Yet another from the snow storm. It was an incredible storm with great atmosphere.

This is another shot from the snowstorm a couple weeks ago in NYC. This is shot in Madison Square Park at the entrance at 26th & 5th Ave. As soon as I walked in, I was struck by how the NY Life building was barely visible behind the snow and tree.

I love this city.

This is from the snow storm we had here in New York on Saturday the 19th. It was brutal out, but we didn’t get hit as hard as our neighbors in Pennsylvania and Maryland (unfortunately!). Now the only thing that’s left are some piles of snow on the side of the streets and a bunch of slush on the corners that you need to jump over.

This is from a few nights ago when I met up with a friend to get some nerdy electronics I won’t go into detail about. I decided that since I live 10 blocks from GCT, I should probably do the tourist photography thing at least once or twice. This time I brought a tripod so I didn’t have to push the shutter speed too high. I think this may become a new thing: doing night shots of classic tourist destinations.

Other spots on the (not-quite-) agenda are: Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park, the Top of the Rock, and a cityscape of the Manhattan skyline from Brooklyn Heights or Williamsburg or something along those lines.

Okay, I need to follow up on the prior post. I’ve been doing a lot of work in Windows lately (yuck!) for my photography and a gig that involved living in Word, Visio, and Excel (clearly why I got an MS in Computer Science), so I haven’t been in Linux much. Finally, the Lenovo W500 was rebooted into Linux and all of the 192 updates were applied successfully. The result? Here’s a run-down of what appears to be the state of Ubuntu’s notoriously poor support for this laptop (due to the ATI video card):

• Suspend and restore seem to work okay with desktop effects enabled
• Desktop effects, with Emerald installed, look sweet
• Restoring, Maximizing, and Resizing Windows with desktop effects enabled is all screwed up.

WHAT THE HELL? Seriously–this is such a well-known issue, that’s so consistently complained about, that this should really be fixed in the main release by now. Or at least there should be a fix. Well, thankfully, there is a fix. A (very) long story short: apparently there’s a conflict between the way X handles certain things with desktop effects on between Intel drivers (for the integrated graphics cards) and ATI drivers (for instance, in the W500 machines). Ubuntu decided to opt for having X work out of the box with Intel instead of ATI, and there’s an ongoing debate between XOrg’s developers and ATI and neither will put in the effort to actually resolve the issue. (I hope I got all that right, after Googling about this for about 45 minutes).

In any case, the way to fix the lag is as follows:

1. Add “ppa:launchpad-weyland/xserver-nobackfill” to your software sources. Click on Applications –> Ubuntu Software Center. Click on Edit, Software Sources. Click on Other Software. Click on Add. Paste in this:
   

   ppa:launchpad-weyland/xserver-nobackfill

2. Open a Command Terminal. Type:
   

   sudo apt-get update

   and hit enter; then type:
   

   sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-core=2:1.6.4-2ubuntu5~ppa1 xserver-xorg-core-dbg=2:1.6.4-2ubuntu5~ppa1

   and hit enter.

3. Sit back and wait. After it’s complete–hopefully successfully!–restart your computer, enable desktop effects, and enjoy not having to deal with that annoying freeze / lag whenever you resize, restore, maximize, or create a new window. Damn, it’s nice!