a dog house on wheels: Postcard from Arizona- 2

14 November 2012

[ Edit: I processed a bunch of images from Day of the Dead in Tucson which I've included below. ]

Catching up. Again.

Not sure why I let this happen, but here I am behind again. I think this may have happened before in an earlier life. But I really do have an excuse: we're having too much fun. I think. Is that possible? to have too much fun? Nah!

Did you vote? Everybody needs to vote. I did- I voted for the end of political rhetoric and accusatory BS. Apparently others of you voted the same way cuz it has finally ended. Or maybe they just ran out of $$$. What a relief! Now where do I vote to stop the tele-marketing and the robo-marketing?!

And we have a lot of gas these days. You know... the kind that comes in a big tank and runs the furnace. Since we were already in their system, Barnett's was out to our site in a matter of 3 or 4 days. Last year it took 3 weeks before they brought the tank plus another 2 weeks before they filled it.

The timing was good as the temperatures dropped a couple days after we were hooked up. Got as low as 25° F where we are on the outer reaches of the park. On the plus side, the daytime highs are down in the 70's now and it's incredibly comfortable outside during the day.

Computers and software.

My (not very!) old HP laptop packed it in. It's not like I didn't have some warning: the touch-pad had died a couple months after I bought it; some keys didn't work right, though that was intermittent and infrequent; then the eSATA connector (connects to my 2 TB external drive) literally fell apart and I had to switch to the very slow USB 2.0 port; and finally about 2 months ago the wireless connection died. Fortunately the latter was only an annoyance as I had a spare NetGear WiFi device that plugs in to a USB port. A separate but really big issue was something associated with the CPU and memory. Processing images started taking longer and longer. I had thought it was maybe a virus, but McAfee Virus Scan and Microsoft malware s/w insisted all was well. I decided it was time to move on, but I held off till we got settled here in Benson. Almost as soon as we arrived I ordered a replacement laptop.

But what to buy?

The old Sony we had on the boat did really well, though it was shot by the time we moved into the Santa Fe house. It worked well and I felt OK with getting another except anything with a Sony logo is pricey.
I wore out the Dell replacement for the Sony... it didn't last 3 years and it was in a friendly environment.
I learned over 15 years ago that Gateway is not anything I want to own again.
The HP that replaced the Dell has lasted only 23 months, so I didn't want to go there again. Plus HP says they're getting out of the PC business.
There are a ton of choices out there, but I've never heard of 90% of the brands.
I decided I wanted to try a Lenovo. Their ThnkPad model was recommended by photographers who process all their images on them (they use a 2nd monitor so they can calibrate color). I think Lenovo is the old IBM PC machines which always had a good reputation (created by the Point of Sale Division of IBM). But they ended their 2-day 20% discount special during the 2 hour period between configuring a machine and checkout. So screw 'em.

I was whining to myself about my lousy timing when I happened to notice the TV and home theater electronics in our Montana: all Samsung equipment. Hmm... this stuff has survived road shock, vibration, altitude changes, high-/low-humidity, and extravagent (though not extreme) temperature swings. This stuff just keeps on keeping on.

So I went to Amazon.com and there was a Samsung Series 7 (it's considered a gaming machine) configured pretty much as I wanted it for about $800 less than the discounted Lenovo I had just tried to order. Plus it had an optical disk drive which reads Blu-Ray & reads/writes multiple format data CDs (for some odd reason Lenovo doesn't offer ODDs on their work station laptops... ???). Amazon had the laptop in my hands in 2 days. Then things got hard...

Getting 'stuff' off the old machine is always the biggest challenge and this time is no exception. What a pain, especially when my 2 TB external hard drive decided it's going to join the rush to retirement! Fortunately I managed to move my images (all 18,000 of them) plus my genealogy, text, spreadsheet & tax files before the external drive died. Sadly I failed to get the last full back-up on the HP restored to the Samsung since my external hard drive also died! It wouldn't have reinstalled executable files, of course, but I had a lot of things I wanted to keep like the goose--bumps.com and rabbit-rabbit.org web site source files and all my saved e-Mails which, among other things, had activation codes for downloaded s/w, receipts for purchases (for warranty claims), all my Contacts and all my Bookmarks. But that's how it is. I'll just have to move on from here (if you haven't already, seend me an e-Mail so I can get your address back in the Contacts!).

At this point I have installed 3 earlier generations of Adobe Creative Suites (CS includes Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Acrobat, etc.), bought and installed the upgrade to CS 6, then uninstalled CS 4 thru CS 5.5 (in hindsight it was unnecessary to install these before the upgrade as Adobe allows typing the qualifying activation codes); my 2 favorite image managing & editing programs are installed: DxO Optics Pro Elite 8 and Adobe Lightroom 4; Microsoft Office 2010 is up and running; I've installed Mozilla's Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-Mail programs (I refuse to use IE or Outlook); and Family Tree Maker 2012 (from Ancestry.com) is up and running and can read my family history file. Still have to deal with H&R Block's TaxCut s/w which I'll need soon.

Btw, it may be nothing but growing pains, but I think Windows 8 (vs. the older Windows 7) may have been a mistake. Ihave essentially thrown away 20 years experience with prior Windows systems as the user interface (aimed at the touch-screen market) has no relationship to prior versions. For instance, none of the utilities like Notepad or Windows Backup or Disk Manager are to be found anywhere. Even the venerable Solitaire & Minesweeper games are gone. I guess with the truck pretty much fixed I now have something new to whine about!

Goings on

We've made it to dinner a couple times with friends Mike & Susan and we made it to the Day of the Dead celebration in Tucson with friends Doug & Linda (I can finally process the images!). Celia has gotten back into line dance (no surprise there) plus she volunteered to do Channel 5 updates (daily announcements). And I've volunteered to work on Channel 43 here in the park. Mostly we've tried to keep a lid on eating so at the very minimum we don't gain.

Oh... and we bought and have started using a Bissel Green Machine which both vacuums and shampoos the carpets and hard floors. It's a beast (heavy, uses water for filtration), but it has dual use and works pretty well. Timely addition as our now 3 years old Kenmore Intuition vacuum is starting to die. Hmm... this seems to be a recurring theme: replace things at 3 years old. That's pretty poor!

So that's it for now. Here's the phto from Day of the Dead...