Grandkids Sports

One really wonderful reason that we are now in Utah rather than in Pennsylvania is "Grandkids". We had tried to always be in Utah for "special events" - births, blessings, priesthood ordinations, and baptisms, but we missed a lot of other events, like school awards, plays and musicals, scout awards, and sports events. So for the last couple of years, we have been able to attend a few of the grandkids sports, including little league baseball, T-ball, basketball, football, and soccer.

This year Braden is playing soccer. Last year it was baseball. I will admit that watching soccer is a lot more fun because the game is always moving up and down the field. Baseball has a lot of "waiting" time. With little league, there is a lot of "waiting" time. There usually is a lot of walks and view hits. Not that it is boring, it is just slow. And the other kids (all younger) get a bit antsy with all of the "waiting". The soccer seems interesting to the younger kids, as it is always moving, with running, kicking, and more running. Braden has also played basketball which is also a fun and fast sport to watch.

Kalin is playing football again this year. Kalin LOVES football. He has attended the BYU football camp for several years now and really enjoys the camp, but loves playing even more. Even better, Kalin is really good. He is fast, quick, and agile, with good hands. His only handicap is his size. Some of the other 14 year olds are HUGE. I admit it is difficult to watch my grandson get hit by a linebacker that is almost twice his weight. This year he decided to Z-down, which evidently means to stay back with the younger kids that are a bit smaller for their age (I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong). So he doesn't seem nearly as small as he did last year. That and he has worked to put on a little weight and a lot of muscle this year.

At the Huntman's house, football is definitely a family affair. Don has been involved with the league for the past few years, this year as the vice-president or assistant-something - the 2nd in charge of the league. Kimberly is a cheer leader for the team and has been for a few years also. Karla is usually at the games, along with Kassie and Kyle. Kyle always leaves the game with several more "new friends".

For us, watching an entire game is usually more than we can handle, but 30-60 minutes is fun and very enjoyable.

End of An Adventure

Tomorrow will be the last day of our Church Service mission. Time seems to have passed both slowly and quickly. It has definitely not been what I have expected. But both Mary Ellen and I feel a lot of appreciation from those we have worked with over the past 12 months. We have both learned a whole lot while being able to contribute our talents toward serving in the Church. While I have worked with Windows and Unix, I have never done anything with Macs, and this whole year has been spent working on Macs, first just setting up new machines, but the last several months I have been writing various scripts to help the Curriculum Department through a number of transitions. My supervisor, the Controller of the department, said that we couldn't have come at a better time as the department was facing a number of technical transitions that were greatly taxing an overworked IT group. Mary Ellen has learned a lot about using the computer and, although she denies it, she does much better on the computer now than she did a year ago. She will be missed, maybe not for her computer skills, but because of her positive and happy attitude, a willingness to do anything, her artistic capabilities, and most especially her ability to make people feel good.

I will definitely miss the people, walking by the Salt Lake Temple every day, the challenges of problem solving, writing programs, designing systems, seeing new brides in the beautifully landscaped grounds, and cheap lunches in the cafeteria. I won't miss the 62 mile round trip through rush hour both ways four times a week, the politics, or the constant soliciting by the homeless around temple square.

Mary Ellen pointed out how much of what I had learned at Penn State had been in preparation for my work in the Curriculum Department. It seemed that whenever they had a problem they couldn't figure out how to solve that I had already faced and solved that problem before. Even today in my last meeting they started talking about Integrated Library Systems and what I might know about them. Fortunately, I just had to give them a quick response and leave all the work to them. A lot of what I did seemed like reruns.

Postscript to Vista and Digital Cameras

I guess I didn't quite finish the story on my saga with moving (well, trying to move and failing to move) my Digital Cameras to Vista. I also tried to move them to my wife's iMac. On an iMac, you don't need drivers for each digital camera. So when I tried both the Canon and the Nikon on the iMac, both worked fine. iPhoto grabbed all of the photos without a hitch. Chalk up another one for the Mac.

Vista and Digital Cameras - A Warning

I have always had a love / hate relationship with Microsoft. I have been using them as a software Operating System for almost 30 years, but I found that their software was generally buggy, over inflated in terms of features and size, and frequently changing from one version to another caused many of my applications to cease to function. My latest issue has been with my digital cameras.

In the last five years I have very much enjoyed taking pictures with my digital cameras. My first digital camera was a Casio. It had no card, it could store about 16 640x480 pictures, it had only a serial cable to download them to the PC, and that took about 20 minutes for all 20 pictures. Battery life - 4 AA batteries - was about 20 pictures. But it was a start and it whetted my appetite for something better. The better came in the form of a Canon S30, a small 3 megapixel camera that took great pictures, used a Compact Flash card for storing up to a couple of hundred at a time, and a rechargeable battery that would also last a couple of hundred pictures. I have had this wonderful camera for about five years. When I retired from Penn State a couple of years ago, my retirement present was a Nikon D50, a still much better camera, with wonderful interchangeable lenses and great battery life and marvelous quality. I still use the Canon for quick pictures and for things a small camera suits better. But the Nikon is my first primary love.

This past month, though, I changed my computer from an HP something running Windows XP to a Dell Vostro running Vista Home Premium. As I have worked through the task of moving software from my old HP that I was planning to retire to the new Dell, I kept running into the "doesn't work on Vista" (sometimes not well, sometimes not at all, sometimes won't even install). So I would search google and the manufactures web sites, find the "Vista patches", and continue with the move of hundreds of programs and gigabytes of data.

This past week I started moving my Canon and Nikon software to Vista. After installing all of the Canon software, I started downloading the updates for Vista. To my surprise, there was no update for the camera USB driver for the S30. Looking around on google, I found that Canon didn't update the drivers for the S30. In short, it no longer works with all of the rest of the Canon software that I was using to organize my pictures. I could still get it to connect as a disk drive and drag the pictures into Vista, but the auto categorization features that the Canon software gave me no longer work. After thinking many unnice thoughts, I removed all of the Canon software from Vista and reinstalled all on my old HP. So I now have to keep that machine around to keep my Canon pictures organized.

I then started on moving my Nikon software to Vista. This time I didn't uninstall it from the HP. I checked the web site for Nikon first. They had an update that made their application Vista compatible. Fine. The update was an update - you had to install the CD version first and post a number of updates from their website. So I get the CD and try to install it. The install fails with the message that the operating system isn't supported. I go back to the Nikon web site. They only have patches for the installer, not the whole package. Too many people were "stealing" the software. My CD (and camera) is "too old" for them to support on Vista. So I leave that on my old HP as well.

I think all of this just says that if you have older cameras (more than a couple of years old), either (1) don't go to Vista on a new machine or (2) buy a new camera that is Vista compliant when you buy a new computer with Vista on it. In the case of Nikon, I could have just upgraded my HP to Vista and it would have worked (as well as Vista will work on a older machine). The Canon, alas, would still be toast.