I really have intended to work my way through the photos from our September trip. However, I have managed to find other activities to keep me from that goal. I do, however, have a new photo gallery for Day 3 of Rocky Mountain National Park.
This new notebook sure is small compared to her old one.
Check out Day 3 of Rocky Mountain National Park and my other Haw Creek photo galleries.
Work, of course, takes a huge chunk of time and my time is shifted since the simulator is primarily available for the students in the evening. While I was planning for the contract to be over at the end of 2009, there is a distinct possibility that I will be there until the second week of March.
Karen has a new notebook computer. I spent the better part of a day installing all of her old programs and transferring files. The notebook runs on Windows 7.
I’m going to also be moving from XP to Windows 7. After restoring my laptop to near original configuration, there are still times where I am waiting an excessive time for processes to finish. My new laptop is on order and will be assembled and shipped next week.
Early this year, I rediscovered a love for reading. I used to read three or more novels a week on a regular basis. After many years of only a few books a year, I’m now reading at least a couple of books a week.
This has been the wettest year of all the years we have lived in Arkansas. Much of the state is well over 20″ over the normal rainfall amounts for the year to date. This is already about the 12th or 13th wettest year on record for Little Rock. From what I understand, the wettest year on record was in the 1880s, and there was a little more than ten inches more than what Little Rock has already so far this year — and there is still two more months of 2009 to go.
I’m going to be concentrating on posting the rest of the material from our September trip and building photo galleries. I’ll post on other topics as I have the time and the inclination.
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Windows 7 isn’t bad at all
November 8, 2009
So far, my experience with Windows 7 has been positive.
All of my files on the old computer, including images, copied over to the new computer painlessly through a wireless connection using the “Windows Easy Transfer” wizard. Of course, most of my files are on three external hard drives – photography files replicated on each of the three –, so there was no need to transfer most of them.
Still, there was 13 gigabytes to transfer wirelessly, and that took several hours. I spent that time reading, watching TV, and sleeping, since it wasn’t done by bedtime.
There are a number of ways that Windows 7 is significantly different from XP. It’s going to take a while to get used to some of the ones I’ll be using.
I realize, of course, that most of the features of Windows 7 first appeared in Vista. In fact, one article I read complained that Windows 7 was little more than a service pack for Vista. The argument was that, for the price of Windows 7, there was no reason to upgrade Vista to Windows 7 and that the only good reason to go to Windows 7 was if you were buying a new computer.
However, going from Windows XP to Windows 7, many Windows features are very new to me.
The biggest change is the way the task bar at the bottom of the screen is used.
I usually have a lot of windows open at one time. In XP, I would have the entire bar filled with application icons and I would use the bar to navigate between them.
In Windows 7, a newly open application’s icon will appear on the task bar if it’s not already there. In this instance, when you close the application, its icon also closes.
One of the features that I like is that you can “pin” useful applications to the task bar. Then, to open the application, all you have to do is click on it’s icon on the task bar.
When there are multiple windows of an application open, holding the mouse’s pointer over the application’s icon in the task bar displays all of the open windows for that application, as shown in the image below, which shows 7 open Firefox windows .
Microsoft has had some real flops over the years and I understand how a lot of IT professionals are going to be hesitant to move to Windows 7.
Large companies, though, are often slow to adopt new platforms. The company I worked for had only just moved to XP about the time that Vista was coming out.
I still have not loaded Office on to my new machine, though I probably will install Office 2003. I have installed Open Office and want to play with that for a while before I decide.
This blog post my first WordPress post written using Windows Live Writer.
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