It’s been another one of those period of time when I haven’t got to posting anything here in a while. There are several things that have gone on that I should have written about but didn’t. Rather than create a lot of new entries, I’ll just mention each of them here in summary:

Email

Glen and I set things up so that email to our server would be received via IMAP rather than POP3, and had clients upload their messages to the server. This means that, now, no matter where any of us are, or what client we use, we’ll always have access to the same set of email and archived messages.

Pegasus doesn’t quite integrate correctly, causing folders not to be refreshed automatically in some cases. I’m not certain yet if I want to dispense with Pegasus altogether or wait for an update. (I’ve used Pegasus for a very long time now, and it would be sad to see it go.)

Windows

Thanks to my MSDN connection from work, I was able to download Vista Ultimate and get a serial number for it. I’ve upgraded our home computer from XP to Vista. All in all, it’s quite nice. There are some minor issues with compatibility, as well as annoyances with security that don’t really apply to my situation but which I have to deal with anyway. However, I quite enjoy the new UI changes, and it seems to be a bit faster than XP. (Although that could just be because I reinstalled a new OS – rather than it being Vista specifically.)

In the process of the upgrade, I managed to lose Michelle’s Palm Pilot contact database. Although she no longer uses that device, she had kept up with the contact database software. I’m kicking myself over this one, because I’d been so careful to back up everything else.

Rash

I woke up about a week ago to discover I had a neck to knee rash. It itched a little bit, and I stayed home from work so I could get to a doctor. It ended up just being a reaction to something, I don’t know what. It’s gone now. There’s the possibility that it was stress related – but I’m not sure about that.

Work

Friday is my last day in the building I’ve been working at for the past 2 years. We move – across the street. I’ll be something like 30 seconds closer to home. However, it will mean that I won’t need to cross the street to get between the building and the bus. In the Winter, when there’s lots of snow, I’ll be grateful for this little perk.

Board Of Directors

This actually happened a while back. (So much for chronological order.) I was voted onto the Board of Directors of my condominium – as were the other people running I was hoping to see get elected with me. So far, it’s been busy, and a fair bit of work, but I’m loving every minute of it. The people I’m with are all fantastic, and we all see eye to eye in general terms. I’m having lots of fun.

One of the Directors, who had originally been on the Board, resigned right after the elections, so we’re working on filling the vacant fifth seat. I’m hoping we’ll find somebody who fits into the culture of the new Board.

Links to two pieces of software I use, and which I put on the left-hand side of this page, have disappeared in different ways. One, Image Grabber II, is nowhere to be found any more – apparently the site is gone. So, clicking on the link actually downloads the software itself, which I’ve put on my server, rather than trying to go to the site. The other thing that’s changed is the FastStone Image Viewer program. While the site still exists, it was only the beta version that had the contact sheet wizard (and a few other things) for free. Now that it’s out of beta, you have to pay to get that extra functionality. However, you can download the most advanced beta (prior to final release) here – also from my server.

I’ve been using Graphic Workshop for several years now – so much so that I purchased it a while back. It’s become a bit dated, however, and won’t let me apply some of the special effects I’d like – such as red eye reduction for use with digital camera pictures. Also, I’m not a fan of the newest version – which doesn’t appear to offer much more than the old version, and which I’d have to pay for again.

I’ve also been using PhotoPlus, and had purchased it also – but I got my copy some time ago, so I only have version 8, not 11 which is the latest. It, too, was useful, but, ironically, was missing some of the things I liked about Graphic Workshop – namely bulk resizing, conversion, and so on.

Just last night I stumbled upon FastStone Image Viewer, a freeware graphics viewer which combines the best of both of the above, and is, I believe, actually better overall – at least for my purposes. PhotoPlus does let you create pictures, unlike FastStone which only applys effects to existing pictures, however I hardly ever need to do that and, when I do, I can just use the native Windows Paint program.

(If I ever need to do something fancier, I can always download the free Gimp – something I’ve installed on and off over the years but have never kept on my system because I almost never need to use something as advanced as it, even though it’s excellent for what it does.)

I will always prefer freeware (and open source software) to anything I could buy – especially if its quality is comparable, as this piece of software is. I heartily recommend it, and it’s now found its place in the list of software links on the left-hand side of my home page. It replaces the previous PhotoFiltre that I’d had there.

Something else interesting is that it also has an excellent contact sheet wizard – which means that it edges out the still good Cas, from Zhorn Software, as my contact sheet utility of choice. This frees up another “spot” on my software link section, as I’ve removed that link too.

A little while ago, I signed up for two magazine subscriptions. One for the wine magazine Decanter for Skip, the other for Popular Science for Michelle and myself. We’d borrowing Popular Science from Walt a couple of times and enjoyed reading through it.

In this months edition of Popular Science, I learned about the 3D virtual world Second Life and I thought it was quite intriguing. Apparently, in addition to a “next generation” online community, you’re also able to actually make real-world money from virtual endeavours. I signed myself up just now, although I haven’t had a chance to actually run the interface and take a look at things.

You’re not able to use your own name. You pick a first name of your own, then have to pick a last name from a list of those currently available. This put a bit of a damper on what I might have chosen, but I muddled through. (Actually, I quite like the end result.) I ended up going with “Syzygy Sin”. Syzygy is a word I’ve liked since reading a science fiction book by Michael C. Coney of that title. (A quick look on Amazon shows me that he’s not the only one to have written a book with that title.) I’ve always liked the way it sounds (“sizz-i-gee”), and its meaning is an astronomical term for 3 or more planetary objects coming into alignment – which I’ve always thought, in “real life”, was a good analogy for things coming together or working out as you’d like. When we first investigated getting a vanity license plate for our car I was disappointed to discover that this word was already taken by somebody in Ontario. (Michelle and I ended up just going with our last name instead.) As for “Sin”, I picked it because it’s a one syllable word (I have an ear for verbal cadence), also started with “s”, and because of the unusual pairing of the two.

I have no idea if I’ll really get into Second Life, or make money from it, but it’s going to be interesting to find out. It certainly sounds like one of those technological things that would make for good party conversation…

There are now two different spots in Toronto that we need to go to in order to check out their menu and beer selection. One is Volo, the other is beerbistro. Oddly, we’ve only really heard about both of these places relatively recently. Our only dilemma now is – how do we try out all of the beer and food and then be in any proper state to do anything else?

Just the other day I plugged in my USB pen drive to my work computer so that I could connect remotely to my server at home. To my surprise, it didn’t identify itself as a “ToughDrive” or pop up an Explorer window with its contents. Instead, it told me that I had plugged in a “USB MEMORY KEY” and that the media was unformatted.

In a state of momentary confusion, I thought that it had something to do with it having gone through the washing machine the week before. I wrote to ATP to ask what I should do with it. It was only when I got home from work that night that I was reminded that it hadn’t been my USB key that had gone through the wash but my space pen. (Which survived the experience just fine.) I haven’t heard back from ATP yet but, even if I do, it might be to be told that they don’t guarantee their ToughDrives will survive such a thing. I somehow doubt that an follow-up, “Oh, no, my mistake. I didn’t run it through the wash after all – it just stopped working for no apparent reason,” will sit well with them. I’ll likely have buggered up any chance I have of getting it fixed if that sequence of events were to happen.

This is now the second USB device I’ve owned that’s just “suddenly” stopped working for no apparent reason. My first one was from SanDisk. It, too, one day just refused to be recognized. I have no idea what’s going on here. The good news is that I did manage to get it recognized at home briefly and back up its contents. That bad news is that I haven’t got it to be recognized consistently since – although my home computer, while doing so erratically, does seem to do better at it then my work computer (which hasn’t recognized it since yesterday at all).

If I buy a third such device and it too mysteriously fails after several months, I think I’ll be taking myself to some lab to be tested for unusual electromagnetic emissions…

It’s a long story, and I’m not going to relate it all. Suffiice it to say, that when I removed a single album from the Media Player 11 beta inventory I’d backed up the source MP3 files and watched to see if it would delete the album from my hard drive. It didn’t. So, after having tested to see how things behaved, I started to delete everything out of the inventory. (For some reason it hadn’t inventoried some tracks, it was bugging me, and I was going to have it redo things again.) This time, however, it did start to delete the files on the hard drive. I don’t know why the behaviour was inconsistent. I stopped the process but not before I’d managed to wipe out a big chunk of my CD collection.

I first hunted around for a utility that told me the empty directories (the process had removed the files but left the directories intact) – so I could tell which albums I’d lost. Then, I managed to recover some of them by copying music back from Michelle’s iPod. This was an interesting process, since the new, native, iPod plugin to Winamp doesn’t allow for copying music from an iPod back to the hard drive (although it’s planned for future versions). I also couldn’t get the legacy version of the plugin (which does let you do this) to work with the new version of Winamp – it would just keep crashing. In the end I made use of a free utility called EphPod to copy the music back.

Now, however, I’m left facing the prospect of having to re-rip about 170 CDs in order to restore the music I’ve lost. As a result, I’ve since ordered a Buffalo HG300 LinkStation from TigerDirect so that I (finally) can have a proper backup solution for my server and workstation. I’ve been meaning to get one of these for a while but haven’t had the ready cash for it. In hindsight, it’s probably cost me more to not have bought it already – so I’m not waiting for the next disaster that could be easily recovered from by having a good backup in place.

The Adolix wallpaper changer utility I mentioned a couple of days ago turned out to not work properly. It would give me an access violation error every time I started it, and it would always start up with the wallpaper being “stretched” – even after I’d told it not to do that. I sent an email to the company, but never got a reply.

(I probably should have tested everything before I wrote to say that I’d be using it. It just didn’t occur to me that something so silly would happen.)

So. I’ve now switched to the freeware version of Wallpaper Master – and, this time, have tested that it installs and functions without any problems.

Every once in a while you realize that you’ve been operating under a massively stupid premise for a long period of time – and then just berate yourself for it. This is one of those times for me. For longer than I care to admit, I’ve been “carrying with me” (through various computer and OS upgrades) an ever-growing set of wallpaper images that I use on my computer at home – which I have randomly change every 20 minutes or so.

When I started doing this, the OS that I had in place (and the utility I was using as a changer) could only properly support 256-colour BMP images. The time has long since passed that this has been a limitation – but, for some obscure reason, I’ve never re-visited the situation.

As a result, my mental “muscle memory” has caused me to download any new and interesting image I’ve found over the years – and then convert it to a 256-colour BMP. It goes without saying that I’ve had to throw some out (because the dithering broke things to such an extent that it was no longer really viewable) and others simply became somewhat “maimed” because the same process resulted in an obvious decrease in quality. This is most often noticed by a pixelation effect – where you see dots in the image, rather than just colour changes.

I no longer need to do this. I haven’t needed to do this for years now. But, for some reason, I’ve continued to do it anyway. I just did a quick Google search on freeware wallpaper changers and came up with a few that I should be able to use without a problem. (Replacing the utility I’ve also kept over the years.)

So, from now on, I can keep the original image without any need to cripple it by decreasing its colour depth. But I can only kick myself for all of the images I have in my “library” that have been crippled for no good reason. No doubt I can find the originals again for some of them. Others, I’ll just have to live with.

Update: I’ve determined that the software I’m going to switch to is Adolix Wallpaper Changer. It seems to do everything I’d like – and I’ve confirmed it has no problem working with high colour JPG images.

The last we heard of our intrepid herione she’d been the victim of a heinous plot by an evil villainess, intent on world domination, to take her out of the picture so that she couldn’t interfere with her nefarious plans.

6 weeks later, she was still out on the street, searching in vain for new colleagues to help in her fight against this global tyranny. And then…silence! It’s like she dropped off the face of the Earth. Is she in hiding, rebuilding her forces? Did the opposition prove too much for her? Is she still alive and ready to fight again? It’s been 9 months now. A period of time steeped with biological meaning. Has she, perhaps, given birth to a new hope?

Surely, somebody must know…