Young Miss Rachel celebrated her bat mitzvah today at Peninsula Temple Sholom along with her family and many friends. Rachel is the second child in her family whose b’nai mitzvah I’ve been asked to photograph. The first was her brother Nathan a while ago. It is a special thrill to be a part of a family’s Jewish history in this way. Here are some previews of coming attractions. Mazel tov!
I participated in celebrating Hannah’s bat mitzvah yesterday at Peninsula Temple Sholom. As I have been doing recently, I’ve captured a few video highlights along with my customary still photographs. Here is a lovely song that Cantor Barry traditionally sings to young ladies celebrating their bat mitzvah, along with some photographic highlights of Hannah’s exciting day. Mazel tov to Hannah and her family!
Local Northern California disc drive manufacturer Seagate has discovered a flaw in the “firmware” which controls many of their recently-manufactured disc drives. I was alarmed when I discovered that as many as SIX of my disc drives might be affected, including two of my main production discs in my Mac Pro. These are very high-performance 1 terabyte discs, and despite all my precautions about backups, I was still concerned.
But after following this story closely for a few days and with the friendly assistance of “Brian B.” on Seagate’s tech support live chat system, I finally got what I needed to update my drives. Five of my drives were actually in need of updates…
After about a half hour of nervous hacking, Mission: Accomplished!
I successfully updated five Seagate ST31000340AS (7200.11 1TB drives) which were at SD15 firmware to ‘SD1A’ firmware. This was a little complicated because after I did the two that were internal to my Mac Pro, I had to remove three of my internal drives and replace them with the three from my eSATA drive. It turns out the sixth 1TB drive was actually a Maxtor-labeled drive, and the firmware hasn’t been posted for that drive yet.
But here you go…FreeDOS booted on my Mac Pro running Seagate’s flasher program. Worked like a champ. Whew!
Feb 2 2009 Interesting update found on Macintouch.com written by Randall Voth:
It is my understanding that a log file is written to by the firmware when certain things happen, such as swapping bad sectors. If you startup the drive when it has written exactly 320 items to this log, then the drive will not be recognized at boot. The data is still intact. The physical drive still functions. The log needs to be cleared and you should update the firmware.
I made portraits of most of the attendees of PARTY’s Black & White Ball at Peninsula Temple Sholom in Burlingame on January 18, 2009. Here is a compilation of all 200+ of those photographs. Enjoy!
(This is also posted on Facebook if you’d like to “tag” it over there)
I had the privilege and the joy of attending Leah’s bat mitzvah yesterday. Here is a short video snippet shot with my new Canon EOS 5D Mark II.
Update (Jan 14): I have edited the video to use the sound from the temple’s sound system, so here you have it in all its glory!
Update (Jan 16): I have added a second video. This is too much fun!
I am amazed at Moore’s Law. For those who may not be familiar with this great piece of computer history, it goes something like this…
Way back in 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore wrote in a research paper that he believed that the number of transistors able to be placed on a circuit board would roughly double every two years. He could not envision this continuing beyond even ten years, when that would place over 65,000 transistors on a single board. Imagine his delight all these years later when he sees things like this.
Digital cameras record their images on “compact flash” or “SD” memory cards. The SD cards are considerably smaller, and are becoming more favorable because of their size advantage. Their capacity has now caught up with their larger siblings, as evidenced by Kingston’s announcement of a 16 GB SD card.
I won’t bore you with yet another accounting of how much of the Library of Congress would fit on that one card. 
But consider this:
Currently the largest available conventional hard drives are one terabyte (that’s roughly one thousand gigabytes, or 1 million megabytes) in size. They’re available from all the major hard drive manufacturers. So I did some math and imagined if you were to build a storage device made up of not a high-speed magnetic platter, but a whole bunch of these little SD cards.
The SD card spec says that the cards must be 24mm X 32mm X 2.1mm in size.
A standard 3.5” one terabyte hard drive is roughly 26mm X 101.4mm X 147mm in size.
So, based on my redimentary calculations, that means if you were to attach a whole lot of SD cards together (I figure 200 would work) so that they could fit in the same space, you’d end up with a solid state storage device which requires very little power, weighs 40% less than a hard drive, and stores over three terabytes. And it would work a lot faster than a hard drive, too.
Unfortunately, at a retail price of around $230 each, this whiffy storage device would cost you $46,000. But remember Moore’s Law, and just wait a few years!
[Update as of Feb 1, 2008]: As if to prove how quickly things change, today I saw that Sandisk has announced a 32GB SD card. So take the calculations above and double them. Except for the price, which is $350, so the cost of your 6.5 terabyte solid state disk would be a nice round $70,000.
Update (August 19, 2008): Intel have announced that they’re jumping into the Solid State Disk business: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10018837-64.html
[Update as of Jan 15, 2009] : Well, the 32GB SDHC cards are still very expensive, but the latest sale I saw just now on 16GB SDHC cards has them at $29.99 (including free shipping!), meaning that the price of our mythical 3TB all-flash hard drive has gone from $46,000 to about $6,000.
(Images courtesy of Kingston, Inc. and Sandisk, Inc.)
After a relaxing vacation with my family, I’m refreshed and ready to grab my cameras and start 2009 the same way I ended 2008: capturing moments and sharing them.
Thank you for making my 2008 the best year so far, and here’s to an awesome 2009!
Steve
Great piece on NBC’s Today Show about how fast Facebook is growing among the 30+ demographic…
