First Friday fashion shows at the Hawaii Institute of Hair Design and SOHO Mixed Media Bar.
Sunsets
SBX-1 Tour
I recently had the opportunity to take a tour of the Sea Based X-Band radar ship, or SBX-1 as it is called. It is a large radar mounted on what would have been a oil drilling platform. SBX-1’s mission is to detect and discriminate incoming ballistic missiles so that they can be shot down by the U.S.’s Ballistic Missile Defense System. Although it is currently docked in Pearl Harbor, it has been deployed recently during North Korea’s missile test.
151 steps is definitely not the kind of commute I would want to do every day. Our guide, Lt. Col. Steve Braddom, said that the crew has the option of going ashore but I’d guess they keep that to a minimum.
The SBX-1 is now in a limited test support role and will remain in Pearl Harbor unless it needs to be re-activated. The original intent of the ship was to go wherever it is needed in the Pacific theatre and be stationed in Alaska. However, SBX-1 was moved to Hawaii for budget reasons. The maintenance in lower in places that don’t freeze I suppose.
The most intriguing part of the tour was when we went inside of the radome, the inflatable dome that surrounds the radar. The radome can protect the radar from winds of at least 130 m.p.h. It’s remarkable since the difference in air pressure inside the dome was only about 1.5″ of water higher than the outside. Call it about 0.05 psi.
If you’re really curious as to what the radar itself looks like, there’s a photo of the X-band radar being installed on the ship in Texas. It’s about 1/3 of the way down the page.
A big Thank You to the Public Affairs Office of and for setting up the tour.
Lightroom Catalog Troubleshooting
I’ve been using Adobe Lightroom since version 2 and I’ve had it crash on me maybe a hundred times over the years. Most of the time it is some kind of glitch and I pickup where I left off. On rarer occasions, Lightroom locks up while in the middle of opening a catalog. I’ve been able to troubleshoot those problems with a little bit of Google-fu. Today’s crash was the most frustrating one to date. None of the usual tricks worked and I was about to give up and pull out a backup catalog. Except that the backup catalog wouldn’t load either. Neither would the previous backup, nor the one before that.
So, obviously there is a whole lot wrong. Here’s how I ultimately fixed it.
1. Delete the Preferences file (*.agprefs) that is stored in %APPDATA%\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Preferences. You could simply rename the .agprefs file, but I’ve never come back to a corrupted one. The .agprefs file contains some Preferences info and most importantly it contains the location of the most recently used catalog. If you run Lightroom like most people, LIghtroom will open the most recent catalog you’ve previously opened. You need to get Lightroom to start in a blank state where it does not try to open a catalog automatically. Deleting the .agprefs file will do this. And don’t worry, a fresh and clean .agprefs file will be created once you’ve gotten Lightroom working again.
2. Delete the ***Previews.lrdata folder and find a backup catalog to restore. I use Crashplan as my general safety net that saves my bacon when a hard drive crashes (and that’s happened once already). But I find that Crashplan is not always the easiest to use when I just want to restore a single file or folder. So, I store my catalog file in my Dropbox folder, as do the current batch of photos I’m working on. When Lightroom craps out, I restore a previous version of the catalog file thru Dropbox’s version history. Usually the version from the day before the crash is good enough. Hopefully, you have some sort of continuous backup solution protecting your catalog and photos too. If I had to rely on Lightroom’s built-in weekly backup feature, I’d be screwed. Deleting the Previews.lrdata folder was the key to recovering from my latest Lightroom mess. And I suppose it would be a best practice to delete those preview files anyway since eliminating the previews makes a catalog load faster. The previews will be regenerated after the catalog has been restored.
3. Launch Lightroom. It should prompt you for a catalog to load.
4. Select the backup catalog and verify its integrity.
5. Lightroom should now open the catalog without any problems, assuming that the catalog passes the integrity check.
Here’s the setting under Edit –> Preferences where you can make Lightroom open without loading the most recent catalog.
Oh, and one more thing you might want to consider. If you save your RAW images in DNG format, you can save your Lightroom edits and tagging directly in the DNG file. The function is under Metadata –> Update DNG Preview & Metadata. This way, even if the catalog file is totally unrecoverable, you can still salvage all of your editing and metadata. You can simply import the photos into a new catalog and pickup where you left off from there.
Google Street View Announcement
Google announced a big improvement of their Street View program today. This includes panoramic vistas of popular places inaccessible by car. It will help tourist take a virtual walking thru Waikiki in addition to driving down Kalakaua Avenue.
First Friday – June 2012
The first First Friday of the summer and things were off to a mellow start…for a First Friday. SOHO Mixed Media Bar celebrated their third anniversary with more body painters. This month’s fashion show had a jungle theme at the Hawaii Institute of Hair Design.
Kina Grannis Concert in Hawaii
It’s so rare when a musician I admire performs a live concert in this town. I don’t even recall the last time I paid for tickets to a concert here. It was such a treat although there were many a technical difficulty. But, she pushed on through it all. A real trooper.
First Friday – April 2012
Better late than never. I caught two fashion shows two weeks ago at First Friday. Work has been keeping me busy. ’nuff said.
Moon Venus Jupiter Sunset Timelapse
Took a break from work on Sunday to catch a sunset and stayed a bit longer to catch the Moon / Venus / Jupiter conjunction.
Kawaii Kon 2012
The complete photo set can be found on Flickr.
My favorite anime convention was last weekend and although it looked like it might rain, we were quite lucky to not have to deal with anything more than a brief drizzle. The costumes were as bright and creative as ever. If you’ve never been to a Con (anime, sci-fi, fantasy, etc.) the experience is so much different than Halloween. The cosplayers have an attachment to their costumes that the average Halloween-goer does not. Halloween costumes are meant to be disposable whereas most cosplayers will keep their costume from year to year and build onto the costume gradually. Cosplayers identify with their characters and take pride in their handiwork. In a nutshell, one can find a Ghostbuster anywhere but only certain type of person will put in the effort to go beyond an inflatable Proton Pack.