Snow Leopard Install

As many people know I am a Mac user. Well last night I bought the new Snow Leopard operating system. This operating system takes a leap as it is the first Intel only Mac operating system. This upgrade along with all future system upgrades no longer support the Power PC chipset.

This upgrade will allow true 64 bit operation for those with 64 bit machines (most Intel Macs). Basically for $29 you get a leaner faster machine. The install was flawless on my Intel iMac and so far only a few bumps in the road.

I did have to buy an upgrade for Phone Valet to make it compatible. Now to be fair the upgrade has been out for some time now and I just lagged behind. I must have Phone Valet as it is my business voice mail and call logging system. If I could not get Phone Valet to work it would have been a deal breaker and I would have gone back to Leopard.

Now I did plan for the worst. First off I have a full backup by Time Machine, then I also had not 1 but 2 total clones of my system drive so I have 3 methods of going back to Leopard if needed (Yes I am careful).

The only other glitch I see right now is Spell Catcher my system wide spell checker. It works but you must activate it every time you switch programs (PITA). They are working on a total rewrite of it that will work with the new input system and I guess I can wait for that.

I am a big Battlefield 1942 game fan. This is an older game but in my opinion still one of the best ever made for Mac, especially with the Desert Combat ad on made by other fans. Well it was pretty crippled on my Intel machine since it was designed to run on the older Power PC chipset. To get a descent frame rate I had to run the video quality way down to keep it from lagging. It was just usable but I have played it like that hundreds of times.

Well I kind of expected it to not run on Snow Leopard at all. I was very surprised that it loaded up and ran just fine, in fact I noticed the frame rate was up a bit so I started taxing it by increasing the video size and quality. Basically I was able to just about double the quality and still get a descent frame rate so it's like having a new game.

I will post more info good or bad as I stumble across things with the new operating system.

Lightwave 3D and Stock Photography

I create a lot of high resolution images that are sold on stock photography sites. What I make are not photos but these sites sell images for the advertising industry and my images fit that need.

I have been using Lightwave and Photoshop since the early days of Lightwave. I think my first version was 1.4 or something like that.

While I love creating the images, I hate some of the rest of the procedures. You see I have to add key words so people can find the images, each image must be given a unique name and each must be categorized.

Then I must upload the images to the sites where I sell them (about 6 sites right now) and each site works differently and each has there own set of categories and requirements for keywords and names. So almost every image needs a bit of work on each of the different sites.

Now this is not a real big deal if you are uploading each image as I make them but as I am finding it's a very big deal when I need to upload all my images to a new stock site.

I just started with Dreamstime.com a few days ago and while their setup is pretty strait forward I still must edit every image to match their setup and I have close to 1,000 images.

Over the past few days I uploaded 200+ images and I can say that I hate this part of the job. I worked on it for many hours but it feels like I have been doing it for months. And I am not even 1/4 of the way through my portfolio.

I'll post more on this later.