RV Travels With Huggy

I just last week ordered my first Amazon Kindle ebook reader. I've had Sony Readers for a few years and bought my first of them about the time the first Kindle (the one I have coming is the Kindle 3, new this spring) came out. I decided on the Sony then mainly because my brother had one he had been using for a year or so and could give me guidance on using it. The Sony is a good system but I think the Kindle is becoming the 800 pound gorilla in the ebook arena so I finally decided to join their ranks. I ordered it a week ago tomorrow (Wed July 20) and hoped they would ship out of Seattle as I'd get it right away, but instead it was shipped Fri from Kentucky. It arrived in Kent, WA yesterday via FedEx but they transfer it to US Mail which was done this morning. It think (hope) it will arrive tomorrow.

I've already bought some books from Amazon for it's format that are on the Amazon.com site and I will be able to download them right away when it arrives. I decided to pay the piper and buy the third in the series of "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" which I had been holding out for the paperback version due out this fall. It was $12.99 from Amazon in Kindle format vs something like $28 as a regular hardback book. I've read the first two in this series and really look forward to this final installment. I'd love to read more as it is a fascinating series but the author, a Swedish gentleman, died from a heart attack shortly after he sent the manuscripts for the first three stories to a publisher, I think in 2004, so there won't be any more in the series.

Many of the books that I had bought for the Sony were from a source called Fictionwise.com which is now owned by Barnes & Noble. I had bought those books in their Multi Format category, which means they can be downloaded in different formats to fit different ereaders. For the Sony, I used .epub but .mobi is also available and that is a format the Kindle can read, so I've downloaded those in .mobi format and they are sitting on my computer hard drive, ready to move to the Kindle after it arrives.

Amazon also has Kindle reading software that can be downloaded for computers, laptops, tablets and even smart phones, so these books can be taken with you almost wherever you go. Amazon says the Kindle will hold about 3500 books in its memory and you can move them on and off the device as you read them, so it really is virtually unlimited. You can also create collections so that you have, say, all your mysteries in one collection, making them easier to sort and find.

Needless to say, I am hyped up waiting for this new toy to arrive and looking forward to playing with it. I just hope the date Amazon told me for shipping the book cover I've ordered isn't right. They said between Aug 31 and Oct 31. That is a long time to wait, although I sure can use the device in the meantime but will just have to be extra careful with it. Pat liked the idea so well that she also ordered a Kindle the day after I did and hers seems to be arriving at the same time. Her book cover will be purple, mine blue, whenever they come.

Labels: Books, Computers, eBooks, Internet, Software

Is anyone else but me having problems with junk type comments being posted on your blogs? I have the system set to require my approval on comments put onto posts that are older than what I have it set for and that is working pretty well but still more active than I think it used to be. Today I told it "No" on a couple of comments on an old post that were all in an Asian language and there was a fairly innocent looking one from Anonymous left on my current one that I really didn't think was from a real reader so I deleted it. I'd rather not have to turn on the thingy where those leaving comments have to type the graphic letters in order to leave a comment as I really think it makes it harder to comment, thus cutting down on the number of them that do get left, but I sure can see why people get pushed into doing that!

I have changed both Pat and my desktop computers to run on Windows 7 and I'll say that I really like the new operating system. It seems to be faster and easier to use than any of the previous editions. On both of our conversions I had to do a complete install of 7 rather than just an upgrade so it was a bit more complicated than an upgrade but like a friend said, it gives the computer a good cleaning out of some of that old stuff that is rarely or never used. Now I have to get our laptops done. So far it looks like most of the programs we use regularly will run under 7 although one of Pat's may not. It is a card making program that dates back to 2002 so being that it is as old as dinosaurs it is probably due to upgrade it, too.

My new bike is due to arrive at REI in Bellingham by tomorrow. Maybe I'll be riding it by this weekend. See how much of an optimist I am?

Labels: Computers, eBikes, Griping, Software

Well, I finally got onto Blogrolling a couple of weeks ago after they reworked their system, and I thought I'd fixed my links display. It worked fine for awhile but now for the last week or so it has only been showing ten links. I just looked at the Blogrolling site and there are 18 of them listed there in my Blogroll. I tried to contact Blogrolling but they are requiring an "enter the letters you see" thing in order to send a contact note and none of them worked for me, so I was unable to get the question sent. I haven't gotten the paid version, just the free one and maybe that is best as I guess I'll have to drop them and use something else.

My blog is on Blogger and I understand Blogger now does have their own system to make this kind of a link list on a blog. Are there fairly clear directions on how to do this located on the Blogger site? Do they allow listing of regular web sites and blogs that are not with Blogger, like those on WordPress? It would appear that it is now time for me to change, after being happy with Blogrolling since Feb, 2006.

By the way, has anyone noticed how similar in appearance my new Smart Car is to the Wheego Whip electric car? The two posts are one after the other with photos of both cars. The Wheego Whip is built on a Chinese copy of the Smart Car. So it is no wonder that they look a lot alike.

Labels: Cars, Electric Cars, Griping, Internet, Software

I guess I have been tardy at updating things on my blog. Today I decided it was time to update some addresses that I have in my Blogroll, so tried to log onto their site. It seems they have taken it offline to change to a newer version and it sounds like it has been that way for a couple of months or longer. I don't know when or if it will come back, nor if it will be as a free service as in the past. Perhaps it is time for me to move to something different.

So, I am asking other Bloggers what are you using to list your contacts on your blog, in a form that allows those reading your blog to click on the listings and be taken there? I use Blogger so it does need to work there as I really don't want to try to change to another system at this point. Any suggestions?

Labels: Computers, Griping, Internet, Software

The UPS delivery guy really surprised us by arriving at 18:45 hours last Wednesday night to deliver my package with Microsoft's Windows Vista Ultimate inside. It took two tries but I did get it installed on my desktop machine and it is working fine. Of course I have a lot to learn as it is different from XP. I have had Vista Home Premium on my laptop but haven't done very much with it in the past. This time I have had to get some new drivers (I never printed from the laptop so didn't need new printer drivers) and even the sound system driver that came on the CD supplied with my computer, that I just bought in mid-November, would not work. But the computer manufacturer did have what I needed online to download and it did the trick.

I have reinstalled quite a few of my programs and did have the data files backed up to both the internal D drive (two internal hard drives) and an external hard drive. About the only thing that is really going to take some time is getting Photoshop Elements Organizer up and running. I decided that there was a better way to organize my photo files on the hard drive so made those changes during this move. I didn't even try to reinstall one of the backups of my old albums as I'd have to go through all of the photos and reconnect them to the data files. I think it will be easier to just start over and re-enter all of them, then redo the tags and comments. But it will be quite a chore as I think there is something over 5000 photos and that is just in the album I made up since I've met Pat. The older one I may just reuse as I haven't changed many if any of those locations in the hierarchy of my hard disk.

We have been doing a few things in addition to working on resurrecting my computer. Yesterday we went to a before noon ($5 admission fee) showing of the movie, "Frost/Nixon." It is one that we've been waiting for and yesterday was it's first day in our town. It is good and that makes the second good movie we have seen recently in the theater, the other being Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino."

A couple of times a month some of the area musicians from the Washington Old Time Fiddler's Association meet at the Mount Vernon Senior Center, on the 2nd and 4th Fridays of each month, in the evening to jam. It is open to the public. This is something I've wanted to go see for quite awhile and we finally made it and will go back as these are fun.

Summer has not yet come to northwest Washington State. Not even Spring! Our forecast for tomorrow shows a high temp of only 32! I don't even want to think about the low, but it's in the lower 20s range. Then, if it is an accurate forecast, come Tuesday it will start warming up and probably get wet again, but we should be back to more normal temps. A week from tomorrow we are into February and then flowers should start blooming. It has to warm up for that to happen, doesn't it?

Labels: Computers, Entertainment, Software, Weather

My new camcorder arrived last Friday and I got its battery charged and actually took a short clip that evening in the living room at home. Boy, is it small in size. Then I wanted to see what it would look like in my new video editing software, Adobe Premiere Elements 7. I took my new software package to the computer room to install it on my desktop PC Saturday morning. That started out well but I soon noticed that it was trying over and over again (it tried 4 or 5 times) to set some value to a system program called .NET Framework. It then failed to install.

Let me back up a bit. Last November I bought a new desktop computer. I have not been a fan of the operating system Windows Vista (I have it on my laptop but haven't used it much) so I paid an extra $100 to get the new machine with Windows XP installed. It also came with a program that I wasn't familiar with called Move and a cable from LapLink, a company I've heard of that I think is primarily involved in designing & selling software/hardware systems that allow a user to keep his or her desktop computer and laptop in sync with each other as far as data used by the same program on each machine. But Move was supposed to move programs and data from the old PC to the new PC. Sounds good as anyone who has gone through the problem of getting a new machine all setup with the programs & data from the old one will know. I decided to try it.

Well, it worked, sort of, but after taking about ten hours to move my "stuff" I found that it all didn't move very well. Some programs and drivers wouldn't work so I ended up having to uninstall & reinstall many of them. At least I still had the data on the old machine. But there was one thing that balked and gave me the message that it had a conflict with a program called .NET Framework. It suggested that I uninstall .NET Framework, so I did, and then my old program worked fine.

I soon discovered that every time I turned the PC off my Auto Update tried to install two updates to, you guessed it, .NET Framework! I tried to reinstall that from the XP disk that came with the new computer but by then XP had updated itself from the Internet and I got the message that I was trying to install an older version to a newer one, so it didn't work. I tried to download the newer one online from Microsoft but their newest version failed to install. This was mainly just an irritant to me, something that slowed down turning my machine off. Until last Saturday when I tried to install Premiere Elements.

So, what to do. I tried a number of things, including the rescue disk that I made that didn't work, either. I even got out an old never before installed full copy of Windows XP that I tried to install, figuring that I'd have to setup all of my programs again and wait through many updates to the OS, but nothing worked. And then finally I got the infamous "blue screen," after which nothing worked. I couldn't boot up into Windows. The machine just wouldn't do anything.

Since then I have ordered a full copy of Windows Vista that is due to arrive tomorrow and I will again, with it, try to boot the machine from a DVD drive. Then I think I'll reformat my C drive, install the operating system and have to start over setting up all of my programs. At least I do have all of the needed data on both of two hard drives in addition to the C drive that will be wiped out by reformatting. I hope I can remember all of the passwords that the machine "knew" so that I didn't have to remember them!

Am I a happy camper (computer user)? No. I paid extra money for this machine to get it with XP, whereas I could have bought it for less with Vista in the first place. And now I am paying out more money to buy a full (I can't just use an upgrade version) copy of Vista. The good news is that all the programs I use plus any new ones that I will be buying in the future should work fine on Vista. I even have a couple of old DOS programs that I wrote and compiled that work on this laptop under Vista. Both my brother who is retired now but was a computer systems manager for our State and a good friend who is a Microsoft retiree have said that the bugs and problems with Vista have been worked out and it is now a stable platform. It is a little different from XP in appearence but I've learned that from using this laptop which came with Vista. I know that I will learn it and I guess I'll be better prepared for the future by having it on my machine. Maybe by the end of this week I'll be able to install and use Adobe Premiere Elements 7.

But it still bugs me.

Labels: Computers, Griping, Software

I would like to wish everyone a Happy 2009. 2008 wasn't too bad a year for us although our meager investments in the stock & bond market became more meager, but overall it was not a bad year. However I think this year is dawning with more promise and hope than I've seen in a long time and that seems to be from many different people.

We are still having winter weather but I guess that isn't too surprising considering that today is only January 2nd. We woke up this morning to a light dusting of snow but it wasn't enough that it kept me from going on the three day a week mens walk from our park to the hospital, where a group of us meet for coffee. The sun did come out although I don't think the temp got much above freezing unless you were directly in that sunlight. Pat & I took advantage of no rain to take out outside holiday lights down and get them packaged away for another year. Maybe tomorrow we will tackle the Christmas tree. We use real trees and after a couple of weeks they become too dry to safely leave up. Otherwise I'd be tempted to leave it up all year as I do enjoy them.

Our bad weather for two and a half weeks has caused some problems with deliveries. It is kind of amazing but the US Post Office did manage to come around every day and deliver the mail, but UPS and FedEx were nowhere to be found for a couple of weeks. I had ordered an upgrade of Adobe Acrobat that was supposed to have been here Dec 19th, delivered by FedEx. It finally came on the 29th. I'm sure glad that I didn't pay any extra for expedited delivery service! I guess that shows who is more dedicated to doing their jobs.

Since last night, our normal Mexican Train game night, was a holiday the game was postponed to tonight. That happened last week too but then it was canceled due to the snow & ice. Won't be a problem tonight, so at 18:15 we'll go over and again try our luck. Mexican Train is played with dominoes for those who are not familiar with the game. In honor of Mexican Train, we are going out to a Mexican restaurant for dinner. See how that works?

Labels: Griping, Software, Weather

Every year our community holds a Christmas Party for the residents on the second Tuesday of December. This was the third one for Pat and I to attend together and she was one of the table hosts. I don't have a lot of photos to post but here are a couple taken this year:


This shows the room before the party started. It is held in what we call the Mirror Room. The decorations and table settings were beautiful. There is enough room for eight tables, each set for eight to be seated. The party committee members prepared turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy while the other foods were brought by those who attended in potluck style. There was plenty of food.


Here the tables are filled with happy people, eating a great meal. The table in the foreground is the one Pat hosted and if you look carefully you can almost see her in the lower right corner of the photo. It was a fun evening and I think everyone was home by 21:00, after cleaning up.

I've fallen a bit behind on posting here but we have been busy. I've got my new computer up and working- I'm using it now to write this. I love the machine- it is very fast, even at downloading files from the camera memory cards. It came with a program called PC Move that involved hooking a special cable between the two machines through their USB ports that transferred not only data but program code and the necessary registry information. I have had some struggles to get some of the programs working and still haven't tried my two flight simulators. It may turn out that I'll want to remove them and reinstall each in order to have them work right. I did order the machine with Windows XP as I am not fond of Vista after fighting with it on my newer laptop. I've made the jump from Microsoft Office XP (2002) to MS Office 2007. It is a lot different but so far hasn't been as much of a problem as I was afraid it would be. You know the idea of trying to teach an old guy new tricks. Well, the menus are different but so far, even with MS Word which has more changes than about any other of the programs, they seem to be pretty obvious. I'd say that there are definitely some things I like better about it. I almost have my other computer ready for Pat to move to it, probably will have that completed by the end of this weekend. Now to go wrap some more gift packages.

Labels: Computers, Events, Photos, Software

I found a link to this site on Chuck Woodbury's RV newsletter. This U-tube video runs about 7 minutes and is kind of fascinating. It takes place on a race track in England but it looks like only one rig out of the five in the video is right hand drive. I find this especially interesting as at one time I had a Midas brand class C motorhome much like the one the main character here is racing. We never tried this with ours. To see it, click on this link. I don't think I'll want to do this with our rig.

Time has been getting away from me. It has been quite awhile since my last post. I will try to do better. We are starting to think about our upcoming RV trip that we will start on Sunday, April 27th by driving east across the Cascade Mountains on Stevens Pass, highway US-2, to the town of Leavenworth where we will spend three nights at Icicle River RV Park. It will be our first outing with the rig since the first week in October when we took it to Oregon to have the solar system installed.

I recently bought and have been playing with a great software product called ProShow Gold by Photodex Corporation. It lets you make slide shows from photos, scans, video and other original material, add music and narration, then save it in many different media such as a DVD that will play on your home movie machine, an executable file that will self extract and run on someone's PC, online (be careful, they can get pretty large) and quite a few others. I have test made one on the building of our sunroom and looked at a first edition of it but am now fine tuning and adding menus, etc. It is fun to use. You can download a demo version from their web site that is a full operating program & will work for 15 days. Then you need to either buy it or delete it. I bought it right off the bat as a friend has been using it over a year so I had a good referral. The cost to just download is $70 or another $10 plus shipping of $7 will have them send you a CD and, more importantly, a User Guide that is very helpful. Much of what you need in directions is included in the download. To get the program, go to Photodex Corp, their web site and look it over. If you buy the CD as I did you still download the file, they send you the key to put into it and you can start using it while waiting for the mail to come.

More later. Have fun!

Labels: RVing, Software

I got into my new version of Photoshop Elements today to try doing something that Jude from Edmonton Alberta pointed out to me that would be interesting. She took the two photos that I had posted earlier of the crater at the top of Mt. Haleakala and stitched them together to make one wide or panorama type photo. I thought I'd look through the photos I have from there and give the new version 6 with it's improved stitching of photos feature a try and this is what I came up with:


This is made up of three original photos that have been combined into one. If I printed it at it's original 300 dots per inch it would make a photo 33 inches wide by 8.5 inches tall. I figured I would have to reduce it a bit in order to fit it into my blog and hope that I guessed about the right amount. I'll find out when I check the blog after I finish this post.

The process of making it was very easy and I'd recommend to anyone that they try the process. It sure makes a different photo from what the original looked like and makes it a lot easier for the viewer to get the overall picture. I know there are other programs available to stitch photos- the one used by Jude is different. PSE v6 has made quite an effort to improve their process and I'd say it is very easy- the computer does most of the work.

Our sunroom is still in it's 15 packages. No one has shown up to start to do anything in the way of assembling it. At this point I'd guess nothing will happen until after at least Christmas Day and probably until after New Years Day. We are starting to think of it as our phantom sunroom. I don't think I would recommend that anyone use the company that we did if they want a sunroom, unless you just want a phantom one. They do that well.

Labels: Hawaii, House, Photos, Software