Thursday, November 25, 2010

Happy Thanksgiving!

This is an American holiday, to celebrate place, and surviving long enough to get to that place.

I am:
Thankful to have a close family.
Thankful that I have a job.
Thankful that I have the choice to do the things that I want to do that does no harm to others.
Thankful to be able to participate in this exercise of sharing.

Have a good one, all!

Friday, November 12, 2010

Swirling


Tis' work, at the moment. Waiting for the new administration to settle in so we can get on with things. Understand that these things take time. The new Legislature and its new leadership is probably chomping at the bit, waiting to cut us to pieces.

In other news, I got my new desktop going. Don't have a productivity suite, yet; I think I did something wrong with the OpenOffice.org installation, and it blew up my load sequence. Got it ripped out and the ship righted itself. Thinking about what I want to do, now; might have to bite the bullet and get MS Office 2010.

That step into 64-bit MS has opened my eyes some; lots to be wary about. Since work stuff is way behind, I may have to just not worry about backward-compatibility and go forward with evaluating everything as new. I can tell it will be expensive, though, and users will freak, especially those that have a hard time with change.

Another thing this move has "forced" me to do is accelerate my move to larger external storage. Got a 5-drawer Drobo, and shoved 5 2TB drives into it, RAID 5, so I have a 1 drive failure cushion. Bought the spare, too, because you never know what will be available when things hit the fan. Network-based, so I can now reach files from multiple stations. Nice, that.

And then... I forget. Ah, old age.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Heart attack

Opened the camera bag, and saw what I thought were shiny shards of glass strewn throughout the bag. Already high blood pressure goes up, breath shortens; did I lose a lens? Trashed an LCD? Mirror blew up? Prism shattered? I hold my breath and check the gear; nothing wrong.

Perplexed, I picked up one of the "shards" and...freakin' desiccant beads! Bag blew up; Whew!

Okay, so it there a better way to put one of those desiccant pouches in a camera bag?