maniacal rage

Unsurprisingly, using iPhoto over the network is completely useless. When you have 12,000+ photos (most of which are over 3MB in size), it's shocking that I would have even considered for a moment that I could store that data on a network and still have the same experience as using it locally. Well, experiment over, you can't.

Don't get me wrong, iPhoto still works, it just takes about 2 minutes to start up and about 4 to quit. And scrolling in the library is a constant beach ball affair.

However, the good news is that I don't really browse around in my old photos anyway after a while. I keep them because I want to have them forever, but I don't really need to look at them constantly. So, effectively, I'm using AirDisk as network storage only and I have a clean local library again.

When I start iPhoto, it uses my empty local library. If I want to browse the network photos, I hold down option when launching iPhoto and choose the network library (thanks for the tip, Shawn). When I want to import new photos, upload to Flickr, etc, I use the local library.

My only concern with this approach is what happens when I want to take photos from the local library and move them to the network library. I can't think of a good way other than copying them there and deleting them locally.

Maybe someone else has figured out a better way to do all of this. I can't be the only person who has a laptop and craploads of photos.

I'm still completely in love with my MacBook Pro¹, but I'm a little disappointed that it doesn't have a draft-N Airport card and that there's no way to upgrade it.

One good thing about the old days of buying an Airport card and installing it yourself was that there was an Airport card you could take out and replace if you wanted to. My MacBook Pro was the first machine I've ever purchased where the Aiport card was a feature that had to be included at the point of sale and wasn't user installable or removable. And, as such, now with Apple releasing draft-N-compatible cards, I'm out of luck.

This is unfortunate for several reasons, the biggest of which is that everything in our apartment is running on wifi at this point. I've got my MBP and Katia's MB, as well as a plethora of other devices² all running in 802.11g mode. Now don't get me wrong, it's fast, but when one of us is uploading photos to Flickr, you definitely feel the slowdown on all other devices. And by slowdown I mean all other devices absolutely crawl.

Hoping there might be an option for upgrades to machines like mine, I stopped by the Apple Store to ask a "genius." He said (I'm paraphrasing here) Apple didn't plan to offer upgrades to older machines, in part because the new draft-N cards uses three-wire antennas and the older cards have two-wire antennas, so the upgrade would be more than just the card itself.

It looks like the only solution for non-N-enabled MacBook Pro users will be to use an ExpressCard/34 device, something like the one Belkin released at MacWorld this year. Of course, then you've got a big hunk of plastic sticking out of the side of your laptop, which isn't too pleasant or sleek. And, of course, this doesn't help MacBook users who don't have the slot. They'll need to use a USB device which is even clunkier.

Obviously, there's only so much complaining you can do about things like this—computers evolve and technology improves and you'll never be able to have it all for very long. It still stings, though.

On a side note, I think the new Aiport Extreme pages on the Apple site are some of the most attractive product pages I've ever seen them do. That background gradient and the colors are really nice.