been scanning my photographic film with a film scanner at 4000 dpi. The raw images are around 130MB each and it takes a long time to scan a whole roll of film. My 200GB external drive had numerous scanned images on it and the last thing I wanted was a hard disk failure. A backup was of the utmost importance.

People using computers today are working more and more with digital photos, movies and music and all of these require massive amounts of disk space. Archiving these for protection is not easy. Tape drives are expensive. RAID 5 towers are probably the best option but are also too expensive. That leaves DVD because CDs are too small to consider.

I've been an addict for quite some time, and not just to one thing either. I've been drinking coffee for several years and usually have to drink at least one cup every day, sometimes two or three cups every day. Off and on, I've also been a TV addict, and I'm probably a dog addict but that's still up for discussion. My biggest and worst addiction though has been my computer!

While others get addicted to surfing on the internet or playing online games or participating in online MUDs (are they still around?), I'm simply addicted to my computer whether I'm surfing, checking email, scanning photographs or watching videos. Every morning when I wake up, the first thought that comes into my head is whether there is any email for me even though I receive very few non-spam emails. All through the day, rather than consider useful things to do, it's much easier to sit down in front of the computer and find stuff to do. You can waste countless hours putting all of your computer files in order.

Many people know that I'm an avid user of Apple computers. I've been using Apple computers since around 1989 when I purchased my first Apple computer, the IIci. Actually, it wasn't my first Apple computer. The first Apple computer I ever owned was a IIe purchased, used and sold back in 1983 before the first Macintosh was ever released.

These days, I'm using a 'desklamp' iMac with a 17" screen, running Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther". It's very solid. Applications almost never crash and when they do, they have no affect on other applications running at the same time. At this very moment, I have only seven applications running, but there are usually in excess of 15 applications running at any time including email, web browser, text editors and photograph processing applications.

Say goodbye to television as you know it.

Just as PodCasts are allowing absolutely everybody to make and distribute their own radio shows, VideoCasts are also allowing the ordinary people to make and distribute videos. No longer will what we can see on TV be controlled by the rich television companies. No longer will we be forced to watch the Olympic Games because every single available channel is showing them.

My wife and I looked at the new Motorola ROKR iTunes phone today here in Hong Kong. We weren't impressed. The plastic used to build the phone was... too plastic! I wondered if it would survive even a single drop to the ground.

My wife who has been using a Nokia 8310 since I can't remember when decided to buy the Sony Ericsson W800i instead. While almost twice the price of the ROKR, I don't think we made the wrong choice and I'm sure it'll work well for her for many years to come.

And it's fully supported by Mac OS X's iSync so what else can I say.

A week ago, I had finally decided on what I wanted in my online photo albums. I wanted a design that was simple to use and simple to look at, a design that would show off my photographs rather than distract from them. In html terms, to me, this meant a single page with controls to view the thumbnails and navigate between photographs, a single page without the flashes of multiple page reloads. I knew exactly what I wanted.

So I sat down and began on the design. Structure first; i.e., html, or in my case, xhtml. There was no style information in the structure. It was pure structure, the way xhtml is supposed to be. It looked good and straight forward. Then the style. CSS. I've done a lot of css work over the past year while I've worked on my blog, changing, improving and developing the blog's design. I've become quite familiar with css but I refuse to bow down to tweaking my css for the sake of arrogant egotistic non-compliant browsers. Writing the css for the photo album was not a piece of cake, but it wasn't difficult either.

iTunes changed the music landscape around the world, even in places where people were unable to purchase music from the iTunes store because their address was not within an authorised country. Before iTunes, people only had two choices for music; buy it at a music store, or download it from an unauthorised source on the internet. Once iTunes proved to the world that people would legally buy digitised (and medium rip quality at that) music if given the chance, other companies began working out how they could join the bandwagon and divert some of that new money into their own bank accounts.

iTunes allowed people to buy music from a corporately condoned online source. It allowed people to easily search for and sample music before buying it, and in the process allowed consumers to expand their music horizons, discovering new musicians and new genres of music, including those not affiliated with the big record labels. Most significantly perhaps, iTunes has also had a permanent affect on the music business itself.