final impressions blog - August 2007

August 3, 4, 5 and 6 - Did Nothing - no really I mean that

The weekend was such a pleasure. Barb and I spent three days on a 58 foot house boat with my cousin Bill (and daughter Erin) and Bonnie and Jim and uncle Calvin. We swam and talked and laughed about our youthful years in this area as kids on this floating 4 bedroom "house":

Bill served for more than 20 years in the Navy and was on the U.S.S. Mobile Bay during the first Gulf War.

and my Uncle Cal served in the Navy during WWII, and also piloted the Princess from Seven Points on the Raystown

and the Proud Mary out of Raystown Resort & Lodge. Well, what I'm saying is that I could relax. Wow, what a great trip with friends and family, a very much needed rest. I did take some shots, but not for “work”. To my family I say wonderful time, great weekend and fantastic fellowship !

The rest of August - New PC and XP and all that

I move to an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU with extra RAM and lots of graphics capabilities. The good folks at JNCS built the box to my specifications. It's a real hummer. So this was also a good time to move to XP, although I met with a lot of unexpected problems. XP is more secure than Win2000 so I had to do a lot of work to get my networked scripts to run.

Also in the mix was moving up to Corel Photo Paint X3 and I upgraded ACDSee to the Pro version. Anyhow, with all of these changes it's been difficult to get the artwork ready and build a new art development machine at the same time.

The biggest move was adopting the free OpenOffice, so now I do not use Microsoft Word, Excel etc.