Feelin' Buggy

I got my camera back from the cleaner's on Friday evening. It had HORRIBLE crud all over the sensor, which is the part of the camera you don't want to touch unless you know what you are doing. I used LeZot camera repair on Cherry Street in Burlington (right over B&J and NO I didn't get a Vermonster while I waited!!).

The weather has been kind of gloomy all day so I wasn't real inspired to go take a walk and use it. Then I rediscovered the website What's That Bug? through Facebook postings they have, and I spent the greater part of the afternoon trying to get macro shots of tiny bugs that were on my plants. I use the term "my plants" loosely. The yellow flowers I have on my back porch yardage are completely there on their own. I planted a bunch of wildflower seeds years ago on the left hand side of my porch and each year they migrate to the right about a foot or so, and are completely different colors. I don't ask questions.

A little earlier in the day I had a tension headache bad from the shoulder wrenching work I did on Wednesday. I'm that out of shape. 4 days later and I'm still crying about it lol It is the kind of headache that makes you hate everything and everyone, and throw a little (a lot) PMS on top of it and let's just say Kris spent the better part of the day in the basement "cleaning" the floor. He was supposed to go to work at UVM today but then at noon decided that the basement needed a good scrubbing now that the water is finally gone. One Vicodin, four oreos, and a couple handfuls of Cheez-its later I was on my way to the park with three kids by myself.

Of course on the way to the park the kids did everything that normally I would ignore but until the V kicked in annoyed the crap out of me. So I put my camera in front of my face and took a few shots of a Hover Fly.

It really is very calming to take pictures. We then continued on to the next torture chamber I mean playground where they played great for about 5 min and then Autumn decided to see what its like to go down the twisty slide face first and we had to depart.

On the way out I just about ate this thing dangling from the tree!

Its an inchworm! Or looper worm. Its actually a moth caterpillar and turns into a Geometrid Moth. I have a Tussock moth caterpillar at home that I have been keeping in a tupperware container with maple leaves. I broke out the 10 gallon tank terrarium that I have and put them both inside.

There seem to be a lot of tussock caterpillars around this year.  I had only seen the milkweed tussock variety in the past!  Shall be interesting to see what it will turn into!

From Tortoise to Hare in 60 minutes!

I don't know about y'all but I have a need for speed when it comes to my computer. We currently have three computers in the house. One, my husband's lap top, is about 6 years old and was refurbished when he got it. I no touchy touchy that one its so slow I would drop kick it in about 2 seconds and he would lose all his geeky science documents. Another is my teeny tiny netbook. Its great for Facebook, email, and can handle my 4 and 8 gig SD cards. This brings me to the third and final pain in my a$$: An HP Pavilion desktop from...2005? 6? Mom?? My parents gave me this computer and don't get me wrong, I am SO grateful to have a large computer to work with my photos.

HOWEVER!

It came with some baggage and I just never got around to unloading.

First, I have XP Home Edition. I don't know if other OS will fit into this but THAT'S WHAT GOOGLE IS FOR!!

Here are the issues I was facing:

1) It started up fast SEEMINGLY (I do believe that is a real word!) but then the hard drive would be chuttering away (totally not a real word) for a good 5 minutes after and it could only handle one process at a time. That means that if I'm editing in Lightroom I can't be surfing the web or even use Picasa (secondary editing program). The Task Master would not show any other program running that was eating up the usage so I could not figure out what the heck.

2) Every time I have tried to download any programs I am unable to save the programs to the C:\Program Files folder. Access Denied EVERY TIME. I mean, come ON!!! I am an "Administrator" and all so I should be in God Mode, right???

3) C: drive disk space was very limited. I knew this and just was too lazy to do anything about it!

Here is the morphine that took away my online pain:

1) I went to Start>Run and typed in msconfig and then clicked on the toggled for Selective Startup. Next I went to the Startup tab at the top. Now, there were about 30 different things that were running at startup in here! No wonder all that chuttering was aflutter!

Here's the thing though--you don't want to just start willy nilly unchecking crap! Your computer DOES need some of it. What I did before I touched ANY of them was go to Bleeping Computer and clicked on their tab that says Startup. In here is a search box. The best thing to do is write a list of all the startup items in the msconfig box on a piece of paper, and then search one by one on Bleeping Computer's site and it will tell you which ones to keep, which to uncheck, and which you need to make a decision about based on your needs. In my case, I do not own a printer so I unchecked all the HP printer driver stuff. Once you have whittled the checked stuff down and are satisfied, click on Apply and then close it out. You must restart your computer to see the changes...a good idea anyway.

2) For the program files issue it was a little more complicated HA! What I basically learned how to do is change ownership on a folder. Didn't know such a thing existed! There is a great article that I followed in the Microsoft Support forum for this task. It seemed to work...guess I'll find out next time I download King's Quest IV!!

3) I then went into my Control Panel>Add/Remove programs and ditched every single DVD movie maker, Scanner, WebCam, and Flight Simulator I could find, and also some programs that I would never, ever use. I only use this computer for photos and surfing the web and I only use 3 programs just about EVER.

After restarting yet again the computer now starts up with almost no grinding noises and I can run Lightroom AND Chrome at the same time, AND a bonus is that Lightroom is loading and exporting almost twice as fast as before which should cut down on the long hours I spend working on photos that most people will never see! Crap there goes my Me Time!!

I hope this was useful in some way...I also recommend Analyzing your C: drive (or whatever your main drive is) in the Defrag application. If you don't know where that is it is under Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools Defragging can make a huge difference especially if you are adding and deleting files often like I do.