another murale

The SDC village complex murale. St Cathernine Montréal, village gai

click photo for larger image

New web site

TriFury, a club for triathletes in Massachusetts (USA) has hire me for remaking the team web site. It is still missing some archival information and the forum is not yet ready but the site itself is done. Because of possible changes in the menus and the need to update certain sections easily, I've used spry menus and spry html databases in the coding.

Photos 11 Novembre

2 panoramiques et 2 de Watson sûr Mont Royal!

OS X 10,6,2 the update

Well it arrived and did nothing to fix my issues with Dreamweaver or the Flash plugin.. other issues I had managed to work around with help from all the forums. The Dreamweaver issue is the worst. I have to open the computer in "Safe mode" to use it (The flash plugin also works in this mode... but many other things do not). I am pretty sure the problem is with Adobe at this point and sent in a request for support. I don't have much confidence they will help, but it's always worth a try.

So now, I'm stuck waiting for Adobe. Sadly issues with their stuff is a lot harder to work around than with MAC.

update:
re-installed Dreamweaver CS3 and it works fine. Of course i am not getting any use of the CS4 features I paid so much for, but i can get some work done in a reasonable period of time now. Hopefully something will happen that sheds some light on this issue and I can just get back to doing my work and not researching fixes for broken software all day!

New website client updates

George Macneil's photography site received a complete overhaul recently. I went for a much more simplified interface and increased the amount of photos available for viewing by over 3 times.

Also Art Maps Boston got a facelift. Since the site's launch there have been a few changes in the gallery scene in boston and this reflects that. Dana Wynne once again provides the excellent map design.

m. Fetische

I actually finished this film almost a year ago but had trouble getting music for it... Soundtrack pro to the rescue again! The version on my site is a small size, but better quality and in 16:9 format like it should be.

Help Forums

Forums are, in many cases, the best way to get help when oyu have a problem, especially a computer problem. Big companies like Apple, Microsoft, Abobe and the like are not exactly forthcoming all the time when there are problems with their products and prefer not to talk about it. end users, on the other hand, nick pick every issue and in many cases find work arounds and solutions. My recent on going problems after installing Snow Leopard on my new tower highlighted some of the best and worst and the do’s and don’ts of using forums.

Asking for help:

Be clear what the problem is or as clear as possible. Make sure to state what you have done already to solve it. Don’t demand that you get an answer in 5 seconds... the other users are no different than you and are not sitting at thier computers hoping to answer your question. No matter how big a company is, they can not just write a solution to your problem and send out a new release that afternoon... it may takes months so be prepared to wait!

Giving help:

READ the question and the other responses. I can’t tell you how many people tell you to «fix permissions» on your MAC... a 1st step most people take and mostly does nothing. It’s npt a bad suggestion, but once it’s been suggested and it always is, saying it the 5th time is not helpful. Do not blame the victim... maybe the computer came with the software already on it, in any case, while it’s often good to wait, it’s these early adopters that are finding the bugs before you get the nerve to update yourself. Not everyone is a computer genius so be clear enough that a typical end user can understand your response.

Do:

Ask for help and give your advice on the forums, if something works, let others know it did.

Don’t:

Blame people for having a problem or knowing less than you do or expect an answer and solution right away, if at all.

My pet «help» peeves:

Software companies too cheap or lazy to make a MAC version now assume you will be willing to run out but a copy of windows and run «Boot Camp» just to use thier product. Others save important bug fixes for the next point upgrade and expect you to pay for something they should have got right in the first place.

In summary... respect the people asking the question and the people taking the time to give a solution, whether is works or not. Read the responces before adding your own and try the solutions before complaining nothing is working!

more panoramas

My sister got married in the states this weekend and I took some panoramas near the location of the wedding.

ABcdaire

J'ai créé un ABCdaire pour les élèves de mon chum. Voici, quelques images.

C4d, Mac OS updates....

Yes more udate:

but more serious this time... it appears Snow leopard is causing complete havoc on many macs, including my new tower. It crashes whenever you open a dialogue box from an application. IN other words you can't place an image, save, save as, export or anything else that requires opening the dialogue box. So far it's affect every Adobe product, Cinema 4D, Apple's own Mail program... so it pretty much a system wide wide bug. I has not affected my laptop - yet. If you read the Apple or Adobe programs you get an idea how very serious this problem is... Apple had better take back some of those Vista ads and get to work on fixing this, TODAY!

Never ending article on updates:

Looks like Apple may have broken records with the patch they put out today. Time will tell if it handles this problem or not.

Cinema 4D has gone to an 11,5 update. Normally ,5 updates are small... but this one includes some heavy duty improvements and features including bucket rendering and dynamics for Mograph. At 700$ in this terrible job market... I just can't afford it. 300$ I would take the chance, but not 700$. Even Apple computer's Final Cut Pro upgrade price was lowered by 200$. I wish Maxon had the sense to realize how really bed it is out there for those of us end users. If I got a really Mograph heavy, very well paying job, it might be worth the update, but it looks like I'll be staying put for now.

OS X is upadted as well. At 35$, it's not a big deal to make the change over. There have been a few issues. Even Adobe Cs$ programs crash until the "get used" to the new system now and then. Even "Safari", Apple's own browser just crashed while I tried to upload the image for this article. Second try, no problem however. I hav enoticed some great improvement in speed and most software plays well (Cyberduck and Cool Iris are 2 exceptions). The new Quicktime X seems a waste of space for now as I use Quicktime pro and have use of many of the features other than just playing movies in a pretty box. It will be interesting to see how quicktime developes as a software over the next year of so.

Update: Dreamweaver seems to crash like hell constantly now. Every time anything changes in the OS... Dreamweaver seems to be the worst in Adobe's line of software for crashing in my experience.

update update:

the new Behemoth media site is up!