We’ve kept up steadily with finishing all our digitizing projects, and have been reluctantly sucked into a few technology update projects during the last few months as well.

Our massive photo-scanning project is finally finished with thousands of pictures now in digital format and carefully filed in directories. The only remaining desire we have is to persuade Chelsea’s dad to send the slides he’s got from the early 1980s so she can scan them and finally complete the family history in photos. That will be so satisfying!

Since the photos were so current in our minds, I decided to do a slideshow retrospective of Paul’s life, and since his birthday was in late August it was perfect timing. We didn’t have as many photos available as we did for Alex, but we co-opted Denise into the project, getting her to secretly email us photos from Paul’s recent ten years.

Having already done the process with Alex’s slideshow, we were much better prepared this time. Finding the songs for Paul was much easier, and we already knew how to put the system together. Chelsea was delighted though, as she got to learn the software to piece the songs together into one seamless song file. Naturally she did an awesome job.

Our lives have been so busy though, as has Paul’s life, that he still hasn’t seen the slideshow, nor does he even know we’ve done it. Since his birthday is now three months past, maybe a surprise Christmas present is better…

Our Sonic Stage project is nearly done as well. All the music is off my laptop and all that remains is for Chelsea to finish renaming the songs and get the metadata input properly. She’ll finish that up in January when she has some time. Meanwhile I’m thrilled that I now have access to some of my favorite old music.

We have a funny story here – since we both now have smartphones with excellent music players, we opted to sell our MP3 players since we need to keep gear at a minimum on the bike trip. Within a few weeks Chelsea’s second-generation iPod Nano sold for thirty dollars on Craigslist…we shipped it off to West Palm Beach.

My expensive (originally well over two hundred dollars) and beautiful 20GB candy-apple-red Sony Walkman MP3 player didn’t fare as well. No interest on Craigslist. Zero interest at our garage sale. As a last resort we put it on eBay, setting the minimum bid at fifteen dollars, wondering if it would go even at that low price.

We’d put several other items up for auction at the same time, all of them originally quite pricey, and hoped for the best. At this point, as you can well imagine, we just want things to move out of the house, and if we can get something for them, all the better.

Two items didn’t sell, and two of the five things we posted went for the minimum bid, which was fine, but to our total utter astonishment and delight, the Sony Walkman had a fierce bidding war and ending up selling for eighty-two dollars! Yes! Universe, bring me more of this!

Chelsea has steadily been finishing the DVD copying process. We need to get a software addition in order to finish two of our favorite movies, but family and friends who have heard about our project have been gifting us movies. Our latest count is over two hundred movies and favorite TV series we’ve digitized. That ought to keep us occupied for a few hours on the road at night.

Audiocassettes are another of our digitizing projects. Chelsea dug out the box of cassettes one day to see where we stand on it, to see if we need to toss them, pack them, or give them away. Much to our delight we discovered that we have a cord to connect from the cassette player to the computer, and my old computer tower has a line-in plug.

It took mere minutes to get totally into the fun of the project. I chose all the really old cassettes from the 70s and 80s and had Chelsea start with those. Jim Croce, Hap Palmer, Raffi, Christmas carols in Czech that are irreplaceable, family recordings from the late 80s, kids books on tape, Music Box Dancer Christmas…we have an absolute treasure trove we can now listen to whenever we want, snatched from the jaws of obsolescence.

The downside is that my computer died, so we have no line-in anymore, and the project has been put on hold. Perhaps before we leave we can find someone who has a tower with a line-in. If not, we’ll store the remaining tapes and wait for the future.

Last but not least, Chelsea is now down to the last round of scanning. We have only a few items from the memories boxes and all the paperwork remaining to be scanned. Of course, the paperwork alone will take weeks to finish, but Chelsea’s already cleaning out four thick binders and has her systems set for the rest.

She’s delighted, as her room is the repository for the boxes, and with every box that she scans and tosses, her room looks better and better and better.

Technology

Technology issues have slowed us down a bit lately, as we’ve had to stop our other projects and take the time to update and rearrange systems.

First was our website. Our banners across the top mysteriously disappeared one day, and though Chelsea put in hours trying to figure it out, nothing worked. She’s wanted to do a major upgrade to the website for a while now, so she took the time one weekend to settle in quietly and do the job start to finish.

She had to do backups first, then she had to upgrade our Word Press to the latest version. Since we have an extensive and somewhat complicated site, she then had to ensure that all our plug-ins and upgrades worked with each other again. Finally she had to make sure our Typekit typefaces all came through properly.

The banner problem was solved, the upgrades and interfaces all worked out, but she still has to figure out one final problem with the headers not showing properly. All things considered it’s pretty minor, especially considering the size of the project, but she’s really looking forward to having the time to solve that one last issue.

I recently switched from Firefox to Chrome, at which time Chelsea and I figured out how to get my many-years-collection of bookmarks from one browser to the other, and how to get them perfectly organized. I had also gotten all my song play lists set up on the computer, just the way I like them, along with the new browser and bookmarks. I was on cloud nine.

Then came the day my computer died, quietly refusing to turn on anymore.

That meant switching over to my laptop, setting up the new browser again, getting my bookmarks transferred again (it was not easy and straightforward), and setting up my play lists all over again. Deep, deep sigh…

Then I discovered the printer would no longer work with the laptop, so there went more time trying to get it solved.

Adding insult to injury, I had photos and music on the two hard drives in the old computer, which I now could not access.

Since I’ve discovered that stressing doesn’t help, I decided to leave it be for a while till I could think things though. Sure enough, a brilliant solution came to me after a few weeks.

Lying awake late one night, I remembered that we had two external hard drives we’d purchased in 2005. We’d wiped them clean when we got our portable drives and we’d given them to Alex. Alex wasn’t using them, so we reclaimed them.

The solution was simple and free. We opened my computer, took out the hard drives, opened the cases on our external hard drives, and replaced the former hard drives with the hard drives from my tower. Voila! I had instant access to all my data, including my music and photos.

It took a number of hours to accomplish all these tasks, but I’m happy to report that all is now well. I’m up and running and everything is perfect.

The only ongoing downsides are that we no longer have a line-in for the cassette project, and our movie-watching system is now more complicated. Instead of just moving my monitor and speakers out to the front room when we want to relax and watch a favorite movie, I now have to plug and unplug speakers, monitor and laptop. It’s awkward, but hey, it works.