It’s that time of year already.  Summer time in the caribbean and The Virgin Islands Game Fish Club is gearing up for their annual event – The 49th annual July Open Billfish Tournament.  This world class event is always a blast and the fishing on the North Drop on the July moon can be fantastic.  I’m flying down early to do some pre fishing and then will be covering the event start to finish.  Hope to see you there.

UPDATE:  I’m back from another great event!  Nine boats signed up to fish and the weather was calm.  The bite could have been better, but a good time was had by all.  In the end, Black Gold won with five blue marlin releases and one white marlin.  To see all of the photos from this event, click on the tournament logo below.

It’s a busy week for workstation maintenance in the office.  Lot’s of updates and upgrades going on.  It started with a single hard drive failure.  For five years I’ve been spinning a Western Digital Raptor drive.  It has been a solid workhorse as a OS X boot drive, although I would call it’s death premature.  Lucky for me it failed slowly with some clicking and read/write issue.  I was able to grab my /user folder with all my preferences before unplugging this drive for the last time.  Perfect time to try out an SSD for a boot drive from OWC.  Wow, what a difference in speed when opening and closing programs.  No heat, no noise, blink, done.  And then came the pull of Adobe’s newest software version of Photoshop CS6.  Plenty of cool new features to play with.  Although still plenty of bugs that have it crashing time after time when trying to save a simple single file.  Dozens of crash reports later and Adobe informs me that it’s Apple’s fault.  Hmmmm, I’m not convinced.  I figured out a work around and also notice that at times CS6 is painfully slow performing some basic tasks.  Since a new Mac Pro is not going to happen anytime soon for me (or ever happen if you believe Apple’s recent WWDC announcement).  Time to switch back to CS5 and make this old CPU keep working for a few more years.  But wait, maybe now is the time to upgrade video cards.  My original NVIDA 7300 GT 256MB has been a fine card, but it isn’t Open CL capable and is a bit short on memory.  So a switch to a Radeon 5770 1 GB card would give me loads of video memory and Open CL performance.  This will also let me make to big switch from iMovie to Final Cut Pro.  Oh the joy of new software and a few hundred hours of a learning curve.