single frame: Closed

Closed

Closed
Nikon F3, 35mm f/2.8 AI Nikkor
Kodak Tri-X (very expired)
2017

I’m giving myself a short break from blogging this week by running nothing but single-photo posts. They’re fun and fast to write and will let me keep to my self-imposed six-days-a-week posting schedule. I know the world would not end if I took a legitimate break and let the blog lie fallow for a week. But I want to keep my solid unbroken posting streak!

I’ve spent most of my spare time lately doing the last home repairs and painting the last couple rooms so that I can put my house on the market. And this past Sunday I preached my first sermon in church! That took considerable time in study and preparation. And my new job (at which I’ve worked three months now) is fabulous but consumes considerable energy. And the commute still stinks.

And then in the middle of all this the hard drive on my main computer failed, as I said on Friday. For years I’ve used a tool called Second Copy to shadow my files to an external drive, so I lost no files. But doing a clean install of Windows 10 on a new hard drive turned out to be frustrating and time consuming. Using my laptop I loaded a bootable Windows 10 installer onto a thumb drive I had lying around. I booted my main machine to that thumb drive and the installer fired right up. It could see the new hard drive, but insisted that there was no valid partition on it.

With lots of help from the Internet, I spent hours troubleshooting. I have good hardware and command-line skills, but nothing I tried worked. I was about to give up and go buy a new computer when I read a side comment at the end of a long forum thread, where a woman said she got around this problem by running the installer from a different thumb drive. I didn’t understand why that would work, but I’d exhausted all other options. And $8 for a new thumb drive is way cheaper than buying a whole new computer. So I bought a new thumb drive and put the Windows installer on it.

It worked, lickety split. Voodoo, I tell you, voodoo.

I hadn’t yet finished installing all of my software when I dismantled my office last weekend to paint it. That took the computer out of commission yet again, as I use it in that office. And so all posts last week and this week have been written on my laptop, where I lack my photo library, my scanner, and all my photo software. I have negatives to scan, photos to share, cameras to review — but it will all have to wait until my backlog of other priorities clears and I can get my main computer fully set up again.

So enjoy the photos this week!


Comments

12 responses to “single frame: Closed”

  1. J P Cavanaugh Avatar

    Wow, I am worn out just reading this. Your life seems to be moving in many good ways. I will eagerly await the daily picture and even more eagerly await more after things have settled down a bit. The preaching sounds like a fascinating story.

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      All of this has been flat out exhausting. Sadly, I know how to handle this kind of stress and activity. It’s much like what I went through during the divorce years.

      As for the preaching: the pastor at my small church needed a Sunday off to see his son get married. We have a shallow bench; he asked if I’d do it. We are in 2 Thessalonians 1, so I ended up preaching on persecution, as that’s what the chapter is about. I love to teach, I love to prepare a lesson, as I always learn so much.

  2. Dan Cluley Avatar
    Dan Cluley

    You have my sympathy. I keep three 3 desktop PCs running for myself & family, and no matter how prepared you are, putting humpty dumpty back together again always take longer than it should.

    Hope your busy schedule allows at least some relaxing on the 4th. :)

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      I would frankly have rather bought a new computer. The one I have has been great, i5 and 8MB — both sufficient for my needs. And since an $80 hard drive is far cheaper than a replacement computer, I went the hard drive route.

  3. Christopher Smith Avatar
    Christopher Smith

    Well you know what they say “a picture is worth a thousand words” .I look forward to your Thousand words when you have more time :) I hope your first Sermon went down well and you left a lasting impression on your listeners.

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      Well, a first sermon is just a beginning — so much to learn if I ever do it again! Hopefully I’ll be back to normal posting next week.

  4. dan james Avatar

    Jim I like this idea of “single frame” posts. With a blog I used to have I would write longer posts (500-1500 words maybe) then in between post short ones that were strictly less than 100 words. I liked the mix, and I think it worked for the readers too. Think I’ll try something similar for 35hunter, looking back over my archives on Flickr and picking out a favourite maybe once a week.

    Re the PC, this is why I bought my first Mac in 1993 and haven’t looked back. Alas at the day job I still have to use Windows PCs and MS Office, but at least when they go wrong (which is often) it’s someone else’s problem to fix!

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      Even a Mac can suffer a failed hard drive after enough cycles. There might be less comedy about getting one installed — if you can even crack the case yourself without a special tool.

  5. DougD Avatar
    DougD

    Happy Independence Day.
    And well done on the sermon. My brother is a pastor and he got 99.5% of that ability in our family, so I will never preach a sermon. I did get 99.5% of the car fixing ability which isn’t too useful in church so I play guitar occasionally instead.

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      Car fixing ability would be super useful at my church! In our challenging neighborhood, broken down cars are a pretty routine fact of life in our parking lot.

  6. DougD Avatar
    DougD

    Yeah, I do a bit of that as well. Unfortunately one does have to be cautious, some vehicles are so thoroughly unsafe you don’t really want to be the last person to lay a hand on it, and sometimes the vehicle owner is a bigger issue than the car.
    The last car I worked on I traded it for my own for a couple of days (they were both 5-speed transmissions) and after I traded back I got a text:
    “Did you do something to the clutch on our car?”
    “No, but I did give you a car with a normal clutch to drive for a couple of days. If yours gets worse you should get it looked at”
    That was the end of it but I got the feeling that they didn’t 100% believe me.

    One of my ideas for a retirement career is hang out at the U-pull yard and assist people who have no idea what they are doing, every time I’ve been there seem to be folks who are lost in more ways than one.

    1. Jim Grey Avatar

      Oooooo I never thought of that, how latent problems can be blamed on the last person to wrench on the car. 😟

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