Finally my Thawte Certificate came through to replace the Verisign Cert.  SSL works fine, but what is fascinating is that it seems that unless you have Thawte.com set as a Trusted Site, in IE, the Thawte Logo doesn't show.  Oh well.  I save a few hundred dollars -- and probably lost the same in sales.  Who knows.

10:19:06 PM    

I had an inkjet breakthrough today.  Of course, it happened by accident.  I had bought a sample pack of Adorama paper -- and while experimenting with it, I noticed that they suggested to set the printer "space" to their driver.  That didn't do much good, but then I decided, on a lark, to set the printer space as well as the printer driver to Colorlife Paper.  First off, it then allowed me to print at 1440 dpi, which it hadn't been allowing me to do before.  Second: I've been printing all morning without any smudging.  So I am beginning to think that a lot of the problems I was having had to do with printing at 2880 dpi as I had been doing for the last year.  One other key setting in the print space area: Intent should be set to Perceptual.

Third: And most important.  The black and white quadtones I'm printing, at least so far, look exactly as they look on the screen.  No sign of color cast on the first three glossy papers I've tried although I'm printing with the driver set to color as I had been doing all along with the REAL colorlife paper.

This is freaking amazing to me as in the past, I was only able to get decent prints on the colorlife paper and the driver was forcing me to print at 2880.

Of course, the Adorama paper is much cheaper than Colorlife, and probably more photo-realistic looking.

But I have all sorts of other paper to experiment with and I'm expecting that I will get similar results on Ilford Gallerie etc. 

I really may be on the cusp of using inkjet for ALL NEW PRINTS.  This will allow me to put up many more images for sale quickly and just do darkroom work for the older prints.  Let's see.  As a matter of fact, I have a nice high res scan that I'm going to try at 8 x 12, something I wouldn't have done before all this.  I just haven't dealt with the "archival" paper issue yet.

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This has been a very important day.  I will have to write it up at some point, exactly what I'm doing -- but I am getting superb black and white out of the 1280 now on Colorlife Paper at 1440.  Real quick, as usual, I am printing them as Quadtones but with Epson Inks, with the color radio button selected.

I'm going to see how they look in the morning -- but I'm seriously thinking that going forward, all new prints are going to be offered as inkjets.  In fact -- and this would really be drastic -- I might stop selling the smaller chemical prints as chemical prints but start selling them as inkjets.  I'm not kidding.  That's how good these prints look to me right now.  Probably the biggest variable involved is the ADO quad file and how you futz with the curves, but I've been doing that for two years already.  The real tipping point was the Print Source Setting -- and setting that to Colorlife P.P. along with saying "No color correction" in the print driver section.  Who would have thunk it?

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11:48:40 AM    

7 U.S. Soldiers Die in Iraq as a Shiite Militia Rises Up

By JOHN F. BURNS (from New York Times)

"In effect, the militia attacks confronted the American military command with what has been its worst nightmare as it has struggled to pacify Iraq: the spread of an insurgency that has stretched a force of 130,000 American troops from the minority Sunni population to the majority Shiites, who are believed to account for about 60 percent of Iraq's population of 25 million. "

One of the things I've noticed lately, is that most of the people I know who were totally in support of going into Iraq are having second thoughts.  I don't know anyone who is saying, now we must get out.  But the question of whether going in was a mistake or not is bubbling up.

Do you remember when one of the American generals before the war testified that more troops would be needed -- and how he was castigated by the administration?  That the war would be paid for with Iraqi oil?  That there was a mushroom cloud on the horizon?  That Iraq was connected with Nine-Eleven? 

As I went down to Adorama yesterday, it was one of those bleak, Poe-like days.  I noticed the concrete barriers everywhere.  The city gated up.  The cops at corners where they had never been.  Maybe it was just the gloomy morning -- but it did finally hit me -- that this is the beginning of what could be another hundred-year war.  Night and day of the living dead. 

Kamikaze : An airplane loaded with explosives to be piloted in a suicide attack.

The attack of the already dead.

Fox News: Now is payback time.  Live coverage as we take Falluja.  Operation Vigilant Resolve. 

MSNBC: Did she fake her own kidnapping.  Her lawyer actually tried to make a connection between her faked kidnapping and the state of terror in the world by saying what was going on in the world might be related to the fact that she bought duct tape etc. and went out to the woods.

Quote of the day: "We have isolated pockets where we are encountering problems" - spokesman for L. Paul Bremer III

I'M DAVE BECKERMAN AND I APPROVE THIS MESSAGE

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8:45:01 AM