Altivo

I promised photos of the railway museum last week. They are loaded (finally) and can be seen starting with this one:



That's an old Chicago Surface Lines street trolley from before WW2. Click on this image to go to the set on Flickr, and proceed with "newer" photos to see the whole group. When you get to the photo below, you've reached the next event.

And that's the Boone County Pioneer Festival in Spencer Park:



That's a photo taken in one of the restored cabins in the park. The re-enactor is making butter by shaking cream up in a preserving jar (yes, that works, but it takes about 20 minutes.) She then proceeded to bake rusks on the woodstove. Click on this image to go to the set of photos, and proceed with the "newer" photos to see the whole group.

I apologize that things seem to be in no particular order. The Flickr uploader sometimes does that to me and I haven't figured out any way to resequence them.

Gloomy, cold, rainy, windy day here. Looks like more of the same for the next week or so. There's been a major geomagnetic storm today, with radio disrupted etc. If you have clear skies anywhere in North America, you might want to check for aurora to the north around midnight or so.

I suspect that's the end of the snow for this season. Birds are going crazy, and I think I've heard a fox once at night now. The frogs are starting up too.

Amazon took all day and into the night to post the results for the next cut in the ABNA. I just got the list, and I didn't make it. I refuse to take this too seriously, since the first cut was based on a 300 word pitch and this second cut was based on amateur reviewers evaluation of the first 5000 words of the manuscript. It would have been nice to get past this second hurdle because then the professionals start reading the entire manuscript, but... eh.

Happy whelp day to farthing who I assume will see this eventually. He's a really sweet wuffy.

Got a new camera today, the one I ordered a few weeks ago. It's a Kodak, and has an awful lot of features and settings for a small snapshot camera under $100 in price. It will take me a while to figure it all out. It doesn't help that instead of providing the instruction manual in the box, they tell you to download it as a PDF from their website. The URL they give gets a "page not found" error. It's a new model of camera, so I'm guessing they just didn't get it posted yet, but I sent them a snippy note about it. The software download, which is triggered when you plug the camera into USB, was grossly overinflated. And it's Windoze only, of course. I went ahead and let it download into my virtual Windows XP setup, but I probably won't use it much. The main advantage seems to be that it will allow the camera to upload to Flickr, Facebook, or the Kodak Gallery directly, using menu selections made on the camera's own display. I usually prefer to crop, scale, and edit my photos on the PC before uploading anyway.

Linux does recognize the camera when it is plugged in, but I don't know yet whether it can load pictures off directly. The memory card is standard SD so I should be able to get at stuff by just pulling the SD card out of the camera and popping it into the Linux machine, which is what I've been doing with Gary's Olympus when I borrow it. Oddly enough, there were batteries included in the camera box but no SD card. There is enough internal memory to hold a dozen images or so if you reduce the size of each shot, and that's it. Fortunately I had a spare 2GB SD sitting around and could just pop that in. Now to experiment and see how well it actually performs. Seemed to do pretty well in a couple of experimental snaps I did using just the artificial light in the living room.

Warning: This means more photos should be forthcoming from me, as I intend to keep this camera with me much of the time so I can snap at will. It's small enough and light enough not to be a big nuisance like a regular SLR would be.