I have two weaknesses. One is that I seem to have a hard drive fetish which would explain my 4 internal hard drives and 11 external harddrives. The second one is that I constantly need to buy gadgets or upgrades to keep myself motivated.
So I went out to BestBuy feeding both of these bad habits and purchased the following items for my Mac Pro:

Seagate 3.5" 1TB Internal Hard Drive Kit

I currently have 4x 500GB hard drives filling all four hard drive bays of my Mac Pro (1st Generation (2007)). Apple's advertised maximum upgrade was 750GB per hard drive bay. I searched the internet but found nothing that really confirmed that a 1TB hard drive would work in a 1st generation Mac Pro. Having the tickles in my hands again I wanted to find out myself. I purchased the above hard drive, took one 500gb hard drive out of my Mac Pro and replaced it with the new 1TB hard drive. I figured if it doesn't work I can use the 1TB for the external eSata hard drive enclosure. Well it worked just fine, my Mac Pro didn't even flinch at all. This should solve the mystery, that a 1TB hard drive can in fact be added to a 1st generation Mac Pro.

Rocketfish SATA Hard Drive Enclosure
I have purchased quite a bunch of external exclosures from cheap to not so cheap. This one makes a really good impression. It comes with an all black screw driver , which is a bit small for my taste. I was not able to put enough twisting power to the hard drive screws that got a little bit harder to move, towards the end. I used one of my own tools which made it less painful. I put in the 500GB hard drive and connected it to the eSATA port of the card I have purchased below. The enclosure also offers a backup button, card reader and a 2 port USB hub. I just read in the manual that in fact the USB hub and memory card reader only operate through the USB connection. The hard drive works and is blazing away, this time externally

ProSpeed eSATA card
eSATA being a long time standard I was surprised to see there is not a single external eSATA port available on the Mac Pro. Well that is actually just half the truth. There are two eSATA ports on board but you would need to get the cables and the bracket to make them available as external solution. I looked at the ports on the main board and got the creeps on how I would ever squeeze my big hands in there and connect the cables to it. Instead of fiddling around I just purchased this 2 port eSATA card. I would have loved to get a 4 port version but I was astonished to see that BestBuy even had this 2 port version for Mac! I connected the above eSata enclosure to it and it worked like a champ. It is blazing fast and beats all other external port solutions the Mac Pro has to offer.

I am pretty happy with my purchase and will probably replace my other three remaining internal 500GB hard drives with each on 1TB hard drive.

The client was in need of a large print ad design for the IFA in Berlin (Germany) and Macworld in San Francisco (U.S.A.). It needed to be available for the printer within the next 4 hours. The client asked me if I have time for this job and I said yes, since there was no other project deadlines for me today. The print ad is supposed to be 80 cm (2.6 Feet) in width and 210cm (7.1 Feet) in height. Viewers will have close up access to it, so the graphics (images/photos) needed to be at least 150dpi.
Following the result of my work along with a photo of the actual print supplied by the client:

The customer was thrilled as he saw the actual printed banner, all I care about.

Did you ever create a document in Adobe Illustrator CS3 and found yourself exporting it to a PDF file for the press or other purpose and open it with Adobe Acrobat Reader, just to see certain letters appear 'fat' and different from all other letters? This is primarily a problem when creating outlines of the fonts used in your Illustrator document.
Unfortunately in Adobe Illustrator you can not export font or font sub-settings to a PDF file. The advantage of outlining fonts if you can't embed them is, that everybody can view the text the way you intended to, even if they do not have that particular font installed on their system. The disadvantage is that the Adobe Acrobat Reader usually shows l, i, I as fat and irregular letters, especially at smaller sizes.
Most clients get back to me and ask about these fat letters. All you can tell them is that it will print alright and that Adobe Acrobat Reader has a rendering problem in that regard. The document in fact prints properly and without these fat letters. But try to explain this to a client investing thousands (or even more) of dollars to have it printed, and on top of it in an oversized format, that makes it impossible to test it with the home printer.
Adobe knows about this issue since 2006 and has not addressed it as of yet.

Follow Up (September 11, 2008)

A workaround to avoid outline problem is to adjust the preferences of Adobe Distiller to include font sub-settings. That said by default font sub settings are not exported to PDF files from Adobe Illustrator, but once you change some preferences within Adobe Distiller, you can add font sub settings to your PDF exports and completely avoid the fat letter bug.

Mac OS X Version: 10.5.4
QuickSilver Version: β54 (3815)
I installed QuickSilver about 3 months ago, and it turned out to be one of my most used applications. The power and flexibility of this application is amazing!
Staring up my Mac Pro it showed me the following error message:


It happened a view times before but usually pushing the relaunch button fixed it. At this point the relaunch button doesn't do it anymore. I almost started to panic because of the extensive use of this application helping me save a lot of time.
After some tying I found a solution:
Basically deleting the clipboard history worked for me. The QuickSilver clipboard history can be found within your user folder at:

~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Shelves/QSPasteboardHistory.qsshelf

The briefing from the client:

We require a strong logo for our Dedicated / Colocation business which will appeal to business critical hosting clients. Data Integrity, security, strength, reliability are all qualities which should be reflected in the brand. Our data centers run at above 99.99% uptime and our clients will expect a high quality service.
We want to project a strong, reliable and trustworthy image. Much like a bank. Which is basically the service we are providing. But in this case money is replaced with data. We are based in Melbourne, Australia and our core business is providing business critical dedicated server and colocation services. We also offer face to face consultancy and operate a server hardware shop in Melbourne''s Eastern Suburbs.
We do not want Australian flags and kangaroos.

I sketched quite a while. I tried to incorporate something that reflects data coming in and out, basically a cycle. I used the main letters to form this very effect. The u and h are connected. They have arrows that show data flow. I added small little lines to add something dynamic. The logo font has been customized just a bit from the original font. This way the logo text can be used by itself and still have somewhat of a different and not regular appearance.
Following the result of my work:



All work has been done within illustrator.

I saw an avatar design from Everaldo Coelho, which he has referred to in twitter. In the background scenery he used what appears to be cows, among other elements.
Following an image of one of the cows he used for his avatar image:

As tiny as it is, IT DOES ROCK! The simplicity of the cow inspired me to create a mean bull with comparable simplicity. This would be perfect for a T-Shirt print with a proper punch line. Following my mean bull creation:

Download ( ZIP archive containing a PDF and an EPS file (RGB) )

Copyright Notice:
Free for personal use.
No permission to use commercially, unless granted by me.
Credits fly out to Everaldo Coelho for his inspiring cows.

Follow Up:
Everaldo just informed me the cow i referred to as inspiration is not from him. I will adjust the copyright info once I find out who the creator of the cow is.

I have just finished another toon. Thank you Mike for having me toon you.

Do you want to be tooned by me? Feel free to check out my service at iToonU

The client requested a simple banner showing company and event info.
The website itself is laid over somewhat of a concrete wall, so I decided to build on that. Putting it more into an urban feel I added the outlines of a skyline. Then I added company info and required logos. Finally I added a sticker look a like containing infos about the event. Following the result of this project (image has been resized):

This project has been created using Adobe Illustrator CS3 and Adobe Photoshop CS3. The result has been sent off to the client, and he was happy, all I care about.

I have just finished another toon. Thank you Claudia for having me toon you.

Do you want to be tooned by me? Feel free to check out my service at iToonU

This was quite a time critical job. I have been contacted by the German Xtand headquarters and they asked me if I can do an ad within a view hours. I didn't have any critical deadlines and accepted the job. If the deadline is tight like this you can easily slip into panic mode. You can not let that happen. Believe in yourself, take a slow and deep breath, collect your thoughts and tackle the job. Obviously the pressure increases when you find out the advertisement placement costs your client 4800 Euros (6864 US Dollars) and the magazine publishes only once every three months. From past work I had all artwork available to me. I have been sent a sketch of what the layout should look like. At this point I didn't ask any questions and fixed up an ad that follows the sketch as good as possible. I was not to happy with the two blocks right of the mini screen shots of the product, regarding their colors. Unfortunately this was subject to 'leave as is'. I said we need to remove some elements since they make this ad seem overloaded. The client approved and I fixed up the following ad.

This is not a WOW ad but it is a representable ad considering the time available to me to create this ad from scratch. The client was happy to have been able to pass on the ad to the printer, just in time.
If you are a freelancer and if you are not 100% certain you can finish the given job in the proper time, don't take it. It does not hurt to say NO. Do not risk to disappoint your client and cause possible loss of future work for that client, because you took the job and weren't able to deliver in time. It is just not worth it. This part takes a lot of experience, you have to know exactly what you are capable of doing especially under pressure and when time is critical to the job.

FOLLOW UP:
The client sent me an actual photo of the final print: