"Magical, revolutionary"... these are among the many words Steve Jobs and company used to describe the iPad during the device's announcement Jan. 27.

Is it, though? Right now, it kind of looks like a big iPhone or iPod Touch ...

The majority of people I have seen discussing the iPad online or talked to in person about it have a lot of hate for the device. Are these your typical Apple bashers feasting upon the latest fresh meat from Cupertino or are there some valid points among the name-calling and panty liner jokes?

While the iPad is a neat device, many of the naysayers have good points when it comes to what isn't included. I'm not a belittler. I'm looking forward to trying one out and, maybe, buying one if I like it. I thought I'd use this post to bring up some intelligent pros/cons about it. If that doesn't suit you, halt your reading now! More...

The start of 2010 for Springfield and the majority of the country was a cold one. At a time when frigid temperatures keep many people indoors, there are those who brave the harsh weather in order to pursue something they love to do. For me, it is getting out and taking photographs. This past weekend, I had the luck to run into a group of guys pursuing one of their favorite activities, too.

I was at Washington Park on Saturday, taking some photos, when I noticed people skating on the frozen pond near the "deck" area. A group of about eight guys was playing an informal game of hockey. I thought it was pretty cool to see people out on the ice because I had only ever seen old-timey photos of people skating at the park. I asked them if they were cool with me photographing their game. Grant Hammer, the gathering's organizer, told me there would be even more out Sunday around 2:30 p.m. I snapped several dozen shots, playing with my camera's settings along the way, in order to get a feel for outdoor winter sports photography, which is something I haven't had any opportunities to shoot yet.

On Sunday, I came back around 3 p.m. to find about 20 players gracing the ice, along with several spectators watching from the deck. It was pretty cool to see so many out playing. I spent the next two hours taking around 1,000 photos, moving around the ice as the lighting conditions changed. Since then, I've weeded out the flops and came up with 577 photos to share with those who played.

Below are my 22 favorite shots. The rest can be viewed on my SmugMug photo gallery.

If you want to save any of the photos on the photo site, move your mouse to the right side of the photo you are viewing. A menu will pop up. Choose "Save Photo" to download it directly to your computer. This is the high-resolution version of the image, which is what you'll want if you wish to print your favorites.

Thanks to all of the players for letting me photograph the game.

You can read more about the Washington Park hockey gathering in a recent State Journal-Register article.

View the rest of the photos at my SmugMug photo gallery.

Our city, Springfield, is located in the part of the United States that experiences all four seasons. Some last longer than others, but they are all definitely there. During the winter months here, you can always count on cold temperatures and driving home after work in the dark. Every now and then, though, we get a few inches of snowfall.

Despite the mad rush to the grocery stores after snow, many people take it upon themselves to bundle up and enjoy it while we have it, before it turns into a muddy, salty slush. Recently, I was among them. Let me tell you why.

My girlfriend and I have had fun this year as new DSLR camera owners. One great tool we've used to learn about our cameras, and photography in general, is a 10-week digital photography course offered by a company called CreativeTechs and taught by Seattle-based photographer John Greengo. John's photography course videos are awesome. His explanations and examples have made years of my partial and basic photography knowledge come together and click. Not only is John a great instructor, but he also has many of his own projects and currently works with the famous photographer Art Wolfe on projects such as the show Travels to the Edge. You can also check out John's weekly photography show at CreativeTechs or subscribe via iTunes.

Now that I have all this great photography knowledge, I thought it was time to get out there and practice! About a week ago, Springfield had a nice blanketing of about 2 inches of snow, which was perfect for those who wanted to get out and enjoy it, yet not enough to cause any major problems. I layered up, grabbed my camera, and headed off to Washington Park, followed by Pasfield Golf Course and, finally, Centennial Park to get some shots of wildlife and people in the snow. Below are some of my favorite shots from that outing. All the images were shot with the Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM lens (review here), except for the last photo, which was shot with the Canon EF 28-135 f/3.5-5.6 IS USM lens (review here) on a Canon 50D.

Here's a time-lapse photography video we made of us decorating the tree this year. Hope you like it!

How'd we do that?

It took a combination of trial, error, and luck to get this photo sequence to turn out well. I had the bright idea to give it a try just before we started putting ornaments on. Whether it worked out the way we wanted it to or not, we thought it would be a fun experiment and learning project. The following is a little technical, but I think it could be helpful to anyone wanting to do a similar project.

The equipment used to make the sequence:

• Canon 50D camera
• EF-S 10-22mm lens
• Speedlite 580 EX II (master) and 430 EX II (slave) flashes
• DSLR Remote by OnOne Software
• Tripod
• My laptop

Camera setup:

The camera and 580 flash were set up on the tripod about 10 feet away from the tree. The 430 flash was placed a few feet closer and lower on our coffee table. The lens was zoomed to about 20mm and was manually focused. I also set the exposure mode to manual, in order for the photos to have a more consistent look. The ISO was set to 200, white balance to flash and the shutter speed and aperture were 1/30 and 6.3.

Problem (lighting):

Even with a DSLR camera, taking indoor pictures with motion under room lighting is kind of tough. Freezing the motion with as little blur as possible is even tougher. If the ISO was bumped up higher, I thought the images would look a little more grainy than I wanted. Increasing the aperture could have left a little too much out of focus and, of course, lowering the shutter speed would produce a lot of undesirable blur. The only option left was to increase the light!

We tried a few options before resorting to flashes. The room the tree is in is our living room, which is about 21 feet by 16 feet  with an 11-foot vaulted ceiling. We turned on every light in the room and took a few test pictures. The results were very dark and lacking detail. Next, I decided to try a really bright work light that I have. I placed it on the floor and shot a few more tests (example at the left). The result was better detail, but the light cast some pretty big shadows that also made the results look bad.

We have flashes for our cameras, so I decided to try them next. When using more than one flash, one of the units is placed on the camera, like normal, and is designated the master. The secondary/slave flash fires when it detects the master flash firing. It's a pretty cool feature. I've known about it for a while, but I hadn't tried it before. Setting them up to work like this required a peek at the manual but it was up and going in a few minutes. I tilted the 580 EX II to a 45-degree angle and used the catchlight panel to bounce some light back to our faces. I set the 430 EX II to use the wide panel, in order to better illuminate the lower portion of the frame. There may have been a better way to set this up, but I haven't done a lot of flash photography yet and can still claim ignorance. Hopefully my experienced photography friends aren't shaking their heads too hard .

The results turned out pretty well. Shadows are there, but they're not as dark as the photos with the work light. They also made it possible to get a better freeze of the action as we were hanging ornaments.

Taking photographs:

There are a number of ways you can take a series of photos with most DSLR cameras. Wired or wireless remote units with built-in intervalometers are available for many cameras. An intervalometer, in photography, is used to trigger a number of exposures over a given amount of time, such as one picture every 15 seconds, which is what we used for our project.

I don't own a dedicated camera remote, however. Instead, I used some great software called DSLR Remote from OnOne Software. DSLR Remote is a two-piece package. An application runs on your Mac/PC, which is attached to your camera via a USB cable. The DSLR remote app runs on the iPhone or iPod Touch. It can control your camera via WiFi. You can use this software to release the shutter (take pictures), change camera settings, view photographs taken on your iPhone/iPod Touch and even enable Live View (if supported on your camera) and see the output in the palm of your hand. Ad hoc wireless networks are supported, too. This software has an intervalometer function that did just what I needed for our project.

The results:

There were some minor technical difficulties during our Christmas tree decorating ... namely my flash batteries giving out! The flash started firing every other photo, so we had to stop and get fresh batteries. Minutes later, we were back in business. Overall, we were very pleased with how the photos turned out. Very minimal adjustments to them had to be made.

I resized the sequence of photos, 153 total, to 1920x1280 and imported them all into Adobe Premiere. Premiere kept the photos in filename order, which made it easy to drag and drop them onto my video sequence. I selected the entire set and added cross dissolves with just a few clicks. Next, I did some searching for some Creative Commons music and found "It's Christmastime" by Oliville Christmas Dynasty. If you're not familiar with Creative Commons, follow the link to learn more. In a nutshell, it's a licensing agreement that lets artists publish their works for others to use or modify, generally with only a few guidelines. I listened to a dozen songs before choosing this one, which I thought was a great fit for the video.

Conclusion:

Despite the bumps here and there, the project was fun. We learned a few things, too, like putting hooks on your ornaments first and then hanging them up seems to go much faster than putting the hooks on as you take them out of the box. I also learned my rechargeable batteries may need replacing soon! Hello, Santa?

Happy holidays!

Virtualization has been a hot topic in tech for several years now and shows no signs of going out of style any time soon. I think there are some really great uses for it, such as server and application consolidation, but, I also think there is a lot of hype and glamour surrounding the topic as well. Will virtualizing your servers really save you money and time? That all depends, in my opinion. Only you know what applications you have and how well those currently perform. The only way you'll know how virtual machines will help or hurt you is by testing.

The department I work for currently uses Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 on top of Windows Server 2003 for the majority of our virtual machines. When Microsoft introduced Hyper-V with Windows Server 2008, we discussed upgrading, but ultimately held off on the new Microsoft virtualization solution. Hyper-V had many mixed reviews upon its debut, so we wanted to wait to see what later revisions could deliver. Also, at the time, Virtual Server 2005 met our needs just fine. Since VS2005 wasn't broken ... you get the idea.

Time has passed since then and Microsoft has recently released Windows Server 2008 R2 with an updated version of Hyper-V. There have been several improvements to Hyper-V since its initial release. Virtual Server 2005 has started to show its age, compared to all the other virtualization solutions now available, so now is a great time to do some testing of Hyper-V 2008 R2. More...

This post is a friendly reminder regarding the importance of regularly backing up your computer. Data disasters happen. Are you prepared?

I recently had a chance to put my backups to the test. I have a secondary computer here that I use for games, fun, and general messing around. I use it a few times during the week, but mostly on weekends. This week, I happened to fire it up on Tuesday evening. My attention drew elsewhere after initially pressing the power button. When I returned to find it hung on the disk detection screen, I knew there was a problem.

On this PC, I used a RAID 0 array for the C drive. For my non-technical readers, RAID is a technology that lets you combine multiple hard drives for either speed, data redundancy, or a combination of both. In my case, I used RAID 0 to combine two physical drives into one logical one. Basically, this means the operating system and applications consider the two hard drives to be one. The advantages to RAID 0 are that it lets you combine the capacity of two hard drives and increases disk performance, generally, by a noticeable amount.

The main disadvantage to RAID 0 is the fact that if one of your hard drives fails, then the data on the remaining drive(s) is useless. This is so because RAID 0 splits the data, like your videos, pictures, songs, and operating system files, between the hard drives (two or more) in the array. If part of the data is gone, like when a hard drive fails, you're toast.

Aware of the data loss risk, I used RAID 0 on this computer for the disk performance improvement. Having made the decision to go with RAID 0, I knew regularly backing up the C drive would be important. Keep in mind, regular backups are important regardless whether or not you are using RAID. I believe it's especially important when using RAID 0, however, because this level of RAID does not provide any data redundancy. Other levels of RAID do and I'd recommend them for storing important data. I won't go into the differences here, but you can check out the Wikipedia articles above or do some general Internet search to find out the benefits of RAID.

The drive that failed was a Western Digital Raptor Raptor 150GB. When a hard drive fails, it can be time consuming to track down exactly which drive is the culprit in multi-drive systems. I had a good idea which one was at fault because the hard drives in this system are in individual trays, each with their own indicator lights. The light on the faulty drive was lit solid when the computer was trying to detect the installed hard drives at startup. To verify this drive was bad, I removed all other hard drives from the system and downloaded the Western Digital diagnostic tools from their site. Each hard drive manufacturer generally has a similar tool they offer for helping your identify hard drive problems. I ran the tool and it verified the drive was bad. Check out the screen shot below. I ran the full scan, like the software suggested, and eventually received another status code (0222 & 0225) indicating the drive failed.

I replaced the drive a few days later with an updated Western Digital model. I've had good luck with Western Digital in the past. One friend of mine has sworn them off completely. Why go back to a manufacturer that failed on me? The simple fact is standard hard drives are mechanical, and thus will eventually wear out and fail, no matter who made them. I, for instance, tended to avoid Maxtor drives before the company was bought by Seagate. Ask ten tech guys what their favorite brand of hard drive is and why and you'll get ten different answers. It's a lot like asking someone about their favorite kind of car.

For my backup solution, I chose to use Acronis True Image Home to back up to an external hard drive. I started using Acronis True Image a few years ago when it was at version 11. They recently released version 2010, which is what my latest backup was created with. I've used Acronis software many times at work to backup and restore data to various machines, but this was the first time I had to use it to recover personal data that would otherwise be gone for good without a reliable backup. After booting the PC from the Acronis recovery CD, I selected the backup archive on my external hard drive and chose to restore it to the new internal hard drive. About an hour and a half later, I saw the message below.

Even before I started the restore, I was confident I'd get my data back. It's always a relief to see this screen, though! After this, all it took to getting back to normal was removing the Acronis CD and restarting the computer. Everything was back to normal.

Lessons learned:

I got lucky because I took the time to set up a backup schedule and made the necessary adjustments to it throughout the years to make sure backups were getting created successfully. My backup solution, which was a USB external hard drive plugged into the computer I was backing up, worked out fine in this case. When creating backups, however, you need to consider all possibilities. Instead of an internal hard drive failure, where would I be now if the house caught on fire or if someone stole all my computer equipment?

With the wide availability of high-speed Internet service, many online backup service providers have emerged. Their goal is to back up your data, encrypted over the Internet, to a secured data center that's protected against fire/flood/theft (hopefully!), rather than an external hard drive sitting no more than 6 feet away from your PC.

Advantages to a service such as this include:

• Safe, offsite storage of your data.
• Having your data available on any Internet connected PC, secured by your account credentials.
• The ability to retrieve older versions of your files (this varies by service provider)

There are some disadvantages, too:

• It can take a long time to back up all your data over the Internet.
• Limitations of the service provider, such as storage limits or platforms supported (Mac and Linux not supported by all).
• Cost, which is usually a monthly or yearly fee.
• Doesn't back up your entire computer (just photos, documents, etc.)
• Generally limited to one computer backed up per account.

Despite the drawbacks, I think I'm going to look into a service like this. It's one thing to lose the hard drive of my secondary PC. I'd be pretty unhappy, though, if I lost all the digital photos I have from the last ten years or so. If I subscribe to one of these services I'll post a follow-up.

I kept the geek level to a minimum in this post so all readers, regardless of computer skills, can understand the importance of backups. If you have a technical question, feel free to ask it in the comments.