The 7D

Becky hates it when I wear my camera bag, which is a medium sized red backpack, because she thinks it makes me look like a dork (she may be right). The reason I have it on so often is that I usually want to have both my SLR and my camcorder on me, which would be difficult without a bag.

I've been itching for a new camera even though I only bought the Rebel XS back in April, so when Canon announced the 7D I zeroed in on it because it seemed like a big advance in combining video into an SLR and wasn't out of my price range.

Thanks to the extra work I've been doing lately (I love being paid by the hour) I could justify the purchase to Becky, plus I figured she'd be enticed by the fact that having a combination SLR/camcorder would mean I'd need to wear the backpack less often.

So I made my order on B&H, watched it's slow progress across the country (funny how I'll spend $1700 on a camera, but am too cheap to pay for faster shipping), and finally it arrived.

Thus far I haven't done anything too wild with it, but I'm definitely enjoying it and believe it to be a major step up from the XS. It's bigger and heavier, but that disadvantage is offset by the fact that its handle fits in my hand much better than the XS, where the handle was less substantial and gave my hand a cramp after holding it for long periods.

The video capability is great. With my 50mm f/1.4 on it I compared it side by side with my HD camcorder in low light and the picture on the 7D was far better (thanks mainly to the fast lens). I was disappointed to find that autofocus stops working after the recording begins, which can be an issue with moving subjects, but it isn't that difficult to focus manually once you get the hang of it.

Unfortunately I have to be patient to get the pictures into Aperture because Apple hasn't yet release a RAW support update that includes the 7D yet, but hopefully that update will appear soon. I guess this is the price of owning a bleeding edge camera.

New Glass

After it became apparent that my purchase of an SLR was evolving from a camera upgrade into a new hobby, thoughts of new glass quickly began to form.

At first I was thinking of investing in a better "walk around" lens, generally defined as a lens with a focal length range similar to that of a point and shoot camera. My Rebel XS came with the 18-55mm kit lens, giving me a 3x zoom range and I figured a higher quality lens that covered that same range and then some was a logical choice, so I was looking at the 17-85mm and the 28-135mm.

However, I've also been coming to the realization that my gadget lust would quickly steer me toward getting a better body. I bought the Rebel XS because it was the cheapest Canon SLR on the market in case the shutter bug never bit me too hard. Now that that bite has covered me in a bright red rash (metaphorically speaking), my standards have heightened a bit. Plus, I'm sick of switching between my camera and camcorder to cover both bases, so something that shoots high-def video is very appealing.

The new body purchase will have to wait a little while, but the reason why this makes buying a new walk around lens less appealing is that the ones I'm interested in can be purchased for $200 as a kit with a new body, and they sell for about $400 on their own.

So I thought about what other types of lenses made the most sense for me. One of my most recent disappointments was the number of shots I threw away from Kyla's birthday party. Many of my shots were blurry due to my hesitation to use flash or high ISO settings (I eventually used both, so I did get a lot of pics from the latter half of the event).

After some research I came to the conclusion that I would get the most bang for my buck from a "fast" (large aperture) prime lens (one that doesn't zoom). Before I really educated myself about photography, I couldn't fathom why anyone would want a lens with a fixed focal-length, but now I understand how a wide aperture allows you to use faster shutter speeds in low light, which is where I needed the most help.

Now I focused in on (pun intended) a 50mm f/1.4 prime, and after flirting with Sigma's version, I went with Canon's model (the Sigma is overall a better lens, but I read a number of complaints about auto-focusing problems). In an unusual move for me, I bought the lens from a local store, whose price was lower than what I found online.

So far I've only really used my new glass at Kyla's soccer practice, which isn't really it's specialty, but I was able to shoot at ISO 100 at high shutter speeds to reduce the grain. I'm anxious for Halloween to really see what it can do.

Serendipity

I've spent a lot of time over the past few months learning about photography, but I hadn't gone out on a picture-taking excursion since May, so it was time to get out there again.

After work on a Wednesday night when Becky had taken the kids to her mother's, I went down to Lake Sammamish State Park with my camera in the hopes of getting some nice evening shots of the lake and nature. I focused mainly on this tree that looked kind of creepy against the sunset, figuring that from some angle this was going to work. Unfortunately after I pulled the pictures into Aperture, there was nothing in there that seemed very good. I also took a few flower shots, but they were also mediocre.

This was a disappointment to me. After all of this studying and playing with my camera, I went out to what I figured was a pretty photogenic park and came back with nothing.

Then the next day I worked from home so that we could all take Kyla to her first day of Kindergarten together, and it rained that morning. I looked into our backyard and saw the dahlia that Becky had planted during her gardening kick when it hit me, flowers look best right after it rains (you can also cheat and hit them with a spray bottle, but this was the real deal).

I grabbed my camera and tripod and managed to get a few shots in before we had to leave for school, and one in particular came out very well. After getting in onto my Mac I did a little touching up and reduced the saturation and vibrancy, and the result is what I now think of as one of my best images.

Sometimes you go in search of beauty and never find it, sometimes beauty just shows up in your backyard. Now I understand that photography is one part skill, one part serendipity.

A New Hobby

When I first bought my SLR, I really just wanted to take nicer pictures of the kids. I knew that a bigger camera with a larger sensor and better optics than a point and shoot would yield much higher quality photos, and it has. However, my camera and photography in general has become my new obsession.

It's actually a very rewarding hobby when you think about it. There are a lot of people to talk to and get tips from, I have several friends who consider themselves to be amateur photogs. Whenever I get a nice shot I can upload it to Flickr or even print it out and hang it up.

Photography also gets me to exercise the right half of my brain, which I don't call upon all that often. Of course it's a fairly technical craft that involves a lot of work on the computer, so I'm not too far out of my comfort zone.

There are many great resources to learn from. I've read two books on photography: The Digital Photography Book and Understanding Exposure. I've also been listening to the This Week in Photography podcast and watching the Photography 101 video podcast. Where does someone with two young children find the time to watch/read/listen to all this? Now you know why I prefer riding the bus to driving to work.

I had an excursion to Alki Beach for some pure photography fun that went pretty well, though I haven't really had the opportunity to duplicate that success. I'm not getting an ego (yet), I feel like those pictures were decent for someone who didn't know what he was doing, not compared to what a real photographer could do.

So it is fair to say I've found myself a new hobby, which is great. Plus I've accomplished my original goal of stepping up my game with taking pictures of the kids.

An Annual Tradition

It's summer again (or close enough), and of course that means it's time for trips to the beach, enjoying the sun until 9:00, big expensive movies, and of course a new iPhone.

If you know me very well you already know that I waited in line for the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G on the first day they were available. This year I thought I'd have to get mine after the official launch date because I wasn't due for a discount on it until July 12th, and even I'm not fanatical enough to drop an extra $200 just to get my hands on the latest Apple gadget one month early.

But fortunately AT&T did something nice (no really, I'm serious) and allowed us early adopters to upgrade to the latest toy before we were technically due, however their rules for this privilege are fuzzy and have left many of my friends and family wondering why they don't qualify.

I would have opted to have my iPhone delivered to me since that was an option this year, but since I didn't know until two days before the release date that I could get one, I'd have to wait several days after the launch before it would arrive, and I'm not really that patient.

Because home delivery was an option I figured I didn't need to show up quite so early this time around, as the lines would be more manageable. Turns out I was wrong. I showed up at Bellevue Square at 7:00 and waited in line for about two hours. I figured once I got into the store I'd be through quickly, however I was there to get new phones for both Becky and I, and AT&T's system said that only I could qualify for discount pricing even though I had been told differently earlier, so I spent a very long time on the phone with them until they said, "sorry, we'll get back to you." Irritating, but Becky doesn't really care.

But now I've got my new toy and I must say I'm pretty impressed with it (who would've thought?). Going from the original iPhone to the 3G was similar to moving from dial-up to DSL, and that was huge to anyone who actually tried to surf the web on the bus with it. Going from the 3G to the 3GS is like moving from a Celeron to a Pentium with twice as much memory.

Just about everything on the 3GS feels faster, browsing the web, switching between apps, and watching video. The improved camera, video, compass, and voice recognition are cool too, but really the big benefit is from the speed.

My old one is up on Craigslist, and the great thing is that it will sell for more than I paid for the 3GS. I know that I had to sign a new two year contract, but for as long as the iPhone is exclusive to AT&T, I'm obviously not going anywhere.

Going Camera Geek

For years now, the reason I gave for why I used a point and shoot camera instead of a more serious SLR was that I needed something more portable for getting pictures of my kids, and that I didn't want to part with the additional money that inevitably gets spent when one starts buying the latest bodies and lenses.

But as managing and editing photos and video of my kids has basically become my biggest hobby (of course it had to be something that involves a computer), I have found that my inner geek has been drawn to the SLR world. As they have come down in price, I've noticed more and more parents at kid functions carrying the big cameras, and I have to admit I've been jealous.

On top of my techie desires, I've noticed that the pictures I've stolen from friends with SLRs have looked much better than what I've been able to take with my more portable cameras. This is due in part to the fact that they are experienced amateur photographers, but the equipment was definitely a big factor.

So I finally decided that I had to take the plunge. My first order of business was to take sides in the Canon-Nikon holy war. This wasn't really a difficult decision for me, of all of my friends and family with SLRs, the majority use Canon and I already have a loyalty to that brand (both my point and shoot and new camcorder are Canons).

Because cost is still an issue in these trying economic times, I tried to find a good deal on Craigslist for a used one, but I quickly found that they don't depreciate nearly as fast as one would expect. Instead I found a good deal on a refurbished Canon Rebel XS with a 18-55mm image stabilized lens (only $420 which was cheaper than some of the used models).

The camera was another birthday gift that I Shanghai'ed (is in not PC to use that term?) where I basically told Becky and my mother that this is what they were getting me. Thankfully they understand that this is often the best strategy when buying gifts for me and they are good sports about it.

This timing also works out well because we are leaving for San Diego on May 13th, so I'll be able to use that trip to get my feet wet with my new toy.

I've tried to learn about ISO, aperture, white balance, etc, but for now I'm sticking with the auto setting and the presets until I figure out how to outsmart the camera.

Thus far I've been really impressed with the image quality, even though I have the lowest-end SLR Canon sells with a kit lens. I'm sure that my inner geek will require me to upgrade the lens, but I'm trying to hold off until I learn enough about how to use the camera to know what kind of lens I really need.

But this is the last major electronics purchase for me for a while. But then, there are rumors of a new iPhone coming soon...

My Time With The iPhone SDK

Since it was first announced a year ago, I've been wanting to kick the tires on the iPhone SDK. The developer tools looked pretty impressive, though they're basically the same as those used for the Mac, and I tend to love all things Apple.

Up until about a month ago I haven't really had the motivation. Obviously I've spent my days working and it's hard as a father of young children to pick up the computer and start writing code on what little free time I get.

I needed a little help so I ordered Beginning iPhone Development, and fortunately I came into some free time as my previous project was winding down.

This book was easily the best technical book I've ever read. The examples are great and the code is broken down into chunks and explained thoroughly. On top of all that the authors threw in a lot of humor to make it a fun read.

One of the most daunting things for me has been figuring out Objective-C and developing in an environment without a garbage collector. Thus far in my career the bulk of my experience has been in Java and .NET, so keywords like alloc, retain, and release are foreign to me.

Also the majority of my UI work has been using HTML, though I do have some fat client experience with Swing and .NET. Cocoa uses a similar event model as what I've seen before, however it's taken a little while to get my head wrapped around nibs, which can be thought of as freeze dried objects in an XML format, kind of like a Spring config file in the Java world.

Now that I've built a foundation of knowledge for iPhone development, I hope I get to use it in the real world soon.

New Project

I started a new project last week and I'm really enjoying it. The unbelievable part is that the application is for the iPhone, which is basically a dream come true for me, however thus far I've only been working on the backend.

Not that I'm complaining, as a developer it is a wonderful feeling building something from scratch. In this case I'm creating REST Web Services using Java, and of course I'm using the sexy tools like Maven, Spring, and Hibernate (well they were sexy five years ago, by now they're pretty much just standards). We're embracing the "cloud" by deploying on Amazon's EC2 platform, which makes a lot of sense for any small to medium sized tech project.

On the advice of a friend I downloaded the Google App Engine and played around with it for a couple of hours and I was really impressed with how quickly I could get an app working in a short period of time. I have very little experience with dynamic languages and Python felt a little odd to me, but it didn't take long to appreciate how easy it makes many programming tasks.

Building a well designed Java application takes some time, even for someone like me who has done it many times. I'm wondering how long it would have taken to get something similar going with App Engine and if the end result would have been any better or worse.

It's hard to say, but someday I hope to give it a shot just to have the comparable experience. Doing something you've done before is nice because you know how to get the boring stuff done quickly and how to avoid the gotchas, plus it makes hitting deadlines far less stressful, but doing something new can also be rewarding because it's challenging. I didn't choose a tech career because I'm afraid of doing new things.

My Hot Unibody

When I bought my MacBook Pro in late 2006, it was a little hard to justify because my Powerbook was only a year and a half old. However I really wanted one because I was taking a job with a consulting company and wanted to work on a Mac instead of a company issued PC and the new Intel-based MacBook Pros could run Windows when I needed it. After making my purchase, I told myself I would try to keep it for about three years.

I didn't quite make it.

I am typing this on my new unibody MacBook Pro, which I've owned for about a week now. I did my best to be frugal, I bought it off of Craig's List for $500 off of the list price and it was only 4 weeks used, plus I sold my old one for $1,200.

My rational this time around was similar to my rational two and a half years ago, my old laptop would run Windows in a virtual machine, but I struggled to run other apps at the same time due to the amount of memory I was giving the VM. This new machine has four gigabytes of RAM and it has made a huge difference.

Of course the new unibodies have other interesting features. The LED backlit screen feels much more vibrant and the keyboard is much nicer to type on. Also, it's the little things like the magnetic latch and the solid feel of the construction.

The biggest adjustment for me has been the new trackpad. The glass surface does glide a little smoother and it's nice to have the larger tracking surface, but there's no button. Of course the entire pad itself is now a button, and originally I tried to push it for clicks, but it's nosier than the old button and feels clunkier, so I'm trying to get by with tapping on the pad without pushing down instead, which is how I'm guessing this trackpad is meant to be used.

I'm still getting used to how dragging is done, where you tap and hold to drag, then tap again to release. It's a little slower than the conventional way, but it feels better and is probably helps me avoid an RSI.

Using this new method for clicking, plus the gestures for zooming, navigating back and forth, and Expose, evokes the feel of a different interface, that of the iPhone. While most smartphone makers are adding physical buttons to their devices so that they will feel more like your computer, Apple is removing buttons from their computers to make them feel more like iPhones. I don't know whose strategy will win out in the end, but it isn't hard to guess who I'm rooting for.

So far I'm really enjoying my new toy, right now it is the hot new thing... at least until a newer, younger model comes along.

How I Came To Love the Mac

Today is the 25th birthday of the original Macintosh. It was a quarter of a decade ago that Apple aired their famous 1984 commercial during the Super Bowl and Steve Jobs announced the first successful line of computers to use a mouse.

I was seven years old at the time and didn't know anything about it. My father had an original IBM PC in our house that he bought in 1982 and I would play Friendlyware games on it. He did eventually bring a Macintosh home in 1987, and I thought that machine was pretty cool. I did the tutorial and remember clicking on the windows of a virtual building to open them up and reveal the people inside. Then there was this dog training game where I would use the mouse to hand the dog a biscuit whenever he'd do something right or I'd use it to swat him on the butt if he did something wrong (seems harsh to me in retrospect).

When I was a sophomore in high school my father gave me his old 286 laptop and I learned how to use WordPerfect 5.1 to write papers on it, which was a huge improvement over using my mother's old typewriter.

When my father offered to split the cost of a new desktop computer with me after in 1996 after I had just finished my freshman year of college, there was no question that I would get a Windows PC. I had taken a computer science course at WSU that taught me how to use MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, and the various Office programs so I was very comfortable in the Microsoft world. Macintoshes were much more of a niche computer and hardly anyone used them.

One notable exception was a good friend of mine whom I'd known since first grade, and who became my roommate when we were seniors. The first time I ever wrote a "Hello, World" program was in C with his help in my dorm room, and we were oblivious to the fact that the famous WSU riots of 1998 had just started a few blocks away. I remember making fun of him for being such a devoted loyalist to what was by that time a dying platform. We didn't yet know that the Mac had just started it's comeback, but I do remember that in my first MIS class a year earlier the instructor mentioned excitedly that Apple had just purchased NeXT, which meant the return of Steve Jobs and convinced him that Apple had turned the corner. I also remember the same guy telling us about how Java was going to be a big threat to Microsoft's desktop monopoly, so he wasn't always prescient.

In 2000, I decided I would build my own PC. By that time everyone was talking about Linux and how it was the next great threat to Microsoft, so by the end of that year I was triple-booting Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Red Hat Linux 6.2. It became common for technical people to develop a loathing for Microsoft, which had released a number of number of mockable products around that time (Windows ME, Visual Basic, etc) while a general fear of it's monopoly power grew.

I tried to switch completely to Linux, even rebuilding my employer-issued laptop with it, which was actually pretty natural because I worked in Unix environments. I think Becky gave it a week or two of really trying to see if she could switch with me, but the additional struggle to get anything to work like it did on Windows frustrated her and eventually she became accustomed to rebooting the home PC into Windows whenever she needed to use it.

By 2004 my love affair with Linux as a desktop platform was basically over. I had started using Eclipse to write Java code with, and it was far more stable on Windows, plus Linux couldn't manage to put my laptop to sleep when I'd close the lid. I never really grew to like Windows, but I used tools like Cygwin that helped me not to hate it. When I built my second PC I just set it up exclusively with XP.

I still was a big fan (and remain so) of Linux as a server platform. When I built my own website when Kyla was born I used my old desktop running Fedora to host it.

In 2000 I remember seeing some screenshots of the new Mac OS X online and being blown away by just how pretty everything looked compared to the drab grayness of Windows. When some of my coworkers and I went to Comp USA in 2001 and played with new computers running Windows XP and OS X, there was no question which operating system was more impressive to us. Later I had a couple of coworkers who brought their Powerbooks to the office and I was drooling when they'd show me even little things like Expose. At one point I borrowed one of them to make Becky a photo book for Valentine's Day using iPhoto.

But in the end, what made me decide that I just had to have a Mac was becoming a parent. When Becky was pregnant I bought a digital camcorder and the Roxio Easy Media Creator software suite. I took some footage of my brother's high school graduation and used the software to edit it into a cute little movie, though the process was long and the software felt pretty unstable. I also tried to add a song to it that I had purchased legally but that didn't work so I downloaded the same song using Kazaa, which gave me the additional gift of spyware.

Then in 2005 I decided it was time for me to buy an iPod, which I eventually did, but while I was in the Apple Store I was checking out iMovie on one of the Macs... and was totally blown away. It had a far more intuitive interface then anything I had used before and much better features like adding still photos and panning over them (known as the Ken Burns effect).

Becky and I had just started living on one income and the last computer I built was only a year old, but she quickly realized that this was something I just had to have, and green-lit the purchase.

Since then I've stopped using Windows completely, except for within a virtual machine. The Mac just feels so much more elegant and powerful that Windows just irritates me. In the interest of full disclosure I must admit that I've never spent more than five minutes with Vista, but nothing I've heard suggests to me that it's going to change my mind.

I don't know if my enthusiasm has rubbed off on others or if it's just the trend, but many of my family and friends have switched recently as well and no one has been disappointed. I've become the tech support guy for many of these switchers, but the ability to control someone else's desktop via iChat makes it far less of a hassle.

I think that Apple's resurgence is proving to be good for Microsoft because some of the new features of Windows 7 appear to have been inspired by OS X and the early reviews of the beta have been very positive, but I doubt they'll ever get me to come back.

Goodbye to an Old Friend

The morning newspaper has been a daily part of my life since 1995, when I'd pick up The Daily Evergreen to keep up with the latest goings-on at WSU.

When I moved to the Seattle area, I lived with my parents and read their copy of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer every morning, which I've always felt was a pretty good paper (though I didn't have a strong basis for comparison), and when I moved into my own apartment with Becky, I started my own subscription. It was my companion every morning with breakfast (I'm very loyal to my rituals).

Over the past few years, I've regularly had internal debates as to whether I should keep my subscription active. I kept hearing how newspapers were struggling to compete with the Internet and that Craig's List had killed their most reliable stream of revenue. I'm a technology geek, so I felt like I should migrate to online news, not to mention the guilt I felt for all of those dead trees (I always recycle, but still).

Of course I did embrace online news a long time ago, but it just felt awkward to have a laptop next to my cereal bowl instead of a traditional newspaper. Having my kids with me at breakfast only increased my concern for my laptop's safety. However over the last several months I've grown quite comfortable reading news on my iPhone via the New York Times' and AP's custom applications, the latter of which draws local news via the P-I and The Seattle Times.

The last straw was when the P-I had to go from five sections to three, hiding the local and business sections within the others. I respect their need to cut costs in this market, but I was irritated nevertheless and vowed that my iPhone would become my new breakfast companion.

Before I had the satisfaction of canceling (actually just not renewing), the P-I announced that they were basically closing up shop (their chances of finding a buyer that will keep printing it is zilch). For the most part this saddens me because I still intended to read it online, and any job losses are bad for the overall economy.

Some of these out of work journalists will find success in new media, but most of them probably won't. I'm curious to see what the landscape for news will look like after this revolution has played itself out. Let's hope that blogs and rumor sites, which are great for what they are, don't supplant hard news sites with high editorial standards.

Will I Miss iWeb?

I just read an article at Macworld about iLife '09 that mentions that iWeb received little attention in this release. Part of me is actually pleased because I really feel like I should moving away from that app, so it's nice to know that Apple agrees.

Since I started using iWeb, I've had something of a love/hate relationship with it. Before I moved to it, the family blog was on Blogger and our photos were on Flickr. Becky was never thrilled with that setup and told me she preferred the Lasserre's site, which was created with iWeb and had all of it's content on a central site.

Already a fan of everything Apple, I migrated everything to iWeb. The blog was pretty but kind of cumbersome and I began writing the entries as RTF files using TextEdit, which meant that any edits to a posted entry required me to change the RTF file and then recopy it to iWeb.

Moving our online photo library from Flickr to iWeb was clearly a downgrade, though my hopes were raised when Apple introduced the .Mac Web Galleries, which were integrated with iPhoto '08. The galleries looked really good, however they weren't really integrated into iWeb, so I just created links from my photos page to the individual galleries. All the while I was missing the community aspect of Flickr.

As soon as Phil Schiller mentioned that iPhoto '09 would support exporting to Flickr, I knew it was time for me to dump the Web Galleries and migrate back. I'm guessing it will just be a simple export and not support syncing, but that's pretty much what I have today with the Web Galleries.

I'll also be moving the family blog back to Blogger. I've enjoyed the ability to drag and drop photos into the iWeb blog, but that's the only nice thing I have to say about it. Blogger allows me to use tags and is more likely to get serendipitous visitors. I'm writing this entry on MarsEdit which gives me a nice desktop app to write with but the blog posts themselves live in the cloud.

I'm not abandoning iWeb entirely, hovenkotter.com will still take visitors to that homepage, but I will provide links from there to Flickr and Blogger. Hopefully this will result in a nice compromise between having a nice centralized site for the family with the content out on sites with communities.

Also I'm trying to figure out how to leverage Facebook more to drive traffic to these sites. I don't think that I get a lot of visits from my family or friends because they don't really know when I make updates, and I don't feel comfortable spamming them when I do. Most everyone I know who I think would be a good audience uses Facebook, so having updates to the blog or my photos appear in my feed seems like a natural and nonintrusive way to encourage people to check them out.

I spend more time working on my family's online presence more than anyone else I know, mainly because I enjoy it. It just seems silly to put so much effort into something where hardly anyone really sees it.

Hovenkotter Website Version 4.0?

The Macworld 2009 keynote is now behind us, and while most of the tech pundits are reacting with disappointment, I am quite pleased.  It is interesting to hear about new hardware products, but I'm not in the market to buy any new computers in the near future (given the current economic climate I'm sure I'm not alone), but I'm a big user of iLife and that suite hasn't been updated for a year and a half.

Back in April 2007, right before Blake was born, I switched away from using Blogger and Flickr to iWeb based on Becky's feedback about our site.  Before then hovenkotter.net (I eventually gave up on that domain figuring that .com would be more memorable) pointed to this blog and in the margins were links to my Flickr page.  She wanted more of a traditional site, and iWeb was the most logical choice.

After Apple announced the Web Galleries, I moved our photos to that given that it was a much better enduser experience.  However they never integrated with iWeb very well, so I just created links from our central site to them.

Now iPhoto '09 has gained the ability to integrate with Flickr (there have been third party plugins to do this for you before, but plugins aren't officially supported in iPhoto, so they made me nervous) as well as Facebook.  I've missed the community features of Flickr a lot since I stopped using it, so I think I'll migrate back to it.  I am a little nervous about Flickr's future given that Yahoo isn't doing really well these days and many of the Flickr people have been laid off, but it is still the premiere photo sharing site.

The Facebook integration is also cool.  I don't think I get a lot of traffic to hovenkotter.com, but whenever I upload anything to Facebook I know it gets viewed and I usually get comments on it too.  Over the past six months my usage of Facebook has gradually increased to the point where I typically check out my feed about once a day and update my profile several times per week.

I'm not sure what to do about the blog.  iWeb's blogger is pretty rudimentary, though I haven't seen if there are any improvements in the latest version.  It looks like you can put RSS widgets in iWeb '09 so I may just move the blog out and insert a feed of it.

Regardless I'm really pumped to get my hands on iLife '09 and I'll be handing my money over for it as soon as it's available later this month.