The big news lately is that I have been selected for an exhibition in St. Louis at the White Flag Gallery. There are 4 other artists in the show this year. It is designed to highlight several B.F.A. and M.F.A. graduates from the St. Louis area. The exhibition will be up from May 17 - June 21. I was unable to attend the opening because I am currently down south working, but several of my friends attended the opening and took some great pictures of the show. I have 7 32”x32” photographs hanging in the gallery. I encourage everyone who is in the St. Louis area to check out the work. I also was selected to have one of my photographs on the large banner outside the gallery. It is pretty crazy to see my image printed at 10 ft. by 25 ft. on the street! This is a great opportunity for me, and I am really excited about the opportunity to show my work, especially in the St. Louis area.

I found this great link on the fake steve jobs blog.  It is interactive, so be sure to click around and explore everything.  I especially liked the solitaire and word applications.  It has apparently been around for awhile, but still good nonetheless.

This is one of the most entertaining blogs I have read. It doesn’t hurt that it is mostly about apple products, but nonetheless, it is very humorous. It was in the news this week because a journalist from the NYT finally figured out who was writing the blog, apparently another journalist from Forbes. The entire blog is supposedly written by Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, and it is absolutely hilarious.

What is even more funny is that now everyone is up in arms at the NYT reporter who uncovered the real writer of the blog. The original article from the Times is here. Interestingly, the Times has removed the comments from the article. I first ran across the article a few days ago and the reporter, Brad Stone, was getting flamed by readers who were upset that he “ruined all the fun.” Here is a quote from one of the comments on nytimes.com.

Thanks, Brad! Couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you? I feel like a kid whose older brother just couldn’t keep his yap shut, spilling his ‘insider knowledge’ about Santa Claus. What a frigtard.

The good news is that the blog will still be written as usual, just sponsored by forbes.com.

For those of you who haven’t read the latest interview with Microsoft chairman Bill Gates about Window’s Vista and comparisons that the media are making with Apple’s OS X, you should really check it out. It is pretty funny to hear Gates attempting to defend an operating system which he knows is inferior. First of all, I’ve used Windows for almost the entirety of my computing life, which is about 16 years. I was never a die hard mac fan from the beginning. I remember one of my best friends from high school whose dad owned an old power mac back in the mid 90s. I remember playing prince of arabia and some other old skool games, but other than that, I thought it was a pretty weird computer. I didn’t know how to use the interface, and for the most part, I thought it was inferior to my Windows 95 computer.

Having said that, I would like to point out several of the humorous quotes that Gates said during his interview with Newsweek. As a response to why users should upgrade to Windows Vista, Gates said…

The most effective thing would be if I could sit down with them and just take them through the new look for a couple of minutes, show them the Sidebar, show them the way the search lets you go through lots of things, including lots of photos. Set up a parental control. And then I might edit a high-definition movie and make a little DVD that’s got photos. As I went through, they’d think, “Wow, is that something I could use, would that make a difference for me?”

First of all, the sidebar is completely useless. I am currently running Vista on my desktop PC, and even with a 24” widescreen monitor, I don’t use the sidebar because it just takes up space. Apple’s Dashboard is a much better option because the widgets never take up any space on your computer screen. They simply fly out of the way when you are ready to work again. Set up parental control? Sure, I’m all for parental control, but is this really the option that is just going to put the “wow” factor in Vista, which Gates and his team has been hyping for so long? Next he is going to edit a high definition movie and “make a little DVD with photos.” Hmm….iDVD and iPhoto have been around for years now, both of which do a much better job of editing and providing novice users the opportunity to create professional quality DVDs. Windows Movie Maker is a pathetic excuse for an editing program, and the built in photo viewer and organizer in Vista is years behind iPhoto. I understand that Gates and his team are doing the best they can to develop a quality operating system, but the fact of the matter is that Apple is 2 or 3 years ahead of Microsoft in software development. You can pin the problem on Microsoft’s engineers having to constantly work on security issues, which gives them less time and resources for innovation, but I don’t understand why the consumer doesn’t realize the vast superiority of the Mac operating system and switch from the Windows platform. Gates also stated that he hadn’t seen the “Get a Mac” commercials ever. Ever? Are you serious? The get a mac ad campaign is one of the most well known commercial campaigns currently on television, and the chairman of the company which it is talking about has never seen the ads? I find that extremely hard to believe. Does all of this add up to Gates becoming more and more detached from the industry which has given him wealth and fame beyond measure? It will be interesting to see the new direction that Microsoft takes after Gates steps down next year. In my opinion, Gates should stick to what he does well, giving out enormous amounts of money for philanthropic causes. I admire Gates for what he is doing around the word, for helping underdeveloped countries struggling with AIDS and continuing to be a spokesman for philanthropy. I just don’t admire him for his vision at Microsoft. The company has become stagnant, a bumbling dreadnought of the tech industry that is unable to innovate. Luckily for consumers, there is a viable alternative that is continuing to innovate and push the limits of quality and creativity.

It’s been 3 weeks since I got my shiny new macbook in the mail. Even though I’m in a financial crisis as a result of buying the computer, I can’t say that I regret it. Like I mentioned before, I have been a mac fan for a few years now, one of the few mac fans that didn’t actually own a mac. So now that I finally have a mac, I can honestly say that I love macs even more. wow, that sounds really confusing when you read it back..oh well. I have found a few new programs for the mac that are absolutely amazing. The kind of programs that make you wonder why no one can ever write something so simple and applicable on the windows platform. The first is quicksilver. I had heard about this app before buying my macbook, but I had never used it. Quicksilver is basically an application launcher and real time search app. It indexes your entire computer, similar to spotlight, but it is much more intuitive and powerful than spotlight. For instance, instead of simply launching iTunes, it can actually browse your library right from the onscreen pop-up interface. You can also assign global triggers for any key combination that can control a variety of programs without having the programs focused. For example, I have assigned a trigger to skip to my next iTunes track, previous track, and play/pause. This is very useful, rather than having to maximize iTunes and change the track while you are in another program. To top it all off, the interface of quicksilver is absolutely beautiful, complete with smooth fading and slick graphics. Why can’t you do anything like this on the Windows platform??? The next app I discovered is Omni Outliner, which is bundled with OSX Tiger. This is an amazing program for taking notes in class. It is so much faster and smaller than using cumborsome Microsoft Word. It allows you to create a parent-child system of note taking, with incredible customizable features such as moving text around within the notes, coloring any notes, and creating infinite levels of hierarchy. It is really an amazing alternative to Word, which is outdated and incredibly slow because it isn’t written for the Intel based macs. Any student or professional should really check it out.

I’m sitting in Panera Bread right now writing this blog entry. There is a girl on the other side of the restaurant that is playing World of Warcraft on a small HP laptop. She has the complete getup, complete with the over the head earphones and the boom mic. I was sitting behind her while waiting for my food, watching her fly through the virtual world on the back of some sort of flying horse. I don’t want to seem sterotypical, but I found this interesting because she doesn’t quite fit the mold of the normal WoW gamer. I would have expected to find a geeky male huddled over the screen, barking orders into his microphone. It’s a rainy day here in SO ILL, it has been raining since early this morning, and it isn’t supposed to stop until after midnight. I am heading down to Cobden, Illinois tonight to attend a town meeting for my documentary project. I have scanned a few images, so check back to the photo side of the site tomorrow for some new pics. For all of you who are in the know….be warned, CWS has begun to take hold in Southern Illinois. It won’t be long until it reaches you as well.

Today is a good day in the life of johndcorson.com. I finally got a new host for the site. My old host (catalog.com) was having some speed problems and also going through new ownership, which was very confusing to say the least. I have switched my hosting company to siteground, which offers much more space at a cheaper price. After migrating all of my databases and code, the site seems to be much faster than before. I am going to wait a bit longer on my recommendation of siteground as a hosting provider until some time goes by. But so far, they have been great. I was able to get the domain propagated in less than 12 hours and had everything up and running about 12 hours from when I signed up….not bad at all!! I also have 40 GB of space on their servers, compared to 500 MB that I had on catalog.com, and i am able to create as many mySQL databases as I want, which makes the site run faster when I have 3 seperate portions of the site. So, it is a good day, and hopefully you will be able to notice the differences in the speed of the site.