Thursday News Quickies
Howdy folks. It’s Thursday; here’s what’s up:
It’s our tradition to come up with a new theme each year for the Photoshop World Conference, and this theme plays out through everything we do around the event, from the marketing pieces to the opening keynote, to the signage at the event—even to the outfits our staff wears at the event. Each year also we create an official conference poster for the conference attendees.
Well, this year’s conference is based on a Football theme, and Nancy Masse (our in-house social diva and bon vivant) has a very cool post over at the Photoshop World Blog with all of the show posters we’ve created over the years (and by “we” I mean Felix Nelson, NAPP’s amazing Creative Director who created all those posters himself!). The poster on the left above is from 2001, when we did a Basketball Theme, and introduced the whole “Photoshop Instructor Dream Team” concept, and on the right it this year’s show poster. (To see all the posters, click here to check out Nancy’s post).
Nancy was bragging this week how she “scooped” me with her post, but I had one up my sleeve. You see, Nancy’s posters start in 2000, but the first Photoshop World was actually held in 1999, in Orlando, Florida and the poster was designed (pre-Felix) by Photoshop genius Doug Gornick. I don’t have the original Photoshop file, but we have that original poster framed and hanging in one of our hallways at NAPP Headquarters, but somehow Nancy missed that (he chuckles under his breath), and so I had Brad take a photo of it, still it in its frame (because over the years its gotten a bit washed out and splotchy because of its hanging location in direct sunlight), and I present it to you below.
The sad part is; if you could see the full size original poster, Doug put an incredible amount of detail into this giant space station, in orbit above a “death star-like” version of Earth, and it’s totally lost in this small Web image (but is clearly visible in the original, and people are always amazed when they see it in person. Those little orange blobs are highly detailed astronaughts welding on that structure). Anyway, thanks to Nancy for her efforts, and oh yeah—“Nah, na, na, na, naaaa, nah!” ;-)
In other news:
- I don’t know if you caught Terry White’s post about his Drobo back-up issues earlier this week, but I’ve received a couple of emails about it, and so I called up Terry to ask him to detail the problem. As Terry says in his article, (I’m paraphrasing here), ‘the Drobo did it’s job, but he still lost his data.’ That’s because the Drobo’s job is to protect against Drive Failure, which is exactly what it did—-all of his drives were still functioning perfectly. But he had a problem the Drobo couldn’t protect against, which was Data Corruption on the OS-level. His directory got hosed, so the data was actually still there, and you can recover it with recovery software, but when your directory doesn’t think the data is still there, you can’t access it. Terry shared a great analogy that brings the problem into perspective; “Let’s say you’re using a Windows PC, and you get a nasty virus. Your Drobo will still have all green lights, because it monitors drive health, and all your drives are fine, but the virus is destroying your directory and all your files on the drives. If you don’t have a back-up of the files on your Drobo in a case like that, you’re hosed.” This is another reason why I have two Drobos; one at home and a mirror of it at the Office. If one goes down, I have a backup. By the way; Terry had a backup, and although it took overnight to restore it; all his photos were saved. Whew!
- We released a new training video this week on Kelby Training Online called “Building a Website with Photoshop CS4 and Dreamweaver CS4,” from Photoshop Web Guru RC Concepcion. We’ve had a lot of folks asking for a class just like this, which really shows the step-by-step process from beginning to end and RC has done a kick-butt job of it (when it comes to this stuff; RC is ‘The Man”). Here’s the link to the full run down of his new course.
- We just announced the winners of the 4th Annual Photoshop User Awards, (produced by Photoshop User magazine, and sponsored by Adobe Systems, Layers Magazine, MPIX, and Peachpit Press). To check out the winning entries, click this link. Congratulations to digital artist Ciro Marchetti, who won the Best of Show award, and will going to Barcelona, Spain for a 5-day “Dream assignment!”
- Lastly, if you want some Thursday inspiration, check out the incredible photography of Thomas Broening. I’ve showcased his work before, here on the blog, but I just went by his site again, and I was impressed all over again with some of his latest stuff. Just brilliant! Here’s the link.
Have a great Thursday everybody, and for those of you who follow NAPP via Nancy’s NAPP_News Twitter page, please don’t mention the whole “I just re-scooped her” thing. She has so little joy as it is. ;-)