08.15.2007
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Don says:
Mom broke her hip about three weeks ago now and she'll be more-or-less an invalid for the next three weeks or so but she's hanging in there somehow and things are pretty much ok at our house, if perhaps a little busier than usual. We manage to watch the occasional short video at YouTube, talk to a friend or two on the phone, mow the lawn, take out the trash; just muddling along on our mundane way and I somehow get confused and forget that it's strenuous, stressful often unpleasant work. I keep thinking I'm having a wonderful time and enjoy pretty much every minute of it. Oh sure, sometimes there are bad moments which remind me how difficult and stressful it really is, but it seems to be like having babies. When you're wrapped up in the middle of it you know exactly how difficult it is but let a few hours go by with no pains and you forget all that. Go figure.I bought Lisa an IBM Thinkpad 600E on eBay. It's a 366 MHz machine, with 128 MB of RAM, running Windows 2000 Pro. It came with an outboard floppy disk drive, a built-in CDROM drive, a built-in modem, a little plug in NIC (Ethernet) card, a new battery and an AC power supply/charger. It's a lot more computer than I thought I was buying for $140.00 (which included the shipping costs). Lisa had me get rid of the things she didn't intend to use (like Microsoft Works, Microsoft Office and Norton Anti-Virus) and prune it down as much as possible before installing the applications she wanted on it. She uses her desktop machine for email, artwork and serious image editing and intends to use the laptop mainly for "real time" demonstrations of her web design ideas. I put NoteTab Light on it because that's our HTML editor-of-choice, both Irfanview and XnView for image editing, and, because we test our web pages in as many browsers as we can get our hands on, I gave her IE6, FireFox, SeaMonkey, Netscape and Opera for browsers. This machine will be used only rarely on the web so I installed Clamwin Anti-Virus. ClamWin doesn't do real-time, monitoring in the background while you're online, you can run a scan manually or schedule it to run automatically and it caught 100% of the genuine virii used in a recent test but it's not a good choice for a machine that's online for long periods of time every day. Because the Comodo Personal Firewall is smaller than Zone Alarm (thus requiring less space) and still very well rated I installed it last and I'm very pleased with it. There's only one thing that bothers me about this computer. It's got a 366 MHz processor, 128 MB of 66 MHz RAM and yet it manages to be very nearly as fast as my 1.8 GHz Win2K system which has 512 MB of RAM. That sort of hurts my feelings you know?
Oh well (sigh), Lisa is thrilled with it and that's a good thing. I've also ordered her a nice padded case and some extra RAM which will bring the total system cost up to just a shade over $200. I did good.
In other news, our lawn finally dried out so we no longer have a small lake in our front yard; my Habanero plant (which Lisa named Carmen) is close to four years old and while successive prunings have made the plant start looking like some sort of Banzai tree, the fruit is full sized and there's plenty of it. Just in case you aren't "in the know" about Habaneros, they are considered by many to be the world's hottest peppers and it can be very hazardous to handle them with one's bare hands. No kidding, these are seriously hot peppers but don't take my word for it, send us a SASE (if you dare) and I'll send you some seeds..
Lisa says:
As usual, it's been a very busy two weeks, but we managed to get the ezine done and get a Personal News page done this time. After creating and maintaining a web site for Llano Master Gardener Association, of which I'm a proud member, I was feeling rather full of myself. Our favorite barbeque restaurant, Inman's Kitchen in Llano, TX, just so happened not to have a web site, so I asked them if they'd like one. Imagine my shock when they gave a tentative yes. I went home and made up a sample page, asked their opinion and got the gig! It helped some that they already knew us and I didn't ask for anything up front, just got busy and gave them something that they could think about with no pressure to buy.I had lots of experience with PaintShop Pro, my favorite image editor to date, and lots of experience using images on the web from doing the Personal News pages and photos for eBay. Here's an enhanced (phone lines, telephone poles and ugly stuff removed) photo of the restaurant. Yes, Texas skies are that beautiful, all the time.
Inman's Kitchen, Llano, TX
So, for some unasked-for advice on how to become a web designer; Visit lots and lots of sites, decide what you like and what you don't, study hard, have a tendency toward OCD, then...jump.
'Til next time, Lisa
