I think I've run the course of this blog. The randomness of it which I initially thought freeing, is causing me to be reluctant to post items. I want blogs with more of a focus if I am to continue blogging. So I'm taking this one down in favor of more specialized blogs. I like to think I've outgrown my initial motivation which prompted a string of complaining posts. I want to move past that.
This blog will be taken down sometime next week.
Besides - I switched offices and no longer work in 31E anyway :)
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Monday, January 14, 2008
Lunch Jan 15
Im trying out a few new things. (One is blogging again)
I'm set up on flickr now, so you might see more photos from me there... here. Somewhere.
Lastly, inspired by Angela I've made up my lunch and snapped a shot of it. This may not seem like a big deal, but considering my idea of bringing my lunch was occassionally to remember to stuff a frozen lunch thing in my bag, this is a huge leap. I hope I can keep myself motivated to do more.
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Snow
Snow falls at the University of Nebraska. I used my new little digital camera to take these photos and video:
Saturday, October 13, 2007
New gadget
I just got a new digital Camera, a Canon PowerShot A570IS. I've been reading the documentation and playing/experimenting with the different features. So far I love it. I put in the 16MB SD card to start with, and realized how very glad I am I got the 2GB card when I bought the camera. 8 pictures was all I could store.
I have so far experimented with creating videos, closeup shots, different settings for indoor, zooming, deleting and now downloading the pictures to the computer. The face recognition technology is cool - it even recognizes them on the television.
I tried using the macro setting for a close up, but did not get in real close yet. There are so many things to set for every option, that I haven't done more than the basic shots you can take by quickly flipping a dial or a button.
I'm anxious to try more close up shots and I'm especially interested to see how I can manipulate things with the manual setting. I have a film SLR which was my traditional choice for shots. I liked controlling aperture settings and exposures.
I'll post more after more experimentation.
I have so far experimented with creating videos, closeup shots, different settings for indoor, zooming, deleting and now downloading the pictures to the computer. The face recognition technology is cool - it even recognizes them on the television.
Here's a view using the macro setting
(first attempt)
(first attempt)
I tried using the macro setting for a close up, but did not get in real close yet. There are so many things to set for every option, that I haven't done more than the basic shots you can take by quickly flipping a dial or a button.
I'm anxious to try more close up shots and I'm especially interested to see how I can manipulate things with the manual setting. I have a film SLR which was my traditional choice for shots. I liked controlling aperture settings and exposures.
I'll post more after more experimentation.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Microsoft frustration
I sat down to get some work done on a document, thinking I would open one of the programs in the suite of Microsoft Office applications installed on my computer to do it.
The program started, but things looked funny. I remembered I had originally had some trial software of Office that would have been re-installed when I had to restore my hard drive earlier this year from an old startup disk. Word looked fine, it was just publisher that looked weird. So I re-installed Office with my properly licensed software disks. Enter the product key. A "validating installation" flies by along with other installation texts. Looks okay. There, done. Let's check it out.
Hmmm... now they all look funny. All greyed out menus. That's not right. Great. Now it's screwed up across the board. At least it's consistent. Why fix the one that's broken when you can break the rest to match?
Uninstall completely. Reboot. Reinstall. Reboot. Apply upgrades. Reboot. Greyed out menus all around. Go to the help. Try the Activate this product. Nothing happens. Supposed to call on the phone if you have trouble activating it. Where's the phone number? In the activation wizard!! Brilliant.
I have no idea what I did wrong in all of this - all I know is I'm frustrated and deciding that Open Office is better. Google Docs too.
UPDATE: Found some information on Microsoft's site that was actually helpful. It was for Office XP, but it fixed my Office 2003 problem. Apparently there was still a trace of the Office installation left behind, so I had to uninstall again. Just removing the file drive:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\OFFICE\DATA\Opa11.dat file as recommended elsewhere may work for some people, but not for me. I had to then go into my registry and remove the keys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office and
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office
Altering the registry is not exactly something your average user is going to feel comfortable doing perhaps, but it worked. When I reinstalled it prompted me to activate the product properly on first run, and they all work now. Whew!
The program started, but things looked funny. I remembered I had originally had some trial software of Office that would have been re-installed when I had to restore my hard drive earlier this year from an old startup disk. Word looked fine, it was just publisher that looked weird. So I re-installed Office with my properly licensed software disks. Enter the product key. A "validating installation" flies by along with other installation texts. Looks okay. There, done. Let's check it out.
Hmmm... now they all look funny. All greyed out menus. That's not right. Great. Now it's screwed up across the board. At least it's consistent. Why fix the one that's broken when you can break the rest to match?
Uninstall completely. Reboot. Reinstall. Reboot. Apply upgrades. Reboot. Greyed out menus all around. Go to the help. Try the Activate this product. Nothing happens. Supposed to call on the phone if you have trouble activating it. Where's the phone number? In the activation wizard!! Brilliant.
I have no idea what I did wrong in all of this - all I know is I'm frustrated and deciding that Open Office is better. Google Docs too.
UPDATE: Found some information on Microsoft's site that was actually helpful. It was for Office XP, but it fixed my Office 2003 problem. Apparently there was still a trace of the Office installation left behind, so I had to uninstall again. Just removing the file drive:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\OFFICE\DATA\Opa11.dat file as recommended elsewhere may work for some people, but not for me. I had to then go into my registry and remove the keys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office and
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office
Altering the registry is not exactly something your average user is going to feel comfortable doing perhaps, but it worked. When I reinstalled it prompted me to activate the product properly on first run, and they all work now. Whew!
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Power Tools
Nope, not talking about the sander, buzz saw or the leaf blower with enough amps to send those errant lawn coverings into the next state. Software power tools. Okay - they're for Windows. So you Mac people will be laughing now and going off to update your iTunes or something else constructive because you either already HAVE these things in your OS, or you frankly won't need them. Maybe ever.
After reading an article on spyware removal over at Coding Horror I realized I hadn't checked out things on my home PC in a while, and had not installed anything new since my error-filled experience installing Gramps.
Here's a list of tools I have recently found useful:
Process Explorer from Sysinternals. This neat little program will run without being installed, and is much more informative than Windows Task Manager.
Here's a screen shot:
You will see a list similar to Task Manager's, but so much more informative with file descriptions and company names. If that isn't enough, an option to search on-line is included which will load it up in your browser. YOu can select to have it run in place of Task Manager, and can emulate many of Task Managers options. It does not recognize when it is already being run however, so if you do minimize it and hide it, if you forget you are running it already you could spawn several processes. Paired with Sysinternals' Autoruns, you can really inspect what is loading and running on your PC. Both have the option to search online for the item, which will load it up in your default browser, and Autoruns will let you jump from it's file display to the corresponding display in Process Explorer.
I think everyone should have decent hard disk recovery tools. Sometimes Windows System Restore just isn't an option. Unfortunately, my litmus test for these has been whether I was able to recover my hard drive data from from failing drives. Sadly that has yet to occur, but that may never happen. Here's a list of things I tried at various times to access the drive partitions with varying levels of success. These are gathered from numerous forums, blog posts, and other resources. Some are imaging software, others boot recovery. It's been a while since I tried them, so I only provide the list here of things I tried without reviewing them.
Dubaron DiskImage (strangely enough it has a project named "Visual Synapse" which is very close to my PHP database project SynAps. Neither of which have very much to do with what a synapse actually is - heh).
PC Inspector File Recovery - a UK product.
Active Partition Recovery - which as I recall came closest to actually getting the drive accessed.
Acronis Disk Director Suite. Only tried demo. Costs $49.99, but does support Vista now.
Undisker. Also demo version.
Ubuntu Live CD
Puppy Linux
Lastly, I just finished installing Cygwin, a Linux emulation for Windows. I'm anxious to get some packages on there such as KDE and gnome and use some other apps that haven't ported to windows yet. After my hard drive failure, you're probably wondering why I didn't just wipe the drives and put Linux on it. I really wanted to, but I needed some of my old Windows Aps and since I'm a creature of habit, it was 'easier' (although not painless) to revert back to my default factory installation and upgrade everything. I still have the toasted hard drive that I am thinking of turning into a Linux box.
After reading an article on spyware removal over at Coding Horror I realized I hadn't checked out things on my home PC in a while, and had not installed anything new since my error-filled experience installing Gramps.
Here's a list of tools I have recently found useful:
Process Explorer from Sysinternals. This neat little program will run without being installed, and is much more informative than Windows Task Manager.
Here's a screen shot:
You will see a list similar to Task Manager's, but so much more informative with file descriptions and company names. If that isn't enough, an option to search on-line is included which will load it up in your browser. YOu can select to have it run in place of Task Manager, and can emulate many of Task Managers options. It does not recognize when it is already being run however, so if you do minimize it and hide it, if you forget you are running it already you could spawn several processes. Paired with Sysinternals' Autoruns, you can really inspect what is loading and running on your PC. Both have the option to search online for the item, which will load it up in your default browser, and Autoruns will let you jump from it's file display to the corresponding display in Process Explorer.
I think everyone should have decent hard disk recovery tools. Sometimes Windows System Restore just isn't an option. Unfortunately, my litmus test for these has been whether I was able to recover my hard drive data from from failing drives. Sadly that has yet to occur, but that may never happen. Here's a list of things I tried at various times to access the drive partitions with varying levels of success. These are gathered from numerous forums, blog posts, and other resources. Some are imaging software, others boot recovery. It's been a while since I tried them, so I only provide the list here of things I tried without reviewing them.
Dubaron DiskImage (strangely enough it has a project named "Visual Synapse" which is very close to my PHP database project SynAps. Neither of which have very much to do with what a synapse actually is - heh).
PC Inspector File Recovery - a UK product.
Active Partition Recovery - which as I recall came closest to actually getting the drive accessed.
Acronis Disk Director Suite. Only tried demo. Costs $49.99, but does support Vista now.
Undisker. Also demo version.
Ubuntu Live CD
Puppy Linux
Lastly, I just finished installing Cygwin, a Linux emulation for Windows. I'm anxious to get some packages on there such as KDE and gnome and use some other apps that haven't ported to windows yet. After my hard drive failure, you're probably wondering why I didn't just wipe the drives and put Linux on it. I really wanted to, but I needed some of my old Windows Aps and since I'm a creature of habit, it was 'easier' (although not painless) to revert back to my default factory installation and upgrade everything. I still have the toasted hard drive that I am thinking of turning into a Linux box.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Cleared for takeoff
So I mentioned that my brother had one of those accidents that seems silly when you have to tell it later. Falling off a golf-cart just seems a little laughable.
I talked to him last night for nearly an hour while he was driving a vehicle for work a long distance. It was late and he was trying to stay awake. Not because of concussion though, the flight surgeon already cleared him on that one thank goodness. It was good old-fashioned 'talk to me and keep my mind going so I don't fall asleep at the wheel' stuff.
So no concussion, no scrambled brains - he was just stressed. He'd been trying to buy a townhouse and the lender he was working with was most unhelpful towards the end. He kept telling them he had a military trip coming up, and needed to close on the date they specified, and no later. And so go the best laid plans. Waiting on others is not something our family does well. Finally, several hours later than promised (which may not seem to be that big a deal unless you have to leave for an extended period immediately following) he closed. YAY! Congrats little bro! I'm so proud. When can I come visit?
I talked to him last night for nearly an hour while he was driving a vehicle for work a long distance. It was late and he was trying to stay awake. Not because of concussion though, the flight surgeon already cleared him on that one thank goodness. It was good old-fashioned 'talk to me and keep my mind going so I don't fall asleep at the wheel' stuff.
So no concussion, no scrambled brains - he was just stressed. He'd been trying to buy a townhouse and the lender he was working with was most unhelpful towards the end. He kept telling them he had a military trip coming up, and needed to close on the date they specified, and no later. And so go the best laid plans. Waiting on others is not something our family does well. Finally, several hours later than promised (which may not seem to be that big a deal unless you have to leave for an extended period immediately following) he closed. YAY! Congrats little bro! I'm so proud. When can I come visit?
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