Moved to Skype

Meaghan and I chat with my folks over the internet about once a month. For the last year we’ve put up with the bugged and flawed experience of MSN Messenger, working around audio delay, dropped calls, and frozen video problems. This morning we switched over to Skype and what a difference!  We’ve been aware of Skype for a while.  I’ve been using it on and off since I was in college.  However, we’d stuck by the principle that if it isn’t broken then don’t fix it.  MSN Messenger finally qualified as “broken enough” to switch.

The Skype call quality is superb, the video degrades and upgrades as the connection quality comes in and out but I’d much prefer a graceful degradation to a dropped call.  Even over the wireless network, the connection quality was amazing.  I was able to give my parents a tour of our house by connecting on our laptop and just wandering around.

Good to see my folks- great to see and hear them clearly!

RSS Feed

Did you know this blog has a feed?  It’s located at: http://stuartthompson.wordpress.com/feed

SubText import: 12 down, 128 to go

Continuing with my import from a failed SubText 2.0 upgrade, I’ve completed the import of my DasBlog entries.  Today I started importing the SubText entries.  With 12 down and 128 to go, it still feels like there is a ton of work ahead.  It’s nice to see it coming together here at WordPress though and I’m really enjoying the new blog interface and overall robustness of this blogging package.  I’m looking forward to having the import completed so that I can return to blogging normally.  I still have all of my photographs and stories from England to post.  If only there were 30 useful hours in every day!

Migration Part I – Complete

The first part of my blog migration has now been completed.  The posts from May 1st 2006 to April 18th 2007 have been successfully migrated to this blog.  Thanks to a lot of manual link cleaning and image relocation work, all of the links and images should now be functional and verified.  I’ll start work on the SubText entries tonight.

The System is Down

She's Dead Jim!

You’ve all probably noticed by now that the old blog has been down for about a week.  Yes, unfortunately I must announce that the old blog has officially.  The upgrade to SubText 2.0 did not succeed, and neither did the restore from backup.  I’ve attempted to breathe life into the patient for the better part of a week with little to no success.  While I have some idea about why the upgrade might have failed, I cannot determine why the restore faired no better.  Everything is, ostensibly, as it was prior to the start of the process.  Alas it is sometimes just the way with these things.

As a result of this loss, I have undertaken a task that has been on my plate ever since I originally retired my old dasBlog archive and moved to SubText back in early 2007.  I am now consolidating the archives from both of those blogs into a new single home here at wordpress.

Fortunately, while the SubText software insists that the contents of the database are not compatible with the files on the web server, the content of the posts is still quite intact in the database itself.  With a bit of surgery and a good amount of manual labor I am fairly confident I can restore each of the posts without loss.  I still have all of the images as I stored those on a separate file system anyway and linked to them from my post text.  The post text itself is alive inside the SubText database.  All that remains is for me to extract the original text from the database and pair it up with the relevant images.  I’m undertaking that task a bit at a time as I get the chance.  It may take a while for full restoration.  Thank you for your patience.

Now I leave you with one from the master in this sort of situation: StrongBad.  Enjoy!

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail45.html

Welcome

Welcome to the our new blog, hosted by SubText!

Meaghan and I have decided to post to this blog together, which should increase posting frequency, but should also give two different perspectives on our experiences.  We are both new to SubText and it will probably take a couple of days to get everything up and running.  We have a ton of photos to post and lots of stories to share concerning our adventures together over the last few months.  It has taken a while to get this going and the old blog hasn’t really seen a post in 2007, but hopefully with two people going at it and some of the nice new features in SubText, we’ll have a lot of fun.

Hope you all had a great weekend!
– Stu

Still Moving to SubText

The move to SubText is going well, although it’s been a busy week and I had to put the project on hold for a couple of days while we take care of our cat Peaches.  She’s not doing so well and we want to make her last week here as comfortable as possible.  I’m hoping to finish up the SubText installation before the weekend and make April 21st a new start with the blog.

On that note, I’ve started blogging technical articles on a corporate blog at work as it makes more sense to do them there.  As a result, I’m going to use the SubText blog for simply personal posting to share pictures and stories with family and friends and keep them connected with our lives.  Meaghan and I both live far from our families and many of our friends now and the blog is an awesome way to keep people in the loop about what’s going on.

Hope you’re all having a good week!

Moving to SubText

I’m moving this blog over to SubText sometime either this week or next week.  I’ve been looking at doing this for quite a while now but hadn’t got behind the effort in earnest until earlier this week.  Meaghan and I have had a tremendous amount of fun over the last three months and have many photos to show for it but I’m going to wait until the new blog is up and running before I post them.  A few attempts to automate an import of the old posts from this blog to the new installation have produced some interesting results but fairly riddled with artifacts concerning post order, mis-matched comments and some loss of post text.  I’m thinking right now that I’ll archive this blog off to a different url and let it run from there; leaving the option open to migrate the posts across later.  For now, I’ll just consider the SubText installation to be a new start and go from there.

Canon PowerShot A710 IS

I recently bought a new camera, the Canon PowerShot A710 IS, and after two weeks of ownership I can honestly say it is one of the best purchases I have ever made.  I love photography and take pictures nearly everywhere I go.  That’s not to say I’m any good at photography and would never claim to have mad skillz or even anything beyond a pedestrian interest level of knowledge, but I enjoy snapping pictures nonetheless and can oft be seen pressing my eye against a lens while on vacation.  My 35mm SLR died on me a couple of months ago when the winding post snapped.  I got the repairs appraised at a camera shop but the cost was a little higher than I was willing to pay right away.  For nostalgia, I may yet get that camera fixed, but the incident was more than enough to prompt me to start looking for something new.  I’ve been interested in digital SLR cameras for a long time.  The speed at which they take photographs and the overall kewl factor of twisting dials, turning knobs, and manually setting everything yourself is too much for me to resist.  However, the cost of the models I am interested starts at $1,200 for just the camera body; the lenses are then purchased separately.  Hmm, not so much for right now methinks!  As a purely information quest without any intent to buy, I went looking with my sweetie pie while down in Eugene just to “research prices and features”.  Yeah, cos that’s how it works. :)  You just look for a while at the shiny thing you want without any danger of a purchase occuring.  Whilst in Best Buy, we spent a good couple of hours playing with almost every digital compact and automatic in the store.  We found a couple that were of interest but nothing that truly stood out and we were about to leave when I wandered back down the ample selection for one final look.   I just happened to pick up a PowerShot A710 by Canon, something I’d passed by originally because of the low price.  Almost instantly I was sold.  The weight felt right, the various knobs and buttons fell instinctively under my fingers and I was able to navigate the menu right away without having to think.  It just fit.  Wouldn’t you know, that was the only digital camera Best Buy carries that they didn’t have in stock!  Fortunately, Costco rushed to the rescue by stocking it for roughly the same price.  One camera, one 2GB SD memory card, one happy Stu.  I’ve carried this camera around with me everywhere since the day I bought it.  Love it.  I’m still interested in the digital SLR cameras, specifically the Nikon D70, D100, D200 series and the Canon EOS 5D, but they can wait for a couple of years.  For now, I’m actually having a lot of fun with the PowerShot…oh yeah, and I’m still waiting for the 2 AA batteries to die…185 shots and counting.

New Phone – TMobile MDA

I got a new phone last weekend, to replace the vastly underfeatured Nokia 6010 that I’ve been using up to now.  I’ve been waiting for the right device to come out for a while, and up until now I’ve been tempted by several but sold on none.  However, the TMobile MDA just sold me.  It has a hide-away thumbboard without too many moving parts to break or snap, and has enough integration with the applications I use most to be useful to me.  I took Travis with me to check it out before buying.  He has a pocket PC style device that he’s used for a while, and I can always trust him to be an honest judge of gadgetry.  I’ve spent about a week setting up various features, integration with Outlook, hotmail, gmail, etc… as well as configuring (think uninstalling) most of the “value add” applications that TMobile stuffed on there.  I’m getting used to the right-click menu paradigm of holding the stylus down on the screen for a couple of seconds, and the interface is beginning to make sense.  I can tell that this isn’t the first iteration of the Windows Mobile operating system software, but there are clearly still a few rough edges to be smoothed out, especially where consistency is concerned.  On the whole though, I’m happily wearing my thumbs into early carpal tunnel and messaging up a storm with everyone around me.  It’s cool factor is still high, for now, and it’s been a while since I had a new piece of gadgetry to show around to people.  I’ll give an update in a couple of months to provide a more weather-worn opinion of how it has fared over time.  I still haven’t played with the theming engine yet, and I’m still working out some of the features such as “email photo” or how to customize the contacts list to be most useful in various applications.  I’m sure I’ll figure all of that out in the coming weeks.

TMobile MDA