A Busy Day

It is all too true of most of us that we are the victims of the same faults of temperament and of character; that we fail for the same reasons; that as year succeeds year, we are no further on. (William Barclay, The Letters to Timothy, Titus and Philemon, p. 118)

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I was very busy yesterday.

I attended the 10:00 a.m. ribbon cutting and open house for the new computers at the Bowie Senior Center. I took ten photos of the event. I thought there was a nice crowd. People attending that I know were: Kathy White; John Jones; Dale Grant, Dick Boell, Dan Lee, Vic Kiviat, Karl Bulger. With the new equipment the computer club will be able to offer courses for the Windows XP operating system and for Windows 7. I never thought to ask what happened to Windows Vista.

When I got home I loaded the ten photos on my computer. Then I uploaded them to my Picasa account where I used their Picnic editor for the first time to do some cropping. I captioned all of the photos, arranged their order, wrote a album description and selected one photo for the album cover.

I copied a piece of HTML code from Picasa and embedded it at the top of the club's training page. This displayed the album's cover photo. Visitors can click on the photo to go to Picasa to view the nine-photo slideshow. I was very pleased with the result. I also installed a link to the slideshow on my Facebook wall and in a posting to Mr. Dickie's Blog. Everything worked. This was the first time I have done this. I'm sure I will want to use this approach again.

I spent time in the morning and evening working on fixing a problem I caused myself with the club's Training page. To make a long story, short, I damaged some links to course description pages and had to retype about ten URLs with rather complicated punctuation. Live and learn!

I continued a project with the genealogy society website. I'm studying the folder structure and trying to get a handle on what graphics are already available on the website. I have discovered that the same file names were used for different graphics and that some graphics can be found in several folders. This makes using the graphics difficult. In my opinion the graphics should all reside in one folder. It's not an easy problem to fix, and probably not worth the trouble. However, the graphic files can each be given a unique name and saved in a new graphics folder for future use. I'm going to advocate for this approach.

I stopped at BJ's (like Costco and Sam's Club) to look for a table for Melva. I didn't find what we want. I bought a bag of birdseed and several other items. It wasn't difficult to leave there fifty dollars poorer. I also stopped at Target where I purchased a 2Gb card for my Oasis player. The card is about the size of your pinky finger nail. It fits in an adapter that I already have. The player came with 2Gb of storage on board. I already have a 1Gb card which I just recently installed and learned how to use. I'm going to have some fun getting the music ready to fill up this new card.

I returned a borrowed flat screen monitor to computer club member Dan Lee. I also brought along my broken Dell laptop computer. Right after I got home he called me to tell me he'd already successfully removed the hard drive and installed it into his hard drive adapter. He hooked the adapter up to his laptop and was able to read my hard drive. He mentioned he found the Devotions file that I had been thinking about recently when I looked at the book I printed out after I created the file. I'd like to update some typos in that file and then publish it to MyBox. Dan and Vic are both urging me to "get off the dime" and purchase a new laptop so I can leave all these problems with obsolete and breaking equipment behind. I don't disagree.

This afternoon I going to take the subway to The Library of Congress. I'll stop at the Credit Union and then attend the retirement function for Sarah Gaymon from 2-4 p.m. Melva will take me to the subway and I'll ride the bus up the hill when I come home.

Mr. Dickie
24/Mar/2011 9:51