Testing: three birds

A new loaner. Since Vista's Photo Gallery was empty, I decided to download my camera, which has a couple of weeks' worth of pix in memory. No PhotoShop (or equal). Pity. I'd like to have cropped in closer.

Caught this raven over by the United Methodist Church; I like his chutzpah, parking on the no parking sign. He was intent upon finishing up the last of an ice cream concoction tossed by some kid and thus didn't run off while I took a couple of shots. When he alit even closer for the goodie, my batteries gave out. Natch.

This acorn woodpecker was in the standard pose, but a closer look would have been preferable. The rufous sided tohee (below) was far more cooperative; a pretty bird, he is.

Maybe by the time my newly bought, refurbished Mac arrives, I'll have tamed Windows Vista and the primitive imaging software. Whatever. At least I have access to a bunch of new pictures. And, yes, the dear old MacLemon has been consigned to history. The techie gave up on it.

Frustration 2

Note the picture above; lovely sox in flame. I'm trying to post that picture (and the other 11 in the folder) LARGE. Blogger (or an imp masquerading as Blogger) won't let me. In the meantime, a Scrabble friend is arriving in a couple of hours and I must clear the kitchen table for play. Backson.

Frustration

So I waited until too late to consult the owner of the laptop to find out just how to download a single folder from the thumb drive I plugged in earlier today. PhotoShop has an aggressive take-charge attitude & was determined to schlurp up all 840 pictures on the drive, even though they were carefully separated into folders. I figured the lot of them would chew up too much memory & crash the machine.

Thus a brief report on today's walk -- down to the Goodwin Street Pharmacy. Depressing. The little Mexican grocer is gone, replaced (briefly, I'm told) by an establishment called Gyros. The little sandwich shop is finding business too slow (I'm told). This after reading Oddball Observations that Sue Ann has put her PV Apple Pan up for sale. However, I lucked out enough to find the new thrift shop open, for a change.

And some reader was kind enough to printout the post about Tai-Phoon, which was tacked up on one of the walls of the take-out where I ordered ... Thai take out, what else? Made me feel loved and almost as much a celebrity as the dotter the day she was spotted down at Sky Harbor by a reader who shouted, "It's OmegaMom!"

Computer Woes

Tis my annual into the shop for the freaky Mac which inhabits my desktop. Apparently my experience is quite singular -- for years, I worked on various PCs with no big problems. I make the change to an Apple and am plagued; possibly it's a curse from Bill Gates. The SteveGuru says that he's never seen a Mac with as many problems as my lovely machine. Cold comfort.

So, in the meantime, I am slowly adjusting to a loaner laptop from friend Georgene. Maybe by tomorrow night, I will be comfortable with PhotoShop & such in alien surrounds and thus able to return to my standard picture posts. In the meantime, I am composing a new calypso tune:

I picked my lovely Apple from the Lemon Tree.

Too bad Harry Belafonte is not around to sing it.

Of jelly fish, beer and computers

It's not often I neglect the blog & I apologize. However, between the arrival of the Sson, this fershimult cold and the lack of my old, comfortable computer, I was worn down last night and couldn't have turned a coherent phrase if you had paid me!

However, I appear to be somewhat better, certainly for a brief report. First, I want everybody to admire that Tshirt above, with its myriad jelly fish and other coelenterates, front and back. Sson, as I've mentioned previously, is an ecologist, currently with the Natl. Park Service. His Ts reflect his career and he has an excellent collection.

Aside from cooking for the shut-in (tonight, curry ... tomorrow a.m. eggs plus sausage) and cleaning up the kitchen after himself, Sson brought something to drink in his suitcase.

Quite a nice head for a small glass of cola, isn't it? He has been brewing his own beer for several years now & I'd be happy to recommend his product if he ever took it out into the big wide world. It's been a good visit, but will over far too soon!

In the meantime, I'm glad that I do NOT have to write a nasty screed about Apple; no, the folks from Cuppertino are coming through with flying colors. Thanks to the ministrations of my good computer guy, the company has agreed to pick up the tab to repair the damage those capacitors did to my iMac. I don't know yet if any files on my hard drive can be rescued. However, I plan to award a super hero's cape to my CG who argued my case. It seems that my particular capacitors were but a few numbers off from the group that was included in the official recall, tho they suffered from the same problem. In the process of all this hoo-rah, I did discover from The Google that a great many PCs also used the same caps and suffered the same problem; in fact, Dell had one bad quarter a year or so ago as a direct result.

Moore's Law* in action

Opening boxes and drawers to get supplies for a knitting project, I came across a brittle, rolled up, yellowed piece of newsprint that had wrapped some sort of goody. When I opened it, there was no goody except for this ad from another world that is now long gone and far away. Just imagine -- for $650 you could buy part of a computer -- just add a couple of 8 inch disc drives, power supply, an enclosure, CRT and you have a total Business System for about 1/3 the cost you might expect to pay. All of 64 K memory (that's kilo -- not mega or giga, guys). Runs at 2.5 MHz (compared to a speed of 400 MHz on yesterday's candy-colored iMac that is the loaner I'm currently using.) And not one word about such niceties as a keyboard to do a little input!

Just for comparison's sake, here is a Dell advert that came with the Courier the other day.What a difference 26 years can make; the ad at the top appeared in the May 1981 Computer Shopper. Of course by that date, the LH had long since built our own home brew computer and logged on to any number of bulletin boards -- precursors to today's slick Internet. In fact, in that same year, Adam Osborne introduced his computer prepackaged with word processor, spreadsheet and (later) database. As I recall, we bought me my first Osborne in 1982. The romance with computers has continued all these years!

*Original statement by Gordon Moore's (of Intel): The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year ... Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. The statement was made, believe it or not, in 1965 and commentators continue to speculate how much longer the exponential growth in computing power and capacity will continue.

I'm back -- sorta

Which is to say that my trusty, not-so-reliable iMac is in the hospital. As I said earlier, I am working on a loaner, with neither DVD player nor PhotoShop. Please come up with some friendly, encouraging vibes for the ailing hard drive with all my pictures on it; I could lose a year's worth! Forgive any slight (or major) tilt you might see in my pictures, since I don't have the capability of remedy.

The question, of course, is "what does this picture have to do with any of these travails?" Let's see if I can explain. The pic, of course, is not of a deliberate sculpt, but rather, an abandoned equatorial mount for a telescope. LH built the very solid stand at the back of our house not long after we moved here; he was excited to add the scope and take his first pictures. But, OOPS! All the stars had little squiggly tails. Apparently this ever-so-solid platform had been erected smack dab on what is probably a mini-mini fault, common in the hills hereabouts.

Why would I surmise that? Because you can't land in Arizona, where the earth's skeleton is exposed to view without getting into geology, Big Time. Of course we located a geological map of Yavapai County forthwith, which showed faults all over the hills.

Plus: I used to serve as my mother's travelling companion on summer escape flights to and from Phoenix and her sister's house in Victoria BC. This took me many times over Nevada and desert Oregon, which is an absolutely amazing terrain. Thus I came to read Basin & Range, by John McPhee. All about the Nevada landscape and how it came to be. A must read for any Westerner. Bro, who had been a petroleum geologist in his career days. picked up my copy while he was here visiting & found it both entertaining and educational (his degrees dated from the days just prior to the plate tectonics revolution).

Which led to buying him the complete McPhee treatment of geology across the USA along the 40th parallel. And an extra copy for good measure, namely me. It's called Annals of the Former World. I've been reading it steadily for a couple of days. It's fat. It's fascinating, if bewildering at times; I'm in California -- about finished. That's how I've spent my enforced vacation!