We spent last weekend camping at Kohler Andrae State Park. We head up there quite a bit - especially in the Spring and Fall. The park tends to be less busy, less bugs, more wildlife... all the good stuff.
The weather wasn't great but Saturday wasn't terrible and it was nice to relax. As usual, Huron swam her heart out even though the water was in the 40's.
I have been weaning myself off the automatic modes of my camera - pictures from the weekend at Kohler Andrae.
Since we canceled our camping trip because the weather was supposed to suck, we thought we would hit the zoo... so did everyone else in the state. It was a decent day anyway, although a gorilla flipped me the bird.
The coolest thing were the hyenas in the cat house. If you're familiar with the Milwaukee County Zoo, in the cat house you are separated from meat eaters by glass that you can touch and so can the animals. Anyway, the room was packed with people checking out the hyenas. Suddenly the hyenas charged to the back of the room near their door - like they were waiting to be fed. They actually spotted a zoo worker in the crowd. It was pretty cool considering the room was packed and this guy was only wearing jeans and a tee shirt with a small zoo logo on the pocket.
The crummy 5 month Midwestern winter is finally over... This past weekend we opened up our camper, drained the antifreeze, sanitized the water system, inflated the tires, remained pissed that we had canceled a camping trip due to weather when it turned out to be 70 and sunny, and installed a water accumulator to supplement the 12 volt pump.
The accumulator is a small pressurized container with a bladder inside. It's supposed to provide more even water pressure and eliminate hammering on the pump. We've had issues in the past where the pump doesn't shut off after the water stops running, this should help. It was only about $30 and was easy to install with a few PEX compression fittings and a couple feet of pipe.
The curved tubing in the picture is a fill point for winterizing and wasn't part of the accumulator installation; only two elbows and a tee were needed. It also doesn't need to be installed in-line - just add it anywhere on the pressurized side of the pump.
I've been terrible about maintaining this blog, so why not start another?
BackcountryK9.Blogspot.com is a new blog for my business. If you have a dog, check it out. There's a little something for everyone.
I live in the City of Milwaukee where we have gotten our fair-share of snow this year. Not breaking records but its been a lot of snow.
The city does not plow alleys in Milwaukee. Instead, those of us with garages on an alley receive letters each fall from a private plowing company claiming we need to send them $25 to plow the alley for the winter.
Ok, I guess. I have no idea how they are chosen or if there is any oversight.
My main gripe is, they rarely do decent job. At one point, about 11 inches fell during the day. They plowed one time when about 3 were on the ground. My astute math tells me, 8 more inches fell and it was not plowed. Fast forward to today after cars have beaten it down to 6 - 8 inches of ice with two tire tracks in it and it is like going through an old carwash... with more bumps... and discarded tail pipes.
It's interesting to see how lazy a business gets in service when they have no real competition. It reminds me in my own affairs to continuously strive to provide good service/good products. Not that you can always keep everyone happy but that's different topic.
A few months ago I posted on converting my old 35mm and APS film to digital pictures. Since then, I've done about 50 rolls through Scan Cafe and taking film into Target stores to be put on CD.
The Good:
- I can actually see pictures now on my computer where I spend time each day versus old albums in the guest bedroom that I never pick up.
- Scan Cafe customer service was good. I got a bad DVD at first and they sent me a new copy right away.
The Bad:
- Quality isn't great. Scan Cafe did a good job creating high resolution images but when they were originally taken with a cheap point and shoot camera or even a disposable camera, what's the point of the high res?
- Scan Cafe allows you to pay for just the scans that you want to keep. However, their web site for viewing your photos is horrible at best. It's excruciatingly painfully slow and only displays a crappy small version of your photo. The photo review part of that experience seriously couldn't have been worse. I'm not sure if they are trying to prevent people from simply downloading photos instead of paying for them or if they just hate their customers but either way, it was really bad. They allow for renaming folders for organization but that does not carry over to the DVD they send. Scan Cafe allows for rotating but that also does not carry over to the DVD. They claim they do manual photo retouching, however, most of my pics that came back appeared to be untouched and benefited greatly from cheap contrast adjustments using Picasa. Scan Cafe allows you to delete photos that you do not want to pay for; great, except they send you the deleted ones too. I guess that is good if you know about it, but I deleted the poorly shot, dark, and blurry photos and was forced to wade through them again when I got the DVD.
- Target is on to me and started charging $7 per roll of APS film to be transferred to a Kodak Picture CD. This is still cheaper than sending APS to Scan Cafe.
In the end, the ability to have digital versions of my pictures out-weighs the bad and I'll continue to send 35 mm to Scan Cafe and take a few rolls of APS at a time to my local Target store.
That's it. That's my main gripe with computers these days. Too many damn wires. On my home laptop I have 6 or 7 USB cables, speaker cable, and a half dozen power cables.
I was excited to hear a while ago that some big names including Samsung, HP, and Microsoft, had banned together to create a wireless USB standard. Finally, a solution to my woes!
Enter Sony. They are, of course, trying to screw it up by creating their own standard called TransferJet. Where have we seen this recently? Oh yeah, HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray.
Thanks to Sony, I get to sit on the sidelines watching crappy up-converted DVD's until the market can name a winner (although that does seem close now). Likewise, I'll get trapped in my USB cables and die because Sony had to create yet another proprietary standard that will slow down the adoption of one or the other.
Thanks, Sony... jerks.
