After my son took an interest in riding, my daughter did not want to be left out.

She wasn't quite as fast, but she learned it pretty quick.  After a few spills, our neighbor suggested learning to ride a slight grassy slope behind her house.

After a few runs, she had the confidence to hit the street again the next day.

What I find amazing is how different my two kids are.  My son learned to ride his bike 2 1/2 years (by age) before his older sister.  But in contrast, my daughter was dressing herself (multiple times per day) a few years before my son did.  To prove my point, my daughter's first comment when she got her tricycle was that it matched her red dress.  Watch the video.

Saturday, my 4 year old son decided he wanted to take the training wheels off of his bike.  He has always been interested in riding bikes.  He picks it up quickly. 

He was confident.

We started out with some success:

And few spills...

But he mastered it very quickly.

It is definitely one of most special moments as a dad.

My dog Hanna celebrates her 9th birthday today.  This is a big deal...considering.  Back in February, she started to limp pretty bad, favoring her front left leg.  The doctors diagnosed her with bone cancer.  They said that they could amputate but not sure if that would extend her life.  They gave her 6 weeks to live or so.  It has been 4 1/2 months.   She has good days and bad days.  But we are having more good right now.

When trying to install my Visioneer 9120 Scanner, I got this weird error:

Running Vista, I have installed the Canon provided RAW codec for CR2 format.  It allows you view those files natively. 

I was browsing through a folder of pictures.  I noticed that it got slower and slower as I went through the pages.  Eventually, it gave me an out of memory error.  I didn't have anything else open.  I brought up Task Manager and saw that I had memory left.  I closed the picture viewer and just watched the memory get reclaimed in about 20 seconds.  The total delta there is about 1.5 gig.

I tried to import pictures for the first time in Lightroom on my new Vista machine.

I kept on getting the mysterious:

"Problem with Importing Files - the file was not imported. Could not copy a file to the requested location."

At first I thought it was my card reader.  I got a brand new, built in one.  But I was able to read the files directly.  So I tried copying the files to my desktop and importing them from there.  I got the same error.

I double checked the file permissions of the target and they were all fine.  I also tried not applying any Metadata templates or "Rendering Standard-Sized Previews."   Same result.

Normally, I organize the imported pictures with the following options:

I went ahead and changed to:

surprisingly that worked! However, that is frustrating because I like to auto create a separate folder for each day based upon date taken.

After looking around on Adobe's website, I found the following:

http://www.adobe.com/go/kb401508

If the By Date path you select for your folder in the Import Photos dialog box contains a forward slash, then your photos are not imported.

So it is a Lightroom bug with Vista.  I changed the option to:

That will work fine.  I can then rearrange after import.  I really want an option that makes it YYYY/MM/YYYY-MM-DD/.  For now, I will manually create that structure. 

One thing that is weird:  this is one of the few "template" things that you cannot edit in the application settings folder for Lightroom.

The other day my wife had a tire blowout.  She doesn't think she hit anything.  Nonetheless, it was a loud "explosion."  Fortunately, she was only driving about 40 MPH and could immediately pull over.  As you can see below, a huge 4" gash was in the sidewall.

Last night I ordered a new computer.  I haven't upgraded for several years...it was time.

I ordered it from NewEgg.com and paid for it with Discover Card.  They have this feature called Secured Online Account Numbers.  It is pretty nice.  You log in and get new credit card number for each vendor that you pay online.  That number is only good at the vendor.  I did that last night.  This morning, I tried to use my card and it got rejected/flagged.  I also got an email and phone call from Discover.  I called them up and told them that I really did buy that computer.  Some people might find this annoying or irritating.  I think it is a good service.  I would rather this happened and error on the conservative.

Here is picture that my daughter drew:

Definitely not another Y2K, but it still was interesting.  Here is what I noticed:

• All my computers had no problems
• The usual VCR clocks had to still be manually changed.
• Our cable box from Time Warner did not change at 1:00 AM.  I was up and saw it say 1:35 AM (which never existed).  It was fine by the morning.
• Our Honda Odyssey which has a built in navigation always updates by itself.  It set the right time based upon where you are.  However, it didn't understand today's change.  It was still an hour behind.  The clock is not settable.  However, you can offset it by +/- hours.  I imagine I will have to do this again in a few weeks.

One personal note, both of my children were born on DLS weekends (both spring and fall).  In fact, if my son was born 5 minutes later, they would have had to indicate which 1:00 AM he was actually born on.  This was because there were 2 "1 AM" times that night (the fall).  It was a little confusing because the nurses were updating all of the clocks beginning at midnight.

DAM as in Digital Asset Management.  One of my hobbies that I have had great interest in since high school has been photography.  I have always enjoyed the whole experience:  taking pictures, developing, printing and sharing.  In fact, I really wanted to create my own darkroom in my house just before digital photography became available.

I have been evaluating the following products for quite some time:

• Google's Picasa2
• Microsoft's Digital Image Suite 2006
• iMatch Image Management
• iView Media Pro3 (Microsoft Elements)

Others that I have researched but did not try were the following:

• Adobe LightRoom (beta)
• Adobe Photoshop Elements

It is truly amazing how some of the products do a few things very nice but fall short in some other aspect that makes it very frustrating. 

Some of the key things that I looked at were:

• Ease of use
• UI--Is it clunky?  It is elegant and simple?  Is is overwhelming?
• Speed--Do I need water cooling or a 486?
• Extensibility--Can you script?  Does it support plugins? 
• How well does it play with others?--Does it use standard IPTC or EXIF?  Does have a proprietary format or backend database?  Where does it store its data?
• Tagging and Organization:  Does it support hierarchical tagging?  What about GEO Tagging? 
• Offline Capabilities
• Unwanted upselling?  Does "encourage" you to use their vendor for printing or web hosting of the pictures?
• Does it support RAW?
• Workflow:  Does it support multiuser?  how do you import the pictures?
• Cost

Some of the things that were really low on my list were:

• Photo editing
• CD/DVD editing
• Picture sharing

I will starting posting a writeup on these.