Snow

Snow falls at the University of Nebraska. I used my new little digital camera to take these photos and video:

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.

Here's a view using the macro setting
(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.

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!

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.

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?

When to worry

Lately I had decided that maybe I should be more socially active. Well more active than I usually am at least. So this past weekend I was at a dinner party Friday, a belated graduation party until late Saturday, visiting an open house (yes, I'm looking at houses now - isn't it cute?) Sunday and going out with friends to celebrate a birthday on Sunday until late.

The gist of this is, I missed a phone call from my Dad - which didn't seem all that critical at the time. He left a message that he talked to my brother in Florida and wanted to tell me about it. Nothing new here - my brother was in the middle of closing a deal to purchase a townhouse, so I figured it was the closing deal update. It was late, so I did not get back to Dad on Saturday. Sunday he called again - same message. I called to tell him I got the message, but couldn't talk at the moment, said I would call back later Sunday. After that I wondered what was going on. Call back and find that my brother had been on a mission with his military unit, and coming back from it, is convinced to ride in a golf cart full of his buddies and falls off hitting his head.

A trip to the hospital, an aborted mission and a phone call to my parents later I hear he was talking to them fine, but had some blurred vision. So I thought it sounded like a concussion - but I wasn't sure if I should be worried. Then my father reminds me of his cousin who had a head injury and had mental difficulties as a result. That was of course falling from a speeding motorcycle, but that did not stop us both from thinking the same thing could happen to my brother.

Anyway - I plan to give him a call and talk to him myself to be sure. My dad kept repeating that he sounded fine - even more coherent than usual. (He's an 'uhm'-er.... "Uh......... yeah, um...... what?") Maybe he shook something back into place. That would be so like him.

Dance Charlie Brown, Dance!

Decided to copy Angela's idea and try it out for myself. I have no original ideas you know, only borrowed concepts that I carefully rephrase into something almost unrecognizable and incomprehensible.... I swear he had a head and not just floating facial features when I created it!


Anyway, this is from PICTAPS .... I should have done the dancing Snoopy - that would have been fun.

A wedding and a funeral

March was horribly busy at work because I was trying to meet a lot of project deadlines and get things done before I took a week off at the beginning of April.

April was the reverse. While I still had a lot of work to do, the busiest time was outside of work.

I volunteered to work on a newsletter for the Ms. Wheelchair Nebraska, INC organization. Due to my computer crash earlier in the year I had limited software on my computer, so getting things edited was more of a struggle than I expected. After a few late nights, telephone calls and emails, it got put together. Thanks to FedEx Kinkos, and the help of some awesome people (Crystal, Scott, and Nicole) we got it all ready and sent out last week. Thanks especially to the board for their patience with me.

This was going on in the midst of my friend's wedding preparations. A Sunday spent getting the wedding 'favors' for the guest ready, a Pampered Chef shower, bachelorette party and decorating evening later, my friend was married last Saturday. I can't imagine what it must have been to plan and carry out the entire thing - I was exhausted from just my small part. (Friday night decorating the reception hall until around 11, then Saturday starting at 9:00 and going until 11 to clean up). Anyway - congratulations to Matt and Theresa - may their marriage be a long and blessed one.

Somewhere in there was a Sacred Chant festival where Eastern and Western Catholic rites came together for an eventing of lovely music. I helped at the reception. Then came a housewarming party for a friend who just bought a new house.

And finally, a sad moment as I had to attend a funeral for a friend's father. He was not much older than my own father, so that brings up uncomfortable thoughts. I was glad to be there for my friend - it was wonderful chatting with Julie and Karen and Dawn and Mike and seeing the new baby (Sean is so adorable - wish I had pics to share).
May your soul rest in peace Bill Rezac.

My favorite blog

So far out in front: Glark.org

Not too pretentious, nothing controversial.

And just in case by the time you read this, the blog has changed from that, here's a snapshot of what it looked like.

Swiss accidentally invade Liechtenstein

Swiss accidentally invade Liechtenstein

So much for Swiss neutrality...

Interior ministry spokesman Markus Amman said nobody in Liechtenstein had even noticed the soldiers, who were carrying assault rifles but no ammunition. "It's not like they stormed over here with attack helicopters or something," he said.

Ice Cream

I'm celebrating the new year with a new look to the blog, and the first batch of ice cream I made in an ice cream maker a friend got me for Christmas.

I was a little.... impatient, and so I went with what I had on hand, which was a little skim milk and some iced coffee mix. I followed the rest of the instructions and sorta got an ice milk concoction. I added some toffee syrup and chocolate sundae syrup along with butterscotch chips (ok, I had a lot of extra junk from before). It tastes all right, but melts almost as soon as it's out of the freezer.

I bought cream and the rest of the good ingredients at the store, so I can try again. I'm thinking of vanilla. Nothing beats a good vanilla ice cream.

I have recipes for rocky road, a fruit sorbet and chocolate, but I don't really like chocolate ice cream as much as vanilla.

Happy New Year!

So it's not the actual first day of the year, but I'm getting to it at least before the month switches over.

Had a good Christmas break - my brothers were visiting from Florida, and got to spend time with them and my parents for a good portion of the break. Had some time with friends, and a little to spare for myself, so all in all a good time.

New Year's resolutions:

1. Complain less.
   
2. Budget time more wisely
3. Actually organize and clean out my files and extra junk at home
4. Work more and actually finish some of my home craft projects

How'm I doing so far? I'm being tested on number 1 already, as I worry over a potential major failure of my Sony Vaio desktop at home. Had the laptop home, but couldn't find my network password, so I couldn't get on my wireless network that way either.

Got new video games for Christmas including Star Wars Legos II and the new Zelda game, testing number 2.

I did manage to clean out a bunch of stuff last night though, actually handwrite a 6-page letter (!) to someone the night before, and got out one of my craft projects from about 2 years ago to figure out where I left off - so maybe 3 and 4 might actually see some action this time around.