He won it! They won it! Amazing!

I feel we can all breathe out now. What an emotional, gripping and historic election. President-elect Obama. Has a nice ring to it.

UPDATE: US bloggers have been effusive and very creative.

I’m typing this on a brand new MacBook Pro. I called it Sandman. I picked a character from Neil Gaiman‘s books, one of my favorite authors, and with the glass screen and trackpad I chose Sandman. Tenuous at best I know, but hey, it’s my laptop.

So how did I get this beautiful, sculpted, top-spec laptop? Especially one I lusted after?

It’s a replacement for my previous MBP which exhibitied graphics glitches whenever the system’s temperature spiked (doing heavy rendering, video conversions, etc). I managed to screen record the problems and showed it to the Apple Geniuses at the Regent Street store. After a couple of days’ testing they couldn’t replicate the fault and so the manager authorised a replacement for me.

The MBP they gave me today is top spec: 15″ screen; 2.53GHz CPU; 4GB RAM; 320GB HD; and with two graphics cards, a 512MB ATI 9600GT graphics and a 256MB 9400M.

I’m speechless. And I’m very very happy!

I recently read a post that had me thinking about Facebook. Titled If It’s Too Social, You’re Too Old, the author argues that designers who ignore the site are like the businesses who ignored the Web way back when.

I’m lucky since the internet isn’t my vocation or source of income. I don’t have to grapple with the ins and outs or the direction the winds blow online. But I am interested in new internet trends if I find them exciting and can see myself using them. 

I deleted my Facebook account in August 2007 because it became less and less comfortable using it and especially when Beacon was announced. I was unhappy with what the site considered was its property and that was anything and everything I added to my profile, be it photos, links or conversations.

Aside from the legal and political issues, I was finding myself tediously updating my profile, my status and frivolously accepting more “friends”. I use Twitter for updates, Flickr for photos and Delicious for links but they don’t feel as empty as Facebook. One of the reasons for starting this blog is to consolidate all of these activities and to attempt to have ownership and control of my activities online.

So, has it changed since I deleted all traces of myself on Facebook last year? Has it become a hybrid Ebay/Amazon/iTunes/Craigslist/Twitter site? According to some sites, it has decreased in popularity with the phrase Facebook Fatigue popping up in the copy. Other reports claim that Facebook and other social sites are the biggest thing on the internet.

Then there is the more shadowy side of Facebook. Some claim that it is a massive data-mining operation by the CIA. The Guardian published an interesting and slightly alarming article on the backgrounds of the board members and the company’s business practices.

When I decided to cancel my Facebook account, I assumed there would be the standard internet “Delete My Account” button to press. There isn’t. Facebook leaves your account dormant and your information is still visible and actionable. The reasoning behind this, according to their customer support, was to enable a smooth re-activation if I change my mind. To completely delete any trace of myself I had to manually remove all applications, photos, messages and links… one by one and almost line by line. That took a while.

Facebook, therefore, is not for me.

The codecs seem tightly optimised and I’m able to play 1080p without the CPU hitting 50%. And it can play anything I can throw at it. It also supports Subtitles. All of these grown-up media centre features make Front Row look like a distant unliked cousin.

Here’s what the Movies view in Plex looks like:

The App scanned my library after I added it as a source, downloaded all the artwork including the background fan art and lots of info. Then I added a few TV shows and this is what that interface looks like:

And the TV Series interface:

Richard did a fantastic job of coming up with a reference shot to sell to the director and clients and this is what it looks like.

CG Leaves

The two leaves in the extreme foreground and the one behind it is fully CG. One of the plugins (or Sparks) which I used in almost every shot is Sapphire’s Z-Defocus in conjunction with a CG Depth pass.

Leaf Depth pass

Other passes include Veins, Facing Ratios and most importantly for this shot a Specular map which helped me light the leaves with a nice waxy grade. The reverse side of the leaves had a different, translucent look.

Specular pass

Here’s the final shot:

I bought our iPhones on the night they were released here in London (6:02pm as I recall). I remember how enthralled I was with it. The touch screen flicking action even skewed my interaction with my MacBook Pro! I kept on wanting to flick the touchpad upwards to scroll down!

I didn’t want to jailbreak it, happy as I was with everything it did. And that was with the 1.0 software. With the App Store and 2.1 version (let’s not talk about lag–heavy 2.0) it was like having a new iPhone. To add to the joy of having a lot of Apple products around my house, O2 contacted me and offered me a free upgrade to the 3G. I didn’t care that I was locked in for another 18–month contract and I jumped at the chance.

Some of the people at my company are avowed anti–Mac pro–Windows users… and they have iPhones. The Mac–heads have iPhones. What’s more, we all exchange tips, tricks and sometimes minor gripes. We sit around and talk about cool Apps we’d love to see developed for our industry. We borrow each other’s USB cables and email each other podcast links.

And then we have the Blackberry users, and this is what prompted me to write this post. They just don’t seem to care about their Blackberrys. They drop them on their desks, glance at the screen and push the devices to one side, groan when it chirps with a new email/sms/voicemail sound and sometimes curse at them. They never update their Blackberrys and never try to figure out creative ways of using the product.

Here’s the point I’m trying to make and I’m definitely biased. iPhone users seem to be inquisitive and curious, continually tweaking, playing, installing, deleting and updating. We plug in our headphones and listen to music as we work, we watch movies on the Tube ride to work and surf the internet on the bus. We play games as we wait for our Flames to finish rendering. In extreme contast, I haven’t seen a single Blackberry user use the device for anything other than email, texting or using it to make or answer calls.

There is an exception to this usage pattern though. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I bought two iPhones. When I upgraded to the 3G version, Gillian decided to keep her first generation iPhone. My wife is the only iPhone user I know who falls in between the two categories of smartphone users, ie, she loves her iPhone but she drops it… a lot. And every time that happens in front of me, I flinch involuntarily. It’s as if she dropped one of our girls on a cold hard floor. It’s an over-reaction, probably, but not that far from the truth.

I wonder if there are any new Apps in the App Store today?