The first

Ok, it’s really the second, now, but it was the first of the year here all day.

I got a new camera today, a Nikon L24, a 14Mg camera. The camera I’ve been using since 2005, a Nikon CoolPix 2200, has a resolution of "2Mg equivalent", meaning that out of the camera, unedited, the pics come out to less than a meg in size. To get ’em boosted in size and to make ’em look better to me, I edit them with the Nikon Editor tools the 2200 came with – that editor works for most digital pictures.

That program is my "digital darkroom". I might adjust contrast and brightness, and sometimes will adjust the colors a bit – a little more green, red, or blue. I use a Microsoft tool to re size the pictures that I’ll upload to Photobucket, which holds the pics I link to entries here.

The new camera will have picture files that are HUGE, compared to the 2200. A 2 Mg memory card in the 2200 gave me over 2,000 pictures. An 8 Mg card in the L24 gives me 836, it says.

The 2200 has taken more than 11,000 pictures, from all over the northwest, that I’m gonna like, have to "re-take". The higher res of the L24 will make it’s pictures that much more usable and marketable.

I spent a good deal of time this evening reading the manual and playing with the camera – both of mine are Nikons, so they share a lot of functions, but it looks like the L24 is set up to be a real "point and shoot" camera, and it will be interesting to see what comes out of it.

***

On the other hand, I drove out to Stonehenge yesterday and took more pictures with the 2200, it looks like, on the drive to and from Stonehenge, than I did of Stonehenge itself, but it also looks like I got some Really Good pictures of the Columbia River too. I’ll get ’em uploaded and posted soon.

I spent all afternoon fixing a virus that took over my computer, due to some careless surfing on my part. Some of these viruses rely upon "social engineering" – they tell you to do things like delete essential files or phish for your financial information by looking legit. This one took on the look of Windows Defender… and then of my AVG virus guard when I tried to stop it. It reappeared after a warm re-boot and after a cold start, and I could not get into "System Restore". At all.

It was an "oh shit" moment, or a too long series of them.

A re-boot into "Safe Mode" looked like it was going to work… until that dammed virus tried to take over again and I was resigned to wiping the disc and running the installation discs again. I have multiple copies of things, especially photographs, saved on different media – CD’s and Flash drives and hard drives. Re-formatting the main drive is no longer as scary as it used to be.

It was right about that point, in that train of thought, that I got the virus to disappear and I got to restore the system to a time a couple of days ago, well before I clicked on something I shouldn’t have. After Restore restarted the machine, I had to run all the updates – anti-virus, with a complete scan of the system (HOURS) and Windows Update and a run of Spybot to catch anything that slipped through all the defenses. I finally got the machine working right again and loaded the camera’s manual and editing tools onto this machine.

Of course, Sundays are Computer Maintenance Days anyway, so a defrag and clean-up and registry repair were on order anyway. I’ve been busy all day, and the new camera is waiting to be used still.

I have 364 more days this year to use it.

*****