Lightroom, Travel, MacWorld, and Comment Spam

So last time I posted, I said I thought I saw light at the end of the tunnel. Boy, was I wrong.

Most of December was a month of extra-long work weeks, interspersed with a feeble attempt at getting into the Christmas spirit and juggling three art exhibits. That was the bad news.

The good news is I can now tell you what I’ve been working on: Adobe Lightroom, an application for developing and managing digital photographs, was released to the public this past Monday morning as a public beta release. The response has been overwhelming and heady. Among other things, we’ve seen an amazing number of downloads and forum posts, and Thursday we learned that the product was named as Best in Show by the editors of MacWorld magazine. (In fairness, I must point out that there were something like 14 best in show awards, but it was nice to hear nonetheless.)

I was in San Francisco and San Jose this past week to see the launch and to hold some engineering meetings to plan future work on the product.

It figures that our evil friends in the comment spam world would pick this week to redouble their attacks on my site. I have a spam filter installed on the site. It’s successfully blocked several hundred spam comments that you haven’t seen (thankfully). I haven’t updated the software in several months, which in Internet terms is practically ancient.
The timing was beautifully ironic. The first of these comments broke through the filter at 2:21 am Monday morning, just as my crazy week was beginning. To top it all off, I had my e-mail notifications (the same one many of you get) routed to a bad address, so I wasn’t even that it was even happening. So a big thank you to Peter H. and Eva for giving me a heads up.

I don’t have time or energy at the moment to do a proper upgrade of the software, so for now, I’ve disabled anonymous commenting. (Oh, and I’ve fixed the e-mail address for my notifications, so I should know about it sooner if it does happen again.) That should put a stop to this stuff for now, and I apologize for the useless e-mails you received in the interim.

Back to travel… we did get a nice chance to spend a weekend away last weekend. Tara and I flew down to San Francisco on Saturday and we stayed at a delightful B&B (Laura’s Cottage at Sonoma Chalet) on Saturday and Sunday nights. Despite all the headlines about recent flooding, we really didn’t have any problems there at all. You could see that some lower-lying areas had flooded recently, but things were actually cleaned up nicely and most businesses were running “as normal.”

And more upcoming travel: Tara and I will both be in Minnesota for the weekend of January 28. A friend of hers is getting married on Saturday, and then we’re going to the reunion dinner for the Greece & Turkey trip last fall on Sunday evening. Tara doesn’t have much time off from her work, so she’ll probably only be around another day or two beyond this, and won’t have the chance to see nearly as many people as she’d like. We are hoping to make a longer trip to Minnesota in the summer sometime, but there’s nothing definite yet. I may stay around a few days longer to do a few other engineering meetings.

And, as if that wasn’t enough, I’ll be coming home, then getting right back on a plane again for California and a week at Adobe’s internal all-engineering technical conference (week of Feb. 5).

Whew!