My old ISP can't find my lab

Yes, I did think about the above title for a couple of minutes before I finally typed it in. Really, it does make sense. I used to use an internet service provider with a company near where I live. For the most part, it was fine. The service only went down a few times in the 1.5 years that I used it. The downloads went fine, although uploads were slow. Even though I wasn’t planning on changing, the whole system went wack a few weeks ago, and I couldn’t connect to many URLs – one being the lab that I use for my custom prints – not good.

After trying for a few weeks to get the problem resolved with no resolution, and no promise of a future solution (this in my mind is crazy – who would stay with no solution in sight?) I decided I needed to look elsewhere.  So, since my brother works for Comcast, I thought it would make sense to try them out. They have a high-speed internet connection and of course cable HDTV.

Now, let me make it clear, I have a very good understanding about network speed and reliability. Reliability is paramount, and speed a close second. My wife on the otherhand, doesn’t really care about the specs, she just knows that when the internet goes down, there’s no Word Scramble to play on Facebook. Ha! Well, she wasn’t happy when our internet went down, and said, “make the switch, and let me know when it’s back up.” So, with the help of my brother, Comcast was slated to be installed along with their expanded cable tv setup.

As soon as Comcast was installed, I wanted to see what the improvements would be regarding speed. WOW. I have to say that the difference was incredible. Here is a sample of the speed test I ran after it was installed:

WOW! That's fast.

This is a huge improvement over my previous ISP, and you can really feel it when you see web pages load faster and see the file size indicators running up so much more quickly. This is great once you connect to the site, but why does it take so long to connect? Hmmm…I’ve dealt with this before a few years ago, but not recently. Can it be that the Domain Name Servers (DNS) are not working well? Are the Comcast DNS servers being too heavily used, or not running on the latest and greatest equipment (of course I do not know, but I felt that it was reasonable to consider this)? Aha! This may be the culprit.

The DNS exists like an internet “yellow pages” so that you can type in yahoo.com or google.com in your browser, and then be directed to their websites without having to know that the real Internet Protocol address is 68.180.206.184 (yahoo.com) or 74.125.19.99 (google.com) This of course makes our lives so much easier and essentially makes the web functional to use. When the DNS servers are not built on a strong or robust system, it takes them a while to figure out that google.com is 68.180.206.184 and hence, “slows down” your internet connection since you have to suffer through this latency.

Just like the yellow-pages, there are other ways to get the number you need from alternate places. The solution, use a high-speed DNS server. In my case, I used another DNS server instead. The difference – amazing. Now, my high-speed internet connection was really that, high-speed.

If you feel that your DNS servers are slow, try out another one. There are many DNS servers that you can try. One of the local businesses here in San Francisco is called OpenDNS who service this problem directly. I have used them in the past and they do deliver on their promise to give you a robust, high-speed DNS server. For home use, their service is free. They also have a diagram on how to setup your home router to use their service.

I gave this recommendation to another photographer friend, and he said that the difference was incredible and felt bad that he’d been using the slow DNS servers up to this point. If you have a slow, high-speed internet service, try it out and let me know what you think.

Aperture or Lightroom or Both?

I have to say that I’m pretty comfortable with Adobe Lightroom™ which I’ve been using since the early betas; however, I just received a legal copy of Aperture 2™ as a gift from a friend who works for Apple. At first, I wasn’t sure if I would even install it since my internal hard drive is pretty full already. Then I started wondering, what benefits would I gain by using it?

So, after thinking for a few minutes, I loaded it up on my Mac, and Aperture found some images that I had sort of forgotten about. Cool. These are some of my earlier photos that were stored away in iPhoto in an album that is not easy to find using the regular Finder in OS X. I also found that I can integrate Aperture with my Apple TV that I use to show slideshows to my clients instead of trying to build it all in iLife and iTunes. This seems like it would be easier to do although I haven’t tackled it yet.

Lightroom will still be my primary tool and maintain my image library and metadata, but to be honest, Aperture will see some use as well in displaying slideshows. Do any of you use Lightroom or Aperture? Do any of you use both? I’ve decided that Aperture has gained a place on my harddrive and during the slower upcoming months I’m going to try to see how I can integrate it into my regular workflow. Let me know what you think.