I’ve completed another gallery of race photos. This one is for the ALMS Petit Le Mans we attended early October 2007. I think this is my best work to date, and others are agreeing. Several people have suggested I consider doing some pro race photography. It would involve incorporating myself (easy part) and getting credentialed for a press pass at the tracks I go to. Getting the latter done is harder.

Anyway, the entire gallery is posted Petit Le Mans 2007

Once again I attended the 12 Hours of Sebring, the classic ALMS sportscar race. This weekend I created a portfolio of about 140 pictures I took.

Here’s a sample:

Apple released Java SE6 for Leopard today. This is a much anticipated release among Java developers using Macs. Go get it from the usual place in the Apple menu. It looks like it also installed the 64-bit Java 5 runtime, because I don’t remember seeing it before in the Java Preferences app. I know that Java 6 requires Leopard, but I don’t know whether it requires a Core 2 Duo (i.e. 64-bit hardware) as the preview releases did.

Apple movie rentals in high definition are $3.99 or $4.99. Pass

Apple Movie Rentals expire 24 hours after you start watching. Pass

Apple Movie Rentals in High Definition stream directly to your HDTV via a HDMI-connected AppleTV. You cannot watch them on your computer or any other device. Pass

Apple Movie Rentals a.k.a. Greed, Fear, and Loathing in Hollywood and Cupertino. Pass

I was lucky enough to get this shot. It’s one of the best racing photos I’ve taken (IMHO). This is Alan McNish driving the Audi R10 at Road America (11 August 2007). This is just before the entrance to turn 13, about 10 minutes before it started pouring and sent the race to a 2 hour full course caution. I’ve had a 16″ x 24″ print made, which I am taking with me to Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta the first week of October. I plan to ask Alan to sign it for me. 

Update 12 Oct. 07

I’m back from Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta, where my friend Don photographed me getting my print of the Audi R10 signed by the Audi team. Alan personalized it for me. This is such a great sport. The racing is first rate and it’s very fan friendly. Next stop…the 12 Hours of Sebring (March 15, 2008).

Apple exposes how truly evil DRM is with its new iTunes Ringtones feature for the iPhone. I have a CD of music I like. I paid for it. I want to excerpt a tune from it to use as a ringtone on my iPhone. Now I have to use iTunes to buy the tune again for $0.99. But I still can’t use it as a ringtone. I have to pay another $0.99 to enable it for ringtone use. By the time its a ringtone on my phone I’ve paid for it three times.  

DRM is evil. I can’t wait until the RIAA and the music industry it represents bankrupts financially (it’s already morally and artistically bankrupt).

* useless record 
† worthless player 

Here’s a tape from my Apple Calculator.

29.99 + 62.99 + 42.02 = 140

WTF?

Part of my recent switch from Windows XP to Mac OS was to get my 12 years of Quicken data moved over. No big deal, I thought. I did that 10 years ago when I switched from Mac OS 9 to Windows 2000.

Yeah, right! I exported my Windows Quicken data as QIF data, and spent $60 to get the overpriced Quicken for Mac 2007 software (they don’t have the cheaper Basic version I like to use on Windows). After importing my data into Quicken for Mac, I notice the balances are off…way, way off…not even close. I thought, WTF, so I did the export and import again. Still OMGWTF! So I go to The Internets and ask The Google about it. There’s a tech note on the Quicken support site about it, which states:

Quicken for Windows and Quicken for Macintosh have different features and data file structure. Due to the differences in the programs, not all data can be converted from Quicken for Windows to Quicken for Mac. The following information shows the data that will NOT convert from Quicken for Windows to Quicken for Mac. This information will need to be re-entered in Quicken for Mac after converting your file.

I’ll translate that for you. “Due to our bad programming, you are shit out of luck if you believe our file formats are anything close to standard or consistent.”

Even though I have WIndows XP running in Parallels on my Mac, I really didn’t want to use it for personal data like my financial accounts. I wanted to move everything back to Mac. So I found a 60-day evaluation for a Mac financial program called Liquid Ledger. I imported my Quicken for Windows QIF export data. Low and behold, the data showed up just fine. All the reconciled and running balances came out to the penny. After I used it for a while, however, I got frustrated with its interface. It’s a bit clunky and difficult to use, and acts quirky at times. For example, I used a filtered view to show just the last two months of transactions, and entered a new transaction with the date in the form mm/dd/yyyy where it expects mm/dd/yy. But it recorded the year 2007 as 2020, and the transaction disappeared from view. I thought it was acting flakey and reentered it, and yet again until I noticed a wildly negative balance. Yikes! It took me a few moments to figure that out and get it corrected. Ultimately I didn’t like it and deleted the software. And it was more expensive then Quicken so I’m glad I didn’t buy it.

Next up was iBank 2. I had some problem importing all my data — it locked up twice before it succeeded, and it flagged all imported transactions as cleared, so my reconciled balances were wrong. The latter was reasonably easy to fix by reversing the cleared status on everything for the past month, plus a few more from late in the previous month. IBank2 has a nicer interface and is easier to use. It also has a Dashboard widget for making quick entries, although it is flawed because there is no field for entering check numbers. I don’t write a lot of checks, but I do sometimes. I have 30 days to decide if I want to keep it, but it seems the most promising now.

I did get my $60 back from Quicken.

Consider this scenario involving a geometric sequence. You need to cover the distance from a start to an end. For each leg of the trip you can go exactly half the remaining distance to your destination, no more no less. At first you get halfway there, then 3/4, then 7/8, then 15/16, and so on. Going this way you will get close, but you never quite arrive.

I’m doing a clean install of Windows XP pro SP2. This is what Windows Update is like. I run it, reboot, and go back to find that an update has an update. Rinse and repeat again.

I’m typing this from my Mac since my PC is on its never ending journey to fulfillment, an unreachable nirvana.