Prior to today, Skype was the only IM program that allowed voice+video chat between Mac and PC users (maybe Aim worked, but I don’t know anyone who still uses Aim). The Mac version of MSN only supported Mac to PC video chats for enterprises, leaving the rest of us in the dark. Now that’s a problem because I have more friends that use MSN then Skype (but of course everyone has a gmail account these days and can use gtalk). In comes Google to save the day!

Starting today, you can download a plugin that will allow you to have video chats straight from your gmail window (which is probably open all the time anyway…or several times a day if you’re like me).  Works on Windows XP and Mac OS 10.4 and above. Download from here and read Google’s announcement on their official blog here. Now I know that they didn’t come up with this for the sole purpose of allowing PC and Mac users to have video chats, but  that’s the aspect of this that interests me the most! What this means to you may be totally different. Maybe you don’t care about video chat? Maybe you don’t have a webcam? For the rest of us who do care this is another piece of awesome news coming out of an awesome company

Hmm Google’s gtalk becomes more and more relevant and theres another reason to kick Microsoft’s MSN messenger out the door? Seems to be a common theme these days when discussing anything by those two companies.

After hearing a lot of good things about Apple’s Aperture photo editing software I finally installed it yesterday (thanks TG for the serial) and I gotta say that this beats Adobe’s Lightroom by loads in my opinion.  I’ve had Lightroom installed on my windows desktop for about 3 months now, and can’t find a single good thing to say about it.

Some things I like about Aperture:
- Number one thing I like about the Aperture is its ease of use. Within minutes of installing the program I was able to get satisfatory results, unlike Lightroom or photoshop where it takes a while before you can start getting good results. Lightroom may technically be more powerful (more features) and may be faster, but I believe that good programs are those that allow users to quickly and easily get to the end results that the user have in it. The less time spent fiddling around with settings and menus, the more time users will have to enjoy and share their results!
- Changes made to images are stored as “versions”, storing just the thumbnail image, adjustements and embedded information, but it does not create a image file until you export it. This saves space on your hard drive.
- Easy to “lift” adjustments made to one picture and apply it to other pictures.
- I have a e-520 camera, and Aperture’s update to support the e-520 RAW format was released before Adobe (they still haven’t).
- $100 cheaper then Lightroom (Aperture 2.0 is $199, while Lightroom is $299).

To close this entry, here is a before and after screenshot of the first image I edited with Aperture. Its a picture I took outside a cathedral in San Francisco earlier this year. Even though the file was not saved in RAW, I was still able to recover the details that were lost in the underexposed parts of the statue.

Original image.

After editing.

If you’ve never seen an ice hockey game, you might be surprised by these pictures because I think its the only professional sport that allows fights to break out in the middle of the game and most people outside of the US and Canada may not have seen anything like it. Even though fighting is allowed, players who engage in fighting are penalized. The referees normally allow the fight to go on for a little bit until they feel its time to break it up and then hands out a 2 minute or 5 minute penalty to the offending players. Here’s some pictures of fights that took place during a sharks game earlier this week. The opposing team was playing an ugly game, illegally hitting Shark’s players with elbows and so forth, and since the referees didn’t see those incidents and penalize the opposing team, the sharks decided to take it into their own hands and Ryan Clowe (number 25) stepped up and beat the crap out of a opposing player :). Oh and he also scored a goal and had an assist on another goal. In ice hockey terminology that’s a Gordie Howe hat trick .