Still Learning...

... this google-sphere web way of "living" that I've decided to take on.  As you may have noticed by now - I'm posting from a new blog.  It is one of the *.blogspot.com addresses (blogger) that google owns.  I'm also making more use of (or attempting to / learning) my picasa web albums that also comes with ones google account.  They (google) offer up a ton of neat and useful toys all for the really nice price of ...  ta da .. basically free.

From Weekend Shooter

Turkey Day / Computer Re-Build

 As mentioned in a previous post regarding how surprised I was (am) at how well windows 8.1 actually seems to be, I did go ahead and pull the trigger and re-build the machine. I started around 8:00pm last night (Wed, 27 Nov) and am more or less finalizing the rebuild of it now.  I obviously began the evening looking over / through both of the drives that live inside of the machine and pushing anything that I felt may be of some value to me to an external for backup.  I then popped in my pair of backup drives for my photo's and libraries and ran the backup for those too.

When "bombs" are good . . .

... I know I'm old and nerdy, and not entirely on top of pop culture but when I saw a link just now re: some celebrity "photobombing" a wedding shoot in NYC I figured I'd follow the link to see what the prima-donna attention whore did. Turns out "photobombing" is a "good" thing?? Apparently it means that - well - I dunno . . .  I guess that because "Joe Actor" wound up in a photo that it became "the bomb!"? ( scratching my old bald head.... lol! ) I read "bomb" in anything and take that to be, generally, a bad thing. Bombs blow things up. But I guess "bombing" in this instance is good because the photo went "viral" in internet speak and kabillions of folks saw it.

Well huh!  Whatddyaknow...   :)

( I wouldn't have had a clue who that guy was had I been editing the photo and may very well have cloned him out of it... lol! )

Hard to believe that I'm actually saying this but ...

I'm actually thinking about installing this thing on my workstation machine at home.  Yeah -- I find it hard to believe but ...  I kinda like it.  It's not nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be - principally because it does allow you to use a more win 7 like desktop as opposed to that damned tiles interface.

Readers digest:  The company that I work for has an enterprise class license for Microsoft products.  I work in the I.T. department and as such am able to "play" with new stuff on test / guinea pig machines.  I installed it on this laptop that I'm using right now a day or two ago and as I learn my way around it, I find that I'm actually somewhat surprised at how well it seems to be performing so far.  I'm gonna give it a week or so of use at work and see what the verdict is . . .   but so far I have to say that I am genuinely surprised at how well it is running.  I've installed a number of applications and utilities on it and have yet to come across anything that I haven't been able to get to run.

We'll see how it goes... 

First Post

Hi - it's me.  I've been kicking around the idea of consolidating my multiple presence(s) on the web into a more or less singular entity, or source if that works better.  I've basically decided to go whole hog with services (free) that google provides.  They've got mail, apps, voice, g+ for photo sharing, etc ....  and now I discover (although I had already suspected) that they have blogging too.

I'm also entertaining some cost cutting.  I have my own domain (jdanvers.com) which is hosted via Bluehost and while that is fine and dandy - it costs me money every year or two and .... I don't know if what I'm spending on it is being justified in what I'm actually seeing in return.  I may keep the domain name as it is nice in a vanity license plate kind of way . . .   we'll see.

When I first started shooting again a few years ago, I was directed to flickr by a friend.  Flickr was (and still is) a great resource and I learned a lot the first few years via the forums that they have in there.  The forums in Flickr are, in my opinion, one of the best kept secrets about that setup.  There are a number of really skilled shooters that post images there obviously, but there are also a good number of surprisingly knowledgeable people who readily share expertise on a wide range of photography subjects.  The photo's that many people post are quite a source of learning themselves in that exif data is available for many of them.  "How'd he shoot that?  What settings did he use"  Look at the exif data - it's all there.  Great stuff.  I've been a "Pro" member of the flickr community for the last 3 or 4 years - it was worth it and relatively inexpensive at $20-$25 bucks a year.  ( I forget exactly how much it was - but not much really) Essentially unlimited file storage, and again, a really great resource in those forums.  Sometime during the last year or so though they (Yahoo / Flickr) changed up their setup though where now *everyone* apparently gets upwards of a terabyte of storage - for free!   Thats great - I don't even come close to that...  why am I spending $25 then?  I've opted to let my flickr account die - I just downloaded nearly 900 images that I had out there via a very handy little utility called "MyFlickrBackup" (google it) and I'm going to start making use of the galleries available on G+ / Picasa.

More later ...