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Happy camper, sad camper.
Mar. 5th, 2005 10:44 amLots of stuff, little time to write about it.
First, family and family-to-be.
My mom is doing pretty good with her broken ribs. My brother and dad have really kicked it up and are doing things around the house, if only this would translate into a regular sort of thing. I spoke with her this morning and my sister is bringing her daughters over to clean the house! So maybe occasional bouts of invalidism isn’t too bad a thing.
Russet’s father, on the other hand…. I spoke with her Wednesday and her dad’s general practitioner had seen the x-rays and cat scans and the cancer has spread to his lungs. I believe she said it has something like a 20% chance of seeing another year, so things are not good. I got home and didn’t call since I figured she’d go to be early as she was flying home Friday. I sent her an email and got a reply late in the afternoon, she’d gotten home (after getting rear-ended leaving the airport) and was going straight to bed, so I hope to talk to her today. They were meeting with the oncologist Thursday to work out a treatment plan, so I’ll find out more soon.
As it stands now, our extremely tentative plans will be that we’ll wed in late May in Ohio. The funny thing is that with all the discussion we’ve had about getting married, I’ve yet to propose to her.
On other things, I’ve bought three light stands off eBay, now I have to buy some lights and I’ll be able to work on re-shooting my dad’s bowls (www.gotbowls.com). I also will be photographing my Pilates instructor for a new brochure, so I’ll be getting a lot of work out of those lights right away. We’re going to do a services swap: Pilates workouts for photography. And since it’s digital, there are no major printing costs.
Thursday night was good, I had money in the bank and went and did a bit of shopping. Got a pair of light hiking boots that are waterproof, so I’ll start breaking those in this weekend, not that they will need a lot of breaking in. Then I swung by Fry’s and FINALLY! bought a DVD burner. It’s an 8x writer, I could have gotten a 16x for a bit more, but the 16x media isn’t all that available or affordable, so I didn’t have a problem not getting latest and greatest. It’s pretty cool, it has front panel slots for memory cards and also a USB port! So that’s pretty convenient.
I installed it last night and started burning DVDs then. So far I’ve gotten my DVD Master burned and part of my MP3 library. It’s going to take something like eight discs for my music collection, then I start on my photo collection. The thought of having to re-rip over 500 music discs just does not appeal. And the photos are irreplaceable, so if something happens to them, they are gone.
The music is interesting. I did a spreadsheet to determine the distribution of how I’ll get ‘em on DVD in an organized fashion. I have my music loaded into 12 subdirectories for 25 gigabytes, and with one exception, any single directory will fit on a DVD.
The exception is Rock. 2800 songs, 13.3 gig. So I worked out a subdivided distribution just for rock. It looks like it’ll take 4 discs, one with A-D, then E-O, P-S, and T-Z. All the song file names start with the band, so David Bowie under D, Led Zeppelin is under L, Suzanne Vega under S. Not strictly accurate, but adequate to my needs.
I am a fanatic about backups, and it’s been driving me nuts because I didn’t have a DVD burner. I will be much happier when my backups are complete. There will be two sets, one for my house and one at my parent’s in case something catastrophic happens here. The DVD Master that I referred to in my previous paragraph is a great boon for reinstalling systems. It contains copies of the following CDs: Adobe PhotoShop and GoLive, Map Send (my GPS map software), Norton System Works, Microsoft Office, Partition Magic, Quicken, SQL Server Developer Edition, and Visio. They’re all my own purchased copies, I copy the CD to my hard drive then use a compression program to pack the whole thing into an executable. When I need to restore my system, I reinstall the OS then copy Partition Magic to the drive and expand it. After repartitioning the system, I copy the remainder of the programs to the drive and commence reloading at much higher speed, and I don’t have to keep track of a dozen CDs floating around: I have them all on 2 DVDs.
I have a companion disc that has two O’Reilly computer libraries (Unix & Perl), two SQL Server reference libraries, several certification test software stuff, and some other miscellaneous stuff. It makes restoring systems wonderfully easy.
Well, I need to hit the road. Gotta get laundry to the dry cleaners, buy some lights at Home Depot for photography, and probably a couple of dozen other things that I’ve forgotten.
First, family and family-to-be.
My mom is doing pretty good with her broken ribs. My brother and dad have really kicked it up and are doing things around the house, if only this would translate into a regular sort of thing. I spoke with her this morning and my sister is bringing her daughters over to clean the house! So maybe occasional bouts of invalidism isn’t too bad a thing.
Russet’s father, on the other hand…. I spoke with her Wednesday and her dad’s general practitioner had seen the x-rays and cat scans and the cancer has spread to his lungs. I believe she said it has something like a 20% chance of seeing another year, so things are not good. I got home and didn’t call since I figured she’d go to be early as she was flying home Friday. I sent her an email and got a reply late in the afternoon, she’d gotten home (after getting rear-ended leaving the airport) and was going straight to bed, so I hope to talk to her today. They were meeting with the oncologist Thursday to work out a treatment plan, so I’ll find out more soon.
As it stands now, our extremely tentative plans will be that we’ll wed in late May in Ohio. The funny thing is that with all the discussion we’ve had about getting married, I’ve yet to propose to her.
On other things, I’ve bought three light stands off eBay, now I have to buy some lights and I’ll be able to work on re-shooting my dad’s bowls (www.gotbowls.com). I also will be photographing my Pilates instructor for a new brochure, so I’ll be getting a lot of work out of those lights right away. We’re going to do a services swap: Pilates workouts for photography. And since it’s digital, there are no major printing costs.
Thursday night was good, I had money in the bank and went and did a bit of shopping. Got a pair of light hiking boots that are waterproof, so I’ll start breaking those in this weekend, not that they will need a lot of breaking in. Then I swung by Fry’s and FINALLY! bought a DVD burner. It’s an 8x writer, I could have gotten a 16x for a bit more, but the 16x media isn’t all that available or affordable, so I didn’t have a problem not getting latest and greatest. It’s pretty cool, it has front panel slots for memory cards and also a USB port! So that’s pretty convenient.
I installed it last night and started burning DVDs then. So far I’ve gotten my DVD Master burned and part of my MP3 library. It’s going to take something like eight discs for my music collection, then I start on my photo collection. The thought of having to re-rip over 500 music discs just does not appeal. And the photos are irreplaceable, so if something happens to them, they are gone.
The music is interesting. I did a spreadsheet to determine the distribution of how I’ll get ‘em on DVD in an organized fashion. I have my music loaded into 12 subdirectories for 25 gigabytes, and with one exception, any single directory will fit on a DVD.
The exception is Rock. 2800 songs, 13.3 gig. So I worked out a subdivided distribution just for rock. It looks like it’ll take 4 discs, one with A-D, then E-O, P-S, and T-Z. All the song file names start with the band, so David Bowie under D, Led Zeppelin is under L, Suzanne Vega under S. Not strictly accurate, but adequate to my needs.
I am a fanatic about backups, and it’s been driving me nuts because I didn’t have a DVD burner. I will be much happier when my backups are complete. There will be two sets, one for my house and one at my parent’s in case something catastrophic happens here. The DVD Master that I referred to in my previous paragraph is a great boon for reinstalling systems. It contains copies of the following CDs: Adobe PhotoShop and GoLive, Map Send (my GPS map software), Norton System Works, Microsoft Office, Partition Magic, Quicken, SQL Server Developer Edition, and Visio. They’re all my own purchased copies, I copy the CD to my hard drive then use a compression program to pack the whole thing into an executable. When I need to restore my system, I reinstall the OS then copy Partition Magic to the drive and expand it. After repartitioning the system, I copy the remainder of the programs to the drive and commence reloading at much higher speed, and I don’t have to keep track of a dozen CDs floating around: I have them all on 2 DVDs.
I have a companion disc that has two O’Reilly computer libraries (Unix & Perl), two SQL Server reference libraries, several certification test software stuff, and some other miscellaneous stuff. It makes restoring systems wonderfully easy.
Well, I need to hit the road. Gotta get laundry to the dry cleaners, buy some lights at Home Depot for photography, and probably a couple of dozen other things that I’ve forgotten.
