Tag: computers

Genealogy

Sweet Success

Shelly

You can file this under D for Duh.

I figured out the problem with Firefox and Ancestry.com’s image viewer. It was the stupid Norton toolbar that automagically installed itself with FF. I really don’t appreciate that Norton did that, without any instigation from me. I uninstalled its sorry ass, and now all is well in vital document viewing land. w00t! This means no more Internet Explorer BS, which makes the baby Shelly very, very happy.

Now, if the databases I exported from the earlier copy of CFT on the old machine will load properly with the new copy of CFT on this machine, all will be well. The first one is taking its sweet fancy time, and I am not the princess of patience.

Genealogy

Hallelujah!

Shelly

I have spent the entire day playing around with Family Historian. It is Just Fine. I even ran a few reports, to see how the source citations looked, and they are Just Fine, too. But, it’s still not the program I love with all my heart, and it is going to cost me $60 when the free trial is over.

Sooooo. I tried one last time to track down the problem with Cumberland Family Tree and Vista. Apparently, it’s something to do with CFT changing file names and Vista being a big meanypants about it. I found a message board post from the guy who wrote the program, written in early 2008, saying that he’d released an updated version for Vista. Huzzah! Except, he’s taken down his website and is no longer selling the program. But, I now had a reason to think that there might be a version out there, somewhere, that’d work. A couple of hours of trolling through message boards and I found a saintly soul who was hosting the new version on his own website

I win!

It took me all damned weekend, but I now have CFT back up and running. I feel like a three year old who just found her security blanket. Now I just have to get the back-up databases off my other machine.

Oh! I did actually get something accomplished, though. I found a bunch of census records for Esther’s family (1900-1930). Apparently they were living in Ohio in 1910. I had no idea! Asa’s mother, Emma, was supposedly born in Ohio, so that might help narrow down the search. Or it could just be a coincidence. I also found Asa’s family in the 1860-1880 census, living in Massachusetts. Still no trace of Robert Cooper, because it’s such a common name, and I don’t have a starting point. I expect I could get info on him from Ball State’s archives, though. Surely they’d know something about him, since they named a building after him!

And now, I’m going to go watch mindless teevee, eat ice cream, and maybe even have an adult beverage, because my brain has turned to mush.

Genealogy

Family Historian

Shelly

Alas, my beloved, horribly out-of-date, and no longer updated genealogy program just plain will not work with Vista. It is for to weep. I spent a good chunk of last week and most of the weekend trying to find a reasonable alternative. The two most promising, My Heritage Family Tree Builder and Legacy both ended up being hugely disappointing.

MHFTB is clunky, ugly as hell, and in my opinion does not handle sources very well. Legacy was even worse. It was horribly un-intuitive, and worse, it’s source input menus kept leading me around in circles, until I wanted to cry. It’s worse than user-unfriendly, it’s actually user hostile. Oh, and it popped up a nag notice every time you tried to use a feature that is only available in the for-pay version. Why not just grey those options out, instead of making me click multiple times? What a pain in the ass! And no, I will not be upgrading to the full-featured. Why the hell would I want to give you money for making me cry?

So, I decided to try Family Historian. It’s kind of pricey (around US$60, I think), but the trial is full-featured. I’d much prefer a time limit than a feature limit. And the 30 days they give you is more than enough to give the software a good trial run. Which I’m doing right now. So far, so good. It seems to handle sources pretty well. It can actually copy events from one individual to another (yay!), and best of all, it works the way I think it should work.

There’s an FH upgrade planned for sometime this spring, but they are promising that anyone who buys now will be able to upgrade for free.

The other thing that is making me cry was that Firefox now seems unable to work with Ancestry.com’s proprietary image viewer. Ancestry has a work-around, but that only managed to crash Firefox. So I’m stuck using IE, which makes me feel like stabbing things with sharp, pointy objects. It’s not just my natural aversion to all things IE, either. The damned browser has security settings that require it to throw warning messages at you every time you try to view an image. And, as if that weren’t enough, when you try to save an image to a specific folder, it (un)helpfully overrides your decision, and puts it in a security threat folder. WTF?! And if you try to add Ancestry.com to IE’s trusted website list—in order to stop the insanity—it then starts popping open a whole new browser window every single time you click a hot link. That’s just plain not reasonable, when you’re doing a lot of searching.

I am doomed to be frustrated.

Uncategorized

Introducing Cracktop!

Shelly

Sorry for the dearth of posts, but I have spent the last few days setting up the new laptop. I still am not finished migrating my music (that might take until approximately Labor Day, at the rate I’m going). But, I’ve finally got all the Adobe stuff loaded, as well as WordPerfect Office X4 (yay, no more MS Office!). I’m a die-hard WP person, so this is a Very Good Thing, because using Word makes the Baby Shelly cry.

Anyway, Cracktop is a thing of beauty. Alas, he is not bright red, like I’d wanted, but a shimmery, metallic bronze color. I am not complaining! He has a super springy keyboard, complete with keypad. I sacrificed some portability for larger screen size, since I won’t be carrying him around with me every day. He’s going to be my only computer, so I wanted a nice, big screen. I also sacrificed a better wireless card for more RAM. The wireless card he came with is only B/G, which is kind of worthless. Since I don’t have a wireless router (yet), and since USB N cards are super cheap, I thought it was a decent trade-off.

All this, I was able to figure out for myself, by shopping around online and reading user reviews. I ended up going to Best Buy, because they actually had the best prices I found. I figured, no shipping fees, plus instant gratification, would be a good thing, right? I did not, alas, factor in the annoyance factor of having a salesdroid give me the 3rd degree and the hard sell on buying one of their in-store warranty plans. Also, she tried to get me to pay them $40 to create a restore disc for me and clean off all the crapware. IDTS! I can do that myself, thankyewverymuch.

And that’s about all I have to say. I’ll be over here in the corner, transferring music files, if anyone needs me!

Crankypantsing

Hmmm.

Shelly

I think my computer overheard me talking about Operation Cracktop, because ever since then, it’s been randomly crashing. This is not good! I don’t know if my hard drive is going out or if my RAM (which I already know is wonky) is getting even wonkier. My plan is to give this machine to my mom when I’m done with it. I’m hoping that replacing (and upgrading) the RAM and installing a new hard drive, as well as reinstalling a clean copy of XP, will fix whatever is wrong with it. I’m not about to start on that project, though, until I have Mr. Cracktop in my greedy little hands and have got him properly set up.

Hrmf.

The other thing that has occurred to me is that the problem may be with Windows Media Player. I don’t use it for anything, but the crashes have all happened when other programs were/could have been interacting with it. It first happened when I was trying to use Amazon’s music downloader, which I know uses WMP. Then, it happened while trying to use QuickTime (which I loathe, so uninstalled, hoping that would solve the problem, but alas, no).

Thinking back, though, the problem started after installing QuickTime, so I have a feeling that’s the culprit, and that it’s overstepped its bounds and corrupted something that WMP required. I ran into the same problem with iTunes a few years ago, and ended up having to uninstall a bunch of programs, uninstall iTunes, then reinstall the affected programs again. Apple knew there was a problem with that release of iTunes, but did not fix it until 2-3 iterations later. Bastards. I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar problem was going on with QuickTime.

Crankypantsing

Saturday Technology Report

Shelly

I’ve had this on-again, off-again problem with my computer not seeing my printer. I’ve torn my hair out over this, because it seemed so arbitrary. At first, I blamed ZoneAlarm for blocking my USB ports[1], and in temporarily disarming ZA, I ended up getting my check card information stolen. So, that didn’t end well, though I thought I had the problem narrowed down to ZA.

Not so.

I turned everything on this morning, and once again, my printer was off-line. Aaack! I tried everything I could think of, retracing my cybersteps yesterday to try to figure out what might have made my printer invisible. Bupkis. So I did a system restore to yesterday. Printer still off-line. Undid the restore and picked a point further back. Printer still off-line. Undid that restore and tore out some more hair. At this point, I’m completely out of ideas.

I finally decided that I’d better just spend the day doing a major back-up, wipe my hard drive, and reinstall everything. That’s not what I had on my agenda for the day. Ugh.

I took the lid off my spindle of discs, which sits in front of my computer tower. And, what did I see? The Compact Flash card from my camera sitting in the card reader. Hmmm. As you may have noticed, I haven’t been taking many pictures lately. Also, lately, my printer (until this morning) has been working fine. Hmmm, again.

You may or may not recall that when I first got this computer, I was extra clueless and hooked up the internal card reader before installing Windows. Windows, because it hates me, assigned drive letter C to the Compact Flash drive. This is obviously not good, and has caused minor problems over the past year. Nothing major enough, though, to motivate me to fix it.

So I got to thinking. I would bet money that my printer, when turned on, first looks for a C drive, and if it doesn’t find one, then it looks further until it finds my main drive (lettered I, which is kind of funny, dontcha think? My computer is no longer part of The Collective. Aieee!). Anyway, I had my camera out yesterday, and took a few photos. I forgot the card in the card reader, and so now I finally know what has been plaguing my printer.

I took the card out of the drive, rebooted, et voila, my printer is now visible.

Teh Enb.

______________________________
1. Which I still think it was doing, onna counta Windows could not see my scanner unless I turned it on before turning on my computer. If Windows was able to see the scanner before ZoneAlarm was up and running, then all was well. Otherwise, any new traffic through my USB ports was blocked. I did some searching on ZA’s boards, and others with HP scanners had the same problem.

Uncategorized

It’s Baaaaack!

Shelly

Scott came over last night and raised my on-board Ethernet adapter from the dead. Yay! I am doing the happy dance of DSL joy right now bay-BEE!

He also got a laugh out of my bizarro drive lettering. It goes something like this:

A-B nothing
C-F multi-card reader
G-H DVD burners
I main drive
J slave drive
K secondary partition on I
L external hard drive

Consider for a moment that most normal PCs have their main hard drive mapped to C. Not having the main hard drive mapped to C results in problems like stupid software not knowing where to install itself. Worse, sometimes that stupid software is so stupid that it does not allow for the possibility of anything but a C main drive.

Good fun. Good, good fun.

Anyway, thank you Scott! You are Teh Awesome!