Okay, slightly frivolous, but I hope useful to some people.

After three years (including summers) in full-time or more than full time school, the house is a mess.  My first chore:  to get the living room back to livable.  To that end, I was on the lookout for three things and tasked with three things:  something to hold all the electronic media gadgets that were beginning to ruin the antique desk; something to replace the old media cabinet that was used by the door to hold all the "in and out" gear such as keys, bags, and mail; something to hold the rather large collection of DVDs we have accumulated; clear off the counter/desk under the window; rearrange the furniture for better flow and conversation/TV viewing; and finally to get the space clean!

IKEA (and World Market) to the rescue!  I found a three-shelf console to hold the TiVo, receiver, DVD-player, etc at World Market for half the usual price.  It's also close to the same color as the piano which is the largest piece of furniture in the room.  At IKEA I found a Besta shelf unit that will be hanging from the wall by tomorrow, above the media console, a lighter wood that matches the two IKEA POANG chairs (beech finish), and a black sideboard (NORDEN) that has two drawers and two shelves.  I also purchased a small bench (MOLGER) to hold my gardening supplies near the door and provide a seat in the entry for changing shoes.  Re-arranging a few things, and suddenly the living room is more functional. 

Additional things I did:  put ALL the graduate papers, books, folders and binders in boxes in a storage locker until I decompress enough to sort through in a rational state of mind.  Boxed up the thousands of books in the bedroom and bought paint for that room (after 11 years, it's time).  Put a good bit of the materials that had accumulated in my office in the storage locker so I can reach my workbench and desk.  

Next steps:  clear off my workbench and desk and put things to rights so I can work in there again.  Paint and re-arrange the bedroom and accoutrements.  Find a way to keep my dining room furniture more dust-free despite the birdcage in the same room.  Might try a piece of HEPA-type filter on the side of the cage that faces the nearest furniture piece.

Oh, and keep working at my garden.  Thanks to Tom and the elder stidkid, I have a garden bed that is ready to plant  and three that are almost discernible from the paths.  Once it stops raining, I can get something put in!

This is just a holding post -- I have had a MacBook Pro since last September.  An issue with my eyes required a large, non-glare, high-res screen.  The MacBook had those qualities. 

And I was curious about the capabilities of the machine.

Well, here we are nearly seven months later and I can say that it's an OS like so many.  There are nice things, and some annoying things.

It's NOT fully accessible to me.  The ability that Windows has to allow a person to make text in message boxes and menu bars BIGGER has somehow escaped the supposedly great abilities of Apple.  So I struggle to see what is going on at times, and that is highly frustrating.

There will be more, later --

I am almost done with the years-long process of getting my master's.  I think.  Look for some radical updates and changes in a couple months!

The latest "upgrade" to the desktop was hardly a positive experience.

In fact, it was so NEGATIVE, that we have gone back to the previous version.

I had tried to use the automatic upgrade several times, each time it failed. And then one day Tom wanted to use my netbook. And HE saw the upgrade notice. And it failed for him, too. But since he's a real computer geek (not a geekette like me), he just upgraded manually.

Slick interface, and it would have allowed me to print livescribe's required "microdot" paper on the new laserjet.... BUT it was taking HOURS as it struggled to catalog the existing livescribe files, AND the pen wouldn't connect any more, AND the newest version wouldn't connect to the livescribe internet site.

"Epic Fail" as our younger son says.

The only way for me to use the newest upgrades appears to be to completely reformat the pen and lose the ability to read the data from previous sessions. NOT good.

So, in a nutshell, I suspect the newest version of livescribe does not work on XP (what my netbook runs) and doesn't fully interface with older versions of its own files. If you have livescribe, make sure that you make regular backups of your uploaded files and such, and that you run a full backup before attempting to install the newest version of livescribe's "desktop."

At the moment, I give the newest livescribe desktop a very negative rating (minus 3), and the system as a whole gets downgraded to a mere 1 on the stidmama scale.  I would recommend it for people with larger hands, huge amounts of notes they must take, and those with the patience to waste hours trying to figure out the interfaces. But for people with huge amounts of notes to take who have smaller hands and no extra time to waste... just take notes with a comfortable pen, and maybe use a recorder. The "convenience" factor is completely lost when the frustration factor is this high.

I have wanted one of these for a very long time. And, to be honest, if we had known the exhaust manifold on the minivan was going to crack clean through at the end of the month, or that the propane tank was due to be re-filled... I would probably still be waiting, especially since property taxes were also due this month. BUT.

Since we didn't know that huge-big expenses were about to occur, I now am the proud user of an HP Color Laserjet CP 2020 Series PCL 6.

The reason we got this one, now, is that with all the documents I need to print for the master's program, I needed duplexing capabilities. I was using huge quantities of paper. Now I use about half as much (funny how that works...). It will make my backpack and binders a lot lighter!

What I am not really happy about... there is a "drag mark" on most documents I print, whether in color or in b/w. I think it's that something is on the drum. It has been there since the second or third day, or at least I noticed it then. I suspect we will need to invoke the warranty, which I had hoped to not do (since I really appreciate the ability to do what I need without standing over the printer to flip pages manually).

On to the other things I like: the COLOR! while we have had inkjets for many years, the nozzles can clog and the problem with rain is that what has been printed can spot rather badly. With the laser printer, color stays put. If I were to make thousands of copies, I would definitely upgrade from this starter-level color laserjet, but for my current purposes, it is plenty.

I would give this one a four-good rating (if I could find the little icons I used to use!).

Just wanted to mention two quick items: The first being that, by the time I got my lovely pink netbook I had forgotten the login and password for my livescribe online login. I was perplexed, I was put-out, I was pretty upset (anyone want to supply a "p" word for that last?).

Worried, I wrote to the tech support folks at livescribe and within 24 hours (would have been sooner if I checked email more often) was all set up to use the netbook with my pen and upload as desired to the web. So a big THANK YOU and thumbs up to the folks at livescribe.com for helping me and being ready to run interference on even the little things.

The other item about Livescribe is that I used it ALL DAY on Saturday to take notes at a conference I attended. Three hour-and-a-half sessions of workshops. I normally use it for lectures at the college, and did use it on the two-day retreat, though the format there required less writing so it wasn't a big deal. It worked just as well for the extended use two days ago, with a caveat: the barrel is just too big around for my hand. Just so you know, from base of the palm to the longest fingertip, my hand is 6" long; four inches side-to-side. I think the people who designed the livescribe pen must have standard adult hands... longer and wider. By the end of the day, my writing hand was cramping quite a bit. I will write to them about this.

My hope is that a subsequent version will have a narrower barrel, with a softer gripping end so that all-day use is more comfortable. I would even be happy if the pen had less memory (it holds 2G) just so I could use it longer in the day. I would also, though this is probably highly individual, like to see it offered in pink...

This was posted also at stidmama.com.

This is Jupiter, with the four moons clearly set in a line, two on each side! The first two were taken with the 2.5 mm lens, the last with 25 mm lens on the telescope.







The nittygritty of the last night's astronomical adventure: We used our new Nikon Coolpix S230 10 Megapixel 3x zoom ISO 2000 with vibration reduction. I held it up to the eyepiece of the telescope with the flash off and no zoom; I did not speed up or slow down the shutter speed. This method works best when the eyepiece is more stationary... the telescope is a bit shaky because it's portable so the camera shakes. Even with vibration reduction, when the magnification increases, it's noticeable. The final picture in the set of three was taken with higher resolution lens on the telescope, and most of those images were too shaky -- even with the relatively fast shutter speed of the camera, in some images Jupiter looked like a neon squiggle.

About the refraction telescope: It is a Telestar by Meade that we bought last year for the family. first lens: 25 mm; second lens: 2.5 mm. The increase in size made it much nicer to view with the eyes, but a lot harder to get a decent picture. It also makes it more challenging to aim the telescope (a task I left to the more adept teens). It's a nice telescope for our purposes. And as you can see, we were quite excited to get four moons showing up so beautifully!

Finally, if you want to try this yourself. Jupiter seems to be "up" around 9 or 9:30 pm where we live, almost directly south (slightly south-east now). We took these pictures between 11 and 11:30 or so. I can't tell you how far above the horizon because that's not visible, but I can say it's a couple degrees higher than the 100+ foot trees about 100 feet away on the neighbor's property.

So it has been a month since I got my little netbook. For the first couple of weeks, I pretty much used this just for email. And then, as I gained more confidence in its abilities, I added more and more of my favorite (freeware) programs.

Someday, I hope to be able to pay the wonderful developers, but for now, I will mention the programs I run in the hope that someone else will discover them and be able to pay a little bit.

I use crimson editor for html (now it's emerald editor). A google of either term will take you to Sourceforge.net where you can search on either name and find it.

I like irfanview for basic photo editing and such; it's quick, it's small. That's at irfanview.com.

And I use paint.net for a paint-style program and more complicated photo editing. That's at getpaint.net.

Of course, we use firefox and thunderbird, both available at mozilla.com.

For FTP and such, I have filezilla from filezilla-project.org.

And there is picasa, again of course, that from google.com.

And Tom has suggested I try Foxit Reader as an alternative to Adobe. foxitsoftware.com

I really love this little machine and so far everything that I have loaded runs just fine.

Of course, the games playbabble.com, quote-puzzler.com, and puzzlepirates.com also work. This screen is a little too small to render the entire puzzlepirates "popup" window that it runs in, so it's cut off a bit at the bottom. Otherwise, it works just fine.

The upgrade I am waiting for is turning 1G RAM into 2... Tom has ordered that and I should have it soon. That will speed things up a bit in terms of not needing to swap out as much.

Oh -- the battery is GREAT. I have the bigger battery, and easily get 4-5 hours continuous use unplugged.

I miss having a manual dial for volume control, but now that I understand how to use the function buttons it's not horrible.

I haven't tried the onboard camera or microphone yet. Have been too busy!

So, for me, this little netbook does exactly what it is supposed to do. I can type easily now that I know where the buttons are, it loads the types of media I use quickly and doesn't crash, and (JOY) it has a screen that is matte so it's doesn't glare.

A resounding FOUR goods on this little machine!

I have been lobbying for a smaller, tablet-style computer for school for some time now. While researching similar ideas for my mother who travels a lot, I read up on the new HP 110 series. Finding them in the stores, I was always impressed with the feel of the keys, the way the screen looks and the fact that it weighs less than my purse.

Today, we got a PINK HP 110-1037tablet. I will blog more extensively later (the Phage Biology meeting will be over in two weeks), but so far I like it.

For grad school notetaking, I needed something portable, and for power I can use the desktops on campus or at home. And yes, I still have (and love) my LiveScribe pen, but sometimes the ability to type is just as necessary.

And yes, to save time and just to get something "up" I am cross-posting between stidmama.com and LiveJournal this time.

LiveJournal automatically alphabetizes the tags I put on posts... so much for my reputation as observant!!!