For all the letter form art lovers out there. You know who you are. Thanks to the folks at Squidspot for putting this little gem together.

For a hi res, downloadable version of your own to put in the bedroom next to the photo of the kiddos, click here.

Today I'm serving up leftovers. I love leftovers... all the satisfaction and scrumptiousness with no effort because it's already been done. Whether it's last night's dinner, previously edited photos, or an unexpected free ticket offer from a friend who - for reasons not known to man - all the sudden couldn't go to the Ohio State-Michigan game... you just can't beat a good leftover. I found this gem while working on a little mini-project that I'll announce soon, and since it's already 11:07pm and I'm too lazy to get up outta my chair, walk into the kitchen, and grab my camera to download the actual photo I took today, here's a little vignette that I found interesting in Italy. It's a shot of a train car at the station in Lucca. It's interesting to me that all these letters, numbers and labels mean something to someone out there. Personally, I think it just makes a cool composition with interesting texture.

Enjoy the leftovers; something fresh will be served up again tomorrow... if I ever get outta this chair.

I added a 4th and final internal hard drive to my beloved Mac Pro workstation tonight. That's it. We're full. No more room here for another internal drive. Tonight's final installment was a 1.5TB Seagate 3.5" Barracuda SATA drive. That's a fancy way of spelling R-E-L-I-E-F. It's amazing how fast what seems like an endless supply of hard drive space vanishes - or worse yet, crashes - before ya know it.

If someone out there knows how to set-up a simple RAID system, I'll pay you in "atta-boys" if you'd kindly chime in or better yet email me. Here's my current setup: 4 internal hard drives: * 1 320 GB drive (came with machine) that houses nothing but Mac OS and applications (including plug-ins)... oh, and iTunes music * 1 1TB drive for current working documents (on-going client work and projects) * Another 1TB drive I affectionately call "The Mattsonian" that houses more long-term work I want to keep easily accessible * 1.5TB drive that I'd like to use as a back-up drive. I've named this one Mac Daddy. In addition, I have 2 external 1TB firewire 800 drives, one with stock photography-ish kinda stuff that's not really client work that doesn't have a permanent home yet, and another that's currently backing up my User Folder on my Mac. Finally, I also have a third external 500Gb firewire 800 drive that - quite frankly - I'm not sure what it's purpose is yet. It has some duplicate folders of important personal images I want to keep, but other than that, it's just kinda hangin' out waitin' for something to do. BTW, I tend to name all my drives to give them a personal touch and to help remember what's what. My three external drives are named according famous side kicks or characters playing a supporting role. I've got Linus (in reference to his blue security blanket that made his world go round), Tonto and Robin. This blog post has run amuck. Let's bring it home, shall we? Where was I? Oh... right. Like I said, I'd love to hear from anyone familiar with how to set-up a RAID system on the Mac side.

Here's a couple random images from the last couple days to keep my Project 365 effort alive and off life support. Our first weekend with the new puppy was 84% good, 16% less than ideal. She's already conquered our fail-proof baby gate system we had set up to keep her in the kitchen while we're gone. We got the gates from someone off freecycle.org, and they were admittedly a little questionable in terms of workmanship (the gates, not the person who gave them to us... stay with me here, people), but still... we get home on the 2nd day of having her to find her smugly perched atop the couch in the living room with a look on her face that said Pffft...Yes, I got out. Yes, I did some things I prolly wasn't supposed to. No, I'm not volunteering any info... good luck finding those presents. This weekend I was cleaning the master bathroom on Saturday afternoon, and Mia was - per usual - following me around everywhere I went, and finally got tired of watching me and Mr. Clean do our thing. She just laid right down on the cool tile floor to deal with the 85 degree March weather we were having.

I turned around at another point to find her sleeping on the rug in front of the bath tub.

After she makes illegal 'deposits', especially in the bedroom, Mia frequently likes to run and hide under the bed after the deed has been discovered. I caught this image just by putting the camera on the ground, aiming it in her general direction under the bed, and clicking. Serendipity. It's impossible to stay mad at this face.

Saturday night we had a couple friends over for a semi-Italian themed dinner party. Usually Jerry and Tina have these at their house, but now that we finally have a dining room table with chairs and a boatload of shiny new wedding gift kitchen paraphernalia, we volunteered to bring the Tackett road show to our house. We cracked up when the doorbell rang and we opened the door to see Jerry, Tina, Richard and Kandis all donning their top chef digs. Too funny. Everybody was responsible for preparing/cooking something on the menu we prepared for the evening once they arrived, which included a couple recipes from the cooking class Kylie and I took in Lucca on the honeymoon. I have to say, everything was fantastic, but I think the homemade mac & cheese Jerry made using Richard's recipe was killer. Actually, with the amount of butter and cheese that went into it, it literally might be a killer. Fantastico, though. The rest of the line-up included bruschetta by Kandis, spinach apple pecan salad by Tina, green beans with shallot dressing by Richard, pork tenderloin in cream and lemon sauce by yours truly (with more than a healthy dose of help from Tina), and finally chocolate linguine pasta covered with ice cream, strawberry sauce and chocolate syrup by Kylie for desert. Here's the master chef's from left to right: Richard, Tina, Kandis, Jerry, Kylie, and apprentice chef Mia.

Isn't Kandis' shirt the coolest? Kinda looks like she's got tattoos all over her arms.

We had an Amy Winehouse pandora playlist going on in the background, but somehow Pandora mixed in Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" (not sure the correlation to Amy Winehouse), but Jerry's got a soft spot for that song, and I found him and Tina dancing to this in my photography studio room. Besides the dance skills, the impressive part of this image is that it was taken at ISO 5000 with the D3. There was not a lot of light in that room, and I'm continually impressed with the D3's high ISO performance. In fact, there was no flash used in any of these dinner party images, and I think the ISO range used throughout the night was between ISO 3200 to ISO 6400. Ridiculous.

After dinner, the guys migrated to the studio and somehow ended up watching the Top Ten Disastrous Letterman Interviews on YouTube. Some funny stuff. Tina grabbed these images while Letterman interviewed Paris Hilton right after she got outta the slammer a while back.

Finally, we finished off the weekend with Kylie giving little Mia her first bath tonight. She was less than thrilled with the whole experience, but overall, she did much better than anticipated, especially once she realized she didn't have a choice.

Stay with it... Found this through Natalie, who is much cooler than I.