Light & Dark

Flying the friendly skies

I'm off to my childhood stomping grounds for the 75th Anniversary of my high school. I'm taking a week, so will also get a chance to visit with old friends unseen in at least 8 years, plus have 2 days with my best bud who moved from here to there 2 years ago. Very curious to see my teenage friends all growed up. Should be a lot of fun.

These are my first holidays in over 2 years, so I'm really looking forward to getting away. Too bad it's been such a madhouse trying to prearrange to have all my responsibilities covered while I'm away.

No idea what kind of Internet access I'll have, as I'm not taking a laptop, but I'll pop in if I get the chance.

Hockey fans

With all the NHL playoffs going on, a lot of guys are watching a lot of hockey. As much as they enjoy the games, and with all the time spent in front of the TV, some of them may be wishing they could get their wives to watch the game with them.

So here's how to get women to enjoy watching hockey...

April snow brings May grizzlies

When you live in the mountains, some of the aphorisms have to change.

The blooming season doesn't really start around here until June, but the grizzlies sure are out in force. There have been up to six grizzlies sighted in the same area as where the runner was killed last year just a kilometer or so down the trail from my back door. I love my evening trail walks, but I guess I'm going to have to be back on the sidewalks for a little while until they manage to find some food and start moving higher up the sides of the mountains. I'm even reconsidering some of my mountain biking routes.

I sure hope we don't have problems with them on the trails around the town site this year, because almost inevitably, we end up with a human/bear incident, and in virtually every one of those cases, the bear loses. Even when the human survives, it's usually a death sentence for the bear.

The other problem is that if there are that many bears in that small an area, they're going to have trouble with too small a home range, and they could very well end up traveling down the mountainside toward the highway and being killed there, or on the train tracks. That's what happened to Bear 66 who kept us all on our toes around the Banff town site last summer - including biting an illegal camper on the ass near where I work. Bear 66 was killed by a train leaving her three cubs orphaned. Two of the cubs were then hit by cars on the highway only 3 weeks later. The lone survivor was taken to the Calgary Zoo, but I don't imagine it's having much of a life either. I really hate to see that happen, and it occurs far too often out here. The local wardens call the stretch of the TransCanada Highway that runs through Banff National Park the Meat Grinder.

I was fortunate enough at the end of last week to see a gorgeous grizzly sow with two perfect little cubs-of-the-year playing around her as she snacked on dandelions. That's the kind of thing I get to see on my drive to and from work many days. It sure makes the commute easy to take! I'm pretty sure this majestic lady was the one I saw.

Trouble finishing defragging because of constant restarts

Susie at Practical Penumbra is having problems defragmenting her hard drive because the defrag application keeps restarting in the middle of the process. As she correctly diagnoses, it's because something keeps writing to the drive as defrag is working. (Anytime new data is written to the disk, the basic defrag in Windows 98 and ME must restart to adapt to the new state of the drive.)

She suspects it could be her antivirus software that's causing the problem. but it could, in fact, be any number of different programs/applications. The only way to avoid the problem is to try to make sure that none of the offending applications are running.

The trick to doing this is to start up in Safe Mode, and run the defrag process from there. When you restart the computer, just start tapping the F8 key about once per second after it has started to boot. (There's an actual point where you're supposed to hit the key, but the timing is different on every machine, so easier to just start tapping early to make sure you catch it.)

What'll happen is you'll eventually get a screen offering you several methods to choose from for the boot, plus a blinking cursor. (If you get into normal Windows instead, just restart and try again as you missed the trigger point) Just check the list for the number that corresponds to Boot into Safe Mode (no network connection), and type that number at the cursor, then hit Enter.

The machine will go through a longer boot process (it'll probably scroll a huge number of lines down your screen while doing it) then will get to your desktop. Note that the screen will look wonky because Safe Mode uses the most basic driver configuration possible, so your screen will be a lower resolution with lower colour quality.

Just navigate to your defrag program the way you normally do, and run as usual. When you're finished, just re-start normally and go back to work.

The reason this usually works is that a Safe Mode boot only starts the most basic components of Windows necessary for the OS to operate. This means the service or program that was writing to the drive in the background has likely not been to allowed to activate yet, so can't interfere with the defrag process.

One other thing that can cause defrags to constantly restart is if there are errors on the hard disk. Depending on what version of Windows you are using, the defrag program should either do a disk scan for you as it's first step in the process (eg Windows 98) or it may prompt you to run a scandisk before running defrag (WinXP using Fat32). If you're prompted to run a scandisk first, do so before restarting defrag.

Lastly, if your disk was heavily fragmented, you'll usually get best results by running defrag twice. (The defrag built into Windows isn't especially sophisticated - 3rd party versions generally don't have these restart/multiple runs requirements, but they do cost a few bucks.)

For those who really want to get into it: The defrag utility built into Windows 98 unfortunately is agonizingly slow. The one in Windows ME is similar code, but runs substantially faster and better (less prone to restarts). The ME version is perfectly compatible with Win98, so you can certainly use a copy of defrag.exe from from WinME to replace the one in your Win98 install. I routinely do this for my Win98 customers who are having defrag problems, but don't want to pay for a 3rd party application. Technically, using this new file would be against Windows licensing agreements, but it's such a minor transgression that I can live with it - especially since it fixes a flaw in Win98 that Microsoft could and should have fixed themselves with an update.

Photo size, DPI, print resolution, doo dah, doo dah, or... what size is this picture really?

Dana has asked the question that drives so many people bananas when it comes to dealing with digital photographs. She's wondering about the size of a digital image, or "How would I determine the DPI for a particular photo I have?"

This question is such a constant problem for so many people, I'm going to settle it once and for all, in the simplest way possible.

The biggest part of the problem is that most people asking the question don't know the correct terminology, and the people answering actually don't have a firm grasp on the situation either, and so just muddy the waters. In this case, the problem is the term DPI. 

The thing is, a picture file can be any DPI you want to make it. It's not a fixed property of the file. You change the DPI of the image according to the device on which you wish to print it. What you really need to know is the size of the image in pixels, what device you wish to print on, and a basic math calculation.

The situation Dana is in is this, I assume: she has a digital file of a photo, and she wants to know how to figure out how big it would print if she used it on the cover of her book. Here's the straight answer, using no additional software.

First, Dana, open the folder the picture file is in. (Easiest if it's already on the desktop.)

Next, drag the icon of the image file into your Internet browser window. You heard that right, trust me.

When the photo opens in the browser window, right-click on it and select Properties from the context menu. In the resulting Properties window that opens, you will see an entry for dimensions or height and width (depends on the browser). The size will be listed in pixels - something like 700x 400 for a small image, or 2100x3600 for a big one.

Once you know the size of the image in pixels, divide each number by 300. The resulting 2 numbers give you the dimensions in inches the image will print in high quality colour on a printing press. That's it.

So in our first example above, a 700x400 pixel image will result in a 2.33 inch by 1.33 inch printed photo. In the 2100x3600 pixel example, you'll end up with a 7 by 12 inch photo.

Now obviously, this process doesn't tell you how to prepare the image to actually print at those sizes, it just tells you what's possible. It's a fast rule-of-thumb way to tell if your file is suitable to print at the size you need.

If your calculations show that your file is almost big enough, there are a number of ways to massage it to slightly increase the size it can print, but in general, you want these calculations to tell you that your image can print at least as big as required in it's original state for highest quality. (There's no problem if your file is bigger than necessary - quality isn't lost making an image print smaller.)

And if you want to print on something other than a colour press? For a laser printer, do the same as for a colour press. For an inkjet printer, divide by 240 instead of 300. For black & white reproduction in a newspaper, divide by 150. Yes these are generalisations, but they'll serve for nearly all typical situations.

Great golf story

Driving home last night, I heard a teaser on the CBC for a wonderful story about a 95-year-old woman who still plays golf. She's been playing for 77 years.

She just scored her first hole in one.

Now that's perseverance finally paying off!

And speaking of perseverance, (or lack thereof) I've just noticed that almost an entire year's worth of posts fit on my front page. Keeryst that's embarrassing.

Once more into the breach...

That title is apropos of a number of things in my life over the last several months, and what's coming. Time to throw some shit against the wall and see what sticks.

In particular, I need to have a few "conversations" like this in the next couple of weeks - a la my Fuck It post. Frustrating how often I seem to end up back in the same place. Although I have noticed myself avoiding a few more of the traps than in the past, but others seem to pop up to bite me in the ass to replace them.