FastStone Image Viewer

For the post on the Williamsburg trip I wanted to take the pictures that Mom and Carol had taken and shrink them down to something appropriate for a web page. I also wanted to handle all of the pictures as a batch, so I didn’t have to open each one individually, resize it, and then save again. I visited download.com and found a highly rated (5 stars by the editors, 4.5 stars by the users) free image editor called FastStone Image Viewer that can handle batch conversions like that. I believe this is the same viewer that I had loaded on Susan’s computer when I had to crop some files. With my copy of Lview Pro (shareware I paid for in the 90’s) getting pretty old, lately I’ve been using the very basic image editor that comes with Microsoft Office, but with the switch to Office 2007, they ruined the program. For instance, I don’t even know how to use it to open a picture file. The obvious menu location, File:Open, is not available.

FastStone is kind of complicated for what it does with some funky screens and previews. But after making copies of the pictures I wanted to use on the gallery web page in a single folder, FastStone made new copies in a subfolder that were resized perfectly.

Trip to Williamsburg

Mom, Carol, Andrew, and I enjoyed a great trip to Virginia. We got to spend a day at Busch Gardens Europe (Florida’s park has an African theme) and ride the terrifying Sheikra . . . I mean, Griffon. We got to see some shows, go on some 4-D rides, go to a beer tasting, and see some of the gardens. Crowds were fairly light and the lines for most of the rides were short. Thanks very much to Mom for the tickets to everything we would go to.

Gallery of Pictures

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Q1 Report

This was a pretty dismal quarter for my web page revenues. In mid-January I moved all of my web pages from SpeedFactory to the new website at iGirder. Traffic was way off (stabilizing at about 200 hits per day from 300 previously) as the search engines slowly started referring people to the new location. But even so, my page rank was down to zero from a respectable 4 previously. This meant I did not rank as high when people did searches and probably also affected the AdSense rates that Google charged to people clicking on ads at my site.

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Downtown Tornado

Today I was able to see some of the tornado damage for myself. Walking around near the Capitol I could see several building with windows out. The Equitable building had a lot of windows out and covered with something white (drywall?). The Georgia Pacific building had a handful of windows blown out. Some other building had windows out as well, but I don’t know their names. A newer building had a patch of stucco torn off the side that looked like it was about 10 feet in diameter. As I rode home on MARTA (I forgot to look out this morning) I went by the cotton mill lofts and saw the corner of that building all fallen in. Also some new apartments going up had the roofing felt torn off, but I don’t think the shingles had been put on yet anyway. There were also a number of billboards damaged and as we rode by Oakland Cemetery you could see some big trees blown over there.

Other buildings were fine. The Capitol showed no damage, nor did Grady. A tower crane near Georgia State was still up and all of the buildings at Georgia State seemed fine. The tornado must have skipped over that area because it was directly between the downtown damage and the damage near the lofts and cemetery.

Solar Prius

It is getting close to time to replace my 1998 Honda Civic. One of the cars on my short list is the Toyota Prius. There has been a lot of talk about plug-in hybrids which, unlike the current Prius, are not powered by gasoline alone, but are plugged into an electric socket to recharge the batteries and then run on electric power alone for as much as possible.

The current Prius keeps the charge of the batteries somewhere in the middle and never seems to charge them completely nor let them drain down completely. I think that is the most efficient way to keep a charge on the batteries and also avoids complete charging cycles which shorten battery life.

So the problem with a plug-in is that you will need to top off the batteries and probably run them down much further in order to run the car solely on electrical power. This will shorten battery life. Also there is some inefficiency in using coal to produce electricity and then use the electricity to charge a battery and then use the battery to run the car. You lose a little power with each step. Additionally, by using electricity you are just transferring the pollution from the tailpipe to a powerplant somewhere (which would at least help Atlanta’s air).

So it occurred to me that instead of a plug-in hybrid, it would be better to put solar cells on top of the car and charge the battery that way. One reason this occurred to me is because my car is parked in the sun all the time, whether that is at home or in the MARTA parking lot.

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