cold morning, a couple of days after our 15 inches of snow, I had an “unfortunate event.” In lifting the cup of coffee sitting next to my one year old laptop, my foot jostled the flimsy desk leg, my hand jostled the coffee cup, and the laptop, as became slowly evident over the next 12 hours or so, died – keys first, followed by ear-splitting noises, culminating in a no longer responsive power button. I felt pretty inept. I was able to console myself with the reminder that I had just backed up several months’ worth of recently downloaded photos to my external hard drive. So other than the loss of time that would now be entailed in securing a new laptop, re-loading various programs and peripherals, re-syncing with apple photo stream, icloud, itunes, amazon cloud player, saved photos, etc., my losses were pretty small – some saved documents and spreadsheets, primarily. (Note to self: Start backing that stuff up.)
Sunday after church Gary and I visited Best Buy to browse laptops and desktops and see whether anything looked more compelling, price or feature-wise, than the next generation of the Dell Inspiron I had killed, which Gary had already determined was available on amazon for about $100 less than it had been a year ago. The answer was no.
But while Gary browsed a display of wide screen monitors, I came upon a row of digital cameras, powered up and begging to be handled. I had been wishing for some time to be able to get crisper, closer shots of flora and fauna, and was quickly impressed with a Canon digital with a 20X zoom (a
PowerShot SX280 HS) that focused very crisply and had a very reasonable price tag. We came home with no new laptop, but with a new monitor for Gary’s desktop and a new camera for me.
The new laptop is good. Basically plug and play. A slightly
wider screen than my last one. A numeric keypad. Had it up and running right away, though it’s taken me a few days to get my various peripherals and programs all back up.
I’ve also made some time to start playing with the new camera.
Here are a few images I’ve been able to capture this week.