You know there are times in your life where something happens and you really can’t control how or why it happens, but it leaves you feeling frustrated and powerless? Okay, I had an experience like that. I am a collector by nature. I keep lots of pictures on my hard drive. I know I shouldn’t but it just happens like that. Ultimately, I think they all need backed up somewhere online, but I haven’t figured out where yet. Well, after my son was born in January, I had tons of pictures laying around in various places on my computer. I had bought a one terabyte hard drive and decided to start using it as a backup. I backed up everything. You know the way you are supposed to. Then I deleted everything off my computer after verifying everything was backed up.
A Month goes by, quickly, I might add. A first time dad. I was working at Olan Mills at the time. I kept the external drive plugged in, thought, why not just use it as my “my documents” folder. Everything is backed up to it. It will keep my computer cleaner and save the extra step of backing up every time.
One night, returning home much intoxicated from one of my haunts about the town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence…. oh wait, that’s Edger Allen Poe’s story, not mine.
One night, returning home, we had just opened the door, when I heard something fall. It sounded heavy. One of our cats was sitting in the middle of the floor, poised, ready to strike, and beside him was my external hard drive. Being the curious animal he was, he had jumped up on my desk and knocked the hard drive to the floor. Since my computer and the hard drive were on, the hard drive began making clicking noises. I plugged it in. Nothing but clicks. Everything gone. I gave it up as a total loss. I got frustrated, loaded up a linux distro I had laying around and got the hard drive working, at least until I posted about it.
While backing everything up from the drive, it failed again. I was too frustrated to post again that the thing had failed… miserable and angry at the whole ordeal, I again gave it all up for loss. I had small images that I had posted when he was born. Those would have to do. Family started asking questions about getting larger images. I told them what had happened. Now it wasn’t just me, other people were ready to kill one of our cats.
I remembered something this morning when Animoto, sent out their newsletter. I had made a video with them and used higher quality images to make it than I have on my blog.
I emailed them this morning if I could get a download of those images.
They emailed back wanting the exact url for the video I had put together.
I emailed it to them.
They emailed back with an individual url for every picture I had uploaded to the video.
I have since downloaded them all and backed them all up online.
Thank You Animoto. I also really loved the slideshow I put together using your service.
I am a bit of a google hound. I love to play with their products and I like the way they function. While I probably will be switching over to Google Chrome as my browser of choice, I am disappointed with two problems I’ve already found in the first five minutes of installing. I know it’s in Beta, but if you don’t make a deal out of it, it doesn’t get fixed.
- Google Chrome isn’t recognized as a window in windows. Let me give you an example. If you have Google Chrome open and Firefox open, then right click on your Windows taskbar and click “Tile Windows Vertically”…. Firefox will do it, but Google Chrome doesn’t. In fact Firefox will open full screen behind Google Chrome if those are the only two (supposed) windows open.
- My image resize handles in my wordpress wsywig “write post” editor is gone. Instead, I just get a big blue box over the area where my image is but no graphical resizing is possible. I can however still drag the editor bar to resize the text area, but when formatting a post, I like to be able to drag the image around too.
If google ever actually builds a cell phone they will rule the roost with this service alone.
*embeded button removed*
I recently was invited to take part in the Grandcentral beta testing of Google’s new service.
First of all it’s versatile beyond belief and simple to use. When I signed up, I had to choose a local phone number for me, but there wasn’t one, so I chose the closest one I could.
It’s also built for bloggers.
Let’s move on to some screenshots, eh?
The inbox is pretty simple and easy to use. Each Item has a drop down navigation control that will allow you to play each message or interact with it in a variety of ways.
You can automatically forward it to an email of choice, reply directly to senders email (if available), make notes on that call. Map the location (if you’ve specified it in their settings), and post the voicemail to a blog or anywhere where you could drop a line of code.
There are also a number of handling options for calls being made. They can ring all numbers at once, and you pick up wherever you want. Also you can route specific callers directly to voicemail or directly to a phone of choice.
Voicemails can then be left on the server or emailed to your location of choice (in my case, my gmail account).
I’m still working around it to figure it all out. I am sure that I will find some more buttons and whistles as I use it more, but it is a product that I am looking forward to using more too.
Technorati Tags: review , grandcentral , google , product , web2.0 , voicemail , phone
Awhile back, meaning around 2001 I walked into this Petland in Lancaster, OH and came out with a kitten. A little puffball of a kitten that looked half-skunk. Unfortunately, half of why I bought the cat was because I wanted to rescue it from the pet store. This cat was absolutely covered in fleas. I honestly didn’t know what else to do at the time about it other than buy the kitten and take it home and give it a flea bath. But let’s fast-forward about six years.
My wife and I have been thinking recently about getting a puppy sometime here in the near future. Probably within a year or two. I am partial to Cocker Spaniels and she is partial to Basset Hounds. Lately, she’s been feeling more of a draw to Cockers though. We decided we would hit up some pet stores and get a feel for their puppy personas before we made a decision about what kind of pup we want to get. We were in Lancaster, OH last week and decided to drop by Petland and hope that the Petland in Lancaster had changed ownership in the last six years.
They had two little cocker spaniel pups and one basset. We figured we’d hit the jackpot. Hey, if the management has changed and things were looking up, maybe we’d eventually buy a pup from this place soon.
We asked to take one of the cockers into the play room. No problem there. But after about 10 minutes of play time, we thought “lets play with the other one a little and see what she was like too”. The guy who took the puppy back in asked us if we were serious about buying or if we were just playing with the puppies. We told him “both” where he then told us that we couldn’t play with any more puppies. Only serious buyers could have a pup brought out. What?!
Now the store wasn’t busy. There were about three employees in the store and we already told the guy that we were serious, but come on, what else do you do with a puppy? Puppies are meant for play. It’s not like they can be guard dogs at six months old.
Well, we liked the puppy that we played with, but we won’t be buying a puppy yet. Not from this Petland in Lancaster, Ohio but someone should at least rescue those animals from this place.
“Thank you for a wonderful vacation away from everything! We needed it.”
This last week, Becca and I went on vacation. After looking online in several locations, we settled down on Summit Haven Retreat. Since we had never vacationed in the Hocking Hills area before, we honestly didn’t know what to expect price-wise.
Along the way, our landlord decided to start painting a day early while we were visiting friends and family in Dayton and Cincinnati. We were upset that even though we told him we were taking that cats, leaving on Tuesday and hadn’t even packed the suitcase yet (it was laying on the bed open), he had started painting anyway. The cats were hiding under the bed. He moved everything, got paint on my laptop screen and keyboard because he didn’t even shut the lid, and even took down our calendar which had 12-17 of June marked as vacation in bright blue marker when he started painting on Monday, the 11th.
My first (actually all of our) experience with Summit Haven was positive. We called and asked if we could come a day early. There was no way we’d be able to stay at home that night. They were flexible and said we could come on down a day early, no problem.
When we arrived we were greeted only with a sign by the door that simply said “Welcome To The Big Oak Lehman’s. Enjoy Your Stay.”
The cabin was clean, the location was quiet with a ton of shade, except for that clearing over the skylight where the bed was, where you could see the stars as you went to sleep.
The next morning, Scott, who runs Summit Haven along with his parents, Don and Cindy, stopped by to make sure we were okay and if we needed anything. I asked about the trails around the cabin and he gratefully informed us that they were overgrown with poison ivy in the summer and that we might not want to try those trails right then.
The cats particularly liked the wood beams that ran across the cabin. This was their regular spot throughout the week. I honestly think that they enjoyed the week as much as we did.
One night after Kayaking, we lost electric when a storm came through. We built the fire high and opened up a few windows and listened to the storm pass, and the rain pelt against the tin roof. The next morning, Scott came by to check on us and brought us some water to flush the toilet and told us if we needed to, to dip a little out of the hot-tub. He also offered us some ice for keeping groceries we had bought cold. Don later came by to make sure we were okay. Becca had talked with Cindy over the phone, and I had spoke with both Scott and Don. Everyone we talked to was nice and did their best to make sure we had a great week, that we had good directions, and that we had everything we needed.
Thank you to everyone at Summit Haven, (Don, Cindy and Scott) for the great week and wonderful time we had there. We look forward to coming back.
Here’s some more of my favorite pictures over at Artist Hideout from the trip
