Still trying to keep up, as you can probably tell! Somehow I don’t have the same hours in a day as everyone else and keep lagging behind. Still, I shouldn’t keep on about it. I will just post when I can and my news will just have to be old. I will try not to make it too old, though.

We went out last weekend, but I am still in the throes of photo editing. I’m not too sure about the Picture Window programme for some things. The RAW converter seems OK, but I find myself heading back to Photoshop once it’s converted. I suppose it’s a case of familiarity with it. I have managed to do some batch conversions in PW, but the latest ones did not come out too well, so I’m back to doing them individually – not the speediest of tasks. Consequently, I’ve decided to try Elements again, and I see they have now released version 8. But I have a version 7 trial installed so I will try and get to grips with that and see how I get on. It seems to do most things I want to do without having to have the full PS, although I will probably keep that as well.

I can’t do anything at the moment, though, as I have finally managed to get my new hard drive installed today and I am currently installing my new copy of Windows XP Pro and all my other software. I’ve partitioned the drive and the extendend partitions are being formatted at the moment. It’s taking some time as it’s a 500GB drive. Windows XP went on without any problems, though. When it’s all done I will re-attach my old drive, move all the data across to the new drive and reformat it to be a back-up drive. I’m thinking of adding another GB of memory as well, just for good measure.

For some reason I was quite tired last week and had trouble summoning any enthusiasm for anything. I have been concentrating intently at work, trying to get the new website up and running, so maybe that has something to do with it. I have been sleeping OK, but waking up feeling as if I still needed more sleep. I even missed camera club on Thursday, which I was a bit miffed about. It was a practical night, so we were taking our cameras anyway, but we meet at a community club and they were having a bonfire and fireworks display, so I was hoping also to get some fireworks images. However, we left work a bit late, had our dinner a bit late, and it was raining quite heavily, and I was exhausted, so I didn’t go.

I suppose I really need to get back into my exercise routine, which has been sadly lacking in recent weeks, despite having spent a small fortune on a new piece of exercise equipment. We have used it, but not really intently enough. And I really need to get my healthy eating habits back on track as well – she says, as she downs a nice glass of the red stuff!

We had a bit of a crisis last weekend. Sunday brought quite heavy rain and high winds, which was blowing directly onto the back of the house. I went into the kitchen to find water dripping onto the floor from the point where the kitchen off-shot joins the main house wall. Thankfully, it hasn’t been as bad since, but we have to hope that it will soon dry out. There is some staining on the ceiling, which will have to wait until we can decorate.

Anyway, dinner almost ready, so I’ll close for now and hope that I can get last week’s photos sorted before too long.

Well, I was hoping to get my new hard drive in this weekend, but I had a quick look on the Internet yesterday and discovered that I may have a problem ‘Ghosting’ my existing drive onto the new one as they are different formats (existing drive is IDE and new one is SATA). The copying itself wouldn’t be a problem – I’ve done this a couple of times before with Norton Ghost between two IDE drives, but when IDE data is cloned to a SATA drive, the latter will not boot into Windows. This is apparently because the two drive formats use a different method of communication between the motherboard and Windows XP, so the system will not recognise the cloned operating system partition on the SATA (have I lost you yet?!!). One way round this is to perform a repair installation of Windows XP on the SATA drive, but there we hit a problem as I don’t have the original Windows CD. There is another method highlighted on the Microsoft site, but again I would need the XP disc.

So, I think, this would be an ideal time to upgrade to Windows 7, as the price difference between that and a copy of XP is not that great. I will just install that on the new drive and copy across my data. It would take longer than the cloning method, what with having to reinstall all my programmes, but never mind. On further investigation it seems that this is not going to be as simple as I thought. I ran a system checking tool from the Microsoft site, which told me that a few programmes would not run, and I would need to update my graphics drivers in order for the new interface to run efficiently. If I wanted to use the XP Compatibility Mode (for certain programmes) I would need another GB or RAM.

Also, they have done away with Outlook Express and the new email is web-based. You can integrate all your email accounts – OE, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, etc., into one location but it’s all now done online. So the prospect of having to do lots of messing about prompted me to have a look for a cheaper Windows XP Pro and I did finally manage to find one for the princely sum of £35. This includes delivery, but I paid an extra £6 for urgent delivery in the hope that this will get round the postal strike. I couldn’t really believe this price as it’s over £100 at Amazon. At least I’ll be up and running quite soon and can consider Windows 7 at a later date.

Anyway, with all this surfing and researching, we didn’t get out Saturday. The weather was quite awful in the morning, though, but amazingly it turned quite nice in the afternoon, although it was very windy. So we decided to have a trip out today to see if there was any autumn colour around to photograph. We were a little tired as we had been woken up in the early hours by Keith’s alarm going off!! He’d accidentally switched it on while turning the clock back. It had been set at 3.40am from a few weeks ago when we set off early one morning to catch the sunrise in the Yorkshire Dales. Anyway, we had a cup of tea and showered to wake ourselves up and off we went.

It was still quite windy but there was blue sky. However, when we arrived in the Peak District there were a few showers which kept interrupting the nicer spells. Unfortunately, the trees had not quite turned a nice colour yet – either we are still too early or they are not having a good year. We drove round looking at various woods, but there was nothing too inspiring. Along Cressbrook Dale the trees were almost bare, so the recent winds must have stripped them. We managed a little wander round – not really a proper walk – and took a few photos before deciding to find somewhere to have lunch. We went in the Moon Inn at Stoney Middleton and very nice it was too. We had bangers and mash with Yorkshire puddings and to follow Keith had Bakewell tart and custard and I had sticky toffee pudding with ice cream – delicious. After that we were so stuffed we just came straight home!

I’ve been putting off a very important job for some time, and it’s become an even worse nightmare as a consequence. I finally made a start last weekend and it’s now looking a lot better. I’ve been sorting out all the images on my computer and filing them into proper categories. It had become a complete mess and although I can locate some images, I could see the day when the image folder would be so huge that it would be impossible to find anything.

I don’t really know if I’m doing it correctly – there are so many recommendations as to how images should be sorted. I am also deleting lots of stuff as I go along – photos that really should have been binned long ago. Once I have some semblance of order, I will then try and keyword the images. Theoretically, this should mean that they can all be in one folder and the keywords will find them, but I think I prefer to keep them in appropriately named folders as well.

While I’ve been sorting through the photos, I found some I’d completely forgotten about, and I certainly forgot to blog them – bit late now, though, as they’re a couple of years old!!

I have also bought a new hard drive, which I will probably install this weekend. I had to move quite a lot of images onto a spare partition as the original location was was full up. I thought I’d get a new, larger drive to give me room to expand the image collection without fear of running out of space and then use the current one as a backup drive. I would like to have a clean install of Windows, but we bought this computer ready-built and we didn’t get an original operating system disc. I normally insist on this, but it was cheaper than a self-build system and I did intend to purchase Windows XP at some later stage but never got round to it. For the time being, I will have to ‘Ghost’ this system onto the new drive and reinstall Windows later.

I am wondering whether to go with the new Windows 7 – a copy of XP Pro is about the same price. I don’t like Vista, which we have on our laptop, but I have read some good reviews about Windows 7. I held off when XP was launched until I was sure that all the problems had been ironed out, but this seems to have no real issues as far as I’ve read. Should I risk it?

My gym membership ran out in September and I decided not to renew. I hadn’t been for some time anyway – I tailed off following my operation and never really got back into it. At the end I think I must have lost out on the total cost for the year. I needed to go two or three times a week to make it pay and I don’t think I managed that overall.

But … we have decided to keep on at home in our makeshift gym. We have an exercise bike, albeit an old one that rattles a bit, I have a fitball, some weights, some resistance cords and a multitude of exercise DVDs. And now, the newest addition, our Aeropilates machine! This is really the bees knees. We saw it on QVC some time ago, and we found it again when investigating  another machine we were thinking about getting. We’d also trawled some local fitness shops looking for something effective that would fit into the room, but we came back to this one. We found it cheaper on Amazon, so it arrived a couple of weeks ago. It is rather larger than we expected, but it goes OK. We are still trying to learn the various exercises – there are a couple of DVDs with it – but we have made a bit of progress with it.

We haven’t been out for a couple of weeks. Even though the weather has been fairly good, we’ve either not really felt like going out, or we just never got round to it. In fact we’ve had a couple of rather lazy weekends. I want to get some autumn colour images, but the trees have not been quite right up to now. I think this weekend might be OK, though, so we’ll try and get out and about.

Every year Sheffield has a comedy festival throughout October. We saw Jimmy Carr two years ago, but the weekend before last we went with our friends to see him again, and last weekend we saw Tim Minchin. I’d never heard of him before, but the last time we went over to see our friends, they had a recording of a TV programme of one of his shows. When we found out he was appearing at the festival we immediately booked some seats. Both shows were good.

So, if we do manage to get out this weekend, weather permitting, I hope to have some lovely images of autumn leaves to show you next time.

Well, I went to the camera club meeting the other night, and took along half a dozen images for the critique session. I was amazed that they were all quite well-received, with very little in the way of editing required – a bit of cropping here and there, one needs darkening a bit as it was a little overexposed. I was even more amazed that I was asked if one image can be entered into an inter-club competition in three weeks’ time!

As if that excitement wasn’t enough, I also won a prize in the raffle, but it was only a couple of bags of sweets. The bottles of wine had been snapped up by previous winners!!

I think I might try something different when I next post some images. I am going to try uploading the images to Flickr and linking to them rather than uploading directly to WordPress. I don’t really use the Flickr account much and I suppose I should, really.

I think I’ve had enough of computers for now, thank you very much! What with the drive-partitioning nightmare on Monday, and Keith deleting important files from his memory stick, then my photo-editing disaster at home, deleting photos from my hard drive. Now I’m trying to get our work website updated and the new version of Joomla is driving me mad.

We already have a website created with this programme, but the version it uses is now out of date and needed upgrading to the latest version. I am currently testing it on a virtual server on my work PC, and it’s taking so long to get to grips with it. I am posting questions on the forum (thank goodness there is one) and just finding my way round it by trial and error. Anyway, I have more or less got the gist of it now.

I became so engrossed in the website today, I forgot that, due to the hard drive misadventure, the weekly back up would take much longer than normal, as all the files were on a different partition and would therefore need a full backup rather than the usual incremental backup. Consequently, I was at work until about 8.30pm waiting for it to finish!! Arrggghhh!!!!! I didn’t want to cancel the backup in case it caused similar hassles to stopping Partition Magic. I suppose it would have been OK, but I just wanted to see it through.

But, the saving grace was that I did eventually get my ‘lost’ images back from my camera, so here is what all the fuss was about. Having recovered them, I was wondering why I bothered. I had taken a photo that looked quite interesting. It’s not exactly sharp, but I liked the effect of the water (probably camera shake as it was taken in the shade of the trees. The remaining images were general scenes which are not really worth posting, and some images taken in the garden with filters. I haven’t really done much experimenting with the compact camera before, and I knew I had some old filters lying around that would fit the lens converter I bought some time ago for digiscoping, so I set it to black and white (in-camera) and fitted yellow, orange and polarising filters on. I think this technique needs a bit more work on a better subject.

And just to update you, we went back today to see if I could get any better shots. The light was different (the sun had been out, but resolutely stayed hidden while we were there), and I had my 40D rather than the compact, and I had it on a tripod with a cable release, so the shot is a lot sharper – probably not what I was after. I think I prefer the ‘painterly’ effect of the compact camera version.

I found this spot further up the river, which is almost the effect I wanted

We drove back into Calver and had a cup of tea and a piece of cake, then drove into Hathersage and I bought myself a jacket from one of the outdoor shops there.

I now need to sort out some photos for the camera club evening, which is Tuesday this week, as the room is being used by another group on Thursday. It’s a critique evening, so I thought I’d open myself up to some constructive criticism. I’m not sure what to take, but they have to be fairly recent images.