http://www.tomspetter.com/index.php/portfolio/ en cyandesign@mac.com Copyright 2010 2010-07-22T06:52:58+00:00 http://www.tomspetter.com/index.php/site/sea_mist/ http://www.tomspetter.com/index.php/site/sea_mist/#When:06:52:58Z West Coast scene in pastels, portraying the calming mists of a seaside morning. Order OnlinePrints, Framed Prints, Canvas Prints & Greeting cards of this are now available for sale! Purchase securely through ImageKind.com Click here to buy online PhotoShop Illustration 2010-07-22T06:52:58+00:00 http://www.tomspetter.com/index.php/site/sun/ http://www.tomspetter.com/index.php/site/sun/#When:19:44:55Z A portrait of the sun, radiating healing energy. Order OnlinePrints, Framed Prints, Canvas Prints & Greeting cards of this are now available for sale! Purchase securely through ImageKind.com Click here to buy online Line Art 2010-05-22T19:44:55+00:00 http://www.tomspetter.com/index.php/site/red_wolf/ http://www.tomspetter.com/index.php/site/red_wolf/#When:19:40:23Z A West Coast Wolf Design. Order OnlinePrints, Framed Prints, Canvas Prints & Greeting cards of this are now available for sale! Purchase securely through ImageKind.com Click here to buy online Line Art 2010-05-02T19:40:23+00:00 http://www.tomspetter.com/index.php/site/card_print_store_now_online/ http://www.tomspetter.com/index.php/site/card_print_store_now_online/#When:17:42:55Z I am pleased to announce that I now have many of the images in my portfolio available for sale online. I am pleased to announce that I now have many of the images in my portfolio available for sale online. Follow the link above to browse through my gallery of images available for purchase in Framed Prints, Unframed Prints, Canvas Prints as well as greeting cards. All transactions are handled securley ImageKind.com and have a 30 day money back gaurantee. Order OnlinePrints, Framed Prints, Canvas Prints & Greeting cards of this are now available for sale! Purchase securely through ImageKind.com Click here to buy online News 2010-05-02T17:42:55+00:00 http://www.tomspetter.com/index.php/site/mount_washington_sunrise/ http://www.tomspetter.com/index.php/site/mount_washington_sunrise/#When:17:53:31Z An Early morning shot at Mount Washington Alpine Ski Village. An Early morning shot at Mount Washington Alpine Ski Village. Order OnlinePrints, Framed Prints, Canvas Prints & Greeting cards of this are now available for sale! Purchase securely through ImageKind.com Click here to buy online Photography 2010-01-07T17:53:31+00:00 http://www.tomspetter.com/index.php/site/just_finished_a_new_site_for_a_friend_of_mine/ http://www.tomspetter.com/index.php/site/just_finished_a_new_site_for_a_friend_of_mine/#When:19:53:07Z MPWicks.com. The new website for my friend & Baby Boomer Author Mike Wicks is now online. Visit his site online at www.mpwicks.com MPWicks.com. The new website for my friend & Baby Boomer Author Mike Wicks is now online. It was a fun site to put together. Built in Expressionengine, It features a full blog, a complete contact management system & integrated Twitter freed. And it even supports IE6, which as a designer I am contimpating giving up supporting. Check it out at www.mpwicks.com Design 2009-12-08T19:53:07+00:00 http://www.tomspetter.com/index.php/site/my_favourite_backup_is_mac_friendly_again/ http://www.tomspetter.com/index.php/site/my_favourite_backup_is_mac_friendly_again/#When:07:48:51Z Although the guys are Carbonite are great at what they do, they kind of strike me as idot savants of the computer world.  OK, here is my reasoning. They come up with a great easy to use back up program. You install it, config a few settings and then walk away. Their program then churns away in the background copying all of your latest files out into cyberspace somewhere. I was content with the old USB hard drive back up, until last year when I was audited. I was all safe and secure thinking. Yep -- I have everything on file, BRINGITON Taxman! Well, when I got the letter... Although the guys are Carbonite are great at what they do, they kind of strike me as idot savants of the computer world.  OK, here is my reasoning. They come up with a great easy to use back up program. You install it, config a few settings and then walk away. Their program then churns away in the background copying all of your latest files out into cyberspace somewhere. I was content with the old external hard drive back up, until last year when I was audited. I was all safe and secure thinking. Yep -- I have everything on file, BRINGITON MR TAXMAN! Well, when I got the letter, after I finished hyperventilating, I fired up my old Mac Mini (which, BTW, is only fired up once a year, before TAX time, just to dump my pile of receipts into an old outdated program that only runs in OS9 - hense the PowerPC Mac Mini. OK that's another Rant -- Where is the decent Mac based accounting software!). Well, my mini, which never really liked me,  picked a fine time to pack it in. I know what your thinking... time to idle the old suburban in the garage for a while with the garage doors shut, right! Ha ha! Nope. I back up!  Everything that I do - there is a copy. A binary doppelganger (Hey now there is a better name than carbonite, and it is available on godaddy). Duplicate Data! I had a FIrewire Hard drive sitting next to the old Mac Mini. But, never did it occur to me that the place could burn down - or that some perverted thief could find my old mac mini & the shiny (well, OK, dusty) 20 gig firewire hard drive sitting next to it even the remotest bit tempting. Well, it was all safe and secure. Redundancy -- in two places, just in case one died. One did die. And so did the other. All of my tax data. Both at the same time.  Or some time in the 9 months that I never touched the two of them. I'm sure the taxman has never heard "Oh, but I did have all of the info you needed,  right here on this computer... but it AND my backup died. How CONVENIENT! (for those of you that remember the 80's -- I'm starting to sound like the church lady here). We'll to make a long story short -- I managed to use a file recovery program, uncountable pots of coffee, and a long sweaty 24 hours filled with lots of swearing and curled up sobbing in the corner (I'm not kidding here). I finally managed to retrieve the files that I needed. Now I am here to tell you -- This has truly been a real story! Ask my wife, or better yet, my barber who laughs at the shiny spots on my head and jokes that it is a good thing he does not charge by the pound. One set of backups is not enough. Have one onsite & another offsite. Either an online service (highly recommended, because you set it and forget it), or at least give a hard drive to a buddy. I'll start a list below of all the sites that I can think of below. Now the reason I think Carbonite. com are Idiot Savants. I updated to Snow Leopard the day it came out & everything worked perfectly. Except when I went to retrieve a file from a Carbonite backup - I accidentally overwritten a file that I needed. Well Carbonite didn't work with Mac 10.6. My bad for installing it in such haste. But Carbonite could have at least told me when their update was out. They could have at least made a mailing list for those of us that are tax data challenged to sign up for. But no, they just quietly updated their software and said keep checking this web page. Someday we will have an update on here. They updated either today, or sometime in the last week... I don't know when... They never told anybody.   Here are some links you may fine useful www.carbonite.com www.crashplan.com www.mozy.com www.idrive.com Miscellaneous 2009-11-17T07:48:51+00:00 http://www.tomspetter.com/index.php/site/great_blue_heron_at_fisgard_lighthouse/ http://www.tomspetter.com/index.php/site/great_blue_heron_at_fisgard_lighthouse/#When:08:14:31Z This was a photoshoot for WestShore Magazine. I woke up at 4:30 in the morning to head over to Fisgard Lighthouse in Colwood to catch the lighthouse at sunrise. I was there to get a covershot for the magazine, which I managed to grab, but luckily there were a few heron's there that morning as well. Not bad I think, for a shot before my first cup of coffee. This was a photoshoot for WestShore Magazine. I woke up at 4:30 in the morning to head over to Fisgard Lighthouse in Colwood to catch the lighthouse at sunrise. I was there to get a covershot for the magazine, which I managed to grab, but luckily there were a few heron's there that morning as well. Not bad I think, for a shot before my first cup of coffee. Order OnlinePrints, Framed Prints, Canvas Prints & Greeting cards of this are now available for sale! Purchase securely through ImageKind.com Click here to buy online Photography 2009-11-02T08:14:31+00:00 http://www.tomspetter.com/index.php/site/w00t_i_jammed_with_trent_reznor/ http://www.tomspetter.com/index.php/site/w00t_i_jammed_with_trent_reznor/#When:04:37:45Z Yep that's me on the guitar... the rhythm and the lead. Thanks to modern technology I am able to join one of the greats like Trent Reznor in the recording studio & lay down a few tracks. Look out Eddie & Yngwie, I'm after your jobs... Yep that's me on the guitar... the rhythm and the lead. Thanks to modern technology I am able to join one of the greats like Trent Reznor in the recording studio & lay down a few tracks. Have a listen. Well kinda, anyway. Actually, thanks to Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails, who in all honest sadness I have never really met, or anyone famous for that matter... unless you can count Nikki Sixx, who I was close enough to spit on at a concert. Heaven knows he kept trying to spit on me and every one else in the first couple of rows, but I digress. Thanks to Trent for making his tracks available in Garageband format & freely down-loadable from his website. I was able to remove a few tracks and lay in a few of my own. Also thanks to Steve Jobs, for never giving up and keeping your employees working those extra hours making "Insanely Great" products like Garageband. With stuff like that, someone with real musical talent could do some really cool stuff. Personal 2009-10-07T04:37:45+00:00 http://www.tomspetter.com/index.php/site/things/ http://www.tomspetter.com/index.php/site/things/#When:03:38:04Z A decent Task Management system has become my Holy Grail of programs. Ages ago when I first started in an advertising agency, all of us in the art department had legal size pieces of foam core with a laser printed grids glued on to them. We would then write every job that we had on little Post-its and rearrange them into little columns. Rush jobs would get moved to one side of the board, normal jobs to the middle and proof out jobs to the other side. Our production manager would come by each morning & we could see at an instant where everything was...A decent Task Management system has become my Holy Grail of programs. Ages ago when I first started in an advertising agency, all of us in the art department had legal size pieces of foam core with a laser printed grids glued on to them. We would then write every job that we had on little Post-its and rearrange them into little columns. Rush jobs would get moved to one side of the board, normal jobs to the middle and proof out jobs to the other side. Our production manager would come by each morning & we could see at an instant where everything was. Hey! I did mention we had laser printed stuff glued on to the foam core - so it's not like we were totally living in the dark ages! For years I have been searching for a better way. This seemed like such an archaic system, amongst our high tech gadgets. I mean, heck, we even had a CD Burner. Ahhh, it's been a long twisted path, this quest o' mine. It all started with a Palm Pilot (You remember those - don't you?). I figured technology could save us from the dreaded Post-it. But no, it just didn't have the same ease of use as picking up a post-it and moving it from one side of the board to the other, each time the status of a job changed. From there I just moved onto heavier things. Constantly hanging out at VersionTracker scoping out the latest stuff. I tried everything there; Omni, Todo X, Organized. Nothing ever quite did the trick. I even rushed out to buy the latest Version of OS X for the built in todo lists in iCal & Mail. Steve Jobs couldn't let me down...Still nothing. From there I progressed onto hosted apps, Remember the Milk, Tada list, BaseCamp & ActiveCollab. Those last two are pretty good at collaborative things, but not so much for all the active jobs that fly across a designers desk in a day. I even ventured into Some PHP Scripts & Filemaker Database programming. But 2 Days ago was my Lucky Day! Things! I have only been using this for 2 days now, but I just had to stop and rave about it. This has been the only app that I have found in my years of searching that is as easy to use as post-its, and as flexible. The Tagging system, the due dates, the drag ad drop. It's just a thing of beauty. See for yourself on Cultured Code's Screencast Oh, yeah... It's a Mac Thing. Sorry Windows folks. Miscellaneous 2009-10-05T03:38:04+00:00