2009 Hello!

Well welcome back to everyone and a happy new year to 2009. I enjoyed my trip back home to the frozen tundra of Illinois. Actually the temp's were not too bad. In fact, we had a tornado warning one day! Then it got cold after that passed through. Now I'm back to the grind and usual blah.

So as a graphic designer I have to get geeky from time to time. Apple had their keynote address last week, which I watched online. They are putting out a new 17" MacBook Pro later this month. I'm now oogling over it and want one! The new iLife 09 is pretty sweet as well. The new version of iPhoto has face recognition software integrated with in it. With it, you can make albums of each of your friends and it will automatically recognize each person's face when you add new photos and it will ask you if it is so and so. Then you can click yes or no and it will put all the same person in one folder. It can organize by person for you. Pretty cool! In the new version of Garage Band they have included music lessons for piano and guitar. You can learn how to play on your own through step by step instruction. Or, they have lessons taught by famous musicians on how to play one of their hit songs. So we all can learn how to play the guitar from John Fogarty! Ha Ha, kind of fun!

First Shout Out of 09:
So in my designer geekyness this past week I also found this, which is super cool. This is a story about a composer/researcher/programmer at Stanford named Ge Wang. He has created an orchestra called Stanford Laptop Orchestra which consists of folks that play their instruments on the computer. They use 20 MacBooks to compose and perform new music electronically. How cool is that! They even created their own speakers out of wooden salad bowls! Check it out here.