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Jacob's 6th Birthday

We had a small party for Jacob's 6th birthday today. Wow... it is incredible how wild and loud 2 extras boys can make in our house. I thought that our 3 boys (ages 1-6) were pretty wild at times. I need to rethink my standards for how I judge wild.



The boys seemed to have a lot of fun eating pizza & ice cream cake, going on a
treasure hunt, opening presents, and then trying out all of the toys. It is starting
to get pretty difficult to find age appropriate gifts for our kids. We try to limit
the toys to things are somewhat constructive. (It seems like they have a lot of
toys. Maybe we should consider getting a bigger house to host their toys. )




Here
is a slide show of the highlights of the party.




That is one birthday down and another two to go for this year!





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New Digital Camera


About two weeks I bought an Olympus
C-5060 digital point and shoot camera. It is 5 mega pixel camera which is some
what modest by today's standards. I actually own quite a bit of photo gear.




It is kind of funny to look back and think about all of the other gear over the
years that I sold and traded for other gear. (Some other Nikon and 645 gear.)



I have to say that 5060 takes
some great pictures.
I have started to really work through the various settings on the camera. Additionally
I have bought some new glass filters for the camera. The filters really help me produce
some of my signature
style images and allow me compose pictures in much the same manner as
I do when I shoot
slides. Granted the camera is not a dSLR but I am very happy with the end result
at a fraction of the price of another dSLR.  I suspect that I will probably still
upgrade to a newer dSLR at some point in the future as I really prefer the feel and
performance of a SLR body.



The 5060 has been a real joy to work with so far!


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BlogJet looks promising

I think that I am going to go ahead and purchase BlogJet.
I have the trial version running two of my laptops. I am pretty happy with application
as it makes remote blogging much easier.




For $19 I think that it is going to be pretty hard to beat the features and easy of
use. I am going use it for the next 15-20 days and then buy the license unless I find
a major issue.
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nGallery Fixed


I was able to finally resolve my problem with nGallery on
Sunday. (I want to post my pictures from my weekend trip with my son.) After a bunch
of research and several really good emails from people on the nGallery
List Server I was able to fix it. As it turns out the Network Service account
needed List access to root of the D:\ drive.  It needs to be able to determine
the directory and programmaticly build out the path/dir structure in order to
be able to create the new directory.



This problem seems to be common to .Net using this particular call for creating directories.



I took a little it of time and patience given that I am no longer hosting my
own servers. I am used to being able to work on these issues myself. I have to admit
that my friend Shawn was
very helpful and patient working with me on this issue.



I am pretty happy to be able to post pictures to my
new website. I am working on getting the galleries setup
and populated.  


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Cascade River State Park


I had a great weekend out of town camping with my son Ben. (Jacob did not want
to come with us because he thought that the drive was too long.) We spent the
weekend at Cascade
River State Park on the north shore of Lake
Superior. The weather was great. The fall colors were spotty but still very nice.





Ben convinced me to run into town and buy some bait so that he could go Salmon fishing.
Ben did a really great job of fishing. Granted he did not actually catch any Coho
Salmon but neither did any of his peers while we were at the fishing hole.
I would suspect that we will try to schedule some vacation time for this fishing hole
for next season. There were quite a few fish and we could seem them less than 10 feet
away from us.




Here is a slideshow
of images from the trip.



The tent trailer has performed excellent this season and has turned out to be a great
investment for our family. This is also our second weekend with our latest digital
camera. The new camera takes excellent pictures and the quality really blows away
my old Canon D30 dSLR.
The addition of glass filters for the 5060 really makes a difference in the photos.



Overall it was a great weekend.


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nGalley is still broken


I am still trying to figure out why nGallery is
not working properly. It worked fine on my old website, it works fine on my test site,
it does NOT work fine on my new site.






I sent an email to the list server with no response. I have sent an email to one of
the developers with no response so far (unless it got lost in my spam filter.) 
This is a real bummer as I am so close... but so far away. I have a lot of photos
to upload so I would like to get working ASAP.



The battle continues!


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A follow up test for BlogJet


BlogJet is not overly exciting to
look at. But it worked properly on the very first post. It costs $19 but may very
well be worth the price given the easy of use for remote blogging.








Something else interesting. I was able to easily save a draft message, then setup
the ftp support, open the draft and post the message including the picture very easily.
I have to give the folks BlogJet some
credit.... it seems to work pretty darn well. The only thing that I can't figure out
how to do is to wrap the text around the image. This formating request might be outside
of the supported scope of the tool at this point in time.