Adobe Steal another Half an Hour of My Life

As I get older, I realise that time is becoming more precious to me. The number of hours left to me is not so huge that I can just squander them on wasted effort. Or have them taken from me.

Adobe Reader has just stolen half an hour of my time. All I wanted to do was read a document and then print it. Without being asked it went on line, found some updates, downloaded 30 MBytes of stuff, spent fifteen minutes installing this, rebooted my machine and then spent another five minutes rattling the disk drive.

Net loss to me, half an hour of my time.

Now, the Adobe reader is a program that lets me read documents. That's all. It does not control a heart-lung machine, fly a plane or operate a nuclear reactor. What can be so wrong with it that it requires 30 MBytes (more space than the original Windows 95 installer) to sort out? I know that the program is free, and so I probably can't complain. But this kind of behaviour means that I would be unlikely to pay for it anyway.

And now I've wasted another ten minutes moaning about the 30 minutes I lost. Bah.

Babies and Petrol

Why not use babies to sell petrol. Indeed.

Frame Fame

I think I'm turning into some kind of media person. Or something. If you get hold of a copy of this month's Windows Vista magazine you will find a picture of me and my photo frame. The frame, an Imate Momento, is actually proving very useful. It uses WIFI to link to the shared photographs and displays them without any faffing about with memory cards and the like.

Wedding Daze

Confetti

Went to a wedding today. We went to the service and then the reception and then came home. Everything was great, even the weather. Number one wife was going out to the evening party, whilst I stayed at home and nursed the jetlag. Before she went out again I thought I'd print off a few of the photos I'd taken. Bad plan. The process went like this.

1. Upload pictures to computer. Select picture and press print.
2. HP printer drops out the print onto 6x4 as requested, but the ink cartridge has run out.
3. Insert new ink cartridge.
4. Printer refuses to do cartridge alignment.
5. Take out all paper. Reset printer. Put paper back in. Reset printer again. Printer does alignment.
6. Restart print.
7. Printer prints out picture on A4 paper, not 6x4.
8. Move lever on printer to get the right size. Print again.
9. One good print. Hurrah. Print two more. Works again. Hurrah.
10. Move on to next picture. Select print, ask for three copies. Go for cup of tea.
11. Come back and find that all three copies have groom's head cut off.
12. Examine the pictures carefully and note that all photographs are being cropped.
13. Spend ten minutes trying to figure out how to get the HP driver to print the actual size that I want.
14. Discover that this is impossible.
15. Select another picture with groom's head closer to the middle. Ask for three copies. Go watch some Dr Who.
16. Come back and find that the 6x4 paper has run out, so the printer has printed the three copies on A4.
17. Load some more 6x4 paper in and ask for three more copies.
18. One print comes out, with the picture diagonally across it as it has not loaded properly.  Printer then stops and flashes a red light.
19. Give single print to number one wife, and walk away from the computer/printer before I do it some serious damage.

Back Home

Travel is nice, but being home is better. Even with jetlag that makes you fall asleep in the middle of a sent