I got a call from Suzanne, “Sean is requesting your presence at noon. We’re having a pre-celebration at Old Chicago pizza.” I love their Thai Pie so she didn’t have to twist my arm. Sean ordered a meat-lovers pizza with Bavarian Sausage that he shared with me. I shared some of Tim’s pizza as well. It pays to sit between them. It probably was a mistake to fill up on so much pizza.
Saturday (12/5), Marilyn West called she got notification from Qwest that her Internet is on. I told her to call Qwest and ask for her login information. (I thought she would get it in the mail.) She ended talking to a ‘nice man’ in India who helped her sign up.
Monday (12/7) I had her Gmail all set up, but she couldn’t get in today. Two problems: she couldn’t get the password login to be accepted and her Gmail account had been frozen. I asked Google to unfreeze it. Not sure why it was froze in the first place.
Marilyn West stopped by. She was talking with dad (her cousin) when I returned home from lunch. She hadn’t opened the box to her new Toshiba Windows 7 laptop computer yet. I unboxed the computer and hooked everything up on the kitchen counter. I first ran Decrapifier on the laptop. Surprisingly there wasn’t much ‘crap’ that had to be removed. I set up the Toshiba so it could get online using our household wireless. I downloaded and ran the Norton Removal tool. At this point I installed Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE). MSE is free and seems to work well. I set up a gmail account for Marilyn at mwestgarden at gmail.com. I finished with a couple shortcuts on the taskbar.
Paul Strings Christmas Light
Paul Dobbins asked me to come over and help with the Christmas lights. When I got there Sean was babysitting Clare and Tim was in the basement playing video games. Clare saw the camera and wanted me to take her photo. I was happy to oblige. Paul got home from his bus-driving job. We got out the ladders and the strings of Christmas lights. Paul hunted down the clips. I held the ladder as he climbed up. Sean helped by running around, and switching the power on and off. It was chilly and windy. I worried with Paul thirty feet up in the air. He got the lights to the peak before they started acting odd. They went off, then on, then off again. The ladder got tangled in the string and pulled half of them down. Frustrated Paul pulled them all down. I plugged them into the garage outlet; they worked! We gave up. Paul thought he might try again on Saturday with his brother Robert. I was going to leave but Suzanne offered me some of Paul’s lamb stew. It was pretty good (spicy).
On the way home I stopped at Marilyn’s. I set up the computer in her kitchen, attach the printer with my USB cable, setting up the wireless mouse, and spending an hour or so showing her how to get started with Microsoft Works Word Processor.
Friday (11/27) Ray’s cousin, Marilyn West checked with CableOne and with Qwest for Internet service. She returned the cable modem and picked up a DSL modem and wireless plug-in at Best Buy. I swung by to set up the equipment. It turned out she was talking to a trainee and was told some things, which weren’t true. Marilyn did score a $50 gift card from Qwest so it wasn’t a total waste, but they can’t turn on her DSL service until December 5th. I removed her wall phone, installed the DSL filters and hooked up the modem via Ethernet. I left after chatting on the subject of her job. Scheels shut down their floral department.
Marilyn (my aunt once removed) called. I was just about to try to call her. She wanted to select and buy a computer tonight. I met her at Best Buy. There was a Toshiba for $329 that wasn’t bad. It was underpowered but other than that there didn’t seem to be much wrong with it. Best Buy was under staffed so it took a long time to get help. When we did, Neal was busying trying to sell us services. All we need is this computer and a mouse. It took Marilyn longer to find a mouse than decide on the computer. Later I mentioned it was an easy selection, “There isn’t much to choose from in the $350 range. If you had $800 to spend we might be there for a week.” I suggested Johnny Carinos. Marilyn bought me supper. We talked about education and then about where to get Internet access, “Call I-29, CableOne, and Qwest- check the prices. I’ll get you set up.” Marilyn was ready to call it night by 7:30 PM.
I would like to update some of my computer equipment and backup drives early in 2010- like January 1st, but events look to be driving this earlier.
This year the Red River Valley Fair is a month later. Mom and her cohorts in the Garden Society are happy because more flowers will be blooming in time for the flower show. However as the show approached Char was worried that half her flowers were past their prime and the other half weren’t ready yet. I was more concerned about running the show. Each year I have to remember what we did last year. The good news is I keep notes and each year I streamline the process.
I’m looking for a script to update the EXIF information on some photos. Namely those shot with my Vivitar 135mm ƒ2.8 M42 mount lens. The Focus Confirmed Adapters tells the camera I’m shooting a 50mm ƒ1.7, so I would like a drop and drag solution. It seems feasible using Applescript and ExifTool but it also seems like a lot of work. In the end I decided to just type data into the Instructions field of the IPTC Core.
I was finishing up Effective Concepts LLC and our personal tax forms, when our laser printer run out of toner. I did the trick where you lightly rock the toner cartridge. This usually gives you a couple dozen good pages. On the HP 2600n this yielded fewer than a dozen. Last time Sam’s Club had the best price on the Q6000A cartridge.
Bob was waiting at McDonalds when I got there. He had his Nikon D80, a 35mm PC lens, and a new .70x adapter from Schneider that he got off of eBay. The timing was interesting because this morning I did another review of wide angle zoom lenses. I’m still leaning toward the 10-20mm Sigma.
In other photographic news, I’ve been listening to photographic podcasts and reading photographic blogs. There were comparisons between Smugmug and Pictage. Smugmug is moving into professional services (Smugmug Pro) and Pictage is offering cheaper photohosting (Pictage Lite). Both are interesting, however I have little need for their professional hosting services and I’m still happy with Zenfolio, which compares favorably with Smugmug Standard.
There were comparisons between Adobe Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture. I’m still leaning to Lightroom even though Aperture has some very cool features. I’m familiar with Adobe products. Lightroom is available for Mac and PC. I don’t need Aperture’s book and print layout functions, cool though they are, because I have Adobe’s InDesign and Macromedia’s Freehand software.
Victor came over for with his camera. He hands me the xD card to back up on my computer. I copy all his image files in one big ‘To File’ folder. Then I manually sort this by date, create a folder with the “MMDD Subject” naming format for each date or event, copy the files to the folder and the folder into the correct directory. (2009 Photos for me and 2009 Teigen Photos for Victor.)
I wanted to speed up this process. I already have the code to retitle files using my Panorama Database so I looked to see what other tools Panorama provides.
