Random Thoughts

Isn't the little bird in the picture the cutest thing? Usually you see these little guys in groups of 10 or so flitting around here.... I don't know where this guys pals where, but I liked how he looked against the branches. I played with it a little in Photoshop.. I liked it in Sepia...eh!

I am finally getting things on the new computer sorted out.... There are things I like about the new laptop, and things I miss about the old one just because I was so used to it. Some odd things I've found about the new laptop:

• Even though I have a '100' gig hard drive I only have access to 80 gig. Why?? Well, the new thing is to put the system recovery on a partition of your hard drive! You are then to make your own restore disks and put them away. The idea is that for most things you can restore from the hard drive.... I'm thinking I would rather have the 20 gig of space! I'm going to call HP this weekend and see if there is any reason I can't just delete all of that off after I make my own restore DVD. Eh, we'll see.
  
• I had a little problem setting up with my wi-fi here... seems that the Mac address of the Lan is different than the wi-fi card. On my old laptop the whole laptop had the same Mac address and it didn't occur to me that this one wouldn't be the same. No where in the documentation did it mention this. It took me almost 3 days to figure out why I could hard wire into my system, but couldn't get it wi-fi.... I did eventually figure it out, but they could have made it easier for me.
  
• Instead of XP Home this one came with the Media Center edition... there are a few things that are different. Mostly things that aren't in quite the same place when you go to look for it.... Nothing major, just takes some getting used to.
  
• This thing came with a few 'toys' that I'm looking forward to playing with. Don't know if I would have gotten them, but since they are there....... well a girl has to entertain herself. I have a remote for if I want to watch DVDs or play CDs. Apparently I can use it from 10 feet away LOL! Another thing is that instead of the CD recorder I had, this thing has a DVD RW -and- it's one of those Lightscribe ones. I bought some of the special disks today and look forward to seeing what it will do. Again, not something I would have looked for, but since I have it.....

So, as you can see, a lot of my time this last week has been spent twiddling (and replaying my ZooTycoon2 scenarios that I lost). One other thing I lost was my bookmarks for Firefox. Not a grave loss in the greater world view, but annoying. I'm glad I had all of my digital pics and documents backed up to my external hard drive(although I WILL be backing up game saves now LOL!), but I think it may be time to look into De.licio.us or one of those services for my bookmarks so I have them saved somewhere else. It never occurred to me to save them off the computer. Thankfully most of my blogs/journals are on Bloglines.

Now that all of the housekeeping is done, I'm looking forward to spending time playing with my Blogger template, spending some time doing some of the photo challenges that are around, playing in Photoshop Elements, and maybe finding some stuff to blog about LOL!