I've only been using this application for about half an hour, and I already love it. I am not in a position to write a review yet, obviously, but here are some things that tickle my fancy right off the bat:

• The sweet presets - Hate to admit it, but that's how I processed the latest photo in my Flickr photostream. Plus, you can create your own presets.
• Importing options - Gives you options to copy the RAW files to a new location or leave them where they are, and doesn't put them in some weird library like Aperture.
• History - Keeps a history of everything you do and you can easily revert back to any state it has been in and work from there.
• Lower the lights - Sometimes it's best to look at a photo by itself, not letting your eye get tricked by anything else on the screen around it. Just press the "L" key, and you can do just that!
• Easy web photo albums - It looks like you can very easily create a web album of the photos in your film strip, and it's highly customizable.
• Snazzy slideshows - Play a very sleek slideshow of your filmstrip.
• Very intuitive and customizable printing - You get an exact print preview of the image(s) and you can adjust margins, columns, rows, set an identity plate...anything.
• Every other little thing - You can tell this app was created by photographers. A lot of little things you wish you had while working in Aperture are here in Lightroom.

Aperture may have some of this stuff, so don't criticize me there. If they do, it's well hidden and not very intuitive. Just download Lightroom for yourself and see what you think.

Recently heard about this new One Hundred Push-ups plan and decided to start five minutes after I found it because it seemed so easy (as in the convenience of doing it) and not very time-consuming at all. As a person who doesn't really work out his upper body, I thought it'd be a great way to get started. I'm a geek, a lazy one, so I don't get out much. Taylor and I ride our bikes a few miles every day, and while it gives me strong legs, I'm still scrawny and weak everywhere else. I'm a fan of cheap and efficient exercise, so this sounds good:

“ Push ups can be performed no matter where you are, and best of all, they are completely free - no expensive equipment or annual gym fees required! If you're looking to develop a great chest and shoulders, you could do much worse than follow along with the hundred push ups plan. Your core strength will also go through the roof too! ”

I'm currently on Day 2 of Week 1, so I don't have much to say at this point. There's an initial test you're supposed to do, and honestly, I got about five good-form push-ups. Not impressive at all, I probably have the most work to do. But it's something quick you can do in your spare time, so try it out if you're looking to get in better shape and let me know how it goes!

This was actually the first computer I could ever call mine. I still remember the model, it was a Toshiba Satellite Pro 445CDT. It was 133MHZ, had 16MB of RAM (which I later bumped up to 80MB) and I think the hard drive was just over 1GB. I was going through some old photos and found this and it brought back the memories. This photo was actually taken with my very first digital camera, made by Kodak. I learned a lot from that little (well, big now) laptop, and I'm very thankful my Mom bought it for me when I was in middle school. I remember she got it for $700 from a friend; she must have known I was very passionate about computers and technology to be so grateful.

I've had my Drobo for about three weeks now and a lot of people have been asking how I'm liking it so far. I decided to get the Drobo because I wasn't happy with my current backup situation. I wanted a device I could use for primary storage and backup that would also keep the data safe. The Drobo seemed like such an obvious necessity so I decided the high price of the Drobo was going to be the price to keep my data safe.

As you can see, I only have two hard drives in the Drobo for now: two 500GB 7200rpm Seagates. I went with Seagate because I've never had a problem with their drives, and I didn't go with Western Digital because I always have problems with their drives. Two 500GB drives give me 461.42GB of actual storage available for data, the rest is for protection and overhead. I'd say this setup will last me a while; as you can see from the capacity lights, I'm only using about 20% of the capacity. That's because I've never really had this much storage available to me, so I eventually have to delete things. If I had it sooner, it'd be filled with the RAW images from my camera I couldn't afford to keep.

Once plugged in, it'll show up as a normal external hard drive that needs to be formatted. I think I used Disk Utility to format it to HFS+. You'll also have to install the Drobo Dashboard software which is to update the firmware on the Drobo and give you on-screen notifications in case you lose a drive you near capacity. As you can see, it puts this ugly little icon down in your Dock which I can do without. I might get around to changing it one day, but for now it'll just be annoying. They also put something up in the menu bar, a pie chart of your drive usage with a menu of options, which is good enough for me, so hopefully they'll give an option to turn off the dock icon.

The noise: As far as complaints about the hardware, I'd say it's the noisiest piece of hardware in my room. I normally have about two or three computers on all the time, and luckily they'll all pretty dead silent. When you start reading and writing data from the Drobo and the fans and hard drives start kicking up, it's very apparent and there's nothing else to drown out the noise. The fans compared to an Xbox which I say is notorious for being noisy are not as bad, but the clicking of the hard drives might be more annoying than an Xbox. I don't know if it's the particular drives I got or what, but it seems to be a common comment about the Drobo.

Drobo Share: At first, I was sure I would want to get the Drobo Share along with the Drobo, but after some digging and some observations, I just can't justify it anymore. I thought it would be great to have the Drobo as a stand-alone network storage device and have all my computers have quick access to it, but you know what? It works just as fine as a shared volume off of my Mac, and Samba takes care of any file-system conflicts, which was said to be a problem with the Drobo Share. Also, the Drobo Share is advertised as having gigabit network speeds. What's the point if USB 2.0 can't even handle gigabit speeds? What the Drobo needs is an integrated gigabit ethernet port so we can read and write to the drives at gigabit speeds. And of course, the Drobo Share costs an absurd $200.

Bottom line: Despite the minor inconveniences of the software and the noise the Drobo produces, and not to mention the hefty price tag, I'd still recommend this product to anybody. It's a great feeling knowing your data is safe. The little bits and pieces I did complain about weren't even that big of a deal which shows you have to nitpick to find faults in this product. Everything seems to work just the way it does in the demo videos. It's intuitive, reliable and functional, which makes a good product. Now I just have to find a way to sync the device to Amazon S3 and I'll be quite a happy camper.

Taylor got to be on the news recently because she went storm-chasing over the summer. I captured it in HD and put it on Vimeo! They won't allow embedding HD videos, so just go here to see the HD goodness..

Since Mozilla's launch of Firefox 3 from their servers is failing miserably, I'm gonna let you download FF3 from me (I was able to get the files during some brief uptime). I'll report the numbers so they're included in the record.

Download: Windows | OSX | Sorry, no Linux