Night picture on the new camera

I recently got a Kodak V1253, a 12MP Point and Shoot camera.

How's the quality of the night pictures? You judge for yourself.

Here's Kevin and Justin last night on our way to get food.

Rude Parking

Everyone who knows me knows that I hate when people park rudely.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is why I started youparkrudely.com.  My eventual goal is to raise the public's awareness of this so people stop parking so rudely.

 

 

 

Today I saw some really rude parking and decided to use my brand-new camera (the Kodak V1253 mentioned in other Blog posts) to bring the experience to you.  It captures 4000x3000 images and is smaller than my cell phone, so I will always have it with me when I spot rude parking.
 
Want to join in and see your photos of rude parking on youparkrudely.com? E-mail them to rudeparking@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

My definition of rude parking is parking in such a way that someone has difficulty parking next to you, or it is impossible to park in the space next to you and still be able to comfortably open their door.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Award Winning Photographer

So I finally received my gift from PC World for winning the Hot Pic of the Month contest. As my friend Deborah says, I can now call myself an Award Winning Photographer!

The prize was 3 promotional items with PC World written all over them: A coaster, a key fob, and a pack of playing cards. The coaster is like a tiny, thin mouse pad, the exact size of a very small, circular coaster.

Obviously, the most valuable part of the prize is the letter that accompanied them:



...and the fact that I can now say that I am an Award Winning Photographer!

Winner! Hot Pic of the Month for August, PC World!

You may remember that a couple of weeks ago, I won the Hot Pic of the Week contest run by PC World. See this blog post for more information on that.

Each month, PC World chooses one of their weekly winners to be the Hot Pic of the Month. For August, they chose "Perfect Daffodil" by me!

To see Dave Johnson declare me the winner, see this PCWorld Article.

You can also see the slide show of all of the month's weekly winners for August in this article.

Windows Vista Hard Drive Activity

Are you on Microsoft Windows Vista and notice that your hard drives spend a lot of time doing some activity you didn't initiate?  Well, I've found a solution to this Vista hard drive issue, and even wrote a video tutorial on how to fix it.  Read on!

 

Ever since I switched to Windows Vista (in February 2007), I've noticed that the hard drive has a lot of activity going on at times when I think that it should not. 

For instance, here I sit with three browser windows open, and nothing else. I'm browsing RSS feeds from my own Blog to see how they look to other people. Suddenly, the hard drive starts reading and writing like a program is loading - sporadic, not like a defrag of similar files, or a download.

While I sit here doing nothing but typing this message, the CPU usage is bouncing between 10% and 60%. I look at the little icons on the bottom right, and only the standard ones are there. The computer is not running a virus scan, automatically defragging the hard drive, looking for spyware, or doing any other automated tasks.

This keeps up for about 10-15 minutes, and then quiets down. The hard drive stops going nuts, the CPU usage goes down to 00%, occasionally bumping up to 01% or 08%. This is behavior I call "station keeping." I figure it's got things it has to do from moment to moment, such as making sure what I'm typing is backed up, figuring out how long until it activates the screensaver, monitoring the temperature of the CPU to know how fast to run the fans, checking the status of network traffic, etc.

This activity doesn't touch the memory at all, it stays at a constant 45%. Station keeping is not a concern for me. What is a concern for me is the 10-15 minutes of usage my computer went through while it was running no other programs.

My computer performs this kind of behavior several times a day, and often they last more than 15 minutes. If it behaves like this during another activity, of course it can slow that other activity down. 

I'm used to my computer busting out with a virus or spyware scan, an automated defrag, an automatic check for updates for my Logitech mouse and keyboard, automated Microsoft downloads, and other things it has to do. I know where to look to see when it's doing one of these things. This other behavior I'm describing happens outside of those times, and takes far longer to perform.

It does not just happen on this computer, but also happened on the computer I bought from a boutique earlier this year with the same version of Windows.

Does this happen to anyone else with Vista? Do you know what it is?

Edit:  Michael Combs was right.  Disabling readyboost and only indexing drives and folders I care about increased my performance by decreasing unnecessary hard drive activity.  I even wrote a tutorial video on how to configure indexing:

Since doing this, my computer now runs faster and has less issues making me wait for the hard drive.

Be sure to see my video on how to disable User Access Control in Windows Vista.