Flickr vs Picasa

At one point, I had made several albums in Yahoo Photos which was eventually converted to Flickr. I wasn't thrilled with Flickr - especially the limits of the free account, so I hadn't added anything to it for a long time.  Several people had told me about Picasa, but I hadn't gotten around to trying it until now.  Very nice program.  Doesn't do a photostream, but I like the "face recognition" feature.  I fouind Picasa much easier to use than Flickr.  

Using Open Office on laptop

Nice program and it is free.  I've had one minor issue.  I saved the documents in the default (.odt) format, then couldn't open them in Word.  You have to use the option to save as a Word97/2000/XP (.doc) file.

Books

I haven't been doing a lot of reading lately other than the required reading for school.  I didn't finish the last 2 books I got from the library, and had to pay a late fine for one.  There are a couple of books on my wish list, though.  I just ordered The Gathering Storm, which is Book 12 in the Wheel of Time series and part 1 of 3 of the finale.  

Record snowfall and no power

This was supposedly a record snowfall in the Baltimore-Washington region.  We have at least 24-30 inches with higher drifts.  Winds knocked out power from around 6:30 am on Saturday until around 2 am on Sunday.  I live on a dirt road so there will be no county snowplow.  We dug out the driveway & vehicles yesterday & today.  Some of the neighbors pitched in and dug out the road, then one neighbor with a bobcat worked on getting it plowed.  Good thing that whatever knocked out the power was not our our road, or we'd still be without electricity.  I don't have an alternative source of heat, but I do have propane for cooking, though we had to light the burners with a match.  Melted snow to wash dishes & used my campers coffee.  Couldn't use a match for the oven, but we did light the burners for a few minutes every couple of hours.   More shoveling tomorrow, and more snow expected midweek.  We are not used to this.

Shylo

We have a new addition.  Shylo is a 3 year old domestic medium hair white cat adopted from the SPCA in Annapolis.  Right now, she is in the spare bedroom with food & litter & toys.  We will introduce her to Fancy & Little Bit slowly.

Windows 7 Adventures

I would like to upgrade both my Dell Inspiron 9100 laptop and my Dell Dimension E-510 desktop to Windows 7.  I was not unhappy with XP, and skipped Vista all together, but I'd like to stay current.  I'm eligible for a student copy, but missed out on the really reduced price by not ordering before 12/31/09.  I needed a few hardware upgrades -  added memory to the laptop over the summer, and also added memory to the desktop and replaced the DVD-RW on the desktop after the holidays. Like a typical home user, I hadn't backed up since my last upgrade and it was time I learned how to do back-ups.  I got an external enclosure to convert an unused 80 gig internal hard drive to an external USB drive for back-ups and storage.  The XP back-up utility does a pretty good job for backing up documents and settings, and I found a decent disk imaging program called Macrium Reflect - free for personal use.  Once I had a handle on the back-up thing, I installed W-7 on the laptop - because it had the least amount of things to restore should everything fail.  W-7 Upgrade advisor indicated that the system required a custom install, but was compatible.  There were 3 yellow flags and one red flag indicated for programs, but none of them appeared to be important, so I proceeded with the install.  After the install, everything appeared to be OK, except for sound, which was NOT one of the yellow flags. I went to the Dell website for a driver, and Dell indicated that the Inspiron 9100 was NOT compatible with Windows 7 and no updated sound driver was available. At this point, I chose to restore XP using the Macrium Reflect restore (which was flawless - great little program). I spoke to my son and he said that I could use the XP driver for sound. So I attempt the installation again. This time, my CD product key is invalid, so I can't complete the installation. I'm re-installing on the same computer, so I have no idea why my product key is now invalid. The support website that came with the CD says to call Microsoft. I call Microsoft, and a very nice tech informs me that since it is a student copy, I have to contact the educational distributor for a new CD key. Of course, this is a holiday weekend, so I will not be able to get any live help until Tuesday. 

Did you send e-cards this year?

I did.  Not because I'm "green" or thrifty or anything like that. I sent some paper cards, too, with the family update and all.  But I was very late getting started and didn't get the first batch mailed out until Monday.  So the rest were e-cards.  Very good for procrastinators.