Sharing Photos from Picasa Web Albums

Since I brought all this up....

Taken from Picasa help screens.....

Embedding albums, images, and slideshows
You can jazz up your blog or website by embedding a slideshow, album, or image. All it takes is a small snippet of HTML that you paste in the source code for your blog or website. Here's how to get it:SlideshowYou can embed a Flash slideshow of any web album. It'll be automatically updated when you make changes to your album. Follow these steps to embed a slideshow:

1. On the My Photos page, click your album.

1. Click Link to this album on the right-hand side.

1. Click Embed Slideshow.

1. Choose your slideshow settings, such as image size, captions, and autoplay.

1. Once you've chosen your settings, copy the resulting HTML code (Ctrl-C).

1. Paste the HTML in the source code for your site (Ctrl-V).

An albumWhen you embed an album in your site, the album cover will display. Viewers who click the cover image will then be taken to view the album in Picasa Web Albums. Follow these steps to embed an album:

1. On the My Photos page, click your album.

1. Click Link to this album on the right-hand side.

1. Copy the HTML (Ctrl-C) in the 'Paste HTML to embed in website' field.

1. Paste the HTML (Ctrl-V) in the source code for your site.

An imageFollow these steps to embed a Picasa Web Albums image in your site.

1. On the My Photos page, click your album.

1. Click the photo you'd like to embed.

1. Click Link to this Photo on the right sidebar.

1. Set the following preferences:

• Select your preferred image size.

• Select 'Hide album link' to remove a link to the containing album, which is displayed by default with the image.

• Select 'Image only (no link)' to get the image URL by itself, with no link back to Picasa Web Albums.

1. Copy the HTML (Ctrl-C) in the 'Embed image' field on the right-hand side.

1. Paste the HTML (Ctrl-V) in the source code for your site.

These tools will only use for albums with visibilities set to be 'Public' or 'Limited, anyone with the link."

updated 09/27/2011

Images saved on Picasa to be used as embedded items.

OK Rick, its your fault!  Ya, Rick Doyle up there on Vancouver Island, he had to go and write a blog about Picasa Web albums.  And I've used Picasa as an editor on my photos that reside on my machines here at home...

And of course as I save the pictures that go into my blogs, they all end up on Picasa in a restricted album...  Limited to  "look at it if you know the web address"...  And you do know the address because you read this blog which links you to those pictures...

But do I use the services of the Web Albums to copy all my pictures up to and store them......???  Well,, No.....  I sort of wish I had, because I had that hard drive failure, and it would have been really nice to just copy all of it back down again, but...  My picture files are too large to copy original sized pictures out on the cloud.... and still be free...  And I am cheap so free is mandatory...

It seems that I have some pictures almost all over the place....  From years ago when I was using Yahoo for the blog, I had and still have a flickr account...  I have left the pictures there because they link into those old blogs...  But I can't find those old blogs any more...  I think Yahoo took them down....

In more recent times, I began to use Photo Bucket...  Mostly because I was involved with Watchgeeks.....  In order to drop a picture into a thread or comment under someone else's thread, you have to have a picture host..  A place to store your picture on the internet, because the software that runs these forums can't or doesn't store pictures... It only stores links to where these pictures are stored on the internet...

Photo Bucket allows pictures to be stored out there and provides four different types of links to copy and paste into the forums....  And it works!!  And its Free!!  But I have never been able to find the way to use Picasa Web Albums as a link, or a storage place for other things beyond Google plus, or these blogs....

Yes you can put up an Album, and copy that link onto this blog and have folks go up there and look at your photos about a subject or place you visited..  But I have never understood the HTML statements required to drop pictures into forums or pinterest and that kind of stuff.....

Oh, sure you can pin stuff from somewhere else on the web to your own pinterest account, but how do you pin your own pictures.....?  Save them to Photo Bucket and then try and decide which of the four available linking codes go into the service to which you are trying to embed...  And I have a bunch of pictures of watches that I did embed into Pinterest just to learn how...  From Photo Bucket, but not Google.

So that study was brought about today because of Rick and his post..  Encouraging me to use Picasa Web Albums...  Or Google Plus Web Albums as they are changing the name and moving us all over...

Eventually I was successful in using the Picasa location, but I had to code the HTML language myself....  [IMG]  https://www.webhost location and serial number [/IMG]...  But that is beyond this post's scope...   And that is only one of four ways depending on where it is going....

Now to their defense, Picasa does offer two of the formats over on the right hand side of the picture when you are viewing it.  After you click on a share image statement...  If you need more in depth explanation, leave a comment and I will try to write it up...

Anyway its a whole lot easier to just save them up to photobucket and copy their offered links, and save them into your forum.  Again, I have stumbled on this as well trying to add comments to the Romeo Riders forum... But their software seems to want yet a different form than the watch geeks....

Well that killed most of the afternoon, and I had wasted the morning mowing the lawn, and trimming the hedges in front of the house...  It was over 90, and I had to quit......

And tonight, I spent the evening watching the political convention, which again is well beyond the scope of this blog....  And yes I will watch the one next week as well, to see what form of truths they will present as well....

But anyway the answer is yes you can use Picasa to store pictures that are embedded into other posts...  But you may have to know the actual HTML code to make them appear as pictures and not just the location that links the pictures.....

Retired Rod

The new camera

OK, here's the problem, a broken display on the Panasonic Lumix DMC ZS7.   I've had this camera now for about two years...   And its been broken like this for over the last full year....  A drop in the motorhome while moving....

See the picture I took of Biscuit a few days ago when she got home from her trip to the groomer....  She had the grouchy look like it was all my fault, but I certainly couldn't see much of it in the display.  Not to mention that most of the  menu items are unselectable  because you can't see them...

This is the camera that I have been using for the blog since I received it...  But for the last year it has been a problem that I really didn't have a grasp of what I was taking a picture of...  All those photos of the rv park parade and the new house as it was built were literally point and shoot.

The help of Picasa allowed me  to edit out the unwanted parts of the picture..

So here is the new camera along side of the old one....  Ya, they're just like each other...

The old one says that it is 16X and the new one says 20X.  That's not much of an improvement, why would I just not fix the old one?  But wait see on the new one where it says 40x under the 20x... Again we're not comparing apples to apples..

The 16X on the old one is after the 4x digital zoom is added.... It is really only a 12X optical zoom...  The new camera is 20X optical zoom and has 20x digital zoom as well..  So, apples to apples, the difference is 16X vs 40X.  So the zoom is more than twice as powerful..  Also the new one is 14.1 mega pixels where the old one is 12.1....

That wouldn't be so important until you get out to that 40X zoom where only about 3 or 4 of those 14 mps remain in the shot....  Then it is important...

But beyond that, the newer camera does High Dynamic Range.  That is where you take several pictures at different exposure values under exposing, and then correctly exposing as well as overexposing the subject...  Then the camera software adds the photos together taking the best exposure for every part of the picture.  Once added together, there are no dark areas or way light areas.  This is especially dramatic in shots that have bad back lighting...

So when I determined that the newer camera did HDR, I was hooked on getting a new one.

But then I went out on the internet looking for the repair display piece, which I found in China....   I have ordered that, but will have to wait for it to arrive later next week...  Or, perhaps never, because I will have no recourse if the money is just gone....  But wait, I think I paypaled the payment, so perhaps they could help in a complete default...

The pictures above were taken with the single lens reflex Nikon 5100, with much older lenses from my very old d70s body..  And yes it will do the bracket exposure for HDR photos, but you have to load them into the computer and use aftermarket software to actually do the photo combining.  That, of course will be much more sophisticated and will combine 5 or 6 shots, but then that will take a tripod .....  yada yada yada....

But now for the interesting part..  The price for a ZS7 is still $199, if you can find one...  And used they are still $175..  But the ZS20 came shipped for $249.  Unless I am successful with my own repair, the price of sending the old one in for repair, with shipping will more than equal the used price of the old camera.  Is it any wonder that nothing is worth fixing these days....?

I know this is kind of technical, but many folks understand this stuff even better than I do, so I thought it would be interesting...

Retired Rod

Another luncheon

Have you ever been in Gower, Mo.? Where??? Well neither had I!

Its up there where the green arrow with a B in it is...  Too small to have a name on the map, unless you zooooooooooom in to the very smallest view....   Its 61 miles up there thru the city, including down town...

We left early this morning after I got it straightened out which McDonalds the fellows were at....  There were some of the guys at two different locations and naturally I went to the wrong one... Those guys weren't going today but rather are going tomorrow down by Wichita....  I sped back over to the right meeting place and there was really only one guy there, but he was my good friend Al, so that was fine.

We decided to go around the outskirts of town on the west side using the outer beltway 435... That added a bunch of miles, but we were fresh, and it was morning and cooler..... about 85, so that was good to go...

The downtown was rather small, and this was the store front of the restaurant.

We parked across the street, as there was only a parking lot on the South side, as the street only had one row of buildings.

But ounce inside, the restaurant was kind of like all the other places you've been to in really small towns....

As usual, I'm in the picture but with my back to the photographer.  I'm the guy with suspenders on behind the fellow making the victory V or what ever he meant by that gesture...   But this shows the inside of the restaurant...

The original web site is here, if you are interested in the rest of the pictures..

By the time we were all talked out and outside looking at folk's bikes getting ready to go, it had become kind of hotter..  I had 96 on the dash of the scooter as we pulled away, and we were 60 miles away....

This time I suggested that we go right down the center of town like the map above shows, and I led the way at about 75 miles per...  Needed that wind to cool down some...

We made it down into the North part of Overland Park, and Al pulled up along side of me and said he needed a drink really bad....

So we found an Air Conditioned McDonalds to pull into for that drink.... So what does he get?  Hot Coffee!!! And a glass of Ice Water.  When you have that coffee habit, you need your afternoon cup!

And of course I was talking a mile a minute, with my hands waving away in front of me, and managed to upset my very large cup of diet dr pepper.... down my front into my pants and onto the floor....  Well, I wasn't hot any more.....!

When we got back home, my new camera was here, in a very smashed box... Eww, but the packing peanuts took the smashes and the camera seemed fine...  you don't get as much as you used to with these cameras, as there was only a USB cord about 18 inches long and a little wall wart charger..  Oh, and a little cloth lanyard.  There was a DVD that supposedly has the instructions on it and a getting started booklet that explains how to put the battery in and plug in the cable.

It has a bunch more features and a touch screen to select things, like an Iphone..  tonight I went over and bought a 16 gb SD card to store the files on as they are 14.1 megapixels.  I think that will be about 5 mb for each photo.... Good land, I remember when we had 160k on a one sided floppy....

I know, for a lot of you this zooming all over the country looking for really out of the way eating joints isn't too interesting, but for a bunch of retired old fogeys it becomes the height of excitement.....  I know, it doesn't take too much......LOL

Retired Rod

Cleaning carpets and driving thru Sedalia..

Do you ever have those days that are not a bit exciting at all?  Like today, we decided that we needed to do some spot cleaning of the carpet in the lake cottage.  With grand kids and three families trouping in and out all the time from the outside driveways, the carpet can be rather ratty in quick order..

I find that using that chemical soap that is designed for the carpet cleaning machine, doesn't come out of the rug completely...  We purchased the machine several years ago, and have to use it quite often, especially if we use that chemical soap stuff.

It is a low suds product, and I come back the second time with clear water for a good rinse, but still the suds keep coming out of the fabric...  Once it is all dry, I feel the soap in the fiber when down on the floor, playing with the kids and the dog.

And it can't be good for the dog or the kids either, so...  Today we used water and  clear vinegar.  About a cup in the tank of the bissell machine full of water..  It probably holds a little more than a gallon all full..

Now that doesn't get all the spots up where things have been spilled, like cola and tea, so I was spotting with Resolve spray and then coming back and rinsing with the vinegar water rinse...  Seemed to work well, and I found that I was sucking up old soap from the last time the carpet had been cleaned...

That old soap tends to clean off the bottoms of folks shoes and trash your just cleaned carpet, so we'll see how it works out this time.

I didn't have the vinegar on hand, so I used that excuse to ride the scooter up to the grocery store in Lake Ozark mid morning.  The bike started right up instantly with the sea foam and stabil mixed into its gas...  The chemicals had been in the engine for two days, and that must have cleared the build up of goop, as it was running like new.

Perhaps a little in the outboard tank wouldn't be a bad idea either...

We packed up and left by 3:30 in the afternoon and arrived back here in KC by about 6:15..  We drove thru the town of Sedalia, Mo where the Escapee's plan to have their Rally later next month..  The state fair is over and traffic seemed normal again in the town....  We usually avoid Sedalia for most of the month of August because of the state fair and its associated activities..    I think the fair was over on the 19th, and today was the 27th, so we are 8 full days beyond its close.

Escapade will start on Sept 16th running for 5 days....   From their website.....

Escapade is a five-day, fun-filled, informational event centered around the RV way of life. Often referred to as a “rally,” Escapade delivers an extensive line-up of educational workshops and lifestyle presentations for the RV enthusiast.

First held in Bakersfield, Calif., in 1979, with 24 families attending, the event now attracts over 1,500 attendees from across the nation and internationally. For the serious RVer, Escapade is the premier opportunity to learn or refine the nuances of a lifestyle that continues to attract devotees. It’s also a great way to meet likeminded folks enjoying the adventure that their “home on wheels” conveys. With almost 60,000 active family members, Escapees RV Club members share a very special bond and a passion for RV travel. You may meet as strangers, but you will part as more than friends.

We always talk about attending when it is in Missouri, but something seems to always come up that gets in our way....  The show alternates with Gillette Wyoming, so there is really no excuse for us not going when its here..

Tomorrow is another Tuesday, and the Romeo Riders are headed way up North of the KC metro into rural Missouri up by St. Joseph..  It makes me ride thru the center of downtown to get there....  Usually on the interstates, or else it would include some neighborhoods that I would choose to avoid.....  We'll see how I feel tomorrow.... It's about 60 miles each way...

I've babbled along here long enough, so have a good day!

Retired Rod

Sea Foam

Rick reports that he has never heard of Sea Foam before, so with no other comments on the post from yesterday, I will concentrate on what Sea Foam is.  And no it doesn't come from the sea, and it isn't foamy..

At one time I think they used to put some green dye in it to make it seem like a green liquid resembling the froth from the sea, but the folks that control the colors of fuels and related taxes told them they had to stop with the colors.

Sea Foam is an automotive additive that is used to clean varnish deposits from inside your engine components. Inside the fuel system like your carburetor or fuel injectors, and inside the engine itself as in the upper cylinders and valves.

Also it can be added to your oil and will circulate in your oil passages and your hydraulic lifters to clean oil varnishes off of the components of the engine.

To use it in the fuel it needs to be added in a ratio of one ounce to one gallon of fuel.  To use it in the oil system it should be added to the engine oil at the end of the life of the oil as a flush and then operated for about a hundred miles and drained.

They also say it can be put into the new oil as well, but I would want to watch carefully its effect on the new oil as it will continue to clean deposits and suspend them in the new oil.  This would shorten the life of that new oil and your filter.... of course trading off the results of a cleaner engine in the process.

Also they sell this stuff in a spray form that can be sprayed into the intake of a running engine until about 2/3 of the can is ingested.  Then shut the engine off and let it stand for 10 minutes to do its magic.  Upon restarting the exhaust will blow copious amounts of junk out the tail pipe..  In my mind this wouldn't be too good for your catalytic converter, as it would tend to catch the soot and clog things..

It can also be added to the fuel of a diesel engine, but not ingested as the compression ratio of the diesel is too high and it might cause hydraulic lock.  It could be added to the oil of a diesel as well.

Sea Foam has a nice web site that explains all of this and please follow their instructions and not my suggestions because I am not an expert on these things...     Web Site

What is sea foam?  I researched this and found that they explain that it is a mixture of Pale Oil, Naptha, and IsoPropyl Alchol.  What is pale oil?  I don't know but one fellow was experimenting making some home brew of this stuff and has a web site.  This is an interesting read.....  Again, engines are a heck of a lot more expensive than saving 10 bucks on a pint of Sea Foam, so use this as an information site to understand what the product does, but don't blow up your garage, and or your engine on my account.....!

It rained here off and on all day, so we were mostly home bound, not leaving for boat rides or scooter rides...  So we decided to stay again overnight tonight...

We have a neighbor that races his boat engines, as he has two in the big boat three doors down...  Varoom, Varoooom, VAROOOOOOM!!!!  He does this constantly starting in the morning and then all day... Last night at 10:30 varoom as well....

This afternoon at about three PM he raced it one last time and headed back to where ever home is...........  The rest of the neighbors all breathed a large SIGH OF RELIEF!!!  See Ya,  dip chit!!!

Retired Rod

Getting the scooter to start, and laying low at the lake.

My big activity for the day was starting up and riding the little red Kymco 200 cc scooter...  It didn't want to start right off the bat, but with some coaxing and interval cranking, it finally went..

Then it ran on the slow speed jet without me being able to increase its rpm from much more than an idle...  Seems as though the carb is gunked after only about 5 weeks of inactivity...  I think the kids had it running when they were here because the gas was quite low...

Otherwise it had evaporated most of a gallon which would explain why it started so rough...  I usually use Sta Bil in the gas because I know it is going to sit for extended periods, but that didn't make a lot of difference this time.

I rode it into town with a stop at the Wendy's for that usual burger, but no fries as I am on a kick to reduce some fat calories..  And just a water to drink, mainly because paying a couple of bucks for a cup of soda seems like a big waste...

This time the bike started a little better, but it was on down to the Wal Mart where I purchased a can of Sea Foam cleaner.  Then over to the gas station where I filled the tank with fresh gas.  1.2 gallons as it has a really small tank, and put in an ounce or so of the cleaner.

I was going to ride some more, but as I looked at the sky to the South out over the lake, it had that thunderstorm blue gray color and it was hazy under the clouds...........rain.

So that put all plans on hold as I headed back North on the highway for as fast as the little bike could reasonably go...  About 60  on the flat, but a lot slower on the uphills.

I had to cool it in the old downtown of Lake Ozark, as they have an active police station and force that patrols the T shirt shop area next to the dam.  They see us tourists as a revenue source.  And we are because without tourists, the town wouldn't exist.

As I rode into the garage here at the cabin, it began to sprinkle and then the rain set in for real..  That left me on the covered porch in the lawn chair looking at the boats scrambling for cover...

Some just put up their canvas roofs and other more expensive yachts have hard tops over their cockpits.  But those have living quarters down below and are designed as all weather....

The sky had gone all gray green and the haze covered the water so that the dam three miles away was undiscernible.  So I grabbed the computer, which caused me to nod off.......

Well that's exactly what a trip to the lake is supposed to be about, complete relaxation....

Anyway Loyce and Biscuit came home and woke me back up....  Oh, well...

But the one thing we haven't done all weekend is turn on the TV..

Retired Rod

Travel to the Lake Cabin

Some time yesterday, we decided that it had been too long since we had been to the lake cabin..  We don't feel comfortable leaving the cabin for long periods of time without dropping by to check things out once in a while...

Trip to Lake Ozark

In the winter when we turn off the water pressure, we feel more secure that bad things won't happen while we are gone, but in the summer we leave the water on..

Our son and his family had been here for a week in the middle of July directly after the 4th holiday, and they reported that nothing was unusual during their stay, but we had to stay in Arizona longer than we had originally anticipated...

Once back in Kansas, things needed attention, and we couldn't seem to pull away for a day or two...   But with the Doctor appointments taken care of for this week and nothing on the schedule now that grandkids are back in school, we took off mid morning..

It was kind of a lazy trip, as I didn't drive fast at all, and we stopped for a Wendy's in Belton, Mo..  Just rolling along seeing the sights, and noting that the farmers fields are burned to a crisp...  Some of the crops are being chopped down rather than being harvested...

That is going to be really hard on folks in the country...  Some will have drought insurance, but most will just have to see it thru till next year...  With prices going up because of the fuel price that is going to make for some lean Christmas plans this year.

Our cabin was in fine shape, but with the AC set at 90, the house was rather hot inside.  It was only 91 outside, but without the AC it is usually ten degrees warmer inside, so we leave it on.

Years ago we didn't do that, but the furniture and lamp shades all turned yellow from the heat, so we have learned our lesson.

We also went into town tonight for a stop at the Wal Mart, but didn't do anything else....  With school back in session, the lake is mostly deserted now...  Also labor day is next weekend and folks will return for their last time this year, so that makes this weekend a dud for most.

We will return with the family next weekend as well, but this weekend will be used to clean and get ready for the holiday...

Biscuit is confused, as every time we seem to be here we have the grandkids with us.  Either with or without their parents...  She has gone down to the lower level of the house looking in the bedrooms for the kids since we arrived and can't seem to understand why they aren't here..

She has been whining at me to go get the kids, like I have cheated her out of them....  Darn it dad, they're supposed to be here.....

Retired Rod

Biscuit is happier now..

Biscuit seems to not be mad at us anymore today, but she is still rubbing her ears on all the couches and carpeted floors...  I think they trim the hair out of her ear canals and that drives her crazy....

She seems to be hanging onto me quite tightly and sitting on my lap like I need to protect her....  Dogs!

As far as looking at the post hit counts, I use the dashboard editor to post these blogs and they have all those comment and hit count statistics right there for your consumption, where you can't miss it....  And today with a title, the hit count popped right back up to 130 which is fairly normal for the day....  But anytime I include a picture of Biscuit, the comments seem to increase....

So I need to remember that no one is interested in motor scooter rides and everyone likes the dog......  And be sure to put the dog's name in the title.....LOL

On the camera front, I did admit to Loyce that I had ordered yet another camera, and the response was just as I had surmised....  She felt that I was breaking them in order to get yet another new one....  Well, I hadn't thought of that, but perhaps when I need another new one.............!

But it did bother me enough that I went out on the net and found where I could order the display module.... $38 including shipping.....  From China......  where they seem to be made....  That might be a bit of a speculation on the old camera, but perhaps if I can get it fixed, I might have one or the other with me when I need one.  But when ordering camera parts from overseas, I would call that somewhat of a long shoooooooooooooot.

I haven't even started the motor bike since Tuesday, and it has been in the high 90s every afternoon, so we have been trapped inside next to the AC for the last couple of afternoons...

I guess I did go out and mow the lawn on the JD tractor last evening after the sun had dropped low in the Western sky.  It is still parchingly dry here, so the grass is mostly weeds and fescue, as the bluegrass has long since become dormant.  The temps were still in the 90s but without the sun beating down, it seemed much more tolerable..

So Biscuit sends her love to all the folks that were worried and concerned about her and her grumpy attitude...  She is out on a walk with Loyce as I type this tonight...

Retired Rod

Biscuit is shaved, and signing up for medicare on the phone.

Its interesting that your title of the daily blog post is so important as to how many hits you will get in a day....  My post from yesterday about the fellow that passed away on the night before all the riders would arrive in his town is kind of interesting, if you believe in fate and that kind of stuff..

But I remember not knowing what to put on it as a title....  Man dies before Riders arrive!  Corny and too newspaper like...   A friend passes in the night...., Several felt tears....  I just didn't know what to say, so I must have forgotten to put anything on it...

Link here, and here for Romeo Rider Forum posts..

So I only had 38 hits on the post all day long...  I went back to the Romeo forum (above) and found myself in a couple of the pictures in Mel's driveway, and that even teared me up....  And I hardly knew him..   So titles on these posts are important, if you want to get any hits at all....

....................

Loyce called over to Biscuit's old groomer's place in Missouri this morning, and Caroline wasn't busy today at all....   " Ya want to bring her right now?"  Biscuit didn't know what hit her....  A big car ride, Yea!!

Uh, that didn't work out quite like she was planning, but she was shaggy after 8 or more weeks since before we went to Arizona......  She was done by late in the afternoon and Loyce went after her...

Tonight she has been just killed!!  Laying around on the floor over in the corner and not even interested in an animal cracker from the cookie jar...

She thinks it is my fault that she had to go there and get all her hair cut off....  Are you really going to take my picture??  Just leave me alone......!

As for me, I spent a long time on the phone with the AARP health care folks, phone enrolling for coverage and the part D prescription coverage...  They have to read all of the possibilities to you and have you state that you understand them....

The application for the part D part is recorded to a digital audio file and saved because folks must call later and  claim that they didn't know it worked that way......   Uh, is this your voice?  Did you say you understood?

For those that did read yesterday, I finally found the Lumix camera, in the camera bag.  It's not supposed to be in there!!   That's for the big DSLR......  A senior moment......?

Well who knows, but after examining it, I see that even more of the display is now gone....   I can't even see the menu items or select anything other than the default.....  Mailing it off somewhere to get fixed is $110 plus the $20 shipping both ways, that's $150 for 2 year old technology...  What to do?

I tried to find the part and experiment but there is discrepancy as to which display it takes, and even that would be taking a big chance that I could get the camera apart and put back together....

So I got to looking and the zs20 came out this January.... Mine was a zs7...  The 20 part was for 20x optical zoom, and the old one is 12x.  I looked briefly at the new mirrorless interchangable lens models, but they were twice the price..  And bigger too...

I use this camera as a small point and shoot where I am riding the Scooter and stuff...  If I need a good (big) camera I'll get out the Nikon...  I broke down and ordered the zs20...  Didn't tell Loyce because she was gone at the time...  If she reads this blog, I'll be in trouble....  But hey, I didn't order another watch anyway....

And speaking of watches, I spent an hour working on one of the watches that I pulled the tiniest little pin out of accidentally.....  And promptly lost it in the carpet of the motorhome...  It took a couple of weeks to call and order the little tube and nail set, I think they called it.  Its under the diver's flip lock safety clasp..

We are still looking for my watch tweezers, so I had to put it in with needle nosed pliers and hold it while nailing it...  I'm not a watch technician and my technique is poor, which makes my language un printable.......  But eventually, the new pieces are in and I have worn it all day without it returning to the broken state....

Now, I need to title this post to see if I can attract a few hits!  Let's see, Naked doggy comes home!!!  That might be a bit over the top.....

Retired Rod

Romeos

This morning I was up at 7 AM preparing for today's bike ride...  The rides are supposed to be within 90 miles of the center of KC...  This one was 50 miles from our house to the restaurant in Adrian, Mo.

Adriana's is an Italian place and will seat somewhere around 50 folks...  We bring more than that, so I knew we had to be there early if I wanted to be in the first group of people...



Here is the map... We live at the point marked with the A, and Adrian is at point B..  The blue line is exactly the route that I took to get there..

It took a little more than an hour, and I was at speeds up to 75, but most of the time I did 65 to 70...

Once we arrived, I found that I was the first one there....  Well I guess that would be early anyway...

The reason that this place was chosen, was to honor a member of the group that could no longer ride a bike and was on his last few days in life....  We learned as the morning progressed that he had not made the night passing at about 1:30..  His name was Mel...  The original plan was that after the lunch, we were all going to ride over to his house and surround the place with motor cycles..  He was on oxygen and would be sitting just inside his front door to watch this parade...

During lunch, and with a few phone calls to his wife, we decided to go thru with the plan in his honor even thou he was now with his God...  We set up a procession thru the little town of about 70 bikes and a few cars, driving around his circular driveway up to the garage and then back out into the street...

His wife had the video camera out and was very moved by this outpouring of sympathy and support.  But he rode with the group for most of the years that it has been around...

There were a few tears in the restaurant as the news of his passing was communicated from table to table...  My friend Al that originally invited me into the group told me that it was a rumor and not to spread it.... I suggested that he go talk to one of the leaders that knew of the story...  He came back almost in tears....

After the business was done in town, a group of us rode together coming home.  The group had individual riders that broke away as we passed where they needed to turn off headed for home....

Eventually I turned and headed to Olathe from a country road headed for Spring Hill....  And watched as Bob, the leader of the Ruratan Ride last spring headed off by himself as the last rider in our group headed for his home..

I went to my son's house in Olathe and by that time it was 96 outside...  Not hot by Arizona standards but it was a lot more humid, and the 70 mile an hour wind had zapped my hydration...

Chris had a big pot of Iced Tea that he had made in the coffee pot....  I had about three tall glasses over big cubes...  Ah,  !!

Later tonight, I was over at Home Depot with the Scooter looking for another fresh tube of Liquid Nails, to again try and cement that pesky back splash to the wall next to our RV cook top range...  Remember I have done this before and it promptly fell back down, once the coach went down the road.....

This time I purchased bathtub and shower surround adhesive designed to hold the walls of your shower stall up..  It is tolerant of hot water and is not supposed to release under this heat...  Time will tell on this decision, but that project will be for another day....

Retired Rod

Aren't broken mirrors bad luck....

Did I mention that our full length mirror fell off of the wall in the motorhome while I was driving out in Arizona....?  I was just going across town from the storage lot to the Valle del Oro campground at city speeds, when KaBooom there was this gigantic crash back in the back somewhere......

The mirror seems to be glass, in a fake wooden frame that was angle clipped together at the corners...  The factory had put a bunch of liquid nails on the back of the frame and then shot a few nails in the corners of the frame into the wall......

Of course camper walls are only about an 1/8 inch thick of wood and then styrofoam like a beer cooler....  Every now and then there is an aluminum girder that is cut into the foam which is then sandwich glued onto the outside fiberglass...   It's barely a half inch thick or maybe 5/8ths.

It amazes me that the brad nails that were in the wall didn't come out of the fiberglass on the outside.....   Of course the glue had dried out in the extreme desert heat and became hard like a rock..... Giving up its adhesive properties in the process....

Somehow the frame was split as it hit the floor but the actual glass in the mirror didn't break....    So now what do we do?

That was the question I posed to Larry, my son Chris' neighbor this morning.... He is a wood worker hobbiest.  He does projects for folks, for pay anyway...  We went over to the motorhome where it is stored and looked over the situation together...

Loyce had the mirror and its broken frame in the back of the clothes closet and under a bunch of other stuff that has accumulated there.......  The extra chairs for the dinette and some kitchen electrics which we carry in their original boxes....

Mostly we decided to see if there is frame material available in the right size and he will make another frame..  This guy is a dynamic wood worker on furniture and hobby items, like a complete wooden trash bin, that Chris has in his kitchen...  Just a gift from Larry, because he is retired and needs somewhere for this stuff to go......

But then, I came home and worried that I really shouldn't have gone over there and asked him to help me......  But he seemed OK with it....

With the cooler weather, the grass has begun to come back up thru the brown dead parts and get high in places....  For a minute there, I thought it might cause me to have to mow it.......   But I got over that feeling and came inside and ignored it.....

Tomorrow is Romeo Riders again and they want to go quite a ways into Southern Missouri, so I need to park this keyboard and go get some sleep....  Have a good day..

Retired Rod

Much cooler and more Twain

Boy these days are lazy here in the late summer....  Again we kind of sat around here all afternoon, and I got caught up in that 500 page book.....   Roughing it by Mark Twain.....  I am up to page 316 which is now more than half way thru...

Once he gets to the place where he begins to be a writer for the local news paper, the story kind of slows down and the stories become more predictable..  So of course it was more difficult to keep my attention....  I did look up to see if the story is true or not, but it was called semi autobiographical...  Meaning that he did go to Nevada and did do a bunch of this stuff, but perhaps the stories might be a bit enhanced..............  Nah,,,  Really?

Two years ago we were in the Garden of the Gods in the middle of August..

So after struggling to keep my eyes from taking that parked position during the afternoon's reading, I finally managed to wake up enough to go on and read more blogs and different stuff....

It's amazing that one can amuse one's self all afternoon long with just a computer and an internet connection.....

Our weather here has really cooled off with only  83 as an afternoon high temperature...  We have been rather cold at that temp, and I was actually wondering if I should go put on some long pants....

I didn't go on a bike ride today as I can't find the liners to my mesh coat and pants.  I know I had them last winter, and haven't been able to find them since..  We have looked in all the suspect places, and I know they didn't get left in Arizona.....

Perhaps they are still in the motorhome, but I thought I looked everywhere inside of it when we were on the road......  Mystery!!  I'll have to go dig around and look in every cabinet no matter what is in it.....

We went to the Flying W Ranch for chuck wagon dinner. 

And the Cowboy singing and fiddling afterwards...

Sadly we will never do that again, as the Ranch burned to the ground in this summer's forest fires..

The weather service is calling for about 90 later in the week and that will be about right for us down here on the Mason Dixon Line.....  Usually defined as I 70 now in modern terms....

Retired Rod

Mark Twain again...

At my older son's suggestion, I have downloaded and began reading Mark Twain's book from a long time ago called Roughing It..

It contains 500 plus pages of text, and the version that I downloaded is a picture copy of the old original book....  I'm about blind from looking into the laptop but I managed to get about half way thru the text....

Its about traveling on a stage coach before there were trains, from St Joseph, Mo to Carson City, Nevada while it was just a territory.  Times were much different at that time, and I am certain if it is fiction or somewhat based roughly on fact...  I'll have to research that question....

But other than spending all day watching the computer screen reading this work, we never accomplished a single thing here.

Have any of you read this work?  And can you reflect on it?  The story seems somewhat disjointed and I'm not sure where it is going or to what end...  But then that somewhat mirrors Huckleberry Finn...  Not sure where the story was headed and even when it was finished, not too sure where I had been....

It fell to overcast around here in the middle of the afternoon and the temps fell to barely 70 degrees by nightfall....  We went and turned up the AC as it was grinding along cooling the house that was almost cold to begin with......

I'm certain that the stay in the hot desert this summer has effected me and my judgement of temperatures for the rest of my days....

Retired Rod

Riding the Bike on only an 87 degree day...

We spent today on the phone with our older son Chris as he is deciding to take a job on the road again....  That isn't an easy decision and he can't talk about what he will be doing with anyone, so that's about all I can say about that...

In the afternoon, I went out with the motor scooter and rode a big square around our house.  First way out into the country to our South and then West  to Kansas highway 7..   Then North up thru the old downtown of Olathe..   Then farther North up to 87th street, still out in the country...

Eventually I ended up at the Cosco Warehouse where I filled the tank on the bike with a little more than two gallons, and went into the store to look at all the neat stuff....  But being a true old person, I only purchased a card of acid reflux medicine from the pharmacy...

Back at home, Loyce and I talked thru my upcoming medicare application and where to make that application.....  We dug thru the unopened mail and finally found the medicare card that was mailed here while we were off in Arizona....

And later tonight, I ended up over at our younger son's house while on the bike again....  It was dark when I returned here to our house....  A nice day on the scooter, but not much accomplished....

Retired Rod

School and the waters running again..

Its amazing how many of you commented on the fact that school is starting tomorrow.....  And with that in mind, I thought I would make some observations on how the school years seems to work here.

I think the first thing that changed the school year here is that all of the school buildings are air conditioned...  They could go all year round if they wanted....  And the second thing is that they all finished last year in mid May....

Back in my day, we had to go until the first few days in June, so yes we did not restart until after labor day... And even then, the buildings were old, and didn't have any AC at all, so the windows were wide open....  Bugs!!!  Us boys paid more attention to the flies than we did the teachers, and if your class was on the afternoon sunny side of the building you fried!!

Our old school had a long row of classes on the South side of the building and my 2nd grade class was let out early on many afternoons because no one could stand to stay in the building in early September.......

Also the principal's office was in the center on that South side, and when he couldn't stand it any more, we all got to go home....  His office was small and back in the back behind the main office.......  Now what was I doing in the principal's office?  Uh, some things need to be kept under the hat so to speak...!

I was up early this morning and off to the Kansas University Hospital...  First to see the vampire, and then to the X-Ray department, and then to the surgeon's  office to help him fund his retirement...  I got a clean bill of health, for this quarter, other than some ongoing infection, which landed me some more pills to take......

Oh, I emailed the Arizona caretaker lady, and she stopped over to see if the landscaper's took my calls seriously yesterday..  Seems that part of the irrigation pipes had been dug back out of the ground with some of the pipe replaced....  And most of the trees had been returned to upright and staked into that position....

She also thinks that the watering system had been shut down in order for the yard to dry out....  Something in their system must have broken...  Darned good thing I found the House Management Service lady!!!!  Otherwise we would have had a flood right off the bat...

So I'm two for two on irrigation systems, they were both broken within a week...  I'm scared what two broken pipes will cost us in water, in the same month.....  Ouch...

Retired Rod

Talking to everyone....

Seems as though one of our new trees in Arizona has wilted and just fallen over to the ground....   And that's not much of a surprise, as it was in the 100 plus fifteen range all week down there.....

But the gardener folks were supposed to come back and stake these trees so that wouldn't happen.....  And of course staking didn't happen, once we left the area and paid the money.....  I just knew that's how it would go...  But sometimes I try and trust folks.......  Generally that tends to bite me in the backside......

So I spent much of the morning calling trying to find this fellow to go look at the plantings and check the water system....  Finally he answered the phone....

Sometime about noon, we had a visit from the younger son and his family....  That's three kids all running around here at once.....   And Ben and I got off discussing the rebuilding of all of these computer machines I have been working on and what was learned....   He has a broken one as well....  Are all computers broken?

They eventually went to the housing association pool to take a refreshing dip, as tomorrow is back to school day for all three of the kids....   The youngest is now officially a kindergartener...  I feel old......

Then the the stock broker called in the sleepy late summer afternoon, as the markets are drifting sideways and I think he was just looking for someone to talk to...  Over the years we have become friends and talk we doooooooo.

But tonight I was determined to go ride the scooter again after it was a little darker, and cooler...  The bike just shined after riding in yesterday's rain, probably the first water it has seen in some time, as it has been way too hot to actually get out the hose and bucket.......   The soft rain water didn't even spot the windshield.

Tomorrow is another one of those medical days for me, and I am not looking forward to the needles that always go with that experience....  I am hard to get some blood out of.....

So rather than stay up all night, I will sign this off for now and catch you later...

Retired Rod

Breakfast in the Rain!!

It was looking rather bleak when I looked out of the blinds on the upstairs windows this morning, thinking about riding to the Romeo luncheon...  Gray and overcast is the best way to describe what I saw in the street in front of our house......

It wasn't really raining yet, but I had to go West to the town of Gardner and it didn't look very promising in that direction..    But what the heck a little rain won't matter, so I dressed for the trip...

Loyce thought I was nuts and told me so in the garage as I was pushing the bike out of the garage, and it had begun to sprinkle....  But I was determined to go thru with it by now, so I headed out into the bleak overcast...

The destination was Todd's Diner on the main street in Gardner about 14 miles to our Southwest..

The picture of Todd's Diner above is posted on the Romeo Rider's forum and I included the HTML code for it to appear here as well.... It must have been snapped on a much nicer day....! There are a lot of pictures on that web site and good descriptions from other riders if you click here..




As is usually the case, I wasn't in any of the pictures other than sitting behind the couple in this photo, while I was talking non stop to the fellow over in the corner drinking coffee.

By this time, most of the other riders had decided to brave the now heavily descending rain, and those of us that were chicken were still sitting around waiting for it to slow up some or stop....



This was the special of the lunch day, with a large plate of ham and beans with corn bread... But what I didn't know was that they also brought a side of potatoes... Either as hash browns or slice and fried potatoes.... They just hadn't arrived yet...

This wasn't my plate, as I had a small breakfast, but rather it was the brunch of the fellow with the coffee cup pictured above.... We sat and talked for some time, while the rain slowed outside....

Eventually I became brave enough to head for home, but it was still raining right along.... And yes I got wet, and no I didn't have any rain gear on... I even had my small helmet that doesn't have a face shield, so the rain was hitting me in the face fairly hard. That meant I went back into the town neighborhoods quickly from the highway and rode at 35 miles an hour rather than highway speeds...

After arriving home and hanging the motorcycle gear on a peg to dry, I found we had the grand girls here while their parents were out doing adult things..... So that was our entire afternoon.......

Claire and I worked with the computer talking about maps and states and history of the white house and all the former presidents...... Boom just like that the day was gone...


Retired Rod

Cooler and reports of heat in the desert.

Today was an overcast day with kind of a foggy morning...  The heat was off visiting other parts of the country, so that was somewhat of a relief.....  

Loyce was gone to the younger son's house for much of the day while she was involved with the grand kids....  I kind of hung back around home with Biscuit....  She really has separation anxiety when Loyce goes anywhere without her....  She was up in my lap whining and crying that her mommy left her behind...

By about noon, I received the phone call that I needed to go to the Doctor's office and leave off some of those testable bodily fluids in preparation for the official visit that I have scheduled for Thursday...  One of the main reasons that we had to come back here to Kansas...

But then tonight I was talking to the security folks out in Arizona as they were doing the walk around of our house, and they indicated the it was 117 this afternoon...........Yeow!!

I'm fairly certain that it is a good thing that we didn't stay any longer in Arizona than we needed to...  117, that's crazy...  Linda the security lady, said the TV people were talking about cooking eggs on the blacktop again, because of the heat....

But in contrast, yesterday when I was out on the scooter early in the morning, it was 81 here....  And I was riding along at about 50 miles an hour and it seemed cool, or almost   cold   as the air came thru my ventilated cycle jacket...  So I guess you do get used to the extreme heat....  I know my Canadian friends begin to complain    when it gets into the 80s, that it is sooo hot and humid..  It was about 95 when I came back from the ride, and it was finally beginning to be a little warm for the endeavor...

And lastly, I'm not sure I should report on this least I might invite the virus to return, but it seems to be gone from this Window's computer for now.....  Maybe AVG will get it into their security package...  And judging by the questions from Microsoft on IE,  Live Essentials will have it very soon as well.....

Have a good day today, as I will be off on the scooter for another Tuesday luncheon, by the time you are reading this...

Retired Rod

Incredibar Mystart (Hijack software, BeWare!!!)

Where to begin?   I down loaded SpyBot which is free from the internet, and started it scanning my computer with a program called Search and Destroy.....

And it found all this incredibar and mystart stuff and identified itself as a trojan...  It offered to remove all of the offending files and I thought I was done with it..... Wrong....

The program said the some of the files were attached as being used by a program and couldn't be removed....  By that time it was way into the middle of the night, and I left the program on its slow scan after a clean reboot where none of the programs had been started except the SpyBot itself....

It ran most of the morning, because when I put the computer down last night, it went to sleep and shut down the scan.....  I went on a scooter ride!!

It still wasn't done when I came back because once I set the machine down it went to sleep again....  So I had to babysit it to keep it awake, and eventually it found a couple of the files and we removed them too.

Well that's the end of that, I thought........... Wrong...

As I was using the computer again tonight, I found that my search engine was still using My Start by Incredibar.....  Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

This time I used the computer explorer and searched on the above terms and removed any file that had that name in it manually..........  A bunch of cookies and stuff...  Then dumped the recycle bin....  But as I was about to  go back into the browser, (Chrome)  I noticed that a download that I hadn't initiated began to download ....................INCREDIBAR..............................  I quickly halted that and deleted the file.....  dumping the recycle bin as well.......

It's still listed as my preferred browser as well here on google chrome....   Must be some cookie that is calling for the download of this trojan. I may have to dump all of the cookies as well just as a precaution.  I'll do that next....

I went into Wrench, Settings, and Search where I managed the available search engines and hovered over My Start and killed it with the X that shows up over to the right of the line...  I selected google again, but will it stay...

I started MS IE, and they had a dialog box asking if my search engine had been changed in their browser and even though it hadn't been changed yet, I answered yes and sent it back to mother MS IE...  So they must be all over this....

It hasn't found or attacked my LINUX box yet, just the windows laptop......    Maybe I will just shut down the Microsoft computers completely until this goes away....  Loyce, go back to your apple will you!

Yep, there were a bunch of cookies in the Chrome cookie folders.....  With that offending name in them...  They're gone now.....

Retired Rod

Mal Ware that attacked today.....

I don't have much to report for today, as I was again spell bound by the computers.....  My Mint project was all encompassing until I did something wrong and corrupted the boot record on the hard drive....

I had put the software on there the first time as a test, and I got everything working just like I wanted it as a test......  but it was in a small partition.....  So I blew that all away and reformated the hard drive to put it on for real this time....

And I worked a long time and just about had it when I added one more program, that corrupted the whole deal............

So tonight I started over from the blank hard drive......  But, Hey I'm really experienced at solving these little problems as they come up.....

In the process of all of this, I had a trojan attack the start up of my browser on the windows machine....  I use Chrome by Google, but a little internet research availed that this trojan can attack IE or Firefox or Chrome, it doesn't care....  Its called incredibar, and mystart....  Nasty business....

What it does is embed itself into your browser and come up as your startup search engine when you start  up the browser... You have to close these tabs to get to your real page, and your old home page is just gone...  The incredibar will add a search bar across your browser to search the internet for things you want...  Of course, the signon when you click on one of the adds credits mystart as the referring web page.... and they get paid if you buy anything, or even for the clicks like google....

I managed to get this out of my lookup page on chrome by clicking, the wrench, settings, startup, open a specific page.  At the end of that line is a set pages that is clickable and if you hover over the mystart, an X appears that will delete it.  But some research on the internet says that I need an additional malware product to identify all of the instances on my hard drive and eliminate it...   Most of the security packages  like Norton and AVG haven't programmed their systems to stop it yet...

If it jumped on my computer, its only a matter of time and it will be headed your way too.  I guess it piggy backs on downloads that you might be doing, and since that was primarily my whole day, I managed to increase my exposure a lot......

Google Mystart, and or Incredibar...

Retired Rod

I have Spy Bot running as I am writing this!!

Broken irrigation fixed and Mint...

The service professional called at 7:30 this morning and said he would be here in a half an hour.......  Well he did come, but it was after 8:30...  It is farther down here to the end of the city than he estimated in the 8 AM morning traffic...

But that gave me enough time to get into some pants and move the truck from the driveway where the offending broken pipes were buried..  I spent some time looking for the other valve boxes that were long since grown over with grass.

I found some of them, but the service guy said not to worry, because he has an electronic tool that sniffs out the magnetic valve solenoids, kind of like a metal detector would find a metal piece underground...

The beauty of having these guy that fix this stuff every day come look at the otherwise un-revealing  hole in the ground, is that he reached in and wiggled the valve body and said it wasn't connected to anything...  So with his shovel he carefully dug around the pipe off to the side of the valve pipe and unearthed the entire problem...

A piece of 1 inch PVC had given way at the elbow... Where it was glued.  Or supposed to have been glued....  The purple cleaner hadn't stained the bottom of the joint, meaning that it was never cleaned correctly...  So the cement had never adhered to the plastic pipe....  Eventually it was going to blow apart!!  It took about 4 years...

Seems that these joints begin to leak, and then build a pocket around the pipe as the water washes away the soil that is holding the pipe together.  And when the pressure is strong enough, they blow with a big bang and water everywhere...

It took a while to cut new parts and re glue and seal all the existing pipes.. He replaced everything back to a threaded joint in the valve, where he used new teflon tape...  Once the ground was filled back in, all I had to do was wait for 3 hours before turning on the pressure....

Oh, and I have a bill for about an hours work and parts....  $113 and change...  Not too bad since my hands never were dirty....

And later this afternoon I have been running each zone of the system checking out the watering patterns and stuff...

The rest of the day has been back on the computer where I learned a valuable lesson about making bootable DVDs....  Microsoft Windows7 will burn an ISO file to a DVD and you can read it and test it and all will look fine......!!!!  BUT IT WON'T BOOT UP YOUR COMPUTER!!!!

I could find no reference to this on the internet wiki files.....  But after trying everything I could think of, it slowly dawned on me that you have to have an ISO image burner program to burn these....  I knew this from my old days of copying other unmentionable media..... Dah...

So once I downloaded Imageburn, and made a dvd disk with it, we had a bingo as I was able to boot from the DVD drive on both the windows laptop and the linux desktop...

I am trying out another version of linux called Mint.  



But it is beyond the nature of this blog, to explain.  Other than it is a competing distribution of linux from different folks...... Supposed to be easier, but of course time will have to prove that one....

Anyway I can now happily spray all that expensive water on the parched grass around my home here in KC...  Wouldn't it just be easier to rock the whole thing like we did in Mesa???   But that's not socially acceptable here in the mid west.....

Retired Rod

Car wash and fixing the broken laptop..

Not many folks found the actual post for yesterday since it was before the Precious Moments pictures so I will repost it again tonight.....  Since all I did today was work on these same issues with the computers again.

Yesterday....

Lets look back at today and see what we did..... Uh, well I went over to the car wash and drove the oldest car thru the line..... It hadn't been washed for a couple of months and it needed a good dusting and cleaning...

We left the Toyota out in Mesa, because there was only two of us and we drove the motorhome back to KC. Loyce drove the truck.. Most of these vehicles have some age on them now, as the truck is 6 models back now and the one I washed today is 8 models back of new.. But we don't have a lot of miles on most of them, but I still dream....

But back to reality, I needed to continue on my computer project. I have been recovering the pictures that were lost from my hard drive crash. Almost everything is stored on other devices, but its hit or miss what is on where...

I have been copying them all onto the newest laptop from a thumb drive, but that proved rather slow as the drive is only 4 gig. So it was off to the computer parts supply store this afternoon looking for, well, parts!

I purchased a new hard drive for the laptop that crashed... It was 500Gb and that was what I found.. The 5400 Rpm was cheaper than the 7200 and I'm slow too, but the old one that crashed was 4400 from looking at the label on it. So it was an upgrade...

Also I purchased a 500 Gb usb portable drive. It was $70 and made by Samsung... You just plug it in, and it has the drivers and stuff right on its disk... or perhaps in a memory chip, but the computers loved it instantly mapping it as the next available drive in the sequence... F: on one machine and G: on the other, but who cares as long as it works!

I had flopped the broken laptop upside down and extracted the old hard drive out of its bottom before I left, to make sure I didn't get one that wouldn't do the job... (should have done that with that fan switch the other night.)

Then I bought a big stack of DVDs for $15. I think there were 25 in the package. But they were Phillips brand, so that seemed OK.

Back here at the house I was merrily making Emergency Recovery DVDs on the newest laptop, while I was installing the new hard drive into the broken one. At one point I was making recovery disks and using the recovery disks that I made two years ago to reinstall the programs on the older computer...

The portable hard drive transferred files between machines seamlessly, but it takes a bunch of time to go thru the process... It read 102 on our weather station, so I wasn't wanting to be outside anyway...

When you do finish your recovery of the older machine, it is returned to the state that it was in when you took it out of its box brand new... Full of the bloat ware that came with it, and without any of the software you normally use.. It takes quite a bit of time to go out on the internet and find the programs that you normally use and then install each of them..

I used internet explorer just once to download Google Chrome, and with that and a signon, my bookmarks and tabs were instantly restored... To my knowledge chrome is the only browser that does it that way...

So I am using the older machine to write this tonight and I am happy to be doing so, because the keyboard is much more familiar to me. And I am all blabber fingers with less errors...

Still it will take a long time to get the rest of the programs downloaded and installed that were on the old hard drive. Perhaps I won't need to do all of them, but it will dawn on me that I don't have Skype when I try and call someone, so that will be when it gets installed... And so forth as I try to use the old,,new,, computer..

And after I had washed the car this morning, it began to rain about supper time, so I had to run and put it in the garage.. It's black, and the rain spots it all up, so I will need to wipe it down now... But it looked really nice for several hours.....!

Retired Rod

Precious Moments Pictures...

I already wrote a blog for today, but in working on all the pictures that needed restored, I ran across our stop in Carthage, Mo, where the Precious Moments factory is located....  It was back in August of 2007, and I wasn't using blogger then but some other program.

I did put these in a blog at that time, but think they are just as pretty yet today... Enjoy.. Click on the first picture and it should take you to the album in Picasa.

This little chapel is down in the basement and is for the children that have departed our life too young, and for their parents that have suffered thru their loss...  It brings tears to your eyes just to stand there.

I purchased this little statue and it is in our cabinet on display yet today....

Loyce stood next to this figure so you could see how big is really is...

Precious Moments is a neat if not touching stop on your RV journey....

Retired Rod