Sunday, January 08, 2006

A Landmark Day

Allan Visited: Allan came up from Pennsylvania where he was visiting his sister to spend the New Year's weekend with our family. We LOVED having him visit! He helped us with multiple technologic projects that had been on hold, in some instances, for months and years.

1. Got our GPS, a Garmin GPSMaps 60C working properly for the first time in 2 years. We promptly went out and found 3 geocaches within a couple hours in the area within walking distance of our house.

2. He installed our wireless router and has it working so that we have wireless internet in our whole house! I am currently posting this using my laptop and the wireless internet connection.

3. He helped installed Jean's new HP Photosmart 26210 All-In-One Printer, which includes printer, scanner, copier and fax machine. All functions are connected and working properly. We have all blessed our three dear daughters who bought this for us for Christmas this year - it is greatly appreciated and has been much used already.

The copier function particularly makes life so much easier than hiking to the basement, wait for the 20-year old Mita copier to warm up and then hope that all works well and you will actually get a copy of acceptable quality. It is low cost but fairly low quality and is at the end of its useful life according to my repair man who serviced it this fall. He told us, "This is the last time I will be able to work on this machine." It is just too worn out and parts are no longer available for it.

So our whole family blesses Allan for his help while he was here, even though his trip back home was long and arduous as documented on his blog, in an entry entitled, "Trains, Planes and Automobiles."

More GPS & Mapping Options: Inspired by Allan's huge boost, I went out today and bought an updated version of Delorme's
StreetAtlas 2006, with the idea being that we can map a route and download it into the GPS and have turn by turn directions in our hand while traveling. It took about 2 hours to install the software, install the maps in the GPS, map a route for an upcoming trip, and download it into the GPS. But it is done! In the future, without the lengthy installation process which taxed the laptop processor considerably, it should take just a few minutes.

Traval Options Abound: Jean and I bought an inverter for traveling so we can even plug the laptop into the car's power port and use it for detailed maps while traveling without fear of running the batter down. The GPS holds only 58 MB of maps, which at the time we bought it was about 4 times the amount of memory other GPS units had for installed street-level maps. We can modify our installed street-level maps as we are traveling if we are on a long car trip. Yeah!

Beth Is On Her Way!: Grammie is with my brother for the upcoming week and Beth has left to spend an all-to-short day with us before flying out at "0:Dark Hundred" Tuesday morning to help with children and household chores during and after her sister's upcoming surgery.

2 Comments:

At 4:00 PM, Blogger Cheryl said...

Those girls should blog about their experience BUYING that printer! It was quite the story....I believe I received 2 phone calls over it. We have an older model (no fax) and the copier function has been such a blessing. In our case - before the printer/scanner/copier we would have to go to a staples to make copies!

 
At 12:20 AM, Blogger Cheryl said...

I was glad to be able to visit and to be of some service.

Also, as I noted before, if I had stayed in PA I might have been caught there in the snowstorms that got the bus-lines to shut down service between Boston and Newark.

 

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