Category: Me

Moving to the USA

Ryan1 Comment on Moving to the USAmoving

I haven’t posted here for a while. One of the reasons is that I started posting more day-to-day stuff on facebook, but the main reason was that the last few months my wife and I have been busy organizing stuff. She got a job offer over here, so December and January we were busy getting everything organized to move from Germany to USA. In December we flew over for a week to get an apartment rented, buy a car, set up a bank account, insurance, … all the fun stuff you go through when moving to a new place. Let it be said, that christmas time is not the advised time to organize such stuff :-p
Steffi flew in on the 15th, and I came over a week later. And now our new home is in (the cold) Twin Cities 🙂 Our internet conenction isn’t going to be installed till Feb 1st (along with phone and TV), so I don’t have much to do except for cleaning the appartment, assembling furniture (IKEA is just around the corner) and shopping … and of course keeping an eye out for interresting jobs here. I’ll keep you all posted on how things are going here, If the sun ever comes out I’ll go out to shoot some photos.

Windows reinstall and Adobe fun

Ryanadobe, gimp, Photomatix, Photoshop, Sony Vegas

I never got around to posting it, but a few weeks back the hard drive of my PC with Windows on it died … a little bit. Technically a large chunk of the harddrive is simply unaccessable. after poking and pushing I at least got windows to boot up again, but a large part of the software was dead. I bough a new drive and went through the fun process of installing a fresh windows, patching it, and then installing all the software again.

I didn’t get around to installing my video and picture software on the new windows until this morning, and it turned out to be lots of fun. Due to pure luck I found the license key for sony vegas (it is shown in the splash screen when starting up, shortly before it crashes due to my harddisk malfunction). Any Photomatix was where I keep most licenses stored. But my Photoshop license was more of a challenge. Adobe only allows 2 activated copies of the software per license, activated copies are bound to hardware … you probably see where this is going. I couldn’t deactivate the old installation since the harddrive was kinda dead, and the new installation says “different hardware (new harddrives), must be a different computer”. Yay, fun. The bright side was that the support was easily contacted and they could reset the activation counter (after lecturing me about using it on “2 computers” and deactivating, bla bla bla). I learned one thing: the more expensive the software, the more problems you have with licenses. A shame I never liked Gimp for photo editing.

a bit of Baking

Ryan

Wife did some baking tonight, so I whipped out the camera and took some shots. Unfortunately I noticed that the flash hot shoe seems to have gone unresponsive after a fall a few weeks ago, but using the built-in flash as a commander to control an off-camera flash still works fine.

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