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!