Eye-Fi Card: Success

Posted by & filed under hobbies, Photography.

About a week ago Woot! had a special for a last-generation 2G Eye-Fi SD card for $20, so I ordered one, and then a SD-to-CF adapter from Amazon. I had hopes that the combination would work in my eight-year-old Canon Digital Rebel dSLR.

The adapter arrived a few days ago, and the Eye-Fi card arrived today. After using its special USB SD reader to configure the card, I popped it in the adapter and loaded up the camera.

Took a picture, and a few seconds later it popped up in a window on my Mac with a progress meter as the uploaded completed. I also have the pictures automatically uploading (as Private) to my Flickr account.

For $45, I’m really happy – and the upload speed is a lot faster than using the camera’s built-in USB 1.1 as well. Here’s one of the test pictures.

My New Guitar

Posted by & filed under general, hobbies, houston.

I’ve not played guitar since before Amy passed away a year and a half ago, and before that I had to sell my Les Paul Studio, MiM Strat, and Peterson strobe tuner when we got into a financial bind. After she passed away, I still had my SRV Signature Strat, but didn’t feel like taking it out of its case.

A week ago, that finally changed. I’m still paying things off, but am making progress and figured it was time to treat myself to another guitar, as I’d really missed my LP Studio. However, I’m too much of a penny-pincher to go down to Guitar Center and throw $1100 at the cashier.

An Agile AL-2000 from Rondo Music has been on my “Eventually..” list for a while now, and while poking around Rondo’s site found that the Douglas Shadow Pro Gold was even cheaper than the Agile. I figured “Good enough for getting my calluses built back up if nothing else..” So, $144 and a week later…

Now I just need to find a good guitar tech here in Houston and get a proper setup job done. I’ve contacted Ron Pace, but haven’t heard back from him yet.

The Belt Story

Posted by & filed under general, humor.

I shared this with a mailing list of friends last night, and realized that I’d not posted it here.

I was born in ’74, and “grew up” in the 80s of course. Don’t remember the year, but it was pre’84.

Was grocery shopping with my mom and little brother, and of course, I was being a little pissant. She threatened to spank me if I didn’t behave.

My little smart ass piped up with “You can’t spank me, you don’t have a BELT!”

Mom stops right there, walks over to the Cowboy ™ (this was early-80s Oklahoma, remember) at the end of the aisle, and says “Excuse me, sir. Can I borrow your belt? I need to spank my child.”

“Certainly, ma’am.” And he whips off his cowboy belt (with name on the back, of course) and hands it over.

She storms back to me, whips my ass, then returns the belt to its owner. “Thank you.” “Anytime, ma’am.”

I never smarted off in the grocery store EVER AGAIN.



Why I Love Frost Bank

Posted by & filed under general, houston, humor.

Called Frost Bank customer service a couple of weeks ago, and the CS rep had to ask me some questions to verify my ID.
After I answered them, I joked “5’10″, brown hair, blood type A positive” and she countered with “And what is your favorite color?”
I answered with “Blue.. No, green!” and she went “AHHHHHHH!”, and we both cracked up.
You have to love friendly reps who quote Monty Python movies.

Great customer service

Posted by & filed under books, computers, general, opinion.

Kudos to Amazon for having GREAT customer service related to their Kindle ebook reader. I bought one last November, and it has worked great. However, this particular unit just REFUSES to upgrade to version 2.5 of the Kindle firmware, no matter what I do (manual installs, etc).

I called up Amazon yesterday, and within five minutes they were doing the necessary stuff to get a replacement Kindle2 sent my way. The replacement unit will be here Wednesday.

Ow.

Posted by & filed under general, houston.

Six days after tripping and falling in my bedroom, landing against the dresser:

I actually hit below my knee. The bruising in my foot is from gravity causing the blood to flow downwards, and the toes are due to blood flowing along the tendons.

Trust me, it LOOKS a lot worse than it feels – but I’m not doing acrobatics, either.