More Power!

This entry won't be especially deep or wordy. It's just to show you something I've been tracking for a few months now.

The last "Safeway Sunset"? Maybe.

At the corner of Golf Links and Wilmot in Tucson is a formerly empty lot. Looking west across it from the Safeway shopping center, one sees the Tucson Mountains in the distance. When the lot was empty, it was a fabulous setting for sunset photos. Over the years I've taken many a "Safeway Sunset" picture from the parking lot in front of Subway.

I think that I shall never see
base housing lovely as a tree.

A year or two ago that began to change, as base housing for Davis-Monthan Air Force Base was built at the south end of the empty lot. The view was suddenly more prosaic, but if I pointed the camera in the right direction at the right time I could still get something good.

Then something new happened. First a bunch of short posts went up, hardly taller than old-fashioned headstones. These spread across the land on the south side of Golf Links, from Wilmot nearly to Craycroft Rd a mile away. As the mysterious construction continued, I discussed this odd sight with someone from the temp job I had at the time. He also lives in the area, and had also been watching the proceedings. We concluded that the work crews were building solar panels.

They were indeed. I don't think they've quite finished construction on the acres of off-the-grid green technology, and it's very hard to photograph them adequately from the Golf Links side. But here are some of them as seen from the Subway / Safeway parking lot.

Much as I love taking sunset photos, I'll happily trade that particular vantage point for DM going solar, and getting off the Tucson Electric Power grid. More power to them.

Karen

Weekend Assignment #265: Darn Computer!

Okay, I'm postponing the topic I started to write up this morning, and starting over:

Weekend Assignment #265: If you're a blogger, you almost certainly have a computer. If you have a computer, you've had computer problems. Did your monitor go dark? Hard drive get hacked? System go silent? Tell us a computer horror story!

Extra Credit: Which has fewer problems, a PC or a Mac?

This entry is way late for several reasons, but the main one is that I've been having computer problems for several weeks now. Every day the computer has slowed to a crawl, the hard drive loudly chugging away, the dreaded words "Not Responding" appearing intermittently in parentheses next to apps.

Looks so innocent, doesn't it?

It's hard to fix what you can't diagnose, and I have several contenders for the position of troublemaker:

This CD, for a different troublesome device, turned up under the desk last night.

The slowdown seems to have started right about the time I installed the software that came with my new Canon camera, the software the documentation insisted had to be installed before the camera was connected to the computer for data transfer. Really? You need these six programs? I like the photo tagging feature, but I can live without that if the tradeoff is Picasa suddenly being convinced that certain photos should be oriented horizontally when they're actually meant to be vertical, and a PhotoStudio edit can't shake that certainty. And it sure as heck isn't worth the computer endlessly chugging away, unwilling to do much of anything. But do I dare uninstall? What happens if I attach the camera without it? Does it blow up or something, invalidating the warranty in the process? Or, as is more likely, does the computer simply revert to listing the five other protocols available for data transfer, instead of all six? So far, I haven't dared to find out.

One possibility I've already eliminated was a full hard drive. File Manager insisted at one point that it was full, so I pulled off several months' worth of raw photo files. Then I checked the storage info, and it turns our the drive isn't even two thirds full. So much for that. I also had my suspicions about a particular build of Firefox, but it's been updated a couple times since then, and it didn't help.

Maybe it's a conflict between Firefox, Norton and Window, all of which want to protect my computer against the big bad world of hacks and viruses and phishing and worms. If so, I have no idea how to get them to play nicely together.

Or maybe there's some background program running that I should disable, sich as a file indexer. Once I opened the startup program manager, and any possibility of disabling anything is greyed out. Nor does the indexing program seem to offer any options.

Maybe I just need more RAM. But a) I can't afford it, cheap as it probably is now, and b) over having just Firefox open doesn't seem to solve the problem. And I usually need to have at least AIM, Firefox, Word or Excel, and problably PhotoStudio open. Is that excessive? It didn't use to be.

Another possibility is it has something to do with the external hard drives wanting to back up the main one, even though they only actually get to do so when I get tired of the error messages, reboot and do a backup with nothing else running. Why does the computer insist half the time that it can't back up any files at all, and refuse to tell me why?

For now I've done the one thing I knew how to do. I did a defrag on the C: drive and the two external ones. It took nearly seven hours. And now you know why this entry is so late!

John, of course, is still using a Mac, still claiming that Windows is way more problematic than whatever big cat Apple's current system software is named for. He could be right, but I found my last Mac, a second-generation iMac, at least as much of a hassle as the Windows laptop that sat next to it. Somewhere around OS X, Macs became much less intuitive in their organiation, and much more prone to needing security authorizations and arcane settings. Or was that mainly so the Mac and the laptop would talk to each other? They never really did so properly. And the iMac, which wasn't broken or anything, left my desk years ago.

Your turn! I know at least one of you bought a computer recently, and Julie always seems to be battling some bit of software or hardware or some bit of the web. Tell us your travails in your blig, and be sure to include a link back here in your entry. Then come back here and leave a link to your entry in the comments below. I'll be back in a week with the results. Meanwhile...

For Weekend Assignment #264: Environmental Awareness , I asked you to assess your personal environmental efforts. It appears we mostly agree we can do better:

Julie said...

So, yes. We dropped a truckload of money (that we're still paying, but that's another rant) on a more energy efficient A/C and heating system. We have the curly bulbs. We practically burst our curbside recycle bin every two weeks. We don't compost (it's something I have trouble keeping up with), but we make sure our tree and lawn clippings get properly gift wrapped for the city compost. I have allergies, so I'm big on natural cleaning and laundry products.

Florinda said...

I actually like small, fuel-efficient cars, and I may be lucky that my size means that I'm comfortable in them. But that car is nine years old now, and although I try to keep up with the maintenance, age does take its toll on everything, so it's less efficient than it once was - and I drive that car eighty miles every weekday, round-trip, by myself, on some of the most congested highways in this country.

Mike said...

I mean, we have a recycling bin that we put all our paper products in, but we are not so good at putting cans or bottles in there. It is easy for us to stack the papers on a table and bring them all out at once. If we did that with cans or bottles, it would get too messy. What I should do, is find a way to put a bin next to the garbage can under the sink. Then maybe my laziness won't destroy the environment as much as it does now.

I'm still dangerously low on "guest professor" suggestions for these Weekend Assignments, so I ask again: please, please, please, PLEASE PLEASE email me some new ones. I warn you, I will continue adding another please to the previous sentence each week until someone suggests something. Save us from the invasion of the pleases!

And oh, good, here comes another computer slowdown as I plug in the camera.

Round Robin entry to follow in a few hours.

Karen

Weekend Assignment #264: Environmental Awareness

Hi, folks! Part Two of my trip up the Sky Island Byway, aka Catalina Highway, aka Mount Lemmon, will be posted later today. First, let's get on with the Weekend Assignment:

Weekend Assignment #264:A lot has changed since 1970, when the first Earth Day took place and had an unexpectedly large impact. In the current, uh, climate of global warming, eco-friendly marketing and recent attempts to gut environmental protections, how much of an effort do you make in your daily routine to help protect the environment?

Extra Credit:Do you observe Earth Day in any way? If so, how?

We just had another Earth Day, obviously. I remember its very first observance in 1970, when I was young and impressionable, and the new holiday was a big deal. I was 13 years old and in seventh grade. We had an environmental science fair at school, and my contribution was two fish tanks. One had a pearl gourami in it named Pearl, chosen because it frequently chased other fish and I wanted to punish it for being so "mean." The other had water mixed with laundry detergent, all that stuff with phosphates and enzymes that was supposed to be so bad for the environment. On Earth Day itself I went to the woods by the frog pond and the disused railroad tracks, and collected a large bag full of empty cans. I took these home and used them to spell out the work "JOIN" on the front lawn. Then I cleaned them up again.

By the time I was in high school, my dad and I were recycling. I've tried to continue ever since, with varying degrees of success depending on the resources available at the time. I used to collect boxes of white paper and boxes of colored paper at Worldwide Travel, and every few months haul them to a photocopy store that took paper for recycling. Then they stopped doing that, but the city had a recycling center by then, with a bin for paper. Then they started mixing all their recycled goods in the same bin, and I was never quite sure after that what they really recycled and what they threw away. These days we have a small recycle bin under the kitchen counter, and a big blue one outside that gets emptied on Fridays. Lots and lots of stuff goes in there, including a few things I'm not sure they take. Still, we follow the city's directions on the subject as best we can, and I even carry stuff home from work (when I work!) or elsewhere to go in the big blue bin.

But you know what? I'm not so good on other stuff. My car isn't an SUV, but I do use a fair amount of gas, just going to the dog park each day. I just guiltily turned off an extra light in the kitchen, and it's not unusual for our tv to show a paused DVD all night long. We try not to overdo the A/C, but I have far less tolerance for heat than John, not to mention the allergens that come in through the windows he likes to open. So yes, I try, but not perhaps hard enough.

As for Earth Day this year, I sort of celebrated it early, going partway up the mountain on Monday afternoon for the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot. When Earth Day actually came, I posted Part One of my EMPS entry, and then went to St. Michael's to prepare the weekly deposit as usual. Shortly after I started, Father Smith made a brief appearance, and told me he was about to go take part in an Earth Day observance.

"Cool," I said, and kept working.

A few minutes after that, the phone in the workroom, which I had not noticed before, was activated as part of an internal PA system. A voice I didn't recognize invited the entire St. Michael's community (i.e., anyone from the church or school who happened to be around and not too busy) to attend an Earth Day ceremony at 3:30 in the Sunken Garden. I was tempted, but there I was with a stack of the church's cash, and limited time to get the deposit done if I wanted to finished before the parish secretary left for the day. I kept working.

How about you? Are environmental concerns something you pay attention to on a daily basis, or is it something you think about for five minutes each April, or something in between? Tell us about it in your blog. Be sure to leave a link to this blog in your entry, and a link to your entry in the comments below. I'll be back in a week with the results. Meanwhile...

For Weekend Assignment #263: Predict the Future!, I asked you to make from one to three predictions about the rest of 2009. Three of you responded:

Julie said...

So, I'm going to shuffle up the cards (The Fool is on top right now, which suggests something), deal out a few, and give you my interpretation of each. And just to make things interesting, the text on the cards is in French, so I can't guarantee I'll get it all right....

Florinda said...

I'll crawl out onto that limb...but I'm a bit afraid of heights, so I'm picking one that's only a few feet off the ground, and hoping that it won't hurt as badly if I fall off. But I'm hedging my bets - no tree-related pun intended - by not predicting anything that's likely to have a dramatic impact on my own day-to-day life. Prediction #1, still staying close to the trunk of the tree: The Dodgers will finish the season somewhere between first and fifth place in the NL West.

Mike said...

First, in sports the Blackhawks will win the Stanley Cup, The Bulls will win the NBA Championship, the Cubs and White Sox will be in the World Series together and the Cubs will win. Hey, the White Sox won just a few years ago. Then, after all the fires have been put out around the city, the IOC will determine that Chicago can't handle a major sporting event, so they decide to have the 2016 Summer Games in Des Moines, Iowa.

I'm still dangerously low on "guest professor" suggestions for these Weekend Assignments, so I ask again: please, please, please, PLEASE email me some new ones. I warn you, I will continue adding another please to the previous sentence each week until someone suggests something. Save us from the invasion of the pleases!

Karen