Since early 2005, my wife and I have owned two Canon PowerShot A75 digital cameras. They’ve been great cameras — we’ve happily shot about 5,000 photos with each of them — and we’ve never had any problems with either one.

Until now.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that my camera started acting weird intermittently. [more...]

As I mentioned here at the time, I had my yearly eye exam several days ago. That’s when my eye doctor confirmed that my proper bifocal prescription is even a little bit stronger than it was last year. I suspected as much. Since I could still read pretty well through my 5-6 year-old prescription after last year’s eye exam, I didn’t bother to buy new glasses last year. But this year, there’s enough of a difference that I decided to buy a new pair of glasses.

My wife and I pay for health insurance as well as separate eye-care insurance, but since we both see an ophthalmologist every year instead of an optometrist, we use our regular medical insurance to help pay for our eye exams since our eye-care insurance doesn’t cover ophthalmologists. But because I need new glasses this year, I decided to check out the eyeglass stores that our eye-care insurance covers. Armed with that information and my new prescription, I visited three of them today. [more...]

This is another one of my do-it-yourself adventures.

For a few years when I was a kid, our family had a subscription to Popular Science magazine. I loved it — every time I read about some new invention (e.g., the Wankel engine) it felt like I was reading an exciting science fiction novel that was going to come true in the near future.

One of the things that I remember very clearly about PS was a cartoon do-it-yourself page, very simply drawn by a guy named “Doty.” Every month, he would [more...]

People who own cats know that they can often be very insistent about what they want, and very clever to find ways to tell you that they want it.

Our cat Petey is a perfect example of that. Years ago, he figured out that if he could wake my wife and me up a little earlier, he could get his breakfast a little earlier.

And being the clever little guy that he is, he knew that he could wake us up by making noise. So, years ago, [more...]

Four days ago, I told you that I had started to use a new WordPress plugin, wpSearch. Later that day, I updated that post to tell you that I was having serious problems with it, and even later that day, I updated it again to tell you that I was going to try to help its creator troubleshoot it.

Well, I continued to use wpSearch, and it continued to give me problems. Each time it did, I sent a copy of its “data” folder to its creator, Kenny Katzgrau, so that he could see what was messing up. It turns out that my suspicion was correct — something was causing the wpSearch search index to become corrupted. Kenny suspected that it had something to do with me re-editing posts that I had already published. The good news is that he was to replicate the problems on his computer.

Yesterday, I heard from Kenny again. [more...]