Young Miss Rachel celebrated her bat mitzvah today at Peninsula Temple Sholom along with her family and many friends. Rachel is the second child in her family whose b’nai mitzvah I’ve been asked to photograph. The first was her brother Nathan a while ago. It is a special thrill to be a part of a family’s Jewish history in this way. Here are some previews of coming attractions. Mazel tov!
I participated in celebrating Hannah’s bat mitzvah yesterday at Peninsula Temple Sholom. As I have been doing recently, I’ve captured a few video highlights along with my customary still photographs. Here is a lovely song that Cantor Barry traditionally sings to young ladies celebrating their bat mitzvah, along with some photographic highlights of Hannah’s exciting day. Mazel tov to Hannah and her family!
Local Northern California disc drive manufacturer Seagate has discovered a flaw in the “firmware” which controls many of their recently-manufactured disc drives. I was alarmed when I discovered that as many as SIX of my disc drives might be affected, including two of my main production discs in my Mac Pro. These are very high-performance 1 terabyte discs, and despite all my precautions about backups, I was still concerned.
But after following this story closely for a few days and with the friendly assistance of “Brian B.” on Seagate’s tech support live chat system, I finally got what I needed to update my drives. Five of my drives were actually in need of updates…
After about a half hour of nervous hacking, Mission: Accomplished!
I successfully updated five Seagate ST31000340AS (7200.11 1TB drives) which were at SD15 firmware to ‘SD1A’ firmware. This was a little complicated because after I did the two that were internal to my Mac Pro, I had to remove three of my internal drives and replace them with the three from my eSATA drive. It turns out the sixth 1TB drive was actually a Maxtor-labeled drive, and the firmware hasn’t been posted for that drive yet.
But here you go…FreeDOS booted on my Mac Pro running Seagate’s flasher program. Worked like a champ. Whew!
Feb 2 2009 Interesting update found on Macintouch.com written by Randall Voth:
It is my understanding that a log file is written to by the firmware when certain things happen, such as swapping bad sectors. If you startup the drive when it has written exactly 320 items to this log, then the drive will not be recognized at boot. The data is still intact. The physical drive still functions. The log needs to be cleared and you should update the firmware.
I made portraits of most of the attendees of PARTY’s Black & White Ball at Peninsula Temple Sholom in Burlingame on January 18, 2009. Here is a compilation of all 200+ of those photographs. Enjoy!
(This is also posted on Facebook if you’d like to “tag” it over there)
I had the privilege and the joy of attending Leah’s bat mitzvah yesterday. Here is a short video snippet shot with my new Canon EOS 5D Mark II.
Update (Jan 14): I have edited the video to use the sound from the temple’s sound system, so here you have it in all its glory!
Update (Jan 16): I have added a second video. This is too much fun!
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