Miscellaneous Ramblings....

Finally had the chance to see a much overlooked movie Standing in the Shadows of Motown. It is a documentary, intercut with concert footage, of The Funk Brothers. The Funk Brothers were an outstanding group of studio musicians that played on every Motown hit, but still remained largely unknown, even though their hits are legendary. It was a very well done movie and I would highly recommended it, especially if you are a fan of music history. (now if only this movie was available on Blu-Ray.... )

Apple has finally released an update which adds support for Java 1.6_05 for Leopard. When Apple initially released Leopard, there was no support for Java 1.6, a move that received much criticism.

Thanks to the generosity of one of our vendors, I (and some of my friends) was able to take in the Casting Crowns concert this past weekend. It was the first time that I had the opportunity to view a concert from private box and it was quite an enjoyable experience . I was also relatively new to the music of Casting Crowns as well, but I will definitely keep an eye on this group going forward. ( For the record, the Skillet concert was still my favorite one this year )

With the WWDC conference looming on the horizon, more (concrete? ) rumors of the upcoming 3G iPhone are circulating. The latest is that GPS unit is only supposed to make the unit only slightly thicker and the much maligned recessed headphone jack is supposed to be replaced by one flush with the unit. The current internet speculation is that the 3G iPhone will be announced at the upcoming WWDC conference in June, possibly shipping in July.

All those (Blu-Ray fans) who didn't see this coming, please raise your hands. Now that the hi-def format war is essentially over, one of the first effects evidently will be Netflix raising the prices on their Blu-Ray rentals.

The stars must truly be aligning. This past weekend, one of my coworkers whom I have been bugging forever to get on the Blu-Ray train finally succumbed and purchased a Blu-Ray player (of course I missed the post, so now I'll be the one receiving the ribbing ) and now rumor has it that Season 2 of Heroes will be released on DVD in August 2008. And in even more good news, Heroes: Season 1 and Heroes: Season 2 will be among Universal's first releases on Blu-Ray. Yes! Incidentally, Season 3: Villains starts September 2008.

This past weekend, I have finally caved in and joined the masses on Facebook. After suffering through a couple of hours with "no friends" ;-), I have been joined by quite a few. It is interesting to see how this is the equivalent of saying "Hi in the school hall" to the younger generation, especially viewing the different comments on different user's walls.

Firefox 2.0.0.14 has been released, mainly to fix the Javascript garbage collection crash. Here are the release notes for the interested. Note: For all you Mac users who have been using Beatnik's optimized builds, there is now a 2.0.0.12 version available. I have used these builds in the past with great success (I am currently beta testing the Firefox 3 beta builds at the current moment however).

Adobe has released LightRoom 1.4.1. This new version incorporates some bug fixes, including the issues that caused Lightroom Update 1.4 to be withdrawn (degraded import performance, incorrect EXIF time/date fields, etc). For the interested, here are the release notes.

Thanks to my other nephew, I was able to get a free ticket to see Desmond Tutu speak (as part of the PeaceJam Festival). It was a simple and direct message, "Making Friends Out of Enemies", but one well worth hearing these days. He spoke for about 20 minutes and then answered questions that had been previously sent in for another 15 minutes or so. One of the funnier moments was when MPR's Kerri Miller asked him what he though Bush's legacy would be. He side-stepped it nicely by remarking that he thought Laura Bush would be remembered for her concern on Burma, then proceeded to tiptoe off of the stage to thunderous applause ( & laughter ). For my part, it was quite rewarding to hear someone with that much impact on World History speaking. If you get the chance to see him in person, I highly recommended it.

MPA (Minnesota Percussion Association) had the Circuit Championships this past weekend and my nephew and I took it in for the first time. It is a state-wide high school percussion competition (although there were some teams from North Dakota and Wisconsin) and it was quite an impressive event. There are four categories that teams are judged by: Performance Analysis, General Effect, Visual, Timing & Penalties. For the impatient, here are the final scores for the various classes. Soon I will have my pictures up as well...

In a move that is sure to raise the hackles of Mac Fanboys (and girls ) everywhere, Adobe has dropped the bombshell that there will be a 64-bit version of Adobe Photoshop CS4, but only available for Windows and not Mac OSX (the tentative plan is to deliver a 64-bit Mac OSX version in CS5). ArsTechnica has an extensive post on the reasoning of this.

Rumor has it that all three Matrix films will be released on Blu-Ray this year, most likely in support of the the Wachowski Brothers' Speed Racer film.

iTunes 7.6.2 has been released. It seems that this release is a fairly minor release aimed at correcting bug fixes and improving stability.

Adobe has released Lightroom 2.0 in a beta state. One of the potentially cool enhancements is support for multiple monitors. You can download the beta from here and an important note is that this beta is designed to run along side of the current 1.3.x Lightroom installation. If you don't already have a valid serial number for Lightroom, the beta will only be good for 30 days.