technology troubles solved!

technology creates and solves so many of my problems.

we got a video monitor for abigail about two months ago.  i'm one of those people that reads reviews obsessively.  it's not enough for me to read a hundred reviews on amazon.  nooo, i'm the person that will find that same product listed online at bed bath and beyond, target, and walmart so i can read those online reviews too.*  so of course i did that when shopping for our video monitor.  and i ended up getting a monitor for 70% off and it's working great and i love it but there's just one thing about it...

it messes with our wireless.  when i have the monitor on, my internet is super slow.  like my blog page could take minutes to load.  the text would be there but the pictures would gradually load from top to bottom and it was impossible to do stuff online.  luckily, i remembered that one of the reviews mentioned that the monitor interfered with their wireless.  i think their problem was that it kicked them off the network but i decided to experiment and see if it would help.  i turned off the monitor, clicked refresh, and all my pages were instantly loaded.  YEAY!  what an easy fix!  this would be more annoying that what it is if 1. i had paid more for the monitor (they're typically a few hundred dollars!) and 2. if i needed it on all the time.  luckily i only need it on occasionally.  i put baby girl down for nap and then turn on the monitor after 30 minutes or so to make sure she's still asleep.  in the morning i just click it on every fifteen minutes or so to see if she's awake yet or what she's up to or if she's taken her diaper off again.  it's not like i need to sit there and watch her every move... although that is fun sometimes.

yesterday i was trying desperately to put pictures from my phone to picasa on my computer.  i have over a thousand pictures on my phone and at least 10-15 minutes of video and i'm almost out of memory.  unfortunately though, picasa was retrieving the pictures soooo slowly.  like maybe 20 pictures over the course of an hour.  which won't work for 1000 pictures.  and i kept closing and opening picasa, checking for updates, unplugging and replugging in my phone... nothing was working and then this morning i tried again and picasa wasn't even recognizing my phone as a device to retrieve pictures from.  enter google.  there are a million forums on this and what worked and what didn't.  a lot of people said to just plug the cord into a different usb.  or to try a different cord.  i tried both... about fifteen times.  they mentioned to turn your phone off and on again.  still didn't work.  and then i started noticing a pattern where people said their printer was the culprit and once they unplugged the printer it was fine.  i thought this for sure couldn't be the problem because our printer doesn't plug into my computer.  it's wireless.  ohhh hmmm let me check and see if i turned it off after i used it the other day.  oh yes, i did.  it's off.  hmmm.  and then i stood there thinking, "should i unplug it?" which i thought was really silly since it was already off... why would unplugging it make a difference?  but what did i have to lose?  so i unplugged it, came back to my computer, clicked the import button in picasa and...

BAM!  not only did it now recognize my phone again, i had over 1000 pictures instantly.  hallelujah!  that's crazy, right?  how on earth would i have figured this out without google?  i mean, that's got to be one of the most random things ever, right?  picasa on your laptop won't recognize your iphone as a camera device unless you manually unplug your printer (on the other side of your house) from the wall.

technology is a tricky, tricky thing.

gmail weather report

i love that my gmail shows me an outdoor tree scene and it changes based on the weather in my area.  normally it's sunny, occasionally partly cloudy, sometimes snowy, and every once in a while, rainy.  i absolutely love it.  on days i would wake up to snow, i don't know if i was more excited to look out the window at the snow on my trees or look on my gmail at the gsnow on my gtree.  it's the little things in life... 

anyways, tonight was a new one for me.  i looked at my gmail and saw a super weird grayish purple background.  i was super confused wondering how my background theme got changed.  until i noticed the lightening bolts and realized it was just reflecting the thunderstorm that was going on outside!

looove picasa screen shots and collages

so there's a little peek into just one thing that made my day today.

all things are spiritual

this afternoon during nap time i had a very frightening experience.  i backed up all of my pictures on my external hard drive, which i do every month or two.  as i was doing that, my OCD kicked in and i decided i needed to organize my pictures by year.  so i separated my pictures into two folders, "2010" and "2011."  (previous pictures are elsewhere... although i'm not exactly certain where that elsewhere is...)

then i looked in my picasa and i about had a heart attack.  everything was gone.  my thousands of pictures from the last two years all vanished.  i knew they weren't gone gone because i'd just backed them up on the external hard drive and i knew they were still on my computer because i'd just put them in those folders, but all of the organization, edits, etc of picasa were no more.  i had that experience where your face goes cold and it's like it's freezing and burning at the same time.

i wanted to call out for help.  i don't know anyone techie and i made me wish i'd better stayed in touch with my tech savvy ex boyfriend.  but i didn't.  so i was like, "i should put out a plea for help on my blog!" and then i remembered i only have about four readers.  and the likelihood of them being tech experts was slim.  so i went to facebook... where i could reach out to hundreds of people i don't ever talk to!  not helpful.  although i got some pretty sincere condolences at our relief society tonight from people asking if i was able to get my pictures back.

wow i'm longwinded.

anyways, i scoured google and found something promising.  i took the plunge to rebuild my database (i have no clue what that means) and uninstall and reinstall picasa to my computer.  it was scary but i did it.  and guess what.  everything came back!  all of my pictures, all of my screenshots, all of my edits, my stars, EVERYTHING.  and it made me think of this...

42 Now, there is a death which is called a temporal death; and the death of Christ shall loose the ^abands of this temporal death, that all shall be raised from this temporal death.
 43 The spirit and the body shall be ^areunited again in its ^bperfectform; both limb and joint shall be restored to its proper frame, even as we now are at this time; and we shall be brought to stand before God, ^cknowing even as we know now, and have a bright^drecollection of all our ^eguilt.
 44 Now, this restoration shall come to all, both old and young, both bond and free, both male and female, both the wicked and the righteous; and even there shall not so much as a hair of their heads be lost; but every thing shall be ^arestored to its perfect frame, as it is now, or in the body, and shall be brought and be arraigned before the bar of Christ the Son, and God the ^bFather, and the Holy Spirit, which is ^cone Eternal God, to be ^djudged according to their works, whether they be good or whether they be evil.
 45 Now, behold, I have spoken unto you concerning the ^adeath of the mortal body, and also concerning the ^bresurrection of the mortal body. I say unto you that this mortal body is ^craised to an^dimmortal body, that is from death, even from the first death unto life, that they can ^edie no more; their spirits uniting with their bodies, never to be divided; thus the whole becoming ^fspiritual and immortal, that they can no more see corruption.

(alma 11:42-45; bold added... by me) 

so really, i don't mean for this to be sacrilegious but y'know... not so much as a red eye correction was lost.  every picture was restored to its perfect frame.  i am so grateful.  for all of this.

let's have a picnik

sometimes i like to edit the crap out of a picture until it's hardly recognizable.  for some reason it just really seems to make me happy.

take a normal picture with bad lighting and a boring background like this

 add some glow

add some blur

adjust highlights and shadows

add some more blur    (i love the blur)

make it black and white

crop it    (look at me!  i'm using the rule of thirds!)

and add your favorite cliche, but exceptionally meaningful, mormon phrase.

voila!  now your kid's picture looks like something straight out of deseret book.

have some time to kill?

just pick a few pictures and try out picasa and picnik.

they're free and strangely addicting.