Michael White was my teacher for Improv 400, and he was undoubtedly one of the best teachers I’ve ever had for any subject. It was truly an awesome class. Michael is also a hypnotherapist, and he recently posted a podcast using hypnosis to help people overcome a fear of clowns. Even if you’re not afraid of clowns, it’s worth checking out!

(Via Creative Creativity.)

Awwww yeah! We’ve got our tickets and hotel reservation (tricky!) — we’re going to Nashville next summer for the CMA Music Festival! Neither of us have been to Nashville, so we’re both really excited.

Do any of you have any CMA Fest tips, or things we should see while we’re in Nashville?

I would apologize for the bad pun in the title of this post, but I think it may be so bad as to not even qualify as a pun.

After much complaining, hand wringing and web searching, I gave in and bought a ReadyNAS NV+. Since the party poopers discontinued the diskless version, I ordered the 1x500GB model, and separately ordered a couple more 500GB disks from NewEgg. If you’re interested in taking this route, you may want to hurry. There are signs that the 1x500 model has also been discontinued — it’s not shown on the Netgear site at all — but some are apparently available still.

With the diskless version out of the picture, it wasn’t quite as much of a slam dunk decision, but I think it’s still a reasonable value. Once I get it, set it up and figure out the rest of my new photo archiving workflow, I’ll report back.

I’m trying something new. I’ve added a section on the right side of the main page (on my real blog — if you’re reading this on MySpace, you won’t see it) labeled “shared items.” I’m going to try to use it to share my favorite posts from other blogs I read. It shows the last few entries I’ve shared in Google Reader, so this depends on me actually remembering to click “share” on posts I like. I’ll do my best, but let’s consider it experimental for now ;-)

Warning: geeky post ahead.

Lately I’ve been struggling a lot with how to manage the many, many, MANY gigabytes of digital photos I have stored. Some day I’ll write a post about my workflow and archiving system, but suffice it to say I have a ton of CDs and DVDs filed away. It’s becoming a major pain in the butt. So I have been considering other options, and a NAS (network attached storage) system is looking really attractive. For my needs, the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ looks like a great solution. But today, I discovered a very annoying problem.

The ReadyNAS is available in a number of configurations, with various numbers and sizes of disks included. Historically, one of the configurations included no disks, so you could buy your own and add them in. That not only gives you more flexibility, but it tended to save a fair amount of money too. Unfortunately, NetGear acquired Infrant earlier this year, and they’re in the process of revamping the product line. As part of that, they’ve apparently eliminated the diskless version of the ReadyNAS from the product lineup. Last week when I started thinking about, there were diskless units in stock a few places. Now there are none. This makes the ReadyNAS a much more expensive proposition.

Let’s look at a couple of examples.

4x250GB configuration

2x500GB configuration

There’s only one word for this: suckage. I hate it when a good company gets acquired and the product line gets screwed up.

I’m still considering going with the ReadyNAS, but I’m also seriously looking at other options. If you have something you really like, please speak up! Anything I’m going to consider needs at least 500GB of storage in a RAID configuration with the ability to add more, and great compatibility with Macs.

Update: I decided to go with the ReadyNAS anyway. It ended up costing me about $150 more than it would have before, but such is life…

Update 2: For those of you stumbling across this post from Google, there’s some discussion of the topic on Infrant’s forum that may interest you.